THE LOWS
Tom Senior: Paradox of Thrones
It's a typical problem, when license holders who normally operate in other mediums wade into the gaming world in search of a studio to turn their hot thing into interactive entertainment. The results can be devastating, as fans ofHouse andGrey's Anatomy will know. HBO have been unusually savvy in approaching Telltale to try and make a choice-driven adventure game out of Westeros (having seemingly learned from the deeply mediocreGame of Thrones RPG), but there's an open goal right there, and it's Paradox. The amazingGame of Thrones mod proves that the Song of Ice and Fire series meshes beautifully with the Paradox real-time-with-pause grand strategy format. Paradoxare understandably wary about the control they might be required to cede to HBO, but everyone knows that world and that studio could make beautiful things together.
Wes Fenlon: Bad move, Lenovo
The entire tech industry was in a justified rage on Thursday over the news that Lenovo has been pre-installing adware software on its laptops for months. The adware, called Superfish, would already be nasty and disappointing if it was just adware. But the way it works potentially leaves Lenovo computers vulnerable to attack, as web security experts proved with just a little dig. It compromises the security of Https connections without users realizing it. Lenovo says it stopped shipping computers with Superfish pre-installed in January, but that still leaves thousands and thousands of computers out in the wild infected. At least Superfish is relatively easy to get rid of. Here's how.
Chris Livingston: Stomping Lame
Dinosaurs are cool. People who can make dinosaurs are cool. Why would you squander both of these cool things at the same time? As we reported on Monday, multiplayer dinosaur survival game The Stomping Land took another ankle-snapping step toward extinction. Dino modeler Vlad Konstantinov decided to leave the project after developer Alex Fundora stopped communicating with him. Konstantinov also says he's owed money. It feels like every week there's more bad crowdfunding news, and it feels like that because every week there's more bad crowdfunding news. It also feels like every other week, the weekly bad crowdfunding news is about The Stomping Land. Boo!
On the plus side, Konstantinov has signed on to another dinosaur game, Beasts of Prey. Life finds a way.
Phil Savage: Dead by Dota
Today, PC Gamer's UK arm played Rock, Paper, Shotgun at Dota 2 for an upcoming magazine feature.
Samuel Roberts: Dota? No-ta
I echo Phil’s grief at being beaten by RPS. I threw as much ice at them as I could as Lich. Now I am cold on the INSIDE.
Tyler Wilde: The internet is weird
This week in e-sports drama, a Hearthstone player was accused of misrepresenting her identity. She split with her team, though at this point, we haven’t seen any proof of wrongdoing. Without getting into the details—because they include personal information and allegations we can’t verify—it’s all just generally weird and sad. I’m concerned by how swiftly someone’s life can be upended by fiery accusations and internet sleuthing, and also overwhelmed by this strange virtual world, where it seems plausible enough that people are inventions that we feel we have to investigate it.
I don’t know what the case is here, but either way, it’s frightening that our identities have become a series of logs—user accounts, IP addresses, everything we’ve ever favorited on Twitter—and now we’re struggling to align that data with something that seems less and less real: an actual human being. At the risk of sounding like an aging cyberpunk novel: are we prepared for the day when our physical identities stop mattering?
