Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an earlier blog , I’d written about the benefits of (certain) video games. But of course, not everyone buys an Xbox or Sony Playstation. Instead, we download the free ones onto our phones. And that’s where our kids play most of the time, on the phone. Think Angry Birds or Temple Run or Candy Crush . And therein lies the rub, writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. Because “free” means the makers of the video games make their money via ads and in-app purchases. Now every game developer (or company) cannot build its own ad-delivery system, so who do they turn to? Facebook, Twitter and Google, of course. The ad-giants give libraries that the game developers integrate into their games. In other words, it’s a black box: “These third parties collect information that allows them to keep intricate histories of your behavior, and use it to make money from you in ways you might not expect or even see.” Sound confusing? Aha, writes Tiffany: “The fact that it’s all so confusing is kind of the...

I have played a fair amount of Atari video games as a kid, but I never became a game junkie/addict. And yet I found this Michael Thomsen article on cheating in video games very interesting and thought provoking. But first, let’s be clear what does not constitute online game cheating. In many online games, you could play them the old fashioned way (advancing by your skills). Or you could pay the game maker to get extra lives or to increase your farm produce or to skip levels! (In case you’re wondering, most such games are free and such purchases are the way the game makers make money. It’s just a different business model). But at least those games were designed with such options in mind and everyone knows that some of the others would be employing such techniques. So what about games where cheat codes were never intended to be part of the game? Your instinctive reaction about using such cheat codes might be, to quote Johan Huizinga: “as soon as the rules are transgressed...

Video games are often reviled for their violence. And their addictiveness. And how they are a bad influence on kids. So what would you say if a video game, Minecraft , allows the player to experiment with quantum mechanics?! I kid you not. Minecraft is a game that supports something called “ mods ”: Short for modifications, mods “add content to the game to alter gameplay, change the creative feel, or give the player more options in how they interact with the  Minecraft  world”. Google’s Quantum AI Lab Team created a mod called qCraft that adds blocks that exhibit quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer-dependency properties! Thus, some of the new blocks can be “activated” simply by looking at them, while others are prone to disappear at any moment. But why add this in a video game of all places? Google’s answer : “Where will future quantum computer scientists come from? Our best guess: Minecraft.” And oh, also to make learning fun: “qCraft isn...