Hey, Burb, I doubt you'll answer this but had we hit scum, would they have been notified of the specific target or would everyone have just been locked without target info?

/waits for non-answer, tries anyway 

A GIRL HAS TO TRY

I'm here with you, my heart - I am deathly afraid of being wrong and also afraid everyone else is wrong and there is no good path.

I do believe. I also think we're going to die so none of it will matter. BUT WHILE WE LIVED, WE HAD A GOOD PARTNERSHIP <3 <3 <3 You're great and we are great and this game is maybe not so great because it's confusing but we are doing the best we can!

Well, now I would bet that we do not die, and instead someone will try to force a mislynch tomorrow.

I do not understand why they would not claim if that was their role. Even claiming in a diminished capacity.

The thing that DOES work in our favor is that even acorhs couldn't prove that I "switched to Ty to save Crim" and I've been pushing Ty for days. I'm hoping we can get folks to no lynch and see. I'm really wondering about Dr Fran now tbh just because no one else is, though it's most likely Crim and Soph.

It feels like it's getting heated in there.

Xbro and Kark got a little suspicious there. What do you think? Is it possible that we DID hit scum?

*do not vote immediately but let's take time to think about it.

Well THAT is an interesting death.

It's my masters thesis. (The EU university system is a bit different from the US one. We have a three years bachelor followed by a two years masters. It's theoretically possible but very very rare to start a PhD without a masters degree. In exchange our PhD programs have no mandatory lectures or exams, it's 3+ years only for research and some teaching. Both bachelor and master programs end with a thesis you work on for one (bachelor) or two (master) semester)

I'm working in experimental quantum optics. My bachelor thesis was about a molecular single photon source. I basically helped a PhD student to set up his first experiment and made my thesis out of that process. The master thesis is about two-photon entanglement with possible applications (in the distant future) of using something like it in quantum cryptography. I think I'll just post you the abstract:


Hit me up with any questions if you want to know more or if you want to see the whole thing.



Also congrats on your passed exams! What exactly are you working on. I have something with games or at least computers in the back of my head...

I see. Although I don't really get the difference between "place" and "space". I mean, I see the difference in your explanation but I don't see how those two concepts map onto the words. Are these established terms in your field? But it surely sounds like an interesting angle, especially as the wannabe game designer I am

Also I have no clue who Ian Bogost is. Wikipedia says a professor in your area. You don't particulary agree with him, I reckon?

I can give you a link to my thesis tomorrow if you're interested. Just don't get lost in the details, especially in the math-y parts of the theory. I figure it has to look like alien language for people not familiar with the formalism... But I hope at least my texts are understandable


Also, I like how we don't even care about the game in here anymore. Have you made peace with our loss yet? I think I have (Although I will of course do my best to cheat out a win anyway). Let's continue talking about other stuff

Oh yeah, data is very important. I mean, in STEM fields that's kind of a non-issue since they hammer it into you from the very beginning and without correct data treatment you won't get anywhere. But I think especially in the "soft" fields you have to take care to not write a subjective opinion piece. Opinion pieces can be really nice to read (and I enjoy doing so) but it's nothing I'd want public funding for... How do you get your data, btw? Online surveys or do you get statistics about characters directly from the studios?

As for myself: I have designed a successful Mafia game, have one other currently in mod-review and already plans for the next three. I really enjoy reading MaRo's blog (he's the head of design for Magic The Gathering) and started doing my own expansion. Never finished it, though.

A friend and I made a local multiplayer version of Snake in C++ using the simple SDL engine. It had special items and a completely customizable visual style (like a mod; make your own sprites, put them in a folder and it becomes selectable from the ingame menu. I guess you could call it rudimentary mod support, lol) and in general is just a ton of fun. We unfortunately could never wrap our head around how to even properly tackle non-local multiplayer, though.

I have quite a detailed concept in my head about a puzzle game where you indirectly control the "P"C from a top down perspective and have to guide him through several mazes by turning lights on and off. You could also change the environment in the style of the "Labyrinth" board game (no clue how famous that one is in the US; here virtually every child knows it). The "P"C would acknowledge your actions and have discussions with several other characters about what you are (a god? somebody who has secretly built a fuckton of contraptions into the underground research facility where the game would take place?). I even have a final twist:

I once cobbled together a prototype in html5/js but wasn't fully convinced with the graphical design. I'm really bad at art so everything I do has to be very stylized and minimalistic to not look like absolute horsecrap. But I think my approach might have been too simplistic for all the different information and puzzle elements I had to represent. Anyway, then there was a bug I couldn't figure out and the semester started and since then the project is on ice (that was 2 or so years ago).

Oh, we (the friend I made the snake game with and I) also made two custom modules for Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes. One is in the Steam Workshop, the other one was never finished because... I don't really know why.

This first - I'm on good terms with folks at a couple studios so I've gotten some data there but honestly the maze of NDAs they have to sign with publishers makes it really difficult. I wanted to publish some game scripts for game design and games writing classes and the idea died on the vine because of that problem. So to get data I primarily do a lot of coding. For instance, in the avatar study I'm submitting for institutional review later this year, I haven't decided for certain what game I'll use, but let's say I'm using Fallout 4 (I'm not; their character creation is weird). I would code, or list out, every possible selectable option players have. All the hair styles. All the hair and skin colors. And then I would track all my subjects' selections based on that list. So four people who made female characters select hair 4, three hair 6, one hair 2, five hair 7, etc. And then I analyze that data to see what I can learn. For a paper I did recently, I looked at eye tracking studies that determined what waist-to-hip ratio men and women found most attractive, and I measured the same in game characters in several MMOs. I learned that male and female characters are both designed on the scale of what men find attractive in women - as in, even the male characters have similar waist-to-hip ratios, curvier, rather than the straight lines women seem to find most attractive in men. Which is really fascinating. It's not that I think primarily male designers are designing men they find "sexy," it's just that not enough women are involved and there's not as much careful thought that goes into it so long as the men have broad shoulders or whatever. But I did all that measurement myself and compared it to the data from the eye tracking studies. It takes time but I find it really satisfying. I do some interviews too and softer research (I did a study with self-professed non-gamers playing narrative-heavy games, for instance, and that was all user-experience interviews), but I feel more comfortable with numbers. I'm also doing a longitudinal study right now at my university, assessing all the incoming students for the next three years. We're trying to measure the writing instruction they received (or perception of) in high school. 

That was a long answer!

Question: how does one get into photons anyway? One day were you just like MAN YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE? MOTHERFUCKING PHOTONS