Category: video games
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The importance of education
We have a new young chancellor and it was his first budget this week. He made at least one schoolboy error. Did you spot it?
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Gnothi seauton
While playing Assassin’s Creed a couple of days ago, I realised that whenever I pick up a new game I first learn the limitations of my game character. In a way I get to relive childhood for a short time and truly experience what it is to know nothing.
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PS3 compatible video
After much searching I’m unable to find a simple reliable method to get video into a format that the PS3 can recognise and play. But I do have a recipe that works in the majority of cases.
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Confirmation bias
I recently read a paper on confirmation bias: the tendency to focus on information that corroborates theories and dismiss information that contradicts them. It explained a general problem that I’ve noticed with many scientific studies (particularly in the field of software development) but I hadn’t been able to identify.
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Networking
A post on one of the game developer newsgroups suggested that I got myself LinkedIn. It’s only when you do something like this that you realise just how many contacts you have in the business.
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A lesson from the school of virtual life
I was half watching some movie; I don’t recall what it was. There was a father and son chat going on regurgitating the usual cliches, “you have to live your own life,” “you only have one life to live,” or something like that. It got me thinking about the different way we live our lives…
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The best tester I ever worked with
Reading an entry on James Bach’s blog reminded me of the best tester I ever worked with. It got me thinking about how he did it.
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Avoiding timing defects
My recent study of the defects that slipped through reviews but were found during testing show an interesting pattern: they were almost all due to timing issues. Could a change of programming style reduce those errors?
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On PSP and code reviews
Since reading about the PSP, I have continued to collect statistics. However, last week I decided to collect additional statistics related the the practice of reviewing code before compilation. The goal of this practice is to catch 100% of your compile errors before compilation by reading through the code. I was unsure about the wisdom…
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Progress quest
A comment on digg about an article on the lack of role playing in the modern RPG led me to this great little indie game.