Gamasutra reports on an AP Poll stating that some 40% of American adults play games. From the article: “The poll also yielded plenty of other results worth ruminating on - 45 percent of gamers play over the Internet, and those who do are notably more ‘hardcore’ than those who do not. Forty-two percent of online gamers spent four hours or more per week playing games, but only 26% of offline gamers did similarly. The AP/AOL survey also revealed that, of those who play online games, almost one in five said they had formed real-life friendships or relationships with those they play with online, showing the use of gaming as a social activity, even when playing remotely against others
– slashdot
This is a really good news for my baby Wars of Earth. If I can successfully create the game to enhance the level of player interaction, then there’s nothing else to say. Based on the above result of the Gamasutra’s poll, the social aspect of the game is very important and it’s one of the main keys to attract more players to come join and stay with the game.
Sugar: Corn vs. Cane
“The Wall Street Journal is urging Washington to discard the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. This tariff is effectively a subsidy for corn-based ethanol produced in the USA. Yet, producing ethanol from corn is highly inefficient and consumes 1 unit of energy for each 1.3 units of energy that burning ethanol provides. By contrast, ethanol derived from sugarcane (which is the sole source of ethanol in Brazil) yields 8.3 units of energy. Sugercane is about 7 times more efficient than corn. Some studies even show that corn yields only 0.8 unit of energy, resulting in a net loss of energy.”
Another news tid bit from Slashdot. I was wondering why people know that corn can be processed to make ethanol as alternative fuel source, but still it’s not widely available in the States. The Mid-west region has a huge corn production rate but why California cannot advocate more on corn-based ethanol? And why Brazil can sustain on ethanol for the past few decades?
According to the above article, corn is not very efficient in making ethanol. Sugar cane, on the other hand, has great conversion rate. This is true because cane sugar is carbohydrate with lots of alcohol (-OH) groups (still remember those organic chemistry stuff?) Hence the conversion of these -OH groups to make ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) is not hard at all and efficient enough to produce larger amount of ethanol. Moreover, isn’t beers and wine all got to start with sugar of some sorts? See! You don’t ever drink corn-based alcohol, do you?
So why isn’t more sugar being produced in the States? I have no answer for that but I think sugar in the states are used to make alcohol for college kids’ consumption (Girls Gone Wild is one of the major customers). I’m just kidding, but the States is still importing sugar from other countries. It’s cheaper to import than to grow and produce cane sugar. More importantly, gas price is still NOT high enough to push the initiatives of finding alternative fuel sources. I suspect that if gas price rises and stay at $3.50/ gallon and above for unleaded, then it is now a big incentive for people to look for cheaper fuel, hence sugar cane comes to the rescue.
Maybe the States will life the embargo and start trading with Cuba again for dirt cheap sugar cane in exchange for excess tortilla made from corn. We’ll see.
I was reading Slashdot and stumbled into an article about XBox 360 and the execution behind it. It was quite amazing how Microsoft could pull it through. The article is available at