I can easily say that my time here has been well spent. Kotaku taught me more than Stanford University's graduate program in journalism ever did and gave me the chance to write about things I really care about. You know, instead of just boobs, Japanese role-playing games and scandals. Not that I mind writing about those things — actually when you combine all three, it can be pretty fun — but the world of video games is a lot larger than that. That's part of why I went to Stanford; to convince them that this is a subject that deserves the attention of journalism, and yes, being a games journalist is compatible with being a "real" journalist.

*After Leigh Alexander and Maggie Greene moved on, that is.

Here are some of the things I'm most proud of:

Knocked Up: A Look At Pregnancy in Video Games — I'd been pitching this feature idea for years to different publications, but Kotaku was the only outfit that let me run with it. I still find the topic fascinating and I still go out of my way to play games that let you get pregnant in some fashion. It's very much my "thing."

Pieces of You: Rebuilding Myself on Consoles — Breakups suck, but my work at Kotaku got me through a really nasty one. I still can't believe Stephen Totilo let me keep the Jewel song title in the headline.

Kotaku's Super Huge Pumpkin Patch (Parts One, Two, Three and Four) — I'm a sucker for crafts projects and I find that there's no other video game blog on the Internet that makes room to post stuff like this as well as shoes, cakes, video game wedding stuff, etc. It took me three hours on Halloween weekend to upload all those images, but it was worth it.

Girls Night With The Most Male Game Of 2009 — Yes, it pissed people off. Yes, I got death threats. But what's most important to me is that this article got people talking. I'm still amazed when I skim through the comments at some of the genuinely thoughtful discourse that goes on in there. Hope to see more of it where I'm going. And I still hope to see women in Modern Warfare 3.

My Master's Project, "Writing About Video Games: Journalism, Criticism and Mainstream Media" — I can't let the full copy of this 7000-word beast see the light of day yet because in my mind, it's still not "done." While working on it, I got the chance to interview Totilo before he jumped ship for Kotaku, N'Gai Croal as he was leaving Newsweek, Seth Schiesel from the New York Times, Jamin Brophy-Warren of the Wall Street Journal and Georgia Tech Associate Professor Ian Bogost — it was an all star cast. Kotaku made that possible by giving me access to these heavy-hitters and its articles make up about a quarter of my source list. Here's a tiny sample of my conclusion:

Time will tell if Schiesel and Brophy-Warren's editors care enough about video games to move their coverage into a more prominent place either in the print edition or in the online arts and entertainment section. If that happens, maybe their stories with replace the "point and giggle" stories in mainstream media. Time will tell if a vocabulary for talking about games emerges that are integrated into pop culture the way words and phrases like "Western" and "tear-jerker" can describe a movie to an audience that hasn't seen it. If that doesn't happen, words and phrases like "gameplay" or "free-look" and "sandbox" used in the reviews that most games journalism produces will remain impenetrable jargon specific to video games hobbyist magazines. Time might also make room for games journalism to grow up a little bit more, to develop into something that can be understood all 228 million American adults instead of just the 114 million who play them.

Well, that about does it for me. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Have a happy, safe, New Year!

Image Cred

One of Lowood's recent additions to the virtual worlds archive is a short compilation of screenshots and video on the evolution of games from text adventures, in which game action was typed out descriptively, to graphically sophisticated titles.

Perhaps the most compelling footage shows an attack from Eve Online, a science fiction game. An array of small spaceships serving the “Goonswarm” alliance assaults a much larger ship from another group, while the audio track follows the frenzied barking of commands to keep up the pressure. When the large ship is destroyed, there is a cacophony of online voices shrieking in triumph.

How do events like that fit into the larger culture?

“The Library of Congress has always collected across a broad spectrum of content types and subjects, ranging from works of serious scholarship to icons of pop culture,” says Beth Dulabahn, director of integration management for the Library of Congress.

“Video games fit right in with that tradition. Besides showing us how society has entertained itself, they also provide a graphic picture of how technology itself has evolved over the decades.”

Nice short piece on a subject near and dear to my heart. Even though the initial grant runs out next year, I hope this is just the beginning for some really fantastic collections of gaming history.

Saving Worlds: Preserving the Digital and Virtual [STANFORD Magazine via How They Got Game]

That's right, a game about the stock market crash of 1987, made in 1987. By current standards 500 points in a day is just a hiccup, but back in the early days it was enough to fuel a whole game. Wonder if there will be a game soon called "The Big Bailout", featuring real-time Henry Paulson supplication controls. Anyway, at least the current financial situation isn't very dire for computer-based games, sales being up 43% and all. Guess people may not want to play a game about the fall of the financial system during the fall of the financial system, but I wish they would. It's a great opportunity to teach and engage with a current problem that is definitely predicated by the playing of financial games in the late-80s, okay maybe not.

It's a fun look back at some not terribly scintillating-sounding titles (but leaping brokers? C'mon).

Financial Woes [How They Got Game]

Working through the collections provides some rather weird challenges to the discipline of library science. An entire segment of the collection is devoted to items termed as realia, basically commercial products tied to video game concepts or characters. They don't fit on shelves very well, and the exact means of how to preserve these detritus of commercial culture are fraught with an internal debate about their validity to humanity. I think everything should be remembered or recorded fastidiously, but then again I get a thrill out of looking at old Nintendo marketing crud, and I work in a library. That said, these items make my inner child awaken anew and crave some tasty morsels of the past.

I hope we can expect to see more of this sort of stuff — it's fun seeing what librarians at Stanford have decided to add to the collection. Though I would be curious to learn the acquisition backstory — was the cereal just hanging out in someone's personal collection? Two decade old overstock at Ralston Purina?

Errant Nintendo Licensing: Parties, Cereal, and School [How They Got Game]

The second day of MetaverseU had much more of the University in it. While the first day certainly had an academic bent, it also featured discussions of technology developments, products, and practices. TL Taylor led the second day with a discussion of online embodiment, ranging across game and social worlds. Jeremy Bailenson took a more quantitative approach, quickly running through 9 experiments and studies, looking at identity, avatars, and persuasion. (Amazing and fast!) Kari Kraus then took the stage to look at how people are approaching the preservation of virtual worlds.

The whole set of entries relating to Metaverse U is great and worth a look through, if you're into that sort of thing.

Liveblogging MetaverseU: TL Taylor, Jeremy Bailenson, Kari Kraus [Virtual Worlds News]

SCEA's Playstation 3 Folding@home project, which went live back on March 22, recently topped one million user, meaning that about 3,000 PS3 users have registered for Folding@home a day since the software went live on the console.

"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe."

Thanks to all of those PS3 owners willing to tie their console to the network, and pay the resulting electric bill, PS3 users make up about 74 percent of the total teraflop computing power of the Folding@home project.

Well done Sony, well done. Oh, speaking of well done, Team Kotaku is currently ranked number 106 at folding@home. If you haven't signed up (for Folding@home) and own a PS3, you really should.

One Million PLAYSTATION(R)3 Users Participate in Folding@home Research Project

PS3(R) Users Support Research Efforts of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Certain Forms of Cancer

FOSTER CITY, Calif., Feb. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) today announced that since PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(R)) took part in Stanford University's Folding@home(TM) project on March 22, 2007, the total number of registered users has reached over one million users. This equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering for Folding@home per day or 2 new registered users every minute worldwide.
"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases.
We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe."
Folding@home aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences, including many well-known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
Prior to the inclusion of PS3 in March 2007, the Folding@home project leveraged the distributed computing power of personal computers from around the world. Now a network of roughly 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same
amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs, and have the ability to perform research simulations in weeks rather than years. In fact, it took just six months after PS3 joining Folding@home for the project to surpass a petaflops (*1), a computing milestone that had never been reached before by a distributed computing network.
On September 16, 2007, Folding@home was recognized by Guinness World Records(TM) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.
Currently PS3 users make up approximately 74 percent of the total teraflop computing power of the Folding@home project. For more information, please see official website: http://www.scei.co.jp/folding/en/.

(*1) A petaflops is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

WHERE: Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University
WHEN: Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th of February 2008
WEBSITE: http://metaverseu.stanford.edu

Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) is thrilled to announce the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University. This two day conference will be held on February 16th and 17th 2008 and feature speakers from a range of disciplines spanning industry and academia. Our lab has worked in virtual worlds for some years now and have seen interest in the space grow exponentially in recent years. We believe that the time has come for an event to tell the interesting stories from the evolving metaverse. The current generation of spaces is part of a larger historical picture and many lessons have been learned over the years. Our ultimate goal with Metaverse U is to create a broad conversation about the pressing question of what the metaverse should be.

Metaverse U's list of speakers includes Raph Koster (Metaplace), Brewster Kahle (The Internet Archive), Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University), TL Taylor (The IT University of Copenhagen), Cory Ondrejka, Tony Parisi (Media Machines & Web3D), Jon Brouchoud (Wikitecture), Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs (Stanford Medical Center), Rebecca Moore (Google Earth), Parvati Dev (Innovation in Learning), Byron Reeves (Stanford University & Seriosity), Kari Kraus (University of Maryland), Christain Renaud (Cisco), Mike Liebhold (Institute for the future), Daniel Huebner (Doppelganger), Vladlen Koltun (Stanford Virtual Worlds Group), Howard Rheingold, Henry Lowood (Stanford University)

For more information please visit: http://metaverseu.stanford.edu

Registration is open at: http://metaverse.stanford.edu/registration/register-now

This is super cool. Sony Computer Entertainment is teaming up with Stanford University to create a distributed computing network of PS3s to help study the causes of a number of diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and many cancers.

The next software update for the PS3, expected to hit at the end of the month, will include a new Folding@home icon for the cross media bar. To join the program you just click on the icon. You can also set up your PS3 to work on the application whenever the console is idle. This second option will require leaving the console powered on and connected to the Internet. Not sure if that could create a heat issue.

The Cell-powered PS3s will tap into Stanford's Folding@home program which has been in use on home computers since 2000 to work on studying disease by simulating the process of folding proteins. When performed on a single computer this simulation can tak up to 30 years, but Folding@home allows thousands of computers, and now thousands of PS3s, to work on the same simulation through distributed computing.

Sony says the Cell process inside the PS is about 10 times faster than a standard chip in a computer, so this will be quite a boon to researchers.

"Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment. Now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases," said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. "In order to study protein folding, researchers need more than just one super computer, but the massive processing power of thousands of networked computers. Previously, PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool — PS3." "We're thrilled to have SCE be part of the Folding@home project," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "With PS3 now part of our network, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases."

This is just the first use of the PS3 for distributive computing, according to Sony. The company said they will continue to support " a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies."

This is a very admirable thing that Sony is doing. Good for them. Brian Crecente

Next time there is a fanboy pissing contest, pull this trump card: The PLAYSTATION 3 fights diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's and cancer. Stanford University's Folding@Home (just "FAH" to the hipsters) links together hundreds of thousands of PCs worldwide. When these machines are not in use, they can run algorithms and get research data. And since, the PLAYSTATION 3 is a "super computer," FAH says:

The PS3 client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

Uh, okay. Neat. But, don't you just love that Stanford writes "PLAYSTATION 3"? Don't you just love it?! Brian Ashcraft

More Here [FAH] Thanks, John!