The nice people at Hide and Seek have a collection of Tiny Games you can play while the commercials are on TV, like each player putting a finger on the screen and scoring a point for every face that they poke during the break -- winner is the most prolific face-poker.

I TOLD YOU SO
A game for two or more overconfident players.

As soon as a show segment ends, player one must say what the first advert will be advertising. Player two immediately mutes the television, and as the advert plays, whatever it is for, player one must explain how they were right, and the advert is definitely for the product they suggested, regardless of what it is actually advertising. Scoring is entirely subjective.

YOGHURT. BECAUSE MUMMIES ARE TIRED. BECAUSE MEN.
A game for two or more verbose players.

At the very start of an advert break, shout out a word. The other players have to shout out something else. Earn one point every time your word is said during the advert break. If someone chooses a word that’s not within the spirit of the game – “the” or “and” or “be” or anything like that – then the other players can reject it by unanimous agreement.

Hide and Seek also brought us the Board Game Remix Kit, and now they're running a Kickstarter to fund a bazillion tiny games as a mobile app.

Tiny Games For Ad Breaks (via Super Punch)

For the past several days, I've been seeing an obviously silly conspiracy theory rocket around the usual online places. It concerns Susan Wilson, whose nine-year-old daughter Mackenzie was challenged by her older brothers when she expressed an aspiration to make games, Mackenzie and her mom posted a Kickstarter to raise $800 for an RPG camp where she could hone her game-development skills.

And out came the trolls. One group was convinced that this was a scam by a "millionaire" (Wilson once attended a fundraiser where she was photographed with Warren Buffet); the other was convinced that this was a radical feminist man-hatin' exercise determined to raise funds by pitting little boys against little girls.

Both theories were silly on their face, but lots of credulous guys found something they liked in it -- specifically, evidence of a vast shadowy conspiracy of emasculating millionaire women who want to relegate men to the scrapheap of history -- and repeated it, and it refused to die. Worse, the campaign whipped up the kind of men who respond to their feelings of discomfort with death and rape threats. Keep it classy, guys.

Thankfully, CNet's Eric Mack took on the unenviable task of rebutting the rumors. And as he points out, the fundraiser has cleared $20K, and Wilson's going to use the excess money to fund girls-in-STEM causes. Victory.

Wilson also responded to other conclusions drawn by the trolls, dispelling the notion of the size of her bank account ("I don't have a million dollars in the bank, I'm not rolling in cash and I'm not a highly paid business woman. Frankly, I'm unemployed at this very moment!"); her status as a Warren Buffet buddy (it was a photo op from an awards ceremony); and those pricey shoes ( a splurge after a long-shot bet at the roulette wheel paid off years ago). She added:

"Kickstarter is about the power of the crowd and though you might not always like what the crowd says, you can't push the "It's not Fair" button when you disagree. Though I'm not in the 1% club, I do find it sad many think Kickstarter should only be used for the downtrodden and the poor because it has the power to extend far beyond. "

Wilson also took the bold move of outing the two people who made threats against her and her family, and she told me in an email that she is actively searching for a worthy cause to direct all the extra money that the crowdfunding campaign raises beyond the original modest goal.

"It's clear this campaign resonated for a reason that's much bigger than Mackenzie and ALL OF THE extra money should go to that bigger movement," Wilson writes. "I can't say I know what that is right now (it's been a whirlwind and certainly wasn't planned) but smart people are working on it with Brenda Romero (gamer in residence at University of California at Santa Cruz who's husband created Doom and Quake) being among my personal favorites."

Trolls take on 9-year-old girl's Kickstarter project...and lose

Adam Young sez,

A developer made a game that's a spin on the old "waterworks"/"pipe mania" type game with an oil pipeline theme... complete with pixel-art anti-pipeline protesters. Like most indie developers, they were eligible and applied for funding from a variety of sources. They are donating a portion of the proceeds to the David Suzuki Foundation.

Apparently this made some blowhards angry, who think that "tax dollars funded the game" and shouldn't fund a game about blowing up pipelines, and that the developer donating to a non-profit charity somehow constitutes an ethics violation, having received so-called "tax-dollar funding". Tax breaks and grants and things are available to all sorts of content and media producers in Canada. Game development and film production and the like are industries that are very active here. It's also not illegal to donate proceeds to non-profit charities.

Pipe Trouble

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Inspired by the Damsels in Distress episode of Tropes vs Women in Video Games, and by the Dad who genderswapped Donkey Kong for his daughter, Kenna swapped the Link and Zelda sprites on a Zelda ROM, so that Zelda rescued Link:

Tiles are the blocks of pixels that make up each sprite. Animation happens when the tiles are swapped for other tiles. So, to create new animation, you just have to edit the appropriate tile.

Some tips! Make sure that tile goes back in the same place where you found it, or you might end up with random legs and arms sticking out of scenery. When you open up your ROM in Tile Layer Pro, you'll see a grid with all of the ROM information displayed as pixels. It shows *all* of the rom information, so you're going to see a flaming hot mess -- at first. Keep scrolling down until you find something vaguely sprite-shaped and use the "+" and "-" keys on the keyboard to align them. But beware -- the tiles will go back to their starting alignment when you scroll and not all parts of the code use the same alignment. We spent hours hunting down the princess tiles because we didn't realize that the alignment changed from section to section.

Kenna's made the patch available.

Zelda Starring Zelda: The Story (via Neatorama)

This amazing EVE Online Gallente Space Station cake was created by Duff Goldma of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, MD. It's unquestionably the greatest MMORPG space-station cake I've ever seen.

Dock Your Fork in This Gallente Space Station Cake

This review also appears on Download the Universe, a group blog reviewing the best (and worst, and just "meh") in science-related ebooks and apps.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music.

Control-Alt-Hack is a tremendously fun, hacker-themed strategy card game that uses the mechanic of the classic Steve Jackson Ninja Burger game. It comes out of the University of Washington Computer Security and Privacy Research Lab, and features extremely entertaining and funny computer-security-themed scenarios, buffs, attacks and characters.

The gameplay is very well-thought-through (here's a PDF of the rules). Three of us sat down to play it this weekend with only a cursory glance at the rules beforehand. By following the quickstart instructions, we were able to jump straight into play, and within a few turns, we really had the rhythm and were busily sabotaging one another and cursing at the dice when they rolled against our favor.

Based on my play session, I'm really impressed. Though one player led the game early on, there were several reversals, wherein the leading and trailing players traded places -- always the mark of a great game. There was a good mix of skill, strategy and luck, and things were just complicated enough that it absorbed our full attention, without lagging or flagging.

A full game takes about an hour, and between three and six people can play at once. We played it after Sunday brunch and it was a great digestive aid. All three of us loved the geeky, info-sec-y references, the funny scenarios (everything from devising a cryptographic protocol for implanted medical devices to pranking a labmate with a gag WiFi keystroke-inserter), and the grace-notes (like a scenario that is encoded as a cryptogram). There were moments of unlikely hail-mary-heroism, crushing defeat, and lots of laughs. We'll play this one again.

Control-Alt-Hack: White Hat Hacking for Fun and Profit

Control-Alt-Hack [Publisher's site]

From the Mario Piano site, where you'll find "authentic, high-fidelity Mario sheet music that was entirely faithful to the original Mario themes and sound effects, and which could be trusted to be 100% accurate," the sheet music for the Mario "coin" sound.

Mario Piano Sheet Music - Coin Sound (via Hacker News)

Derp: Mark blogged this one back in October!

Len sez, "A few years ago, you posted about my Monster By Mail project. Since then I've drawn a lot of things including Cory for my Geek A Week project. Now I am doing something similar to Monster By Mail with RPG and D&D characters. I'm drawing people's characters for their character sheets. They get an 8.5 x 11 drawing and a 72 dpi version for their character sheet and online use. As long as it is not a licensed character, I will draw it. You can see all the characters I've drawn so far here."

Geek A Week's Len Peralta Draws Your D & D and RPG Characters (Thanks, Len!)

At Rock Paper Shotgun, John Walker hears from a "Maxis insider" who claims that Electronic Arts lied about how SimCity works in order to avoid the obvious solution to its launch troubles: disabling the "digital rights management" (DRM) system that locked paying customers out.

Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that [Sim City] “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player. A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

SimCity's spent much of the last week in a state of near-unusability. If the source is telling the truth, it means that EA could have fixed it, but instead preferred to keep it broken, with customers locked out and lied to, all to maintain the credibility of its DRM system.

That SimCity was built to require "server-side calculations" was daft to begin with. Expecting players to believe this setup is instrinstic to the game rather than merely a DRM hook? Pull the other one, it's got a dongle on it!