The Blog: News

An overly sized brick that weighed a ton in my hands, comprising of a 2D, black and white screen and some buttons. That’s exactly how the six years old me would have described a Gameboy. Even with its primitive characteristics, the Gameboy is a feature in an evolutionary timeline that started many years before its arrival. If we go back to the beginning of human time, I’m sure that you’d be able to find some relative of gaming regardless of how basic. Competition and play are part of human nature, so whether it was punching wholes in the ground or killing the most mammoths, games can easily be made of anything.
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I’ve noticed that there are some who hesitate when it comes to positively correlating video games and art.  Of course a statement like there is an art to playing (insert game) is invalid, but what about the finished product itself? This quote “Video games can never be art” by Roger Ebert has me stumped because games are simply hybrids of the art we take for granted everyday. For some, to appreciate a compilation,  one must examine each of the individual parts. To begin, what is art?
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As June comes to an end, we remember that it brought more to us than the official start of summer. Below is a high level view of just a few of the projects and events that took place this month.

MLG Columbus
Lets start off with our biggest event, MLG Columbus. This month’s Pro circuit was held during the weekend of June 3-5 in Columbus Ohio and obtained notable success. Throughout the weekend, nearly 15 thousand people showed up to support their favorite gamers. That however, was nothing near the 22.5 million people who streamed the event from their computers. With the major updates we made to our systems, we formulated the equation for a very successful pro circuit event that tromped the ones before it.
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Several days ago, I was walking with my Agora Games t-shirt, which happens to bare the Major League Gaming (MLG) logo on the arm. Out of Dunkin Donuts, a young boy excitedly ran up to me. After catching his breath, he goes, “excuse me, do you compete in the MLG?” At that point I had gotten towed and was on the phone with the police so I simply shook my head no.
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Here at Agora we make use of dedicated hardware and virtual machines running on our providers’ respective clouds. In recent months, we’ve moved our RabbitMQ hosts onto hardware because we found that we could far exceed the CPU capacity of our virtual machines and it was far cheaper to run a small cluster of hardware hosts than a giant cluster of VMs. We used an existing, underutilized host for our primary traffic while awaiting delivery and installation of a new pair servers. Expecting a simple plug-and-play swap, I set out to test the new hardware before we made the transition. What follows is a harrowing tale into the deepest depths of modern hardware architecture.

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When we play video games, we are automatically transported into a world that stretches beyond the line of current reality. Within this world, you are granted complete freedom while omitting consequences. Many people play games because it’s a channel through which we can live out the impossible. While there are many other reasons, I question whether our attention spans are the only things being is injected into the games we play.
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Success pertains to anyone willing to grab it, however, the majority will experience it through different channels. A lot of people measure success by a person’s current status; what they have, who they know and ultimately where they are. Only, is this a correct scale upon which to measure a person’s triumphs? When measuring success, should you look at the point where a person has landed or consider the journey from where they made the initial jump?
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We’re pleased to announce the official release of haigha, our Python AMQP client library.

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Around this time last year, I was preparing to return to my internship with a fortune 50 company. However, the excitement that normally comes with such an accomplishment escaped me. The reason is because I knew exactly what to expect. I’d dress up in typical business attire and sit at my desk from 9-5, while waiting for the occasional computer crash or random fire drill. With so much to look forward to, who could complain, right?

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This weekend, MLG held a highly competitive, highly anticipated competition to test the strengths of pro gamers alike. The Pro Circuit, this time in Columbus, Ohio, included a number of competitors facing off for champion status in StarCraft 2, Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops.  The three-day event concluded as follows:

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