Slashdot Mirror
Female MMORPG Developers On Influences
Thanks to Warcry for their discussion with a number of female MMOG developers, asking whether "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by men." Of the respondents, Judith at Turbine Entertainment points out that "an audience that skews towards immature males will very likely have exaggeratedly female avatars for them to play with", and Srand at Turbine doesn't see any particular male-patterned design trap, suggesting: "the reason so many MMOGs follow the same paths... is that they were designed, built, and maintained by people. And people, as the mantra goes, are stupid."
Anyone can get laid. It is one of the two driving forces behind culture. The other being laziness.
That said, it's important to realize that the ease of getting laid is different from person to person.
Attractive people can get laid easily. Unattractive people must invest more time and energy into getting laid.
When the effort involved in getting laid outweighs the cost of being lazy, lazy wins and the person goes off and does something like play videogames.
For women, it is relatively easy to get laid. Even the most unattractive woman can apply enough make up, wear a short enough skirt, or laugh at inane jokes to be attractive to someone. Also, women do not base their desire of someone solely on appearance, even unattractive men stand a chance at getting laid by a women. So women spend much of their time investing to become more proficient in these activities in order to maximize their ability to get laid.
Men, on the other hand, do not have such an easy path ahead. Unattractive men will commonly find that they are beaten to the punch by attractive men. Unlike women, men base most of their desire to lay a women solely on her physical attractiveness. So even the most unattractive man would look at an unattractive woman and proclaim that he wouldn't "hit it". Since attractive women have already chosen suitable sexual partners from among the attractive men, and since the unattractive man has already ruled out having sex with an unattractive woman, he is left with no possibility for sex without exerting the effort to become an attractive man. Physically he can exercise, mentally he can read, socially he can interact with others. However, for certain types of men this kind of exertion is far too much. It is easier for them to be lazy and forego sex.
Therefore it is easy to see that women will be less inclined to waste valuable time playing video games and instead focus on increasing their attractiveness, and men will be more inclined to play video games and forego the required investment to become attractive.
Another interesting outcome of this theory is that those who remain in the gaming category, both men and women, will necessarily be unattractive and possibly socially inept. The theory has far reaching implications and predictions such as the "unattractive gamers" hypothesis are clearly played out in reality.
Hi, I've been using QNX for the last few weeks on my 1 GHz Penium III system, and I'm quite baffled by the performance or lack thereof that I've been seeing.
I downloaded the QNX 6.2.1 ISO, burnt a CD, and installed onto my hard drive. This was after erasing an old Windows 2000/Linux dual-boot install. Things went smoothly, and I was easily able to connect to the Internet for updates to various packages. I was really impressed at this point.
After a couple days of playing with it, however, I was boggled at how much like Windows the system acted. Here I was with a 1 GHz processor (the minimum required is 600 MHz) and 1 gigabyte of RAM and Photon, the GUI, was lagging. If I have a few programs open and an MP3 playing in the background, I can watch widgets redraw. Tweaking some options helped a little, but this is not in line with what I have read about QNX performance.
Isn't this supposed to be a hard realtime operating system that runs on medical devices meant to save peoples' lives? How is it that it runs on 33 MHz processors with 128k of RAM in an IV drip yet skips MP3s on a system 100x beefier in every way imagineable? Do they release a different version for free that doesn't try for realtime performance or what?
After less than a full month I've grown dissatisfied with something I'd hoped I could replace my Windows and Linux installs with for leisure and hobbyist purposes. My main system is a dual 3 GHz Pentium4 box with 4 gigs of RAM, but that's a DV workstation and I can't use it just to see how QNX scales with more robust hardware and a dual processor configuration. Something tells me it might not, though.
Can anyone offer me any insights? I realize that this is a free operating system and that I have little room to bitch, but I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing before I discount QNX altogether and go back to Windows or Linux, which while performing slugglishly are more familiar to me.
Thank you.
Somebody once said something to the effect of "The fool sees ignorance everywhere. The wise sees ignorance within himself". This basically means that the truly wise concentrate on their own ignorance, instead of spewing off on others'.
-Enfors-
If you want proof that people as a whole are stupid, go and take a job where you work with the public. I work at Wally World (Wal-Mart) and I get questions like, do you work here, is this Wal-Mart, (over the phone) do you have a phone that looks just like the one I got here, why are you sold out, do you carry movies, (holding a DVD) is this a CD movie, why don't you carry that, when you are finished watching a DVD how do you rewind it, and the list goes on and on. People are stupid, there is proof P.S. These are all actuall quotes, I can't make stuff this stupid up!
Profanity is the language all programmers know best.