Month: October 2017

Enlarge / A world so nice, you won't even mind the mundane quests.

Glistening sands and teaming life stretch far away. I stand at the head of a gilded Pyramid, looking away to the bustling lives and vibrant oases around me. Dust curls up along the horizon, eager to embrace a nearby village. Hippos lumber around the beaches, warding off wary intruders with their girth. This is ancient Egypt not as we imagine it—a popularized image of endlessly mythologized figures—but closer to Egypt as it really might have been. It's lush and vibrant, harsh and unforgiving; a land of scoped mystery, steeped in blood.

Ubisoft has plenty of experience replicating realistic (or at least realistic-esque) worlds like these throughout the Assassin’s Creed series. The mega-developer's latest tentpole, Assassin's Creed: Origins, continues the tradition. The attention to detail is exceptional, and here that's no mere quip about superficial beauty. Like a digital museum, great care has been spent curating the fineries and looks and culture of its disparate corners. Indeed, Ubisoft has already announced a “Discovery Mode” update, coming next year, that literally turns the game into a digital museum, allowing visitors to rifle through relics and records, pyramids and obelisks to learn about the mores and traditions of the people who lived there.

Trope-laden, crushing variety

For now, though, Origins is more of a known quantity, a rough assemblage of the cornucopia of ideas that have settled into the popular consciousness of what games need to be (side missions, gathering, crafting, stealth sections, and so forth). As such, Origins has a sort of crushing variety, for better and worse.

Enlarge / Exploring an inhospitable world. (credit: Charles Theel)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

This War of Mine is a giant punch to the gut. Inspired by the war in Sarajevo, the concept here tilts the notion of a "war game" on its head, presenting war not as explosions and bullets but as hunger and pneumonia. The game sets out to create a gritty experience, one of discomfort and anguish, and the good news (or the bad news, depending on your perspective) is that the challenging moral dilemmas are as compelling in the cardboard version as they were in the critically acclaimed 2014 video game.

Long is the day

This War of Mine is a cooperative experience of shared narrative. Players coordinate actions among a group of war-weary survivors holed up in a dilapidated multi-story ruin. Your people are starving, bruised, and emotionally broken, but you still need wood and pieces of machinery. During the day phase, you'll move miniatures about the house and assign them to tasks. Perhaps you'll expend a great deal of energy to dig up the bricks and mortar blocking the passage upstairs. Maybe you'll search through the broken furniture in what was once a living room.

Winter is coming—and not in that Game of Thrones sense. Many people are starting to button up across the US, but while you might have to turn the heater up too, there’s reason to stop and think before blasting the warm air. Like so many of the best aspects of modern living, heaters aren’t necessarily great for the environment. In fact, your heating habit may be bloating your carbon footprint dramatically.

With the Trump administration ditching the Paris Climate Agreement, of course, there may be no federal mandate for individuals and organizations to shrink their carbon footprint. But many people—for reasons ranging from the financial to the environmental—still want to find out how to shrink their impact on the Earth. While it’s hard, there is a way.

Carbon footprints are essentially a convenient way for scientists and environmental advocates to provide you with a number—typically in tons—of the C02 emissions you produce each year. Calculated based on a number of factors including where you live, what you eat, and how you get around, the size of each person’s C02 footprint varies widely. Things are especially different between city slickers and suburbanites, as urban living lowers carbon emissions by 20 percent. Still, the average American clocks in at 16.4 metric tons, or some 36,00 pounds, of carbon dioxide and its greenhouse gas equivalents each year, according to the World Bank. That made for a shared national footprint of about 5,300 million metric tons in 2015, which continues to contribute to the acceleration of global climate change.

Historically, the vast majority of the world’s power has been consumed as quickly as it is made, or it's wasted. But climate change has made governments interested in renewable energy, and renewable energy is variable—it can't be dispatched on demand. Or can it? As research into utility-sized batteries receives more attention, the economics of adding storage to a grid or wind farm are starting to make more sense.

But grid-tied energy storage is not new; it has just always been limited to whatever resources a local power producer had at the time. Much like electricity production itself, storage schemes differ regionally. Power companies will invest in batteries that make sense on a local level, whether it is pumped storage, compressed air, or lithium-ion cells.

Looking at the kinds of storage that already exist is instructive in helping us see where storage is going to go, too. Lots of the latest battery projects merely build on engineering that has been in service for decades. To better see our way forward, we collected a number of images and diagrams of the world’s biggest energy storage schemes.