Links: Your Brain Is Tricky, Making Black Vienna Work & More

If you're like me, then you're 6'5" and in need of a haircut. More relevantly to this post, you take whatever you read and apply it to games, as with this first item:

• A March 2011 article in Scientific American titled "How Free Is Your Will?" reports on research that suggests you decide to take action before you know that you decide to take action. Patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains and recording the activity of specific neurons were asked to watch a clock with a button in hand, press the button whenever they wanted to, and – most importantly – indicate where the second hand had been pointing when they decided to press the button. From the article:

Quote:

But here is the interesting thing: about a quarter of these neurons began to change their activity before the time patients declared as the moment they felt the urge to press the button. The change began as long as a second and a half before the decision, and as early as seven tenths of a second before it, this activity was robust enough that the researchers could predict with over 80 percent accuracy not only whether a movement had occurred, but when the decision to make it happened.

I'd like to see this experiment recreated with patients playing Jungle Speed.

• Designer Richard Berg was interviewed on the Old Board Gamers Blog about Godzilla: Kaiju World Wars, due out soonish from Toy Vault.

• Designers Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim are interviewed on Giant Fire Breathing Robot about Train of Thought, Belfort and working together as a long-distance couple.

• On Opinionated Gamers, Greg Aleknevicus explains why he created an online version of the deduction game Black Vienna and why the online version does (and doesn't) work better than the real life version. Which other games fall into the bucket of "better as an online game"? I know I had that reaction after playing At the Gates of Loyang with three. I appreciated the cleverness of the design and liked the game play, but watching others churn through the possibilities of how to string together a dozen actions optimally was less of a thrill.

• The seventh annual gathering of game designers at the Swiss Museum of Games takes place May 7-8, 2011. If you happen to be in the neighborhood – or need an excuse to visit the Alps – be sure to stop and check it out!

• Another obscure game migrates to iOS, this being 22 Apples by designer Juan Carlos Pérez Pulido. I've played this game roughly a dozen times and have not won once. Apparently I perfected an anti-strategy...

• And designer Reinhard Staupe has moved into the iOS field as well, but with the original game SqWhere, developed as an app by Gilad Yarnitzky.