braingames4geeks

Web 2.0 Directory: Game Services

This is an interesting hybrid list of sites with games, game commentary forums and outlets, and even sites that let you place widget-games on your own site for visitors and yourself to enjoy. (kind of like I have on my iGoogle homepage)
Not your usual game site list.

Game Services (9 sites) : Web 2.0 Directory : eConsultant.

Poll Results Commentary: MIT and Jeopardy

Thus far, it appears that visitors to antiaging4geeks, who chose to participate in our poll, are most impressed by talents related to chess, Jeopardy, and Rubik's Cube, with Jeopardy wooing most. Early on, it appeared that a perfect GRE score was going to take it, but these three dark horses surged midway through polling. Sudoku skill impressed no one and crossword puzzle facility impressed few.

Additionally, according to a seperate poll, most respondents feel that MIT graduates are more intelligent than the networking experts otherwise known as CCIEs.

Speed cubing and power sudoku-solving appear related, as do crossword puzzles and jeopardy, with a weaker similarity between the analytical reasoning section of the GRE and chess. The correlates and their indications:
Jeopardy and crossword puzzles: scholarship/knowledge recall/richness of early environment
Chess and the GRE: abstraction/logic/quantitative reasoning
Rubik' Cube and sudoku: logic/spatial reasoning/speed processing

The winners: MIT and Jeopardy.

Screenshot from www.rubiks.com: the official website of Rubik's Cube

Make Systems, Not Games

GameMaker 7.0

Don't make games. Make those objects whip around in the most amazingly circuitous routes, such whimsy, such essential DNA-ness, it's delightful and immersive.

Perhaps, after months of designing and evolving knotty, winding, tangled systems, an interactivity may be developed around them, a kind of tutorial in the guise of a game, a kind of novel universe with its own constellations and meteorology.

Screenshot is from the object properties panel of GameMaker 7.0

What researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, call 'crystallized intelligence', is really specialized, encoded brilliance. [Yes, the hermit is aware that the term, along with the term 'fluid intelligence', have been around for much longer than this current research.]

Why?
The learned, honed versifier may be wholly inadequate in novel situations in the three dimensional world, but he is not inadequate in novel situations in the realms of poesy. He crafts complex brilliance to be sung for centuries. Maybe not G, maybe not IQ, but far greater.

The hermit's subjectively derived impression is that the development of scholarship comes at the expense of I.Q., but that it is well worth the trade, lest he falls asleep and wakes up in Waterworld, or anywhere where raw thinking skills are more in demand than artistic specialization.

There is a certain slow pace that sets in once scholarship is pursued. It is as if the pulsations of the brain are gently coaxed into a softer sine wave, and that new knowledge is acquired as the being snakes by the wave nadir, and dreadfully bold advances are made as the radar blip meanders through the peak.

Photo courtesy of Martin Buschkuehl.

Stochastic Puzzle Solving

The recluse cannot consciously fathom how he solves FreeCell and other complex, random puzzles when he immerses. But, it is clear that it is not intuition or similars, but rather, a state that is like a light constant strain on the body that allows a second and third mind to free themselves and, machine-like, brain-like, ribosome-like, solve puzzles: through fits and starts, via pauzing before impulsive column clearing, then scanning, then impulsive clearing, via holding impulse off from impulzive row clearing, and via utilizing almost thinking.

Fascinating.

Pong's Revenge

Episode 89, 'No Quarter', of the old time radio show Nightfall, is all about a grown man's obsession with early video games such as Defender, Asteroids and Donkey Kong, and a silly Tron-like, 2001-like, Lawnmowerman-like, increasingly real, immersion.
Zany funny, but not really that funny, if you take my meaning.

It is a little known and fresh take on early video game mania.

Check it out: Nightfall at Archive.org
[Remember: Episode 089]

Screenshot is of the 1972 Atari videogame 'Pong'.