53. biotic gaming: gods, monsters and pac-man

biotic games, from switched

its impact on gaming in general and its firmly cemented place in video game history notwithstanding, pac-man was a fairly simple and straightforward game.  you could move in four directions - up, down, left and right, while escaping ghosts that are coming after you.  a powerpill lets you dispatch of your foes and send them back to the start point.  get all the dots, beat the level, move on. i remember seeing human pac-man re-creations in college at halloween time as well as a number of imitations and parodies.  but now, we have broken into new plane - a place where pac-man is a real game, with real biological creatures swimming through fluid as the round yellow man himself, controlled by us.

confused?  allow me to elaborate.

scientists at stanford have recreated a pac-man shaped playing field, where the creature playing the role of pac-man is actually a single-celled organism called a paramecium (come on kids, you remember your old science classes).  this has led to the title of this little game - "PAC-mecium."  illustrated in the lower-left in the picture above, the "player" directs the movement of the paramecium via joystick, same as he or she would on an arcade screen, and it moves accordingly.  this joystick is connected to a controller that shifts the polarity of an electric field that's put across the fluid, changing the direction the paramecium moves.  a video camera keeps score.  i hope you're all with me on this one in the fact that this is some serious craziness, despite the relatively basic science behind it.  other so-called "biotic games" include POND PONG, ciliaball, and biotic pinball (gizmodo).  so why do this at all?  what possible scientific gain can society garner from this sort of strange experimentation?  according to professor ingmar riedel-kruse, awareness.  all a strange ad campaign for science.  "we hope that by playing games involving biology of a scale too small to see with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes are and they'll get curious and want to know more," said the good professor (the register).

and it may just work to get people paying attention to science, especially microbiology, as these experiments illustrate.  but that's not to say that all of the attention is good.  some of his testers had some ethical problems with what these "games," and because of this professor riedel-kruse thinks that it may also be a good starting point to stimulate discussion on issues of bioethics. "we are talking about microbiology with these games, very primitive life forms. we do not use any higher-level organisms," said the professor to the stanford university news.  for those of you that need to brush up on your biology, paramecia are single-celled organisms, lacking a brain and nervous system - meaning that they don't possess the capacity to feel pain.  the professor assures us that nothing with any sort of higher-level function was used for this project

this is just a sampling of what the scientific world has for research and biotic gaming. "we would argue that modern biotechnology will influence our life at an accelerating pace, most prominently in the personal biomedical choices that we will be faced with more and more often," riedel-kruse told stanford university news. "therefore everyone should have sufficient knowledge about the basics of biomedicine and biotechnology. biotic games could promote that."

i wouldn't look for a console release of anything like this for the 2011 holiday season, but it may be appearing in a lab near you.  as novel of an idea as this is, all one can really ask themselves is "what next?"

for more games that are scientifically relevant, check out fold-it and carnegie mellon university's eteRNA and help science help you.

21. IBM spreading malware, google celebrates pac-man in style

i know it's been a while, and yes, i'm still alive.  now that that's out of the way:

i'm sure some of you have had to attend some sort of conference for work or school before.  generally these are pretty dry and full of boring booths and seminars.  but your consolation is usually a bag full of free (mostly useless) stuff and booth giveaways - that's right, the delicious conference swag.  granted, the swag you get isn't nearly as cool as it would be at, say, E3, but there's generally some fun knick knacks in there nonetheless.  living in the digital age, a lot of companies give out USB flash drives as their trick-or-treat offerings.  makes sense right?  small, useful, and most of all, imprintable with your company's logo so they'll never forget who gave it to them.

turns out that last part is a double edged sword.

enter the ausCERT conference, held in australia's gold coast last week.  IBM's giveaways were, as anyone who read the first paragraph can guess, USB flash drives.  these weren't ordinary flash drives though - with these there was a slight twist - they came pre-infected with malware.  here's the real kicker - the whole ausCERT production?  it's a damn computer security expo.  collected in the RACV royal pines resort for this conference was a veritable who's who from the realm of network security - representatives from many antivirus/antimalware companies, the guy who co-invented public key cryptography, up to and including the the chief security officer for cisco.  IBM's message to ausCERT delegates:

"at the ausCERT conference this week, you may have collected a complimentary USB key from the IBM booth. unfortunately we have discovered that some of these USB keys contained malware and we suspect that all USB keys may be affected."

ouch.  the rest of the note went on to explain that any current antivirus/antimalware software would catch and quarantine it, but still, ouch.  i wouldn't exactly consider W32/LibHack-A a value-add software to bundle with a piece of hardware.  when i first saw this i thought it was a marketing ploy, maybe something like an IBM security solution demo on the drive.  until i saw the rest of the note IBM sent out.  after letting the delegates know that they may have infected them, they asked for anyone that had one to (1) not use them and (2) send them back to ibm.

now this isn't new - there have been other companies that have passed out infected memory sticks before, including IBM themselves in 2002.  but still it has to be embarrassing to be a bigshot like them, at a conference that IT professionals go to to hear lectures on the latest and greatest security techniques.  i just don't see how they didn't have some tighter QC, given the situation and their audience.

now from ridiculous to awesome - time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of pac-man, and out of all the tributes that exist on the web, google topped everyone.  by a mile.  google always has a lot of "doodles" to replace their stock logo on their search homepage to commemorate special days.  but today's takes the cake.  their doodle is a pac-man level shaped with the google logo, and it's playable, complete with sound.  if you're reading this and it's still friday the 21st, head over to google and click the "insert coin" button and have some fun.