23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
How Metroid Forces Players to Remember the Whole World
Whenever a Metroid player aquires a new power-up, her mind races back in time in a way not unlike what happens at a turning point in a movie. When a secret is revealed we are forced back through the story to mentally review everything we've seen so far, sometimes changing the interpretation of entire scenes.
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Since the player never completely leaves an area behind and forgets about it, the game world constantly expands in the mind of the player. By never completely exhausting an area b...Folksonomies: game development game design
Folksonomies: game development game design
30 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Bottom-Up VS Top-Down Method for Finding Laws
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically expressible form to connect the two. Components are weaved into a mental map and experiments are planned to verify or nullify the model. If the experimental observations r...Fascinating explanation for why laws are harder and harder to find as we move into macroscopic sciences.