Interesting Reading

I flagged these two articles to share with our gaming committee at work and finally had a chance to read them tonight after filling in for Evening Storytime. They're even more interesting than I expected.

The first one is about gaming in South Korea, where it seems to be the number one sport and entertainment. There are professional players and leagues with their own TV channels. It is the largest entertainment industry and they are the biggest stars. Parents encourage their kids to game in their downtime to work out stress and exercise their minds. Most of the gaming is done in "bangs," clubs filled with PCs set up for gaming, and it is considered a very social activity.

10 million South Koreans regularly follow eSports, as they are known here, and said that some fan clubs of top gamers have 700,000 members or more. “These fan clubs are actually bigger in size than the fan clubs of actors and singers in Korea,” he said. “The total number of people who go spectate pro basketball, baseball and soccer put together is the same as the number of people who go watch pro game leagues.”

The second one is about a new game being developed called Spore. It's kind of like civilization, except you start as a one-celled amoeba and have to evolve to the point of civilization, and then keep progressing to the point that you head into outer space and colonize galaxies. There is a ton of creativity in that you can decide what form your creature will take at the very beginning and that effects how your world evolves. It's a lengthy read, but good.

As you work your way through the Spore levels, your creatures are automatically sent back to the central Spore file servers, where they are then used to populate the worlds of other players. This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson’s notion of Panspermia — the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic “spores” of life from other planets. (Dyson’s concept is also the origin of the game’s title.) When you land on a new planet in the game’s final stage, it may be teeming with multiple exotic species, all of whom have evolved separately on other computers around the world, guided by the tastes and imagination of complete strangers. But these creatures will, crucially, have lives of their own once they have found their ways onto your machine. They will not be controlled by other players as you interact with them on your screen. Once they have migrated to your computer, they will act autonomously, based on the procedural animation and artificial-intelligence algorithms of the Spore software. By the same token, the creatures that you have lovingly brought to life will spread throughout the alternate universes of other Spore players, struggling for existence on their own, independent from your direct control.