Ian On The Red Dot

A few days before World Cup 2010 started, I started noticing people calling out the results of upcoming games on Twitter.

I thought it would be interesting to run a game where fans make predictions using Twitter and a little application runs in the background to collect these tweets and tabulate success rates.

There are 3 prizes sponsored by Nike football thanks to a friend who helped obtained them.

Definitely not as profitable as betting on ladbrokes, but probably less of a hassle considering that it seems there isn’t an easy way for Singaporeans to deposit money into a ladbrokes account.

So, if you have a Twitter account, and love football, head down to football.onthereddot.com and participate by tweeting the results you expect.

Further notes:

Over the course of coding the site and the backend, I learned a few things about the Twitter API:

Going to update them over the course of the month as I tinker a little more with the scripts.

Back-end script to retrieve data from Twitter was written using python and:

1. The library tweepy as an interface to Twitter’s API.
2. SQLAlchemy to connect and deal with database stuff.

Front-end:

1. Built with Sinatra

While having coffee with Daniel of Young Upstarts, he shared the secret of his English essay writing abilities – GAMING.

danielgoh:

One of the best things I ever did in my youth was to play role-playing games. Taught me problem-solving skills and about consequences.

Seeing the tweet, I’m reminded of two articles I read about the link between gaming and skill acquisitions.

Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter

The second half of first grade, our son started reading the fine-print paragraphs on the cards. He got more reading time in through his love of Pokémon than he ever did at night, when we handed him books. He did read the books out loud to us, but it was a necessary chore. Pokémon was never a chore. And I noticed the paragraphs on the cards were syntactically far more complicated than anything he read in books. Soon, the same brain transformation that drove his math speed was reproduced with his reading speed.

Our son taught me an extremely valuable lesson. When it comes to kids, we often bring moralistic bias to their interests. There’s a pervasive tendency in our society to label things as either good for children or bad for children. Cultivating children’s natural intrinsic motivation requires abandoning all judgment of good and bad content. Society has a long list of subjects that we’ve determined they should learn. But learning itself is kick-started when enmeshed and inseparable from what a child inherently loves.

As always, the right game matters.

Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement

To progress in an action game, the player has to improve, which is by no means guaranteed – but to progress in an RPG, the characters have to improve, which is inevitable.

RPGs are many things, but they are almost never hard. As I realized in childhood, the vast majority of RPG challenges can be defeated simply by putting in time. RPGs reward patience, not skill. Almost never is the player required to work hard – only the characters need improve. Failing to defeat Zeromus might mean your strategy is flawed, but it also might mean your level is too low. Guess which problem is easier to remedy?

w00t.

Managed to get free tickets for the Video Games Live concert. Initially I wanted to go for it after my mom told me about it (yes, I know it is sad that I had to find out about this concert from my mom) but couldn’t because the budget for this month was tight.

So, when I got approached with the offer for free tickets if I helped spread the word, I had the joy of a kid who has just been told he can go and play Nintendo at his friend’s house.

Double w00t.

VGL is not just a concert, but a celebration of the entire video game industry that people of all ages will adore. Created and produced by Jack Wall and Tommy Tallarico, Guinness Record holder for prolificacy in video game composing, VGL is a tribute to video games culture over the last three decades. The concert will stage music and footage from the most popular video games from past to present, including Mario, Halo, Final Fantasy, WarCraft, Sonic, Metal Gear Solid, Interactive Space Invaders, Diablo III, Metroid, Pac-Man, Kingdom Hearts, Castlevania, Zelda and many more.

This is what I would be enjoying on Friday night:

For most of us who had the good fortune of growing up with gaming in the eighties and nineties, it is really interesting to see how those games have managed to become embedded into the mainstream and how people have used those influences to produce other creative works.

An example – making the movie Death Race even more awesome:

From super game-master Jane McGonigal, a new game Cryptozoo – the funnest way to explore a city.

you’ll follow mysterious tracks through the city on 1-mile chase through city streets and gardens.

It’s very possible that we’ll actually encounter 1 or 2 real, giant cryptids in the wild. So be prepared to interact with creatures unlike any you’ve seen before… we’ll take your photograph with them if you don’t startle them off!

I’m pretty sure it isn’t a coincidence that I just finished watching the movie The Spiderwick Chronicles when I learned of this game. The material on the main site reminds me of ‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You’.

Whatever those Japanese game developers are on, I wouldn’t mind having some. Super weird, slightly gay but freaking awesome Wii game.

There used to be a time when parents were able to understand what their kids were doing for recreation. Football, tennis, badminton, softballs, rugby,squash – these were activities that parents understood, and could even support if not join in the fun.

Then those blasted contraptions called computers came along and things changed. Kids started getting lost in new worlds created by – what parents must surely think are the devil’s playthings – computer games.

“So son, what did you do over the weekend?”

“Oh, nothing much dad. Me and some clan mates played a few games where we gang-banged some idiot noobs.”

And the conversation pretty much ends there, with the parents’ hearts breaking into a million pieces, them wondering what they did wrong to raise such a deviant child.

In a move to help create an environment where father and son can bond over the sharing of spoils after slaying a level 200 monster in a faraway virtual land, the event Licence2Play is being organized by SPHere Exhibits and the Singapore) Cybersports and Online Gaming Association.

Its aim was to introduce cyberwellness and responsible gaming elements into the industry, thus engaging often-neglected stakeholders like parents, educators, and the Government. While at the same time having loads of fun and family entertainment, which is what gaming–a pretty recession-proof industry–should always be about.

Find out more about the event from Aaron over at his cnet blog.

I think being a Mac user for the last few years, since I bought the original iBook, has made me missed out on quite a few awesome games. Left 4 Dead looks good. Time to get a PC.

The game’s blog has an interesting post on the development of the video embedded above.

Traditional in-game training mechanics didn’t make sense for Left 4 Dead, because they would take away from the sense that players had been immediately dropped into a very real, very dire zombie apocalypse. We didn’t want a slow ramp-up in gameplay to take away from that tension. As a result, we decided that it would make sense to begin the game experience with a non-interactive introductory movie that could get players revved up and subtly cue them to important gameplay mechanics such as “light disturbs the witch” and “car alarms attract the horde.”

As we now know, Christian killed Tommy.

Which probably does not explain much to the people who didn’t come to the dinner. So here’s what happened – I wanted to host a dinner at my old place and have a mini gathering where the participants (aka guinea pigs) will pretend to be certain characters and the aim was to solve a murder mystery (which didn’t turn out to be quite the mystery as it will soon be obvious why).

So, the characters:

1. Denise – a TV star and Tommy’s ex-lover.
2. Nigel – Tommy’s body guard.
3. James – a former contestant of Singapore Idol who got kicked out due to a sex video scandal.
4. A palm reading psychic ( I realized that this role was perfect for my friend’s friend and even more perfect for me…considering that I am damn cheekopek and can use that character as an excuse to touch females’ hands…KIV).
5. Christian – a former actor on one of Tommy’s hit TV shows who got booted out because he didn’t respond to Tommy’s advances.

Yes…Tommy was gay (actually more like bi) and having sex with tons of beautiful women was just a front.

And Christian was the killer.

I realized that one of my close friends was right. It was probably easier to solve the mystery by thinking what I would write as opposed to what the characters would do. And I didn’t even realize that I was making the character named Christian the killer. I guess my disdain for religion is so deeply embedded that even when I try to write a murder mystery my subconscious makes someone named Christian the killer.

I realized it is damn important to have a few more writers.

My friends really played their character well throughout the night.

And it was great to have a dinner with a bunch of close friends at my old place – the sharing in the closing of a chapter for my family.

I was hoping certain new friends would take the bait and join the dinner – hence the scattering of random messages on Plurk and my blog. So, if in the future you get some random mail from me or see some random message, hopefully it would be the start of a better written/coordinated mystery with Seng Kang as the scene of the crime and you would take the bait.

You know you play too much DOTA when:

1. Before you sleep, you don’t count sheep. You count creep kills.

2. When your girlfriend says to you ” You are my bf “, you wonder why she is calling you a battlefury.

3. When all your java code which is supposed to reference a variable named ‘gs’ (i.e. government securities ) accidentally got refactored to reference ‘gg’.

4. Whenever you wait for your gf, you wonder if 30 minutes is quick enough for a game at the LAN shop.

5. When you buy a new high resolution super big monitor, the first thing your friends ask you is whether you zoomed in to check CM, Drow and Lina out.

Hmmm…anymore to add guys and girls who play DOTA?

Last Friday, FO, Aaron, Aaron’s wife and me went to L’estaminet at Greenwood where we have an amazingly large family sized pizza for dinner. The pizza as usual was delicious.

After dinner, FO took out his set of Arkham Horror and started teaching us how to play the game. The game has an extremely rich storyline and gameplay. I’m a big fan of Buffy and the game allowed my inner slayer to roam free. I’m pretty sure we didn’t get to appreciate the full texture of the game that night. If only we had more time, and more experience in playing the game, we could have invested more in the storytelling elements – the lighting where we sat suited the game. No matter. The game was still terribly enjoyable.

I was probably the most useless player on the team. Notwithstanding the fact I was a bit distracted what with the beer and chatting with the staff, the character I chose, while in theory should have been a mighty slayer of monsters and seasoned sealer of portals, was a nun who pretty much didn’t contribute the whole night. I’m pretty sure I played the character wrongly. Should have focused more on spells.

Only managed to vanquish like two monsters and sealed one portal. Terrible.

I can imagine Asha Gill pointing at me and proclaiming I was the weakest link.

My character card for Sister Mary below:

Somehow this photo turned out wrong yet seemed so suited to the theme of the game:

FO and Aaron’s wife stuck in another dimension:

Aaron’s sexy psychologist stuck in another dimension: