Writing For Half-Life - Marc Laidlaw.
Here is an essay I did for my last Media Studies course (a 200 level paper) on immersion, play, narrative and Half-Life 2. Enjoy! Half-Life 2. Video games, an ever popular form of new media, are often described as just mindless entertainment but there are games out there that let us experience emotions, immersion and extend ourselves in some way.Half-life refers to the amount of time it takes for half of a particular sample to react. Furthermore, it refers to the time that a particular quantity requires to reduce its initial value to half. This concept is quite common in nuclear physics and it describes how quickly atoms would undergo radioactive decay.Half-life marks the time in which isotope mass reduces by half. For example, an isotope has a mass of 10 Grams and its half-life is 5 years, Five years later mass of the isotope would be 5 Grams, in the next five years, its mass would be 2.5 Grams and this procedure will decrease exponentially until the mass is Zero.
Writing For Half-Life. PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake that sort of thing.A radioactive substance has a half-life of 30 minutes. What fraction of the atoms will not have decayed after 1 hour? click for answer. Another substance has a half-life of 3 hours. What fraction of the atoms will have decayed after 6 hours? click for answer. A researcher measures 200 counts per minute coming from a radioactive source at midday.
Riis quotes a French Renaissance writer Rabelais who once said that one half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Riis adds that this is because the top half has never cared about those below it, until recently—when the discomfort and despair of the most vulnerable have finally made the privileged wonder about them.
