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World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things?
Gamasutra has a 'Soap Box' editorial up discussing the bad lessons World of Warcraft teaches. From the article: "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien."
The very idea that time > skill is alien.
;)
Ah, but time = money, therefore, in what is quickly becoming the "Formulae of WoW," money > skill, which I think everyone will agree is a lesson modern America teaches pretty much every day.
This is also substantiated by the original axiom, WoW = Golf.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Here are some other life lessons games teach us:
- Killing cops and prostitues is funny
- In war, once you die, you come right back to life (or maybe there is a slight delay)
- etc
Computer games aren't supposed to teach values!?
fuck! I bought my kid GTA a few years ago and haven't bothered to check back since! I thought it would be okay!!
Playing Ninja Gaiden Black on the XBOX has definitely improved my real life Flying Swallow technique.
So you never pretended that your fist was a rocket and the school bully was a Hellknight?
When I was a little squirt, I pretended to be BATMAN!!! and everyone else was a villian. The playground monitor wasn't too crazy about the villians going to see the nurse and my cape was taken away.
I got that ability after playing a few games of GTA. ;)
I'm sure fighting the cyberdemons tought you that sometimes gung-ho brute force looses out to finesse and patience.
Pitting cacodemons against hellnights shows you that if two people hate you but hate eachother more there's no reason that you need to deal with either of them.
And the game as a whole teaches you to always stock up on any and all valuable supplies because you never know when shit might get rocky.
Ah, LPC, one of the most fun languages ever when combined with the interface. Being able to go up to someone and call functions on their player object (or your own) was great. I loved doing things like impersonating a message board.
:)
;) ). Oh, and the ever-so-fun and overly elaborate soul commands. :)
Coding wars upped the ante quite a bit. So, another wizard has a habit of desting (destroying your player object - kicking you off, usually with fanfare) me? I dest them back when I see their dest start. So, they modify their dester to create an object in my inventory that eats my keyboard commands as soon as they start their dest. So, I create a "counterdest" object that immediately dests them whenever it sees their message and destroys any unknown objects in my inventory or my room (this was later expanded into an "AT-field" object). So they make one-line dests, where the player gets kicked off first thing. On and on it goes -- it was such great fun
Even when not "combatting" each other (or actually being productive), there were so many fun things you could do. An alchemical "bread shop" that performed alchemy based on hashes of the objects put into the bread and picked a result for the bread from a large table. A chat analyzer which would pick the most frequently used words on the wizard chat line and compiled statistics on them (net result: wizards became fond of inserting their own names in inappropriate places all throughout conversation
Letting players ultimately code is a nice reward indeed.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
Cry more, noob.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Um, so that's great, dude. You have an opinion about what kind of games you like.
So do most of us - congratulations.
Ifby the age of 16, your daughter hasn't been exposed to the idea of manipulating men with sex, she's led a painfully sheltered life.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Probably because video games are a virtual reality meaning that different laws apply there. I have learned never to use the same strategy when different rules are in effect. That's been pretty useful.
Chess taught me that it's very, very important to kill the women. Do you mean to say this rule doesn't apply to real life?
Damn. I guess that would explain the way things have turned out for me.
KFG
"Pitting cacodemons against hellnights shows you that if two people hate you but hate eachother more there's no reason that you need to deal with either of them."
my how times of changes. In my day, we learned that lesson by watching the build up along the Russian and Chinese border.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, Frank just gets to read /. for 9 hours and the GP poster gets to for 8. However, no /. for Joe!!
;-)
I'll grant that most shooters carry little applicable value for the average 21st century human... so far.
When the alien invaders/mutated humans/zombies show up, however, you'll be glad for a few lessons.
1) Constant movement around the map is the primary key to avoiding a grisly death at the hands of a particularly ugly creature that otherwise would have snuck up behind you and torn out your spine.
2) Scrounging up *every possible* health pack isn't just life saving, it will also enable you to become rich selling them to those who didn't have your videogame inspired foresight.
3) All doors you need to open will be color coded and have a corresponding colored key hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the door.
4) When you come to a dark hallway always send somebody else ahead to scout it out first. After the alien tentacle has burst through the floor and dashed them to pieces against a wall, you can then usually simply sneak by quietly on the opposite side.
A friend was working on a crossword puzzle and asked me what the name of the fleshy thing that hangs in the back of the throat was called.
In my minds eye I was instantly transported back to the interior of a giant, hercules colored whale wherein, armed only with a giant feather, I was trying to tickle said fleshy thing to get out.
So: I did learn something useful from a video game. The uvula.