Bob Bates
Robert Bates (born December 11, 1953) is an American video game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include ''Unreal II'' (2003), ''Spider-Man 3 (video game), Spider-Man 3'' (2007), and ''Eric the Unready'' (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by ''Computer Gaming World'' magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game ''Quandaries'' for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Greenbelt, Maryland
Greenbelt is a city in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States, and a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 24,921. Greenbelt is the first and the largest of the three experimental and controversial New Deal Greenbelt Towns, the others being Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin. Greenbelt was planned and built by the Federal government of the United States, federal government as an all-white town. The cooperative community was conceived in 1935 by Undersecretary of United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Rexford Tugwell, Rexford Guy Tugwell, whose perceived collectivist ideology attracted opposition to the Greenbelt Towns project throughout its short duration. The project came into legal existence on April 8, 1935, when United States Congress, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. Under the authority granted to him by this legislation, President of the United States, Presid ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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International Game Developers Association
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is a nonprofit professional association whose stated mission is to "support and empower game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable careers." The IGDA is incorporated in the United States as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization. It has over 12,000 members from all fields of game development. In recognition of the wide-ranging, multidisciplinary nature of interactive entertainment, everyone who participates in any way in the game development process is welcome to join the IGDA. History The beginnings of the IGDA emerged from several other organizations for computer game developers which were forming in the late 1980s and early 1990s: * The Computer Game Designers Symposium, later known as the Computer Game Developers Conference, was started in 1988 by Chris Crawford. He had already been producing a bimonthly newsletter for game developers, ''The Journal of Computer Game Design'', since 1987. On ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chantilly, Virginia
Chantilly is a census-designated place (CDP) in western Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The population was 24,301 as of the 2020 census. Chantilly is named after an early-19th-century mansion and farm, which in turn took the name of an 18th-century plantation that was located in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The name "Chantilly" originated in France with the Château de Chantilly, about 28 miles north of Paris. Located in the Northern Virginia portion of the Washington metropolitan area, Chantilly sits approximately west of Washington, D.C., via Interstate 66 and U.S. Route 50. It is located between Centreville, Virginia, Centreville to the south, Herndon, Virginia, Herndon and Reston, Virginia, Reston to the north and northeast, respectively, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax to the southeast. U.S. Route 50 and Virginia State Route 28 intersect in Chantilly, and these highways provide access to the Dulles International Airport, Dulles/Reston/Tysons Corner, Virginia, Ty ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mike Verdu
Michael Verdu (born December 28, 1964) is an American manager and producer and author of computer games. Life Verdu was born on December 28, 1964. His father worked for a trade union, his mother was a dance instructor. Michael visited the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, 600 km away from his native Washington. He did not finish his studies because Advanced Technology, an IT service provider for the US Department of Defense, offered him a lucrative job as a programmer. Aged 20, he left Advanced Technology in 1985 to found the software company Paragon Systems that produced software for the Department of Defense. Paragon's programs were used to maintain submarines of the Ohio and Los Angeles-class submarines. The company also rented out programming capacities, for example to Bob Bates' video game start-up Challenge Inc. which developed text adventures for industry leader Infocom. In September 1987 Verdu sold Paragon Systems (which had 25 employees by the time) to IT ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Activision
Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. on October 1, 1979, in Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari, Inc., Atari game developers upset at their treatment by Atari in order to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. The video game crash of 1983, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the experience of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games and forced the company to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Robin Hood
Robin Hood is a legendary noble outlaw, heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature, theatre, and cinema. According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. In some versions of the legend, he is depicted as being of noble birth, and in modern retellings he is sometimes depicted as having fought in the Crusades before returning to England to find his lands taken by the Sheriff of Nottingham (position), Sheriff. In the oldest known versions, he is instead a member of the yeoman class. He is traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln green. Today, he is most closely associated with his stance of "redistribution of income and wealth, robbing the rich to give to the poor". There exists no canonical version of the Robin Hood mythos, which has resulted in different creators imbuing their adaptations with different messages over the centuries. Adaptations have often vacillated between a libertarian version of Robin Hood ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Z-machine
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code files) and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system. History and design Nomenclature and conventions The "Z" of Z-machine stands for ''Zork'', Infocom's first adventure game. Infocom used file extensions of .dat (Data) and .zip (ZIP = Z-machine Interpreter Program), but the latter clashed with the widespread use of .zip for PKZIP-compatible archive files starting in the 1990s, after Activision had closed Infocom. Infocom produced six versions of the Z-machine. Files using versions 1 a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alexandria Harmonizers
The Alexandria Harmonizers are an international champion barbershop chorus based in Alexandria, Virginia, with 110 men in 2013. The chorus is the performing arm of the Alexandria Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society The Barbershop Harmony Society, legally and historically named the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. (SPEBSQSA), is the first of several organizations to promote and preserve barbersho ..., under the direction of Joseph Cerutti, Jr. References External linksOfficial website Chapter entry in the Mid-Atlantic District of the Barbershop Harmony Society Barbershop Harmony Society choruses [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Zork
''Zork'' is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson (programmer), Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles''ZorkI: The Great Underground Empire'', ''ZorkII: The Wizard of Frobozz'', and ''ZorkIII: The Dungeon Master''which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In ''Zork'', the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language processing, natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction. The original game, developed between 1977 and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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TRS-80
The TRS-80 Micro Computer System (TRS-80, later renamed the Model I to distinguish it from successors) is a desktop microcomputer developed by American company Tandy Corporation and sold through their Radio Shack stores. Launched in 1977, it is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers. The name is an abbreviation of ''Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 [microprocessor]'', referring to its Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor. The TRS-80 has a full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, 4 kilobyte, KB dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) standard memory, small size and desk area, floating-point Level I BASIC language Interpreter (computing), interpreter in read-only memory (ROM), 64-character-per-line computer monitor, video monitor, and had a starting price of US$600 (equivalent to US$ in ). A cassette tape drive for program storage was included in the original package. While the software environment was stable, the cassette load/save process combined with keyboard bounce issues ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motivation, motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the Natural science, natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the Emergence, emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as Behavioural sciences, behavioral or Cognitive science, cognitive scientists. Some psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Philosophy
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions. Historically, many of the individual sciences, such as physics and psychology, formed part of philosophy. However, they are considered separate academic disciplines in the modern sense of the term. Influential traditions in the history of philosophy include Western philosophy, Western, Islamic philosophy, Arabic–Persian, Indian philosophy, Indian, and Chinese philosophy. Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece and covers a wide area of philosophical subfields. A central topic in Arabic–Persian philosophy is the relation between reason and revelation. Indian philosophy combines the Spirituality, spiritual problem of how to reach Enlightenment in Buddhism, enlighten ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |