A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. From a report: “Music,” wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, “has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.” A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers — that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life. A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed “music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing,” as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.
Roberta and Ken Williams are back. After 25 years out of the video game industry, the legendary founders of Sierra On-Line are working on a new project with an old twist – they’re rebuilding the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure as a 3D experience with a VR component.
Maybe that’s an old project with a new twist, but regardless, Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is a complete reimagining of the original title and it’s due to come out this fall for PC and Quest 2 VR headsets. Not only will this new interpretation add graphics to the text adventure, but it’ll be in first-person 3D, with details filled in by the minds that brought us King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria.
In traditional Williams fashion, Ken is in charge of the code as chief engineer, while Roberta is creative director, building the narrative and working across all aspects of the project. There are 16 people on their team at Cygnus Entertainment and they’ve all worked together remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve had our stressful moments,” Roberta said. “There have been moments that Ken and I have said, what are we doing? Why did we do this? And other moments are just really exhilarating and exciting. I’ve learned a lot, Ken has learned a lot. We have a really good team and I’m just so excited to have met them – not in person – but they’re very experienced in 3D graphics and programming.”
Cygnus Entertainment
That last bit is especially important, considering 3D development is a new arena for Roberta and Ken, who are best known for ’80s and ’90s narrative adventures and full-motion video titles. It’s been a quarter of a century since they last stepped into the world of game development, and they’re jumping straight into VR and Unity, a 3D development platform.
By her own admission, Roberta hasn’t even played games for the past 25 years. She and Ken have kept tabs on the industry, but mostly, they’ve been checked out.
“It was like, if we thought about it too much, we could be drawn back in,” Roberta said.
Instead of staring at computer screens and dreaming of digital worlds, Roberta and Ken spent 15 years traveling the planet on a 60-foot boat. They would land wherever they wanted and spend a few months, half a year, in one spot before hopping back on the trawler and sailing to a new location. Ken wrote four books about their travels during this time, plus another one about Sierra On-Line; Roberta wrote a historical novel about the Great Famine in Ireland.
“Which didn’t sell as well as his book,” Roberta said, laughing. “But anyway, after that we were looking for something to do and I noticed that Ken was doing a lot of YouTube tutorials on some sort of 3D engine, some sort of 3D programming language.”
She didn’t think much of it at first. Ken outlined a game idea he was toying with, where players would learn programming as they went, building simple experiences within his digital ecosystem. Kind of like Roblox, but with more emphasis on learning real-world programming skills.
“He was telling me this and he had some ideas on how to do it and make it fun,” Roberta said. “And I said, well, will it be fun?”
Ken assured her it would be, but she wasn’t convinced. That night when she was in bed, mulling over her husband’s dull-sounding idea, Colossal Cave Adventure popped into her head.
“I remember laying there and thinking, why did it do that?” she said. “You know, it’s like, is this a sign?” In the morning, Roberta brought her late-night revelation to Ken.
“I hadn’t really wanted to get back in the industry, but I just suddenly felt this urge, almost kind of like when I sat down and did Mystery House,” Roberta said. “And I don’t know why, and I mentioned it to him and I saw his eyes kind of light up.”
Cygnus Entertainment
Mystery House was Sierra On-Line’s debut game and when it landed in 1980, it was the first-ever graphic adventure. Roberta mapped out Mystery House in a quiet frenzy after playing the original Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game, in the late 1970s – as an avid reader, she was inspired by its interactivity and narrative heft, and her imagination got to work. She acquired a giant piece of paper from a local stationery store and started drawing rooms, connecting them and finding creative ways to get from one area to another. This ended up being the flowchart for Mystery House, and Ken, an avid programmer, brought it to digital life.
“Colossal Cave is the game that started Sierra On-Line,” Roberta said. “It started my career.”
Colossal Cave Adventure creators Don Woods and Will Crowther never copyrighted their work, which means anyone can do what they want with the IP, including the Williamses. Still, they got on the phone with Woods himself to ask permission, and the original developer had one request: Never try to copyright it. Keep the Colossal Cave franchise open, unowned and free for anyone to play with.
Roberta and Ken agreed, and they got to work. In June 2021, they revealed there was a new, secret game in development at their studio, Cygnus Entertainment. Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is due to come out this fall, primed to capture the imaginations of a new generation of players.
Instagram has finally brought back the ability to view your feed in chronological order. The default feed on Instagram mixes recent posts with older ones, which makes it hard to tell which posts are actually new. The app also adds clutter to your feed in the form of “suggested” posts, from accounts you do not follow.…
An ice shelf the size of Hong Kong has collapsed in eastern Antarctica, spawning a large iceberg and concerns that unusually warm temperatures in the region might be responsible.
Regulators in the European Union’s Parliament reached an agreement on a package of laws aimed at curtailing technology companies’ anti-competitive practices late Thursday.
The NVMe M.2 solid state storage market continues to expand with an ever-increasing number of drives, at a variety of price points and performance targets. There has been a steady influx of high-end drives targeting enthusiasts, along with an array of more-affordable DRAM-less offerings specifically tuned for consumer and gaming workloads….
Marco Arment’s Overcast has long served as an alternative to Apple Podcasts with features you don’t often see elsewhere, but there’s little doubt Apple has stepped up its game in recent years — and Arment has redesigned his app to match. The newly released (and still free) Overcast 2022.2 for iOS centers around a major interface rework that better reflects how you listen to podcast episodes. You’ll now have quick access to new and recently played podcasts from the home screen, and you can pin must-listen shows. You can also filter your podcast list to look at actively updated shows, all shows or even inactive productions.
The revamp also includes a few much-needed management tools. You can finally mark a podcast as played — yes, Apple and others have provided this for a while. You can also create playlists that only show starred, downloaded and in-progress episodes. If you’re fond of personalization, you can customize the look and order of playlists as well as the color of playback controls.
These additions won’t necessarily persuade you to ditch Apple Podcasts if you’re already heavily invested. Some of them are more catch-up features than unique selling points. However, they might make Overcast more compelling if you’re either frustrated with Apple’s app or didn’t want to give up a few must-have features just to use Overcast-specific perks like voice boosting and dead air reduction.
This Sunday, the 94th annual Acadamy Awards will grace your TV screen and with them, another cycle of film achievement comes to a close. Among the night’s nominees, the Acadamy rightfully recognized some of the best genre films of the year in various categories. But this slideshow isn’t about them.
At this point, Wordle needs no introduction. The game not only inspired many of us to enjoy guessing words every day, it also inspired a wave of clones and spin-offs, some of which were just as fun as the original. This latest one, however fun, turns up the difficulty dial to levels I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.
The ParrotSec team announced today the general availability of Parrot 5.0 as the latest stable release of this Debian-based distribution for ethical hacking and penetration testing.
A paramount rule of the animal kingdom is not to be seen unless you want to be. It goes for predators as much as prey: going unnoticed means surviving longer, either because it allows you to catch food or keeps you from becoming it. Here are some of the more creative ways that natural selection has produced effective…
Apple’s MacBook Air has received some crucial internal updates recently, but the larger design of this ultra-portable laptop has remained the same for nearly a decade—always a 13-inch screen. That could soon change with the introduction of a 15-inch model.
The Academy Awards are upon us, and you still have a bit of time to catch up on the nominated films…but not a lot. Theater-to-streaming windows are shorter than ever, which makes catching the nominees easier than ever, but ever-expanding runtimes (the average length of this year’s Best Picture nominees is a…
Former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd is working with whistleblowing agency Lioness to share information about kickbacks and bribery in the Middle East and North Africa. From a report: In June 2019, former Microsoft Senior Director Yasser Elabd traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney General’s office to discuss his allegations that Microsoft was ignoring bribery at subsidiaries in the Middle East and Africa. The meetings lasted nearly the entire day. Federal agents asked Elabd questions for hours. Elabd’s attorney told him that it was one of the first times they had witnessed the AG’s office send a representative to a whistleblower meeting like his.
But more than a year later, the SEC still hadn’t made a decision about Elabd’s allegations. The agency kept promising him that the team in charge of his case would make a decision soon about whether they would bring charges against Microsoft. Finally, at the beginning of March 2022, the case agent in charge of Elabd’s whistleblowing report told his lawyer that the SEC was closing the case because it didn’t have the resources to conduct interviews and find documentation abroad during the coronavirus pandemic. So Elabd decided to try a different route to share what he knows. Today he published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness that accuses Microsoft of firing him after two decades with the company because he asked questions about what he saw as bribery within the contracting services Microsoft uses to sell software to government and public bodies in countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Apple is said to be looking into creating a hardware subscription service for its iPhone and other devices, much like paying a monthly subscription for an app. It would come at a time when the cost of smartphones and other electronic devices continue to rise.
Apple is no stranger to subscription services. It already offers monthly digital
You Won’t Be Alone had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year (we were big fans), and will be hitting theaters on April 1. It’s a movie full of imagery and ideas that hang out in your head for days, somehow making a gritty story about a shape-shifting witch into a startlingly lovely investigation…
It takes a human being around 0.1 to 0.4 seconds to blink. In even less time, an AI-based inverse rendering process developed by NVIDIA can generate a realistic three-dimensional scene from a series of two-dimensional photographs taken from different angles.
NVIDIA’s approach is based on a new technology called neural radiance fields (NeRF,
Offering better visibility in bright conditions and lower power consumption, E Ink’s electronic paper screens are gaining in popularity as alternatives to LCD and OLED panels for digital signage, and the company has just made them even more appealing with an updated version of its color e-paper panels featuring much…
The water dispenser on your fridge is a modern convenience that many of us take for granted. Usually, it tastes better than the tap and it’s perfectly chilled. But sometimes, the dispenser can develop issues that cause the water to taste funky, even if the fridge itself is new. Here are some potential causes and…
Elden Ring has a bunch of spirit ashes, ethereal summons you can call forth to aid you in battle. Some, like Banished Knight Oleg, are highly effective damage dealers, capable of wiping out even the toughest of bosses. Others, hm, not so much—looking at you, spirit jellyfish ashes. While each has its own strengths and…
