ダニエルの冒険

A friend of mine has started a blog on economics. It’s a really great read and puts bailouts, bad debts, and stimulus packages in a down-to-earth context.

Economics isn’t a subject discussed a lot on internet communities so it’s definitely something worth subscribing to, if you have an RSS reader (or favourites or bookmarks or whatever ancient technology you’re using if not RSS ).

Here’s something I remembered during our class on space in games. It’s an article and video on personal space in games, and how our social reactions to space in reality (such as someone standing too close to you), to virtual reality.

My favourite line from the video: “this guy’s state of nudity makes me less interested in being near him than if he was clothed.”

We had a very interesting class about rules in games last week. It was interesting to see how people understood the concept, as I came at it from a physics point of view but others approached from a legal/social authority point of view. Surely both will give very different understandings.
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Last class we had discussions on our theses. I’ve decided to take a topic which came up in class a few weeks ago: how the quality of a simulation affects our reaction to the violence we experience. It’s fairly narrow but that means I can go quite deep into video game violence (a topic where there isn’t really a general consensus), as well as the technical side of things with the current state of simulation quality and where we’re heading. Uncanny valley and all that.

What I’m going to be looking at throughout is how better simulation (through graphics, animation, AI, sound, input, and everything else all together) changes our emotional and psychological reaction to what we experience in games.

Hope I can squeeze 10k words out of this.

We had some interesting talks last Thursday from a couple of guys. More after the jump.
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