Have you ever given thought to Zero-Player Games? Let’s

Information:
Zero-player games are games that have no human players
Wikipedia Entry

Examples:
Progress Quest
NPC Quest
Conway’s Game of Life

Most sports games (i.e. Madden Football) can be used to create CPU vs. CPU matches and are often used to simulate the outcomes of real games.  Fighting games, RTS games, and other games can also be used for this purpose.

Glider, a bot that plays World of Warcraft for you, is also worth mentioning.  Botting, in a sense, is cruise control that plays the game for the user. (When I had an active WoW account, my favorite thing about the game was using my bot to turn WoW into an entertaining screensaver featuring my avatar grinding.)

WarGames is a movie where a zero-player game controls the fate of mankind

Discussion:

• Do you think there is a future for zero-player games?
• What type of zero-player game do you think would be most interesting/marketable/entertaining?
• If you’ve ever “played” a zero-player game before, what did you like/dislike about it?
• Do you think incorporating “cruise-control” into on-line games is a good idea?

Unreal World is an old-school video game that is hard to stop playing once you start. Not to cut the game down at all, but the fact that it produced the “just one more minute” syndrome in me surprised me. The reason it’s surprising is that it is not at all the best looking game.

Unreal World is a graphical RPG with roguelike qualities. The setting is ancient Finland during the late Iron Age. UrW is full of historical atmosphere and emphasises northern folklore, knowledge, and way of life. Best of all, like any other great game UrW gives you freedom to do as you choose; you can become a rough hunter, a brave adventurer, a fisherman, a trapper, etc.

At $4, it’s hard to not recommend this as a lightweight game that is perfect for little sessions on a laptop.

Unreal World Official Site

The U.S. intelligence community is developing software to detect violent extremists in the World of Warcrfaft and other massively multiplayer online games. According to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence, this project, known as the Reynard project, will begin with profiling online gaming behavior. The ultimate goal of the Reynard project is “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are
generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the
emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and
gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned
to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious
behavior and actions in the virtual world.

The report is publicly available, as mandated by Congress. Read the full report in .pdf format.

It’s interesting that Reynard the Fox is a trickster in folklore and literature.

Coast to Coast AM is a great late-night AM talk radio show with an emphasis on the paranormal. And for those that actually don’t know, Half-Life is one of the all-time greatest first-person shooters that has a sci-fi story. If you’re familiar with both, you will laugh your ass off as you hear this phone call in which the caller plays the role of Half-Life’s lead character Gordon Freeman.

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With all the wiimote mods coming out nowadays, it was only a matter of time before somebody produced a replica of terrorists’ gun of choice. The AK-47 is probably the most famous weapon the Soviets ever produced. Somewhere along the line they became an icon of terrorists. Now all of you Wii owners out there can play Jihad!

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That’s right folks. After years of w00ting the best situations that arise in the world of video gaming, Merriam-Webster has officially announced that “w00t” is the word of the year. w00t, for those of you who do not interact with video games or socialize with gamers that pwn stuff, is a lot like saying “yay,” Merriam said. Merriam-Webster went on to further explain that, “It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all.”

Here’s where it gets silly: Merriam-Webster then claimed that there is a rising trend in using numbers in the place of letters. Is this trend not so 1995?

Bottom line: Score one for l33t speak!

Reuters article on the debacle

Are there video games for the Amazon Kindle? If not - We need Amazon Kindle games to play! It would be kick-ass to be able to play NetHack on the Amazon Kindle. NetHack the roguelike specifically. If you know whether or not you can play games on the Kindle, please leave a comment.

If you’ve never played NetHack, this will still at least make you say “what the fuck”. NetHack is a roguelike dungeon crawling game that is incredibly difficult to win at. Anyways, I have heard of people creating fan-fiction, stories detailing adventures in NetHack’s ASCII-graphics world, but never one that was a 334-page .pdf book. This takes video game fiction to the next level - especially considering it is about a text-based game.

Read Ellora the Elven Archer

Video of GayBoy going onto XBox live. I am filing this under humor. If you are gay and offended: tough shit. I am not going to lie; I happen to think the shit-talking in this video is funny!

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Call of Duty 4 makes you unlock weapons, weapon attachments and mods, camouflage, and challenges. Well there is a way around that because all of the data is stored client-side. To unlock all weapons for Call of Duty 4 multiplayer so that you don’t have to level up follow these easy instructions.

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This video is about the feelings of playing video games. Featuring games such as Metal Gear Solid, the Mii channel, Spore, Crysis, Half-Life, Zelda, Metroid, a handful of retro games, and many more games including games that I’ve never played, this is truly a cool “love letter to video games”.

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This comic is priceless. It is just like the “Dangers of Alcoholism” comic from the 60’s / 70’s. WoW is a danger to health, folks.

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There will always be those people who pay a boatload of money for something that most people could give a rat’s ass about. In this case, we’re talking about rare video game collectors. These people honestly do not care about the gameplay or the price of these games; they care about owning them.

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No, the title is not a typo. In China, there is a cheap alternative to the Nintendo Wii known as the Vii. Featuring games such as Alacrity Golf, Free Craps, and Happy Tennis, just how does the Vii hold up against Nintendo’s hit system? Video included

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As dumb as this is, I am not at all surprised. Some Romeo out there has put together a site that aims at helping Warcraft addicts find romance. Why go on 8 hour raids alone when you can do it with the female Night Elf of your dreams?

Datecraft is destined for failure for one reason - no true World of Warcraft player will log off long enough to complete an entire date.  Keep in Ironforge, y’all.

In Call of Duty 4, to INSTANTLY unlock every gun and level 55 rank, check out my COD4 Unlock All Guns, Level 55 Crack post.

It will unlock all Call of Duty 4 Mulitplayer guns, gun mods and attachments, level 55, rank 55, and all challenges. Enjoy

The new Nintendo DS game Spanish for Everyone is about as racist as they come.

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I’m at a loss for words here. Yes, view the full article and you will see two bars of Warcraft soap.

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Roguelike is a term to describe a peculiar type of game - a text-based dungeon crawler. Like Blizzard’s Diablo series, roguelikes consist of randomly generated dungeons, monsters, and phat loot. Unlike Diablo, roguelikes are freaking difficult. More on that after the jump…

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The Gamerator is pure genius: an arcade cabinet with a beer tap! Picture after the jump

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