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anonymous

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom - 0 views

  • WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?
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    "What if teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child's bedroom or even a child's pocket, circa 2010 - if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children's learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we've known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game? " By Sara Corbett at The New York Times on September 15, 2010.
anonymous

How mainstream games butchered themselves and why it's my fault - 0 views

  • Unskippable cut-scenes exist because idiots like me skip the skippable ones. There’s text on screen because idiots like me don’t listen to the characters, and the characters are repeating what the text says because idiots like me won’t read the text. Friendly characters are invincible because idiots like me would shoot them, and we’re not allowed to shoot them because idiots like me will try anyway.
  • For the most part, Half-Life and its sequel did it right: you could always look wherever you wanted, and after the intro you were usually free to move. You generally couldn’t interact with the scripted sequences, but for logical reasons – they happened out of reach or behind glass.
  • I don’t have Attention Deficit Disorder, designers – you do. Only one of us in this relationship is forcing the other to look at what they’re doing. We’re locked in a destructive cycle of dickification: I resent when you take control away from me, so I’m as much of a dick as the controls permit. You see dicks like me being dicks in your playtests, and you think of new ways to be bigger dicks back: to force me to watch your scenes, play out your script, follow your high-school reading level plot.
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  • But in a desperate, frantic attempt to engage disinterested jerks like me, it tried to shove its horrible characters, misjudged script and awkward on-rails sections down my throat before showing me what the game was really about. If it wasn’t for Rich’s review, I’d never have drudged through that miserable dross to the game I like beyond.
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    "I'm a horrible gamer. Hopefully it doesn't show in ordinary conversation, but as soon as I start playing something, I become an asshole. The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there's text on screen, I'm not reading it. If there's a cut-scene, I'm skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can't shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won't do anything. I thought that was normal."
anonymous

Sony hack: Can Sony's brand recover from massive breach? - 0 views

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    " It's been a nightmarish three weeks for Sony, as it struggles to recover from massive hack attacks on three separate gaming systems it runs. Not only are the PlayStation, Qriocity and Sony online gaming networks still offline, but tens of millions of credit card numbers may have been stolen." - May. 10, 2011
anonymous

Agenda: With George Friedman on Russia - 0 views

  • Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.
  • And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.
  • So, STRATFOR was perhaps a little unkind in its forecast for 2011 when it said that Russia would play a double game, ensuring it can reap benefits from having warm relations with countries, such as investment and economic ties, while keeping the pressure up on them. It’s been a clever game, hasn’t it?
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  • Well, a double game is a clever game, particularly when no one realizes you’re playing a double game. I have to say that I don’t regard duplicity among nations as a critique of nations, it’s the lifeblood of international affairs.
  • They’ve become much more accommodating because they’ve achieved, within the former Soviet Union, the goals they wanted to achieve by and large.
  • Now they’re operating from a position of strength and therefore they don’t have to assert their strength.
  • Now they’re being courted by the Americans, they’re being courted by the Germans and this is the position that Putin wanted to get them into, and he did.
  • This Russian empire, the Soviet Union, were not accidents of history. They didn’t just happen. They were structures that grew naturally from the underlying economic and political relationships.
  • Russia is far too vast to simply be the whim of a given personality. In my view even Stalin represented the vast czarist and Leninist tradition, to an extreme perhaps, but still the idea of the personalization of rule.
  • The media tends to think of better and worse relations — I don’t think of that. Russia has its interests; the United States has its interests. There are times when these interests coincide; there are times when these interests diverge. There are times when one country or the other is too preoccupied with other things to be worried about the other.
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    "A re-emerging Russia is restoring its global influence without taking on the burden of an empire. In the second of his series on global pressure points, STRATFOR CEO Dr. George Friedman applauds Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's achievements and examines the Russian-U.S. relationship."
anonymous

Former CIA-backed dictator Noriega sues video game for accurate portrayal of his atroci... - 0 views

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    Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is suing the video game publisher Activision Blizzard for using his likeness in Call of Duty: Black Ops II without his permission, The Los Angeles Times reports.
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    Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is suing the video game publisher Activision Blizzard for using his likeness in Call of Duty: Black Ops II without his permission, The Los Angeles Times reports.
anonymous

Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games - 1 views

  • For a kid that wasn't into fantasy books, I didn't approach it as an adventurer. I approached the game as me: I'm standing in front of a house, not unlike my own, a wrapped gift that you have to figure out how to unwrap. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure in which no other pages were suggested. Here's where you are, kid. Now what?
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    Text-based adventures were written as much as they were designed, employing tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world.
anonymous

The Case Against High-School Sports - Amanda Ripley - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.
  • Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.
    • anonymous
       
      It does in my home.
  • When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
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  • As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?
  • On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.
  • Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.
  • The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.
  • Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.
  • Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.
  • But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
  • “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”
    • anonymous
       
      This is so absurd.
  • But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”
  • Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”
  • Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”
  • Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
    • anonymous
       
      So much awesome.
  • In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one—not even the people in charge—realizes their actual cost.
  • When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.
  • “And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading,” Roza wrote. “In fact, this district’s ‘strategic plan’ has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.”
  • Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport.
  • Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.
  • That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all.
  • During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics.
  • Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.
  • Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
  • But here’s the thing: most American principals I spoke with expressed no outrage over the primacy of sports in school. In fact, they fiercely defended it. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have more athletic opportunities for students, not less,” Bigham, the former Tennessee principal, told me.
  • His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”
    • anonymous
       
      "The process" equals sports, not education. Dipstick.
  • But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned.
  • America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits.
  • “Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support,” he told me in an e-mail. “If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.”
  • But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.
  • One study of 30,000 students at the University of Oregon found that the grades of men who did not play sports went down as the football team’s performance improved. Both men and women reported that the better their football team did, the less they studied and the more they partied.
  • Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
  • Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.
  • Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.
  • “I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
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    "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"
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    Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.
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    It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.
anonymous

All Hail Julian Murdoch - 0 views

  • I've written many times about how I feel like the gaming industry spends most of its time fighting for larger slices of pie instead of focusing on increasing the size of the pie. Having more people playing your game greatly increases the theoretical size of the pie.
  • The micro-transaction model makes it incredibly painless for anyone to try out a game, and even if lots of those people don't come back, it's a larger group to filter through to produce a dedicated player base, and to survive.
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    "...How much do you think Dungeons & Dragons Online cost to develop? They have 300 people and two properties. They just sold for $160 million to Warner, and they're monstrously, outrageously profitable. Now. It's a F2P microtransaction world, man. Just wait for it. It's ALL gonna be horse armor, Rock Band tracks and map expansions. ALL of it." By Bill Harris at Dubious Quality on August 4, 2010.
anonymous

Gamifying Homework - 0 views

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    "If the success of sites like Gowalla, Foursquare, and other game-like forms of social media tells us much, it's that people will do *anything* for a virtual badge. The attempt to capitalize on this behavior has been called gamification, since it borrows some of the reward structures of game mechanics and applies them to everyday tasks. While the premise behind it has been around for a while, as Wikipedia notes, it has started to get more attention from venture capitalists, developers, and researchers in 2010." By Jason B. Jones at The Chronicle on November 3, 2010.
anonymous

Kingdom Rush - 0 views

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    From Armor Games, a new Tower Defense Game that's supposed to be pretty good.
anonymous

Anonymity and Blizzard Forums - 0 views

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    "Earlier this week Blizzard dropped a big AoE by announcing that it was greatly reducing user anonymity on its Starcraft II and World of Warcraft forums. " By Jamie Madigan at The Psychology of Video Games on July 7, 2010.
anonymous

History: The New Great Game - Matteo Tacconi | Reset Dialogues on Civilizations - 0 views

  • Times change, as do situations, empires die and imperial democracies are born, but Central Asia, this vast portion of the world bordered on the west by the Caspian, on the east by China, on the north by Russia and on the south by Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, continues to be the theatre of significant manoeuvring.
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    "China, Russia and the United States are the main competitors. The match is particularly intense in Kabul, Islamabad and Teheran and news reports confirm this. The Great Game, however, is also played in the five "stans" - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan. Laying hands on oil and gas fields, not to mention the vast network of pipelines, defining agreements and signing trade contracts with local governments is a priority. Not everything, however, revolves around energy. The post-Soviet part of Central Asia is also of extremely important political significance. Control over this area can mean "fencing in" the al Qaeda galaxy, monitoring its activities and studying countermeasures." By Matteo Tacconi at Reset DOC on June 9, 2010.
anonymous

Did Culture, Not Biology, Develop Humanity's Sense of Fair Play? - 0 views

  • in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.
  • Lead researcher Joseph Henrich observed that members of smaller groups were unwilling to punish selfish behavior and were willing to keep much of the money for themselves. This may be because smaller communities lack the social norms or informal institutions like markets and religion, causing them to have narrower concepts of fairness.
  • However critics argue that in the absence of cultural context, the tests seem weak. Terming the games an “artificial situation,” evolutionary game theorists Martin Nowak and David Rand pointed out that college students are “used to [such] concepts and hunter-gatherers aren’t. Who knows how they’re understanding the game?”
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    From Discover Magazine Blogs, by Smriti Rao on March 22, 2010.
anonymous

Deletion as Death Performance - 0 views

  • This performance of death is a ritual farewell to the world. Even when it happens that the player is not leaving the world completely, just that character, the performance of death in deletion severs their connection to the world through that avatar allowing them to fully re-enter the world in a new character. Giving the character a final end allows the player to move on from the experiences s/he shared with that avatar and experience closure to this kind of self-relationship. For some players though, this performance of death is too strong. Rather than actually delete the character, they just set it aside as ‘retired’. Avatars and the lives we live through them (they live through us) are meaningful. Sometimes, they’re just not ready to die.
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    "A new game has hit the MMO scene in the last couple of weeks and is making waves. RIFT has managed to draw a sizeable portion of the community at least temporarily away from their current homes. Many players are excitedly moving house from Azeroth to Telara, saying goodbyes to old friends and making new ones."
anonymous

Atari's Test Drive Unlimited Studio Goes On 'Symbolic Day Strike' - 0 views

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    "Test Drive Unlimited 2 developer Eden Games is initiating a "symbolic day strike" in response to layoffs and alleged "mismanagement" by parent Atari, according to a statement sent to Gamasutra. The statement said that the studio is in the middle of a redundancy plan that targets 51 out of the total 80 employees at the Lyon, France-based developer. The strike is taking place today."
anonymous

Moral Goods - 3 views

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    This is the story of a strange little game that tells a story about immigration. It's not pro. It's not anti. But it *is* convoluted and time consuming. By Danielle Riendeau at Kill Screen.
anonymous

You've Been Playing GTA IV Wrong - 0 views

  • That icon-strewn circle in the lower-left corner of the screen is a Rockstar perennial; one could even call it a defining feature of their games.
  • As an experiment, I tried loading up GTA IV and turning off the HUD and mini-map completely. I found that it made the game significantly more immersive, engaging, difficult, and fun. It didn't quite feel "optimal," and at times the shift was pretty extreme, but all the same I recommend that fans of GTA IV give it a shot.
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    "Three years, two expansions, and countless hours of vehicular manslaughter have provided some much-needed perspective. These days criticisms abound, from sluggish controls and a finicky camera to inconsistent characterization and bloated plotting. But of all of Grand Theft Auto (and indeed, Red Dead Redemption)'s issues, one is perhaps the most overlooked: The crummy, distracting mini-map."
anonymous

The Greater Game in Bahrain - 0 views

  • STRATFOR has also picked up indications that Iran was playing a much more deliberate game — taking care to conserve its resources while counting on the perception of a Wahhabist occupation of Shiite-majority land to exacerbate local grievances and stress the GCC states over time. With the Arab states on edge, Iran’s primary aim is to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq — an area where threats to the Islamic republic have historically originated.
  • Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies are left wondering if the United States will temporarily set aside its broader conflict with Tehran and forge a short-term understanding with the Islamic republic. Such an understanding could expand Iran’s sphere of influence in the region on U.S. terms, leaving Saudi Arabia with a deep sense of betrayal and vulnerability. There are no clear indications that negotiations between the United States and Iran have reached such a juncture, but the Saudis have to reckon with the possibility.
  • This logic is what led STRAFOR today to take a closer look at what was happening behind the scenes
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    "According to rumors cited by anonymous Bahraini and Saudi government sources on Tuesday, the 1,000-plus Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) force, deployed to Bahrain in the spring to quell a Shia-led uprising, has begun to withdraw now that the security situation on the island has largely stabilized. STRATFOR sources in the Saudi and Bahraini governments clarified that there will be a reduction of GCC forces, but not a full withdrawal. A Saudi source went on to explain that a permanent base will be built to station a stripped-down Saudi-led force, ready to deploy on short notice, with Saudi reinforcements less than three hours away across the Bahrain-Saudi causeway."
anonymous

Principles of Combat (Frozen Synapse Wiki) - 0 views

  • Common mistakes Ducking does not confer any bonus in a combat, it just allows you to cower behind cover like, well, a coward. Furthermore, changing state from standing to ducking will actually make your unit incapable of defending itself for a fraction of a second. This is often long enough for your unit to lose a vital body part, like a head or torso. Partial line of sight does not provide a defensive bonus, I.E., peeking around a corner will not make you harder to hit. Cover bonuses are only granted when standing behind half height (light blue) objects.
  • The factors that affect this time are listed in rough order below: Unit type - shotguns have the shortest time, snipers the longest. Distance to target - closer target: shorter time. Cover - target in cover: longer time. Stillness - the more quickly a unit was moving before they started firing, the longer it takes for them to get a kill shot.
  • When engaging another unit, the engaged unit will often attempt to shoot back, even if the engaged unit was not previously looking at the engaging unit. Indeed, a unit will only not do so if it is set to Continue on Sight or it is an indirect fire unit. In this case, there is one additional factor to those discussed earlier: first sight. If unit A engages unit B and B is not aiming at A, then B will suffer a penalty for not having first sight; that is to say, unit B will be at a disadvantage because it joined the combat a bit late.
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  • How quickly a unit is moving is one of the things that determines the amount of time until a kill shot will occur.
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    "Combat in Frozen Synapse is entirely deterministic, that is, for the same starting conditions and plans you will get the exact same result every time. This is a long way of saying that Frozen Synapse is not a game of chance. Your primary units in a given match are likely to be direct fire units; units firing bullets. These units will attempt to engage any enemy unit that enters their vision and their engagement range. Once a unit has engaged it will shoot at its target until either the target is no longer visible or one of the combatants is dead. The time it takes a direct fire unit to fire the kill shot (the shot that will actually kill the enemy unit, all other bullets fired being eye-candy) is determined by a number of bonuses and penalties described in detail below."
anonymous

The Good, Racist People - 0 views

  • I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
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    "Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from "The Great Debaters" to "The Crying Game" to "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai." By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can't get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he'd been robbed."
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