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Virtual Reality

Virtual reality seems to be the only topic that is being developed at all in the realm of video games. Right now, it looks to be that virtual reality will be the next revolution in video games; a third of employees at Valve are working on something related to virtual reality. But Isn't Every Video Game Some Kind Of Virtual Reality? Yes, every game is a virtual reality of some kind, but the virtual reality that I will be writing about is a virtual reality that is able to completely trick a sense into thinking it is real. The virtual reality developments going on today are developments in sight, the predominant sense in Humans . Saying that all video games are virtual realities is not accurate, because, to date, no video game has been able to accurately portray a reality indistinguishable to our senses than a real reality. The Moral Importance Of Virtual Reality In Language vlass, I read an essay titled, The moral Importance of Fiction and Literature th
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An Open Letter To Valve and the TF Team

Dear Valve, It is no question that your match making service for TF2 is horrible. Players are met with long wait times, unbalanced matches, and matches the end as soon as they get there. Players, much like me, get infuriated about how i get matched onto a loosing team at towards the end of the round every time . you need to change something about this process, Team Fortress Two is loosing players because of it. Before the Matchmaking Update Before the Matchmaking update, the "Valve Servers" were searchable servers that the client-slash-player could choose from. Servers would never stop, and players could set the round to be whatever map they wanted. Experiences players would join them to use the non experiences players as cannon fodder, and the non experiences players would join because they didn't know how to use the game yet. You most likely changed the way players join servers for this reason, so that newer players could go up against players that wouldn't

Net Neutrality

Sigh... I really do not want to comment on this. It's never a good idea to get political; getting political makes people who don't agree with your views stop consuming your content, and people who agree with your values pressure you into saying things that you do not want, which will cause all of the previous. I will try to be as unbiased as possible. I live in the United States, so I will be writing from an American perspective, and using current events in American politics; however, this is still an issue that applies to everyone. What is Net Neutrality Net neutrality is the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must treat all [legal] traffic on the Internet equally; no service receiving better or worse treatment. What is a violation of net neutrality Take a person who desires to search Google for "hilarious cats failing jumps" or whatever. With net neutrality in place, the person's ISP is forced to treat Google equally as all

Late Shift

Some people say we're all connected, all part of a bigger picture; some harmonious flow, endless and meaningful. Maybe that's how it looks from a distance; but up close, with eyes open, I see no evidence of some spiritual choreographer at work. No, I see nothing but random fractals of a selfish, queenless hive. -Exert of the opening narration suggesting that the player is an omniscient, "spiritual choreographer" WARNING: I try to keep it to a minimum, but there are still spoilers. For the last two weeks, I have been playing a game called late Shift . Late Shift is the first choose your own adventure game, and originally came out in April of 2016. About a year after that, it was released on steam; the game looked interesting, so I bought it. I found multiple parts of the game, and its platform interesting, and I wanted to share them The trailer for Late Shift is below. There is language that may be considered offensive to younger audiences. Firs

Well, I Was Wrong

The simplest way of doing this [defending against malicious synchronization] is by having each of the servers send each other the data that they receive from the others. This will allow each of the servers to compare the data, and figure out if it is manipulated. Only one check is needed because it is majority prof this way; as long as the majority of the servers are reporting the correct data, the individual servers can judge vote whether to kick a client or not. - One Twenty Eight, April 10 th , 2017, 5 AM GMT, in this post Quick Note I use the words "server" and "player" interchangeably; this article is focused on the type of decentralized server that has one server per player. Nope Umm... No. That is not right. That is definitely not right. In case you did not read that article, I went over the technicalities of a decentralized video game round. During this, I declared that as long as the majority of servers are reporting accurate data, t

Is A Decentralized Video Game Round Possible?

The Problom Facing This Question Every time I think of decentralization; I think of huge supercomputers, spread around the world, all preforming calculations to mine the next block. The blockchain format is not a viable video game environment because of the large latency that comes with it. However, the only reason that blocks are necessary in a cryptocurrency is to that malicious users do not try to exploit the inherent latency that comes with the internet, by spending more than they have. This is not the case for video game servers, because packets are an unlimited recourse. However, there is a possibility that a malicious client could send different data to each client, but more on that later. An Explanation From now on, I will refer to a collection of players playing together as a round, or as a video game round. I will also reserve the term "server" as a application that computes, stores, sends, and interprets all the data necessary to run a normal video gam

Is a Decentralized Video Game Possible?

This is probably going to be the single most confusing article I will ever write for people of an older age. Recently, there has been interest throughout the Internet of decentralized technology like Bitcoin and Etherium; and I was wondering if the same type of decentralization can be implemented in a video game. What is Decentralization? Decentralization is the quality of a system not having any single party having devine control over the system, or being able to cause it to fail. Structure I will design the game off of a blockchain format. Blockchains are very efficient, do not require trust, and are insusceptible to latency errors. Listed Servers Most video games with multilayer compatibility have some way of listing community servers, but how can players find games if nobody can own a list of where to find those games? My solution to this was to have a server browser, where the server IPs are listed on all the nodes, much like how the transactions of a cryp

Are Video Games Sports?

The dictionary definition of a sport is: A physical activity engaged in for pleasure Merriam-Webster Onilne This definition has two parts on it. the first one is that a sport must be a "physical activity," with some form of exercise. The second one is that it must be "engaged in for pleasure," and not just to get in shape. Video games do not fit the definition of sport; because video games do not fit the first part of the definition of being physical. Video games currently don't have much of a physical component to them (exept if you want your right middle and index finger strong from clicking the mouse,) and are therefore, not a sport. But wait, there's a rebuttal for this argument. Sports were designed as a pastime to entertain the people playing them, and soon after, the people watching them; and now with competitive gaming, both of those criteria are able to exist inside Video Games. Our denotation of words is based off its connotation, which