Jan 13, 2017 06:41 PM
How Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs
http://m.nautil.us/blog/how-video-games-...uman-needs
EXCERPT: [...] a team of five psychologists more closely examined the way in which players experiment with “type” in video games. They found that video games that allowed players to play out their “ideal selves” (embodying roles that allow them to be, for example, braver, fairer, more generous, or more glorious) were not only the most intrinsically rewarding, but also had the greatest influence on our emotions. “Humans are drawn to video and computer games because such games provide players with access to ideal aspects of themselves,” the authors concluded. Video games are at their most alluring, in other words, when they allow a person to close the distance between how they are, and how they wish to be.
[...] In video games, we are free to be who we really are—or at least find out who we really are if we don’t already know. “Self-actualization is there at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it’s what many games deliver,” Bartle added. “That’s all people ever truly want: to be.” Not every game, however, allows us to act in the way that we might want to. The designer, that omniscient being who sets the rules and boundaries of a game reality, and the ways in which we players can interact with it, plays their own role in the dance. Through the designer’s choices, interactions that we might wish to make if we were to fully and bodily enter the fiction are entirely closed off. We may be forced to touch the world exclusively via a gun’s sights. There is no option in many video games to eat, to love, to touch, to comfort, or any of the other critical verbs with which we live life....
Why computers need to learn to 'disambiguate' people
http://www.futurity.org/machine-learning...1334412-2/
EXCERPT: Millions of people share names. Computers have to distinguish—or, technically speaking, disambiguate—between them, which can be challenging for common names. [...] Computer scientists have developed a machine-learning method to tackle the problem. They report in a recent paper that the new method is an improvement on currently existing approaches of name disambiguation because the new method works on streaming data that enables the identification of previously unencountered individuals. Existing methods can disambiguate an individual only if the person’s records are present in machine-learning training data, whereas the new method can perform non-exhaustive classification so that it can detect the fact that a new record that appears in streaming data actually belongs to a fourth John Smith, even if the training data has records of only three different John Smiths....
http://m.nautil.us/blog/how-video-games-...uman-needs
EXCERPT: [...] a team of five psychologists more closely examined the way in which players experiment with “type” in video games. They found that video games that allowed players to play out their “ideal selves” (embodying roles that allow them to be, for example, braver, fairer, more generous, or more glorious) were not only the most intrinsically rewarding, but also had the greatest influence on our emotions. “Humans are drawn to video and computer games because such games provide players with access to ideal aspects of themselves,” the authors concluded. Video games are at their most alluring, in other words, when they allow a person to close the distance between how they are, and how they wish to be.
[...] In video games, we are free to be who we really are—or at least find out who we really are if we don’t already know. “Self-actualization is there at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it’s what many games deliver,” Bartle added. “That’s all people ever truly want: to be.” Not every game, however, allows us to act in the way that we might want to. The designer, that omniscient being who sets the rules and boundaries of a game reality, and the ways in which we players can interact with it, plays their own role in the dance. Through the designer’s choices, interactions that we might wish to make if we were to fully and bodily enter the fiction are entirely closed off. We may be forced to touch the world exclusively via a gun’s sights. There is no option in many video games to eat, to love, to touch, to comfort, or any of the other critical verbs with which we live life....
Why computers need to learn to 'disambiguate' people
http://www.futurity.org/machine-learning...1334412-2/
EXCERPT: Millions of people share names. Computers have to distinguish—or, technically speaking, disambiguate—between them, which can be challenging for common names. [...] Computer scientists have developed a machine-learning method to tackle the problem. They report in a recent paper that the new method is an improvement on currently existing approaches of name disambiguation because the new method works on streaming data that enables the identification of previously unencountered individuals. Existing methods can disambiguate an individual only if the person’s records are present in machine-learning training data, whereas the new method can perform non-exhaustive classification so that it can detect the fact that a new record that appears in streaming data actually belongs to a fourth John Smith, even if the training data has records of only three different John Smiths....