Giant Bomb Presents: Zoe Quinn Has Embraced Our Cybernetic Future

ohgodjustmakemearobotalreadyscience

@alorithin: Talking about stuff barely videogame related is at the heart of Giantbomb, and it has been since the very beginning. Hell, the arrow pointing down podcast started with soft/energy drink taste tests for god's sake. This is almost exactly the sort of stuff that makes it onto the podcast every week. Stuff tangentially related to games have always been the precedent.

You think Tested would have run with this?

O god you're right lol. Though one day youtube will be gone or that video will be. And that guy will feel real dumb. :p

But you wouldn't believe you! They can't see it! They'll think you're crazy when you start mumbling that you feel MAGNETIC FIELDS MAN!!! So it seems like this implant will eventually lead to an intervention or a trip to the nut house.

@thefriend: That was the very first thing I thought. He would've been better off buying a domain and hosting the video himself rather than hoping that the video will be on youtube forever.

It is interesting. In listening to this podcast I was realizing that regardless of how much I think or don't think about body mod type stuff I now think that it probably could be a really good means to ends that I think about all the time. Kinda like the internet. When people think about solutions to problems they think inside what they know. But then the internet came about and information moved much more quickly emmerging all kinds of things that were impossible to predict. I am really curious what would happen with body modding that I just couldn't predict. Those are the things that will get people on board big time. There used to be big pushback against cell phones, especially when it was just a phone. But now it is used for so much more than that. The average person became a mini news reporter. The things became tracking devices as well. etc...

@kwang2000: Yes, the internet is a place right now where if you are negative about anything involving a woman or a minority then you will be labeled as sexist/racist (of course anything involving a woman or a minority will usually have a ton of genuinely sexist/racist comments, too).

But, this is a website which routinely has content dedicated to movies, wrestling and F1. Content involving John Vignocchi, John Drake, Dave Lang, Max Temkin, Eric Pope, Brad Muir, Paul Burnett and other industry folks often segues from video games to literally anything else imaginable, so I don't think this interview is out of place in the slightest.

i want to debate the value of this being used in video games. So her hand has a chip that contains... a string? Why would anyone need to modify their body to push a string? Why not a barcode... or usb stick. Again, i think this a solution in search of a problem... a very bad solution.

Why are people complaining about this? It's an interesting piece on a prominent video game developer that has been on the site multiple times in one way or another. This site was never just about video games, but also about the personalities behind them.

This has every right to be here.

DOWN WITH THE CYBORGS. PURE HUMANS FOR A PURE FUTURE.

Implants.

So is Zoe Quinn essentially Magneto now?

What?!?

This is a precedent we do not need to be starting.

On a website with both a wrestling podcast and an F1 podcast (and the occasional movie podcast) some of you are really gonna complain about this not being video game related? On Giant Bomb? Really you guys?

This is all a bit sensationalist. I really hope she hasn't set a precedent for uncertified people to start injecting themselves with foreign objects.

This decade-old (or more) fad is still a thing?

Sucks she has magnets in her fingers. It's a really cool idea, but you can't get a cat scan because it'll just pull the implants out immediately.

Well, at least you point out the hypocrisy of your argument at the beginning of the post instead of wasting everyone's time by making them read the whole thing.

Two employees of separate games websites have a semi-regular feature in which they discuss real life cars going fast around a track. People in comments profess undying (and admittedly understandable) love for Drew Scanlon.

Two different employees also have a full-on featured content thing they do regularly. They talk about movies. What they liked, what they don't like, what they watched. Movies, movies, movies.

In another semi-regular feature, a variety of individuals earnestly discuss wrestling. From top to bottom. Narratives, business moves, upcoming changes, speculation. All about wrestling. Literally zero negative criticism in the comment section for the most recent episode.

All three of those require you to pay money to a "gaming news" website to be able to view. Premium gaming news website content.

Here's a community favorite:

This is a video that shows a mobile llama petting zoo in San Francisco. Repeated calls for a regular segment/feature in comments, along with requests to have Llama do a guest appearance on the Bombcast.

Then an interview goes up. A game developer implants electronics that interact with hardware and software, wants to raise awareness of how that can impact games, and talks briefly about the neatness of having a code for a game about cybernetic augmentation in her cybernetic augmentation. People proceed to question the worthiness of such an interview on a gaming website.

Come on with the extremist talk, he has her on for a couple of things and she proved to be a good guest and now he is "worshiping" her? I think your insinuation is a bit weird.

@smackeroo: Why?

Also, as others have pointed out, it's interesting (not really) that some people here don't think this is "games-related enough" to be covered on this site when GB has a wrestling and F1 podcast, a llama video that no one said wasn't "games-related enough", the Bombcast which has always had a lot of non-games related talk etc.

Also, she's "barely a game dev"? Are we going to have that dumb fucking discussion about "what's a REAL video game???" now?

Some people on this site are gonna fucking explode if she gets the open Editor job.

That just gave me the best idea... This is how we finally get John Vignocchi into Disney Infinity!!!!

If your a fan of Zoe Quinn or body modification you may find this interview interesting.

Unfortunately, unless you're looking for personal history of a game developer i, personally, found this interview to be fairly valueless. The description text, "and some ideas she has for making games with this tech" is pretty misleading. the most valuable information i got out of the interview is that you can get an NFC chip that can be programmed with an android app (i don't know a lot about NFC and this interview didn't change that).

The conversation of body mods as it relates to software entertainment, rather then practicality, is an interesting one but really all this interview said about it was, "maybe we can do something weird with ARG or Asynchronous (DM) gameplay, i'm looking into it". Didn't come out of it with too much more information then i already had and very little inspiration with what you can do with the tech let alone why it would be necessary to embed it into your body.

So, how long until we have actual Cybermen walking the streets?

Ok, folks. Everyone needs to tone down the negativity. Constructive criticism is welcome, outright hostility to staff and guests is not. Keep it civil or your comments will be deleted.

Implants are going to be VERY niche for a VERY long time in the gaming community.

@monetarydread: Where's all this cool Zoe Quinn content? I only know about a Bombin on the AM guest appearance and this. I must be really missing out.

+1,000,000 cool points for Doctor Who references in the forums.

I can see why someone would want to do the chip thing, but implanting a magnet just seems like a terrible idea all around. Seems like so many things could go wrong with that.

@ruggles: The only other thing I can think of is the panel she and Patrick did at PAX East this year.

D:

All right, now.

I know that this is conceptually cool and we'd all really like this to be true, but this just screams "confirmation bias" to me. Seriously? A few hours after getting her implant, she's tapping into the Machine Gaia and can feel machines dying all around her? Do we even know that a hard drive's magnetic field fluctuates as it deteroriates? Could that just be normal disc activity as the disc head moves around?

More likely, these are minor (normal) operating magnetic field fluctations that she's not used to feeling and she's unintentionally personifying them and romanticizing them into something poetic, and something that they're not. Let's try to be rational here and not get swept up in the "OOH AHH CYBORG FUTURE" sensationalism of it.

I got the same NFC chip myself (not the magnet yet). I'd be happy to answer anyone's questions about it, since Zoe doesn't seem to post around here, and I haven't seen anyone else offer.

A couple things I caught: She can still get an MRI. It's been proved (including on an ep of Mythbusters) that it won't get ripped out. Same with the magnet. As I understand it, the implants are too small, to be effected by the MRI? Or something like that?

As for what it can do: anything any NFC tag can do. This particular tag holds 863 bytes of data. Enough for a URL, contact information, plain text, etc. There are also applications that can execute tasks just based on having scan the tag itself, by serial number. There are keyless ignition systems for vehicles that work on RFID. The Samsung Ezon is a deadbolt (like for your front door) that works with included NFC cards, but any other NFC tag can be programmed into it as well.

Also, you can totally order just the same one now: http://dangerousthings.com/shop/xnt-ntag216-2x12mm-glass-tag.

I guess you can eventually remove a small chip, but I'd be worried about serious implants seeing how quickly technology becomes outdated or outright obsolete.

@ruggles Also, she was on the couch with Phil Fish and the Samurai Gunn dudes for one of the GDC segments this year. But, as to be expected between Jeff, Max Temkin, and Phil Fish, she wasn't doing most of the talking...