In Back in 1995, a new PC game that looks like an old PlayStation game, Kent, a low-polygon man in a jacket and jeans, stands on a rooftop looking at a different rooftop in the distance. Before he can ask “What is going on?” Kent finds himself being assaulted by a snarling, floating raisin with arms, or perhaps a melting chocolate Slimer. It's hard to tell.
It appears that while Kent’s back was turned, the city had become overrun with some sorts of demon folk, and the remaining humans live on the upper floors of their buildings trying to survive. This is the foggy setting for Back in 1995, a game made by Takaaki Ichijo as an homage to PlayStation horror games like Silent Hill, though perhaps only in the bluntest, most superficial ways.
Back in 1995 received hype in recent years after appearing at Japanese game festivals and even winning the Spark Award the Tokyo Game Show. With a very conscious, specific visual aesthetic, it seeks to recreate the halcyon days of '90s horror survival games, which focused less on action and gunplay and more on dread, claustrophobic environments, and gurgling brownish monsters.
Caption: Really burying the lede there. Credit: Back in 1995
Oddly enough, most of those games being honoured here came out after 1995. Resident Evil started in 1996. Silent Hill in 1999. Before you start you can select one of three types of visual filters based on display errors from a CRT monitor. You can play without these errors, though the game suggests you don’t, but I’d argue they don’t add much. Back in 1995 aspires to recreate the PlayStation/Sega Saturn era, from molten texture-mapping and dysmorphic polygons to a d-pad control scheme that feels like a human trying to parallel park. Similar to Eternal Darkness, Back in 1995 will throw some prankish television gags your way, like pretending to change the video input, but because you are probably playing on a computer I doubt they’d cause you any panic.
This game feels like it’s looking at the wrong things through its rose-tinted glasses. The non-plot zips by, and even beyond the straight-talk translated dialogue (which, admittedly, is pretty 1995) there’s a death of subtlety. Horrors simply pop up without any dramatic build up. Back in 1995 seems more concentrated on recreating the technical limitations of a generation instead of interesting things that happened despite them. Not nearly as fun as Resident Evil, nowhere near as subversive as Silent Hill, not even as spooky as Alone in the Dark. A concept that could have been done right, Back in 1995 is a disappointing tribute to pawn store televisions instead of the games you enjoyed on them.
'Silent Hill' Homage 'Back in 1995' Is Fogged in Nostalgia
Last week I wrote about how worries over a player's alleged cheats were causing a stir in the eSports community for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, while arguing that cheating remains one of the greatest hurdles for eSports as it strives for legitimacy. This week, another episode illustrated just how prevalent the problem might be. After five years, developer Valve at last figured out how to detect the LMAOBOX cheat for its arena shooter Team Fortress 2, and after an update last night, almost 170 players in the game's UGC eSports league found themselves banned. The bulk of the bans appear to affect players who used LMAOBOX between March 28 and April 11, but some players are reporting that they're locked out of the game even though they haven't used it in months.
But that small number doesn't even count the thousands of other affected players, many of whom took to the Team Fortress 2subreddit to express their anger and frustration. Valve was always decently thorough at getting rid of users of the free version of the cheat, but it was the premium version that caused the most trouble. I mean, just look at this list of features. Automatic aims, automatic backstabs, forced melee criticals, the ability to show all enemy players on the in-game radar, the ability to steal the names of other players, target locks, and even the ability to avoid shooting your Steam friends. All for just 20 bucks. It's amazing anyone bothered to play Team Fortress 2 at all after LMAOBOX became popular. Here it is in action:
Apparently the ban came about through the efforts of a player known as Miggy. A few days ago, Miggy emailed Valve after finding the source code for LMAOBOX on a forum via a Github link, linked it, and related that he'd been told it wasn't listed in Valve Anti-Cheat (or VAC), the program Valve users to sniff out LMAOBOX and similar offenders. And boom, that was that. Somewhat hilariously, a huge percentage of the affected players tend to play snipers as their main characters—a class that's much less likely to be discovered cheating by mere observation.
Among the affected UGC eSports players was "Vlad," a well-known player from Platinum- and Gold-ranking teams who claims he hadn't used LMAOBOX since 2015. In a post on the UGC forums, Vlad explained his reasons for using the hack in the first place.
"So, back in [Season] 17, [another player, F]lare showed me lmaobox on his private server, and, this kind of piqued my interest. Something to make you good really quick? Sounds good. Now, I bought lmaobox premium after having looked around a bit, and I messed around with it. I got more and more cocky in using in on a non alt, and then started messing around in pubs for a bit," he said. "I used it in s17, because I was really not as good at that point. I wanted to be good, and that was the best way to do it. Now, I know there is no reason for any of you to believe me, but it doesn't really matter honestly. I haven't used it since S17, so I'm impressed they backlogged it that long. Well, I deserve the VAC and I deserve the league ban I'm going to get for it, but I will say that I did not cheat in any way during season 18."
Initially, word got around that the creator of LMAOBOX had conceded defeat, after a statement went up on the UnknownCheats forum.
"hey since this cheat is having some vac problems, im going to release it to the public," the post from the ostensible creator said. "this marks the end of the lmaobox project; I hope everyone enjoyed it."
But that may not be the truth. In a delicious display of irony, a Reddit post claims that the PC of the creator of LMAOBOX allegedly has been hacked, and thus someone else wrote the post. Work on LMAOBOX is therefore merely "paused." As the writer for the Reddit post says, "for a person who makes high tier hacks - that's a pretty stupid way to fall foul."
LMAO, indeed.
After Years of Abuse, Valve Takes Down Popular 'Team Fortress 2' Cheat
On Dec. 4, 2012, physicists at the Antarctic IceCube Observatory bagged the highest energy neutrino ever detected. The experiment, which hunts for neutrino events within a subsurface cubic-kilometer of clear glacial ice, has registered around 100 high-energy neutrino observations, but the particle nicknamed "Big Bird" remains the most energetic. Now, years later, NASA astronomers equipped with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can say with some assurance where (and when) that single particle came from: the gamma-ray blazer known as PKS B1424-418.
The group's work is described this week in Nature Physics.
Neutrinos are unlike most of the particles we're more used to. For one thing, they tend to ignore most of those particles—neutrinos only very weakly experience the electromagnetic force, which means that they're invisible to electricity, light, and matter itself in all but the most rare occasions. Detecting a neutrino on one of these occasions is unlikely enough to require enormous detectors (like a cubic-kilometer of Antarctic ice) laden with vast arrays of photomultiplier tubes and sensors ready to catch the barest flicker of light as a neutrino interacts with the detector in such a way as to produce an electron or muon, which are particles we can observe.
Because neutrinos are so ambivalent when it comes to matter, they make good probes for observing the distant (and very old) universe. That is, it's reasonable to imagine a single particle produced billions of light years away arriving here on Earth intact and uninterfered with: a particle postcard of a very different time and place. Neutrinos also happen to be extremely powerful, with energies on the order of petaelectronvolts (or a quadrillion or a 1 with 15 zeros after it). As explained in the video above, that's about a million million times greater than the energy of a dental X-ray packed into a single particle with a mass of less than one-millionth that of a single electron. It's probably a good thing neutrinos don't interact with most matter.
In the summer of 2012, the Fermi satellite's Large Area Telescope (LAT) registered an abrupt brightening ("flaring") of the galaxy PKS B1424-418, which lives about 9.12 billion light-years from Earth (which means that we're seeing the galaxy as it was 8 billion years ago, give or take). The galaxy lit up to nearly 30 times that of its originally observed brightness. That's wild, but PKS B1424-418 was an intense place to begin with: a variety of active galaxy known as a blazer featuring a supermassive black hole at its core. It's here that the extra luminescence comes from: the intense outward jets of energized particles that result from a whole lot of cosmic stuff trying to collapse into a black hole all at once. Blazers are among the most energetic things in space.
Being able to correlate a single particle, however energetic, with a galaxy billions of light years away is kinda nuts. "Tentative associations of high-energy neutrinos with flaring blazars have been suggested before, but it remained questionable whether a high-enough neutrino flux could be produced in the candidate flares," the current paper explains. "Here, we have identified for the first time a single source that has emitted a sufficiently high fluence during a major outburst to explain an observed coinciding petaelectronvolt-neutrino event."
And that's what we're talking about here: correlation. The IceCube experiment was only able to narrow the likely source of the neutrino down to a still fairly large slice of sky, but one limited enough that astronomers could reasonably look for their neutrino's source. The flaring PKS B1424-418 seemed to be the only candidate and the Fermi scientists are able to say that it's the source with only a 5 percent margin of error. In a statement from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, study co-author Felicia Krauss recalled that happening upon the blazer was a "moment of wonder and awe."
There's a lot left we still don't know about neutrinos and the galactic origins of cosmic rays in general. As the paper notes, better statistics and monitoring at IceCube will continue to improve our still-limited understanding of this hidden but unfathomably powerful realm.
Astrophysicists Trace 'Big Bird' Neutrino to Ancient Exploding Galaxy
Say what you want about your last hookup, but as far as sex in the animal world goes, humans have it pretty good. Female garter snakes have their “mating ball” (which is just as horrid as it sounds), male white fronted parrots vomit into the female’s beak during copulation, and then of course there are female spiders, many species of which are renowned for cannibalizing their mate after the deed.
According to new research published on Friday in Scientific Reports however, it’s not all beheadings and no (fore)play when it comes to spider sex—in fact, one particular species has been shown to have a “rich sexual repertoire” which includes forcing the males to engage in oral sex up to 100 times during copulation.
Known as the Madagascan Darwin’s bark spider, the females of this recently discovered species are several times larger and heavier than the males. According to the researchers, they use this size advantage to force males to salivate on their genitals “before, in between, and after copulations.”
If you’re wondering what this might look like—and I know you are—it looks like this:
While other species have been known to engage in oral sex, such as lemurs, lions, dolphins and bats, the researchers report that this behavior in spiders is incredibly rare—the only other spider known to engage in such behavior are widows.
Although the researchers aren’t entirely sure why male spiders engage in oral sex, they do have some ideas. It is perhaps an analog of mate binding, where a male spider deposits silk on the abdomen of a female prior to copulation to tone down her aggressiveness, thereby avoiding cannibalization after sex.
More likely, however, is that the oral sexual contact signals “male quality.” If this is the case, the researchers write, this would signal a “cryptic” female selection mechanism which allows them to select the best mate based on the saliva deposit. Or, perhaps, enzymes in the male spider’s saliva offer a physiological advantage over a rival’s sperm, similar to the way other insects have seminal toxins.
This Male Spider Gives Oral Up to 100 Times During Copulation
In 1968, when the video below was first published, John Whitney was already a computer graphics pioneer. 10 years earlier, he'd created the iconic, deeply trippy opening sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, arguably the first-ever usage of computer graphics in a movie (but having little to do with what we normally think of as Hollywood CGI circa 2016). Over the next decade he created reels of CG footage for TV shows and commercials, all on an analog computer that Whitney had built himself.
Then, in 1966, Whitney became IBM's first-ever artist-in-residence. Here he traded his own analog machine for the high-powered digital computers being developed at International Business Machines, largely for/with the US military.
You can check out some more of Whitney's work in this homage at the Creator's Project.
When Computer Graphics Pioneer John Whitney Melted Minds for IBM
Museums have always aimed to engage their visitors with the spectacle of their displays, be they works of art, fossils, or historical artifacts. Increasingly, this has resulted in numerous efforts to integrate an interactive, game-based dimension into the museum experience, as opposed to relying on more passive observation of collections. Using multiple platforms like augmented reality, tabletop games, or digital displays, curators and designers are hoping to immerse people more deeply in their exhibitions, and to push the limits of what it means to take a trip to the museum.
“For a number of years now we’ve been exploring what it might mean for museums to employ games and play as a way to increase visitor motivation,” Barry Joseph, associate director of digital learning at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), told me over the phone. “We want to offer something to people that makes them want to leave their home, come to the museum, and experience something and it also gives them an opportunity to not only appreciate, but actually connect with the objects themselves.”
Take, for instance, the mobile game MicroRangers, which debuted at the AMNH last December. Players download an app and use a scannable collector’s coin to activate missions around various halls in the museum, at the behest of animated scientists. Augmented reality displays at each station provide clues about how to tackle each problem, while constructing a larger narrative about the effect of microbial life on entire ecosystems.
MicroRangers drew inspiration from a diverse range of existing gaming platforms—including cooperative board games like Pandemic and the Disney attraction Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom—and was developed with active input from the target audience.
“We got a group of students together and spent a couple of months teaching them about the science of what would be in the exhibit, teaching them the basics of game design, and then working with them to create this prototype for what would eventually become MicroRangers,” Joseph said.
The result demonstrates how AMNH, along with many other museums, are integrating both analog and digital gameplay into the visitor experience as a way to connect with exhibitions on new levels. The idea is not to edge out the more traditional ways of exploring collections, like aimlessly wandering through halls or reading about the backstory of specific displays, but rather to complement them with new avenues of engagement.
“An exhibition is a multimedia environment,“ Hélène Alonso, director of digital experiences at AMNH, told me in a phone call. “Some people like to just observe. Some people prefer to read. Some people prefer to be told a story in a movie. So, in the department of exhibitions, we have people that think in all these different ways and we have to balance it out between all of us to get an exhibition that is attractive to everybody, and tells each one of these stories in the most compelling way.”
One of my personal favorite examples of this interdisciplinary mashup in action was AMNH’s exhibit “Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs,” which ran from April 5, 2014 to January 4, 2015. In addition to displaying intricately preserved pterosaur fossils and colorful scale models of these extinct animals, the experience included a fun interactive game called “Fly Like a Pterosaur.” Using a motion-sensing Kinect simulator, players could flap their arms to pilot an onscreen pterosaur avatar through different environments and challenges. Needless to say, it was a popular corner of the exhibit.
“It is a natural thing to want to fly,” Alonso said. “That’s what makes pterosaurs unique in that world of reptiles.”
“The subjects of the exhibition are the beginning of everything,” she continued. “The science behind the topics always reveal the best way to tell a story. The goal is always to explain. Explain how something works, and make [visitors] fall in love with the science too.”
To that end, AMNH has also introduced game experiences that transcend the museum walls, such as the card game Gutsy, developed for “The Secret World Inside You” exhibit on the human microbiome.
“The games in the exhibit give people a fun and engaging way to connect with the content, and then when you bring a game home, it gives them an opportunity to go deeper,” Joseph said.
In addition to his role at AMNH, Joseph is also a co-founder of Games for Change, a nonprofit organization that aims to channel the popularity of games into educational and social initiatives. At the time it was established, in 2004, Games for Change encountered much more resistance from educators who were skeptical of games as a learning aid.
“It was at a time when principals would respond to a request to do game design with youth in the context of trying to understand why you wanted to bring Grand Theft Auto into the classroom,” Joseph told me. “There was a lot of confusion about what games were, and what they afforded for learning.”
But over a decade later, the idea that games to augment and enhance educational experiences is becoming more mainstream, and museums are more eager than ever to adopt these interactive elements into their exhibits.
“We are at a very different point now,” Joseph said. “There are still concerns people have about youth access to computer screens, or about the role that video games have in young people’s lives, but those conversations are much more informed and thoughtful. Certain games in certain contexts offer tremendous possibilities. I think over the next ten years, we’re going to see a lot happening in our section of the civic space around understanding what games afford for learning.”
A new Oxford University study has published empirical evidence showing that government mass surveillance programs like those exposed by Edward Snowden make us significantly less likely to read about surveillance and other national security-related topics online.
The study looks at Wikipedia traffic before and after Snowden's surveillance revelations to offer some new insight into the phenomenon of “chilling effects,” which privacy advocates frequently cite as a damaging consequence of unchecked government surveillance. What it found is that traffic on “privacy-sensitive” articles dropped significantly following what author Jon Penney describes as an “exogenous shock” caused by revelations of the NSA's mass surveillance programs and the resulting media coverage.
The articles were chosen based on keywords from a list of terms flagged by the Department of Homeland Security, used for monitoring social media for terrorism and “suspicious” activity. For example, Wikipedia articles containing the 48 terrorism-related terms the DHS identified—including “al-Qaeda,” “carbomb” and “Taliban”—saw their traffic drop by 20 percent.
The results also mirror a similar MIT study from last year which found that users were less likely to run Google searches containing privacy and national security-related terms that might make them suspicious in the eyes of the government.
Perhaps even more alarmingly, the study seems to show a long-term drop in article views on these topics that lasts well past the initial shock of Snowden's revelations, suggesting that people's' calculations about what to read on Wikipedia may have been permanently affected.
“It means that the NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations, covered by media in June 2013, are associated in the findings not only with a sudden chilling effect but also a longer term, possibly even permanent, decrease in web traffic to the Wikipedia pages studied. This indicates a possible chill,” writes Penney.
While the study makes a convincing argument, identifying chilling effects empirically has always been tricky. There are plenty of other factors that can influence behavior online that may not necessarily have to do with being afraid of the government, for example. But given the specific timeframe and the huge amount of other evidence showing that surveillance tends makes citizens more prone to self-censorship and conformity, Penney's study seems to at least be an anchor point for future arguments that these programs have caused harm.
Snowden's Surveillance Leaks Made People Less Likely to Read About Surveillance
