firehose

A well-constructed Mage deck in Blizzard’s free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone has the satisfying ability to take the enemy’s figurative arm over your knee to snap the bone in two.

The Polymorph card allows you to turn any minion on the board into a sheep that can only hit for one damage, with one unit of health. It can take out some of the biggest threats from your opponent. The Fireball card costs four mana and deals six points of damage to whatever it hits. But the Mage's holy terror of doom is Flame Strike.

It’s not a complicated card. You don’t have to set it up in order to bring destruction on your enemy. You don’t have to build your deck around it. It costs seven mana to cast, and deals four damage to every enemy minion on the board. It all but destroys your opponent’s ability to control the board, and there’s next to nothing they can do to stop it. It's the Hearthstone equivalent of opening the Ark of the Covenant.

It’s the sort of card that makes your opponent howl in frustration. I’ve laid it down and had the other player concede the match. It’s an amazingly effective middle finger aimed at the other player. I always imagine a string of curses coming from my opponent.

But what do I hear in the game?  "Well played." I've never been abused online, even when destroying my opponent's carefully constructed army of minions.

This is due to the fact that Hearthstone doesn’t allow you to chat with the players in the game. There are a series of pre-selected emotes that vary slightly depending on your character, but there is no way to send your own text message unless you’re Battle.net friends with your opponent. There is effectively no chat, and no direct communication.

Blizzard has created a highly competitive and, in some ways, vindictive collectible card game that is a pleasure to play against random people, and it did so by removing our collective voice.

Words like violence

"This was a decision that was made early in development, before the launch of the beta," Jason Chayes, production director of Hearthstone, told me.

"It’s a topic that has been heavily debated on our team, and we definitely recognize that there are tradeoffs associated with this decision, such as adding steps for players looking to establish a friendship after an awesome game," he continued. "Overall though, we feel this was a very important part of our strategy to keep Hearthstone feeling fun, safe and appealing to everyone."

This echoes the strategy of games like Journey that also completely remove the ability of a player to troll, harass or otherwise ruin the day of anyone else. You can greet the other player, you can tell them they did well, you can admit you messed up and you can give them an in-character threat about how you’re about to destroy them. That’s it.

There is no string of profanity after I play one of those great cards in my deck. No slurs against any race, gender or sexual orientation. There is no button to teabag the other player. They can lightly poke fun at you by saying "Sorry" before laying waste to your defenses, but that's as far as it goes.

Every match against another human has real stakes due to players going through their daily quests for gold, so almost everyone you play is trying as hard as possible to win. The combination of random opponents and the in-game currency hangs in the balance could lead to a game where the loudest voices turn into the worst voices, but the emote system keeps them in check.

You can even "squelch" your opponent if you don’t want to hear from them at all. This turns off your opponent's emotes completely. I have a buddy who plays every match this way, treating other players as very able AI.

There is a psychic cost to going online and being buffeted by hate speech

What’s striking about the decision to limit communication isn’t just that it increases the speed of the game — there are no pauses to type and no long conversations, nasty or otherwise — your ability to play for long sessions is improved.

There is a psychic cost to going online and being buffeted by hate speech, but the basic emotes create a kind of very simple and welcoming conversation between players. You say hello, tell them you hope to win, you compliment them on their play, and say good game whether you win or lose. That's all you say, and it's more or less all you can say.

I walk away from long Hearthstone sessions just as happy as I walked into them, and the lack of constant abuse makes the games much more approachable. My son wants me to set up an account, and I don't have to worry about what he may hear, or say, online.

While this emote system may be a bit controversial in some circles, it sounds like it's unlikely to change. "For now, we continue to feel this is the right decision for Hearthstone, and are not planning to change this approach in the near future," Chayes told Polygon. "If the sentiment of the community changes, and there’s a good indication that the majority of interactions with other players using chat would be positive, at that point we would be happy to reconsider this approach."

To heck with that, I’m overjoyed at the game’s velvet muzzle.

Blizzard has created a comparatively safe space in gaming, and that’s worth preserving. It may be telling that it required us to give up almost all avenues of communication when playing against random opponents, but so be it. My long sessions are made more pleasant by the calls of "Well Played," and "Ooops" that come as I make some good decision and some poor ones, and that’s all I need from my opponents.

If it means I don’t have to hear from anyone else, I’ll gladly shut up as well.

AVC: The show obviously is not overtly political, but it fits in with your career in a lot of ways in that it’s got some sneaky feminist themes in the background. Was that always part of the plan?

GM: I think that was part of the plan, but it certainly developed particularly with a couple of key people in the writers’ room. One is Karen Walton, who is our resident keep-the-boys-in-line writer. Very experienced. Great old friend of mine. She keeps all the boys in line, but she always says that all the boys are feminists, so I guess that helps.

The other person who really helps with that is the real Cosima, Cosima Herter, who is our science advisor. Again, another old friend of mine who reads all the drafts and watches all the episodes and then it runs through her incredible brain, and it comes back as, “Do you know what you guys are doing? This is the territory you’re treading.” We have those conversations early in the script, and those conversations really help to inform the script. They help to inform the big picture even if it’s not overt. So those are important thematic things. We don’t want it to take over the show, but we want it to be such a part of the fabric that you can’t avoid it.

A team of scientists have used cloning methods to produce stem cells from the skin cells of adult patients. To do this, researchers extracted DNA from the cells of two adult males, aged 35 and 75. The DNA was then fused with human eggs donated by four adult women. The study, published in the scientific journal Cell, shows that it might be possible for scientists to grow patient-specific cells to treat illnesses such as heart disease or even blindness.

This marks only the second time human stem cells have been cloned, and the first time cells from an adult have been successfully copied. The first such procedure, performed last year, was completed using cells from infants, which are considered more malleable. The scientists involved in the new study, based in Los Angeles and South Korea, showed that the cells they harvested could develop into any of the major tissues found in a human embryo, giving them the "potential for applications in a range of therapeutic contexts." Therapeutic cloning describes the concept of using a subject's DNA to create stem cells tailored for their own body, cells that could then be used to cure diseases or repair tissues in the original donor.

The US government has banned the use of federal money for human cloning research

But therapeutic cloning raises ethical questions. In 2005, The United Nations General Assembly adopted a non-binding declaration that called for the ban of human cloning on the grounds of dignity. And the United States government has restricted the use of federal funds for research into therapeutic or reproductive cloning.

By fusing DNA from skin cells with human eggs, the scientists were effectively creating a human embryo. While they harvested the cells during the early stages of cell multiplication, the resultant embryo could theoretically have been implanted into a host and brought to term, making it an actual human clone. The authors of the study choose not to address this issue, discussing instead the cells' potential for helping humans produced in the traditional manner.

If you’re like most of us at ComicsAlliance, there’s a good chance that you remember that fleeting year or so in the mid ’90s when comic shops were overflowing with the heavily-decorated circular disks known as pogs, plus all of their prevalent slammer, mat and “pogtainer” accessories. Well, get stoked on a kind of resurgence next week as Regular Show #12 fills both physical and digital retailers with the flip-em-to-win-em items once again… only not quite the way you think. See how KC Green and artist Alison Strejlau have teamed to exploit your pogstalgia — and, in many ways, warn a generation that hasn’t experienced them of the wickendess of pogs — with our first-look preview.

From Boom!’s official synopsis:

Mordecai, Skips, and the others have been challenged by the 90s to an ultimate game of Pogs in order to save Rigby! But can they defeat the ’90s at its own game?

You can get a first look at five pages from Regular Show #12, plus all four of its variant covers by Matt Cummings, Felicia Choo, Jon Morris and Manuel Kilger below.

No, the issue itself doesn’t include any pog pack-ins, but that sure does seem like a fine idea for the trade paperback or deluxe hardcover down the road… eh Boom!?

Seriously, please give us Regular Show pogs.

Experience Pogstalgia With This Terrible Pog Video

Aquarium, Battery Park, New York City [Postcard], ca. 1931. This is just one of the many resources you can find online through the DPLA website or through apps using its API.

New York Aquarium Postcards collection of the Wildlife Conservation Society Archives. Via Empire State Digital Network.

Today marks the Digital Public Library of America's one-year anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, the non-profit library network announced six new partnerships with major archives, including the US Government Printing Office and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The DPLA is best described as a platform that connects the online archives of many libraries around the nation into a single network. You can search all of these archives through the digital library's website, and developers can build apps around the DPLA's metadata collection using the publicly available API.

It's easy to find historical documents, public domain works, and vintage photos online through a search on the DPLA's website. "To participate in the DPLA, all institutions have to donate their metadata under a CC0 license, send us a thumbnail, and host a publicly viewable full version of the item," DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen told Ars.