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"That's why soldiers purposely missed eachother, while using individual weapons, up until recently."

Prestigious historian SLA Marshall did a wonderful sales job on that idea, which is so emotionally appealing that it has been repeated without question.

http://warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallproblem.htm

http://pages.slc.edu/~fsmoler/amheritagemarshall1989pagefour.htm

"Lt Gen. Harry 0. Kinnard, who participated in every one of the 101st Airborne's World War II operations (and who is singled out by Marshall in several books as one of the war's most distinguished combat leaders) says, "In both World War II and in Vietnam it never came to the attention that failure to fire was a problem at any level." Gen. Bruce Clarke, who led the defense of St.-Vith and served as both commanding general-Europe and commanding general-Continental U.S., put it more strongly. Marshall's theories, he said, are "ridiculous and dangerous assertions-absolute nonsense And Gen. James PA. Gavin, who commanded the famous 82d Airborne Division during World War II, says bluntly that Marshall's claim "is absolutely false." According to Gavin, "All of our infantry fired their weapons. I know because I was there and took part."

And again, I must refer to this:

Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science

What we have here is a quasi-religious belief in the goodness of Man. Something not born out by human behavior for as long as there have been humans.

None of it is based on real science, and it has what for most of it's adherants is a non-falsifiable premise, no matter how many Sparticani the Romans crucified, how many babies sacrificed to Dagon, or how many hearts were given to the Aztec gods.

  The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so. The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become much more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy. And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions. His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science.

I wouldn't care, but the whole point of all these mental gymnastics is to remove First Amendment protections from video games, as Frederick Wertham did to comic books for many years. And the author of the article sites as his "realistic, murder simulator" Bioshock. Seriously, Bioshock.

I might have more respect if they were talking about realistic war simulations... ok, who am I kidding, no I wouldn't. But Bioshock? Seriously? They game where you have magic powers and the enemies all look like freakshow rejects? That game?

I'm interested in the idea of procedurally generated RPG content too. There's a guy who's set out to post Three Hundred game ideas, and devotes many of the current 99 to procedural generation in the Roguelike style. Because I'm mainly interested in building a "real" history for a game world as opposed to a set of dungeons, I don't completely agree with his approach, but the site is definitely worth browsing.

On the topic of how a computer could possibly judge what makes a "good" game world/level/whatever when that's a highly subjective judgment, have you heard of the AI research of Douglas Hofstadter? His book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" describes his 90s-era research into how a computer program can display a form of creativity and aesthetic judgment. There's a description with code (tricky to get running) of his group's project "Metacat," which solves letter-related puzzles with no objectively right answer. I could see a similar system judging aspects of a game world.

.

Massive quotes to follow:

The Premise:

Lt. Col. Grossman, a former paratrooper who has taught psychology at West Point and is now a professor of military science in Arkansas, has Good News and Bad News to reveal. The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so. The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become much more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy. And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions. His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science.

Some absurdity:

Grossman is much given to psychologizing monocausal explanation, with the result that many of his military historical dicta are absurd. Take a single example: Gunpowders superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield. The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing was all that mattered, since both the longbows firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of the smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going ploink, ploink, ploink with a bow, doesnt stand much of a chance against an equally frightened man going BANG!BANG! with a musket. The traditional explanation for the decline of the longbow is less subtle: an arrow could not penetrate plate armor, whereas an arquebus ball could, and did, and gunpowder thus rendered the longbow thoroughly obsolete by the mid-16th century, around which time the last Dialogue Between Hermes and An English Solider was published.

This is just sad, but what's even sadder is that there are people who take this nonsense seriously. I'll leave it with his conclusion:

Brooding over this review, I was pondering Grossmanism with a friend the other day; if you dont know any history, he remarked, you dont know anything at all:. That, I think, is indeed part of the story: a genuine ignorance of history is probably a pre-condition for this sort of warmed-over Rousseauvian sentimentality about an extremely violent human past, and contemporary American social scientists are pretty innocent of history, particularly of the range of historical evidence that makes historians intensely hostile to this sort of overarching claim; historians are by nature splitters, not lumpers. A reverence for quantitative methods is also part of the story: Grossman, after writing off the most recent evidence as indeterminate, proudly disdains data for American violence which predate FBI statistics, appearing innocent of the problem that the FBI started accumulating statistics fairly recently, and did so at the start of a long fall in American crime rates, followed by a long rise, so in essence two data points become the statistical universe for conclusions about allegedly fundamental human traits. Marshall, too, fell afoul of this reverence for quantitative methods, and as a result invented the statistics that would instantiate his claim. Finally, Grossmanist thought is wonderfully prepared to write off all of our ancestors experience as unscientificthey are assumed to have perfectly misunderstood themselves, and the vast array of their art and literature and political philosophy that concerned itself with war and violence is readily written off as no better than fantasy.

Huh? He wrote a whole book about his lousy Scheme function, and you can in fact try out the code.

I wonder how long it will be before the above stupid theory goes the way of phrenology.

It's been thoroughly debunked, along with it's origins in that professional liar S. L. A. Marshall's works. Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science

I suppose it will have to wait until the current witch-hunt is over, the same sorts of things were said about Jazz, Comic Books and Dungeons and Dragons, it's typical witch-hunter boilerplate.

Honestly, it's obviously lost most of it's pull against First Person Shooters, which are more plentiful, and violent, than they've ever been. In fact, I say with confidence that if Manhunt 2 were a First Person Shooter, rather than a third person stealth game, it wouldn't have gotten an AO rating (Note: the only exception here is if it just got an AO because it's a Mature game called Manhunt, and it was switched to First Person after making the first one Third Person.) I mean a guy eats a corpse in the F.E.A.R. demo, and no one is getting upset about that, except panty waists like the above loser.

Politically, it's a fact that the games that are most attacked lately, GTA, Manhunt, and Rule of Rose are all Third Person Adventure type games. If people were swayed by the above garbage, it'd be stuff like Far Cry, F.E.A.R., Painkiller, Halo and Half-Life getting trashed.

Well, Resistance got bashed by the CoE, but that's just because the Bishop of Manchester is a reincarnation of Titus Oates and he figured he could grandstand because "his" cathedral was used without permission and that's mainly about selling lucrative film rights.

Imagine if no one ever needed to pay Manchester Cathedral because they could just create a digital simulation, horrors, the Bishop would lose lose out on bags and bags of money. It's sacreligious I tell you!

Of course, it's always possible that someone will figure out a way to make FPSs controversial again, but so far if you want to make a political witchhunt agains your game, it's third person all the way.

First, read the following link. I'll wait. It's about the debunking of Men Against Fire:

http://pages.slc.edu/~fsmoler/grossman.html

This goes beyond video games.

The problem here is that we have two competing world views, one or the other is true. They can't both be true.

The view which you endorse, which I believe to be false, dangerous, and naive is that humans are basically peaceful creatures that only kill in extreme situation.

The alternative, which I believe, is that humans are born killers, like most animals. It is our human natures and our access to reason that allows us to rise above such animal cruelty and create codes of conduct for ourselves.

I'm not expecting to convince you of the truth, but I'm sad that Doom gets the blame whenever a mentally ill lunatic, usually who has been telegraphing what he's going to do for months in advance, goes on a killing spree.

Even in cases where it turns out later that the lunatic had never played any video games.

As it happens, Marshall proved nothing of the kind. By the late nineteen eighties Marshalls statistical argument for his ratio of fire had been debunked as a fantastic fraud. I should declare an interest: I was one of the peopleby far the least distinguished, and certainly the one who performed the least original research--who discovered this fact. Although a lot of people have looked for it, no evidence has ever emerged that Marshall had interviewed a single rifle company in the European theater, let alone the four, or five, or six hundred that he at various times claimed to have interviewed. But Marshall had interviewed some in the Pacific, who had fought on Makin Island, and on Kwajalein, and my only real research involved finding the record of what Marshall had there discovered. As it happens, those men showed no striking refusal to firein fact, Marshall discovered that on Makin, at least, they fired far too much, as one might suspect would be the case with green troops: Much aimless shooting by `trigger-happy men occurredIn the early morning its volume increasedA wave of shooting hysteria swept through the area and men started blazing at bushes and trees until the place was `simply ablaze with fireshouted orders to the men to cease firing proved ineffectualflat terrain and limited area made control of fire abnormally difficult. --- Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science

However, it will not matter that it has been debunked, because it represents a very seductive world view (not seductive to me, but to many people). The view was famously articulated by Rousseau as the noble savage.

As a philosophy, it is anti-civilization, anti-science and anti-progress. Video games, in this case, are simply a representative of scientific progress that can be attacked with impunity. The plot is always the same, "In the past human beings were better, but then science and civilization came along and corrupted them."

To quote Fred Smoler:

The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so. The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become much more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy. And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions. His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science.

However, I already pointed to this in a previous comment on yet another article on the coming ban on 'M' rated games. (I really don't know how long it will take, but I believe it is coming so be prepared for it.)

So, in the interest in presenting new research on the subject of this impressive charlatan, I present this, The Dave Grossman Debate. The author tends to use emotional rhetoric too much but is understandably upset by the implications of Grossman's writing, which is that police officers and military personel are being turned into homicidal zombie killbots by the new 'murder simulators' that also happen to be the basis of the evil videogames that are poisoning our children:

Your allegations imply that deadly force is routinely employed in a manner that is the product of a conditioned response. The troubling implication is that police don't use professional judgment on a case-by-case basis..... they merely pull triggers as a matter of conditioning!

Of course, none of this is going to matter to the believers.

'Killology' is bogus pseudoscience

Link: Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science

Link: Grossman-ism: Media Violence and Mad Social Science

And if the lack of an engineering program isn't an issue, try out Sarah Lawrence College. Though, I must say, it's more than a little unnerving to walk into a dining hall and be one of the only guys there. Be careful what you wish for.

Actually, a CS professor I had in college wrote an interesting essay defining computer science. I think it was quite good, actually.

since you more than likely are doing a course in "Computer Repair" through the mail.

Dude, you are so right! Look at his email address:

fervent@slc.edu

"Sarah Lawrence College" I bet the recruiters are flocking towards your campus!

By the way.. I was being sarcastic!

OK, who has what up their sleeves, and why? Fervent writes "Interesting twist in the SDMI boycott -- Don Marti's backing down a bit. Apparently he and Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the SDMI, talked and found ways to get along about secure music. The article is here ."

I'll be impressed if the music industry or anyone else can come up with a high-quality music format which can't be effectively copied with a modicum of hassle. "Anything that can be read," etc. Thta's not about to stop them from trying on both technological and legal fronts. Of the two, I'll take technological any day.

Previously reported:
Set Digital Music Free
Boycott of Music Industry's Hacker Challenge Urged

This beat my last college, Boston College, hands down. Working in the student computing lab here, the administrators wouldn't even think to use a system like Carnivore.