Month: July 2005

The Gambling Addiction Pill

It’s not a cure, it’s a pill that gives you gambling addiction.

Scientific American writes about a treatment for Parkinson’s disease that seems to lead to gambling addiction in a number of the patients.

Apparently the patients were given a drug that mimics dopamine (often missing in Parkinson patients I guess), and a number of them became addicted to gambling.

The scientists report that the good news is that only a small number of patients exhibit the compulsive gambling side effect. In addition, it is reversible and thus poses no reason to avoid these therapies, they say. When the patients tapered off use of the troubling medications, the desire to gamble compulsively also disappeared. “I’d want patients to be very forthcoming with their doctors about their gambling,” says study co-author M. Leann Dodd. “If you recognize this association early, you can possibly prevent financial ruin or destruction of relationships.”

I think there’s a huge untapped market for game-related medications, I suggest:

1) A pill that makes me enjoy Metal Gear Solid 2.
2) A pill that makes be better at strategy games.
3) A pill that makes me stop playing WarioWare: Twisted.

Façade Mirror: Download Here.

Update: I have taken the file down. You can download it from http://www.interactivestory.net/download/.]

Until my server bandwidth runs out, you can download Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama Façade from this site.

Note! The official Bittorrent download will almost certainly be the fastest way to download. Try that first.

This service is provided for those of you who have problems with Bittorrent.

File size is 800MB.

Read the official announcement here.

If downloading is denied, you have probably hit the traffic limit. In case download via Bittorrent instead.

Happy Façadeing!

Playing Cultures: GLS Presentation Video Available

The video of our shared Eric Zimmerman / Jesper Juul presentation from GLS is available online.

Click here, look for “Playing Culture”. For around 20 minutes of the talk you see an empty room as the game was being played in the hallway outside…

(I still need to work on my microphone technique.)

It was interesting having to switch between talking and having the audience play a game, but I think we managed with a reasonably low glitch and uncertainty rate.