A new “gaming center” just opened up in Cary, the kind of place with a room brimming with TVs and video game consoles where you can go and pay for a few hours of game time. My first reaction is excitement. Well, no, my first reaction was “Are you kidding?” when I learned the name of the place is “RUaGamer”. Ugh.

So, my second reaction was excitement. Finally, a new place to go to get the LAN experience and play games with friends!

Unfortunately, this place does not use a new business model, and I hate to say it, but I don’t think it’ll be any more successful than in previous incarnations. See, there have been other gaming centers like this before, like The Tek that opened up on Hillsborough St around 2004-2005 as a combination LAN gaming center and coffee shop. It last a year or two, switched to being just a coffee shop, and then closed down. There was also a GameFrog in Cary Town Center a few months ago but it’s gone now too.

And then, of course, back around the turn of the century, there was TGZ, the Triangle Gaming Zone, which was a little hole in the wall that was the same thing: a whole bunch of PCs, networked together, with all the latest games to play, paid for by the hour.

And all of them are gone now.

Again, this kinda pains me to say, because this is the type of joint that I, as a gamer myself, should love. But somehow I just can’t justify $6/hour to play video games. They are trying to sell the social experience of gaming, but I can get 80% of that just by using VOIP programs like Ventrilo to talk to my friends over the internet while we play some game together from our dorms.

But I won’t deny that getting a few friends together at RUaGamer would be pretty awesome now and then. I remember the most successful part of both TGZ’s and The Tek’s business models were their lock-ins. Show up at 10pm, pay $15, and play until 8am. Those events were awesome. I don’t know if RUaGamer is planning on running regular lock-ins, but they really should be. They’re what kept The Tek alive so long.

The other thing is just the hourly rate. There’s something about $6/hour that just makes me want to run the other way. The $25 all-day pass is a little closer to the right thing. I think I’d pay $25 for a lock-in that I didn’t have to bring my computer for.

But I think they really need to look at some kind of memberships. $50/year, and then hours are $2-3 a piece afterward. Don’t make the memberships unlimited access or you may run in to overcrowding, but they definitely need some way to make the marginal price of an hour lower.

I wish them luck, and I’ll likely stop by to have a look at their facility some time, if only to see how it compares with previous efforts, before the outfit goes Tango Uniform.

The Technician has an article about the impending death of Harrelson Hall, the cylindrical building in the middle of campus that was built in the fifties as a model of efficiency. Like, seriously: to use the bath room, you go in the “In” door, use the facilities, wash your hands at the sink and go out the “Out” door, the whole time moving in this counter-clockwise arc around the center of the building. It seems like the kind of thing that could handle the worst post-class rush.

But as the article demonstrates, it’s become very cool to hate on Harrelson, but I for one kinda like it. Sure the stairs are steep: this is the math building. Things here are going to be hard!

Sure the hallways are concentric circles so it’s easy to walk around the building without realizing it. But the rooms are numbered from 1 to 360 in an obvious pattern. From any given place in the building, you should only have to walk at most a half-circumference to get to your destination.

Maybe I’m too much of a dreamer, but I’ve always been enchanted by the sense of hope that Harrelson embodied: trying to create this perfectly efficient building to enable the Learning of The Future. Maybe the implementation of the building has a few flaws, but just looking at the soul of the building really makes you wish for the days when we believed that all we had to do was study enough and we could solve any problem.

CNN has an article talking about the scary problems with new technology, in particular with trying to use computers to replace memory. Sure, we have the technology to record everything we do all day, every day, for years. But should we?

The answer that the article doesn’t say is “No. Duh.”

However, old friend Douglas Hofstadter is eager to fill that void:

Being able to compress a lot of experiences and summarize them well is part of the very nature of human intelligence, said Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.”

“It’s about finding the essence of things,” he said. “It’s not about restoring everything. It’s about reducing things in complexity until they’re manageable and understandable.”

Over at Marko’s place,

When parking your vehicle without permission on the lot of a private company for five days in a row, blocking the spot for legitimate users, make sure the company in question isn’t one that specializes in building fences.

Picture included.

The “Live” just means that it’s taped live, like The Price Is Right or Tool Time.

An excellent point. The whole notion of anything called The Late Show is becoming meaningless. The show is on when I want it to be on.

How long will it be before people start wondering what the title Saturday Night Live is supposed to mean?

Given the obvious trend towards time-shifting, it should be clear to anyone pitching something as “DVR-proof” that what they mean is really “soon to be obsolete”.

I mean, isn’t the whole point of late night shows that there’s nothing else to watch in their timeslot? But when you can put on last night’s episode of Mythbusters at 11pm when the Late Shows take to the airwaves, timeslots become meaningless.

A few months ago, I wondered what the effect would be on all of the used cars being taken out of circulation by Cash for Clunkers:

So, first of all, they’re destroying the engines of perfectly good cars making them useless as cars, which reduces the supply of used cars on the market. By definition cars must be “drivable” to be eligible for the rebate and therefore could be serviceably resold.

. . .

A case could be made here that this is an attempt to weaken the used car market to the benefit of the new car market. I guess the idea is that if there are fewer used cars, then folks that normally wouldn’t buy new cars will do so now. That may be true for a thin slice of the economic spectrum but for the rest of us who continually buy used cars, we might should be angry.

Well, it only took about three months:

“Customers used to be able to find a good car for their son or daughter to take to college for $2,000 or $3,000, but now that same car may cost $5,000,” [general manager of Perry Auto Service & Sales George] Tabakelis said. “It’s sad.”

Of course, in this recession with unemployment high, I’m sure if people can’t get a used car, they’ll just buy a new one.

Right?

The TV networks finally seem to be coming to their senses. The New York Times reports that network executives are beginning to see what many of us knew all along: DVRs are a good thing.

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.

And rather unsurprisingly, when you include DVR playbacks, ratings for some shows improve dramatically. The article mentions substantial ratings boosts for shows like House, Heroes, and FlashForward; the biggest increase was for The Office, which gained 26 percent when DVRs were included.

In an ironic twist, the article also mentions the so-called “Leno effect”: topical shows like talk shows have lower relative viewership when DVRs are included (nobody wants to watch a topical show three days later). While the networks used to consider it a good thing for a show to be “DVR-proof,” they’re realizing that that just means fewer people will watch.

In an unrelated but equally heartening story, Ars Technica reports on a survey showing that consumers of P2P music downloads end up buying more music than they otherwise would, not less. Which means the record labels have been busily persecuting their biggest customers. Are we surprised?

Today’s Federalism reading comes from the 3rd section of the 43rd chapter: The Powers Conferred by the Constitution Further Considered (continued).

But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

In essence, it is important to define treason in the Constitution, lest “violent factions” attempt to define each other as treasoners in order to hold them up before the nation on high charges.

Most interesting part? “the natural offspring of free government”. The founders knew their system would be abused, they just didn’t realize quite how.