Tag Archives | Video Games

Army Shopping for New Video Game to Train Troops

By on August 1, 2012 in News 8

Via Kotaku:
The United States Army is shopping for a new video game training aid for its Games for Training program, and it has some very specific requirements:

Also notable is how explicitly oriented the new Army shooter is toward fighting “small wars”. The Army wants a game that includes more than 50 types and models of civilian vehicles, from Taliban-endorsed Toyota Hilux pickup trucks to bicycles, more than 100 civilian structures from factories and mosques to trash piles, and traffic control gear such as spike strips and speed bumps. After a decade of fighting two wars, the Pentagon isn’t salivating at the prospect of doing more counterinsurgency, but the new shooter game suggests that the Army is girding for it anyway.

It appears that the Army is still acting as if the United States won’t be leaving the Middle East any time soon – not that there was ever any doubt.… Read the rest

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Taiwanese Teen Dies In Internet Cafe After 40 Straight Hours Of Video Games

By on July 24, 2012 in News 6

In all honesty, gazing at the packaging of this so-called Diablo III, it seems implied that a few users will die while playing. Via the Australian:

The Taiwanese teenager collapsed and died at an internet cafe after playing Diablo 3, a popular online video game, for 40 consecutive hours, according to Australian Associated Press. The 18-year-old identified by only his surname, Chuang, booked a private room at the cafe in Tainan around noon on July 13 and played for nearly two days without eating.

On the morning of July 15, an attendant entered the room and found Chuang resting on a table. After the attendant woke him, he stood, took a few steps and then collapsed, the report said. He was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a local hospital.

In February, heart failure was the attributed cause of the reported death of a man in New Taipei who was found dead, slumped in a chair facing a computer with his arms still reaching out for the keyboard after playing for 23 hours.

… Read the rest

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Salman Rushdie Fatwa To Be Turned Into Iranian Video Game

By on June 27, 2012 in News 8

The religious bounty on the head of Satanic Verses author Salman Rushie will be the basis for a video game under development in Iran, the Guardian reports:

Salman Rushdie was the target of a notorious fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic of Iran, 23 years ago.

The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict is the title of the game being developed by the Islamic Association of Students, a government-sponsored organisation which announced this week it had completed initial phases of production.

News of the game came as Tehran on Tuesday played host to the country’s second International Computer Games Expo. Little has been revealed about the game but its title suggests players will be asked to implement Khomeini’s call for the killing of Rushdie.

… Read the rest

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World Becomes “Hellish Nightmare of Suffering and Devastation” After Playing Civilization II For 10 Years

By on June 12, 2012 in News 39

Lycerius writes on reddit:

I’ve been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I’m not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation. There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands:

  • The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars.

… Read the rest

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Alice In Wonderland: The Mind Control Story (Video)

By on June 7, 2012 in News 3

Alice In Wonderland: The Mind Control Story is about mind control sex slave programming through Alice in Wonderland script. This video is made from the video game Alice Madness Returns. It’s a deleted scene from my upcoming video Video Games That Want Your Soul which wraps up the trilogy. It helps to be familiar with the topic of MKULTRA Mind Control for understanding the video’s imagery and story:

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‘Far Cry 3′ Incorporates Psychoactive Mushrooms in First Mission

By on May 23, 2012 in News 22

Far Cry 3A pirated video from what must be a beta test of upcoming shooter Far Cry 3 features a mission in which the player gathers psychoactive mushrooms for a rogue scientist.

In the course of the mission the character is exposed to the mushroom’s active ingredients. The relevant footage begins at 3:47.

Warning: the video is of poor quality due to whatever the poster used to extract the footage from the game. Watch it now before manufacturer UbiSoft pulls it down.

Bonus: Check out the near-photorealistic official trailer for some “uncanny valley” fun.

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Blending War And Virtual Reality: Harun Farocki’s “Immersion”

By on May 6, 2012 in News 3

tumblr_m3b6l07pHf1qjjis9o1_500Metropolis Magazine on artist Harun Farocki’s Immersion: a video exploration of the connection between virtual reality and the military:

Eighteen years after the first Gulf War, computer-generated game technology is not only employed on the battlefield, but also used for recruiting, training prior to combat zone deployment, and now psychological care for for troops suffering battlefield trauma upon their return. It is the beginning, the middle and the end of the violence of war.

Filming for Immersion took place at Fort Louis, near Seattle, during a demonstration for therapists of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy, which consists of subjecting traumatized soldiers to the conditions of war once again, in a virtual reality.

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Why Can’t Real Life Be More Like Double Dragon?

By on May 3, 2012 in News 6

Double Dragon“People get really tired of having all the tough villains front-loaded against them and resent getting short changed on play time because some fat mouth-breather’s hogging it all with a stack of quarters that could knock out a Clydesdale. If that’s all on offer, can you blame folks for staying home?”

Games are the repositories of our culture’s most primal values. As ostensible objects of complete fancy, they (can) deftly sidestep at will many of the extraneous ambiguities that force us to compromise our deepest values and thus help give clearest expression to our highest ideals.

For starters, game consequences are not so final or existential as they are in real life. You’re typically given at least 3 initial ‘lives’ to perform strategy experiments and become comfortable with play options before you’re fatally croaked. And even then you’re usually offered the option to restart the game. You have an opportunity to weigh options with some level of maturity and develop a play style that suits you personally.… Read the rest

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Mass Murderer Trained With ‘Call Of Duty’

By on April 19, 2012 in News 43

Here’s some fuel for the debate over the potential harm of allowing children (and presumably unstable adults) to play extremely realistic first-person shooter games, via the Guardian:

Call of Duty Black Ops Logotipo-2011-28-08

Anders Behring Breivik has described how he “trained” for the attacks he carried out in Norway last summer using the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The 33-year-old said he practised his shot using a “holographic aiming device” he had bought to use with the war simulation game, which he said is used by armies around the world for training.

“You develop target acquisition,” he said. He used a similar device during the shooting attacks that left 69 dead at a political youth camp on the island of Utøya on 22 July.

Describing the game, he said: “It consists of many hundreds of different tasks and some of these tasks can be compared with an attack, for real. That’s why it’s used by many armies throughout the world.

… Read the rest

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Words With Friends: Another Stupid Game – Or An Obsession?

By on April 19, 2012 in News 7

Silly Games NYTThe New York Times Magazine ran a fascinating cover story on April 4, 2012 written with wisdom, humor and insight by Sam Anderson.

Anderson’s basic premise is that the concept of gaming has changed. For decades, a special class of teen or young adult gamer would use specialized systems, to play complex multi-player, multi-level games that might last from a few hours to many days or even weeks. Now, however, anyone can play a quick game — what Anderson terms a “stupid game” — any time of the day or night right there on their smartphone that rests somewhere next to their body 24/7. And this, Anderson argues, has changed the world of gaming to

” . . . not just hard-core gamers, but their mothers, their mailmen and their college professors. Consumers who never would have put a quarter into an arcade or even set eyes on an Xbox 360 were now carrying a sophisticated game console with them, all the time, in their pockets or their purses.”

For decades I scrupulously avoided video games even when my four children delighted in playing them.… Read the rest

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