Indeed, I've often found it beneficial to play available games in other languages, as a way of enhancing my language understanding.
Back around 1994, I had a CD version of "The Secret of Monkey Island" that contained five language versions of the game. I brought it in to my high school French class and my teacher LOVED it. Thanks to that, I can still say, "How appropriate: you fight like a cow!" in French. (Didn't come in so useful at that job where we actually communicated with Francophone schools and businesses, though...)
Similarly, I've played my MMOG of choice -- EQ2 -- on the French servers from time to time. I haven't worked up to having the gall to group with anyone yet but it's still interesting to be in that kind of informal environment in my second language.
That said, even after two years of college Chinese I don't think I'd ever be bold enough to attempt to do that with Mandarin! But I like the idea of an MMO meant for learning. I'll have to give it a try.
This is why Executive Assistant is a valid career track that requires intelligent people who can work efficiently -- and keep their mouths shut. And the salary for that kind of help, in a respectable company, does match.
When you get down to it, really, what people want is not insurance so much as someone else pays for my medical care.
Indeed, this is what health care (in the US, at least) has gone to.
The problem is, though, that the costs of much health care are not just above, but ASTRONOMICALLY above the average individual's (or family's) disposable income. For example: I recently switched jobs, and tried to have my annual "well-woman" checkup on my old insurance. Because it was only 355 days since my last one, and not a full 365+ calendar year, it wouldn't have been covered. End result? Ten minute exam and one lab test -- perfectly average and recommended at least yearly for all women between 16 and 65 -- would have been $882 out of pocket. (Ordinarily? A $30 copay.) I scrapped the appointment and decided it would wait a few months for my new insurance at the new job.
After grad school, I went without insurance for two years because I was working part-time / contract / contingent jobs that didn't offer it. I burned my hand with hot oil while cooking dinner: $1700 ER bill. Services rendered? 7 hours' waiting, 5 disposable ice packs, one roll gauze, one jar ointment, three miuntes' actual exam by medical professional.
There's spending wisely and being prepared with savings, frugality, etc. and then there's just plain over-the-top ridiculous. Sure, I work a good middle-class job, and I spend wisely and save as much as I can (and I'm very lucky that I don't have to drive to work, so my commute costs stay flat even while my boyfriend's double and triple), but that doesn't help in the face of bills that size.
A simple preventative exam yearly can cut off all sorts of medical problems before they become million-dollar dramas. But if you add the cost of a dental exam, a "women's health" exam, and a regular physical, without health insurance I'd need about $2200 a year just for maintenance. If I had kids, it'd be unbelievably worse. So something, somewhere, has to give.
...I got locked out of my apartment. It was a stupid mistake: I was leaning out of the front door to drop the bag of garbage down the trash chute, and I didn't realize my roommate had pushed down the button that locks the door automatically.
So there I was, middle of February, in New York City, in my workout clothes (shorts, T-shirt, and socks -- but no shoes) with no keys, no phone, and no resources except my wits. My roommate was on a plane to Florida. So quick: what do I do?
I handled the situation (met some great neighbors, too) and was back into my apartment in 45 minutes. And after the adrenaline wore off, I realized: I handled this situation EXACTLY like I handle an adventure game.
What I have learned from gaming is problem-solving outside of the norm. I think of it now as rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle thinking. I applied the correct methods of problem-solving -- what do I need? what do I have? how can I get the things I need and don't have? who are the relevant non-me people here? how do my surroundings help / hinder? -- but I didn't learn them from school, or even from my parents (who taught me a great many things). I learned them from the trail & error system of many, many years of questing in many different times of games and game worlds.
Having just finished the entirety of the Baroque Cycle last month, and having loved it, I just picked up Cryptonomicon at a train station on Saturday. (I'm in the process of moving from NYC to DC and therefore spending rather a lot of time and money on Amtrak and JetBlue.) I think I, too got this edition -- the text size doesn't bother me, but the fact that the ink from the pages and the black of the cover was coming off all over my hands on the subway today, as if I were reading a cheap newspaper. Given how much even a mass market paperback costs these days, I'm pretty annoyed.
(Still quite enjoying the book so far, particularly as I can look at the Baroque Cycle as a big huge historical prologue to it, hehe.)
Thanks for the link; that actually looks really interesting.
There are always consumers who fall well outside the core demographic for any product. They'll remain largely ignored by major market forces until you can demonstrate that it's economically viable to pursue them.
Yeah, but there are more of us than you think.;) I'm a genuine female gamer, and our dollars are pretty viable -- from those who are MMORPG players to those who are Bejeweled experts. I'm glad to see that the industry is now soliciting rather than tolerating my patronage, and that of my peers.;)
Gamers have always come in different races and ages and income brackets.
Someone who plays Tetris for an hour at a time three times a week is a video game consumer, just as someone who raids in WoW for five hours a night is.
Nintendo hasn't so much blown open the demographics -- though they have -- as they've blown open the debate and the recognition.
No-one has said, in eighty years, "all watchers of movies fit the same demographic." Television has ten networks PER demographic. So why this overwrought, antiquated insistence that All Gamers Are Of The Same Ilk?
I worked for Gamestop for a year, in 2005, and I developed my own admittedly anti-PC gamer categories. One of the MANY demographcis I saw represented was the fratboy/thug gamer: the white or hispanic males between ages 18 and 24, who were buying every sex and violence 360 title they could snap up. To so much of the world, they are the only gamers. To us, they were about 20% of our patrons.
If the rest of the world is finally, FINALLY starting to recognize that "gamer" means a lot, LOT more than just the fratboy/thug or the EQ addict in mom's basement, then so much the better.
But it certainly would have been nice if they wouldn't have had a "no flash, no service" sign out front.
Yup. We all have Flash disabled and can't install it at work, because the overlord office in Europe doesn't understand that it's not just for YouTube. We're starting to have serious trouble using travel booking sites, hotel booking sites, and restaurant booking sites (all of which are legitimate and frequent uses of our PCs for our business) because of this. A HUGE percentage of them don't have a single no-flash page left. Many of them don't even generate a "you need Flash to view this site" message; they just come up blank. Or the page frame (borders, margin -- whatever) will come up but you can't get to any content.
It's driving me nuts. Part of the reason I spend so much time on Slashdot is because around here, there's still Actual Text that I can just plain damn read.
I have a Facebook account, because as someone in that nebulous realm between college and her 30s, it's the best way to keep loose track of the people I knew in high school, college, grad school, back home, etc. But I consider it sort of a fancy Rolodex -- I've shot down every single application invitation any friend has ever sent me. They don't see why, but then again they're the ones with drunken-party-pictures on their profiles, too.
Saying, "the average user should be intelligent enough to..." is always frought with difficulty, but aside from the Beacon business last year, Facebook is pretty transparent about how it works. Don't want to give the application access? Don't check the little box. Do you REALLY need a ninja score?
As the OP is at a non-profit, the culture may be a little different.
I work at a non-profit that has seen exponential growth in the last 15 years. The Powers That Be in the European offices are finally on board with the 20th century, and now we in the states are pushing for the money to enter the 21st. Because we are a non-profit operating in dozens of countries, we have financial and procedural audits several times a year.
One of the key points the auditors gave us in 2006 was a need to document everything, and so we've all been creating procedural manuals as we go. In about 98% of cases, this hasn't so much made us feel replaceable (of course, we're overworked and underpaid so we know the organization needs us) as it has really improved some of our most stupid processes.
Case in point: in December, 2006 I was told to write a manual describing a process that had evolved for dealingw ith customer satisfaction surveys. I wrote the manual and went away for Christmas. While I was gone, my boss used my manual to do my job and discovered that it was a minor miracle that I ever managed to do it, let alone to do it in a timely and efficient way. Result? Increased budget and technology infrastructure for our department.
I think communication and honesty solves any of those "workload" issues.
I'll grant "many," although not "any," hehe. I've worked in some places for some people who were just about as useful as your average garden snail. I could communicate clearly and break things down until I was blue in the face and I'd just get a blank stare or a completely WRONG paraphrase back.
Happily, that's a "used to." That last position, they had 5 people in 18 months. (I think I was #3.) Someday maybe they'll learn.
Suffice it to say that on Salary.com's estimates, we're all between the 8th and 25th percentiles for our job titles in this city. The laws passed in the last few years (the current administration) are actually what made my position exempt.
There are a lot of places where if you refuse to work the unpaid overtime, or whatever, the management says, "That's great. We've hired a replacement for you. Bye now!" I don't know if IBM is one of those places or not.
But even though technically the employee has the freedom to leave, let's face it -- workers NEED salaries in their hands, and you can't usually realisitcally leave one job until after you've got another lined up. (And when you're working 50+ hours a week, it's harder to line a new one up.) The harsher the economy is, the more likely you are to put up with treatment or mistreatment just for the sake of having health insurance and a roof over your head.
I'm an exempt employee in a low-paid (I'm at a non-profit, every one of us is badly underpaid for the market) position. I pitched in well above-and-beyond in May, because it was necessary and I didn't mind, but then by June my managers were expecting 55-hour weeks and 110% normal capacity at all times. That's just not tenable. I'm very fortunate that they're understanding people and I was able to go to them and say, "no," but I've had managers in the past -- and friends and family have employers like that now -- where it either would have been that new standard all the time, or a nice cardboard box on the corner.
This is my first thought, too. If the WGA is only nominating union-written games -- which would make sense -- then it stands to reason from the list that union membership isn't (yet?) as pervasive in the gaming world as in the film and television worlds.
I was about six years old, and an only child. It was New Year's Eve and we were at my parents' friends' house. The friends were both engineers (a married couple) and grade-A geeks, and the house was filled with computer parts, Star Trek action figures, and all sorts of other things I'd appreciate more now.
It was about 11:00 p.m. and I was starting to get "not tired" and irritable the way small kids do. I could read and write and had some minor familiarity with computers (we had an Atari computer at home, courtesy of my worked-for-Lotus uncle), so to keep me entertained my dad's friend sat me down at his desk and fired up a program.
"A friend gave me this," he said, "and a friend of his gave it to him. It's from the Soviet Union so you may not know about it yet."
That game was Tetris, and I was hooked. I begged my dad for most of the month of January to let me play it again and for my birthday (February) he got the engineer friend to make us a copy.
The following years saw me playing Oregon Trail at friends' houses and saving up babysitting money to get LucasArts classics from the J&R catalog. I never had much money, but I played Nintendo at Jenny's house and Sega at the Brooks's. In recent years (where I am a grown-up with my own paycheck but yet no kids, haha) this has translated into my own custom-built gaming PC and a Wii (with a 360 to come this year).
Even now, when I play newer versions of Tetris on my DS or whatnot, I think fondly back to being a little girl and being immeasurably pleased at being able to kick my dad's ass at a video game.;)
My common-use screen name is incredibly easy to Google, but I've made no secret of it. I don't, however, give it to real-life people -- co-workers, employers, and so on.
I happen to have a real name in common with a very famous film actor of the 1950s - 1980s, so I've never found a result that was actually me within the first 40 pages of searching, even when I start to add keywords about my hometown, university, business, or so on. I consider that my good fortune.
I can't help but agree with Portal. I was impressed with it through and through. And as someone who adores Jonathan Coulton and who writes about gender issues in gaming... well, what's not to love? The game had a SUPERB learning curve, especially for someone like me who generally hates and does poorly with FPS-like games. It was clever, darkly amusing, and hnad actual problems to solve, which is my favorite sort of game.
So Portal hands down, with BioShock in a good solid second place. I can't find out until after Christmas what I'll place in third, because that's when I'll be getting the rest of the games I was hoping to try this year.;)
...and in having learned that, you've ruined the experience for yourself.
It goes both ways. *shrug* My boyfriend works in television and can barely stand to watch more than two hours a week of visual media. My father used to work in (music) radio and still doesn't listen to much but sports in his own car, over a decade later. But I studied music seriously for a number of years and don't find my enjoyment either of listening or of performing lessened at all by having a deeper understanding of the way in which the music is constructed. And I've an ex who reverse engineers everything he gets his little ADD brain on, but still enjoys the hobbies.
Different people have different experiences with their art and with their entertainment. Learning how something works -- learning how to do it yourself, or how, in detail, others do it -- doesn't necessarily have to make your enjoyment less or worse, but it WILL make it different. Even now I'm extraordinarily aware of the construction of each and every film and TV show I watch, but I feel that it's enhanced my experience, because I've taught myself to work both levels at once.
Honestly, I would think it's just like learning film theory, or seriously studying literature. You have to think about the construction of the content, not the narrative being presented.
When you study film, you're constantly being asked not, "why did this character do this," but, "why did the director, cinematographer, and editor choose to construct this scene in this way?" Approaching gaming in much the same way can be very revealing. And in terms of learning to think that waylll once again, Portal proves to be one of the best examples of the year. It's easy to approach both internally and externally and great to think about.
I'm sure, the more I dig through the comments, the more stories like this I'll see.
I'm not actually my company's IT person. I've done that work in the past but I do other things now. Nevertheless, I do much of the non-admin-privilege assisting for our company, because our actual IT staff is one person for 45 of us -- and she doesn't need to be bothered with anyone's inability to find a function in MS Word.
So we moved from one floor of our building to another, and I was going around helping everyone get their PCs hooked up and running again. And not one, not two, but three different employees came to me, panicky, because they couldn't make their computers "work right."
None of those systems had the power cord plugged into the wall. "Well, HERE'S your problem..." *facepalm*
It explains more than that. In many cities, there are also special for-critics-only pre-screenings of some films. And the critics tend to behave abominably during these: cell phones, noise, talking, getting up and walking around, talking and networking, and so on. It stands to reason that if that's the crowd environment you're in, it will color your perception of the movie.
As for me, I went to grad school for film theory and I've seen hundreds of movies on my own, in classrooms, and in theaters. And I could have said years ago that there's something about the crowd that really makes a big movie sizzle. As much as I hate the cell phones and the people that feel compelled to bring children under the age of three to 11 p.m. movies (this happens almost every time, now), I absolutely love the vibe that an excited crowd brings to a screening. Particularly a geek crowd getting a fandom-heavy film: it's better, the first time, to see it in a room full of people who really care and will get into it.
Photoshop 7 is still close enough to CS2 and CS3 that honestly, translating from one to the other isn't much problem. Also, although PS7 is old it's still very powerful and very useful. The learning curve fropm PS7 to PS CS3 will take maybe a week for most people to make the transition -- but GIMP and PS CS3 are like two different planets.
I could read books at age 3. My ex-boyfriend couldn't read until he was in the 3rd grade, aged 9. Guess what? In our late 20s, we're both voracious readers (I finished my 80th book of the year last night!); he went to an Ivy League school and I've got a master's from a respectable enough university.
Not all kids learn on the same pace. And many adult gamers are ALSO voracious readers. (There's more text in some Japanese RPGs than in all of War and Peace, I swear.) I wouldn't go freaking out about the 6-year-old's DS and criticizing someone's parenting because of it.
Ditto. I've been using the same online name since 1995 but although I've told some "internet people" my real name, I hardly ever tell "real people" my internet name.;) So far, so good.
Do you know how far away from his or her workplace the average suburban commuter actually lives? A 3-hour walk each direction just isn't practical. On the other hand, if more cities out there had some kind of reliable mass transit... (or if mass transit were more reliable in the cities that have it...).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I've often found it beneficial to play available games in other languages, as a way of enhancing my language understanding.
Back around 1994, I had a CD version of "The Secret of Monkey Island" that contained five language versions of the game. I brought it in to my high school French class and my teacher LOVED it. Thanks to that, I can still say, "How appropriate: you fight like a cow!" in French. (Didn't come in so useful at that job where we actually communicated with Francophone schools and businesses, though...)
Similarly, I've played my MMOG of choice -- EQ2 -- on the French servers from time to time. I haven't worked up to having the gall to group with anyone yet but it's still interesting to be in that kind of informal environment in my second language.
That said, even after two years of college Chinese I don't think I'd ever be bold enough to attempt to do that with Mandarin! But I like the idea of an MMO meant for learning. I'll have to give it a try.
This is why Executive Assistant is a valid career track that requires intelligent people who can work efficiently -- and keep their mouths shut. And the salary for that kind of help, in a respectable company, does match.
When you get down to it, really, what people want is not insurance so much as someone else pays for my medical care.
Indeed, this is what health care (in the US, at least) has gone to.
The problem is, though, that the costs of much health care are not just above, but ASTRONOMICALLY above the average individual's (or family's) disposable income. For example: I recently switched jobs, and tried to have my annual "well-woman" checkup on my old insurance. Because it was only 355 days since my last one, and not a full 365+ calendar year, it wouldn't have been covered. End result? Ten minute exam and one lab test -- perfectly average and recommended at least yearly for all women between 16 and 65 -- would have been $882 out of pocket. (Ordinarily? A $30 copay.) I scrapped the appointment and decided it would wait a few months for my new insurance at the new job.
After grad school, I went without insurance for two years because I was working part-time / contract / contingent jobs that didn't offer it. I burned my hand with hot oil while cooking dinner: $1700 ER bill. Services rendered? 7 hours' waiting, 5 disposable ice packs, one roll gauze, one jar ointment, three miuntes' actual exam by medical professional.
There's spending wisely and being prepared with savings, frugality, etc. and then there's just plain over-the-top ridiculous. Sure, I work a good middle-class job, and I spend wisely and save as much as I can (and I'm very lucky that I don't have to drive to work, so my commute costs stay flat even while my boyfriend's double and triple), but that doesn't help in the face of bills that size.
A simple preventative exam yearly can cut off all sorts of medical problems before they become million-dollar dramas. But if you add the cost of a dental exam, a "women's health" exam, and a regular physical, without health insurance I'd need about $2200 a year just for maintenance. If I had kids, it'd be unbelievably worse. So something, somewhere, has to give.
...I got locked out of my apartment. It was a stupid mistake: I was leaning out of the front door to drop the bag of garbage down the trash chute, and I didn't realize my roommate had pushed down the button that locks the door automatically.
So there I was, middle of February, in New York City, in my workout clothes (shorts, T-shirt, and socks -- but no shoes) with no keys, no phone, and no resources except my wits. My roommate was on a plane to Florida. So quick: what do I do?
I handled the situation (met some great neighbors, too) and was back into my apartment in 45 minutes. And after the adrenaline wore off, I realized: I handled this situation EXACTLY like I handle an adventure game.
What I have learned from gaming is problem-solving outside of the norm. I think of it now as rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle thinking. I applied the correct methods of problem-solving -- what do I need? what do I have? how can I get the things I need and don't have? who are the relevant non-me people here? how do my surroundings help / hinder? -- but I didn't learn them from school, or even from my parents (who taught me a great many things). I learned them from the trail & error system of many, many years of questing in many different times of games and game worlds.
Having just finished the entirety of the Baroque Cycle last month, and having loved it, I just picked up Cryptonomicon at a train station on Saturday. (I'm in the process of moving from NYC to DC and therefore spending rather a lot of time and money on Amtrak and JetBlue.) I think I, too got this edition -- the text size doesn't bother me, but the fact that the ink from the pages and the black of the cover was coming off all over my hands on the subway today, as if I were reading a cheap newspaper. Given how much even a mass market paperback costs these days, I'm pretty annoyed.
(Still quite enjoying the book so far, particularly as I can look at the Baroque Cycle as a big huge historical prologue to it, hehe.)
Thanks for the link; that actually looks really interesting.
;) I'm a genuine female gamer, and our dollars are pretty viable -- from those who are MMORPG players to those who are Bejeweled experts. I'm glad to see that the industry is now soliciting rather than tolerating my patronage, and that of my peers. ;)
There are always consumers who fall well outside the core demographic for any product. They'll remain largely ignored by major market forces until you can demonstrate that it's economically viable to pursue them.
Yeah, but there are more of us than you think.
There have always been girls and women in gaming.
Gamers have always come in different races and ages and income brackets.
Someone who plays Tetris for an hour at a time three times a week is a video game consumer, just as someone who raids in WoW for five hours a night is.
Nintendo hasn't so much blown open the demographics -- though they have -- as they've blown open the debate and the recognition.
No-one has said, in eighty years, "all watchers of movies fit the same demographic." Television has ten networks PER demographic. So why this overwrought, antiquated insistence that All Gamers Are Of The Same Ilk?
I worked for Gamestop for a year, in 2005, and I developed my own admittedly anti-PC gamer categories. One of the MANY demographcis I saw represented was the fratboy/thug gamer: the white or hispanic males between ages 18 and 24, who were buying every sex and violence 360 title they could snap up. To so much of the world, they are the only gamers. To us, they were about 20% of our patrons.
If the rest of the world is finally, FINALLY starting to recognize that "gamer" means a lot, LOT more than just the fratboy/thug or the EQ addict in mom's basement, then so much the better.
But it certainly would have been nice if they wouldn't have had a "no flash, no service" sign out front.
Yup. We all have Flash disabled and can't install it at work, because the overlord office in Europe doesn't understand that it's not just for YouTube. We're starting to have serious trouble using travel booking sites, hotel booking sites, and restaurant booking sites (all of which are legitimate and frequent uses of our PCs for our business) because of this. A HUGE percentage of them don't have a single no-flash page left. Many of them don't even generate a "you need Flash to view this site" message; they just come up blank. Or the page frame (borders, margin -- whatever) will come up but you can't get to any content.
It's driving me nuts. Part of the reason I spend so much time on Slashdot is because around here, there's still Actual Text that I can just plain damn read.
Ding ding! That's absolutely correct.
I have a Facebook account, because as someone in that nebulous realm between college and her 30s, it's the best way to keep loose track of the people I knew in high school, college, grad school, back home, etc. But I consider it sort of a fancy Rolodex -- I've shot down every single application invitation any friend has ever sent me. They don't see why, but then again they're the ones with drunken-party-pictures on their profiles, too.
Saying, "the average user should be intelligent enough to..." is always frought with difficulty, but aside from the Beacon business last year, Facebook is pretty transparent about how it works. Don't want to give the application access? Don't check the little box. Do you REALLY need a ninja score?
As the OP is at a non-profit, the culture may be a little different.
I work at a non-profit that has seen exponential growth in the last 15 years. The Powers That Be in the European offices are finally on board with the 20th century, and now we in the states are pushing for the money to enter the 21st. Because we are a non-profit operating in dozens of countries, we have financial and procedural audits several times a year.
One of the key points the auditors gave us in 2006 was a need to document everything, and so we've all been creating procedural manuals as we go. In about 98% of cases, this hasn't so much made us feel replaceable (of course, we're overworked and underpaid so we know the organization needs us) as it has really improved some of our most stupid processes.
Case in point: in December, 2006 I was told to write a manual describing a process that had evolved for dealingw ith customer satisfaction surveys. I wrote the manual and went away for Christmas. While I was gone, my boss used my manual to do my job and discovered that it was a minor miracle that I ever managed to do it, let alone to do it in a timely and efficient way. Result? Increased budget and technology infrastructure for our department.
I think communication and honesty solves any of those "workload" issues.
I'll grant "many," although not "any," hehe. I've worked in some places for some people who were just about as useful as your average garden snail. I could communicate clearly and break things down until I was blue in the face and I'd just get a blank stare or a completely WRONG paraphrase back.
Happily, that's a "used to." That last position, they had 5 people in 18 months. (I think I was #3.) Someday maybe they'll learn.
Suffice it to say that on Salary.com's estimates, we're all between the 8th and 25th percentiles for our job titles in this city. The laws passed in the last few years (the current administration) are actually what made my position exempt.
There are a lot of places where if you refuse to work the unpaid overtime, or whatever, the management says, "That's great. We've hired a replacement for you. Bye now!" I don't know if IBM is one of those places or not.
But even though technically the employee has the freedom to leave, let's face it -- workers NEED salaries in their hands, and you can't usually realisitcally leave one job until after you've got another lined up. (And when you're working 50+ hours a week, it's harder to line a new one up.) The harsher the economy is, the more likely you are to put up with treatment or mistreatment just for the sake of having health insurance and a roof over your head.
I'm an exempt employee in a low-paid (I'm at a non-profit, every one of us is badly underpaid for the market) position. I pitched in well above-and-beyond in May, because it was necessary and I didn't mind, but then by June my managers were expecting 55-hour weeks and 110% normal capacity at all times. That's just not tenable. I'm very fortunate that they're understanding people and I was able to go to them and say, "no," but I've had managers in the past -- and friends and family have employers like that now -- where it either would have been that new standard all the time, or a nice cardboard box on the corner.
This is my first thought, too. If the WGA is only nominating union-written games -- which would make sense -- then it stands to reason from the list that union membership isn't (yet?) as pervasive in the gaming world as in the film and television worlds.
I was about six years old, and an only child. It was New Year's Eve and we were at my parents' friends' house. The friends were both engineers (a married couple) and grade-A geeks, and the house was filled with computer parts, Star Trek action figures, and all sorts of other things I'd appreciate more now.
;)
It was about 11:00 p.m. and I was starting to get "not tired" and irritable the way small kids do. I could read and write and had some minor familiarity with computers (we had an Atari computer at home, courtesy of my worked-for-Lotus uncle), so to keep me entertained my dad's friend sat me down at his desk and fired up a program.
"A friend gave me this," he said, "and a friend of his gave it to him. It's from the Soviet Union so you may not know about it yet."
That game was Tetris, and I was hooked. I begged my dad for most of the month of January to let me play it again and for my birthday (February) he got the engineer friend to make us a copy.
The following years saw me playing Oregon Trail at friends' houses and saving up babysitting money to get LucasArts classics from the J&R catalog. I never had much money, but I played Nintendo at Jenny's house and Sega at the Brooks's. In recent years (where I am a grown-up with my own paycheck but yet no kids, haha) this has translated into my own custom-built gaming PC and a Wii (with a 360 to come this year).
Even now, when I play newer versions of Tetris on my DS or whatnot, I think fondly back to being a little girl and being immeasurably pleased at being able to kick my dad's ass at a video game.
My common-use screen name is incredibly easy to Google, but I've made no secret of it. I don't, however, give it to real-life people -- co-workers, employers, and so on.
I happen to have a real name in common with a very famous film actor of the 1950s - 1980s, so I've never found a result that was actually me within the first 40 pages of searching, even when I start to add keywords about my hometown, university, business, or so on. I consider that my good fortune.
I can't help but agree with Portal. I was impressed with it through and through. And as someone who adores Jonathan Coulton and who writes about gender issues in gaming... well, what's not to love? The game had a SUPERB learning curve, especially for someone like me who generally hates and does poorly with FPS-like games. It was clever, darkly amusing, and hnad actual problems to solve, which is my favorite sort of game.
;)
So Portal hands down, with BioShock in a good solid second place. I can't find out until after Christmas what I'll place in third, because that's when I'll be getting the rest of the games I was hoping to try this year.
...and in having learned that, you've ruined the experience for yourself.
;)
It goes both ways. *shrug* My boyfriend works in television and can barely stand to watch more than two hours a week of visual media. My father used to work in (music) radio and still doesn't listen to much but sports in his own car, over a decade later. But I studied music seriously for a number of years and don't find my enjoyment either of listening or of performing lessened at all by having a deeper understanding of the way in which the music is constructed. And I've an ex who reverse engineers everything he gets his little ADD brain on, but still enjoys the hobbies.
Different people have different experiences with their art and with their entertainment. Learning how something works -- learning how to do it yourself, or how, in detail, others do it -- doesn't necessarily have to make your enjoyment less or worse, but it WILL make it different. Even now I'm extraordinarily aware of the construction of each and every film and TV show I watch, but I feel that it's enhanced my experience, because I've taught myself to work both levels at once.
Call it my last remaining area of optimism.
Honestly, I would think it's just like learning film theory, or seriously studying literature. You have to think about the construction of the content, not the narrative being presented.
When you study film, you're constantly being asked not, "why did this character do this," but, "why did the director, cinematographer, and editor choose to construct this scene in this way?" Approaching gaming in much the same way can be very revealing. And in terms of learning to think that waylll once again, Portal proves to be one of the best examples of the year. It's easy to approach both internally and externally and great to think about.
I'm sure, the more I dig through the comments, the more stories like this I'll see.
I'm not actually my company's IT person. I've done that work in the past but I do other things now. Nevertheless, I do much of the non-admin-privilege assisting for our company, because our actual IT staff is one person for 45 of us -- and she doesn't need to be bothered with anyone's inability to find a function in MS Word.
So we moved from one floor of our building to another, and I was going around helping everyone get their PCs hooked up and running again. And not one, not two, but three different employees came to me, panicky, because they couldn't make their computers "work right."
None of those systems had the power cord plugged into the wall. "Well, HERE'S your problem..." *facepalm*
It explains more than that. In many cities, there are also special for-critics-only pre-screenings of some films. And the critics tend to behave abominably during these: cell phones, noise, talking, getting up and walking around, talking and networking, and so on. It stands to reason that if that's the crowd environment you're in, it will color your perception of the movie.
As for me, I went to grad school for film theory and I've seen hundreds of movies on my own, in classrooms, and in theaters. And I could have said years ago that there's something about the crowd that really makes a big movie sizzle. As much as I hate the cell phones and the people that feel compelled to bring children under the age of three to 11 p.m. movies (this happens almost every time, now), I absolutely love the vibe that an excited crowd brings to a screening. Particularly a geek crowd getting a fandom-heavy film: it's better, the first time, to see it in a room full of people who really care and will get into it.
Photoshop 7 is still close enough to CS2 and CS3 that honestly, translating from one to the other isn't much problem. Also, although PS7 is old it's still very powerful and very useful. The learning curve fropm PS7 to PS CS3 will take maybe a week for most people to make the transition -- but GIMP and PS CS3 are like two different planets.
I could read books at age 3. My ex-boyfriend couldn't read until he was in the 3rd grade, aged 9. Guess what? In our late 20s, we're both voracious readers (I finished my 80th book of the year last night!); he went to an Ivy League school and I've got a master's from a respectable enough university.
Not all kids learn on the same pace. And many adult gamers are ALSO voracious readers. (There's more text in some Japanese RPGs than in all of War and Peace, I swear.) I wouldn't go freaking out about the 6-year-old's DS and criticizing someone's parenting because of it.
Ditto. I've been using the same online name since 1995 but although I've told some "internet people" my real name, I hardly ever tell "real people" my internet name. ;) So far, so good.
Do you know how far away from his or her workplace the average suburban commuter actually lives? A 3-hour walk each direction just isn't practical. On the other hand, if more cities out there had some kind of reliable mass transit... (or if mass transit were more reliable in the cities that have it...).