Alex Carobus

An intelligent and funny TV show about games? What a strange concept. - Alex Carobus

He seemed quite Yahtzee-like to me. :) - Rob Shillingsburg

PAX really is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it to all gamers. - Alex Carobus

SIgn me up dude! Bummed that I didn't go. - Rob Shillingsburg

How many polys in that demo? - Rob Shillingsburg

800 (20 x 20 x 2) - Alex Carobus

"Professors Duncan Watts, Matthew Salganikand and Peter Dodds recently demonstrated that, in a digital music ecosystem devoid of traditional marketing signals and recognizable IP (but possessing a public rating system), not only did “the hits get bigger,” but popularity was essentially random. A song’s popularity depended entirely on the first few users who happened to notice, rate and download it; a song that was #1 within one test ecosystem was bottom of the barrel in another." - Alex Carobus

It could depend on how you use that public ratings system. There might be a difference between sorting all content by overall popularity and doing more nuanced collaborative filtering. - Seth

A bunch of interesting insights. - Alex Carobus

Interesting point about the influence of CRPGs on the next generation of fantasy writers. - Alex Carobus

Fascinating story (and analysis) of the consequences of "playing to win" in an MMO. - Alex Carobus

RPGs used to be so much more hard-core. Bring back perma-death! :) Best part: "It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing the game appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to." - Alex Carobus

Progress Quest, you mean? I played that for hours! ;-) - Amit Patel

Interesting defense of handcrafted content vs. algorithmic content. I think the best point is that algorithmic content can often be more fun for the developer than the player. - Alex Carobus

Before reading this post, I had been thinking that even in a story-based game, it seems that there are neat things that one can do with predator/prey and market-based approaches. Negative feedback loops can produce a variety of behaviors that all fall in some range. Two-class feedback (wolves and rabbits) are simple, but three-class (wolves, rabbits, grass) could lead to interesting... more... - Amit Patel

The depth of the strategy in professional StarCraft games is amazing. - Alex Carobus

I'm amazed that this class is not about the design of Starcraft, or the phenomenon of Starcraft, but actually how to play Starcraft - Rob Shillingsburg

Goddamn it, where was this class when I was in college! :) - Private Sanjeev

We are live! Come play GameHalf! - Rob Shillingsburg