What sports did they play during the renaissance in England from 14-1600s?
What sports did they play during the renaissance in England?
Answer by Verity
Tennis was very popular among the upper classes.
Rating: 5 like it? Reviewed by Master on Source: http://www.thebestsolver.com/what-sports-did-they-play-during-the-renaissance-in-england.html
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New-home sales rose in November, recording their strongest pace in more than 2 years, another sign of improvement in the housing market.
The Census Bureau reported Thursday that sales of new homes rose to an annual rate of 377,000 in the month, up 4.4% from October, and up 15% from year-earlier levels. It was the highest rate of new-home sales since April 2010, when sales were inflated by a temporary $8,000 tax credit for home buyers.
A combination of near record low mortgage rates, lower unemployment and a drop in foreclosures means there are more buyers interested in purchasing, and fewer available homes. That in turn has lifted home prices.
Those supply-and-demand dynamics are especially true in the new-home market.
There was only a 4.7 month supply of new homes on the market in November, the same tight inventory as has been the case in four of the previous six months. The last time there was a tighter supply of new homes available was in October 2005, near the height of the housing bubble.
The tight supply has lifted the median price of a new home sold in November to $246,200, up 14.9% from the comparable price a year earlier.
Anika Khan, senior economist with Wells Fargo Securities, said the report was stronger than expected, especially for what is traditionally a slow month for home sales. She said new-home sales and construction are becoming a more important driver of overall economic growth, which is even more important with the economy facing other headwinds such as a cutback on business investment and consumer worries about the fiscal cliff.
?New-home sales is a good story and it will continue to be a good story,? she said.
New-home sales can be more important to the economy than sales of previously owned homes since they require purchase of other goods, such as appliances, and because of the construction jobs needed to build the homes.
The continued rebound in prices likely will be a positive for both purchases and construction in the year ahead. Higher prices give current homeowners an incentive to sell their homes and procure the down payment they need for their next home purchase. Potential home buyers, who may have been on the sidelines because of uncertainty about home prices, might also be lured into the market.
Source: http://myfox8.com/2012/12/27/new-home-sales-strongest-in-more-than-2-years/
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So far at least, many on Wall Street seem to think that no matter what happens over the next few days with the fiscal cliff, Congress will still come through early in the new year.
Trader Warren Meyers uses his handheld device as he works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Dec. 21. Though stocks were slightly down before Christmas, there has been no mass panic on Wall Street, even as the fiscal cliff looms closer.
Richard Drew/AP
EnlargeWhen it comes to the ?fiscal cliff,? Wall Street has yet to hit the panic button ? although some politicians might wish it would.
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Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, practically begged for a sharp sell-off on Wall Street to get Congress to make a deal.
?If we get pistol-whipped by the market, if it punishes us for our failure to act, it might be the only thing that gets us to act,? he told CNBC.
It wouldn?t be the first time a sell-off on Wall Street prompted Congress to do something. Back in October 2008, an initial failure by Congress to help the banking industry caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall 30 percent, or about 3,000 points, in two weeks.
That hasn?t happened so far this time. Yes, in the past four trading sessions, the market has declined modestly. But since President Obama?s reelection, the Dow is off only about 130 points, or about 1 percent.
On Thursday, the Dow had a roller-coaster day, at one point falling nearly 140 points before recouping most of its losses when reports circulated the House would return on Sunday. At 4 p.m., the average was down only about 19 points.
What?s going on?
Wall Street?s shrug is partly related to its feeling that no matter what happens over the next few days, Congress will still come through early in the new year.
?It makes no difference whether it?s next week or on Jan. 4, when there is a new House of Representatives,? says David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors in Vineland, N.J. ?They will reach a deal because they have to reach a deal.?
Pete Davis of Davis Capital Investment Ideas, who advises many Wall Street clients about Congress?s actions, says many of his clients think as Mr. Kotok does ? that Congress will act early in 2013.
However, ?I keep telling them that is not my view,? he says. ?They will reach agreement, but not before a fair amount of damage.?
Still, some on Wall Street think Congress doesn?t have to act right away.
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Video games are an evolution of the human tradition of storytelling. It began as tales told around a fire, progressed into images painted on walls, developed into text printed on paper, and advanced to moving pictures accompanied by sound. Video games take story telling a step farther. The audience is no longer a passive spectator, but is instead an active participant in the story being told. Often authors are tapped to write tie-in fiction for popular video game franchises, and sometimes they are even hired on to help craft compelling stories for the games themselves.
We asked this week?s panelists?
Q: How do you feel about the state of storytelling in video games? What do developers do right? What could they be doing better? What games do you think tell excellent stories?
Here?s what they said?
William C. Dietz
New York Times bestselling author William C. Dietz has published more than forty novels some of which have been translated into German, French, Russian, Korean and Japanese.
If it was easy to write good games everyone would do it.
There was a time when killing aliens, monsters, and bad guys was enough. But not anymore. Now gamers want good writing too!
Yeah, yeah, I know. There are lots of games that don?t involve shooting things. And that?s good. But since I don?t play those games my expertise (such as it is) relates to shooting aliens, monsters and bad guys. And I believe good writing and good game play can coexist.
But before I get into that I should divulge that my perspective has been shaped by writing tie-in novels for franchises like Star Wars, Halo, Starcraft, Hitman, Resistance, and Mass Effect.
I?ve written games too, including Sony?s RESISTANCE: Burning Skies with Mike Bates, and the LEGION OF THE DAMNED? ios game with Conlan Rios. But I have never been a full-time employee of a gaming studio?so my knowledge is limited to what I have seen from the outside looking in.
First, before you write a game you have to have an outline or treatment. Unlike writing a novel, which some people (although I?m not one of them) can do without an outline, a game involves lots of people working in parallel. And they need a plan.
Generally speaking there are two kinds of outlines/treatments. Short outlines that are designed to get a game together by a hard deadline with little regard for possible sequels. And I can relate to that. Take the Legion of the Damned series for example. I planned to write a series so I created a universe large enough to accommodate a number of books. But did I write a nine book story arc? Heck, no. I had no way to know that the first volume would do well enough to pave the way for a second novel never mind all the rest.
And it?s the same for a lot of the game shops. They hope there will be more iterations but have to put all the energy they have into the one they?re working on at the moment. And given the strength of the competition it will have to be awesome in order to survive.
The result is that long term story and character development suffers and I see the results of that when I?m hired to write a tie-in novel. Time and time again I see really interesting characters who were killed off in the first or second game because no one knew what to do with them or to freak players out. (If we kill Carter they?ll figure we might smoke anybody!) The result being that they aren?t around for people like me to feature in books, comics, or secondary games.
And the reverse is true as well. Some characters need to be devoured by a ten story tall boss or fall into the bottomless abyss! But they live on and on. Usually because they are useful in some way or have a substantial fan base.
Long outlines by contrast assume success and incorporate something like a three game story arc. That?s totally cool if three games get made. But what if the first game fails to gain sufficient traction? Then the team is left with a hanger? Meaning characters that aren?t fully developed, a plot was never fully realized, and some disappointed customers.
The point is that to some extent the quality of the writing, or what the writing could be, is determined by the choice of whether to create a short or long outline.
Now this is where things get even more complicated. Some teams have a very vertical top-down management structure that dictates the plot to the person or team who are writing the script. Others are more collaborative and tend to get things done through brainstorming and consensus.
Each approach has definite advantages especially to an outsider such as myself. The top-down people know what they want, and that?s a good thing, except that they are frequently resistant to outside ideas. And, if they are driven by a long form outline/treatment then they have a tendency to sacrifice things to it. As in, ?Hell no, we can?t do that? If we do we won?t be able to blow up the moon in game three.?
The result being that the characters, the plot, and even the dialog is dictated to the writers. Not directly?but through marginalia like, ?Jessica would never say something like this.? And no justification is required because hey, the team leaders have the ability to channel Jessica, and the writers don?t. Another way in which the writing gets skewed.
Meanwhile the consensus driven teams are more open to suggestions, but it can be difficult to get closure, and when you think you have it chances are you don?t. So you pitch your idea to the team, they nod, and you can feel the beginning of a glorious consensus. Then Larry says, ?I think that works Bill? I?ll write it up, share it with the level designers, and check with my wife. She has a lot of good ideas. Then, once we have everybody?s feedback, we?ll move ahead.?
No, I?m not kidding. So the danger here is producing a script that lacks focus, a consistent voice, and a singular style.
I mentioned level designers who, as the title implies are responsible for developing individual levels in a game, often referred to as ?missions? in shooters. First let me say that these poor souls are often as powerless as the writers are and frequently for the same reasons.
However where writing is concerned the designers can be part of the problem. That?s because while they want the overall project to succeed?it?s even more important to them that they create the coolest level that ever was. Because if they can do that they succeed even if the game fails. You can imagine their next job interview. ?Sure Invasion of the Snails cratered, but look at Level Three? It rocks.?
That means they might be vocal advocates for ideas, gimmicks, and dialog that is antithetical to the overall script. As in ?Hey, dude, how ?bout we cap Baxter at the end of level three? The players will never see it coming.? Which would be fine except that Baxter has to throw the lever on the light bridge in level five. Sigh.
Another barrier to good story telling is the almost universal tendency to sacrifice dialog to action. Time and time again I?ve seen management whack character interaction in order to shoehorn some additional action into the mix. The assumption being that players, especially young ones, are mostly interested in shooting things. And if you look at which games make the most money there?s something to be said for that view.
That brings us to the audience and their role in this. Yes, they have a role. If people buy well written games that will encourage management to insist on better writing. And there?s some evidence that we?re headed in that direction. The fact that people regularly create and post lists of the best written games attests to that.
Finally there are process/production issues that limit what a script can or can?t be. You can write it?but can the company afford it? Can the technology support it? And is there enough staff to get the job done? Typically the answer to at least some of those questions is going to be no. And that means compromise.
So given all of the moving parts, all of the ways that things can wrong, it?s amazing that good game scripts ever get written! Fortunately they do. Which ones are they? The ones you enjoy most.
That brings us to the question of what could be done to improve the quality of game related scripts. I think the solution is for management to insist on good writing, interesting characters, and a story that matters. The sort of characteristics that define a good book or a good movie. I believe that will lead to an immersive experience and commercial success.
Oh, and they should be nice to writers! Never mind, I got carried away.
Kameron Hurley
I think video game writers are suffering from some of the same things novel writers are in this biz. Big studios want break-out hits. They want to sell 100 million copies of stuff like Madden and Grand Turismo. To sell in those kinds of numbers, you have to write for a very broad audience. You have to dumb a lot of stuff down. I?ve been following the struggles of game developers like BioWare, who were acquired by EA a couple years ago, and how they?re trying to make these mega-millions sellers games out of what are, to some extent, niche RPG games. It?s a heart-bleeding thing to watch sometimes, but I see some light.
BioWare writes some of the best games around, and that?s in no small part due to the fact that their goal is to create amazing games where storytelling is still held up as core to the game making process, as opposed to something that just strings together big fight scenes or makes sense of slick graphics.
I broke into BioWare games with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and was hooked. It not only has one of the most epic twists of all time, but the characters and worldbuilding are so diverse and complex that you get totally sucked in. I had the same experience playing their Dragon Age: Origins game, where at one point I had to make a decision between continuing a romance with one character and doing the best thing for the party. I still remember the shock I got when a character ended up walking away from the party because of a decision I made. Immersive storytelling means that over a series of games, or even a single game, you get really attached to the outcome of the story ? more so than you would in a traditional point and shoot game. We see this all the time in regular fiction, too ? the more you connect with and empathize with the characters, the more you feel like they?re people you really know, the more involved you become in the story.
And then, of course, there?s the successful Mass Effect games, also put out by BioWare, which give you the opportunity to play the most badass heroine in video game history maybe ever. If you so choose. BioWare does an astonishing job creating characters of all types, including powerful female characters, and that?s still all too rare in the gaming business. I?m a huge fan of the God of War games, too, but I don?t fall head-over-heels for those button mashers the way I do deep, interactive storytelling games.
I think the best games ? like the best novels ? can teach you empathy. And what really great RPG?s like BioWare?s excel at is also teaching you how to deal with the results of your actions. Being an asshole has consequences. So does being a goody-goody. Budget constraints and that whole ?make something that pisses off no one? push for mass appeal have meant fewer real choices and consequences, it?s true, but I have hope for a return to more choices in the future.
That?s because I see some shifts back toward great storytelling. Games like World of Warcraft ? which I don?t exactly play for the deep storytelling ? have placed more emphasis on story and inventive questing with recent expansions in order to appeal to and retain long-time subscribers.
Knowing there are still companies out there willing to take some risks and invest in great storytelling makes me optimistic, as does the rise of indie gaming companies, which may have smaller budgets, but also less pressure for selling mega-millions. Sometimes I think that gaming companies, like many novelists, get so focused on the selling mega-millions part that they forget about why they got into storytelling in the first place.
As players, as readers, we do occasionally need to remind them that we value great stories.
Guy Haley
British writer Guy Haley is the author of Reality 36, Omega Point, and Champion of Mars. He has three books coming out from the Black Library next year ? first of which will be Baneblade and Skarsnik. The Crash, his latest novel for Solaris, is also out next summer.? Guy has been a magazine editor and journalist for 15 years, working for SFX, Death Ray and White Dwarf. When he?s not staring at words on a screen he spends his time trying to train his Malamute to do stuff, shouting at the cat, or drinking beer; sometimes all at once.
Computer games are a difficult medium to write effective stories for. Traditional storytelling is by no means passive ? television, books, films, plays etc all require a significant imaginative effort on the part of those enjoying them, but video games are a different creature. They?re halfway between actual experience and story, and that means a lot of tricks you can use in other formats just don?t work very well.
There are games out there with fantastically detailed backstories that play little part in one?s enjoyment of the game, being just a framework to set a bunch of missions against, and those where the narrative is so all-consuming the player feels like they?re on rails, running through a fairground ride (check out my article here) on MMORGS for more on this). Some games, sandbox 4X games, the better RPGs like Fallout 3 and Skyrim, present you with a story that you can stick to or ignore, but these can be just as frustrating as games-on-rails, as your own meandering quests lose any meaningful framework.
And this is because games need stories, and they need stories mainly because they are limited and limiting. If you were really trying to survive a rad-blasted wasteland or conquer the galaxy, you?d feel invested, but even in an open-ended video game adventure, there are a great many restrictions to what you can do, and many distancing factors between you and the world you are exploring/invading.
Furthermore, there?s none of the subtle shading of emotion and connection with other ?people? that you get in real life, or, for that matter, in books, theatre or cinema. Even in old-fashioned wargames and RPGs, I have a greater sense of connection with the characters, probably because these games, unlike video games, are acts of collaborative storytelling. Perversely, this lack of emotional involvement is even more true of multiplayer online games, where most players? focus on the mechanics of the game (and sheer rudeness, unfortunately) distances you further from the tale.
Some games have brilliant worlds, great scripts, and awesome levels of detail. But I?ve yet to play a game (and I do play a lot of games) where I?ve gone, ?Wow, what an excellent story.? X-Com is probably the closest I?ve come to feeling that, and probably only because of the attachment to my men that I built up through nail-biting missions.
So it?s a question of engagement, and video games are not engaging. I love computer games, I love gaming of all types in fact, and although I have been very impressed by the backgrounds of many, I?ll turn to other forms of entertainment for a genuine story experience every time.
Abhinav Jain
Long-time science-fiction and fantasy geek, lover of all things Star Wars and Warhammer (mostly all things anyway). I currently have several works in progress for both science fiction and fantasy in different formats ? short story, novella, novel. I am also a book reviewer for The Founding Fields and a movie reviewer for Just Beyond Infinity. You can follow me on twitter @abhinavjain87 and through my blog at http://sonsofcorax.wordpress.com/
Storytelling in video games. Now that?s a real bag of tricks to consider. If I?m honest, storytelling has always been much more important to me than gameplay ever has. I believe it?s harder to innovate in game-play than it is with storytelling because, after all, how long can you keep on doing the same thing you always do in a shooter like Doom or Space Marine, or in a strategy game like Homeworld or Age of Mythology? And yet, storytelling is often what I see developers not getting right. I used to play quite a few games in college, not the least of which was Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic and World of WarCraft and Zeus: Master of Olympus, but that interest has waned in recent years, especially since I had to stop playing World of WarCraft for financial and personal reasons. In the last two and a half years since then, I?ve only played Space Marine, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, Sins of a Solar Empire and some free time on Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of WarCraft, alongwith some Mass Effect demos.
That?s not to say that the storytelling or the gameplay is at fault here, just that I?ve changed priorities of sorts, being invested in becoming a published author and my various reviewing gigs and blogging. What hasn?t changed though is that I still pick up games because of the storytelling, and not the gameplay. The only way a video game is going to turn me off with regards to the gameplay is when the gameplay is really, really bad. Storytelling remains the bar with which I judge all video games.
For me, one of the games with the best storytelling out there is the original Homeworld, a space-based Real Time Strategy game, by Barking Dog Studios and Relic Entertainment. In it, you have a society, the Kushan, stranded on a hell-hole of a planet, Kharak, with tons of infighting and everything else that entails. Then, they find a crashed spaceship in a desert and their entire world-view changes. They discover that the planet they have called home for all these uncounted years isn?t actually their home world. And they set out on an epic journey across space to reclaim their true home world: Hiigara. On the way they encounter space pirates (the Turanics), traders (the Bentuusi), and the people who stranded them on that hell-hole in the first place, the Taiidani. The story is simply epic. Through in-game cut-scenes and cinematic videos, we get to explore all the different cultures and learn about the history of this setting. Often times the videos are simplistic, in that they are little more than a series of still images. But they still pack a hell of a punch because of the voice-overs and narration. You get treated to the story in bite-sized chunks and that?s okay, because the writing, the dialogues, the narration and everything is just superb. I was so inspired by the story that for one of my high school English essay assignments I wrote a thousand word flash fiction about how the Kushan people felt when they learned that Kharak had been destroyed by their enemies, in retaliation for the Kushan developing spaceflight, which had been a condition of their exile to that world. In all the missions that the player must perform to help the Kushan reclaim Hiigara and their place in the wider galaxy, the story is extremely immersive. We get last stand type missions, missions where you have to break blockades, missions where you have to survive asteroid fields,destroy staging areas, pass through spaceship graveyards, and so much more. The variety is great. Homeworld: Cataclysm and Homeworld II continue all of this and more, as the stakes keep increasing and the setting is increasingly more detailed and more nuanced. Ancient horrors are brought back, there are prophecies of great apocalypses and resurgences, and more, much more. I would love to read a series of novels based on Homeworld.
Then you have the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, another of my all-time favourite games, this time by Bioware and LucasArts. As a big fan of the Star Wars franchise, this was another epic game that had so much focus on the storytelling aspects, with some really great game play that was so different than what I had seen in Diablo and Diablo 2 (my gaming experience at the time was very limited). The folks at Bioware got me to really invest into the story and the characters. I didn?t like some of the narrative decisions that I was forced to make, but the setting they had created was really diverse. They got the space opera feeling of the setting down, since we had to travel to all these different planets, explore ancient and ?modern? cultures that are all different from each other, like the Wookies and the Rakata for example. And since this was an RPG, the storytelling was even more important than it had been for Homeworld. What Bioware did right was what Barking Dogs did right: diversity in the missions and how they are carried out and actually exploring the backstory of both settings.
And we can?t ignore World of WarCraft either here, which I think has one of the best storytelling experiences out there right now. I started playing towards the tail-end of The Burning Crusade, which was the first expansion, just before Wrath of the Lick King came out. I pretty much burned through the various quest lines until the new expansion came out so I could be ready to step into it as an at-level character, so I don?t remember much of the classic and TBC quest-lines. But there are some that stuck with me. Both the Eastern and Western Plaguelands, the lands that once used to be the Kingdom of Lordaeron, have some of the most haunting questlines in terms of their emotional impact. We deal with big-bad undead enemies and the foot soldiers alike, but there were the little things that really made those zones awesome. I offer this fan-video by noted machinima artist Cranius as evidence: click here for the link. This is the quest line titled ?The Redemption of Joseph Redpath? and begins with the ghost of his daughter. The video always makes me teary-eyed. When players have to get into Stratholme and fight against all the big bads, it?s even worse. Fans of WarCraft III will remember that Prince Arthas slaughtered the citizens of the city when the city was struck by the plague. Just the emotional resonance of that moment, as you stride through the city is immense.
The entirety of Wrath of the Lich King also has some epic questlines, and my favourite zone is Storm Peaks, a land steeped in the mysticism of Azeroth?s history. Discovering everything there, like the instance of Ulduar, allying with the various tribes of dwarves and giants that call it home, was a great experience. That zone underscores what for me is an undeniable fact: Blizzard knows how to do some great epic questlines. Despite what people may have you believe, it?s not all just kill twenty goblins, collecting ten red wolf meat and so on. Wrath of the Lich King brought with it vehicle combat. That had an incredible effect on how the quests could be done. I could fly gnomish copters and bomb the hell out of enemies. I could ride young drakes and fight off a big bad dragon. I could ride in tanks and destroy other tanks. The possibilities really were endless. That?s how Blizzard innovates. Wrath of the Lich King was an incredible experience for me as someone who is invested in storytelling. I even wrote up some pieces of fan fiction about my character, a human paladin who has sworn revenge on Arthas and all Orcs. I think I still have that somewhere on my hard drive.
In more recent memory, Space Marine by the folks at Relic and THQ has been another awesome experience. Based on the Warhammer 40,000 franchise of tabletop games by Games Workshop, the game is about a Captain of the Ultramarines chapter as he and his warriors defend an Imperial world from the ravages of the Orks, the galactic menace. The storyline in the game is great and has some truly epic moments (such as a female senior officer of the Imperial Guard, and fighting off enemies in gunships), the game combines elements of both the RPG and shooter genres for a really interesting hybrid. Again, there is a great diversity in mission types and locations, etc, but where the storytelling fails is in its denouement, in the epic battle that?s been building up from the get go. It also underscores how painfully short the whole game is. The Warhammer 40,000 setting one of the grandest and most epic settings out there in science fiction, with an incredible amount of depth and nuance to it, no matter which faction it is. But it seemed that the developers went for the safe and short route. It?s a very different sort of approach than what we got in the first three Dawn of War games, which are RTS games based on the same franchise. A lot of potential for character development was simply left unfulfilled. And that?s my main criticism for the game. I do have to say though that the opening, when the fate of the world is being discussed by the bigwigs of the local Imperial authorities, that is exactly the kind of opening I wanted for this game. It highlights the merciless and ?grimdark? feel of the setting.
As you can tell, I?m a big fan of the grand, epic storylines, where both the focus and scope of the game is huge. I think those are trickier stories for developers to get right. Whether its dialogue, or narration, or quest text there is something inherently compelling in such stories. I find them much more inspiring than the Halos and Call of Duty?s out there.
Myke Cole
As a secu?rity con?tractor, gov?ern?ment civilian and mil?i?tary officer, Myke Cole?s career has run the gamut from Coun?tert?er?rorism to Cyber War?fare to Fed?eral Law Enforce?ment. He?s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deep?water Horizon oil spill. All that con?flict can wear a guy out. Thank good?ness for fan?tasy novels, comic books, late night games of Dun?geons and Dragons and lots of angst fueled writing.
I started in the video game stone age with the 8 bit graphics of Hunt the Wumpus and Ultima I and the text reels of Zork. They helped form the bedrock of love-of-fantasy that eventually grew into my desire to write for a living. Infocom, for reasons I don?t fully understand, always treated the Zork storylines as a lark, as if the medium of gaming somehow precluded taking the story seriously (we like games? Nah. We?re only KIDDING!). Anyone remember Leather Goddesses of Phobos?
But the graphic based games had only a veneer of a storyline. In Karateka, an 8 bit classic that sucked up WEEKS of my childhood, a bad guy kidnapped your girlfriend, and you had to fight your way through a castle to rescue her. Not much of a story.
But, here?s the thing. I *miss* those days. This is because I filled in the blanks. I knew that Akuma had a backstory. Maybe he was part demon? I knew that his castle ruled over a fiefdom, full of peasants suffering under his rule. Maybe there were other resisters among them? Maybe some of them had stories? I knew that princess Mariko wasn?t just a weak woman, waiting to be rescued. At the end of the game, if you stayed in your fighting stance and got to close to her, she?d kick you in the head and kill you. She must have some training of her own. Was she also a karateka? Had she kept this secret from you? Why?
These questions formed the bedrock of my nascent storytelling skills, as I drifted off to sleep at night wondering about Iolo and Shamino. Who were they? Where did they grow up? What was that like? The 8-bit rendering of the Wumpus didn?t satisfy. I had to paint the picture in my head. The Grue comes to eat you in the pitch black, but you never *see* it. My mind worked to fill in the blanks.
And that, just as much as fantasy novels and comic books, made a writer out of me.
Don?t get me wrong, today?s video game storytelling is *outstanding* (the original Deus Ex and Thief series, anyone?) Modern game stories have absolutely inspired my writing. But there?s something about the early days, a gap in the picture, that I will always miss.
I had to work to fill in those blanks. And I came to love that work.
I still do.
Jason M. Hough
Jason M. Hough (pronounced Huff) is a former 3D Artist and Game Designer (Metal Fatigue, Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction).? His first novel, The Darwin Elevator, will be released in July 2013 by Del Rey, followed by books two and three of the trilogy in August and September.
Robert McKee, the great lecturer on plot structure, said ?There?s only one story: the hero?s journey.?? And, other than a handful of possible exceptions, most video games are exactly that: A hero, usually you, on a journey of some sort.
Games are an interesting beast though because there?s really two stories trying to be told: the one pre-programmed in (sometimes no such thing exists), and the one the player creates through their actions.
The massive challenge facing game designers is to make us feel that we?re making the decisions, that this really is our story being told.? This often must be an illusion, but the great games will make us forget that (Grand Theft Auto comes to mind).? The worst of them, and I feel this is happening more and more as story complexity in games increases, will feel to us like nothing more than a string of pre-recorded scenes we?ve simply been given the tedious task of unlocking.? In these cases, either the gameplay or the story must be uncommonly good for players to put up with it.? Uncharted pulled this off.? Mass Effect, too, though the feeling of not being in control is well masked here because much of the story unfolds in gameplay rather than cinematics.? On the other hand, most movie-based games fail in this area for reasons I hope are self-evident.
Portal is a great example of a game that could have eschewed a pre-programmed story.? At its core Portal is a linear collection of clever physics-based puzzles.? If it went no further it would have been pretty good, too.? But it would have been sterile.? I think what made Portal so great, beyond the brilliant play mechanic, was the story layered on top of it.? It tied the whole thing together and added a wonderful momentum, all without getting in the way.? Players remember ?thinking with portals? as much as they remember ?the cake is a lie.?
In fact this illustrates another challenge in conveying story in a game: the nature in which we play them.? Short sessions over the course of a few weeks, occasionally with multiple-day gaps in between.? The odds are stacked against complexity and characterization.? How often have you picked up an RPG after a long break and racked your brain to try and remember what the hell was going on?? I feel this way with books when there are years between releases in a series, but if I?m away from an RPG for even a few days I sometimes feel lost.? Games also are likely to get repeat visits, often with players going through the same game but as a different character.? All of this stacks up against the game designer who is striving to tell a complex story, and in the past has been the primary reason for light stories that put most of their focus on high-impact moments (first and last level, typically).
My favorite game this year was FTL.? The wonderful thing about FTL is that it has no preconceived story line.? Instead it has an elegant, simple plot motivator: unseen bad guys are coming for you.? They get closer with each passing moment and your goal is to stay ahead of them so that when they do catch up, you?re ready.? The story, though, the journey that you go on to get from beginning to end, is yours.? It comes through organically.? And it is different every time and even though you basically never win, it?s almost always an amazing, gut-wrenching, tension filled extravaganza.? And the further you get, the higher the experience soars.? It?s brilliant, and the best part is that your decisions, every damn little one of them, ends up helping or haunting you right to the bitter end.
Another game I?ll mention is Minecraft.? A very different game from FTL, but similar in the sense that the story is what you make it. And though it can often have a story no more interesting than ?I dug a ditch?, I guarantee you when you have a truly epic hardcore survival-mode run that ends in a desperate clash with a slew of monsters pouring through the dungeon stronghold you accidentally breached, you will never forget that.? And you know what, when you tell another player about it they will listen with rapt attention to your story.? Story, see? I bet you didn?t know Minecraft had one.? Sure, sometimes it doesn?t. Sometimes it is boring.? But try telling another Uncharted player how you beat the final level.? They?ll probably cut you off halfway through and say, ?yeah, I know, I played it? (or maybe ?dude, no spoilers?).? Nothing against Uncharted, by the way. I played it and enjoyed it, but since setting down the controller I hadn?t spent a moment thinking about it until now.? The focus is on a pre-programmed story (a great one too, with fine writing) but there?s virtual zero opportunity for the player to make their own story.
My advice to game designers today: Design your game to let the player?s actions tell a great story.? Don?t treat the player as a mule who is just carrying the camera gear from pre-rendered scene to pre-rendered scene.? I say this, by the way, as a former game designer who is guilty of every sin mentioned above.? I also realize this is a tall order in this age of movie-sized budgets and risk-averse executives.? They want to see every dollar on the screen, as the saying goes, and so they want designers to force the player down one path, allowing all the focus to go there.? Resist!? Or do what I did, and write books instead.
Paul Kirsch
Paul Kirsch thinks way too hard about science fiction, steampunk, and video games, and treats every Twilight Zone marathon like a national holiday. He reviews books and writes about writing at paul-kirsch.com
I used to think that we could do no better than games like Baldur?s Gate or Planescape: Torment, where reading a novel?s worth of dialogue and description was as vital to the game play experience as combat. Those are like The Godfather of gaming ? fantastic, but they would prove a hard sell today, when gamers could just as easily flick an angry bird across the screen. That said, I would argue that the potential for quality storytelling is every bit as genuine today as it was yesterday, and that gamers have some of the biggest hearts in the creative world.
Whether putting together a book, a film, or a piece of music, the artist has to think beyond their vision of the masterpiece and factor how the product will engage the audience. Game designers face this challenge every day. They need to craft a convincing environment with (often) a quality score, sound, graphics, narrative flow, and dare I even mention a fun and challenging game mechanic. I can only imagine that they?re pulling their hair out over audience engagement during every stage of the project.
When the game is done, gamers are left with nothing but the rattling in our heads. The quest is over. No one left to guide them through the world. This is where the story of a game is tested: with the question of where it left its audience. Did it tie up every loose end, or leave us wondering what we did wrong? Was the ending consistent with the rest of the perceived narrative? How did the gameplay inform the story itself, if at all? The story becomes the emotional anchor that weighs the game in our minds long after we play it. Bastion is a fantastic example of a game with emotional girth. A combination of narrative, music and overall tone make the player feel nostalgia for a world that was already dead. That game is laden with resonance before even approaching the question of play. Portal and Half-Life are instances where the designers value the intelligence and insight of players, and craft resonant experiences where the limitations and puppet strings are nearly invisible. Alan Wake, Assassin?s Creed, and the classical Omikron: The Nomad Soul utilize the meta tools of great literature and force the player to confront their own sense of reality, with the game?s journey as symbolic of an interior quest for self-discovery.
Telling a story in a game is both simpler and more complicated. We have the tools to craft gorgeous worlds on a massive scale, but a greater responsibility to make the story as compelling.
I save the lion?s share of optimism for the independent game world. Steam has leveled the playing field to give modest games the audience they once lacked, using the same model as iTunes or ebook self-publishing. Even if the big companies went morally bankrupt overnight and started to grind out Call of Duty clones, it would take a lot more to destroy the creative endurance of gamers. The games we want to play are being made because we?re the ones making them.
Zachary Jernigan
Zachary Jernigan?s debut novel, No Return, comes out on the 5th of March, 2013, from Night Shade Books. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov?s, Crossed Genres, and Escape Pod, among others. He promises/hopes that he is better at writing fiction than he is at playing video games.
When the kind and august ? not to mention muscular ? Nick Sharps asked me to be part of this discussion, my first thought was, He should get Paul Kirsch to contribute! (This was literally thirty seconds before Paul, knowing his own strength in this department, volunteered.) Though I was interested in the topic and agreed to contribute, my knowledge of the current state of storytelling in gaming is? sadly lacking.
But Paul ? Paul?s a gaming guru, a vocal supporter of the art form. His enthusiasm is often infectious. He has, for a couple years now, been encouraging me to play video games more. In particular, he has raved about the storytelling in Mass Effect. One evening, he told me with ever-growing enthusiasm how immersive and complex the game was, completely ignorant of how much the very idea of the game stressed me out. You see, I?m the kind of gamer (though that term is too select; occasional and completely bumbling controller-masher is more appropriate) that worries over every little detail, making sure that every corner of aroom is explored, until giving up in a huff five minutes after starting.
Dude, the games of today are hard. And the more complex they are, the closer I come to a heart attack. I mean, goodness, my favorite game series of all time is Mario Kart. That?s my speed, man.
So why on Earth am I part of this discussion? Well, because, other than the fact that Nick was kind enough to ask me and I?m just enough of an attention-junkie to accept, I really love the concept of storytelling in video games. While I?m sitting, neurons barely firing as I watch some dumb TV show, there are millions of gamers immersing themselves in virtual worlds, solving puzzles and building skills ? contributing, in a far from passive way, to sophisticated storylines. It?s awesome. I, interested if uninvolved party that I am, lament how little respect is granted to an art form that contributes so much to our narrative culture.
All of this begs the question, though: If I can see the virtue in these games, why don?t I make a more concerted effort to play them? And my answer is? Laziness? Stupidity? I don?t really know the exact reasons. I do know, however, that I?d be thrilled to have my own novel turned into a game ? of course I would; No Return: The Game would be so much cooler than No Return: The Movie! ? but I also know that I?d stink at playing it. I?d go to L.A. to visit Paul, where I?d watch him play, reveling in how he contributes to the story I helped create. And then I?d visit my bosses, Jason and Jen (both huge gaming advocates), and watch them play.
I?d be a bystander, thrilled and jealous by turns.
It probably won?t happen, of course, but it gives me shivers just thinking about how cool it?d be.
Now, I realize that I haven?t contributed too much to the issue, here. I only touched on the first of Nick?s questions. But? I do hope I?ve made it clear that, even to the non-player, the virtues of video games as a narrative medium are obvious. In other words, some of us may be intimidated by how mature the art form has become, but this doesn?t mean we can?t appreciate it in our own way.
Thanks for asking me to contribute, Nick. Thanks for reading, readers!
David J. Williams
David J. Williams is author of the 22nd century espionage/future war Autumn Rain trilogy as well as this year?s steampunk novel The Pillars of Hercules; he is also credited with story concept for last century?s Homeworld.
I think there?s been some fantastic stuff in recent years?the Bioshock and Fallout franchises come to mind?but really, I think it?s just getting started.? What?s possible now is so beyond what was do-able at the outset of the video game era that it?s as fundamental as the shift from silent to sound in cinema.? Yet all too many of the attempts to take advantage of that bring to mind the maladroit 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler?s classic The Lady In the Lake (in which the entire movie was shot from Philip Marlowe?s point of view, to disastrous results).? Immersive storytelling demands a different set of rules, and I?d have to say that the twin gods of programming and art continue to draw the bulk of the attention of the folks running the industry.? This is understandable, but also unfortunate.? Because if the New Aesthetic applies to anything at all, it applies to video games; Borges? ?The Garden of Forking Paths? might just be the ur-template here, with its (seemingly) endless chains of possibilities?though the challenge for video-game narrative is to control those in a way that Borges? narrator did not, integrating the virtual with implicit expectations from the ever-more-elusive real one.
Though in the spirit of full disclosure:? this is in many ways still my favorite game evah.
Tagged with: Abhinav Jain ? David J Williams ? Guy Haley ? Jason M. Hough ? Kameron Hurley ? Mind Meld ? Myke Cole ? Paul Kirsch ? video games ? William C. Dietz ? Zachary Jernigan
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File-In this Thursday, July 26, 2012 file photo an AR-15 style rifle is displayed at the Firing-Line indoor range and gun shop, in Aurora, Colo. Similar weapons have been used in at least four high-profile shootings in the past year, including most recently the Connecticut school shootings and the Christmas Eve killings of two New York firefighters. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
File-In this Thursday, July 26, 2012 file photo an AR-15 style rifle is displayed at the Firing-Line indoor range and gun shop, in Aurora, Colo. Similar weapons have been used in at least four high-profile shootings in the past year, including most recently the Connecticut school shootings and the Christmas Eve killings of two New York firefighters. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
PHOENIX (AP) ? Military-style semiautomatic rifles have been used in at least four high-profile shootings in the past year. Bushmaster variations of the weapon have been used in two recent attacks, including the Newtown, Conn., school shootings and the Christmas Eve ambush slayings of two New York firefighters. While commonly called the AR-15, Colt and Armalite have been the only companies to make weapons by that specific name. Many other manufacturers, however, now sell similar versions of the rifle largely styled after the military's fully automatic M-16.
A look at the guns, their history and why they're so popular:
HOW WERE THE WEAPONS DEVELOPED?
Armalite first built the so-called AR-15 rifle for military use, but the design was later acquired by Colt, which produced the M-16 automatic weapon for the U.S. military. In the early 1960s, Colt then began marketing the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle largely as the civilian version of the fully-auto M-16. Many other companies have since begun manufacturing and selling AR-15-type rifles, but under different names, including the Remington Arms R-15, Bushmaster X-15 and Carbon 15 and the Smith & Wesson M&P15. The AR-15 has become the commonly-used generic term for all similar rifles.
WHAT ARE THEY USED FOR?
The AR-15-type rifles and .223 caliber ammunition are largely used for hunting small game like coyotes and prairie dogs. They also are extremely popular in shooting competitions due to the light weight of the gun and ammunition and the weapon's accuracy.
HOW DO YOU PURCHASE ONE?
Most military-style semiautomatic rifles were restricted for sale under the 1994 assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. Today, such weapons can be purchased in gun stores across the country.
ARE THERE ANY LIMITATIONS ON SALES?
Licensed dealers must first run a background check on the buyer to determine whether they are eligible under state and federal laws to own the weapon; convicted felons, for instance, cannot legally own firearms. However, private sellers of such rifles are not required to perform background checks. This would include a person selling their private collection to a buyer from their home, as well as private sellers hawking their weapons at any number of dozens of gun shows that occur nationwide every year.
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December 18, 2012 at 11:17 am
To nudge a gas tax hike or other transportation tax increases through the legislature is going to take a coalition, Capitol insiders believe.
And some question whether such a coalition currently exists.
But recent transportation finance reports have raised hope among funding advocates.
?I think we see this year as different,? said Executive Director Margaret Donahoe of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, a century-old group of business, labor, and government transportation advocates.
Donahoe points to the creation of a state transportation finance advisory group by Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, which recently released a report suggesting vehicle tab fees, the gas tax, and other transportation taxes be considered for increases, as evidence that transportation is important to Dayton.
Beyond this, Donahoe cites a recent report by the Itasca Project, a business CEO-driven group, which claims that speedily completing the regional transit system at a cost of $5 billion could produce direct benefits ranging from $11 billion to $16 billion over 20 years.
?All of these things are sort of coming together,? Donahoe said.
Minnesota Trucking Association President John Hausladen said association board members support a ?reasonable increase? in the state fuel tax if the increase provides tangible benefits to the trucking industry.
The association board, Hausladen said, has not determined the exact amount of the increase it might support.
Members are not eager to be first in line when it comes to absorbing new taxes, Hausladen explained.
But they know funding discussions will be taking place this coming session.
?We want to be part of that,? Hausladen said.
The association, with some 720 members, ?strongly? opposes the use of toll roads or a mileage tax in raising transportation revenues.
In polling conducted within the association, the Interstate system in Minnesota was considered adequate.
But close to a third of the members responding to the poll deemed county and city roads below average. Hausladen said.
The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, which like the Trucking Association has supported gas tax increases in the past, is not supporting taxes now.
?The Chamber?s current fiscal policy supports revenue neutrality,? Kate Johansen, health and transportation policy manager for the chamber, said in an email.
?Within that principle, the Chamber?s transportation position has been to maximize existing state resources to give Minnesotans the greatest value for their transportation dollars,? she said.
The chamber supports innovative public-private partnerships, she noted.
It will continue to focus on ?increased value? as an important tool in improving infrastructure this session, Johansen said.
Rep. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, one of the ?Override Six? of State Capitol lore? Republicans who broke ranks to vote to override Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty?s veto of a transportation finance bill four years ago? ? senses the fervor of those days is lacking.
?They?d have to do a lot of selling on it,? Abeler said of getting transportation tax increases through the legislature.
?The momentum is not there yet,? he said.
Hennepin County Board Chairman Mike Opat said it?s not enough that transportation advocates rally around proposed transportation tax increases.? Other groups, outside of the advocacy circle, need to back them, too.
The Hennepin County Board, other than an ?enduring? desire to see Southwest LRT and the Bottineau Transitway funded, has not taken a stance on transportation tax increases, Opat said.
Personally, Opat indicated support for a gas tax increase.
?I think long term, the gas tax is too low in Minnesota,? he said.
That opinion is not shared by Anoka County Commissioner Andy Westerberg who views state government facing a spending problem, not a revenue, problem.
Roads projects are expensive, he noted.
For instance, correcting the intersection of Armstrong Boulevard and Highway 10 ? a stretch of highway through the City of Ramsey slowed by traffic lights ? to freeway status could cost $30 million and up, Westerberg said.
State leaders have been coy in discussing transportation tax increases.
Dayton has been more direct, coming out against a gas tax increase and citing the findings of the transportation finance advisory group as evidence of a growing problem.
?I think they (the task force) laid it out,? Dayton said.
?If we continue where we are now ? that level of effort ? we?re going to have continued deterioration, more congestion, longer drive times, worse roads. And that?s not a pleasant prospect,? Dayton said.
?But no one can say now that we?re not forewarned,? he said.
Senate Majority Leader-designate Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, when asked about lawmakers passing additional transportation funding beyond bonding, indicated things were up in the air.
?I don?t have a clue at this point,? he said.
?I know there are a lot of unmet needs in our transportation infrastructure,? Bakk said.
House Speaker-designate Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, agreed.
?We didn?t get into this situation in being behind on transportation funding in a year or two years or even a decade,? Thissen said.
?It?s been a long time coming. And it?s not going to be fixed in a year or two years,? he said.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has identified billions in unmet transportation need over upcoming decades.
Bakk counselled all funding advocates to show restraint.
House Transportation Policy Committee Chairman Ron Erhardt, DFL-Edina, indicated there was no doubt in his mind transportation needs more money.
?No, there?s not,? he said.
Erhardt, one of the Override Six who later changed political parties, spoke of funding Southwest Light Rail to leverage federal dollars.
With more fuel efficient vehicles, gas tax revenues, if not flat, are faltering, he noted.
But replacing the gas tax with a mileage tax, for instance, is likely years away, Erhardt said.
The gas tax has a long history in transportation funding.
In the 1920s, a 2 cent per gallon gas tax was established in Minnesota to help pay for the growing road system, a state revenue history noted.
Currently, the state gas tax is about 28 cents a gallon ? the federal gas tax 18 cents a gallon and it hasn?t been raised in almost 20 years.
In 2011, state fuel taxes raised about $849 million.
Every penny the gas tax is increased yields an additional $31 million a year.
The Tax Foundation ranks the state gas tax 19th among the 50 states.
Almost 5 million vehicles were registered in Minnesota last year.
MnDOT oversees about 12,000 miles of state road.
Neighboring Wisconsin has about the same miles of state road, with Iowa and North Dakota, at about 8,900 and 7,300, respectively.
Michigan has about 9,700 miles of state road, with Illinois at 16,000 miles.
Texas boasts the most state road miles in the nation at about 80,000.
?
Source: http://hometownargus.com/2012/12/18/it-takes-a-coalition-to-raise-a-transportation-tax/
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Genetic manipulation of urate alters neurodegeneration in mouse model of Parkinson's disease
Tuesday, December 18, 2012A study by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers adds further support to the possibility that increasing levels of the antioxidant urate may protect against Parkinson's disease. In their report published in PNAS Early Edition, the investigators report that mice with a genetic mutation increasing urate levels were protected against the kind of neurodegeneration that underlies Parkinson's disease, while the damage was worse in animals with abnormally low urate.
"These results strengthen the rationale for investigating whether elevating urate in people with Parkinson's can slow progression of the disease," says Xiqun Chen, MD, PhD, of the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (MGH-MIND) and lead author of the PNAS report. "Our study is the first demonstration in an animal model that genetic elevation of urate can protect dopamine neurons from degeneration and that lowering urate can conversely exacerbate neurodegeneration."
Characterized by tremors, rigidity, difficulty walking and other symptoms, Parkinson's disease is caused by destruction of brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. Healthy people whose urate levels are at the high end of the normal range have been found to be at reduced risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Studies led by Michael Schwarzschild, MD, PhD, director of Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory at MGH-MIND, showed that, among Parkinson's patients, symptoms appear to progress more slowly in those with higher urate levels. These observations led Schwarzschild and his colleagues to develop the SURE-PD (Safety of URate Elevation in Parkinson's Disease) clinical trial, conducted at sites across the country through the support of the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Expected in early 2013, the results of SURE-PD will determine whether a medication that elevates urate levels should be tested further for its ability to slow the progression of disability in Parkinson's disease.
The current study by Schwarzschild's team was designed to improve understanding of how urate protects against neurodegeneration. As in most animals, mice normally have very low levels of the antioxidant because it is broken down by the enzyme urate oxidase or uricase. The higher urate levels seen in humans and great apes were caused by inactivation of the uricase gene during primate evolution. The MGH-MIND team used two strains of genetically altered mice. In one, the gene for uricase is knocked out as it is in humans, increasing urate levels in the blood and brain; in the other strain, the gene is overexpressed, reducing urate levels even lower than usual for mice. Animals from both strains were used in a standard Parkinson's modeling procedure in which a neurotoxin is injected into the dopamine-producing brain cells on one side of the brain.
As expected, the brains of animals with genetically elevated urate levels showed significantly less damage from the neurotoxin injection than did the brains of genetically normal mice. The damage was increased even more in the mice with genetically reduced urate levels, which also exhibited reduced dopamine production and worsened movement abnormalities. The researchers confirmed that genetically altering uricase expression did not affect levels of other molecules in the metabolic pathway that includes urate, supporting attribution of the protective role to urate alone.
"The biology of urate in the brain is largely unexplored," says Schwarzschild, an associate professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "Understanding both urate's mechanisms of protection and the way its levels are regulated in the body will help us determine how to better harness its protective effects, if they are substantiated. We now are searching for the mediators of urate's neuroprotection and beginning to explore how it is generated and transported in different brain cells."
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Massachusetts General Hospital: http://www.mgh.harvard.edu
Thanks to Massachusetts General Hospital for this article.
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Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said that anabolic steroids were found in the room where Garrett Reid was staying when he overdosed on heroin Aug. 5 during Eagles training camp. Reid was helping the team's strength and conditioning coach at the time of his death.
Morganelli said steroids had nothing to do with Reid's death, and there was no evidence that Reid was giving the steroids to any Eagles players. Investigators could not determine if the drugs were for Reid's own use or for distribution.
He showed little appetite for a deeper probe.
"The issue of steroids, it's an illegal substance in Pennsylvania law. It has probably more significance in the sports world. But since it did not appear to be related to his death, we're not pursuing that any further," Morganelli said.
In a statement released Monday (see box), Andy Reid said he is "confident that my son's decisions did not affect our football team in any way" and he "cannot apologize enough for any adverse appearances that my son's actions may have for an organization and a community that has been nothing but supportive of our family.?
Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie went a step further (see story) and clarified that the team has not been involved in steroid use.
"It is a matter of record that none of our players has tested positive for any of the steroids mentioned in the district attorney?s report," Lurie said in a statement, adding that, "We are extremely confident that Garrett?s actions were unknown to those around him and did not involve our football team."
He also said the "conduct in which he apparently engaged runs counter to the values and principles for everyone associated with our organization" and "we have pledged our full cooperation" with any potential requests coming from the NFL.
Garrett Reid's body was found in his dorm room at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. A coroner said the 29-year-old died of an accidental heroin overdose.
Lehigh University police were called to the dorm room around 7:20 a.m. on Aug. 5, arriving after Eagles team physician Dr. Omar Elkhamra had tried to revive him with a defibrillator.
Investigators searching his room found a used syringe and spoon, along with a gym bag filled with dozens of syringes and needles, many of them unopened, as well as 19 vials of an unknown liquid.
Testing revealed the vials contained four types of anabolic steroids, Morganelli said.
But said he did not have any evidence that Reid was distributing steroids to players.
Asked how aggressively his office and Lehigh University's police department pursued the question, Morganelli said: "Lots of interviews were conducted by the police. And I can't go into all of them, but all I can say is that we could not provide any evidence or substantiate that anybody in the Eagles organization was involved in this, or whether or not this was for his personal use. It was just undetermined."
He acknowledged the quantity found could have been intended for distribution, "but what I'm saying is I have no evidence of that, that there was any distribution by Mr. Reid, either here or anywhere else."
The prosecutor said he had not been in touch either with the NFL or the Eagles organization.
It wasn't clear if Reid had steroids in his system at the time of his death. Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek did not immediately return a phone call
Once the corner determined that Reid had succumbed to heroin, investigators focused on learning who had supplied him with it, combing through Reid's phone records to see who he was calling and texting before his death. But Morganelli said that probe ran into a dead end.
"It cannot be determined whether Mr. Reid obtained heroin here in the Lehigh Valley or brought it with him to training camp from elsewhere," Morganelli said, adding that Lehigh University police has closed the investigation.
Reid seemed to have rebounded from a long struggle with drug abuse.
He was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for a 2007 high-speed car crash that injured another driver. Police said Reid was high on heroin, and they found the drug and more than 200 pills in his car.
More recently, exercise and training had become his passion and he aspired to make it a career. At the time of his death, he had been helping strength and conditioning coach Barry Rubin. But an autopsy revealed his body showed signs of chronic drug use.
Reid's younger brother, Britt, has also struggled with drug use and was arrested on the same day as Garrett in 2007 after a road-rage incident. Police discovered weapons and drugs in Britt Reid's vehicle. He now works as a graduate assistant coach at Temple.
?2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited.
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TOKYO (AP) ? Japan's conservative Liberal Democratic Party returned to power in a landslide election victory Sunday after three years in opposition, according to unofficial results, signaling a rightward shift in the government that could further heighten tensions with China, a key economic partner as well as rival.
The victory means that the hawkish former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will get a second chance to lead the nation after a one-year stint in 2006-2007. He would be Japan's seventh prime minister in six-and-a-half years.
In the first election since the March 11, 2011, earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters, atomic energy ended up not being a major election issue even though polls show about 80 percent of Japanese want to phase out nuclear power.
Public broadcaster NHK's tally showed that the LDP, which ruled Japan for most of the post-World War II era until it was dumped in 2009, won 294 seats in the 480-seat lower house of parliament. Official results were not expected until Monday morning.
LDP, the most pro-nuclear power party, had 118 seats before the election. A new, staunchly anti-nuclear power party won just nine seats, according to NHK.
In the end, economic concerns won out, said Kazuhisa Kawakami, a political science professor at Meiji Gakuin University.
"We need to prioritize the economy, especially since we are an island nation," he said. "We're not like Germany. We can't just get energy from other countries in a pinch."
The results were a sharp rebuke for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's ruling Democratic Party of Japan, reflecting widespread unhappiness with its failure to keep campaign promises and get the stagnant economy going during its three years in power.
The DPJ won in a landslide three years ago amid high hopes for change, but won only 57 seats, compared to 230 seats before Sunday's election, according to the NHK tally. Among the casualties were eight Cabinet ministers, the most to lose their seats in an election since World War II, the Kyodo News agency reported.
With Japan stuck in a two-decade slump and receding behind China as the region's most important economic player, voters appeared ready to turn back to the LDP.
A serious-looking Abe characterized the win as more of a protest vote against the DPJ than a strong endorsement of his party.
"I think the results do not mean we have regained the public's trust 100 percent. Rather, they reflect 'no votes' to the DPJ's politics that stalled everything the past three years," he told NHK. "Now we are facing the test of how we can live up to the public's expectations, and we have to answer that question."
Japanese TV stations compile their own tallies by adding all local government interim vote counts and are generally highly accurate. The central government does not provide a grand total until all the numbers are official the next day.
Calling the results "severe," Noda told a late-night news conference he was stepping down as party chief to take responsibility for the defeat.
"I apologize deeply for our failure to achieve results," he said. "It was the voters' judgment to our failure to live up to their expectations."
The LDP will stick with its long-time partner New Komeito, backed by a large Buddhist organization, to form a coalition government, party officials said. Together, they now control 325 seats, securing a two-thirds majority that would make it easier for the government to pass legislation.
Noda said a special parliamentary session would be held before year-end to pick a new prime minister. As leader of the biggest party in the lower house, Abe will almost certainly assume that post.
The new government will need to quickly deliver results ahead of upper house elections in the summer. To revive Japan's struggling economy, Abe will likely push for increased public works spending and lobby for stronger moves by the central bank to break Japan out of its deflationary trap.
"The economy has been in dire straits these past three years, and it must be the top priority," Abe said in a televised interview. He has repeatedly said in the past he will protect Japan's "territory and beautiful seas" amid a territorial dispute with China over some uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that Japan calls Senkaku and China calls Daioyu.
"We must strengthen our alliance with the U.S. and also improve relations with China, with a strong determination that is no change in the fact the Senkaku islands are our territory," Abe said in the interview.
President Barack Obama congratulated Abe in a statement issued Sunday, declaring that the U.S.-Japanese alliance "serves as the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific."
Obama said he looked forward to working close with the new Japanese government "on a range of important bilateral, regional and global issues."
Some Japanese voters also said they supported the LDP's vows to build a stronger, more assertive country to answer increasing pressure from China and threats of North Korean rocket launches.
"I feel like the LDP will protect Japan and restore some national pride," Momoko Mihara, 31, said after voting in the western Tokyo suburb of Fuchu. "I hope Mr. Abe will stand tall."
A dizzying array of more than 12 parties, including several news ones, contested, some with vague policy goals.
One of the new parties, the right-leaning, populist Japan Restoration Party, won 54 seats, NHK said. The party, led by the bombastic nationalist ex-Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara and lawyer-turned Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto ? both of whom are polarizing figures with forceful leadership styles ? could become a future coalition partner for the LDP, analysts said.
Ishihara was the one who stirred up the latest dispute with China over the islands when he proposed that the Tokyo government buy them from their private Japanese owners and develop them.
The anti-nuclear Tomorrow Party ? formed just three weeks ago ?captured just nine seats, according to NHK. Party head Yukiko Kada said she was very disappointed to see LDP, the original promoter of Japan's nuclear energy policy making a big comeback.
Abe, 58, is considered one of the more conservative figures in the increasingly conservative LDP.
During his previous tenure as prime minister, he pursued a nationalistic agenda pressing for more patriotic education and upgrading the defense agency to ministry status.
It remains to be seen how he will behave this time around, though he is talking tough toward China, and the LDP platform calls developing fisheries and setting up a permanent outpost in the Senkaku/Daioyu islands, a move that would infuriate Beijing.
During his time as leader, Abe also insisted there was no proof Japan's military had coerced Chinese, Korean and other women into prostitution in military brothels during Japan's wartime aggression in Asia. He later apologized but lately has suggested that a landmark 1993 apology by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary for sex slavery needs revising.
He has said he regrets not visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan's war dead, including top war criminals, during his term as prime minister. China and South Korea oppose such visits, saying they reflect Japan's reluctance to fully atone for its wartime atrocities.
The LDP wants to revise Japan's pacifist constitution to strengthen its Self-Defense Forces and, breaching a postwar taboo, designate them as a "military." It also proposes increasing Japan's defense budget and allowing Japanese troops to engage in "collective self-defense" operations with allies that are not directly related to Japan's own defense.
It's not clear, however, how strongly the LDP will push such proposals, which have been kicked around by conservatives for decades but made no headway in parliament because of limited support among a group of right-wing advocates. LDP could push them harder this time as it and coalition partner now controlling two-thirds in the lower house, though they lack control of the other chamber.
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AP writers Elaine Kurtenbach, Mari Yamaguchi and Eric Talmadge contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/conservative-ldp-returns-landslide-japan-193823117.html
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