What 'Network Games' Could Have Looked Like

An anonymous reader writes "A game for children modified for geeks: The austrian art (or something like that) group monochrom has made the worlds probably first massive multiplayer thumbwrestling performance in the viennese Museumsquartier. They've got some photos and explanation of several network structures (even includes a Death Star Reactor - i wonder how many things like that could be done - new kind of simple origami?). A network game in the 50s? Beware: requires real social interaction!"

Comments

Actual reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

This was so obviously just a ploy for geeks to hold hands with girls. And guys too, I guess.

Re:Actual reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the fact that every DnD game where a girl happened to be semi-interested, the male geeks were trying to convince her that part of the game was to remove articles of clothing.

Re:Actual reason:

[Whitecloud]

they had geeks back then?

what did geeks look like before computers?

Re:Actual reason:

[Richard_L_James]

Next week on slashdot...... a geeks guide to finger dancing!

Can't Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

for the speed hacks and bots to come out for this one.

Re:Can't Wait...

[BigDumbSpaceApe]

Been out for years... use your index finger to pull down opponents thumb... game over.

Re:Stupid.

[daniel_mcl]

The game "war," as I have seen it, is completely random -- you simply apply an algorithm to a given shuffling to a deck, so the game is decided before it is begun. The game is effectively equivalent to a coin toss.

By the way, I'm a rather good thumbwrestler (if I do say so myself), and I do enjoy playing the game. It's great for roadtrips or anything else that involves a lot of waiting.

dexterity required

[acceber]

Looking at those pictures, being ambidextrous would be a huge advantage. The average person would be predominantly right or left handed and would probably end up being caught "out" much quicker than somebody who could use both hands with equal ease.

But then, the average person wouldn't be playing massive multiplayer thumbwrestling.
And true ambidexterity is rare.

Re:dexterity required

[OneBarG]

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous

Re:dexterity required

[CGP314]

And true ambidexterity is rare.

Well, this is something I wonder about and hope that a more qualified person on slashdot could provide an answer to. Is there any such thing as a naturally ambidextrous or left/right handed person? I'm asking because so many of the things people do with their hand are practiced skills. For example I'm right handed and thus have always shaved with my right hand. But if I were to try and shave using my left hand would my left-handed shaving be any better than the first time I tried to shave with my right hand?

I'm just curious because I have an Aunt who says she's ambidextrous, but I think it's because when she learns something new, she makes an effort to learn it with both hands. IE, when she learned to play tennis, she switched hands every few hits. Also, for my [shameless plug] London Journal[/shameless plug] I usually write the entries out long hand first. But after a few pages my right hand gets tired. Because I didn't want to stop, I decided to learn to write with my left hand as well so I could alternate hands on each page.

I just wonder if handedness is the result of the fact than it takes less energy and effort to make one one hand a specialist that is required to make two.

Re:dexterity required

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder if handedness is the result of the fact than it takes less energy and effort to make one one hand a specialist that is required to make two.

Handedness is that sketchy area which involves a number of things such as brain laterality, environmental, sociocultural and genetic factors.

There is a research team that does indepth studies in such areas and obviously there are different theories which exist.

Hereditary factors state that a child is more likely to be born left handed if one parent is left handed, and the chances increase if both parents are left handed.

Socially and culturally, you have reasons like religious beliefs that left handedness is wrong or the left hand is associated with "cleaning yourself". In the old days, kids were beaten for using the left hand.

And then there's other medical reasons like kids who are born with higher levels of testosterone as a result of increased stress during birth are more likely to be born left handed.

True ambidexterity is rare because the brain is wired to predominately favour one hand over the other.

Re:dexterity required

[TheGavster]

I would say that I do most things with my right hand because thats the hand I use more frequently. Don't really know why I always start doing things right-handed, though. I know there are a few things, like swinging a baseball bat, that I started so clueless that I wound up doing them left-handed and not knowing it. So, handedness might be a cultural thing ... the more you observe something, the more you're likely to adopt the handedness that you observe.

Re:dexterity required

[ValourX]

Right-brained people are left-handed; left-brained people are right-handed. This is not always true, but it generally is.

Each hemisphere has its own duties, and usually the more structured part is the left hemisphere, and that's the one we want for motor tasks because it involves simple instructions in a proper order. Some people are "backwards" and their right hemisphere wants to handle writing and similar tasks.

Still there are others whose division of duties is scrambled -- not necessarily a bad thing, but people like this tend to have a totally different organizational structure. I believe this may be me; there are things I can't do right-handed (it took a long time to learn to shoot pool with my right hand, and it's still not comfortable), and there are some things I can't do left-handed (mousing). I'll also occasionally write a word backwards by accident if I'm handwriting (a right-handed task).

It's been a few years since I read up on this, but if you want to know more, there's a really good book called "How To Learn Anything Quickly" by Ricki Linksman. It explains brain hemispheric and sense preferences and how they assist you in learning and remembering.

-Jem

Re:dexterity required

[archivis]

I was struggling in kindergarten to cut paper, with the scissors in my right hand. The teacher came by, looked at me for a bit, and said "You're left handed!"

She took the scissors, gave me a left-handed pair, and off I went like a shot. I swapped hands for everything in class - writting, cutting, etc. All those manual dexterity tasks became much easier.

I don't remember anyone before this saying anything about my handedness - definately no abuse or restrictions on left-hand use.

So, I'm left-handed. Only thing I do right-handed is mouse, and that's because I didn't run into a left-handed mouse to use until something like 5 years after using right-handed mice and by then it was generally too late to change. If I ever find a decent left-handed trackball the mirror image of my Logitech one, I might take a crack at switching though.

Re:Stupid.

[LightwaveNet]

There's a happy lil family scene with The Governator, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Eliza Dushku playing a game o ThumbWars in the movie True Lies.

Eliza Dushku... enough said.

what about security?

[xlyz]

just image a DOS attack on any of that networks

Re:what about security?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the headlines now.

In today's news a massive human pyramid of thumbwrestlers died from DoS attack from an unknown assailant. The assailant is believed to have used a brute force method known as "pushing". When the network was "pushed" each memeber of the group succumbed to the "pushing" and the attack spread throughout the whole network killing the entire netowrk at an exponential rate.

Advanced Thumbwrestling Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to assure that you will win every thumbwrestling match, stick your hand in your pants and poke your thumb up your ass in full view of your oponents. You will win their immediate submission or forfieture, ensuring your advancement to the next round of competition.

More Advanced Thumbwrestling Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, another tactic is to piss on your hand prior to competition, in view of your opponents. This will service the purpose of shaking their confidence and coat your thumb with a slickening layer of urine enabling you to escape from otherwise finishing blows.

did that top pic make anyone else think...

[JeremyALogan]

Third-Reich Thumb Wrestling???

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[JeremyALogan]

how was that a Troll comment? the top pic is of a bunch of people thumb wrestling with their arms making the shape of a swastika. it may not have been funny, but I sure as hell don't think it was a troll either

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[snuto]

come on, ... don't be silly.

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[jea6]

The brown shirt adds the really nice subtle touch.

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[3770]

Honestly, those thumbs, and that rectangular red object behind them made me associate with the Nazi flag.

Now, I don't read anything into it and I'm not a Nazi.

It was just a silly coincidence.

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[JeremyALogan]

see... I'm not the only one. thanks you.

Re:did that top pic make anyone else think...

[snuto]

the red book behind the hands is simple the yearbook of the group. www.monochrom.at/mono/ and they're definitely no nazis ;-))

viruses galore

[Random Web Developer]

If you look at their rules i am surprised they don't include "wash hands before and after games" anywhere.

With those sweaty hands and thumbs i'm sure it wouldn't hurt

Re:viruses galore

[Kamerynn]

This happened in Europe. They know they won't get the plague by touching the skin of another, seemingly healthy, human being(even if that same human being has picked his nose earlier, or worse, touched a door handle!). Massive hygiene hysteria in the US makes many people believe the contrary. Gosh I guess some of them even ATE without washing their hands after this!! I wonder of many of them are still alive... While I was an exchange student in the US (coming from Belgium) I was staying with a wonderful american family in Colorado and have kept strong contacts with them ever since. Before departing, I decided to prepare them meat balls with a home recipe. Once we sat at the table, nobody would eat, and I was wondering how they could not like it without tasting it. So I asked them and they were embarassed because they did not dare to eat because I had prepared the meat balls WITH MY BARE HANDS after washing them. The housewife usually put plastic gloves when manipulating food... So I had to convince them that my hands were disease free and that I had washed them thoroughly and that the meatballs had cooked for 40 minutes in the oven, which would kill anything left. They finally tried the meal (half cold, but we put it in the microwave-- what a sacrilege!) and founjd it fabulous (in earnest, because they asked me to do it once again before leaving)

Re:viruses galore

[StormReaver]

they did not dare to eat because I had prepared the meat balls WITH MY BARE HANDS after washing them.

When I was reading through this, I was waiting for (what I had anticipated to be) the inevitable, "made them with my bare hands after having done gross things with them all day." I thought you were going to say stuff like, "Europeans always eat food that was cooked with dirty hands and no one has ever gotten sick from it." I was mentally preparing my response that the American family was fully justified in rejecting your food that was prepared with bare hands that hadn't been washed all day.

Then I read the part I quoted above, and realized that you thought this was typical behavior in American homes. It is not typical, and is actually the first time I, having been born nearly 35 years ago and having lived my entire life in various parts of the States, have ever heard of this outside of restaurants.

Public food services are required to wear plastic gloves when handling food, but I have never seen this done in private homes.

Most Americans are extremely steadfast in requiring washed hands around food, but resorting to plastic gloves for food handling at home probably indicates some type of mental disorder.

You're probably lucky you got out of there alive... ;)

Re:viruses galore

[Kamerynn]

Well she didn't put gloves for most things like handling vegetables and such, but she explained that for some things it was necessary: handling raw meat apparently was one of them, mixing flour and water to make bread or other things where the hands would get "covered" with a lot of food. I guess she still allowed herself to take a carrot with her naked hand when cutting it.

Re:viruses galore

[javatips]

Wearing plastic glove would not help... You have to change your plastic glove after handling the raw chicken or you will contaminate other food (with salmonella) anyway.

Wearing plastic glove is just useless. Just wash your hand after handling raw meat and you'll never have contaminate your other ingrediends.

Re:viruses galore

[anshil]

For this issue even plastic gloves do not help, except you constantly change them against new ones (which is a real good thing for environmental waste, isn't it?).

If you touch raw chicken with you gloves, and suppose it even has salmonellae then use the gloves to pluck the lettuce, guess what happens?

I rather have bare hands washed even only sleazy inbetween, since even if one or two bacteries keep steeking on the hand, they won't kill you. Remember everything is just a matter of the dose.

I usually wash my hands only after going to the toilet, and then just mere 2-3 seconds. Well I'm still pretty alive and sound, hardly hadn't any influenza for more than two years.

Re:viruses galore

[anshil]

Let me guess, but you do have an allergy.

It is already prooven that exaggerated hygiene is at least fostering allergies, since your immune systems sits there and is idle, it can't train, and figurueally at one time it so bored it starts to react at just something - normally totally harmless to the human body like housedust, cat-hair, strawberries, milk, pollen, and so on.

I.e. chidring growing up on a farm have less than half the risk of becoming an allrgic, like ones living in a city.

I think there were some extreme examples where some babies even died after living some years too long in a hyper-steril surronding, and than beeing released to "normal" world.

Re:viruses galore

[ediron2]

Dude, this is a *first*. I mean, usually we Ugly Americans are getting dissed by the (rest of the) civilized world for doing all the gross stuff: reusing handkerchiefs apparently freaks out japanese people, we eat virtually everything with our hands, and we even coined the 'five second rule' for dealing with food that falls on the floor.

My grandma is REALLY old-school. Living with her for a summer, I noticed a lot of spooky habits. The worst was that she was storing Mayonaise in the cupboard, unrefrigerated. I gasped, and she reminded me that she'd made me dozens of sandwiches from the same jar, and that she'd lived to be 80 with that bad habit.

Risks are a matrix, not a line. Draw the percent-chance of incident on one axis and the hazard level on the other. And each high-risk item removed shifts attention downstream to the next-riskiest item. We've already gotten rid of all the common-deadly risks, the uncommon-deadly ones, and so on. Now we're worrying about slim chances or really-unpleasant hazard factors.

Getting dead from granny's chicken salad is probably unlikely because she (coincidentally) never double-dips to contaminate the source. Likewise, drinking from a mountain stream is generally safe, but the gut-wrenching agony of Giardiasis is a fate worse than death, so I either carry a filtering straw or bottled water. In both cases, we're just worrying about ingested pathogens because they're still the most common risk we face on a daily basis.

Re:viruses galore

[ediron2]

Milk, leftovers, vegetables, bread. Ten bucks a month for all of these, including the amortized cost of the machine. I use the freezer for ice, bulk-purchases of meat, more leftovers, pre-packaged meals, kid-friendly snacks (pizzas, chicken nuggets, etc), my annual wild-game (ahem) harvests so they can be stretched out over a year (hunting season comes but once a year!). And did I mention milk? As far as I'm concerned, the 4 essential food groups are milk, potatoes, oreos, and more milk. At anything close to room temperature in my house, milk spoils in a half-day at best. If I had to restock every half-day, I'd spend my whole life going to and from the dairy a few miles away. And that irradiated milk I tried in Europe is neither tasty nor readily available in the US.

Neat idea, though. Gives me something to shoot for. I could do with a teensy fridge with 5x the insulation. And that bit on eggs is every bit as startling as Granny's mayo stunts.

Clearly foreign!

[ctime]

The mere thought of invading ones personal bubble, let alone touching another persons hands is unacceptable. Dear God, think of the germs! It's no coinsidence they named one of the games the "death star"!

Fully inverted muli-touching acts should be made illegal!

Re:Clearly foreign!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

You know, that keyboard your touching is full of germs too. And that piece of soap you used this morning is covered with them as well.
You see those walls around you? They're full of them too. Those windows? Covered as well. Your door? Billions of germs covering evert square cm. Even the floor you're resting your feet on...
They are everywhere. You can't escape them. The germs have you...
</Sadistical mocking voice>

AH! this is excellent!

[snuto]

i'm meeting some of my friends this afternoon. i think we'll first try the token ring battle!

oh my gosh

[spazoid12]

So, a few pointy-hair bosses and some evil project managers are in a meeting.

"This project is going to take 1 year with 5 developers."

"Then, quadruple the size of the team and finish in 1 quarter!"

"You can't get that many geeks to work together on a single horribly retarded objective!!"

"Oh yes you can... here are some pictures to prove it..."

virii

[mtenhagen]

I think these networks are very vunerable to viruses.

Blah

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really the most worthless thing Ive ever seen.

Shhh!

[empaler]

She might be reading this!

wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually don't hang out with the slashdot trolls, but wt_F_?

This really is the dumbest story I've ever seen posted.

Re:wtf?

[dhanes]

I usually don't hang out with the slashdot trolls, but wt_F_? This really is the dumbest story I've ever seen posted

I, for one, originally found it refreshingly insipid. Then, while actually reading through monochrom's explanation and then his blog, realized that I was grinning the entire time and chuckling.

What's wrong with a little tounge-in-cheek insipidness on a dull Sunday morning?

Then you're doing it wrong

[empaler]

In war, the point is that some times you come up with the same card as your opponent. You each then put three cards face down before you. Then you choose one of these cards as the one to battle the others new card with.

Then again, this is a complex variation of the rules...

Re:Then you're doing it wrong

[empaler]

It changes the outcome as compared to not picking cards - but I agree that it does not change the fact that your skill has no effect on the outcome.

I realized that in Kindergarten. As the only one. I hate stupid people.

Re:Then you're doing it wrong

[empaler]

Of course it changes the possible outcome - if you choose a 'lucky' card, you'll end up with more cards than if you'd chosen an 'unlucky' card, thus altering the content of both you and your opponent's stacks, and ultimately the following plays until victory or defeat.

Re:Then you're doing it wrong

[empaler]

Being completely random doesn't make it inconsequential. Your choice of card does affect the game, even though you have no chance to foresee which card it will be. It's not completely unlike rolling a die.

Re:Then you're doing it wrong

[empaler]

There is no difference, theoretically.
But when the card has been shuffled and are in a set order, a card from the middle of the pile is unlikely to be the same as the top card. Unless it has the same value as the top card, it is either higher or lower. This is the point of the entire discussion; this is the only time apart from deck shuffling that randomness is a factor of the game. Just because it's not predictable doesn't make it inconsequential.
I'm not sure you read my post on how it's supposed to go when getting two cards with equal face value.

Viellecht nicht

[empaler]

That's just cos the Brits couldn't wrap their heads around the word "Österreich". It has an umlaut and stuff.

Jesus

[carcosa30]

There needs to be a filter for this sort of stuff... like "-5 frivolous." "Frivolous" would filter out things like lifesize models of Luke Skywalker made of mashed potatoes and Testor's enamel. This stuff hurts me.

Geeks are eternal.

[Roman_(ajvvs)]

Exactly the same, only with pocket protectors and elbow patches. Come to think of it.. an elbow patch would be handy...

Re:retards

[Richard_L_James]

Reread the article about the Austrians , and wonder no more why Americans are harassed and attacked.

Relax my friend, everything is in hand... the Austrians being the smart people they are have already sent in The Governator to do their dirty work!!

No one has said it yet...

[RoloDMonkey]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

Wait...

Ewwww!

Swedish, pah!

[empaler]

I understand that you post as an AC, cos I wouldn't wanna be known as a swede, either ;)

Jeg er trods alt fra jeres gamle herrefolk :p
I må bare lære at bruge de rigtige bogstaver igen - hvad er det, I bruger ikke ø og æ, men ö og ä? Puha... ;)

Double-Jointed Advantage

[skooba]

Both of my thumbs are double jointed. Because of this, I have always crushed every single thumb wrestling opponent. No one has ever been able to pin my thumb, because I can quickly snap it out of harm's way via the double-jointed action. Then, as soon as I detect a hint of fatigue in my opponent's thumb, my thumb pounces like a mongoose.

Would this obvious advantage disqualify me from multiplayer thumb wrestling tournaments?

Re:Double-Jointed Advantage

[d474]

I believe that qualifies as the first documented thumb exploit.