#actually challenging maps without artificial difficulty??

[kodorki]

forever upset the route system in fates was done as poorly as it was because had it been done in any normal way, i would have liked this game significantly more and significantly earlier than now

[taqato-alim]

Analysis of: "From Brain to AI and Back" (academic lecture by Ambuj Singh)

The term "document" in the following text refers to the video's subtitles.

Here is a summary of the key discussions:

The document describes advances in using brain signal recordings (fMRI) and machine learning to reconstruct images viewed by subjects.

Challenges include sparseness of data due to difficulties and costs of collecting extensive neural recordings from many subjects.

Researchers are working to develop robust models that can generalize reconstruction capabilities to new subjects with less extensive training data.

Applications in medical diagnosis and lie detection are possibilities, but risks of misuse and overpromising on capabilities must be carefully considered.

The genre of the document is an academic lecture presenting cutting-edge neuroscience and AI research progress to an informed audience.

Technical content is clearly explained at an advanced level with representative examples and discussion of challenges.

Ethical implications around informed consent, privacy, and dual-use concerns are acknowledged without overstating current capabilities.

While more information is needed, the presentation style and framing of topics skews towards empirical science over opinion or fiction.

A wide range of stakeholders stand to be impacted, so responsible development and governance of emerging neural technologies should involve multidisciplinary input.

Advancing both basic scientific understanding and more human-like machine learning is a long-term motivation driving continued innovation in this important field.

Here is a summary of the key points from the document:

The speaker discusses advances in using brain signal recordings (fMRI) to reconstruct images that a person is viewing by training AI/machine learning models.

An example is shown where the top row is the actual image viewed and the bottom row is the image reconstructed from the person's brain signals.

Larger datasets with brain recordings from multiple subjects are allowing better models to be developed that may generalize to new subjects.

Challenges include the sparseness of brain signal data due to the difficulty and costs of collecting it from many subjects.

A model is presented that maps brain signals to a joint embedding space of images and text, allowing reconstruction of novel images from new brain signals.

Examples are shown where the reconstructed images match fairly well or not as well depending on image details and semantics.

Issues around ethics, risks of misuse, and questions of explaining and improving the models are discussed.

Ongoing work aims to address challenges around transferring models between subjects and measuring reconstruction performance.

Based on the content and style of the document, it appears to be an academic lecture or presentation.

Key evidence points include:

The document consists primarily of a speaker talking and presenting slides/examples to an audience, as indicated by phrases like "Let me just start with this" and an applause at the end.

Technical topics from neuroscience and machine learning/AI are discussed in detail, such as fMRI brain recordings, reconstructing images from brain signals, modeling approaches, dataset descriptions, and challenges/questions in the field.

Academic concepts like human subjects studies, building models, transferring learning, and measuring performance are referred to.

The presentation of information is intended to educate the audience on the state of the field and cuttting edge research, not just entertain.

There are no narratives, characters or creative storytelling elements - it adheres strictly to explaining complex technical content.

Therefore, based on the instructive/educational style and focus on explaining advanced technical research, I would classify the genre of this document as an academic lecture/presentation intended to inform an audience about progress in the domain of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Here are some of the key stakeholders that could be affected by the content and topics discussed in this document:

Neuroscience researchers - Directly interested and impacted by advances reported from their field of study. Progress informs future research directions.

AI/machine learning researchers - Models and challenges discussed could inspire new research at the intersection of AI and neuroscience. Transfer of model techniques.

Medical/clinical communities - Potential applications to diagnosis, personalized medicine if models can accurately reconstruct brain states. Raises ethical issues.

Government research agencies - Fund future related research based on understanding of opportunities and challenges conveyed. Evaluates societal impacts.

General public - Increased understanding of science helps engagement but topics like brain reading raise public concerns around privacy, consent if translated beyond research.

Research participants - Summary does not disclose identities but motivates others to contribute data for progress. Well-being depends on responsible use of data.

Technology companies - Commercial opportunities from real-world applications but also reputational risks if misused. Data ownership questions.

Academic institutions - Collaborations, education of next generations of researchers on cutting-edge topics is enabled through open dissemination of knowledge.

Overall the document provides value to a wide range of stakeholders by communicating the state and potential implications of this multidisciplinary area of neuroscience and AI research. Responsible stewardship is important given several ethical considerations.

Here is a summary of the key points about advances in using brain signal recordings from the document:

Researchers are using fMRI to record brain signals as people view images, in order to reconstruct the viewed images from the brain activity patterns alone.

Machine learning models, especially neural networks, are allowing researchers to train mappings from brain signals to representations of semantic content like images and text.

Examples show the capability of reconstructing fairly accurate images that a person viewed, based solely on their brain activity recordings during viewing.

Larger datasets with multiple subjects are important to develop models that may generalize beyond individual subjects. However, fMRI data is very difficult and expensive to collect at scale.

Advances now allow reconstruction of more complex stimuli like full stories a person reads, not just static images.

Ongoing work aims to better understand brain learning processes and apply those principles to more human-like machine learning architectures.

Analyzing brain recordings also has potential applications for medical diagnosis, lie detection, personalized medicine as models improve.

Ethics must be carefully considered to ensure technologies for reading neural signals are developed and applied responsibly and avoid misuse or privacy violations.

So in summary, the document outlines significant progress using machine learning on brain recordings to reconstruct sensory experiences, with applications and open questions that can further both neuroscience and AI.

Here is a summary of the key points about the sparseness of brain signal data:

Collecting fMRI brain signal recordings from large numbers of subjects is extremely challenging and costly due to the resources and time required.

Each recording session with a single subject takes considerable time, as the number of images/stimuli that can be presented is limited within a session.

Collecting data from a single subject sufficient for training complex models may require recording sessions over multiple days or weeks.

As a result, publicly available datasets typically contain recordings from only a small number of subjects, often under 10.

The sparseness of data makes it difficult to develop robust models that will generalize well to new subjects that lack extensive recordings.

Researchers aim to better leverage smaller datasets by training models that can reconstruct novel stimuli from just a subset of training data per subject.

If successful, this could enable more efficient data collection, such as obtaining usable models from a subject after a single shorter session rather than many long sessions.

However, overcoming the sparseness of brain signal data remains a major challenge holding back progress in the field. Larger collaborative datasets are needed.

So in summary, sparse data severely limits progress but also motivates techniques to optimize learning from limited samples per subject.

Here is a summary of key points regarding risks of misuse from the document:

Advances in reconstructing cognitive states like images viewed from brain recordings raise potential dual-use concerns if technologies are not regulated.

Applications in medical diagnosis and lie detection could help many, but lead to issues if used without consent or for non-medical surveillance.

Overly ambitious claims about capabilities need to be avoided to prevent misleading expectations that could fuel inappropriate usage assumptions.

Privacy and security of sensitive neural data must be prioritized to prevent potential misuse for profiling, identification or manipulation without oversight.

Commercial pressures may incentivize premature deployment before understanding implications, so continued research is important.

Public education about limitations and complexities involved can help curb fears that fuel misuse if capabilities are overestimated.

Multidisciplinary cooperation ensures societal and ethical issues are considered proactively rather than reactively addressed later.

Governance frameworks may be needed to steer applications toward public benefit rather individual or state abuse of personal mental information.

The speaker acknowledges misuse risks to inform discussion and underscore the importance of ongoing examination of new neural technologies through multidisciplinary lens including ethics.

Based on the content and style of presentation, my evaluation of the document status is:

Science vs Fiction: Clearly grounded in science as it discusses ongoing empirical research studies using neuroimaging and machine learning techniques. No fictional or hypothetical elements.

Empirical vs Anecdotal: Empirical in nature, rooted in dataset collection from human subjects and quantitative modeling/evaluation, not personal experience. While data quantities are limited, research follows scientific method.

Fact vs Opinion: Primarily presents technical details and research findings as established facts from the literature. Does not advance strong personal opinions beyond realistic discussion of challenges. Maintains an objective tone.

Objective vs Subjective: Remains objective in explaining research accomplishments and questions objectively without emotive language or bias. Any subjective experience like dataset limitations are clearly labeled as such. Presentation aims for factual information transfer.

In summary, while farther research is still ongoing, the document presents the current state of a scientific research domain factually based on empirical evidence and quantitative analysis published in the field. It does not intermingle non-factual elements or stray from an objective reporting of the topic at hand. The status therefore skews heavily toward science, empiricism, fact and objectivity.

I did not identify any logical fallacies in the content or arguments presented in this document.

The speaker objectively summarizes established research results and proposals, without making assertions that require logical scrutiny.

Some key reasons why logical fallacies are not present include:

No causal claims are made without proper evidence or empirical support from published studies. Progress is tied to concrete research efforts.

No arguments are constructed through flawed reasoning or non sequiturs. Concepts are explained clearly and build upon each other logically.

Comparisons to other approaches are fair without strawman misrepresentations of opposing ideas. Related work is acknowledged.

Limitations and open challenges are candidly outlined rather than ignored or obscured through fallacious defense.

No emotional, exaggerated or politically motivated language is used that could constitute emotional appeals. Tone remains factual.

No false dilemmas or false attributions of complexity are presented. Discussions appropriately scope multi-factor research questions.

No hasty generalizations are made from limited evidence. Data constraints are clearly communicated.

Overall, through objectively summarizing established neuroscience and AI research domains and techniques, without engaging in argument or debate, I did not find any logical fallacies employed in this academic information-sharing document. The focus appears to be factual reporting of progress and issues, avoiding fallacious reasoning.

Here is an evaluation of the ethics addressed and considered in the document:

Informed consent is implied but not explicitly discussed for research participants. Given the sensitivity of brain data, proper protocols were likely followed.

Privacy and anonymity of participants is a concern, but cannot be fully assessed without more details on the dataset and review process.

Potential dual-use issues around brain reading/reconstruction technologies are identifed by discussing applications but also worries about misuse or lack of oversight. This shows awareness of ethical implications.

Limitations and challenges and openly discussed, avoiding overpromising on capabilities. This establishes credibility and sets appropriate expectations.

Societal impacts and usage beyond research (e.g. diagnostics) are flagged as requiring careful consideration of risks like surveillance, discrimination if not regulated properly.

No claims are made without empirical evidence, showing results are driven by facts rather than desires which can bias judgment. Objectivity helps ethical analysis.

Multidisciplinary collaboration is emphasized , suggesting diverse viewpoints were incorporated into the research process.

Overall, while full review details are not provided, the document demonstrates an awareness of important ethical considerations around privacy, consent and responsible development for these sensitive types of neural data and technologies. A balanced assessment of opportunities and risks is conveyed.

Here are the usual evaluation criteria for an academic lecture/presentation genre and my evaluation of this document based on each criteria:

Clarity of explanation: The concepts and technical details are explained clearly without jargon. Examples enhance understanding. Overall the content is presented in a clear, logical manner.

Depth of technical knowledge: The speaker demonstrates thorough expertise and up-to-date knowledge of the neuroscience and AI topics discussed, including datasets, modeling approaches, challenges and future directions.

Organization of information: The presentation flows in a logical sequence, with intro/overview, detailed examples, related work, challenges/future work. Concepts build upon each other well.

Engagement of audience: While an oral delivery is missing, the document seeks to engage the audience through rhetorical questions, previews/reviews of upcoming points. Visuals would enhance engagement if available.

Persuasiveness of argument: A compelling case is made for the value and progress of this important multidisciplinary research area. Challenges are realistically discussed alongside accomplishments.

Timeliness and relevance: This is a cutting-edge topic at the forefront of neuroscience and AI. Advances have clear implications for the fields and wider society.

Overall, based on the evaluation criteria for an academic lecture, this document demonstrates strong technical expertise, clear explanations, logical organization and timely relevance to communicate progress in the domain effectively to an informed audience. Some engagement could be further enhanced with accompanying visual/oral presentation.

mjsMlb20fS2YW1b9lqnN

[katyspersonal]

It isn't even exclusive to the DLC though?

Well, for starters, Scadutree Fragments system, just like upgrading flasks and weapons in the base game, IS fun for the simple reason that you are supposed to find the fragments naturally, as you explore the world! It is not supposed to be a "tedious" task, with the MAYBE exception of 5 of these being locked behind Gaius that is a difficult optional boss, but you can do without them as well! You will still get at +13 or +15 level of Scadutree Blessings AT LEAST by SOTE's finale by simply exploring the map, optional nooks roads and dungeons, optional bosses as well!

What I am saying is, if you are devastated by exploring the world in the open world videogame, you are probably just playing the wrong game! It is okay if open world games that should be explored by definition are not for you, just...... why. why you even play them then? Elden Ring, SOTE or base game, is not supposed to be a speedrun instant progress stuff from boss to boss as if you are trying to "get rid of the game" and get your badge as soon as possible!

As for what makes it unique in SOTE specifically? It is, additionally, a fair way to give players challenge that they most likely WANTED for their money and hype, because you can only give so much strong boss attacks against 300+ level players with dumbass stats and fully upgraded weapons. Since base game launched and until SOTE, many players have leveled their characters way too much and, again, would've beaten SOTE way too fast. It was a clever way to artificially rise up the difficulty of the DLC because, again.. you don't ACTUALLY think this DLC would be worth its money if it turned out to be obnoxiously easy for overleveled players (aka majority of them) and get beaten within a couple of hours first-trying every boss? When you get enough Scadutree Fragments bosses do not become easy either, they just become more beatable, yet returning to them like this after taking the side route has a much more fun effect than speedrunning from boss to boss and ignoring beautiful world of Shadow's Land.

While looking for the fragments, you end up exploring the world and the story better, learn more lore and get more invested in the atmosphere. Making players learn the story and see every corner of expansion crafted for them during actually playing the game is a fair game design solution. Nobody needs to be gAsLiGhT bY iNfLuEnCeRs uwu to understand this much

Elden ring "controversy"? SotET

I usually don't say things that could hurt peoples feelings or make them mad, but I've wanted to talk about this for a long time. In eldenring shadow of the erdtree, why are people defending the scadu tree fragment system? it feels like it should objectively be a bad game mechanic. "I need to stop doing the fun thing so I can go find easter eggs." didn't a similar system in a Dark souls 2 DLC get it branded as "the worst DLC" ? I'm just annoyed that 'influencers' gaslit people into believing they can't think of the DLC as weak (when compared to all other soulsborne DLC's) while still LOVING other parts of it. eldenring shadow of the erdtree gave me my favorite weapons, armor, npc's, bosses and most importantly, my most favorite BOSSFIGHT! Igon & I fighting Bayel was akin to opera and made me more emotional than most other games have, along with some other heart wrenching boss fights in that DLC. idk, I'm sleepy ranting. just, as a huge fromsoft fan, don't say it's good because it's hard or annoying, okay? it's good because it's supposed to be fun. :3

[deetvar]

Gonna kick the ball into your court. From best to worst, rank Fire Emblem games from best challenge to worst designed. (Not hardest to easiest, but by quality.)

This is admittedly a bit difficult since even the better designed games are haphazard at best. And since I am lazy to rank them all concisely pre-fact until I wrote this post, let’s do some noombers.

Dark Dragon & The Blade Of Light

- First Fire Emblem and it’s wonky. Marth is broken, most of the units are basically serviceable since it only has a max 20 in any given stat. There is questionable design features and the maps go for a more grand scale (as a NES can do) without much in terms of challenge. 

Gaiden

- Lol. If you aren’t grinding you’re doing it wrong. The maps aren’t maps. 

Mystery Of The Emblem Book 2

- I distinguish between Mystery Of The Emblem Book 2 from Book 1 since Book 2 is just a near perfect remake of FE1. Book 2 is what I believe to be the quintessential Fire Emblem experience. This is the game where I believe Marth comes into his own. The map design is excellent (for the Super Nintendo era) with careful positioning and precarious situations that incentive hurrying up...up until the half way point where everyone is strong enough and all the cool shiny weapons are around and BROKEN AF. 

Genealogy

- The maps are massive, immersive, and give a wondrous sense of scale. However design wise they are fucking terrible. The only chapter that kind of forces you to hurry is can fuck you over by pure RNG. The later chapter have more rush sections but they are no challenge. The better challenge comes doing a Sub Run but...that’s artificially imposed and only is the final chapter any different in that regard. 

Thracia

- I love this game. It’s my favorite in the series, But it is not forgiving, the map design and conveying of information is really bogged by the 90′s video game mentality of stumbling upon. Thematically it works since the whole narrative is an uphill battle..but no. 

Binding Blade

- This game’s design is actually pretty decent with a lot of really good rush moments, well placed maps, along with giving you all the tools you need to make it through. However all this goes out the window past the initial setting of Lycia. Most of the units are pretty bad and a lot of questionable map choices appear. Here’s lighting bolts that are semi-random. A desert chapter WITH FOG OF WAR. The extremely long and open fields of the Sacae route. 

Blazing Sword

- I think FE7 is the middle ground of what Fire Emblem should be. Not too hard, not even on Hector Hard Mode, everyone is workable if you really want to use them, the map design is at most a little annoying to decently challenging. 

Sacred Stones

- This game is fine. I dont really care for it. Not bad. Not good. Mostly just eh. This game kind of assumes you’re doing this for fun. Ephraim is objectively the harder route but not by much. 

Path of Radiance

- This is what Genealogy should have been. A good boat map? A decent fog of war map? Amazing. There are some real bad stinkers though. Pit Fall Chapter. Almost everything else is fine. 

Radiant Dawn

- Hard Mode is how to live. That said, this games are better and you’re thinking more BUT they veneer into pure frustration and the PIT FALL CHAPTER IS EVEN WORSE. Also a desert chapter that is really bad. Also more than half your units are fucking useless or require too much work for little benefit. 

Shadow Dragon 

- No. Go play Old Mystery. 

New Mystery

- No. Go play Old Mystery.

Awakening - It’s been memed to hell but this game operates under the assumption you are building your army as you want to. Make them as you like and make the kids as you like. The map design has become rout or kill commander, and on higher difficulties.....ohhh boy.

Fates: Birthright

- Same problems as Awakening. 

Fates Conquest - 45% of this game is genuinely brilliant map design, very good careful consideration of pairings, secondary classes, MAKING ARMORS AMAZING, MAKE BOW USERS AMAZING, tactical usage of positioning, pair up being vastly refined, clever use of map altering effects via Dragon Veins. But then there are just some utterly annoying BS like Enfeeble or cutting HP in half.  Fates: Revelation - All the creativity of Conquest, with all the annoying features (or lack of) of Awakening. You get an experience that is interesting but not at all enjoyable design wise. Shadows Of Valentia - Same as Gaiden but Combat Arts exist and...dont add much aside from the personal ones like Scendscale.  Three Houses - This has more of an Genealogy problems of immersion over tactical gameplay. Because the game is designed with the sort of near free customization like Awakening had, the map design isn’t constructed in a way that would incentive or make use of any particular X because doing so would kind of mean you wasted all your time training X unit in Y skills/abilities. Some of these are obviously lazy and need a refresh. Maybe I need to replay some of these.

[ranger-report]

Review: THE WITCHER (2007)

With the recent popularity of The Witcher across mass media thanks to the Netflix series starring Henry Cavill and his arms, I finally began what I consider an epic quest to play through all three of the Witcher games and their DLC. This is, by no means, a small task, but you know I might as well sacrifice myself in the name of entertainment. So I began to play The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, a PC game released in 2007 based on the books of the same name written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Now that I’ve beaten it I have quite a few things to say about it. But, first thing’s first, and that is easily the most obvious aspect of this game:

It has not aged well. Not at all.

To begin with, the graphics of the game are very 2007. A product of seventh generation graphical technology to be sure, it doesn’t help that it’s running on BioWare’s Aurora engine, which was notoriously difficult to use outside BioWare’s own house. There’s all kinds of graphical glitches, people pass through objects, character models and textures are fuzzy and sometimes plasticine, facial animations are sometimes downright frightening. There’s also the fact that the game reuses the same character model for multiple characters, both important and unimportant, leading me to confusion sometimes as I swore I just saw that goddamn priest I just killed wandering around the city. Except now there’s two of him. And all the merchants look the same, too! This being the enhanced edition there’s a number of upgrades and clarity that’s been added in to the experience, but it’s still dated for better or worse. What has aged well is the use of impressionistic paintings for the purpose of certain cutscenes, adding an extra dose of epic quality to some of the goings-ons. This also includes more “intimate endeavors” Geralt can engage in. Long story short, there’s a lot of women in this game who are willing to throw themselves at Geralt, and if you play the cards right you can get down to business pretty quickly. Sometimes too quickly; one time I brought a woman a loaf of bread and she had sex with Geralt. It was confusing and out of left field. But each encounter comes with a brief piece of tasteful nude artwork of the lady in question as blurred models bump and grind in the background. And, to be completely honest, the artwork is really well done. Although it is very jarring to play a game where sex workers are clearly labeled “whores” and “hookers,” most of the women have a good amount of agency in the proceedings, particularly the two primary romance options, Triss and Shani. Geralt can actually romance these two women to the point of committed relationship, which is refreshing to see that sex is not just a reward for “romancing” a character in a game, but something the characters enjoy, while the romance comes from genuinely caring about someone.

Despite the graphical despondency, main characters fare slightly better, as anyone who needs to be easily recognizable is, and are crafted with much more detail and fine tuning than regular NPCs. While this is fine, sometimes finding these characters is a chore and a half. The Witcher has a day/night cycle, and characters follow this, but when my map is telling me I need to be in one place to meet up with someone, I can’t count that they will actually be there depending on the time of day. And I can’t artificially move the time of day forward unless I have a campfire to meditate at. Meditation is an interesting mechanic, btw, as it basically acts as Geralt “sleeping” and also functions as your chance to level up and distribute talents. On paper, I’m okay with that. In reality, campfires and places to sleep are few and far between, unless you’re close to an inn or someone who doesn’t mind you crashing at their place. And oftentimes you’re running back and forth in linear paths across deceptively open areas, back and forth and back and forth in what can only best be described as tedium when you’ll approach the quest marker on your map, only to find no one there, and need to hoof it back to a fireplace to change the time again. This can also lead to extra consternation if the game crashes, which it did a handful of times during my fifty hours of gametime. Save often.

And, finally, there’s the combat. For better or worse, it’s an exercise in clicking on people to attack them, then clicking again at the right time when your icon changes in order to string together combos. That’s fine. Combat is also divided into three styles between two swords: strong, fast, and group style, with steel blade and silver blade. Strong and fast styles speak for themselves; group style is for when you’re surrounded and need to attack everyone around you. Steel blade is for humans, silver blade for monsters. Sounds simple right? It is -- too simple. Clicking on people is as easy as that, with little interaction otherwise. Sure, you have to figure out which style to use on which enemies, and you can couple in Signs (magic spells) to make your life easier, but repeatedly clicking on people to whack away is bland at best, frustrating at worst. Later on when you can level up your sword styles to include more powerful/deadly moves it becomes more challenging, but even then it remains a strange exercise in an odd hybrid of real time/tactical combat.  Finding oneself surrounded can lead to death quickly, so if you’re not paying attention, you can go from overpowered madman to witcher meat in seconds. Literally seconds: enemies I would have no problem with one-on-one, or even two-on-one, suddenly escalate to an unstoppable force the moment that three or more come in for an attack. The game has a way of forcing Geralt into combat situations without warning as well, making it easy to be thoroughly unprepared for a deadly gangbang around a corner and a cutscene. The game also doesn’t have much of an autosave system, meaning that if you haven’t been hitting that quicksave button very often, there’s a deep chance you could get your ass handed to you and reload a ways back from where you were. Easily the biggest frustration for me in terms of playing the game. Enemies will stack status effects to clobber you; Geralt will attack and get hit; sometimes you can stagger enemies and one-hit kill them, but enemies can still attack while Geralt goes through the slow kill animation. I don’t know how many times I cursed the game in anguish as I was forced to reload yet again after a fourth monster swept in out of nowhere, or the one monster I was fighting decided to get in a Stun attack, then proceed to own my ass. Pausing the game at any time using the space bar can help to get bearings, but you can’t execute commands while paused. Saving in combat isn’t allowed either, so if a big fight starts and you realize you haven’t saved in a while, you’re screwed. Couple this frustration with the intensely boring act of clicking on monsters over and over again to fight them, and here we have the biggest weakness of the whole product.

That being said -- is the game worth playing in 2020? Despite being 13 years of age and regarded as the least accessible game in the franchise, what it brings to the table is a surprisingly effective storyline that involves subject matter which is shockingly relevant. Racial tension. Class war. Plague. Quarantine. Riots. Gray morals. Strange creatures. Frustration. Difficulty spikes. Blurred lines between human and monster. If that sounds hauntingly familiar, it’s probably because that sums up the first half of the year 2020. To say that I was expecting a 13-year-old game to reflect the state of current events would be a massive lie; in fact, at the outset of the game, I was struggling to maintain interest at all. However, as time goes, the story and the choices made are what end up being the game’s biggest strength, and ultimately its salvation.

The story opens up simply enough: Geralt of Rivia, our titular witcher, has been found in a near-death state and nursed back to health by his fellow witchers and former lover, the sorceress Triss Merigold. Coming back from the dead has cost him his memories, however, and the amnesiac Geralt is quickly plunged into conflict as a group of mercenaries called Salamandra attack the witchers’s base to steal the secrets of their mutations. Swords clash, magic flies back and forth, and Geralt is tasked with giving chase in order to retrieve the mutagenic formulae so they can’t be used for harm.

A great conceit in this is that Geralt having no memory of his past allows anyone unfamiliar with the world to gently ease in and learn about the world as he does. The game is set after the events of the books, so this gives an added bonus to readers already knowledgable of events. And as the player learns more about Geralt and his world, a variety of choices come into play. Most RPGs have this option to allow player freedom in telling a story, but unforseen consequences follow every decision; whether they come into play immediately or further down the road remains to be seen, but there’s a ripple effect that goes above and beyond the usual Choose Your Own Adventure details which essentially craft your character into a good guy or a bad guy. What’s brilliant about this is that the game never hints at this; it isn’t until the game breaks away into a cutscene with monologue does Geralt realize how his choices crafted this specific moment. For example, in the Salamandra attack, Geralt can choose to fight off a horrific monster or help Triss defend the witcher laboratory. Depending on that choice, some characters may live or die, and the game will let you know that when it wants to....usually to hammer home a point.

What works to this being the strength of the game even further is the deep narrative, which is often times complex to the point of frustration. But the story develops at a natural pace, and never presents any choice as being right or wrong, black or white, good or bad. The main gist is that the human city of Vizima is under quarantine, fighting off a vicious plague, but also defending itself from the rise of nonhuman freedom fighters comprised of elves and dwarves. The city is divided on this, particularly in class division, with any nonhuman residents living in the slum quarter, while the affluent humans live exclusively in the market quarter. There are humans in the slums too, make no mistake, but it’s very apparent who is allowed to live where. However, the game makes no stance on this whatsoever; Geralt is presented with a series of choices based on the information at hand, and as the game goes on, comes closer and closer to choosing a side between the freedom fighters or the humans as tensions comes to a head with violence. Every action has a consequence, positive or negative, but also depending on who the consequences affect. Questions of moral arise; what truly defines a monster? Is it appearance, or is it action? It’s difficult to really spell it out further without diving into spoilers, as the story should be experienced first hand without any warning. That being said, it’s refreshing to play through a game in which the character is clearly defined as being the hero, but then forces the player to ask if their actions are truly heroic or actually damaging in the quest to destroy the greater evil.

In closing, The Witcher is a mixed bag. Narratively, it’s a stellar effort that swings for the fences and sticks the landing. From a gameplay perspective, it’s a dated game that’s sometimes a chore to play through, even to the point of dire frustration. But it’s one that I can cautiously recommend. While it certainly took me six or so hours to finally believe that I had the hang of it -- I didn’t -- struggling through the first quarter of the game can yield beautiful results, especially once it rolls into the final, jaw-dropping conclusion. What I will say is that it really beats you over the head with your choices, even the ones you didn’t know you were making, and holds up a mirror to ask if your decisions were really for the greater good or not. Outstanding work in that regard. I’m looking forward to playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings now that I’ve beaten this, and someday I’ll even come back to see the paths I could have taken. Just with tempered expectations this time around.

Final score: 7/10

[myfriendpokey]

easy like sunday morning

I know it sounds funny but I just can't stand the pain.. Given the volume of critical writing on difficult games in recent years isn't it time to talk about some easy ones?  Everybody loves talking about, 'Sekiro', but no-one ever talks about, 'Felix The Cat (NES) (1992)', a delightful game with many levels that stands out in my childhood memory as being one of the very few games I was ever able to complete within the Xtravision rental window. In these notes I try to lay down a preliminary basis for felix the cat studies.[1]

1. Firstly what is easiness, is it a quality or the absence of a quality, of a texture? I'd like to focus here specifically NOT on games which deliberately avoid the idea of 'challenge' altogether (Proteus, etc) but instead on games where challenge is both theoretically present and totally perfunctory, where it's both possible to die, and just easier not to.

2. And the strange sense of waste that this creates - the waste in having something and not needing it, of having some productive capacity lie fallow. The dream is to always have both an affordance and something to flex it on, in perfect sync. There are situations where exercising some affordance might give a bad outcome (use sword on king to increase crime meter etc) but in general the universe is set up so that your acting, your being, your bodily striving has a useful and productive effect on the world at large – we hope, ha ha ha. We have no reason to doubt that we use our affordances, rather than that our affordances are using us. In an easy game this relationship becomes more uncanny - we get a sense of how an affordance can be baggage, a kind of painful excess of productive energy that comes with a vague, felt obligation to use it all up in some manner. The machine speaks through us just as much as if we were playing any bullet hell - but it does so less through an overload of stimulus than through lack of it, through opening a space, which the ambient noise of the body then rushes to fill. The aimless, stupid twitching of our flesh as it burns off all the energy which is socially and economically surplus to requirements is directed and made visible, jumping back and forth onscreen in the mocking form of a smiling platform cat, a form of automatic writing.

3. I'd actually like to avoid making a moral or political case for easy games as having some intrinsic social value (that they resist the 'investment' of skill mastery, that they undercut feelings of power and control, or that they indeed actually represent a new form of meta-difficulty in testing your ability to reject false measurements of success and artificial scarcity and that therefore playing Goldeneye with infinite ammo cheats on is praxis or something.[2]) These might be useful qualities at some moment or another - but I think they also show the strange, magic-eye effect, of trying to write about easiness in itself, writing about absence without just converting it into another kind of presence (I'm sure I have failed multiple times and will fail multiple more). So easiness in videogames is constantly at risk of becoming just a different kind of difficulty, or some form of symbolic content - rather than the lack of such difficulty, or the lack of such content... In the context of videogames, a new media form busily involved with stockpiling content and meanings and symbolism and justification of all kinds, in trying to fill itself up and out, the idea of their emptiness is somehow quite threatening.[3]

4. Difficulty in games tends to be framed as a challenge to the primacy of the self, or as an estrangement, something that pushes you out of your comfort zone. It wakes you up, makes you more alert. Easiness by comparison is a sop to the self - indulgent, a narrowing of horizons. Easiness is mainstream, difficulty is avant-garde - and discussions of difficulty in games tend to draw a lot upon comparisons to older avant-garde art or literature. I'm in favour of avant-garde videogames but i think part of claiming that tradition should be a willingness to critique it, too. For example, difficult games are some of the most popular ones to stream - are these challenging the self? To an extent they allow the performance of the self, as manifested in angry outbursts, "reacting" in some characteristic manner, individuating oneself through accomplishment or distinctive playstyle, demonstrating personal qualities such as persistence and strength of will, very little of which could be said to come through in your average Felix The Cat longplay. And while Marvel movies and longrunning tv shows are seldom difficult in the same way as experimental art they do at least tend to gesture at the idea and feeling of a certain difficulty, an emotional strenuousness, a conflict to overcome. We don't just get a whole movie of Spiderman trying on 100 different hats. Some kind of difficulty is prized in both cultures, with the difference being that of location and degree. The idea of the modernist shock, the abrupt estrangement that jolts the (presumably bourgeois, etc) viewer out of their habitual comfort zone, sits awkwardly against comparatively more recent concepts like Naomi Klein's idea of the “shock doctrine” or Paul Virilio's writings on the bombarded, exhausted viewer - or indeed with that most modern form: the hot take, the truly gratuitous and combative opinion, tossed at the unsuspecting for the sake of wreaking minor carnage. The succession of shocks here don't so much disturb the self as confirm it as a thing apart, defined in negative against the tumult outside and valued as a refuge from that outside. Maybe we take it to the gym now and then, we test it out upon some pre-selected object of difficulty to keep it in shape, but afterwards the gate goes down and the wall goes up. I don't think difficulty is bad or illegitimate but if psychic reconfiguration is the goal then how about a modernist slackening instead? In the vein of Stein, Pessoa, Walser, Musil - "the game without qualities". Lured into roaming outside of its protective carapace the brain starts to dissolve, sprawl, melt into gloop, be devoured by ants.

5. Experience of playing an easy game: there’s no pushback, there's no skill check , a string of easy victories lead you forward without realising, or leads a part of you forward, there's no moment where you have to pull yourself together and decide just how much more of your time you wanna spend on this thing, a chirpy character onscreen is declaiming "GREAT!" and "SUBURB!" as you shoot pellets at more enemies, whatever aimless drive or impulse you flicked toward this thing to test it has not yet slowed down or returned, it's like dropping a pebble down a well, and waiting for the sound, and waiting forever - and then there's a plop! and whatever the process was, it's finished, you blink, try to remember what you were doing, wander off, still adjusting to the light.

6. The history of aesthetics is that of converting new kinds of necessity into new kinds of virtue [4]. Difficulty is a virtue in videogames, but it started out as a necessity, as well - as a prefab form handed down from the old mechanical amusements, a way to aestheticise (and commercialise) material resistance at a time when material resistance was almost all that videogames had to offer[5]. As certain kinds of difficulty emerge as objects of attention a reversal takes place: instead of difficulty being a way to engage with videogames, videogames become a way to engage with a certain kind of difficulty. Difficulty becomes a sign that unites a diffuse and heterogenuous field of garish electronic debris into a single medium and an aesthetic – this becomes part of what videogames *are*, and persists even when the original reasons for that difficulty become less and less present, and as 'difficulty' comes to exist mainly as a set of inherited structures and modes of representation (health bar, life counter etc). To make something that looks like a videogame in every way but has no difficulty is in a way to re-historicise it, to cut the thread which holds all the parts together - now the game collapses into a set of disembodied effects, sounds, gestures, machinery, which exist not so much as the expression of an aesthetic as an expression of the material history behind that aesthetic. The easy game is not a game but a kind of game-byproduct, an industrial accident that gives clue to the inner workings of the machine.

7. The mysterious purgatory that is the solved or near-solved state of a videogame, aimless and uncanny, an image of fulfilled desire: maybe not your desire, but somebody's, or some part of you. Think of playing with cheat codes: a few minutes ago you might have been desperate to get BLUE SWORD [RARE], now you can't get rid of the things. A routine complaint in popular longform games is that people just end up getting too much money and not having enough endless pits to dump it all into (thorstein veblen real??). And this is a known thing and trite to even remark upon and usually the point where the discussion turns into pop-psychology liturgy of how the human brain is "broken" and "hard-wired" to need new challenges and etc. I don't care, I'd like to spend more time within this twilight area, to construct as diligent and thorough a map of its empty rooms and blockages and tiny, shifting, hypersubtle moments of enjoyment or deep melancholy as the one we  already have for Diablo clones and similar. I think here of stuff like EJ Gold's games which claim to depict (indeed, allow you to perform rituals within) the bardo realms waiting after this world, where you roll around endless corridors collecting icons to accumulate money and charisma for your next life, and where for some reason there's a button to fire out pellets despite there being no enemies to kill. Videogames are depressingly, predictably excellent at producing new manifestations of inferno; I think, for the same reasons, that they could produce some very interesting paradises as well.

Is Felix The Cat a good game? Or is it in fact the only game, and also i'm dead and my spirit has been trapped inside of it? I hope the above comments make my feelings known. All i can do from here is recommend you watch Docfuture's Sonic Easy Mode video, and contemplate the world that could have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ef8SD9gUg

[1] Just imagine it - instead of endless essays on "how completing, not completing, not playing VIDEOGAME made me a better person, worse person, more divorced person delete as appropriate" we would instead get endless essays on "how playing VIDEOGAME left me more or less the same person, I suppose, I don't really remember. But I did like the beach level".

[2] Having said this I of course realise that this is totally inevitable and look forward to BABYMODECORE, the videogame movement for people who always instinctively pick the lowest difficulty setting and want to reclaim such powerful formative experiences as beating up on the test dummy character in Tekken (and being scared that one day he'd glitch out and hunt me down instead)

[3] I wonder if part of the hatred for "asset flips" that they just replicate the shape of a videogame without filling it up with justificatory content, abstracting it somehow.

[4] Mangled from a line in F. Jameson's "Marxism and Form"

[5] Like early digital forms of old mechanical arm wrestling machines and punching bags - which slowly became part of that mysterious stock repository of ancestral videogame dream imagery, the minigame collection.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 2 -- Flow and Optimal Experience with Octopath Traveler

This week I played the Japanese role-playing game Octopath Traveler, developed by Square Enix.

Before this week I’d already put around 65 hours of gameplay into it, and I ended up playing around 7 hours over the course of the weekend. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses a main character out of eight potential characters of different job classes (such as thief, hunter, warrior, merchant, etc). I chose Therion, the thief. After finishing that character’s first chapter, the player is able to recruit the other characters to their party in any order they desire. Each character has their own story, broken up into four chapters. The locations to continue the characters’ stories are shown on the map, with level recommendations so that the player knows just how difficult each chapter will be.

The party is made up of four characters, including your main character and three others, and the other three slots can be swapped out freely at a tavern. In terms of the classification of games as proposed by Cailois, Octopath can best be classified as existing in both agon and mimicry. The agonistic elements of the game are best exemplified in the game’s battles against enemies, where the rival the player is pitted against is the artificial intelligence of the enemies. Octopath does have elements of alea, however, as certain abilities in and out of battles are left to chance. For example, Therion’s Steal ability has a percentage chance of success each time you use it.

Octopath fits in the mimicry category because the game creates this fantasy world, an “imaginary universe” as Cailois describes, and you, the player, take control of a character in that world. However, I found the game broke the illusion of you being the character through the game’s cutscenes. The player has no control over what the character says or does during cutscenes, and the cutscenes also broke the illusion by completely ignoring the other characters in your party. They have no bearing on each other’s stories. When experiencing a chapter in another character’s story, it comes from their perspective, so the player does not become a single “illusory character”.

When I started playing this week, I had just finished up the cleric Ophilia’s third chapter, which was the final character’s Chapter 3 I had left. I decided to tackle the merchant Tressa’s final chapter next because it was in a city I had not been to before, which meant I would have access to new weapons and armor. A few of the characters I was planning to use in my party were a couple of levels below the recommended level, but I figured I would level them up while exploring the dungeon before the boss, and I’d be fine.

(This video shows a fight against the particular boss I was fighting, starting at 24:52)

I reached the boss Esmeralda, and proceeded to get absolutely destroyed. Over and over again. Before the boss, I was in the flow channel, as Csikszentmihalyi describes. The challenge and my skill were pretty evenly matched, but when I encountered the boss, the challenge shot up, and I was in a state of anxiety. I had to increase my skills by grinding my level -- fighting the less powerful enemies in the dungeon before the boss. As I continued to grind, my skills increased and I was bored. The pattern repeated itself several times. I got to a higher level, attempted the boss, got defeated, and had to go grind again. I was bored and frustrated.

I realized that in most RPGs like this, your character’s level is how the game measures skill and difficulty, but it is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t actually reflect the player’s skill. If a player’s level is high enough, they can beat virtually any enemy with little skill. Octopath’s battle system has a way of forcing the player to develop at least some skill and use strategy through the shield system. Each enemy has a shield up that can only be broken after a certain number of hits from certain weapons or from certain elemental attacks. Until it’s broken, your attacks will be half as effective, and once you break a shield, the enemy is stunned for two turns. This is crucial for a battle against an enemy like Esmeralda, whose incredibly strong attacks can easily defeat all four of your party members in just two consecutive turns without healing.

The fight with Esmeralda forced me to reevaluate my strategies. Each character can learn a secondary job that comes with different support skills, and I had to experiment with using different secondary jobs on my characters and teaching them different secondary skills. For example, I taught all the characters the apothecary skill Heightened Healing, which would give them thirty percent more health any time they were healed. I made the warrior Ha’anit’s secondary job the cleric, and taught her a skill that allowed her to be healed above her maximum HP. I also realized that all of Esmeralda’s attacks were physical, so I gave my characters shields and armor that raised their physical defense as much as possible, ignoring elemental defense. As I was experimenting with changing my strategies, I entered the flow channel again, and my optimal experience began. My real skills had matched the challenge posed by Esmeralda, and they had caught up with my characters’ levels.

I began the battle for what ended up being the final time. I had the TV on in the background while I was playing, but I was so in the flow of the game that now I can’t even remember what show was on, let alone what actually happened in the episode. But I remember how I felt while I was playing, and it was exactly how the different people in the Flow excerpts described their optimal experiences. The first time Ha’anit was hit, I used a healing item that healed her to 9,999 HP. That way, she couldn’t be taken out with a single hit, and since she was my cleric in the battle, she was always able to heal and revive the other party members. The fight was still difficult, and it kept me on my toes, but it was no longer impossible. I found a deep sense of enjoyment watching Esmeralda finally turn to dust, as I had been expecting to be defeated once again. Finally winning was both pleasurable and enjoyable, because I had exceeded my expectations.

I have an attention disorder, so it can be difficult for me to have optimal experiences. For me, not all video games are flow activities. Some of the games I play are merely pleasurable, and I use them to relax or pass the time. Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is one of those games for me, but I have had other similar optimal experiences during my time with Octopath. Many of the bosses come with a spike in challenge, forcing me to get better, and that’s the main reason why I keep coming back to Octopath. The story and immersion afforded by the game are lacking, and it does require a lot of boring grinding, but the way the agon of the game makes optimal experiences easier to achieve is why I’m probably going to end up putting well over 100 hours into Octopath Traveler.

[crystalelemental]

ultrakatua replied to your post “You basically need to have two pairs of units and send one pair up...”

Do you want me to send you my solution? It's all f2p units. With fliers you can ignore Shannan altogether and actually, I'd recommend not fighting these units at all if you can. Naesala can reach the top left easily with Hit and Run and a Heron dancer. Altina can get the one on the top right as long as you loot either Dancer Veil or Infantry boots. She ORKO Ced.

I actually got the solution, thanks to your hint yesterday about Naesala and a Heron, so yes, it’s done here.

Here’s my problem with this mode, though.  Take off Naesala, and tell me how this is doable.  Take off a dancer that can move 3 spaces and can only move two, and tell me how this is doable.  Find me a solution that doesn’t outright require a Smite bot to get Altina to the back to cleave things open.  That’s outrageously restrictive, and considering there are times when Radiant units aren’t permitted, how are you supposed to be able to clear maps like this in the future, when it’s a different game they’re focused on?

That’s what I hate about this mode.  Arbitrary restriction.  If they allowed Naesala and a dancer all the time without massive score penalties, allowed Galeforce, allowed WoM dancers an easy in - we’d have options.  Instead, it’s all completely restricted for no reason, and we’re forced to play with basically two long-term options: Smite, and Lunge.  So great, hope no one who’s Free to Play wanted to merge up a Bartre, Ross, or Beruka ever, because now all of them have to be fodder for units you’re essentially testing out in this game mode.  At least with Galeforce you inherit it because it’s useful everywhere else.  This game mode demands you waste materials en masse to get skills that serve virtually no other purpose.  It locks you out of common strategies and approaches to this type of map, for no reason other than artificial difficulty, and it’s lazy as hell.

I’m gonna reference another game that did a similar thing: Final Fantasy Tactics A2.  A friend recommended I try it, said I might like it.  I got a bit of the way through, and encountered one map, where the field was all plants.  Plants being weak to fire, I went “Oh, my Fire mage will just clear this easy.”  So we go in, only for some bullshit judge to show up and say no one’s allowed to use Fire magic.  It’s the same type of arbitrary bullshit as Resonance Battles.  You’re not being clever, you’re being obtuse.  If you wanted a challenge, then design the map in a way to be challenging, don’t just arbitrarily decide that some strategies aren’t allowed, that’s not fair.  Like, imagine if a mainline game tried to pull some bullshit like this.  Like imagine you go into a map that’s 100% axe enemies in a game where the weapon triangle still exists, and your lord has a sword.  You decide this is your time to level them up, but when you get to the map there’s just some bullshit that says you can’t use a sword.  That’s not a tactics game at that point, because you’re taking away the tools the player is supposed to use and demanding we operate outside of the established mode of play.  Why bother having weaknesses then?  Why bother having any of it?  You didn’t design a clever map, you designed something that has a clear path to victory, and rather than make it engaging by just...I dunno...having a unit with a fucking Guard effect somewhere to slow down the Galeforce charge?  You just make it impossible to Galeforce.  For no reason.  This game mode is the antithesis of strategy-based map design.  What should have had multiple solutions based on player preference and style has been completely reduced to only one possibility, which is outright demanded in every iteration of these maps, and requires a ton of extra fodder to spread out across units from all games, and which also serves no actual value outside of this mode.  That’s why I hate this so much.  It’s not fun, it’s not interesting, they didn’t design a fun map.  They made a steaming pile of bullshit.

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

11 exciting B2B marketing trends you need to know

When is voice search finally going to take over? When do we start auto-generating blog posts? Are we still living in the age of influencer marketing?

With a couple of weeks to go, it’s not going to be 2019.

But as our minds turn to 2020, let’s have a look at some current B2B marketing trends that all marketers should have an eye on.

A snapshot of B2B marketing spend

CMI’s latest benchmark report indicates spending on content marketing is expected to rise. Just 4 percent of B2B marketers plan to decrease their content marketing budget, while about one-third intend to keep their spending levels static.

And how is that money being spent? The majority of new investments are going toward content creation, particularly audio and visual content.

And are marketers heading in the right direction? Are they becoming more successful than they were last year? Seventy percent believe so. And 30 percent either don’t believe so or aren’t sure.

So what trends are on the horizon?

1. Account-based marketing (ABM)

ABM has been a bellwether since 2017 or so.

More businesses are experimenting with account-based marketing because the reported results are just too positive to ignore.

Relative to other marketing activities, ABM delivers 97-percent higher ROI. But at the moment, only about 20 percent of B2B brands have dedicated ABM strategies; 60 percent are hoping to implement one soon.

2. Marketing automation adoption and integration

The content marketing supply chain is ripe for automation at nearly every stage. From keyword research and creation to distribution and measurement, the proliferation of marketing automation tools, plugins and platforms has made content more efficient and cost-effective than ever.

Actual marketing automation systems are used by 54 percent of B2B brands, although other types of martech have even higher adoption rates. These various technologies are often integrated, so automation is practically inescapable in this era of marketing – and that’s a good thing.

3. Customer experience, first and foremost

Customer experience (CX) has undergone significant transformation in the last five years. Because the methods of communication and comparison available to consumers pervade our actions and thoughts, businesses are often caught on the back foot.

Amazon has made same-day delivery an expectation. Netflix has made on-demand streaming a nightly activity. Google has made information of any kind readily available at the tap of a button or the voice command of a user. The “customer” is satisfied only when these networks function exactly and in real time, expectations that carry over to the B2B habitat as well.

As PwC recently found, buyers demand these top CX traits:

Speed.

Convenience.

Knowledgeable help.

Friendliness.

Presently, 46 percent of all B2B researchers and buyers are millennials, so the above customer-experience expectations are innately ingrained into their lifestyles and purchasing habits based on their upbringing in digital-first environments. A large B2B software vendor, for example, must have faster problem-resolution protocols and authentic organic search presences that they may not have needed years ago.

Bad reviews on Google My Business, negative commentary on social media and a lack of positive referrals can lead to irreparable reputational harm and fewer leads. Further, poor UX on mobile sites and apps, incessant cold calls or emails and difficulty locating information online immediately turn off today’s B2B buyer, eroding trust, loyalty and satisfaction.

B2C brands have dealt with this reality in front of our eyes, but B2B brands will now confront the same customer-experience challenges moving forward.

4. Artificial intelligence

One of the ways companies are addressing CX needs is through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbots have certainly grown in adoption, but they are but one variation of AI for marketers.

Programmatic advertising marketplaces are more commonly integrating AI into their ad buying techniques, connecting publishers and advertisers with more efficiency, speed and accuracy – and at a price point that’s already pre-set within the system.

AI is still relatively nascent in the content marketing industry from the standpoint of actual production, though. It can help decipher structured data sets and pull out key insights through machine learning, but turning that information into organic content is much more difficult.

That’s not stopping marketers from experimenting, however. And rightfully so.

5. Marketing podcasts

They may not be as universally intriguing as Last Podcast on the Left, Serial or NPR’s Hidden Brain, but podcasts about marketing can definitely teach you a thing or two.

IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review and Content Champion from Content Marketing Institute have been long-running marketing podcasts of acclaim, and more recently, Searchmetrics launched Voices of Search. Our friends at Brafton are also moving with a full head of steam with their podcast Above the Fold.

As evidenced, B2B marketers have now jumped fully onboard with podcasts, viewing them as the ideal format for connecting with on-the-move audiences. Their rise in search popularity is illustrated in Google Trends data:

6. Lead conversion (not just lead generation)

As B2B brands’ marketing matures, more of a focus is placed on actual macro conversions.

We know blogs drive traffic, which can be funneled toward gated content, generating leads. But how valuable is a lead that never ever actually makes it toward the bottom of the sales funnel?

Content can help at this stage as well.

It’s estimated that only 0.75 percent of leads result in closed revenue, which is infinitesimal, especially for companies that already struggle with generating quality leads in the first place. But 41 percent of B2B firms are looking for content marketing to be a veritable “revenue center,” so, clearly, much headway is to be made toward the goal of generating plus converting leads.

Using video testimonials, customer references and case studies can help inch prospects toward signing on the dotted line. And that’s what’s necessary for most marketers to justify their budgets to their CEOs – actual revenue, not just micro conversions.

7. LinkedIn crowds out other social channels

More than 50 percent of all B2B social traffic comes from LinkedIn, and 80 percent of leads are derived from LinkedIn, too.

It’s clear that LinkedIn reigns supreme as a distribution channel, a publishing platform and a referral network, so much so that B2B marketers are unsure whether it’s even worth their time to allocate resources toward other feeds like Facebook, Twitter or Medium.

B2B buyers, researchers and influencers will likely leverage their LinkedIn profile even further in 2020 and beyond due to the highly valuable concentration of their core target audiences: other B2B buyers, researchers and influencers.

8. Local search optimisation

One underrated and potentially overlooked component of SEO this year has been local search.

Google My Business (GMB) listings have traditionally been most useful for consumer-facing brands with geo-targeted marketing and sales strategies. Google Maps and organic results in Google SERPs scrape business data from GMB, allowing searchers to find info about organisations, the products they sell, their physical locations, their contact info and user reviews.

B2B brands have been much slower to adopt Google Maps marketing strategies or even to completely populate their GMB listings, not to mention other online business directories like Yelp, BBB, BizJournals and Glassdoor.

Via BrightLocal.

By forgoing these localised marketing methods, B2B brands may be disrupting the buyer journey of their prospects. If the Knowledge Panel on the right sidebar of Google SERPs displays incorrect information, or it shows that you only have locations in certain regions, searchers may just turn away, believing you’re not equipped to help them in their journey.

9. Paid ads

Organic search is just one side of the marketing coin. B2B brands have found that paid search ads can be a quick and measurable way to immediately leapfrog organic listings in Google SERPs and stand out from competitor posts.

For example, the search term “content for SEO” only returns two results above the fold. One is a featured snippet from Yoast and the other is an ad from SEMrush.

But what about the other 10 or so listing that are also supposed to appear on Page 1?

Those positions belong to big industry names like Moz, Wordstream, Search Engine Land and Neil Patel, but you would never know it because THEY DON’T SHOW UP without a user having to scroll down to find them. That’s the benefit of paid ads – immediate SERP ownership over competitors.

While organic content marketing tends to generate more leads than paid ads, that’s not the whole story. For commercial-intent keywords, search ads actually receive twice as many clicks as organic listings.

So, the lesson is that informational or navigational content may not be suited for paid ads, but commercial content is. Don’t waste your money paying for advertising campaigns built around wrong-intent keywords.

That’s why combining paid and organic strategies is necessary for brand awareness, SERP visibility and high-intent traffic in 2019.

10. Re-optimisation

There’s too much content on the web. We know that.

So flooding SERPs with new content isn’t really the best way to break onto Page 1. Since fresh content requires starting from scratch with external link accrual and waiting for Google to actually index and rank your page, your time-to-rank can be too long to produce the results you’re looking for more immediately.

And as the chart above shows, if you’re not ranking in the top three spots in SERPs, you practically don’t exist.

Re-optimising existing posts, on the other hand, allows you to retain your current URL structure and your page’s already-earned link equity and SERP positioning – you’re just making it even better!

“Better” could mean updating data with more recent findings, replacing older imagery and expanding upon certain subtopics to improve the comprehensiveness of the page as a whole.

We’ve followed this process for over a year now and the results have been just as we expected, including getting 70 percent of our product landing pages ranked on Page 1 of Google.

B2B brands are currently ramping up their development of long-form content, specifically. In-depth articles, guides and evergreen lists are ideal formats for continuous optimisation over time, as they typically need just minor adjustments to propel higher in SERPs year after year.

11. Email marketing personalisation

In addition to LinkedIn, email marketing is a distribution channel that has been rock-solid for B2B marketers.

Roughly 60 percent of B2B marketers say email marketing is their most effective channel for generating revenue, and it’s also the third best way to find information. What’s first and second? Recommendations from colleagues and industry thought leaders – hard to beat.

To increase the margins on email even further, personalisation has been a goldmine. Because of the number of templates and tools on the market that simplify outreach, personalise messaging and segment audiences, it’s no longer a game of mass email blasts with low response rates; brands can now better measure and predict the success of their email campaigns.

Personalised emails have proven to increase transaction rates six-fold, a figure that may rise further in 2019.

We promised 11, and we gave you 11! What predictions do you have?

from http://bit.ly/2rIvnqE

[sankynarula315]

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         i.            offered in slim planks, strip flooring degrees in thickness from 5/sixteen to a few/4 of an inch. It does no longer, but, vary in width. As such, there are fewer set up and format alternatives.

      ii.            all of the aforementioned hard laminate floors options are to be had in certainly one of a type laminated species, which include cherry, hickory, walnut, oak, beech, and maple.

    iii.            it's miles to be had in widths that fluctuate from 3 to eight inches, plank flooring is frequently taken into consideration greater versatile than strip floors. although it may be set up in nearly any space, it works great in massive rooms, in which wider planks can add an experience of grandeur.

     iv.            without difficulty identifiable, parquet floors, consist of character wood slats that shape geometric patterns. sold in tiles, they may be frequently much less challenging to install than each wooden planks and strips.

 Discount Offer Continued Laminate Flooring

Preference to one sturdy plank of laminate, engineered versions embody severa layers of numerous wood veneers. less steeply laminate floors prices and more critical balance than sturdy floors, they're a exquisite Waterproof Laminate Flooring in contemporary houses. available in a extensive variety of colors and laminate sorts, engineered floors may be delivered to a whole stage of a home or enterprise. Plank length and thickness also can range based totally at the manufacturer. amazing great of engineered laminate floorings will definitely provoke you.

  Laminate flooring.ae

Feel free to contact us for any query, and we would be happy to assist you with a quick response. Phone: (00971)56-600-9626, 0566776789, 042959449 Email: mailto:info@laminateflooring.ae

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Why You Must Experience SEO 2019 At Least Once In Your Lifetime

Professional SEO providers can lift your site over your competition. Without the doubt, one of the greatest trends that has already started to take place and may continue well into 2018 will be the consolidation of niche MarTech gamers by larger content cloud suppliers, with the role and significance of SEO increasing significantly all through this transformation. SEO Internet marketing provides major components, which develop the particular website traffic, and top lookup engine rankings. SEO is brief for Seo, and there is usually nothing really mystical about this particular. You might have heard the lot about SEO and just how it works, but basically exactly what is a measurable, repeatable procedure which is used to send out signals to search engines that will the pages are worth displaying in Google's index. Topic clusters have got been lauded since the future associated with SEO and content strategy, yet are widely underreported on (so now's the time to hit! ) 93% of B2B companies use content marketing. Teresa Walsh, Marketing Professional at automobile site, Cazana, forecasts that hyper organic targeting will probably increase its importance in 2019 with more location search plus more voice search. We get to the particular bottom of on-page SEO difficulties in order for search motors to clearly see what your own website is all about. SEO requires you to continuously be considered a student because of exactly how quickly the algorithms of research engine companies change. Google's punishing methods probably class pages as some thing akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e. g. lack associated with reputation or old-school SEO stuff such as keyword stuffing a site. Let's confirm our knowing of SEO basics with the one question quiz about the particular factors in search rankings: web pages, links and keyphrases. When it comes in order to Google SEO, the rel=canonical hyperlink element has become VERY IMPORTANT over the yrs and NEVER MORE SO. To place the particular focus on the website guest, it has been suggested that will acronym SEO should are a symbol of research experience optimization. It's important to remember in order to share content from your web site or blog socially to provide it an SEO boost as well. Some Webmasters will spend thousands of dollars to several so-called professional SEO expert in order to get their Websites on best in the rankings. It is constantly preferable to ask questions upon their SEO procedures and find out whether they have knowledge associated with keyword density or if these people have information about the most recent keyword research strategies and equipment. This combined expertise makes all of us uniquely qualified to present a good ethics-based, search engine-friendly SEO guide to teach you guidelines that will reflect the latest developments looking. They include important subjects like search motor success factors and how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION relates to social media marketing and advertising. In order in order to make web pages appear in high positions in the search outcomes, SEO tries to shape the website according to Google's protocol. The major problem of SEO is the truth that there are billions associated with pages in the internet lookup engine indexes and your place in the SERPS is reliant on a constantly changing formula which is not published. One thing is usually crystal clear: if you would like people to discover your function, you need search engine marketing (SEO). This almost all means when you're thinking regarding your SEO strategy, you require to think about how your own social media marketing strategy fits into the particular puzzle, too. As your visitors slowly increases, be sure to include some other SEO strategies (like adding exterior and internal links, guest publishing, etc) to engage more customers and keep your metrics higher. Google has remaining a very narrow band associated with opportunity when it comes in order to SEO - and punishments are created to take you out associated with the game for some period while you cleanup the infractions. Head of Marketing, Shiny Edstrom, at BioClarity, a San Diego based health-science company, thinks that SEO is going in order to see a decreased importance within 2019, and SEOs should begin ensuring they're competent in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The best rank that you could notice the profile with contact information and maps on right hands side of search result web page is achieved after long process for using SEO tactics. Numerous search engine marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of enhancing a website for search motor discovery and indexing. SEO is actually a technique which search motors require that sites must enhance properly, so that they show up high in search results. The European Search Honours is an international competition that will shines the spotlight around the best SEO and Content Marketing organizations in Europe. SEO differs from local research engine optimization in that the particular latter is targeted on customizing a business' online presence therefore that its web pages is usually going to be displayed simply by search engines when a consumer enters a local search regarding its products or services. The challenge for webmasters plus SEO is that Google does not want company owners to rank regarding lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that generates A LOT of pages upon a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variants page-to-page. In time, the collection between social networking management, channel advancement, and SEO will be considerably blurrier than it really is definitely today. In 2016, SEO experts have got determined which factors are almost all likely to affect your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Customers and marketers will need in order to begin implementing multiple forms associated with digital marketing tactics including compensated search, social media marketing, nearby SEO, in addition to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if they hope to rule a given Google SERP. Before beginning with this, the SEO experts should visit your business and realize each and every aspect associated with your company so that these people can help your achieve your own marketing goals. What really matters in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is what a person prioritise today to ensure that will in 3-6 months you may see improvements in the high quality of your organic traffic. Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad invest by 2019. Since her business, web traffic, in addition to customer base grow, Sue may require some outside support intended for keeping her SEO on monitor so she can certainly still sell the particular best shoes on the prevent. Whilst links continue to be essential and it's incredibly difficult in order to rank well without links through other websites, content and on-page SEO has become increasingly essential. For businesses searching to raise their search search positions, what this means is that will a comprehensive social media technique may be in order - within addition to all of the particular usual SEO tactics. Because of protocol changes and the trend in order to more local searches, it actually is no longer an tremendous cost to implement good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Whether you're killing it along with SEO, or struggling to break the very first page, a good SEO audit can assist give your own rankings a shot within the particular arm. According to web marketing experts, the impact associated with AI and Voice Browse SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can be expected in 2019 after that. Which it. If you'd like in order to speak to us about a good SEO campaign, or even multilingual SEO marketing and keyword study then get in touch associated with just start a live conversation if we're around. Moreover, Google will carry on to elevate the importance associated with usability and technical SEO elements, like site security, page acceleration, mobile friendliness, and navigability. As a consultant, this individual has helped many different businesses—including, Lonely Planet, Zillow, Tower Information, and literally countless medium plus small businesses—with SEO and online-marketing advice. This particular means that SEOs spend the lot of time working upon getting links in a procedure called link building Link-building strategies can range from simply asking for a link to writing the guest post - and right now there are many others. Basically, SEO plans the keywords that will are to be delivered plus content provides them. So, when you are considering about applying SEO in the particular broad sense, you need in order to channelize its technical specifications by means of content marketing. In 2019, you can wager that White Hat SEO can have separated itself even additional from Black Hat SEO, plus that above all else, delivering quality content will be the particular most important factor for companies ranking in search. The outcomes are not instant, you can use the time on attempting other Internet marketing techniques whilst SEO would go to function. The third major SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking signal is Google's synthetic intelligence search ranking algorithm. Sometimes SEO is usually simply a matter of producing sure your site is organised in a way that research engines like google understand. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION involves a number of changes towards the HTML of person Web pages to attain a higher search engine ranking. As a result associated with technological advancement, SEO is in order to undergo more drastic changes, plus the two latest technologies that will are expected to influence SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to some very great degree are AI (Artificial Intelligence) plus Voice Search. If you speak about search ranking in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you're talking about the place of your content on lookup results pages (SERPs). Kent Lewis, Creator, and President of Anvil, the performance-based firm based out associated with Portland, says that in 2019 voice search and Amazon lookup can become a lot more notable than they were in 2018. Google Search Console (Webmaster tools) is one of the particular SEO basics. If you desire to find out how We actually do it, visit Write-up Czar to get a free gift plus details of the way i use post marketing and SEOcious to get top Google listings. It really is geared towards SEO professionals (in-house and agency), marketing managers, and company owners. But now SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION considers tweets, retweets, Google+ authorship, as well as other social signals. Besides position the site, the SEO team will become fault Client's marketing or product sales team by converting surfers or even visitors into buyers. Because therefore much sharing now takes place on major social media systems, social signals may become mainly because important to SEO as period on page, editorial linking, plus content quality. Using social press marketing in PA with SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics can help boost the website's ranking and popularity. This may create friction and the impact that most well-designed websites are usually very poorly optimized for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. They have impacted SEO during the past as well by bringing inbound links, and today it's even even more. Erase all duplicated articles; it will increase your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking. Long-term: as discussed over, you'll ultimately get more lookup traffic from better usability, also though you don't squeeze each last drop from the SEO-trick lemon. However, to accomplish all this particular, web-developers use SEO custom solutions, that have long-lasting SEO Search engines rank. That being said, companies usually have little or simply no time for you to maintain up with the latest advancements in SEO techniques. Social search motor optimization is largely built on user-generated content. Keywords are at the coronary heart of SEO, but they're in fact not your first step in order to an organic growth play any more. Obviously, reviews are a powerful type of customer content that has large implications for SEO and increasing organic traffic. With right search engine optimization and with the help associated with an SEO expert however, your own website can give you a good increasing number of visitors plus exposure. Just keep in mind to pay attention to strong content creation and copywriting principles, engage your viewers deeply, plus stay abreast of technical developments such as backlinks, SEO health, site acceleration, and schema. SEOmonitor pricing is based on the particular number of websites and key phrases you track. So, I actually would say that 2018 will be a challenge for Google, mainly because much as it may be for SEOs. The SEO Publication Keyword Suggestion Tool aggregates lookup data and provides volumes, associated terms, and more. Voice research is going to be 1 of the main parts of concentrate for SEO in 2019 plus beyond. By 2019 mobile advertising will represent 72% of all US digital advertisement spending. They will should realize that SEO Internet marketing and advertising mandates a business website, given that it is a necessary on the internet marketing tool. Eventually you can send these pages on various SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION sites or simply submit the particular web page so that the particular search engine spiders can examine on your created content. The history of SEO will go back to the 90s whenever the search engines emerged regarding the first time. High quality content material is critical in any lengthy term SEO strategy. Successful SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based key phrases; and off-page strategies, which make inbound links from other web sites. So, along with content marketing and advertising, SEO now needs to be deeply aimed with your company's PR initiatives. Information will be a good introduction to and summary of lookup engine optimization (SEO), a very important tactic for driving visitors to your internet site. There is definitely a lots of misinformation about exactly what an SEO campaign (company) may accomplish when it comes in order to search engines engine rankings. But using the particular SEO analysis tools, you may increase the chances of your own website's high ranking that can enable you to get more traffic and ultimately, more business and revenue. Those who have the many to achieve are small businesses that will before a new harder period breaking into the snug SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION world. SEO is really the shortened phrase for search motor optimization. I believe SEO within 2019 will largely be such as SEO in 2018, with the particular exception of some big” Search engines update that wipes out sufficient websites to make people think the algorithms have grown significantly smarter. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION works by optimizing a cyberspace pages, conducting keyword research, plus earning inbound links. The organization offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' web site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. That can make SEO an ideal lead era tool, because when searchers stick to links back to your web site, you have the chance in order to convert them to leads, plus later make sales. Whenever asked to point out principles that are unique towards the particular web, most people will arrive up with two main types: SEO and social media. How many links do a person need for good off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? If you are performing a professional SEO audit to get a genuine business, you are going in order to have to think like the Google Search Quality Rater Plus a Google search engineer to offer real long-term value to the client. 44. Give your own social media profiles an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. 10% of our experts believe that will there's likely to be the lot of focus on cellular in 2019, as older SEOs realize optimizing for desktop is usually pointless. White hat SEO is not really just about following guidelines, yet is about ensuring that the particular content google search indexes and consequently ranks may be the same content the user will see. Businesses with multiple websites and SEO-agencies can set up report layouts. Its search engine marketing group provides expertise in Pay-per-click marketing services, organic SEO and interpersonal media optimisation. The particular ads that you often notice on various web pages demonstrated and those that also show up on the rightmost side associated with search engine results are inorganic SEO examples. While I nevertheless see this trend in have fun with with many enterprises still within the midst of their electronic transformation, the convergence in the particular MarTech space is creating a lot of synergies and opportunities and this particular should be seen as the welcome development for brands plus agencies who are looking intended for an edge in regards in order to their SEO driven content advertising or outreach strategies. Along with the only complete certainty that SEO's, Website owners may have several adjustments to make to sites under their care in the particular mobile and voice search scenery. The basics of GOOD SEO hasn't changed for years - although effectiveness of particular elements provides certainly narrowed or changed within type of usefulness - a person should still be focusing upon building a simple site making use of VERY simple SEO best practices - don't perspiration the small stuff, while all-the-time paying attention to the essential stuff - add plenty of unique PAGE TITLES and lots associated with new ORIGINAL CONTENT. Keyword research is usually THE first step of any kind of SEO campaign. Deciding on the best key phrases is critical for successful SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and it is easy in order to choose the wrong ones through falling into the trap associated with optimization. Research engine optimisation, or SEO, is the procedure of enhancing your site's position in search results. Web Marketing SEO, and in specific, Google SEO is the essential. Get into your competitor's URL into the particular SEMRush search bar and you will become provided with a list associated with SEO keywords, with their ranks and traffic. About: Brighton SEO is made up of courses and a one-day search marketing conference. Before this change, the greatest practice was to avoid concealed content at any cost because it wasn't as effective with regard to SEO (it was either as well much to crawl for the particular bot in some instances or even given less important by Search engines in others). This is due to the particular fact that you will require contents to be submitted in order to the websites for whom a person are working as an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, when you build the hyperlinks, you will need to offer Blog9T the profile information, and a person will also have to supply articles for submissions as nicely as numerous other types associated with written work. If you've actually searched for something online (and most of us have), a person already know read more regarding SEO than you think a person do. We all already see this trend within several places, like extremely exact targeting of social ads : some brands still approach SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and content creation with the one-size-fits all attitude. Screaming Frog SEO Index tool does it for you personally inside a few seconds, even with regard to larger websites. SEOs also used to believe that buying links was the valid method of link developing; however, Google will now punish you for buying links within an attempt to manipulate page rank. Ultimately, achievement in SEO in 2018 plus forward will depend on generating amazing content and making this as easy as possible regarding search engines like google in order to understand exactly what that articles is all about. Answer: When you focus upon SEO for voice search an individual need to create your written content around long tail keywords because people tend to use a great deal more words in voice search. SEO is the practice associated with increasing the search engine search positions of your webpages so that will they appear higher in lookup results, bringing more traffic in order to your website. In the particular previous example, Bob's home web page might have the title, "Bob's Soccer Store - Soccer Sneakers and Equipment. " The name is the most important component of SEO, since it shows the search engine exactly exactly what the page is all regarding. 47. When creating SEO content material, keep the social layer within your mind. In case you have time to get good search engine optimisation education, after that combine this knowledge with greatest practices and you are upon your way to become a good SEO expert. 46. Use SEO practices in order to optimize your social media articles. 4. Mobile SEO plus Local Business: - As all of us mentioned before, users tend in order to search for local business upon the smartphones. It looks generally used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain phrases are related to others within a piece of text, is used to the indexing of websites by search engines like search engines. So if you would become to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the info will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the energy to comprehend even the essentials of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, ratings. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon research Ten Taboos About SEO 2019 You Should Never Share On Twitter and voice search will end up being trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO behavior could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high rank with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important because links. Previously known since WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user encounter kicks in even before making use of the website. You will find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your research engine ranking. A greater number associated with people will stick to tone of voice search, so SEO specialists will certainly need to adjust to this particular relatively new kind of research. Seo or SEO is definitely a powerful method to generate targeted traffic to your web site and hopefully increase your bottom level line. Whilst many marketing tactics rely upon you reaching out to your own audience, SEO gives you the particular power to achieve people whenever they are actively searching away information related to your solutions and products. White colored hat SEOs the actual recommendations of Google and other lookup engines like google. As Google's search engine outcomes become increasingly monetized and some other platforms such as Amazon plus YouTube gain more SoV plus search volume, I think we are going to overdue for the focus associated with SEO to shift far through Google. Traditional SEO will be focused on building (keyword relevant) links and (keyword relevant) articles. The main reason these kinds of are sometimes misunderstood is because there are a whole Internet underbelly of alleged SEO companies that you may pay to link to your own site on their networks associated with low-quality articles. However, before we obtain to our main event, I actually must note that after the 2017 edition of SEO tendencies launched last year on Research Engine Journal, we heard the couple of complaints about simply how long it was. After that your boss tells you most likely accountable for search engine marketing (SEO), too. Michael jordan Harling, SEO Specialist at Roman Blinds Direct, agrees with the particular consensus that voice search can be the trend in 2019.

[kyliealejandra]

Augmented Reality Apps for Tourism

Imagine taking a lengthy backpacking trip through Europe with an interactive map of all the cathedrals, museums, castles and other landmarks, complete with information on the cultural significance of each location—all at your fingertips. Augmented reality (AR) has made this a reality. The technology adds digital layers of data to real-world images viewed via a smartphone, helping users gain a more comprehensive appreciation of their surroundings without a cumbersome, physical brochure.

Image Source: Unsplash user rawpixel.

The goal of augmented reality in tourism is to offer travelers additional guidance and entertainment options as they explore new terrain. The first travel app to incorporate AR was Tuscany+, which labeled itself as an “interactive, real-time guide” to help with navigation and cultural learning.

Since then, more and more companies have found ways to improve the tourist experience with augmented reality apps, including unorthodox cases such as Pokemon GO encouraging people to get off their couches and find digital creatures in surrounding areas. AR technology has evolved plenty since its early days, with augmented reality apps for tourism now offering some of the most sophisticated capabilities for travelers.

Picking the Right Hotel

You can read all the reviews in the world about a hotel, but you won’t know what the place is actually like until you get there. Thankfully, AR apps now make it possible for travelers to check out the digs without physically being there in the form of virtual 3D tours of hotels.

Some hotels allow you to examine various room options via the tour, as well as features such as swimming pools, gyms, bars and restaurants. These apps also give users a solid idea of restaurants, entertainment and other tourist attractions near the hotel.

One such hotel that offers an augmented reality app is the Mansion at Casa Madrona in California. The app has been successful in helping the property attract more guests by displaying its amenities and offering them a more personalized experience with accommodations to suit their needs.

Hotels can benefit greatly from the use of augmented reality apps to showcase what’s inside them. Essentially, these apps serve as marketing tools that improve a hotel’s reputation and attract customers.

Finding the Best Route to Your Destination

Traveling used to be a logistical nightmare, as you would have to buy guides with updated bus departure and arrival times, routes and information on the local traffic. Even if you planned your trip to a tee, you might end up on the wrong bus or miss your bus altogether.

App developers have now made it easier to figure out how to get around when traveling. For example, Mapway Limited developed Bus Times London. This app uses augmented reality to create a digital path to your destination through a live feed on your smartphone’s camera. It’s a similar idea to regular mapping apps, but you can see the route in front of you with a higher degree of accuracy.

The app is quite intuitive, as it creates a path that begins with your real-time position, then follows a line that includes a red icon that marks your bus stop. You can also find buses by following the path, and Bus Times London adjusts your path if you deviate from it, finding alternate ways to reach your destination.

While we already have apps for bus routes in certain metropolitan areas, there is a lot of potential to expand this idea to other cities, towns and countries thanks to the magic of AR. With this technology, you can give travelers a good idea of traffic conditions, the weather, bus and train routes and real-time alerts to enhance their itineraries, all in one screen.

Breaking Down Language Barriers

Perhaps the biggest challenge of entering a foreign country is attempting to get a grasp of the language in a short period of time. Many people will buy a traveler’s guide to the city in order to learn common phrases and hand gestures. However, even with these guides, you will still experience difficulty when you encounter a situation you did not anticipate.

Common language barrier issues when traveling abroad include not knowing what to order in a restaurant because you can’t read the language or not knowing if you’re on the right street because you can’t read the signs. AR can now help with such conundrums, as companies like Google have developed advanced translation apps that leverage the technology.

The Google Translate app makes it easy to translate a word into English from another language or vice versa. Nevertheless, the app won’t help if you see a sign in Japanese that you’re unable to translate because you don’t know how to type it in. Enter Word Lens, an extension of the Translate app. This app lets users snap a picture of a foreign language on the streets, on a menu or elsewhere, then the app immediately translates it into the language of your choosing. The app isn’t perfect just yet, but it can handle live translations in 30 languages.

In this case, augmented reality is combined with object identification and translation technology to tackle the language barrier issues that plague travelers. These apps represent one of many ways you can use AR to create a better connection between tourists and locals, allowing users to gain a deeper appreciation of other cultures while also enjoying a hassle-free trip.

Augmented Reality Apps for Tourism: Changing the Face of Travel

With the help of augmented reality, you can help travelers enjoy a tourist experience with mobile apps that cover everything from booking a hotel room to navigating their surroundings to translating foreign languages. AR offers endless business opportunities for companies interested in advancing their position in the tourism industry, attracting customers and increasing their bottom line.

If you’re hoping to implement augmented reality technology into your tourism app, you will need a developer with the talent and experience to help you achieve your goals. The team at SevenTablets specializes in augmented reality, and we’re also well-versed in other emerging technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain and natural language processing.

SevenTablets is headquartered in Dallas, but we also work with clients in Austin, Houston, and beyond. If you’re ready to discuss your project, we invite you to contact us today.

Reach out to our team today! hbspt.forms.create({ portalId: "1760668", formId: "7a1d929d-d378-443a-a048-9888a5e199a1" });

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Augmented Reality Apps for Tourism

Imagine taking a lengthy backpacking trip through Europe with an interactive map of all the cathedrals, museums, castles and other landmarks, complete with information on the cultural significance of each location—all at your fingertips. Augmented reality (AR) has made this a reality. The technology adds digital layers of data to real-world images viewed via a smartphone, helping users gain a more comprehensive appreciation of their surroundings without a cumbersome, physical brochure.

Image Source: Unsplash user rawpixel.

The goal of augmented reality in tourism is to offer travelers additional guidance and entertainment options as they explore new terrain. The first travel app to incorporate AR was Tuscany+, which labeled itself as an “interactive, real-time guide” to help with navigation and cultural learning.

Since then, more and more companies have found ways to improve the tourist experience with augmented reality apps, including unorthodox cases such as Pokemon GO encouraging people to get off their couches and find digital creatures in surrounding areas. AR technology has evolved plenty since its early days, with augmented reality apps for tourism now offering some of the most sophisticated capabilities for travelers.

Picking the Right Hotel

You can read all the reviews in the world about a hotel, but you won’t know what the place is actually like until you get there. Thankfully, AR apps now make it possible for travelers to check out the digs without physically being there in the form of virtual 3D tours of hotels.

Some hotels allow you to examine various room options via the tour, as well as features such as swimming pools, gyms, bars and restaurants. These apps also give users a solid idea of restaurants, entertainment and other tourist attractions near the hotel.

One such hotel that offers an augmented reality app is the Mansion at Casa Madrona in California. The app has been successful in helping the property attract more guests by displaying its amenities and offering them a more personalized experience with accommodations to suit their needs.

Hotels can benefit greatly from the use of augmented reality apps to showcase what’s inside them. Essentially, these apps serve as marketing tools that improve a hotel’s reputation and attract customers.

Finding the Best Route to Your Destination

Traveling used to be a logistical nightmare, as you would have to buy guides with updated bus departure and arrival times, routes and information on the local traffic. Even if you planned your trip to a tee, you might end up on the wrong bus or miss your bus altogether.

App developers have now made it easier to figure out how to get around when traveling. For example, Mapway Limited developed Bus Times London. This app uses augmented reality to create a digital path to your destination through a live feed on your smartphone’s camera. It’s a similar idea to regular mapping apps, but you can see the route in front of you with a higher degree of accuracy.

The app is quite intuitive, as it creates a path that begins with your real-time position, then follows a line that includes a red icon that marks your bus stop. You can also find buses by following the path, and Bus Times London adjusts your path if you deviate from it, finding alternate ways to reach your destination.

While we already have apps for bus routes in certain metropolitan areas, there is a lot of potential to expand this idea to other cities, towns and countries thanks to the magic of AR. With this technology, you can give travelers a good idea of traffic conditions, the weather, bus and train routes and real-time alerts to enhance their itineraries, all in one screen.

Breaking Down Language Barriers

Perhaps the biggest challenge of entering a foreign country is attempting to get a grasp of the language in a short period of time. Many people will buy a traveler’s guide to the city in order to learn common phrases and hand gestures. However, even with these guides, you will still experience difficulty when you encounter a situation you did not anticipate.

Common language barrier issues when traveling abroad include not knowing what to order in a restaurant because you can’t read the language or not knowing if you’re on the right street because you can’t read the signs. AR can now help with such conundrums, as companies like Google have developed advanced translation apps that leverage the technology.

The Google Translate app makes it easy to translate a word into English from another language or vice versa. Nevertheless, the app won’t help if you see a sign in Japanese that you’re unable to translate because you don’t know how to type it in. Enter Word Lens, an extension of the Translate app. This app lets users snap a picture of a foreign language on the streets, on a menu or elsewhere, then the app immediately translates it into the language of your choosing. The app isn’t perfect just yet, but it can handle live translations in 30 languages.

In this case, augmented reality is combined with object identification and translation technology to tackle the language barrier issues that plague travelers. These apps represent one of many ways you can use AR to create a better connection between tourists and locals, allowing users to gain a deeper appreciation of other cultures while also enjoying a hassle-free trip.

Augmented Reality Apps for Tourism: Changing the Face of Travel

With the help of augmented reality, you can help travelers enjoy a tourist experience with mobile apps that cover everything from booking a hotel room to navigating their surroundings to translating foreign languages. AR offers endless business opportunities for companies interested in advancing their position in the tourism industry, attracting customers and increasing their bottom line.

If you’re hoping to implement augmented reality technology into your tourism app, you will need a developer with the talent and experience to help you achieve your goals. The team at SevenTablets specializes in augmented reality, and we’re also well-versed in other emerging technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain and natural language processing.

SevenTablets is headquartered in Dallas, but we also work with clients in Austin, Houston, and beyond. If you’re ready to discuss your project, we invite you to contact us today.

  Reach out to our team today! hbspt.forms.create({ portalId: "1760668", formId: "7a1d929d-d378-443a-a048-9888a5e199a1" });

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from SevenTablets http://seventablets.com/blog/augmented-reality-apps-for-tourism/

[bluntsmoker666-blog]

Minor spoilers; I was very careful not to reveal anything major, but NieR: Automata is one of those games I feel is best enjoyed without any prior knowledge of its content, so proceed with caution. I spent the last 30 days banned from Facebook; during this time, I did little of note. Afflicted as I was by a seasonal depression, I spent my days either sleeping in bed, attempting to be physically active, or consuming media and pop culture. Of course, this sort of thing is hardly exceptional, the winter months being nondiscriminatory in whom it chooses to oppress, yet I did find some solace in one of these meaningless ways I passed time; instead of merely being idle, I was able to enjoy a masterpiece of a video game, the title of which is NieR: Automata.

I must admit that this is my first foray into the DrakeNieR series, despite my awareness of Yoko Taro and his 'ideas'; the man has a reputation for eccentricity in both his interests and his works. To make amends for this, I have therefore spent the last week studying both the man and the lore of his creations; what I've discovered is a man who is so dedicated to his vision that he's willing to sacrifice good taste and accessibility; essentially, he is a modern-day idiot savant, a creative genius the likes of which have not for some time been seen. Indeed, contrary to NieR: Automata's positive stature within the gaming community, the other entries in his series are nigh-universally considered mediocre, suffering from a myriad of problems, among them of which the gameplay simply being boring is a consistent issue. Yet, I find myself completely fascinated by Yoko Taro; he's a man completely true to himself and whether it is through sheer force of will or the tides of fortune that he has survived at Square is as good as anyone's guess.

I must admit that I have completely and truly fallen in love with the world of NieR: Automata; it is not often that a game thrusts you into a world completely devoid of human life, having been utterly ruined by centuries of war between two different factions of automata, and despite my issues with some of the aspects of the open world-nature of the game (such as the frequent presence of invisible walls), I must say that the rather spacious map truly drives home a feeling of emptiness, of a planet long out of touch with mankind. Certainly, though the game is at its core very linear, the open nature of the game certainly compliments the main idea brought forth within its open cut-scene: that of life being an eternal struggle.

As the game begins, the protagonist, an android named 2B , opens up with a few lines of dialogue which the player is certain to remember as they play through the game;

"全ての存在は滅びるようにデザインされている。 Everything that lives is designed to end. 生と死を繰り返すと螺旋に…… We are perpetually trapped 私達は囚われ続けている。 in a never-ending spiral of life and death. これは、呪いか。 Is this a curse? それとも、罰か。 Or some kind of punishment? 不可解なパズルを渡した神に I often think about the God who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle いつか、私達は弓を引くのだろうか？ and wonder if we’ll ever have the chance to kill him."

As I heard this, I was immediately stricken; long have I viewed life as a trial that one must overcome; moreover, it has always been my opinion that it is too long and too tiring to be of worth and that in this bleak universe full of fear and despair, that the only thing worth attempting to discover is a meaning for oneself. So, naturally, I made sure to play through the game very thoroughly. Remembering 2B's words, I cleared the various side-quests which abounded in NieR: Automata and found myself both hypnotized and horrified by the various crises and pleas of the many side-characters. Many of those in need of help were robots, who without human masters or connection to a central network, struggled in finding purposes for themselves. I had at first interpreted this to be Yoko Taro's answer to the transhumanist movement; that machines might some day be so human-like as to render the distinction between flesh and technology indistinct.

However, upon further reflection, this is not the entire message of Automata; though transhumanist themes are certainly touched on, the game's heavy references to various Existentialist philosophers emphasizes that the game's overarching theme is meant for those sorry individuals lost in their own quest for meaning in the world.

Each of the primary character's motivations are tied to conflict and searching for meaning; 2B, for example, is a machine whose purpose is to kill in spite of her personal convictions, a piece of hardware engineered to murder those she loves no matter what the circumstances. 9S, a reconnaissance/hacking-oriented model, must deal with the inevitable consequences of his own natural curiosity; even the one of the antagonists, Adam, who represents a physical manifestation of the enemy network, is explicitly driven by his own quest to understand what it's like to be human.

Being an artificial construct, Adam has no inherent understanding of what it means to be human; in an effort to circumvent this, he emulates humanity as much as possible. Whether its through wearing clothes, reading books, or eating food, Adam attempts to get to the truth of what being human means; and yet despite this, or perhaps because of this, he never quite grasps it. The clothes he wears are, though fancy, mismatched; the books he reads are never more than literal stories to him, Adam never examining them through the use of metaphor; even the apples he eats, inspired as he was by the Bible, are not things to be enjoyed but tools to be gained in an effort to understand humanness. The apple is to Adam nothing more than what the Bible says it is to him, a fruit that bears knowledge, knowledge that to the end eludes Adam because he's never able to, or perhaps completely incapable of, understanding the meaning behind the Bible's words.

Though Adam is but one character, this underlines the next part of the theme of struggle; that even if one struggles as hard as they can, that they may fail and die regardless. And this is a tale relevant to the whole of humanity; each and every individual on this earth has their own goals; each and every individual on this earth ends up in a different state, even if the goals are the same; each and every individual on this earth lives, struggles, and dies and even that despite the unchanging result of all of these lives, the contents contained between these beginnings, middles, and ends is so varied as to be immeasurable.

Now the idea of struggle being at the center of life is one that Nietzsche discusses frequently; myself being something of a Nietzsche acolyte, I've spent more than long enough thinking about the meaning of 'pain' and whether or not the presence of it adds value to our lives. Nietzsche was of course very fond of this idea; he famous stated

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures."

Essentially, as I have long believed, if one were to view life as one big test, or even a game, of such a high difficulty as to make the majority of participants regret attempting it, would not persisting in spite of this be the grandest example of flourishing? After all, if such an arduous tribulation is able to be triumphed against, who comes out looking the mightier? The wise yet coddled masses who choose a life of comfort and grow to live to an old age? Or those impetuous and courageous few who decide that despite such treats and treasures that they're willing to elect for themselves what or what doesn't make them feel fulfilled?

The reptile brain within yourself should naturally be inclined the latter; though the former choice offers a wonderful choice bereft of the unknown, the animals inside us are naturally wont to side with the mighty few able to choose their own destinies, our ancestors living as violently as they did; the world before man, or even when man was still uncivilized, was filled with blood. Death, sex, and hatred abounded, early hominins, protosimians, dinosaurs, and even sea creatures struggling as hard as they could so that they might pass on their genes to the next generation. Certainly, the logical part of our brains desires an easy and comfortable life, but the truly primitive part of ourselves wishes nothing more than to be one of the few at the top, overlooking the masses, ensuring that they're able to reproduce and indirectly persist in the future.

Therefore, it might be said that violence is at the heart of what it means to be human; and indeed, Adam broaches this topic through his challenge of 2B and 9S at various points of the game, his explicit motivation being that through his hatred he hopes to discover more about humanity. I, given my background within the anthropology field, find this to be something worthy of affirming to myself; for if we are to truly understand ourselves, we must understand our ancestors, and if we are to understand our ancestors, we must understand those parts of ourselves we share in common with our ancestors. Thus, it might be said that the idea of struggling is inherent to the human condition, if not altogether essential to it, given that it has been the constant friend of mankind since before life even left the ocean.

So then; what might we say of those who are able to be those few? Does that make those masses less human or, perhaps, more? For certainly, though logic and sentience are altogether human inventions, to deny our own feelings regarding strength is to deny ourselves the truth and fall away from the world in which we actually live, which is to say that the only things with meaning in the world are those things in which we can actually prove. Thus, I find that in order to be truly human, we must pursue the shadows of those victorious few, for none can deny power when power is manifested; of course, to sleep in is nice, but are we then able to prove the value of our lives? Because again, if we truly live and have lived, we must leave SOME proof of our existence, whether it be children or something else; if there nothing exists that is left of us, how can we prove that we ever existed at all? And certainly no one remembers the statistic, the victim, no matter how good a life they were able to live, even if the means of forgetting that person means a 100 or 10000 years have passed. Yet everyone remembers Alexander, even if he did die young and in pain.

Which leads me back to my point; is not struggle the meaning behind life? For if it truly is, then that makes NieR: Automata the most life-affirming game of all, despite its dark themes; because despite how much it attempts to crush its characters, and despite many of its characters dying and failing, none of them ever attempts to give up. And it is this determination that characterizes them, that tells the player that despite whatever hardships afflict them, that life is worth living.

So perhaps this is why I have found myself so deeply touched by this game; for a man who similarly has struggled near endlessly his whole life, I cannot help but be moved by the story of people trying to survive a land that doesn't them to. Because, despite the length of time between the world of 2B and my own is separated by a span of some 9000 years, we each of us do our best with the hard circumstances we find ourselves in. And I think that's incredibly beautiful.

What do you think? Perhaps I feel as if I have talked myself into circles. Still, I definitely feel like going through the game again as, despite the loss of my save data, I am more than willing to get inspired by 2B and 9S once more.

[strifereviews-blog]

Destiny 2: Please just let me love you

Destiny 2, everyone’s favourite Nathan Fillion dating sim, is in fact a very fun game. The gameplay itself is always enjoyable and satisfying as with most of Bungie’s produce, the weapons generally feel and sound great, the music is incredible and this one even has an actual story and everything. The feeling of reclaiming your power and reuniting the vanguard was great. 

The new strikes were generally pretty enjoyable and I quite like a lot of the modifiers for the nightfall, I mean, except momentum, please Bungie, no more momentum. Sometimes you get the Torrent modifier and you get to feel like an absolute bad-ass running around constantly throwing grenades and just generally being powerful for once. 

I quite like the new twist on PVP, I realise lots of people don’t like team shooting but I think promoting work with your squad makes a lot of sense given that Bungie seem to be focused on making the end game of Destiny highly social. Generally, if you stick with your fire team and communicate well, you’ll do a lot better. Although the recent Prometheus Lens Trials Weekend negated a lot of that. 

Reaching the Power Level limit felt as good as hitting the level cap in any game does and doing the end game bits and bobs were a lot of fun with your friends. The issue with the game generally lies here. The end game just doesn’t have enough to do. We all knew Curse of Osiris was coming soon so a lot of people just waited around to see the legendary Guardian be awesome and also to get a bunch of new stuff to do. 

The DLC was a little disappointing. I didn’t watch the streams about it because I wanted to go in blind, however some mates talked about the Infinite Forest and some of the new weapons we could get and I started to get really excited. Add in some new PVP maps and a higher Power Level and we are on to a winner. 

Except we aren’t. Osiris felt incredibly dull, I enjoyed his Ghost Sagira being your sidekick for a while and she was by far and away the best written character and her interactions with you and your Ghost were fun and entertaining, which is a nice counterpoint to Osiris I guess?

The campaign was short, really short, I played through with a friend and was a bit bored throughout because, even though I was playing as my oh so squishy Hunter I never worried about my health, never worried about being shot. It just wasn’t challenging. Sure some of the bits after the campaign are harder but why wasn’t the campaign scaled up for end game difficulty? Give me some of the artificial campaign length of the old NES days. 

I am told the Raid Lair is easily the best thing in Destiny 2 and when I find myself some free time I will jump into it with my Clan Mates and no doubt enjoy it. However I still find myself disappointed by the lack of new Raid. Did we not deserve one Bungie? I know it is a lot of work but please give us a DLCs worth of content. 

This leaves me with the Infinite Forest. I love me some procedural generation, roguelites and roguelikes are some of my favourite games. I have put an ungodly number of hours into The Binding of Isaac and play the game to unwind rather than to flagellate myself for my sins. So I was looking forward to the Infinite Forest. However, it is an incredibly linear feeling experience, sure you get some new bits and pieces generated but I wanted to be travelling through portals and seeing different realities each time, not just following a path and occasionally killing an enemy with a different name to normal. 

If we cast our minds back to The Taken King for a while, actually can we just stay there? This expansion was what players wanted, what they were expecting, a new world that felt new and fresh and almost alive, not one that was a circle. The NPCs involved with TTK were enjoyable and memorable not just an annoying the fanboy that Vance seems to have become. 

I understand that building a game is an immensely difficult and undeniably maddening experience. The fans are all screaming for something different and you can’t address all of them at once. Some people like fixed drops, some like random rolls, some people want an endless grind, others just want to have all the toys already without having to still grind for the Orpheus Rigs. That isn’t me, I was lucky. Ultimately it just feels like Bungie aren’t sure what they want the game to be, it feels disjointed and mixed up. I have full faith in them and I do genuinely believe that at some point we can look back at this like everyone did with Vanilla Destiny from the lofty perch of The Taken King. But do we really need to go through this process every time? I don’t want to do this if/when Destiny 3 happens, please just learn the lessons and keep moving forward positively. 

I have hope and it is clear that you can make great games, but as it stands, I feel a lot like I did at this point in Destiny 1′s life cycle and I am annoyed that it doesn’t feel like any real progress has been made. I will still play this game, I still have the season pass, but I won’t keep buying stuff if it doesn’t get better soon.

PS Give us all more vault space please :)