Interesting Links for 28-09-2024

[andrewducker]

1. In case you were wondering what Lord Alli gets in exchange for donations to Starmer...

(tags:politics money corruption uk labour )

2. Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

(tags:games stories )

3. People who had two COVID-19 infections were more than twice as likely—and those who had three or more COVID-19 infections were almost four times more likely—to report long COVID as those with one infection.

(tags:pandemic doom )

4. Mathematician unravels Shakespeare-era card trick (with a little help from his ten year old)

(tags:children mathematics shakespeare magic cards history )

Comments

[vivdunstan]

4. I bought the book by the Weymouth man’s friend about Shakespeare and maths, just the other day! As a birthday present for Martin! It’s called Much Ado About Numbers.

[vivdunstan]

Oh and we have a mutual solar mathematician PhD friend at St Andrews!

[andrewducker]

Truly, it is a small world.

[vivdunstan]

Yup!

[toothycat]

4. The real trick is writing a whole article about a magic trick without, at any point, actually describing the trick. The readers, too, would like a go working out the maths behind it!

[vivdunstan]

I'm rather gobsmacked that the whole article failed to name the book and author the trick info is from! See my comment above for the new book about this.

[vivdunstan]

Here's the link to Colin's detailed writeup about the trick:

https://aperiodical.com/2024/09/philip-henslowes-card-trick/

Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

[jack]

That makes sense. Although I always have the caveat that people usually mean something more like narrative, because that's the main way of telling stories in non-interactive mediums. I think games can have very effective stories not told through narrative: e.g. no-one has much idea of a sequence of events from doom, but it conveys very very effectively "Hell demons invade space, but can they defeat one marine?!"

Re: Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

[andrewducker]

To be fair, that's such a tiny amount of story that it would be hard to not convey it.

Dark Souls (and related games) convey huge amounts of story through item descriptions and the like, to an impressive level.

Re: Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

[channelpenguin]

As a non game player, the article helped me understand more reasons exactly why I'm a non player.

Training mode, plot tokens... That is just too much like either my physical hobbies (training) or my daily work (definitely too many plot tokens in IaC, cloud techs, frameworks, 3rd party APIs...). I always said I would rather spend that amount of effort on learning "real life" skills. But that's me. I'm fairly sporty, musical and I have my garden fruit and veg adventures for strategy "gaming"...

Maybe I'd never be a gamer, but in theory, I would definitely like story and to be able to use creativity over collecting plot tokens ... to get better at running round killing things (which isn't too interesting to me. And why all the running all the time??).

Maybe there's some different type of games possible, where this conflict between story and "the game" doesn't arise. Just artificial / restricted enough to inspire creativity, without requiring the plot token mechanism...

Re: Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

[andrewducker]

If you like story, and not "Doing simulated things" then games just aren't really your thing. You'd be better off with books/movies/TV, which do story better without having to be distracted by giving you things to do.

Re: Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling

[channelpenguin]

Yeah. Exactly. That's what I do.

Real Things and Films/TV.

I am in a minority though, right? I just wonder what people get out of games in case I'm missing out. And out of general curiosity. I'm not huge on more traditional games/board games either, except as a social thing that's ok even if not my favourite thing.