Andrew Doull's shared items in Google Reader

Opposable Thumbs and Upright Walking Caused By "Junk DNA"

2008-09-07T15:25:00Z

quinnlynn writes "A group of research scientists at Yale discovered that the evolution of opposable thumbs and upright walking in humans is due to changes in the genome in the areas still classified as "junk DNA." Quoting: 'Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as "junk DNA." ... Researchers have long suspected changes in gene expression contributed to human evolution, but this had been difficult to study until recently because most of the sequences that control genes had not been identified. In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off.'" Yale has also recently completed sequencing the Trichoplax genome. Trichoplax has the simplest known animal genome, and it shares 80 percent of its genes (comprised of 98 million base pairs) with humanity. Professor Stephen Dellaporta was quoted saying, "We are [excited] to find that Trichoplax contains shared pathways and defined regulatory sequences that link these most primitive ancestors to higher animal species. The Trichoplax genome will serve as a type of 'Rosetta Stone' for understanding the origins of animal-specific pathways."

The Age of Awareness: My latest feature for the New York Times Magazine

2008-09-07T12:40:46Z

Today, the New York Times Magazine is publishing an article I wrote about "ambient awareness" -- the way that micro-updating tools like Twitter and Facebook give us a constant, floating sense of what everyone we know is doing, all the time. The piece is online free at the Times' site, and I've put a copy below for archival purposes too.

That graphic above is a snippet from Peter Cho's wonderful illustrations that accompany the piece. Cho did a lovely job of taking a pretty amorphous concept and turning it into evocative imagery!

Here we go:

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You
How News Feed, Twitter and other forms of incessant online contact have created a brave new world of ambient intimacy.

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.
Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc "groups” they had joined (like "Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they'd post "status” notes explaining their moods -- "hating Monday,” "skipping class b/c i'm hung over.” After each party, they'd stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons -- the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to "single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend's page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone's room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site -- a fairly typical number -- there weren't enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

"It was very primitive,” Zuckerberg told me when I asked him about it last month. And so he decided to modernize. He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user's page to every one of his or her friends. Students would no longer need to spend their time zipping around to examine each friend's page, checking to see if there was any new information. Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that -- like a social gazette from the 18th century -- delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. "A stream of everything that's going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.
When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news -- Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew -- and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.

"Everyone was freaking out,” Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go private” and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move,” a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, "Frankly, I don't need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve.” By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr's group, and by the next day it had 284,000.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they'd like it.

He was right. Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they'd learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about -- Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? -- when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group -- proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace -- all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users' worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site's growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook's success. "Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. "And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren't yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

In essence, Facebook users didn't think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS HAVE A NAME for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it "ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does -- body language, sighs, stray comments -- out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for "microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you're doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They're far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates -- limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message -- on what they're doing. There are other services for reporting where you're traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you're looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

For many people -- particularly anyone over the age of 30 -- the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme -- the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. Twitter, in particular, has been the subject of nearly relentless scorn since it went online. "Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day?” wondered Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, in an essay about Twitter last month. "Even I don't care.”

Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these "awareness” tools, admit that at first they couldn't figure out why anybody would want to do this. Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich -- and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update -- each individual bit of social information -- is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

"It's like I can distantly read everyone's mind,” Haley went on to say. "I love that. I feel like I'm getting to something raw about my friends. It's like I've got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley's group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by -- ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of "co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night -- tiny updates like "enjoying a glass of wine now” or "watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn't very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.

"It's an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. "No message is the single-most-important message. It's sort of like when you're sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You're sitting here reading the paper, and you're doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you're aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you've experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger's Twitter or Facebook feed isn't interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it's a novel.

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book "Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to "feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

WHEN I DECIDED TO TRY OUT TWITTER last year, at first I didn't have anyone to follow. None of my friends were yet using the service. But while doing some Googling one day I stumbled upon the blog of Shannon Seery, a 32-year-old recruiting consultant in Florida, and I noticed that she Twittered. Her Twitter updates were pretty charming -- she would often post links to camera-phone pictures of her two children or videos of herself cooking Mexican food, or broadcast her agonized cries when a flight was delayed on a business trip. So on a whim I started "following” her -- as easy on Twitter as a click of the mouse -- and never took her off my account. (A Twitter account can be "private,” so that only invited friends can read one's tweets, or it can be public, so anyone can; Seery's was public.) When I checked in last month, I noticed that she had built up a huge number of online connections: She was now following 677 people on Twitter and another 442 on Facebook. How in God's name, I wondered, could she follow so many people? Who precisely are they? I called Seery to find out.

"I have a rule,” she told me. "I either have to know who you are, or I have to know of you.” That means she monitors the lives of friends, family, anyone she works with, and she'll also follow interesting people she discovers via her friends' online lives. Like many people who live online, she has wound up following a few strangers -- though after a few months they no longer feel like strangers, despite the fact that she has never physically met them.

I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that's several thousand little social pings to sift through daily. What would it be like to get thousands of e-mail messages a day? But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren't as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It's personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they're not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you'll read them all, maybe you'll skip some. Seery estimated that she needs to spend only a small part of each hour actively reading her Twitter stream.

Yet she has, she said, become far more gregarious online. "What's really funny is that before this 'social media' stuff, I always said that I'm not the type of person who had a ton of friends,” she told me. "It's so hard to make plans and have an active social life, having the type of job I have where I travel all the time and have two small kids. But it's easy to tweet all the time, to post pictures of what I'm doing, to keep social relations up.” She paused for a second, before continuing: "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.”

I realized that this is becoming true of me, too. After following Seery's Twitter stream for a year, I'm more knowledgeable about the details of her life than the lives of my two sisters in Canada, whom I talk to only once every month or so. When I called Seery, I knew that she had been struggling with a three-day migraine headache; I began the conversation by asking her how she was feeling.

Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of "friends” on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?

IN 1998, THE ANTHROPOLOGIST ROBIN DUNBAR ARGUED that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another's fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming -- chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice -- we won't really feel that we "know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the "Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online -- people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others -- it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn't actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their "weak ties” -- loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently "friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year's holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist. I have noticed this effect myself. In the last few months, dozens of old work colleagues I knew from 10 years ago in Toronto have friended me on Facebook, such that I'm now suddenly reading their stray comments and updates and falling into oblique, funny conversations with them. My overall Dunbar number is thus 301: Facebook (254) + Twitter (47), double what it would be without technology. Yet only 20 are family or people I'd consider close friends. The rest are weak ties -- maintained via technology.

This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that "weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you're looking for a job and ask your friends, they won't be much help; they're too similar to you, and thus probably won't have any leads that you don't already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they're farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users -- the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers -- explicitly milk this dynamic for all it's worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter -- she has more than 5,300 followers -- recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year's taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

"I outsource my entire life,” she said. "I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family -- "My little secret,” she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you're reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they're dating and whether they're happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in "parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial -- peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

"The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. "I've been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they're writing saying, 'Hey, I broke my neck!' And I'm like, 'You're being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don't.' ” Boyd sighed. "They can observe you, but it's not the same as knowing you.”

When I spoke to Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr (a popular photo-sharing site), she suggested an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends' updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person. "At one point I realized I had a friend whose child I had seen, via photos on Flickr, grow from birth to 1 year old,” she said. "I thought, I really should go meet her in person. But it was weird; I also felt that Flickr had satisfied that getting-to-know you satisfaction, so I didn't feel the urgency. But then I was like, Oh, that's not sufficient! I should go in person!” She has about 400 people she follows online but suspects many of those relationships are tissue-fragile. "These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people.”

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO NEVER LOSE TOUCH WITH ANYONE? One morning this summer at my local cafe, I overheard a young woman complaining to her friend about a recent Facebook drama. Her name is Andrea Ahan, a 27-year-old restaurant entrepreneur, and she told me that she had discovered that high-school friends were uploading old photos of her to Facebook and tagging them with her name, so they automatically appeared in searches for her.

She was aghast. "I'm like, my God, these pictures are completely hideous!” Ahan complained, while her friend looked on sympathetically and sipped her coffee. "I'm wearing all these totally awful '90s clothes. I look like crap. And I'm like, Why are you people in my life, anyway? I haven't seen you in 10 years. I don't know you anymore!” She began furiously detagging the pictures -- removing her name, so they wouldn't show up in a search anymore.

Worse, Ahan was also confronting a common plague of Facebook: the recent ex. She had broken up with her boyfriend not long ago, but she hadn't "unfriended” him, because that felt too extreme. But soon he paired up with another young woman, and the new couple began having public conversations on Ahan's ex-boyfriend's page. One day, she noticed with alarm that the new girlfriend was quoting material Ahan had e-mailed privately to her boyfriend; she suspected he had been sharing the e-mail with his new girlfriend. It is the sort of weirdly subtle mind game that becomes possible via Facebook, and it drove Ahan nuts.

"Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone's trivia and gossiping,” she said.

Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won't stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what's being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn't optional. If you don't dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you're doing -- right now! -- if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness, told me that athletes used to sneak off to parties illicitly, breaking the no-drinking rule for team members. But then camera phones and Facebook came along, with students posting photos of the drunken carousing during the party; savvy coaches could see which athletes were breaking the rules. First the athletes tried to fight back by waking up early the morning after the party in a hungover daze to detag photos of themselves so they wouldn't be searchable. But that didn't work, because the coaches sometimes viewed the pictures live, as they went online at 2 a.m. So parties simply began banning all camera phones in a last-ditch attempt to preserve privacy.

"It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century.”

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor -- a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early '90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity -- become someone new.

"If anything, it's identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. "You can't play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, 'Oh, right, ha-ha -- I know you, and you're not into that.' ” She laughed. "You know that old cartoon? 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'? On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog! If you don't want people to know you're a dog, you'd better stay away from a keyboard.”

Or, as Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London who writes regularly about ambient tools, put it to me: "Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What's that going to do to them?” Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching -- but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another -- quite different -- result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter's Web site -- "What are you doing?” -- can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her "a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. "It drags you out of your own head,” she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

Burn Center Game Trains Docs for Mass Casualty Events

2008-09-04T11:30:39Z

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the development of Burn Center by 360Ed, a local startup. The training game is designed to teach medical professionals who are not burn experts to deal with mass casualties from an event such as an explosion

The Sentinel notes that 360Ed partnered with the University of Florida College of Medicine and the Florida Department of Health on the project. 360Ed CEO Ben Noel, formerly of Electronic Arts:

September 11 awakened us to the fact that we have to prepare for these mass-casualty type of events, and the best way to prepare is modern technology, simulation and games. Instead of simulating it in a field experience, which can be very expensive, we are simulating it on a computer, which can be played over and over...

They said, 'If we give you a playbook, can you make like a Madden football for mass-casualty emergency response?' I said, 'Yeah, we aren't creating any new technology here; we'd just be taking content to places it hasn't been before.'

As the game begins, players are told that bombs have just exploded at a theme park:

The first phase is a race against time in which the player has to quickly assess and triage 40 victims. The second phase takes place in the intensive-care unit, where players make treatment decisions during a simulated 36-hour period. To get training certification from the American Burn Association, players must reach a certain score.

Burn Center isn't for the faint of heart. The game features screaming people, many of whom have gruesome burns and are covered in blood. In fact, some of the 360Ed team had a hard time looking at the real photos provided by UF to ensure the graphics in the game were realistic.

Mythbusters RFID episode axed after 'pressure' from credit card firms

2008-09-03T16:07:19Z

Bust this

Discovery Channel prevented the exploration of RFID security by Mythbusters, the popular science television show, after allegedly coming under pressure from credit card companies.…

Creepy Tom Cruise Interview Redone As Creepy Half-Life 2 Interview [Half-Life 2]

2008-09-03T04:30:00Z

You remember those Tom Cruise Scientology interviews? Creepy stuff. They've been remade countless times by comedians, we know, but this is the first time we've seen them remade in the Half-Life 2 universe. Which makes it just as creepy, if not more so, because it's not too big a stretch imagining the Thetans being a part of the Combine. Which would make Tom Cruise, big-name Hollywood star, the harbinger of our ultimate destruction. Food for thought, no?

Procedural puzzles in RLs: keys & doors

2008-09-05T04:41:54Z

Hi all, I'll try to keep this short and do away with the usual lengthy
introductions. Although we all love a good dungeon crawl, I was
thinking that a few simple puzzles here and there would only add
flavor to an otherwise pretty standard dungeon.
The most cliché would be, of course, the locked door. You find a

The Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913

2008-09-02T14:26:00Z

radioweather writes "August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST) we just witnessed the first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according to sunspot data from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749. In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun, but activity has been declining in the last few years. The sun today is a nearly featureless sphere and has been spotless for 42 days total, but this is the first full calendar month since 1913 for a spotless sun. And there are other indicators of the sun being in a funk. Australia's space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the expected date for a ramping up of cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months." As one of the links above indicate, there was a "sunspeck" reported August 21/22, though. Reader MikeyTheK adds a link to a story at Daily Tech on the spotless record.

Kennedy Approach

2008-09-03T14:37:49Z

I never owned a C64. But I'm finding myself playing a number of C64 games in emulation, as well as remakes of C64 games. One of the best I've found yet is Kennedy Approach, a minimalist gem that makes air traffic control at least as tense and gripping as surviving a Zerg rush.

Kennedy Approach was released by MicroProse in 1986, but has only recently been ported to Windows by one M. Frassen, aka "Weps", who very kindly released the game as freeware. This is definitely a port rather than a remake; everything's just as it was on the 64 -- graphics, interface and all, though at least you can use a mouse rather than a joystick. The result is a rather stark experience, with simple, lo-res pixel graphics that convey exactly as much as is needed to play the game, and no more -- although the game does have digitized speech, a pretty heavy technical feat on the original machine.

The action is exactly what you'd think, managing aircraft as they move in and out of busy airports, carefully directing them through takeoff, landing, and the inevitable holding patterns, all in nail-biting real time. Play is divided into ten-minute "shifts", but you get a lot done in those ten minutes. As a simulation, KA isn't all that realistic; aircraft can only travel in eight directions, and at a constant speed, and airports have only one arrival and one departure runway. But the abstraction doesn't make it easy -- you need to be thinking every moment about where everything is going. That Cessna needs to land, but there's a 747 in its path, passing through between faraway cities. You can divert the Cessna, but be careful to avoid the heavy weather to the north and the second jetliner that's just taken off, which needs to be vectored towards its destination. And where does the Concorde that just appeared on your radar screen fit into your plan? This is hard, especially when that new aircraft wanders onto the map and upsets your delicate pattern of planes waiting for their landing slots. I hope some modern RTS players try their hands at controlling the airspace above New York City in bad weather. I may never be able to do it, that shit is relentless.

There's a definite learning curve. The controls are not immediately intuitive, although they'll get familiar after an hour or so of playing. There's a simple but mostly helpful manual on the game's website. To my mind, the only serious flaw is in the visual display -- not the low resolution, but the choice and format of visible information about all the planes in flight. It seems a little harder than it needs to be to assemble all the data into an intuitive picture of what exactly is going on. It would be useful to see the past and projected flight paths of individual planes, for instance, or to have their source and destination next to their icons on the radar.

Those niceties will have to go in a different game, though. (And apparently M. Frassen is hoping to make a sequel...) KA is, again, a port -- take it or leave it. I'd take it, despite its flaws. For all its simplicity, Kennedy Approach is almost as much fun as Starcraft or its successors. And the ten-minute playing time makes it easy to pick up and put down -- this is a great game for coffee breaks, if you can resist the urge to play shift after shift. Even if the words "air traffic control game" make you start to yawn, give this one a try.

COLUMN: @Play: Eye of the Vulture

2008-08-28T16:00:47Z

['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Here's a look at a roguelike game that some of you might not quite be familiar with. The graphics are very well-done, at least.

It's got an isometric view, fairly detailed character and monster art, and decorated room walls and floors. Looked at with unfocused eyes, it even begins to resemble Diablo. So what game might this be?

Of course, it's Nethack.

Would you go Head Over Heels for this?

(If you recognize why I picked these section titles, you're probably an even bigger geek than me.)

Nethack is one of the most widely-ported games in existence. Probably, the only games made for more platforms were from Infocom. And all of Nethack's official ports, amazingly, are compiled off the same source tree, with customizations to work around the crotchets of this operating system, or that C compiler. And since the facts of the display varies greatly across platforms, the output portions of the source code are compartmentalized in a very thorough way.

This compartmentalization makes it relatively simple to create a new graphics system, simple enough that many ports support multiple styles of output. A few years ago there was a version for Linux and Windows systems called AllegroHack, that was like the basic tile version but with much more detailed graphics and more colors. Soon after that we saw the release of Falcon's Eye, a version of the game that provided isometric graphics, even more detailed images, and a somewhat-improved user interface.

After a couple of years updates died out, although its developer still plans to continue work on the port (the original site is still on the web here), leaving the world bereft of a maintained, high-quality graphical Nethack port until DarkArts Studios forked it to produce Vulture's Eye and Vulture's Claw, which are graphic versions of Nethack and SLASH'EM respectively.

Perfect for playing on either the Solstice or the Equinox

Some of the eye-candy in the Falcon/Vulture games goes far beyond the call of duty. Different rooms have different wall styles, and dressing elements remain consistent within each room.

There are several tilesets used for mine levels. An isometric minimap in the corner assists the player in keeping track of his position in the level, and a map window can be called up to get a look at the board in a more traditional format.

But the most useful thing here for new players is the various user interface enhancements. Most of the traditional keypresses work as before, but the inventory screen has been made much more capable. Not only is it graphic, but pressing the right mouse button on an item brings up a submenu of things to do with it. Yes! Finally a version of Nethack that's light on the need to memorize commands!

It should also be noted that the right-click menu is fairly inclusive, offering functions such a "eat" for all items, not just food. This is probably by design; there are times in the game when the player might want to eat something that wouldn't ordinarily be considered food, or wield something that's not a typical weapon, or throw something that's not a missile. Having commands mysteriously appear and vanish from the list at different times would be a subtle spoiler.

The right-click inventory feature, should a player discover it, makes Nethack vastly more accessible to a new player. So it really is a shame that it isn't easier to discover itself; most new players wouldn't expect to find it there. And although there are command icons in the corner of the screen, some of the most important utility commands, particularly searching, saving and quitting, are still only accessible through keypresses.

A knight is nothing but a Light Crusader

One of the first things players will notice about Vulture's Eye, probably before the new graphics in fact, is that the game has music and sound effects. The sound effects, particularly, are implemented in a haphazard manner: the sound code scans the message buffer for a number of strings, and if one is found, it plays a roughly-appropriate sound. So, the word "kitten" will play a sound of a meow.

This might seem clever at first, but the program is not at all discerning about context. The same meow is played whether you display your kitten, whether you're being attacked by an enemy kitten (standard definition of awesome: enemy kitten), or whether you're stepping over the corpse of your deceased pet. Fortunately, both music and sounds can be turned off from the options menu.

What I consider most interesting about the Vulture's games, ultimately, is that they're easier to play if you have no prior Nethack experience. The more familiar with standard Nethack a player is, the more comfortable he'll be with its key commands and simple, but information-rich, screen.

Vulture's Eye's isometric graphics may help a new player to better perceive the world as a place, but the graphics take up lots of space, meaning the player can't see as much of the world at once, corridors and walls are easy to confuse (especially with walls overlapping floor spaces), and the greater diversity in monster and item representations makes it harder to distinguish them at a glance.

For a new player, these distractions aren't substantively greater than those presented by Nethack itself. But for an experienced player, Vulture's Eye has poses a surprising learning curve, even though the game itself is identical to vanilla Nethack.

Over-engineering dungeon generation

2008-08-28T16:44:04Z

I've been working on a new variant (yeah, I'll probably never finish it) and I decided to overhaul the dungeon generation code a bit. I'm sure my techniques are overly-complicated, inefficient, and generally involve more programming work than necessary... but I rather like the results so far.

A few quick notes:
- I'm using the SAngband character set at the moment, mostly because I liked the doors
- I'm writing everything in C# because I'm a lazy bum who doesn't like to deal with memory allocation issues
- I've only implemented a handful of basic room types. It's very easy to add other types of rooms later, though.

Here's a quick preview of the dungeon generation output.

So why did I even bother writing a new dungeon generator?
1. IMO it's actually a very fun and interesting programming exercise
2. I wanted to be able to cram more rooms into a smaller space
3. I didn't like the Angband-style corridors; they meander a little too much for my taste

From here I'll just describe the techniques I'm using. Feel free to tell me that I'm going about this all wrong :)

Step 1: Make a random list of rooms

At this point I don't worry about drawing rooms on the map or even deciding where they go. I just randomly create a list of 30-40 rooms with defined sizes.

Step 2: Room placement

I start placing the rooms by putting the 1st room in the center of the dungeon. The remaining rooms are distributed by essentially playing Tetris :)

At each step, the algorithm considers the dungeon from a different direction: from above, left, right, or below. It really does play a form of Tetris at this point. It looks for the deepest hole into which it can slide one of the remaining rooms. The room is then placed into the hole, leaving 1-4 tiles as a buffer.

We keep going until we run out of rooms or the Tetris algorithm has failed to work from every direction.

Step 3: Which rooms should be connected?

Now Angband just connects rooms randomly. It might (and frequently does) try to connect rooms on opposite sides of the map, and it doesn't care if the rooms between get turned into swiss cheese.

Instead of random connections, I decided to use delaunay triangulation of the room coordinates. The resulting triangle edges form a pool of room connections that I construct the tunnels from. Not all of the triangle edges are used to make tunnels (that would make too many tunnels), but the triangulation ensures that tunnels are frequently drawn between neighboring rooms.

From the edges that were obtained during the triangulation I construct a minimum spanning tree; this ensures that there are no disconnected regions of the dungeon. I use approximately 30% of the remaining edges to make additional tunnels, so that there are multiple paths between rooms.

Step 4: Drawing tunnels

Sometimes I like Angband tunnels, and sometimes they're totally crazy. They can move in and out of the same room multiple times, bend back on themselves, and generally behave in a very illogical fashion.

I wanted my tunnels to be a little less erratic: more straight (on average), but with a few bends to add flavor and tactical complexity to the dungeon. I settled on using the A* pathfinding algorithm, with the following additional considerations:

- Similar to Angband, tunnels into and out of rooms are only allowed in certain areas. We don't allow the pathfinder to move through certain types of rock.

- The pathfinder incurs a cost penalty whenever the tunnel makes a turn. This forces it to prefer straight sections

- I'm using Perlin noise in order to define invisible regions of "hard" rock. The pathfinder incurs a penalty for trying to move through hard areas. This prevents our tunnels from being completely straight.

- It's cheaper to move through existing tunnels. Therefore the pathfinder will prefer to meet up with an existing tunnel whenever possible, creating intersections

- Some of the tunnel intersections are artificial. One of the random "room" types is actually just a solid block of granite, but it still gets considered as a room when everything is connected. So when adjacent rooms gets connected to it it appears to be a natural tunnel intersection. This also causes occasional dead-end tunnels which are great for staircase placement.

Spore: It’s Made Of People

2008-08-27T18:25:02Z

[Brandon Boyer, the author of this piece, is one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s international agents. In 2006 he visited Spore developers Maxis at their studio on behalf of Edge magazine. The following article is an updated version of the feature that was published in that magazine last year. In it Mr Boyer talks to Wright and his team, and gets the heart of how this game came to be. Read on to discover how Spore was made of people.]

… [visit site to read more]

Comic bio of Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and magician

2008-08-27T17:41:37Z

Jack Parsons (1914-1952) was a pioneering rocket scientist and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was also a deep devotee of Aleister Crowley and worked some heavy duty occult rituals with none-other than L. Run Hubbard. Parsons had an amazingly strange life that writer Richard Carbonneau and artist Robin Simon are now translating into comic form. "The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons" is now online as a serialized Web comic. I hope it eventually gets published as a graphic novel! The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons (Webcomics Nation via Damn Data)

Previously on BB:
• Book review: Strange Angel, a Jack Parsons biography

First

2008-08-27T05:11:52Z

So, the First <1KBRL Challenge is over.

A total of 14 entries were produced

Berserker Troll Hunt by Konijn_, Online
C# <1kRl by Nick Coughlin Homepage
Deveah’s Source Executable
Energon Absorber by Numeron Post
Fur Hunter by Jakub Debski Homepage
Ido’s Source
LUCK! by Slash Homepage Online
Nate879’s Homepage
Ooooorrrrcs! by Jakub Debski Homepage
Oh Rats by BlackEye Download Source and Executable
Pink Warrior by Jurgen Lerch Post
Ten levels of slaughter by Konstantin Post
Tower of Doom Chr M Charles Executable
Xecutor’s Post

You may think it is pointless to make efforts to work a game on less than 1KB of source code nowadays… if i am a bit possitive, the best you could think would be “hey, it’s fun for the developer… let him be!” or “well, thats a pretty cool way to waste whatever work could go into a REAL game”.

I have news for you, and I can’t really explain it. The entries you are about to be reviewed have something, may be having such restriction in the quantity of code to create “playability” makes the developer of the game do what really matters into the game, no place for plot, no place for the simplest of effects, no place for munchkinism, no place for cool, complex algorithms or a full-live-world simulation. It is all about The Game.

I didn’t have the pleasure of living through the ages of classic gaming, but I think this is as close as I can get. My best guess (and great hope) is things were like this before. It is a shame everything has changed so much (natural de-evolution, one day soon we will be able to play games like these <1KBRLs inside a “real”, photorealistic videogame).

Play the games, you will really enjoy them. Also, be sure to tell the author he rocks, and fight with your friends for the highest score or equivalent. Use the roguetemple forums when needed.

So, without further ado, I announce the start of the 1st <1KBRL Challenge reviewing cycle, which start with an really interesting entry: Ooooorrrrcs!

Sitting on the Fence

2008-08-25T13:00:00Z

For roughly the past month, I've been interviewing at a few different places looking for a new job. I've felt overqualified at my current place of employment and really wanted some more challenging work. At the end of the process I had two offers to choose from, both of which were really similar and far superior to my current job. I suppose most people might decide based on some simple, simple heuristic like "highest salary", "most attractive coworkers", or "did I flip heads?"

But I'm a compulsive optimizer. Naturally I agonized for two weeks over which offer I should. I was hoping one offer would be clearly better than the other, but both the corporate cultures and salary packages were similar. I analyzed every angle I could think of, from the commute times to little things my interviewers had said. I called friends I knew and got as much inside information about the places. I made risk estimates for the companies based on their respective industries. Talk about overkill! My opinion changed on a daily basis, but after two weeks I finally made my final decision.

This is, of course, the exact opposite of what good AI should do.

In most systems where a computer must analyze some data and make a decision, there's a problem when two choices are very similar. Sometimes the system can get caught in an oscillation state where working on either choice makes the other one better. For example, a Quake 3 bot might decide to pick up armor, but the act of moving towards the armor makes it decide that picking up some health is a better choice. So the bot instead moves towards the health, and on the way decides the armor is better. The bot can end up in a situation of indecision where it picks up neither of the two items, and clearly this is the worst of the three choices.

Item pickup isn't the only situation where this occurs. Target selection and weapon selection can have the same problems. A bot can try to chase down one target but on the way decide it would rather aim at a different one and waste valuable time aiming at neither. Or in theory a bot can switch to one weapon and change its range based on the new choice, but by the time it gets in position it decides another weapon is useful. If you've never seen a BrainWorks bot do this, that's great! I've worked hard to remove these indecisions from the AI, but it's neigh impossible to make AI that works in all situations. There are two basic tactics you can use to solve indecision oscillations, each with their own costs.

Most of the time I give the scoring estimate a bonus of between 10% and 25% for keeping the same decision. In other words, the AI won't change its mind unless the new option is at least 25% better than the old. The higher this factor is, the fewer oscillations will occur. However, the risk is that an option that's genuinely 8% better will be missed, even if it wouldn't cause an indecision loop. Additionally, it's rare but still possible that even with a 25% factor, the bot can get stuck in indecision. This method is best used for situations where the estimated value of one option over another doesn't change that rapidly. This is how general item pickup oscillations are handled, as well as enemy selection.

When a small buffer isn't sufficient, the other option is to prevent the bot from changing its mind until it completes its selection, or at least for a reasonably long duration (such as half a minute). This is guaranteed to solve the problem. But there are two drawbacks. Not only will the bot be more likely to make suboptimal decisions, but it could get caught in a situation where it's very predictable. As such, it's best to apply this tactic only when absolutely necessary and ideally when the action can be completed quickly.

This method is used in item pickup for items the bot is very nearby. If a bot can pickup an item in less than one second, it immediately overrides all other item pickups and grabs it no matter how useful some other item may be. It turns out that even with a bonus factor for keeping the same item selection, bots could still get stuck in indecision loops when they were very close to an item of low value. That's because the estimated points per second is the ratio of two very small numbers, so the estimation has a large margin of error. No bonus factor could stop the bot from switching between the bad nearby item and the good item that was far away. The code forces the bot to spend half second to grab the nearby item, thereby preventing the loop from occurring.

Regarding my new job, I was leaning towards the place that offered slightly less money but seemed to have higher job satisfaction. In the end they decided to beat the salary offered by the other company, so it was a no-brainer to pick the job that has both higher pay and happier workers.

A Procedural ASCII Universe

2008-08-24T16:11:46Z

Hi everyone!
I thought I'd finally get out of shadows and also share my latest
project with you.
It is not strictly a roguelike in the traditional meaning, more like
an exploration game with some collecting and trading maybe, but it
features things you might find interesting. So, I am creating a
procedural universe presented in ascii graphics. It has billions of

gTile: Javascript tile based game engine

2008-08-24T06:35:16Z

Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by chupy to games/javascript roguelike - More about this bookmark

The Tomorrow War: Hard Sci-Fi

2008-08-22T11:14:59Z

Russian spacewar simulator The Tomorrow War is set for a September 1st release in Europe, and should apparently have an English-language version in the pipeline too. The game is an incredibly expansive simulation based on the galactic-war fictions of Alexander Zorich (actually a pseudonym for two Russian writers, Yana Botsman and Dmitry Gordevsky). After the jump we have ten minutes of footage from the game’s vast interstellar environments: it’s the absolute antidote to those glossed-up trailers coming out of Leipzig.

… [visit site to read more]

MI5 on Terrorist Profiling

2008-08-22T12:18:30Z

There's no profile:

MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.

[...]

The main findings include:

• The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic experiences and oppressive regimes and claimed UK asylum, but more came to Britain to study or for family or economic reasons and became radicalised many years after arriving.

• Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.

• The "mad and bad" theory to explain why people turn to terrorism does not stand up, with no more evidence of mental illness or pathological personality traits found among British terrorists than is found in the general population.

• British-based terrorists are as ethnically diverse as the UK Muslim population, with individuals from Pakistani, Middle Eastern and Caucasian backgrounds. MI5 says assumptions cannot be made about suspects based on skin colour, ethnic heritage or nationality.

• Most UK terrorists are male, but women also play an important role. Sometimes they are aware of their husbands', brothers' or sons' activities, but do not object or try to stop them.

• While the majority are in their early to mid-20s when they become radicalised, a small but not insignificant minority first become involved in violent extremism at over the age of 30.

• Far from being lone individuals with no ties, the majority of those over 30 have steady relationships, and most have children. MI5 says this challenges the idea that terrorists are young men driven by sexual frustration and lured to "martyrdom" by the promise of beautiful virgins waiting for them in paradise. It is wrong to assume that someone with a wife and children is less likely to commit acts of terrorism.

• Those involved in British terrorism are not unintelligent or gullible, and nor are they more likely to be well-educated; their educational achievement ranges from total lack of qualifications to degree-level education. However, they are almost all employed in low-grade jobs.

Starcraft: Disliking Terran vs. Zerg

2008-08-22T09:38:13Z

I’m not entirely sure why I dislike playing the Terran vs. Zerg matchup so much.

I think it’s because it’s the only matchup that comes down to hard counters. It’s weird, because you’d think Starcraft would be a game of hard counters. Ranged beats melee, armored beats range, air beats armor, etc. But it actually doesn’t work that way in practice. Starcraft counters are soft counters. Compare to Warcraft III, where the units are almost completely ineffective against their counters. In Starcraft, a zergling beats a marine, at least until there are more marines and they are upgraded. Then the zerglings are in big trouble. And these relationships evolve throughout the game, players switching from counter to counter.

What’s weird about the Terran vs. Zerg matchup is that this doesn’t hold true. There’s a lot of great interplay in the early and mid game. The zergling and mutalisk harass, the terran drops, the lurker hides. All require great skill and tactics. But the game inevitably goes to 2 units. The Zerg is going for Defilers with Dark Swarm and Consume and the Terran player is going for Science Vessels with Irradiate to counter. Marines and Medics with stim pack are just so strong against Zerg troops, that you need the Defiler’s Dark Swarm to succeed in numbers. But Defilers are easily countered by Science Vessels with Irradiate, and even Burrow is no defense. To top it off, Science Vessels destroy all the other high end Zerg units, even Lurkers and Ultralisks.

The lesson here is to not have super units that dominate the game or have easily covered weaknesses. The Terran vs. Zerg late game is completely obsessed with these 2 units. The matchup becomes about micro-control: the Science Vessels try to catch the Defilers in the open while they hide as long as possible. It’s not soft counter focused at all, and it feels wrong.

What I especially find interesting is this doesn’t seem to have been the intention of the designers at all. Guardians are supposed to be very good in this matchup, but in practice are rarely effective. Queens and Ghosts are entirely unused. Air is rarely seen in the late game. The lack of usable alternatives traps the matchup between these 2 units.

People often ask me what I would change to improve Starcraft. I think the game is very balanced, and the metagame is healthy. But in the spirit of mixing things up, in the other matchups I’d still only try changing the costs of the underused units. This particular matchup, however, needs more then diversification. For you Starcraft lovers, here’s my current list of overall balance changes I’d be interested in trying incrementally:

Decrease the duration of Dark Swarm from 45 seconds to 12 seconds.
Decrease the range of Dark Swarm and Plague from 9 to 8.
Decrease the cost of Spawn Broodling from 150 to 100.
Decrease the range of Spawn Broodling from 9 to 7.
Increase the cooldown effect of Ensnare to a true 25%.
Decrease the cost of the Guardian upgrade from 50 minerals, 100 gas to 0 minerals, 50 gas.
Decrease the cost of the Devourer upgrade from 150 minerals, 50 gas to 75 minerals, 25 gas.
Increase the HP of Infested Terran from 60 to 200 HP. (for fun!)

Increase the cost of Irradiate from 75 to 125.
Decrease the range of Irradiate from 9 to 8.
Increase the damage of Firebats from 16cs to 17cs.
Decrease the cooldown of Ghosts from 22 to 11.
Decrease the cost of Lockdown from 100 to 75.
Increase the damage of Wraiths from 8/20e to 20e/20e.
Decrease Medic armor from 1 to 0 and decrease their hitpoints from 50 to 40.
Increase the cost of Heal from 1 to 2.
Decrease the cost of Valkyries from 250 minerals, 125 gas to 175 minerals, 100 gas.

Decrease the cost of Hallucination from 100 to 75. (again, for fun! Psi Storm is so popular already)
Decrease the cost of Scouts from 250 minerals, 125 gas to 175 minerals, 100 gas.
(Edit) Decrease the cooldown of Reavers from 60 to 30.
Increase the shields of Dark Archons from 200 to 300.
Increase the build time of Carrier’s Interceptors from 10 seconds to 20 seconds.

It speaks volumes how minor these changes are - few significant changes, with the biggest to the endgame counter units. Crazier possibilities might be giving Queens Restoration to add a viable Irradiate counter for Zerg and giving Ghosts EMP instead of Science Vessels, swapping in Lockdown.

Maybe I’ll map edit these changes to try them out. Would be fun!