I had the privilege of working at IG for a few years back during the SWAT4 / FFV3R / Bioshock 1 days, when the people who made System Shock 2 were largely still there.
It's sad to see the name being retired, but it's better than seeing the name ruined by a flop or diluted by endless sequels.
The announcement is pretty opaque---I expect the rumor mill to churn for awhile.
Yes. This. The real problem with Flappy Bird is that it made money and got attention without being blessed by curator types who think it shouldn't be popular.
If one of the usual indie darlings had made Flappy Bird, it would be hailed as a "brilliant, hardcore, minimalist free-to-play flying game with ingenously-simple touchscreen control, procedurally generated obstacle courses, and 8-bit-styled graphics that recall the glory days of NES."
I also found it really surprising that the author didn't mention Minecraft, which somehow graduated from being an Infiniminer clone to being an original IP you can sue over. Not coincidentally, today there are only "Minecraft clones".
Really a better title for this article would be "Simulation backs up theory that universe is a simulation".
I find them very curious, the "TheUniverseIsAComputer" people.
Suppose there is an experiment proving that the Universe is indeed a particle simulation whose discoverable elements are being actuated by unspecified interactions of presumably very different elements in some other, underlying "universe", say a substrate of Rule 110, and consciousness can be marked out as a computable pattern in such, and that the simulation process works well enough for a group of researchers (presumably "us") to feel as if "we" are really here. Okay great.
But for this to qualify as a simulation, surely the experiment (and the conscious experimenters) would have to be reproduced exactly, right down to the consciousnesses apprehending the results that establish scientific consensus that the UniverseIsAComputer, in precisely the consciousness-simulating way that these people fantasize about?
We are to understand that the scientists in the "real" universe presumably would not reach the same consensus, because theirs is the actually Real Universe, not the simulated one, and so the Reality Detection Experiment fails in some way.
So if this alleged difference appears---then why does the "simulation" even qualify as a simulation? For that matter, why does the author's own computer simulation qualify as having something to say about the real Universe?
I suppose the simulation is "good enough" for consciousness to be reproduced more or less exactly, except for just recently the aspect of scientists becoming conscious of the fact that TheUniverseIsASimulation.
I guess I could accept that everything is perfectly simulated except for... the evidence for the simulation?
I sort of worry about that. As a userspace client Steam could never have hoped to lock out non-approved games, but as an OS it probably could. The HN commentariat probably skew pro-curation, but I for one think it would be bad for the future of Indie games if Steambox did not support side loading.
Special relevance to Lisp: this game involves procedurally-generated puzzles so that you never play the same level twice. I doubt I would have been able to pull this off the way I did, without a dialect of Lisp to use in generating non-trivial (yet always-solvable) puzzles for the player.
I hope there is a bright future for games and other multimedia in Common Lisp---Some folks maintain a lisp games wiki at http://lispgames.org . And it isn't just CL, there are exciting things going on in Schemeland like Fluxus Scheme and Schemebricks.