Korobov Wins Sunway Sitges Alongside Entertaining Tiebreaks

Leading the tournament from start to finish, Anton Korobov of Ukraine won the 5,000-euro first prize at the Sunway Sitges tournament. A series of entertaining blitz tiebreaks decided the lower prizes.

After his fine performance at the Grand Chess Tour event in Bucharest, Korobov also did quite well in Sitges. His 6/6 start was the foundation for his tournament victory.

After his draw with Vassily Ivanchuk in round seven, Korobov was still half a point ahead of the pack. Two players were trailing him: Vasif Durarbayli of Azerbaijan and Abhimanyu Puranik of India.

A draw with Durarbayli was enough for Korobov to keep the lead as Puranik lost his game in round eight. The leader's new opponent for the penultimate round was the American youngster Awonder Liang, who had surprisingly defeated Ivanchuk.

"I was already very happy when I saw the pairings," Liang said later on the live broadcast. "If you told me I would play Ivanchuk like any time in my life, that would just be amazing. That was why I came here, to be able to play great players like him."

To beat the other strong Ukrainian was too much to ask for Liang. Playing a Grand Prix Attack setup, the American's thematic pawn push f4-f5 was not correct as all ideas with Bh6 would be easy for Black to parry. Korobov said he was planning to sacrifice the exchange, and all of his remaining pieces would be strong while White wouldn't have a clear plan.

With his special kind of humor, Korobov discussed this game in the studio on the final day, after he had drawn his last-round game with German GM Andreas Heimann.

The other big difference is how Stober deals with players finishing in a tie. Many open tournaments don't have a playoff, but having playoffs for second to eighth places is definitely rare. Only the Sants Open in Barcelona is an event we can think of that does something similar.

Adding to the show element, these tiebreaks are held outside on a terrace in front of the hotel with palm trees and the Mediterranean Sea as a splendid backdrop for a few dozen spectators.

For these tiebreaks only the top eight of the final standings were eligible play. Therefore, seven players were involved (as Korobov had ended clearly first). Before Durarbayli and Rasmus Svane played for second place, Heimann and Puranik had played with Amin Tabatabaei (Iran), Li Di (China) and Timur Gareyev (U.S.) for places four to eight.

Westside students share coding expertise with local dignitaries

While video and computer games capture of the interest of many young kids, the designing process that goes into them is something Angleton ISD Assistant Superintendent Adam Stephens wants to emphasize as a part of a growing computer science and engineering world.

During Computer Science Education Week, fifth-grade students at Westside Elementary took an hour of class time to meet with local dignitaries, including County Judge Matt Sebesta, Superintendent Phil Edwards and Angleton Mayor Jason Perez, to take part in coding activities.

“In order to get more students and community members excited about computer science, the national nonprofit Code.org is encouraging students to complete one hour of coding,” Stephens said. “It’s done through the lens of cute games, kind of fun, interactive activities, and it uses block-based coding, which is entry-level coding.”

The students each partnered with a community member and chose an activity to code during the event. With dancing and popular Disney-themed games, students were able to work their way through increasingly challenging levels of code.

“Once you get the hang of it, it’s kind of easy,” Perez said. He was assisted by fifth-grader Keira Cooke. The two created an avatar that performed a sequence of fun dance moves.

“Right now in Texas, we know there are 30,000 vacant computer science jobs, so whatever we can do to get kids interested and kind of prepare them for that path is our goal,” Stephens said.

All 7,000 Angleton ISD students are being asked to complete the hour of code as a part of the education week, Stephens said.

Those students who go online and complete a 10-part coding process through a district initiative called Code Front will be eligible to participate in a pizza party in January, Stephens said.

“For my mindset, it just shows them they can do more and achieve more,” Robotics Club director Katie Medina said. “This, for them, looks like a game, but in real life they can go farther and achieve careers in STEM.”

Starting early and incorporating small amounts of coding early on is beneficial to the leaning process, Medina said.

“It lets me be creative, and it’s mainly just fun,” fifth-grade student Andrew Aasletten said.

Aasletten and the county judge worked on code for a dancing game that was a few minutes long.

“This is something anyone in the world can do,” Stephens said. “We want to instill in our kids that learning is messy. It’s fun and it’s hard and you’re gonna make mistakes, and so, you know, this is something a lot of adults haven’t tried. And it’s not so much just about computer science but computational thinking.”

The Making of the TERA Valkyrie

The Valkyrie has a bit of a history here at En Masse Entertainment, and like the class itself, her story needs a little explanation.

Whenever we get new content for TERA, be it new classes, costumes, or battlegrounds, we start a “top-down” process of localization, thoroughly studying any changes to the game before changing any translated terms, and then writing all text relating to the change at the same time.

But for the Valkyrie, we faced a few more challenges than usual. The class name was originally translated as “glaiver,” which didn’t fit in well with the class names we already had in the game. So, before we could start in on skills, items, costumes, or quests, we needed a new name for the high-flying female Castanic fighter.

After a lengthy internal debate, and with some feedback from the TERA community, we put the matter up for a vote, asking players to choose between several new names. Valkyrie won out, and we could finally begin the localization process.

Only how do you fit the Valkyrie, a uniquely Germanic concept, into a Korean MMO? With a looming deadline and a few thousand words of writing ahead of me, I decided to break the character down to its core elements. Valkyries are a race-restricted class, reserved to castanic female characters only. And since Castanics are an intensely matriarchal society, it stood to reason that NPC valkyries would be very powerful in castanic society.

So, where were they? Why had we, TERA fans (and writers, though the two are interchangeable), never heard of them before now? They had to be a secret martial order known only to Castanics—specifically NPC castanic matriarchs, who are never seen in-game. And they had to be a very, very old secret order, since the quest describing their origins starts in a section of the map that had been cut off from the rest of the world for generations.

Everybody loves a good conspiracy, so I combed back through all our lore (published and unpublished) on Castanics, looking for “story holes” in which to write. It didn’t take very long at all, and within the week I’d written some micro-flash fiction for in-game story books, and three scripts for my frequent collaborator, EME Senior Artist Josh Fulmore, to turn into comic book pages.

With the name and background squared away, I could now turn my attention to her skills. With the fiction we’d written, we could easily explain why her skills were so different from the more “modern” classes. Her ancient origins let us use Norse terms like Ragnarok, Bloodflower, and Gjallar Horn as skill names, alongside skills like Spinning Death, Shining Crescent, and Maelstrom. We even included lore in the skill descriptions, mentioning how the Valkyrie manipulates dream energy to explosive effects.

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil your fun. So, I’ll sign off with a bit of Valkyrie lore to tease your appetite, and I’ll see you in game!

I leave you with this, my sister of the storm. The sour smell of blood stays with you, no matter how many times you wash.

The memories of dead, black eyes, of twisted bodies with the faces of friends, will never leave you.

My grandmother was wrong, and most likely yours as well. Patience, tolerance, acceptance...these are not our ways.

We are no longer the guardians of history. We are vengeance, the choosers of the slain.

We are valkyries, and as foretold in prophecy, thrice carved in stone, our time will come again.

How Simulation Games Prepare the Military for More Than Just Combat

Before signing up for active duty, today's generation of armed forces recruits have usually played hours of branded RPGs such as Call of Duty. But while engaging in simulated battescapes improves motor skills and familiarity with military jargon, it can't prepare them for what's ahead. Or can it?

Peter Morrison, a veteran of the Australian Army and Chief Commercial Officer of Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim), says virtual exposure is vital to the success of tomorrow's warfighters in the field. His company, which recently scored a $5 million contract from the US Marines, takes it to the next level. We spoke with Morrison from his HQ in Orlando, Florida. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Peter, have you always been into RPG and SIMs?
I have always loved computer games and I was a gamer well before I was an Army officer. I discovered Operation Flashpoint from Bohemia Interactive Studio back in 2001, while I was studying computer science at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). I realized, as did many others at the time, that this particular computer game was especially suited to military training. It supported large, open environments and it included a mission editor that allowed a non-programmer to build very complex scenarios.

After graduation, I looked for positions in the Army that allowed me to work with simulations, and eventually I ended up at the Australian Defence Simulation Office (ADSO). I worked primarily as a Project Manager on many different simulations. It was very fulfilling for me to witness firsthand the adoption of game-based training in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) from 2003 to 2005.

Did BISim recruit you before you left active duty? What was your first role there and when did you become CEO?
I resigned from the Army in 2005 and approached BIS to advise them on the development of VBS2 and work on various components of the software. I didn't officially join the company until 2007, when I became CEO. In the meantime I had my own business, consulting for BIS and providing guidance on how to build the game based upon my knowledge of military training.

When did the company win its first US military contract and what was the product?
BIS had actually been contracted to deliver a military training game well before I joined, way back around 2003. The USMC funded the development of VBS1, which was a game-based desktop training tool used for squad-level training and call for fire. The next major contract was with the Australian Defence Force in 2005, when the VBS1 product was used to train soldiers deploying to Iraq. The USMC upgraded to the next version of VBS—VBS2—in 2006 on an enterprise-wide basis. Since then, VBS has been sold to more than 50 military organizations, including the US Army, where VBS3 is referred to as the US Army's "Game for Training."

Almost every veteran I've interviewed credits Call of Duty with helping them develop great motor skills before signing up. Explain how BISim does this on a whole other level.
A key point is that game-based training in the military focuses on cognitive learning—or "how to think" training. While certain games—like Call of Duty—might help with certain motor skills, they certainly don't improve the use of a real rifle, for example. Games are used in huge Battle Simulation Centers across the US Army (and many other military organizations), and soldiers sit at the computers and play collectively. But in the game, they are primarily practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures, and most importantly they are practicing making decisions. Yes, they move through and conduct the mission virtually—including shooting simulated rifles in the computer game—but the real point is to practice decision-making skills that will lead to better decisions in the real world.

Explain how you're able to recreate virtual Afghanistan, or elsewhere, to a level of fidelity unseen before?
What we do is combine the best of what the game industry offers—photo-realistic graphics and technologies like normal mapping and inverse kinematic animation—and apply this to meet military training needs, in the form of a game. So we have developed tens of thousands of high-fidelity 3D models over the years, and we (or the Army) can procedurally / automatically place this high-fidelity content based upon the best information available, [such as] the real-world location of roads, buildings, etc.

One of the most exciting things we're doing now is supporting the direct import of drone-collected 3D data into the game. This means that the military can fly a drone at a low level, and using photogrammetry, a highly realistic 3D model of a huge area can be constructed. Our users can quickly pull that data into the game and use it as the basis of training, which is really cutting-edge. We are actually working on this with the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), part of University of Southern California.

Which HMDs are used for engaging in your products—just military-grade, or have you integrated with commercial products such as Oculus too?
We have focused on commercial headsets but some of these are very high-end—for example the Varjo VR-1. The main issue with commercial VR has been relatively low resolution, making it difficult to read text or identify distant objects in the headset, but now we are seeing new headsets like the Vive Pro and the Varjo VR-1 providing resolutions that are close to acceptable. We are excited about the future and it's only a matter of time before we have 4K resolution in commercial VR devices.

Can you learn a language playing video games?

Online gaming has become a concern for some parents in the past few years and there are worries children might become addicted, with negative effects on their socialisation. This has led some parents to think of creative ways to reduce gaming, including rationing the time children spend online.

It’s important to remember though, that not all the research into children playing video games paints a bleak picture. In fact, there is a growing body of research that suggests such worries might be unfounded and that gaming could be an incredibly useful educational tool which might actually make children more sociable, not less.

In the same way that many schools use other forms of technology to get students more excited about learning – such as interactive whiteboards and tablets – both of which seem popular with students, video games might also offer similar benefits.

How gaming could help

Language learning in particular seems a perfect place to try “gamified” classes. Some schools are already using Minecraft in French classes – the idea is that students work together to build a “learning zone” in the Minecraft space – finding new words to help them along the way.

Indeed, James Paul Gee, a leading researcher in the area of video games as language learning tools, suggests that role-playing games such as The Elder Scrolls series or World of Warcraft, offer an ideal learning space for what he calls “at-risk” learners. In theory, there is just enough challenge, just enough support, just enough room for players to be themselves and, possibly most important, students have just enough “ownership” of the learning process.

“At-risk” language learners, by Gee’s definition, could be anyone. They may be learners with special educational needs, but equally they may also simply be learners who feel more vulnerable in a language classroom. Learning a language, after all, is a huge departure from some students’ comfort zones. Students, for example, can get nervous and inhibited in a classroom. Language learning researchers describe this as an “affective filter” – a fear of making a mistake and losing face literally affects how far a student joins in the class.

My research specifically looks at language learning – a subject area that appears to be one that students seem to endure rather than necessarily enjoy. It builds on the ideas of Philip Hubbard, a leading researcher in the field of using technology to enhance language learning. He has previously suggested that while technology in classrooms is seen as useful there is no strategy for using it – and this is where my research comes in. What I’m aiming to do is find that strategy and try to answer the following questions: how video games might help, why some students might prefer playing a video game to being in class and what areas of language learning a teacher could improve with this technology.

The power of gaming

Video games, especially massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and Runescape tend to cut through all the reasons for someone to be self-conscious. Players have to communicate in real-time, with no opportunity to agonise over what to say, or how to speak perfectly.

As a result, they may force themselves to become better at communicating so they can level up quicker – and this drive might go deeper still. Gamers are often encouraged to repeat levels several times, so that they can perform better.

Building connections

This is what the prominent motivation researcher, Zoltan Dörnyei, describes as “directed motivational currents”. The concept implies that motivation, for some students, may be driven entirely by their personal view of what success entails.

This is important because if the commonly held theory that many students learn languages to “tick a box” needed for graduation is correct, then they may only be motivated to study just enough to pass. On the other hand, if success in the language classroom is aligned with success in a gaming space, then harnessing this drive may be a powerful way to foster continued interest in language learning and developing language skills.

Video games may also have the potential to help learners develop more complex social skills. This view is inspired by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that truly meaningful communication came from negotiating cultural differences and finding solutions.

This happens a lot in a video game, as players try to find their roles, but more significant is what the negotiations seem to lead to: relatedness – finding shared meaning and a sense of belonging. A study conducted in Japan found that players seemed to play MMOs mainly for the purpose of forming social connections.

So will schools of the future all be learning languages through gaming? This remains to be seen, but given that the evidence suggests gaming can encourage social skills and teamwork – as well as incredible scope to share ideas and build knowledge – there may be a good argument for ditching the textbooks and logging into another world for a while.