games
sciencepunk | July 20, 2011I miss the 80s, when computing manuals were illustrated with things far removed from home computing. I found this amongst my pop's old computing books.
Nowadays off-the-shelf programming software tends to be designed for a specific purpose, and I like to think that the artist here was trying to capture the infinite possibilties that lay ahead at the dawn of home computing, but perhaps I'm just being sentimental.
Wait, there's more!
sciencepunk | June 10, 2011It's been a while since we had some Friday Flash Fun here at SciencePunk, but this one really blew me out of the water.
SpaceChem is currently causing quite a stir amongst the gaming websites: Escapist Magazine gave it the Genre Buster award and Rock Paper Shotgun hailed it as "one of the year's best indie games". Deservedly so, in my opinion.
SpaceChem puts you in the shoes of a junior materials chemist, blasted into the depths of space to work for a pan-galactic mining corporation. Your job is to build complex molecules from the basic chemicals mined out of these planets. At your…
sciencepunk | April 5, 2011What games would a robot play? It's a question that struck me last night, and kept me up as I sketched out diagrams for android puzzle toys.
For a start, we have to imagine why a robot would play games. We're not even able to explain why we enjoy them so much. To say that games trigger the reward system in the brain doesn't add anything by way of an explanation. Enjoyment, pleasure, is an atomic building block of behaviour, it's impossible to break it down any further. So why ask why robots would play games when we can't explain our own fascination with them? They just do. We can give…
pontiff | May 24, 2010Martin Gardner has passed away at age 95. I fondly remember going back through the back issues of "Scientific American" as a kid and devouring Gardner's "Mathematical Recreations" column (along with the similar columns written by Hofstadter and Dewdney.) If I have any mathematical skills, I probably owe a large chunk of them to some of Gardner's puzzles. Indeed, in my mind, Scientific American went from a pretty good first rate science magazine, to something less than stellar, when they ended these regular columns along with their "Amateur Scientist" column. (And don't get me started on…
cagapakis | January 14, 2010Most synthetic biologists and biological engineers (and basically everyone else) think of DNA as code, simply carrying the information to make the RNA and proteins that do the real work inside the cell. In the past few years, a small group of biological engineers have used DNA instead as a physical substrate, a programmable nanomaterial to build all kinds of tiny shapes with (even smiley faces). The shapes that the DNA folds into depend on the sequence, which controls how different strands match up to each other and bend. For a great introduction to building shapes out of DNA in 2D and 3D…
sciencepunk | November 20, 2009
Unlike most games, this one wants you to prevent havoc, not create it! But it's still fun! Following in the footsteps of The Great Flu, this is a game designed by the noble people responsible for saving lives in real world situations. Stop Disasters! lets you play the role of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, pitting your wits against a multitude of Mother Nature's worst tantrums - wildfires, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods and more. You'll be expected to put in homes, early warning systems, and carry out improvements to existing buildings whilst installing defences in…
pontiff | September 8, 2009Tomorrow, September 9, 2009 is apparently the date for a worldwide game of monopoly: Monopoly City StreetsWelcome to Monopoly City Streets. You versus the world in the biggest live game of MONOPOLY in history!
On the 9th SEPTEMBER, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will be launched! A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.
Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect…
sciencepunk | August 13, 2009
A new game developed by experts at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam puts you in charge of a global war against an emerging pandemic. The Great Flu, created by Ranj Serious Games, is designed to give the public an insight into how disease control is managed on a world-wide stage.
Players are given various tools to try and halt the pandemic - early warning systems public information campaigns, face masks and anti-viral drugs, as well as improved research centres and medical services. In addition you can suspend public transport and close schools and businesses, and forcibly…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2009Get Your Sexy Name
But I actually like this name better;
Get Your Sexy Name
But I am such an amazing lover that, when I give the generator my full name -- "GrrlScientist" -- it blows up! But when I give it my name in bits and pieces, it gives me this (see above the jump for the first part of my name);
Get Your Sexy Name
sciencepunk | June 12, 2009
Remember all the fun you had with the Great Sperm Race game a while back? Well, now you can step it up a level with Sperm Rider. In this game you play a delighted little guy in a cowboy hat, riding on a giant spermatozoa through a city drawn crudely in crayons. Using your "seed of destruction", set about squishing the local populace, and fend off attacks from tanks, helicopters and jet planes by deflecting their missiles with your long tail. It's all set to brilliant music and has very little to do with any kind of science, but I like it anyway. Just make sure you don't "ruin everything…
sciencepunk | June 5, 2009
Direct via the blue pages of Metafilter comes a slice of flash fun that encourages you to play with zoo poo. Who Pooped? is an educational game from Minnesota Zoo that's full of crap in the best possible way. Guess the owner of a sample, feed them and examine the results. Good dirty fun!
pontiff | May 27, 2009Katamari Damacy is a very cool game, if for no other reason than it is a game in which "scale" changes. The basic idea is that you roll a ball around which picks up objects that aren't too big for the ball and then the ball grows. Usually you are racing a clock to make your ball big enough. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but it's highly addictive.
But this, this is way cool. A controller for the game which is....a big shiny metal ball:
sciencepunk | May 14, 2009
From CrazyMonkey, the powerhouse of internet Flash fun, comes Cosmic Crush, a deceptively simple game of meteor might. The rules are straightforward: propel your sentient lump of rock through space, absorbing smaller asteroids whilst avoiding the gravity wells of larger planets. If this sounds fun, you've been conned. It is fun, but it's also fiendishly difficult.
Unfortunately for you, large planets wield a gravitational pull that extends far beyond the visible screen, meaning that by the time you see them, it's too late. Driving blind, you must be sensitive to the minor tugs and drifts…
pontiff | May 12, 2009The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…
sciencepunk | May 8, 2009
Not content with sapping our productivity with the Space Game, Armor Games have released another little science-themed gem in Microbe Kombat. The premise is simple - guide your microbe through the primordial ooze, eat proteins, and engulf smaller microbes. There are two broad strategies: keep eating protein until you're the biggest bully on the block, or keep dividing until you swarm out the enemy. Both have their pros and cons - dividing will make you and your daughter cells more vulnerable to macrophages, but many small microbes will out-compete a single large one in scavenging proteins…
sciencepunk | April 30, 2009
Sex is fun, but it's nothing compared to the thrilling life-or-death struggle spawned by passionate, unprotected lovemaking. Thankfully, to promote Channel 4's The Great Sperm Race, Flash game maestro Johnny Two Shoes has conceived a game that puts you in the cockpit of a humble gamete struggling to become whole again.
Like a super-fecund cage match, 250 million enter, but only one leaves. Can you safely navigate the acid-filled folds of the vagina and outwit the hungry leukocytes to bury yourself into the egg in an explosion of zygotic glory? Find out now!
awild | February 28, 2009Those of you who were into ants in the early '90s might remember SimAnt, a simulation game where you control the decisions your ants make to steer a colony to dominance over a competing species in a suburban lawn.
The game is based, in part, on the optimality equations summarized in Oster & Wilson's 1978 text "Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects". The book lays out mathematical foundations for determining the investments a colony should place in workers, queens, and males in order to optimize Darwinian fitness over a range of ecological conditions. If you knew the equations,…
pontiff | September 12, 2008War is a classic kids card game. I spent many an hour wiling away the time playing war growing up. Enough so that I actually developed a strategy for the game. A strategy for the game of war? That's crazy talk.
For those who've never encounter the game of war here are the rules. A standard deck of 52 cards is shuffled and split between two equal stacks which are then given to the two players. The players then turn over the top card of their stacks and the player with the higher rank card "wins" and gets to take the two cards and place them at the bottom of their stack. If the cards…
esiegel | April 19, 2008Sometimes, gravity and motion has the power to mesmerize me. I found this online game called "compulse" which was so much fun, that I spent about 90 minutes this week just playing this game until I had beaten every level on the "pro" setting. Yikes. (My score is 104 under par, 8 under pro.)
And so, in the interest of bringing it to you, I've tried to embed it into my website. Have fun playing if it works in your browser (I told you to use firefox or safari), and if you enjoy playing with the mechanics of motion as much as I do, maybe you, too, have the interest it takes to be a physicist!…