Hello and welcome to another roundup. We’re already rounding out March and I don’t know what to think about that.
Let’s get to the roundup.
Daylight Saving Time
U.S. Senate approves bill to make daylight saving time permanent | Reuters
The Senate has approved a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Which no matter which way you cut it, between standard or DST, the thing that we can agree on is that switching the clocks is dumb.
Unrelated, but interesting. I am an early dinner type of person around 6 PM as that’s how I grew up. But I’m flexible unless I’m hangry.
#NEAT
The scale of relative time and humanity yet we act like we know everything.
Google Docs now lets you draft emails with others and export them to Gmail
Collaborative emails/communications? Finally in 2022? I’ve had people have to review emails before, and this one of those things that just makes sense.
Video Games
DeepWell DTx is a therapy-focused game studio from the co-founder of Devolver | Engadget
“And these game developers had cracked that code at a level that they were really hitting hard neurological reward centers in the brain, in a way that the availability to effectively change what people do and think in certain times of mental illness was vastly improved over anything I’d seen before.”
Video games as therapy isn’t a new concept but that may still elude people that don’t understand that2. So I’m curious to see where this studio goes.
A Taxonomy of Video Game Difficulty
Comprehensive difficulty relates to understanding the rules of the game while executive difficulty is about physicality (e.g. fast reflexes, coordination). Strategic difficulty relates to how to use your understanding of the rules and your reflexes to best master the game, your opponent, or yourself.
Friends have often asked me to become someone who recommends video games based on personal taste, however, one of the hardest things to assess is someone’s desire to face difficulty or skill. Often I have to use video games to help describe other video games. But this doesn’t help when introducing someone to something new. Video games have their own language that’s hard to put into words, and that’s what where the differentiator of good to great game design comes in.
I’ll leave the discussion of what is the correct game difficulty for a later day3. (Spoiler: it’s the one that you have the most fun with.)
Katsuya Terada Zelda Art | Flickr
Melora Hart has been collecting and scanning high quality prints of The Legend of Zelda art from official sources for quite some time. This collection of art from Katsuya Terada from Zelda’s earliest days.
Noclip which has produced some fantastic documentaries about video game production needs to move to a Patreon supported model to stay alive.
The first reference of comparing Elden Ring to Radiant Silvergun. This thread is related to video game difficulty. There is a fine line where someone wants to explore how things work, to getting frustrated because they aren’t explicitly defined. That’s why you get the hand-holding tutorials4.
YouTube
There is something very wholesome about this interaction and audience isn’t in on it.
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- Even though my preference is to make DST permanent, that means solar noon and noon..noon will no longer be aligned, and that’s generally the one constant of standard time is that noon is generally aligned and consistent. ↩
- I’d argue there’s a difference from video games that just hit dopamine centers, compared to games that have environments to get absorbed in. ↩
- If someone tells you the right way to play a game, tell them kindly to shut up. ↩
- I feel this is where having tutorials accessible but optional is good. ↩
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