Tag: gamer habits

News

Gone Home’s Steve Gaynor: "Being a gamer has a stigma to it."

This is something we’ve known forever, but the creator of Gone Home drove the point home and perhaps put the nail in the coffin. Talking today about narrative design, Gaynor made a subtle, but piercing call.  In particular he was lamenting the fact that people who don’t play games but wanted to play his because of the more thoughtful subject matter were greeted with images of dudes with guns when they went to buy it on Steam.  “Downloading something on Steam is intimidating. Being a gamer has a stigma to it,” he said, pulling up a slide of the popular digital distribution platform’s…
Article

EyeWire and the Brave New World of crowd-sourced neuroscience games

The retina of the eye is wired with a superhighway of fiber, and the crowd-sourced research project dedicated to charting it is called EyeWire. It was codeveloped at MIT and Max Planck Institute for Medical Research under the tutelage of Dr. Sebastian Seung, a professor of neuroscience who specializes in the study of connectomes, which are like road maps to the brain. But even a small connectome is infinitesimally complex, and in order to get his tasks done with any sense of urgency, he needs to enlist, train, motivate, and let loose a class of diligent but unpaid operators —…
Article

The psychology behind to-do lists explains our "incomplete" complex

I don’t know about you, but my proverbial pile of incomplete shame – the list of games I’ve started, but never finished – is huge, growing, and seems to gnaw at me a little more every day. I harbor fond memories of the original Metroid Prime, and fantasize about finally picking it up again and finishing it one day. I still daydream about one day reaching the end of Skies of Arcadia (on Dreamcast, yes, that’s how long ago we’re talking), and don’t even get me started on Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The statistics are against me. It’s probably impossible…