#ziba scott

[satoshi-mochida]

Kind Words 2 (lofi city pop) announced for PC

Gematsu Source

Popcannibal has announced simulation game sequel Kind Words 2 (lofi city pop) for PC (Steam). It will launch in 2024.

“We made Kind Words 2 because there aren’t enough online spaces where strangers can be fearlessly open and caring without worrying about likes, subscribes, followers, and any other garbage that gets in between people just talking to each other,” said Popcannibal founder Ziba Scott in a press release.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

About

Kind Words 2 is a place to be yourself without worrying about fitting in. It’s a social space with no followers, no likes, no subscribing. These are real people making each other feel seen, heard and less alone. Kind Words players have written each other over five million letters, expressing worries and comforting each other. It won a BAFTA and is one of the best reviewed games on Steam. Kind Words 2 includes an improved version of the original and a whole lot more!

Key Features

Tell a neighbor how your day is going!

Get all dressed up!

Attend a poetry slam at the coffee shop!

Take a minute for yourself.

Tell stories! Swap recommendations for music and shows! Write extra long letters! Trade life tips! Make wishes on the night sky stars!

Backwards Compatible

Kind Words 2 includes a re-made version of the original Kind Words. Every room has been polished and the user interface has been redone for much greater accessibility. If you played Kind Words, all your old letters and favorites are waiting for you in Kind Words 2. It all runs on one big, happy server. Swap letters and stickers with players of either game! Ready to be kind? This is a chance to care and be cared for by real people in a video game. Sometimes all you need are a few kind words.

Watch the announcement trailer below. View the first screenshots at the gallery.

Announce Trailer

[gaming]

The Game Awards: Ziba Scott and Luigi Guatieri

Bonus: The team behind Kind Words was also kind enough to stop by to say hi!

[brotheralyosha]

“Kind Words is not like any game I’ve ever played. And while Kind Words relies heavily on the input from other players, it’s definitely not like any other multiplayer titles I’ve come across.”

“The premise is simple. When you first load up the game, a deer that sounds like an Animal Crossing character asks you to write a short letter about something that’s worrying you. This letter will then get sent out to the community, who can respond to your requests. Everything is anonymous. If you like someone’s response, you can share a sticker with them.  While you wait, a selection of lo-fi chill beats by composer Clark Aboud play in the background, giving everything a dreamlike feel. That’s it, that’s the whole game. Some, I’m sure, would question if it really does qualify as a game, but whatever you want to call it, it’s a one-of-a-kind experience”

“Does this sound like a recipe for disaster? Anonymity plus the ability to write anything you want?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I went in with an open mind, which is to say, I was incredibly honest in my first letter about something that hurt me recently. The what doesn’t matter. What you need to know is that I was afraid to send it. It’s not something I’ve been able to say out loud, much less to anyone around me, so in that sense, the game provided a valuable outlet.”

“I was surprised to find that every single person that responded to me did so with the utmost kindness. Even those who didn’t understand my predicament were sympathetic, and while nobody could fix the issue, I had the distinct sense that we were in this together. In a world where we perpetually tell each other to not read the comments, or to turn off public chat in video games, Kind Word’s tenderness felt like a revelation.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Frustrated game devs automated the production of 1,500 terrible slot machine apps and actually made money

Last March, game devs Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott gave a presentation at the Game Developers Conference called "1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality in which they described how their own dissatisfaction with falling revenues from mobile app stores led them to muse about bulk-creating crappy apps and seeing if they could get paid.

They hit on the idea of churning out thousands of near-identical slot-machine apps, using a basic template they bought for $15; they then proceeded to automate the mass-production of more than 1,500 different slot machine games with every conceivable theme, from "tasteful sideboob" (removed from Google's app store) to "dolphins" and "canteloupe." Mining Google Trends for new themes, they began to target trends.

The whole thing made an improbable amount of money and generated investment offers. Eventually they got ditched by their ad provider and decided to walk away, but leave the automated system running. They document how it took years to fail.

The guys are very funny and clearly bemused and shocked by how well their crackpot idea worked. I love that they used nothing but terrible stock art for their slides.

https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/automated-shovelware.html

[maxofs2d]

Quality is overrated.

Disheartened by all of the noise in the mobile ecosystem, speakers Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott set out to determine the lowest bar for success on App Stores. They flooded the market with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games, got 1.6 million installs, made money (!!), received some very strange emails, made it big in Iran, and garnered a stupefying number of good reviews on Google Play.

They even enlisted the talents of an honest-to-God MIT statistician.

Take a fantastic tour of the weird, dark underbelly of the mobile app market. Marvel as the speakers share their experience with pushing the limits of automation as well as the rate limits of every public API under the sun. Silently judge the questionable ethics of their enterprise.

By the end, you may be reconsidering your life choices as Alex and Ziba debate the merits of quantity over quality. 

[nvgotd]

Kind Words (Lo Fi Chill Beats To Write To)

[ PC, Mac, Linux / 2019 / Ziba Scott (aka Popcannibal) ]

Kind Words is about just that: sending positive messages to other people - and not just fictional characters or lifeless NPCs, but real people. The game puts players as a solitary character in a quiet bedroom with a writing desk and little else to interact with. They can use this to write down their real-life woes and concerns and send them out to the community anonymously. Other players can then reply, and of course you can send your own kind words to them. There are also a variety of stickers you can use to personalise and spruce up your letters. There is no score to be earned, no winning or losing, no end. It’s a platform for supporting each other and discovering that, whatever you’re going through, you’re not alone. And, as the full title implies, there are some lo fi chill beats playing in the background for a more relaxing writing experience.

Buy it on Steam.

[indiehangover]

New Teaser for Make Sail

New Teaser for Make Sail #indiegame from @popcannibal #indiedev

I’ve been eagerly awaiting updates on Popcannibal’s Make Sail, a fantastical sailing simulator that puts you at the rudder of a ship trapped in the eye of a storm. There’s a superb art direction, exploration and ship building that are a formula for a great Indie title.

Now, a new teaser shows even more of the whimsical, wave filled world we’ll be able to explore when Make Sail releases:

  You…

[thethingssafhaslearnedsofar]

52 things I learned in 2019

Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains of rice and wheat combined. [Mark P Mills]

The maths of queuing are absolutely brutal and counter-intuitive. [John D Cook]

Emojis are starting to appear in evidence in court cases, and lawyers are worried: “When emoji symbols are strung together, we don’t have a reliable way of interpreting their meaning.” (In 2017, an Israeli judge had to decide if one emoji-filled message constituted a verbal contract) [Eric Goldman]

Harbinger customers are customers who buy products that tend to fail. They group together, forming harbinger zip codes. If households in those zip codes buy a product, it is likely to fail. If they back a political candidate, they are likely to lose the election. [Simester, Tucker & Yang]

Baijiu is the world’s most popular spirit, with 10bn litres sold each year, almost entirely in China. The second most popular spirit in the world is vodka, with just 5bn litres sold. [Feyi Fawehinmi]

A Python script, an Instagram account and quite a bit of free time can get you free meals in New York City. [Chris Buetti]

At least three private companies have fallen victim to ‘deep fake’ audio fraud. In each case, a computerised voice clone of the company CEO “called a senior financial officer to request an urgent money transfer.” [Kaveh Waddell, Jennifer A. Kingson]

Drunk shopping could be a $45bn /year industry, and only 6% of people regret their drunk purchases. [Zachary Crockett]

Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain. [Victoria Wai-lanYeung]

Since the 1960s, British motorways have been deliberately designed by computer as series of long curves, rather than straight lines. This is done for both safety (less hypnotic) and aesthetic (“sculpture on an exciting, grand scale”) reasons. [Joe Moran]

Between 1880 and 1916, Ireland had its own timezone, which was 25m 21s behind Greenwich Mean Time. After the Easter Rising, the House of Commons in London introduced GMT in Ireland and abolished Dublin Mean Time [Elena Goukassian]

Drug names are changing: X and Z names (Prozac, Seroxat) are giving way to names ending in O or A (Natesto, Qsymia) which are more appealing to speakers of Romance languages in Europe and South America. [Pascaline Faure]

The UK male suicide rate is the lowest since accurate records began in 1981. [Office for National Statistics]

The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day may have originated when a Japanese pedometer manufacturer noticed that the 万 symbol (which means 10,000) looks a little like someone walking. The actual health merits of that number ‘have never been validated by research.’ [Amanda Mull]

People hate asking sensitive questions. However, it turns out that people don’t hate being asked sensitive questions. So talking around difficult questions in research interviews is a waste of time and money. [Hart, VanEpps, Schweitzer]

The Korean Police force includes five labradors who are clones of ‘Quinn’, a bomb-sniffing dog who found fame after finding a missing girl’s body in a 2007 kidnapping. [Kim Tong-hyung]

As mobile phones became mainstream in the US in the early 1990s, the murder rate fell sharply. Street drug dealing became less popular, so gang-related turf wars were less common. (Other factors were also involved, obviously.) [Alexis C. Madrigal]

Mechanical devices to cheat your phone pedometer (for health insurance fraud or vanity) are now all over AliExpress. [Matthew Brennan]

In 2017 Google and Facebook lost $100 million between them to one scammer who sent them fake invoices. [Jeff John Roberts] [found by TomBot*]

Teenagers with acne get higher marks, are more likely to complete college and, if female, eventually get paid more than people without teenage acne. [Hugo M. Mialon & Erik T. Nesson]

72% of classical musicians have taken beta blockers for performance anxiety. [Composed]

Black women in the United States die in childbirth at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia. [Annie Lowrey]

Sometime in the 1990s, it seems the US forgot how to make a critical component of some nuclear warheads. [Nick Baumann]

“Mushrooms and truffles are fungi, more closely related to humans than they are to plants.” [Lynne Peskoe-Yang]

In the US Northwest, rain can damage the fruit on cherry trees. So helicopter pilots are paid to fly over the orchards, using their downdraft to dry the fruit as it ripens. For the pilots, it’s a risky but potentially profitable job. [Maria Langer]

Gravitricity is a Scottish startup planning to store energy by lifting huge weights up a disused mine shaft when electricity is cheap, dropping them down to generate power when it is expensive. Using a 12,000 tonne weight (roughly the weight of the Eiffel tower), it should be half as expensive as equivalent lithium ion battery. [Jillian Ambrose]

Spotify pays by the song. Two three minute songs are twice as profitable as one six minute song. So songs are getting shorter. [Dan Kopf]

Fashion++ is a Facebook-funded computer vision project that looks at a photo of your outfit and suggests ‘minimal edits for outfit improvement’ like tucking in a shirt or removing an accessory. [Wei-Lin Hsiao & co] (In 2019, Fluxx helped launch Vogue Business.)

Three million students at US schools don’t have the internet at home. [Michael Melia & co]

No babies born in Britain in 2016 were named Nigel. [Jonathan Ore] (Correction: Robert Colvile, who broke the original story, points out that there could have been one or two Nigels in 2016 — the ONS only reports names with three or more examples)

Using machine learning, researchers can now predict how likely an individual is to be involve in a car accident by looking at the image of their home address on Google Street View. [Kinga Kita-Wojciechowska]

In 2018, the Nigerian government spent more on subsidies for petrol than on health, education, or defence. [Andrew S Nevin]

According to WaterAid research, women spend 97 billion hours a year looking for a safe place to go to the loo. That equals 46 million working years, which is the same workforce as Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. [Caroline Criado Perez via Tanya Gold]

28% of people like the smell of (their own) urine after eating asparagus.[Rolf Degen]

AliBaba is investing $15m to research Chinese dialects, hoping to improve the performance of their voice recognition systems. [Emma Lee]

At least half of the effort of most AI projects goes on data labelling, and that’s often done in rural Indian villages. [Anand Murali]

Worldwide, growth in the fragrance industry is lagging behind cosmetics and skincare products. Why? ‘You can’t smell a selfie’. [Andrea Felsted and Sarah Halzack]

CD sales still make up 78% of music revenue in Japan (compared with less than 30% in the UK). Japanese pop fans have been encouraged to buy multiple copies of their favourite releases to win rewards (buy 2,000 copies, win a night at a hot spring with your favourite star). One 32 year-old fan was charged with illegally dumping 585 copies of a CD on the side of a mountain. [Mark Mulligan] [found by TomBot*]

Two disgruntled game developers wrote a script to generate and release identical but differently-named slot machine apps (sample names: Deer Antler Spray Slots, 3D Ravioli Slots). Eventually, the slot machine apps earned them $50,000. [Alex Schwartz & Ziba Scott]

80% of prisoners released late 2018 in a presidential pardon have opted to return to Kinshasa’s infamous Makala jail due to lack of means to live. [Olivier Kalume]

Disco, a Japanese high tech manufacturing company, has introduced an internal billing and payment system, where every cost is charged back to workers. Renting a conference room costs $100. “People really cut back on useless meetings,” says one staffer. [Yuji Nakamura & Yuki Furukawa]

A man who bought the personalised number plate NULL has received over $12,000 of parking fines, because the system records ‘NULL’ when no numberplate has been recorded. [Jack Morse]

The islands of Orkney generate 120% of their energy needs using wind and solar. However, 57% of homes in Orkney are in fuel poverty, where a household spends more than 10% of income on fuel. [Chris Silver] (This year I worked briefly with Community Energy Scotland on a project with Energy Systems Catapult)

Some blind people can understand speech that is almost three times faster than the fastest speech sighted people can understand. They can use speech synthesisers set at at 800 words per minute (conversational speech is 120–150 wpm). Research suggests that a section of the brain that normally responds to light is re-mapped in blind people to process sound. [Austin Hicks & R Douglas Fields]

SpottedRisk is a disgrace insurance company built on data: “Firstborns are at slightly higher risk of disgrace, as are those… who’ve suffered recent breakups — until the passage of time sends the bereft partner back down the ‘risk-decay curve.’” [Boris Kachka]

SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) is a rare syndrome where otherwise healthy, high-functioning people are unable to remember events from their own life. There is also an exhausting syndrome called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, where people can remember precise details about every single day of their life. [Palumbo & Alain]

“Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped. In the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%… [falling to] a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018.” [The Economist]

In 2012, only one sports team (Manchester United) was worth more than $2bn. Today, there are 52 sports teams worth more than $2bn. [Kurt Badenhausen]

Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were invented by a cleaner at a Frito-Lay factory. He’s now VP of multicultural sales for PepsiCo America. [Zachary Crockett]

Six reluctant Chinese hitmen who hired each other to carry out a murder went to jail when their outsourcing scheme collapsed. [Eric Cheung]

Fast fashion is hitting the wiping rags businesses, because some clothing is just too badly made to be sold as rags. [Adam Minter] (In January, Fluxx worked with Fibretrace to develop new ways to make the circular economy work in fashion.)

Asking ‘What questions do you have for me?’ can be dramatically more effective than ‘Any questions?’ at the end of a talk. (Many more good tips in this thread. [Jacqueline Antonovich]

[ajayuikey]

Why games like Animal Crossing are the new social media of the coronavirus era Released in September, Kind Words was originally designed as an antidote to an increasingly vitriolic internet environment, says co-creator Ziba Scott.

[hermanwatts]

Thousands of people have come together for the most moving game of the year

Ziba Scott

Kind Words is an immensely vulnerable experience

Continue reading…

Thousands of people have come together for the most moving game of the year published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[mamaofthewildones]

Thousands of people have come together for the most moving game of the year

Ziba Scott

Kind Words is an immensely vulnerable experience

Continue reading…

from Polygon - All https://ift.tt/2MBITEw via IFTTT

[scifigeneration]

Four video games to boost your mood

by Conor Mckeown

The video game Fortnite revels in silliness. Epic Games/IGDB

In her book How Games Move Us (2016), computer games researcher Katherine Isbister writes that her friends and colleagues believe that gaming might numb people’s emotions. Given the possible connection between games and violence, it may be understandable that they think this, but Isbister disagrees with them. She writes that “games can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences”.

Designers want players to laugh, cry and extend empathy to the other characters and players within digital games. So whether you are looking for a welcome distraction or a mood boost, here are four games to try.

1. Kind Words

Ziba Scott’s Kind Words (Lo Fi Chill Beats to Write To) may seem like an odd game. All it involves is players writing and receiving encouraging letters in a cosy room that cocoons them in the relaxing sounds of of “lo fi chill beats”.

It takes its inspiration from the YouTube sensation lo fi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to. A combination of chill electronic music that is looped over animation, the channel has a surprisingly active live chat that has become a space for heartfelt confession.

Kind Words expands on the spirit of the YouTube stream by allowing players to write a letter about something worrying them and read responses from an anonymous community. While it may be tempting to dismiss this game because of its simplicity, the exchange of messages may have an important role to play. In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister relates this type of communication to a note left by a parent in a child’s lunchbox – a small but heartfelt attempt to reach out.

2. Going Under

According to the game designer Dan Cook, humour in games is difficult due to the conflicting nature of video games and comedy. While comedy comes from unexpected violations of the expected, video games rely on the predictable to be playable.

Broadly speaking, even excellent comedic writing is doomed when placed within the context of a video game because the required repetition of a game means that players will come to expect what was once the unexpected. However, comedy and punk-culture scholar Krista Bonello contends that comedy in games can be successful when it comes from exploiting the player’s experience of (and nostalgia for) previous games.

In that vein, the game Going Under succeeds by twisting the familiar setting of the action-adventure into the world of crumbling startups. Instead of searching for buried treasure in mystical ruins, players must instead explore the remnants of failed tech companies and strip the buildings of assets. Perhaps most comically of all, we are expected to do this for free, because we’re only interns.

3. Fortnite

When life is as dark as it is right now, it’s important to remember the importance of “fun”. Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian and cultural theorist, first wrote about the idea of fun in 1938, saying:

The fun of playing resists all analysis, all logical interpretation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.

Huizinga argued that fun was something beyond rational capacities, something universal to humans and other animals alike. This was not to discount fun as irrelevant but to establish its importance among our emotional capacities.

As such, there’s never been a better time to log in to Epic Games’ Fortnite. Although a competitive shooting game at heart, Fortnite distances itself from similar games through its cartoon-like aesthetic that can be felt in its gameplay as well as its visual design. The game welcomes up to 100 players to indulge in the childlike play of building box forts and throwing snowballs together, all while dressed as a pink llama. The game’s devotion to fun has amassed over 250 million players so far.

4. Euro Truck Simulator

Finally, I’d like to suggest to anyone who just needs to relax – or to embrace, as we call it in game theory, abnegation. Popularised by the paper Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics, abnegation is generally thought of as a synonym for that feeling of “zoning out” we can experience when playing games.

Euro Truck Simulator, an almost entirely pointless game, asks players to engage in the long, thankless job of driving a shipping truck through simulations of mainland Europe. In providing players with a straightforward goal and some simple but hard to master controls, some players can find themselves sucked into the game for hours at a time.

About The Author:

Conor Mckeown, King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[gocurrentcom]

Why games like Animal Crossing are the new social media of the coronavirus era

You can read our most essential coverage of the coronavirus/covid-19 outbreak for free, and also sign up for our coronavirus newsletter. But please consider subscribing to support our nonprofit journalism.

Released in September, Kind Words was originally designed as an antidote to an increasingly vitriolic internet environment, says co-creator Ziba Scott. In recent weeks, though, it’s taken on an…

[terryblount]

GDC Main Stage returns for 2020 with marquee talks on game dev's social impact!

This multi-part presentation about the impact of games and game dev will be delivered at GDC 2020 in March by three esteemed game creators: Osama Dorias, Ziba Scott, and Lyndsay Pearson! ...

GDC Main Stage returns for 2020 with marquee talks on game dev's social impact! published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[iotcoresoft]

These Developers Prove You Can Profit From Bad Mobile Games

These Developers Prove You Can Profit From Bad Mobile Games

Two developers quickly discovered that making money from mobile games was more about quantity than quality, whether they liked it or not.

Like many indie game developers believed when Apple first launched the iPhone, Ziba Scott and Alex Schwartz were of the belief that the landscape was about to change. Smartphones would become a platform where independent developers could create and release…