human-beings

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  • WildStar discusses the exotic and alien human race

    by 
    Eliot Lefebvre
    Eliot Lefebvre
    02.01.2012

    Humans are the standard basis for comparison in games that feature non-human races, almost as if said games were being made by humans for other humans. But there's still a distinct flavor to the human race depending on the setting. Case in point, the latest WildStar "interview" with one of the three lore characters from the cinematic trailer gives players a peek at a typical human, and he's a bit different than what you might have been expecting. While the other major characters identify a specific world as "home," humans are portrayed as being a bit more free-forming, having roamed out in space for so long that they're really not bound to a location. The entry also discusses some of the lore behind being an Explorer and some of the perils associated with intentionally venturing into the unknown (it involves lots of things that try to eat you, if you need the short version). If you've been enjoying the flavor of the world Carbine Studios is slowly building, you'll probably enjoy this latest look as well.

  • Research suggests that your body knows you made a typo when your conscious mind simply can't be bothered

    by 
    Laura June Dziuban
    Laura June Dziuban
    11.01.2010

    This may or may not come as a shocker to you -- but when you make a typo, your body can tell, according to a new study at Vanderbilt University. The study monitored a group of people who could type at least 40 WPM consistently as they transcribed copy. In analyzing the typists' key strokes, researchers found that interestingly, even if a typist's mistake was immediately 'silently' corrected onscreen by those running the study, the typist's fingers fumbled or paused, signaling an 'awareness' that a mistake had been made. Essentially, this means that while the conscious mind may not know that a mistake has been made (especially if there's no visual evidence of it), the part of the brain that controls the fingers typing movements have some awareness of the mistakes. For those of us who spend our lives banging away at a keyboard, these preliminary results won't really come as any surprise -- the feeling of having made a mistake is pretty instinctual. Regardless, the results suggest a hierarchical manner of mistake detection in humans, the "lower" more instinctual part of the brain recognizing and correcting the mistake, while the conscious part of the brain assigns credit and blame. Now if we could just figure out what part of our brain is responsible for relentlessly pointing out others' typos, we'd be set.