video games

Which Face is Real?

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But while we’ve learned to distrust user names and text more generally, pictures are different. You can’t synthesize a picture out of nothing, we assume; a picture had to be of someone. Sure a scammer could appropriate someone else’s picture, but doing so is a risky strategy in a world with google reverse search and so forth. So we tend to trust pictures. A business profile with a picture obviously belongs to someone. A match on a dating site may turn out to be 10 pounds heavier or 10 years older than when a picture was taken, but if there’s a picture, the person obviously exists.

No longer. New adverserial machine learning algorithms allow people to rapidly generate synthetic ‘photographs’ of people who have never existed. Already faces of this sort are being used in espionage.

Computers are good, but your visual processing systems are even better. If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance — at least for the time being. The hardware and software used to generate them will continue to improve, and it may be only a few years until humans fall behind in the arms race between forgery and detection.

Our aim is to make you aware of the ease with which digital identities can be faked, and to help you spot these fakes at a single glance.

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Which Face is Real?

I was at a conference last month where research was presented which concluded pretty solidly that the mechanisms used to make “deepfakes” meant that it was probably impossible to create artificial intelligence that can learn to distinguish between real and fake pictures of humans. Simply put, this is because the way we make such images is with generative adversarial networks, an AI technique which thrives upon having an effective discriminator component, and any research into differentiating between real and fake images feeds the capability of the next generation of discriminators!

Instead, then, the best medium-term defence against deepfakes is training humans to be able to identify them, and that’s what this website aims to do. I was pleased that I did very well on my first attempt (I sort-of knew what to look for already, based on a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) but I was also pleased that I was able to learn to do better with the aid of the authors’ tips. Nice.

Impossible Geometry

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The Stupendium feat. Chi-chi (YouTube)

Rapping about video games is one thing. Rapping about music/beatmatching video games takes this to a whole new level.

Bus Station, Unbound

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Back in February my friend Katie shared with me an already four-year-old piece of interactive fiction, Bus Station: Unbound, that I’d somehow managed to miss the first time around. In the five months since then I’ve periodically revisited and played through it and finally gotten around to writing a review:

All of the haunting majesty of its subject, and a must-read-thrice plot

Perhaps it helps to be as intimately familiar with Preston Bus Station – in many ways, the subject of the piece – as the protagonist. This work lovingly and faithfully depicts the space and the architecture in a way that’s hauntingly familiar to anybody who knows it personally: right down to the shape of the rubberised tiles near the phone booths, the forbidding shadows of the underpass, and the buildings that can be surveyed from its roof.

But even without such a deep recognition of the space… which, ultimately, soon comes to diverge from reality and take on a different – darker, otherworldly – feel… there’s a magic to the writing of this story. The reader is teased with just enough backstory to provide a compelling narrative without breaking the first-person illusion. No matter how many times you play (and I’ve played quite a few!), you’ll be left with a hole of unanswered questions, and you’ll need to be comfortable with that to get the most out of the story, but that in itself is an important part of the adventure. This is a story of a young person who doesn’t – who can’t – know everything that they need to bring them comfort in the (literally and figuratively) cold and disquieting world that surrounds them, and it’s a world that’s presented with a touching and tragic beauty.

Through multiple playthroughs – or rewinds, which it took me a while to notice were an option! – you’ll find yourself teased with more and more of the story. There are a few frankly-unfair moments where an unsatisfactory ending comes with little or no warning, and a handful of places where it feels like your choices are insignificant to the story, but these are few and far between. Altogether this is among the better pieces of hypertext fiction I’ve enjoyed, and I’d recommend that you give it a try (even if you don’t share the love-hate relationship with Preston Bus Station that is so common among those who spent much of their youth sitting in it).

Dan Q (IFDB)

It’s no secret that I spent a significant proportion of my youth waiting for or changing buses at (the remarkable) Preston Bus Station, and that doubtless biases my enjoyment of this game by tingeing it with nostalgia. But I maintain that it’s a well-written piece of hypertext interactive fiction with a rich, developed world. You can play it starting from here, and you should. It looks like the story’s accompanying images died somewhere along the way, but you can flick through them all here and get a feel for the shadowy, brutalist, imposing place.

Endless Quadrum #50

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SrGrafo (Rimworldme)

I can’t get enough of this comic. Despite the fact that it’s got no written dialogue at all I must’ve read it half a dozen times and seen more in it each time. Go read the whole thing…

How a video game community filled my nephew’s final days with joy

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My nephew, Michael, died on 22 May 2019. He was 15 years old.

He loved his family, tractors, lorries, tanks, spaceships and video games (mostly about tractors, lorries, tanks and spaceships), and confronted every challenge in his short, difficult life with a resolute will that earned him much love and respect. Online in his favourite game, Elite Dangerous by Frontier Developments, he was known as CMDR Michael Holyland.

In Michael’s last week of life, thanks to the Elite Dangerous player community, a whole network of new friends sprang up in our darkest hour and made things more bearable with a magnificent display of empathy, kindness and creativity. I know it was Michael’s wish to celebrate the generosity he was shown, so I’ve written this account of how Frontier and friends made the intolerable last days of a 15-year-old boy infinitely better.

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Mat Westhorpe (The Guardian)

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

A beautiful article which, despite its tragedy, does an excellent job of showcasing how video gaming communities can transcend barriers of distance, age, and ability and bring joy to the world. I wish that all gaming communities could be this open-minded and caring, and that they could do so more of the time.

Metropoloid: A Metropolis Remix

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Yaz Minksy (YouTube)

Yaz writes, by way of partial explanation:

You could fit almost the entire history of videogames into the time span covered by the silent film era, yet we consider it a mature medium, rather than one just breaking out of its infancy. Like silent movies, classic games are often incomplete, damaged, or technically limited, but have a beauty all their own. In this spirit, indie game developer Joe Blair and I built Metropoloid, a remix of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which replaces its famously lost score with that of its contemporaries from the early days of games.

I’ve watched Metropolis a number of times over the decades, in a variety of the stages of its recovery, and I love it. I’ve watched it with a pre-recorded but believed-to-be-faithful soundtrack and I’ve watched it with several diolive accompaniment. But this is the first time I’ve watched it to the soundtrack of classic (and contemporary-retro) videogames: the Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda, Mega Man and Final Fantasy series, Doom, Kirby, F-Zero and more. If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare and a love of classic film and classic videogames, then you’re in the slim minority that will get the most out of this fabulous labour of love (which, at the time of my writing, has enjoyed only a few hundred views and a mere 26 “thumbs up”: it certainly deserves a wider audience!).

Killed by Google – The Google Graveyard & Cemetery

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Fusion Tables… Fabric… Inbox… Google+… goo.gl… Goggles… Site Search… Glass… Now… Code… Bump!… Gears… Desktop Search…

Killed by Google

Just some of the projects and services that Google has offered and then killed; this site aims to catalogue them all. Some, like Wave, were given to the community (Wave lived on for a while as an Apache project but is now basically dead), but most, like Reader, were assassinated in a misguided attempt to drive traffic to other services (ultimately, Reader was killed perhaps to try to get people onto Google+, which was then also killed).

Google can’t be trusted to maintain the services of theirs that you depend upon (relevant XKCD?). That’s not a phenomenon that’s unique to Google, of course: it’s perhaps just that they produce so many new and often-experimental services that they inevitably cease supporting more of them than some of the many other providers who’ve killed the silos that people depended upon.

How could things be better? For a start, Google could make a better commitment to open-source and developing standards rather than platforms. But if you don’t think you can trust them to do that – and you can’t – then the only solution for individuals is to use fewer Google products to break the Google-monoculture. Encourage the competition to weaken their position, and break free from silos in general where it’s possible to do so.

148+ projects and services dead. But hey, we’re getting Stadia so everything’s okay, right? <sigh>

Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game

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Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.

Until now, I don’t believe anyone has ever written about it.

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Cat DeSpira

Interesting exploration of the history of the cabinets housing Pac-Man, observing the ergonomic impact of the controls on the way that people would hold the side of the machine and, in turn, how that would affect where and how the paint would wear off.

I love that folks care about this stuff.

Sierra Death Generator

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Sierra Death Generator

For all of your screenshot/death scene meme needs.

EDIT.COM showing the source code of THIS web page. — Also, y’know, being meta.

Pong

I’ve recently been reimplementing retro arcade classic Pong to show off during a celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2018 yesterday at the Bodleian Libraries. Here’s how that went down.

The team responsible for digital archiving had plans to spend World Digital Preservation Day running a stand in Blackwell Hall for some time before I got involved. They’d asked my department about using the Heritage Window – the Bodleian’s 15-screen video wall – to show a carousel of slides with relevant content over the course of the day. Or, they added, half-jokingly, “perhaps we could have Pong up there as it’ll be its 46th birthday?”

But I didn’t take it as a joke. I took it as a challenge.

Emulating Pong is pretty easy. Emulating Pong perfectly is pretty hard. Indeed, a lot of the challenge in the preservation of (especially digital) archives in general is in finding the best possible compromise in situations where perfect preservation is not possible. If these 8″ disks are degrading, is is acceptable to copy them onto a different medium? If this video file is unreadable in modern devices, is it acceptable to re-encode it in a contemporary format? These are the kinds of questions that digital preservation specialists have to ask themselves all the damn time.

Emulating Pong in a way that would work on the Heritage Window but be true to the original raised all kinds of complications. (Original) Pong’s aspect ratio doesn’t fit nicely on a 16:9 widescreen, much less on a 27:80 ultrawide. Like most games of its era, the speed is tied to the clock rate of the processor. And of course, it should be controlled using a “dial”.

By the time I realised that there was no way that I could thoroughly replicate the experience of the original game, I decided to take a different track. Instead, I opted to reimplement Pong. A reimplementation could stay true to the idea of Pong but serve as a jumping-off point for discussion about how the experience of playing the game may be superficially “like Pong” but that this still wasn’t an example of digital preservation.

Two participants play Pong on the Heritage Window — Bip… boop… boop… bip… boop… bip…

Here’s the skinny:

A web page, displayed full-screen, contains both a <canvas> (for the game, sized appropriately for a 3 × 3 section of the video wall) and a <div> full of “slides” of static content to carousel alongside (filling a 2 × 3 section).
Javascript writes to the canvas, simulates the movement of the ball and paddles, and accepts input from the JS Gamepad API (which is awesome, by the way). If there’s only one player, a (tough! – only three people managed to beat it over the course of the day!) AI plays the other paddle.
A pair of SNES controllers adapted for use as USB controllers which I happened to own already.

I felt that the day, event, and game were a success. A few dozen people played Pong and explored the other technology on display. Some got nostalgic about punch tape, huge floppy disks, and even mechanical calculators. Many more talked to the digital archives folks and I about the challenges and importance of digital archiving. And a good time was had by all.

I’ve open-sourced the entire thing with a super-permissive license so you can deploy it yourself (you know, on your ultrawide video wall) or adapt it as you see fit. Or if you’d just like to see it for yourself on your own computer, you can (but unless you’re using a 4K monitor you’ll probably need to use your browser’s mobile/responsive design simulator set to 3200 × 1080 to make it fit your screen). If you don’t have controllers attached, use W/S to control player 1 and the cursor keys for player 2 in a 2-player game.

Happy 46th birthday, Pong.

Note #11906

Playing Pong at the @bodleianlibs for #WDPD2018 #dp0c.

Note #11893

Some days my job… isn’t like other people’s jobs. Lately, I’ve been reimplementing Pong in Javascript for the @bodleianlibs’ video wall for an event on Thursday.

Pong on the Heritage Window

Testing a few days prior to public display.

Also available on YouTube and on QTube.

Forza Horizon 4 is really very British

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There is a phenomenon of culture that I’m not convinced has a name. Living in the UK, the vast, vast majority of the media I consume is from the US. And nearly always has been. While television was more localised, all my life the films and games (and indeed an awful lot of the TV) I’ve watched and played has not only come from America, but been set there, or created by people whose perception of life is based there. And, while we may share a decent proportion of a common language, we really are very different countries and indeed continents. The result of this being, the media I watch that comes from the US is in many senses alien, to the point where a film set in an American high school might as well be set on a spaceship for all the familiarity it will have to my own lived experiences.

Which makes playing Forza Horizon 4 a really bloody weird thing. It’s… it’s British. Which is causing my double-takes to do double-takes.

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John Walker (Rock Paper Shotgun)

I’m not usually a fan of driving games, but this review of Forza Horizon 4 on Rock Paper Shotgun makes me want to give it a try. It sounds like the designers have worked incredibly hard to make the game feel genuinely-British without falling back on tired old tropes.

Note #11210

Notes from #musetech18 presentations (with a strong “collaboration” theme). Note that these are “live notes” first-and-foremost for my own use and so are probably full of typos. Sorry.

Matt Locke (StoryThings, @matlocke):

Over the last 100 years, proportional total advertising revenue has been stolen from newspapers by radio, then television: scheduled media that is experienced simultaneously. But we see a recent drift in “patterns of attention” towards the Internet. (Schedulers, not producers, hold the power in radio/television.)
The new attention “spectrum” includes things that aren’t “20-60 minutes” (which has historically been dominated by TV) nor “1-3 hours” (which has been film), but now there are shorter and longer forms of popular medium, from tweets and blog posts (very short) to livestreams and binging (very long). To gather the full spectrum of attention, we need to span these spectra.
Rhythm is the traditions and patterns of how work is done in your industry, sector, platforms and supply chains. You need to understand this to be most-effective (but this is hard to see from the inside: newcomers are helpful). In broadcast television as a medium, the schedules dictate the rhythms… in traditional print publishing, the major book festivals and “blockbuster release” cycles dominate the rhythm.
Then how do we collaborate with organisations not in our sector (i.e. with different rhythms)? There are several approaches, but think about the rhythmic impact.

Lizzy Bullock (English Heritage, @lizzybethness):

g.co/englishheritage
Partnered with Google Arts & Heritage; Google’s first single-partner project and also their first project with a multi-site organisation.
This kind of tech can be used to increase access (e.g. street view of closed sites) and also support curatorial/research aims (e.g. ultra-high-resolution photography).
Aside from the tech access, working with a big company like Google provides basically “free” PR. In combination, these benefits boost reach.
Learnings: prepare to work hard and fast, multi-site projects are a logistical nightmare, you will need help, stay organised and get recordkeeping/planning in place early, be aware that there’ll be things you can’t control (e.g. off-brand PR produced by the partner), don’t be afraid to stand your ground where you know your content better.
Decide what successw looks like at the outset and with all relevant stakeholders involved, so that you can stay on course. Make sure the project is integrated into contributors’ work streams.

Daria Cybulska (Wikimedia UK, @DCybulska):

Collaborative work via Wikimedians-in-residence not only provides a boost to open content but involves engagement with staff and opens further partnership opportunities.
Your audience is already using Wikipedia: reaching out via Wikipedia provides new ways to engage with them – see it as a medium as well as a platform.
Wikimedians-in-residence, being “external”, are great motivators to agitate processes and promote healthy change in your organisation.

Creative Collaborations ([1] Kate Noble @kateinoble, Ina Pruegel @3today, [2] Joanna Salter, [3] Michal Cudrnak, Johnathan Prior):

Digital making (learning about technology through making with it) can link museums with “maker culture”. Cambridge museums (Zoology, Fitzwilliam) used a “Maker in Residence” programme and promoted “family workshops” and worked with primary schools. Staff learned-as-they-went and delivered training that they’d just done themselves (which fits maker culture thinking). Unexpected outcomes included interest from staff and discovery of “hidden” resources around the museums, and the provision of valuable role models to participants. Tips: find allies, be ambitious and playful, and take risks.
National Maritime Museum Greenwich/National Maritime Museum – “re.think” aimed to engage public with emotive topics and physically-interactive exhibits. Digital wing allowed leaving of connections/memories, voting on hot issues, etc. This leads to a model in which visitors are actively engaged in shaping the future display (and interpretation) of exhibitions. Stefanie Posavec appointed as a data artist in residence.
SoundWalk Strazky at Slovak National Gallery: audio-geography soundwalks as an immersive experiential exhibition; can be done relatively cheaply, at the basic end. Telling fictional stories (based on reality) can help engage visitors with content (in this case, recreating scenes from artists’ lives). Interlingual challenges. Delivery via Phonegap app which provides map and audio at “spots”; with a simple design that discourages staring-at-the-screen (only use digital to improve access to content!).

Lightning talks:

Maritime Museum Greenwich: wanted to find out how people engage with objects – we added both a museum interpretation and a community message to each object. Highly-observational testing helped see how hundreds of people engage with content. Lesson: curators are not good judges of how their stuff will be received; audience ownership is amazing. Be reactive. Visitors don’t mind being testers of super-rough paper-based designs.
Nordic Museum / Swedish National Heritage Board explored Generous Interfaces: show first, don’t ask, rich overviews, interobject relationships, encourage exploration etc. (Whitelaw, 2012). Open data + open source + design sprints (with coding in between) + lots of testing = a collaborative process. Use testing to decide between sorting OR filtering; not both! As a bonus, generous interfaces encourage finding of data errors. bit.ly/2CNsNna
IWM on the centenary of WWI: thinking about continuing the crowdsourcing begun by the IWM’s original mission. Millions of assets have been created by users. Highly-collaborative mechanism to explore, contribute to, and share a data space.
Lauren Bassam (@lswbassam) on LGBT History and co-opting of Instagram as an archival space: Instagram is an unconventional archival source, but provides a few benefits in collaboration and engagement management, and serves as a viable platform for stories that are hard to tell using the collections in conventional archives. A suitably-engaged community can take pride in their accuracy and their research cred, whether or not you strictly approve of their use of the term “archivist”. With closed stacks, we sometimes forget how important engagement, touch, exploration and play can be.
Owen Gower (@owentg) from Dr. Jenner’s House Museum and Garden: they received EU REVEAL funding to look at VR as an engagement tool. Their game is for PSVR and has a commercial release. The objects that interested the game designers the most weren’t necessarily those which the curators might have chosen. Don’t let your designers get carried away and fill the game with e.g. zombies. But work with them, and your designers can help you find not only new ways to tell stories, but new stories you didn’t know you could tell. Don’t be afraid to use cheap/student developers!
Rebecca Kahm @rebamex from Pelagios Commons (@Pelagiosproject): the problem with linked data is that it’s hard to show its value to end users (or even show museums “what you can do” with it). Coins have great linked data, in collections. Peripleo was used to implement a sort-of “reverse Indiana Jones”: players try to recover information to find where an artefact belongs.
Jon Pratty: There are lots of useful services (Flickr, Storify etc.) and many are free (which is great)… but this produces problems for us in terms of the long-term life of our online content, not to mention the ethical issues with using services whose business model is built on trading personal data of our users. [Editor’s note: everything being talked about here is the stuff that the Indieweb movement have been working on for some time!] We need to de-siloise and de-centralise our content and services. redecentralize.org? responsibledata.io?

In-House Collaboration and the State of the Sector:

Rosie Cardiff @RosieCardiff, Serpentine Galleries on Mobile Tours. Delivered as web application via captive WiFi hotspot. Technical challenges were significant for a relatively small digital team, and there was some apprehension among frontline staff. As a result of these and other problems, the mobile tours were underused. Ideas to overcome barriers: report successes and feedback, reuse content cross-channel, fix bugs ASAP, invite dialogue. Interesting that they’ve gained a print guides off the back of the the digital. Learn lessons and relaunch.
Sarah Younaf @sarahyounas, Tyne & Wear Museums. Digital’s job is to ask the questions the museum wouldn’t normally ask, i.e. experimentation (with a human-centric bias). Digital is quietly, by its nature, “given permission” to take risks. Consider establishing relationships with (and inviting-in) people who will/want to do “mashups” or find alternative uses for your content; get those conversations going about collections access. Experimental Try-New-Things afternoons had value but this didn’t directly translate into ideas-from-the-bottom, perhaps as a result of a lack of confidence, a requirement for fully-formed ideas, or a heavy form in the application process for investment in new initiatives. Remember you can’t change everyone, but find champions and encourage participation!
Kati Price @katiprice on Structuring for Digital Success in GLAM. Study showed that technical leadership and digital management/analysis is rated as vital, yet they’re also underrepresented. Ambitions routinely outstrip budgets. Assumptions about what digital teams “look” like from an org-chart perspective don’t cover the full diversity: digital teams look very different from one another! Forrester Research model of Digital Maturity seems to be the closest measure of digital maturity in GLAM institutions, but has flaws (mostly relating to its focus in the commercial sector): what’s interesting is that digital maturity seems to correlate to structure – decentralised less mature than centralised less mature than hub-and-spoke less mature than holistic.
Jennifer Wexler, Daniel Pett, Chiara Bonacchi on Diversifying Museum Audiences through Participation and stuff. Crowdsourcing boring data entry tasks is sometimes easier than asking staff to do it, amazingly. For success, make sure you get institutional buy-in and get press on board. Also: make sure that the resulting data is open so everybody can explore it. Crowdsourcing is not implicitly democratisating, but it leads to the production of data that can be. 3D prints (made from 3D cutouts generated by crowdsourcing) are a useful accessibility feature for bringing a collection to blind or partially-sighted visitors, for example. Think about your audiences: kids might love your hip VR, but if their parents hate it then you still need a way to engage with them!