Handy Vandal's Almanac

According to a recent study of gaming and aggression:

Victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone – but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. When male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, levels of the potent sex hormone plummeted.

This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone’s effect on aggression is advantageous.

Against a group of strangers – be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone’s effects on aggression offer an advantage.

“In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you’re better for it,” says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study.

However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn’t make sense. “You can’t alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,” he says.

- Ewen Callaway @ New Scientist

Via Slashdot.

At the Austin Indie Summit, game designer Colin Northway — author of the remarkable Fantastic Contraption — outlined several key principles for aspiring designers:

1. Make your game in Flash

Northway draws a fine distinction between ‘Flash games’ (games where you “launch kitties into a spiky thing”) and ‘games written in Flash’, but he’s an evangelist for the platform more than anything because “the content discovery problem has been solved” compared to consoles, the iPhone, etc. Forums, emails, all pre-existing internet communities will do the work of keeping your game’s name in front of other people, whereas, say, with the iPhone, “making money is hard to do if Apple doesn’t spray the money hose on you.”

2. Make your game “live online” …

3. Leverage “pride based marketing” …

4. Make a free game that gives players ‘a tote bag’ if they pay …

Via Offworld.

Now this is a beautiful thing:

Computer Space, the world’s first commercially-sold coin-operated video game. Recently for sale on Ebay!

Don’t you wish you owned one? I know I do!

Via BoingBoing.

See Computer Space @ Wikipedia.

I don’t believe I’ve ever actually seen Computer Space. I suppose it’s possible — I haunted more than a few video arcades, back in the seventies — but I’m certain I never played it.

Salome, as interpreted by artist Takayoshi Sato for Fatale, “an interactive vignette in realtime 3D based on the story of Salome, particularly the play by Oscar Wilde.”

Beautiful work, very much to my taste.

Via Offworld; see also Femme Fatale: Graveyard, Path creators taking on Wilde’s Salomé.

It’s got art — it’s got sex — it’s got death — what more do you want in a game??

Right: Salome (with the head of John the Baptist) by Klimt.

Salome has been widely interpreted, in various media — painting, sculpture, drama, literature, dance, film, and now interactive computer games — for … how long now? Two millenia, three?

Such is the power of Eternal She!

The eternal things change forms, but the underlying substance remains the same.

Or perhaps the reverse is true …?

See also Deus Ex meets Icarus.