I enjoy playing video games. I used to play PC games since early 1990’s. I played anything from real-time strategies like WarCraft, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, etc; to first-person shooters like Half Life and Quake III.
In the recent years though I have completely moved to consoles. My favorite gaming device is Sony PlayStation 3. Now I play mostly first-person shooters (Kill Zone, Call of Duty series, and the like), driving simulations (Colin McRae’s Dirt), adventure quests (Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted), and sports (NHL09 ice hockey).
I don’t write much about games, but when I do, I publish my posts in this category.
Have a look at kottke’s article about the Fortnite World Cup. It’s short enough to digest in a few seconds. Yet it links to more articles, and features some numbers, that blew my mind.
More than 40 million people played in the 10 weeks of qualifiers, the oldest player in the final lineup was 24 (!!), and the winning duo won a $3 million grand prize.
Turns out, the prizes totaled $30 million!
Google Play Store shares the best games and apps of 2018 in the following two lists:
For me personally, most of the apps I used in 2018 remained the same from the previous years. The two new discovers were:
I have recently blogged about the Faces of Open Source project. That’s a great initiative. But here’s another one, with a lot more practical approach – Programmer Playing Cards. It is a deck of playing cards, featuring people who influenced the world of computer programming in a variety of ways. Each card has a photo of a person, his or her name, what was the influence, and, as a nice touch, a quote from that person.
Here’s an example with Larry Wall.
More examples as well as instructions on how to get these cards are here.
Here is an interesting story for all the fans of SimCity and similar games, as well as for anyone who still thinks that computer games are a useless time waste. I’d like to see you try doing something even remotely close to this:
This story reminds me of all the time I spent playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe and OpenTTD. The game is fun and I learned a lot about transportation. But no matter how hard I tried, I never came close to the real pros (there are many actual professionals from the transportation industry playing the game and trying things out). Have a look at this monster train station, for example (found in this forum thread):
Just stop and think for a moment. How much do you really know about transportation? Trucks, buses, trains, ships, airplanes and helicopters? Roads, maintenance, history and technology change? Road planning, bridges, tunnels, semaphores, roundabouts, ports, loading stations, warehouse? I can go on …
These games teach you a great deal about the complex world around you.
I’ve been a fan of Jeff Atwood’s writing on Coding Horror for years. But it was mostly about technology and programming. Today, I was reading through his review of a video game – Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds – and for the first time in a really really long time, I wanted to download it and start playing even before I finished reading his post.
That reminded me of how gaming reviews and guides were done back in the 90’s – not by professional content managers and editors, but by people who had a passion. Learn from that, the gaming industry. Learn from that, everyone else!