getting to PERMA

Jane McGonigal - On Productivity from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jane McGonigal my New Year's Resolution is to play more games.

And get back to blogging (I miss it).


Jane McGonigal is a game designer based in San Francisco, California. She is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

and you thought Eyjafjallajökull was a bitch.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Discover more animation and arts videos.

punchatzed

So how was I to know this thing called Doom would make a jillion smackers?

Illustrator Don Ivan Punchatz, on his decision to accept a flat fee over a royalty for his illustrated cover for the first release of the video game Doom. Cited this morning in his New York Times obituary.

Punchatz, who passed away on 22 October, created book jackets for Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury; magazine covers for Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and National Lampoon; illustrations for National Geographic. He also created the original Star Wars movie poster.

When I saw the Star Wars reference in the obit for the man who peopled my imagination with planets and other far away places (even though I didn't know it was him doing it), I immediately thought of the poster in which Luke raises his light saber overhead and Leia stands all chesty beside him. But Google reveals that that one is not his. Instead, Punchatz armed Leia and set her jaw fiercely as she leans into battle.

Which makes me miss him all the more.

fold it good

Long-term, I'm hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world's population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game.

We're trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.

David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry, commenting in the University of Washington News on the beta release of FoldIt -- which puts gamers to work folding proteins.

According to the UW News FoldIt is “a new game [that] turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes -- key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer's to vaccines.”

Or more to the point, from fold.it:

What big problems is this game tackling?
Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom.

Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

(+ I love that fold.it registered an Italian domain so that they could get the .it extension...)

Game on »

staying alive

Guys like to blow things up; women like to figure things out — it's a broad generalization but I think it's true.

Robert Bach, President, Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft, at yesterday's Forrester Consumer Forum, talking (broadly) about the kinds of games that men and women prefer.

To be fair: I have to admit to a wicked preference for those two person shooter games. But that's just me being a girl again: I like it when decimation goes hand in hand with cooperation.