Re: I mentioned DF in an article

Also, I mentioned to you my eccentric project a while back, Project PM. I don't know how closely you follow these things, but my friend and project participant Michael Hastings seems to have just fucked up all kinds of shit with his new Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, who's now been summoned to Washington. He also blurbed my book and I'm doing a piece on the background to all this for Vanity Fair today, so we're going to be in a much better position to act on our agenda pretty soon with the additional notoriety. If you're still interested in discussing our project further at some point, let me know, as again, I'd be honored to have you on board. Incidentally, playing Liberal Crime Squad is what inspired me to do this in the first place, although our scope is somewhat more limited and we probably won't be engaging in prostitution or bank robberies and we're not so much liberal as we are technocrats. Anyway, I suck at that game.

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:58 PM, Tarn Adams <tarn.adams@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1. Do you think that playing such games as Dwarf Fortress have a net
> positive effect on cognitive ability?

I'd defer to actual studies on any specifics, but you can certainly
learn things from games and working different parts of your brain
tends to make them work better. I can't imagine solving puzzles or
playing a game with a large spatial component or whatever else has no
broader effects. As long as you feel active and engaged when playing
a game, it's probably not turning your brain into mush. Some of the
activities in Dwarf Fortress are probably beneficial, but it's not
necessarily the most efficient way to improve yourself and I wouldn't
try to pass it off as an educational tool. When you are really
working on solving a challenge that has come up in DF, I'm pretty sure
that would be as effective as anything, for as long as that state
lasts.

> 2. Serious question, how much does he play DF? What's the fanciest data
> structure in there, and why was it needed?

I hardly get a chance to play it now, at least for extended periods.
I don't know much about programming, so I doubt any of the structures
are fancy or that I'd be able to tell the difference.

> 3. Ask him how he avoids cave adaptation.

I don't. I avoid the negative effects of cave adaptation by sleeping
during the day, though. Dwarf mode doesn't have day/night, so the
dwarves don't have this luxury.

> 4. What games does he like?

The first Starflight is probably my favorite game in terms of
inspiration and influence, and there are a bunch of older ones like
that, but more modern ones... there was a patch of years where I was
in school and wasn't playing as much, but I started up again more in
the last few years. Of those, off the top of my head, I liked the new
King's Bounty games by Katauri Interactive, Shadow of the Colossus was
pretty awe-inspiring, Demons' Souls (everything but the level
draining...), blowing stuff up in Red Faction... I had fun with one
of the recent ROTK games. Spelunky was entertaining and Aquaria was a
nice game.

> 5. When will he implement multithreading. Oh GOD when will he implement
> multithreading!!

The SDL version has Baughn's multithreading of the graphics, and there
might be some hope for path-finding later on, but it's tricky to have
a simulation where pieces interlock to have separate threads if it
hasn't been preplanned.

> 6. What exactly does your brother do?

We talk about game ideas together. He does the bulk of the work on
donation awards, the stories for the web site and handles a lot of the
initial testing burden.

Tarn

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302