You're being paid per post by Sony, aren't you? Admit it!
I cannot think of another reason anyone would rationally post so many times about the definition of the word flimsy and its profound difference from the words "cheap" and "plasticky."
That, or you are a philosophy major in a liberal arts college.
who has come out with something "different" in a console system in the past few years? other than the DS (dual screens + touchscreen) i can't really think of anything.
I may be alone, but I feel that Sony's EyeToy was fairly innovative. It may not have been the first camera system for on-screen gaming, but they did a nice job with ease of use and supporting it with some fun games. Very much in the same vein, Apple may not have made the first portable digital music player, but they made a nice software/hardware package that made the thing mainstream.
I would show the EyeToy to folks who are non-gamers, and they thought it was interesting enough to buy a Playstation 2. Mind you, these were folks who would never consider playing typical console games. If Sony had packaged an improved EyeToy with the PS3 (maybe with a Fitness Game), I think they would have gotten a lot of good coverage from the mainstream press.
More telling, in my opinion, is the number of original (>20 year old) NES machines that can still be made to work perfectly with just this trick.
All electronics manufactured in this era tend to have longer lives than electronics manufactured today. A TV manufactured in 1985 probably still works today, whereas one manufactured yesterday will probably only last you 10 years.
This study is also subject to several limitations. We used a self-report measure of school performance as our main outcome. Use of self-report for school performance is supported by previous studies showing that, whereas students may inflate their grades,14, 38 self-reports generally correlate with teacher reports. Specifically, Anderson et al14 reported that whereas self-reported grades were inflated from 0.26 to 0.37 points on a 4-point scale, they were highly correlated with transcript grades (r = 0.71-0.82). Hence, we believe that despite the probable grade inflation, the substantial and statistically significant correlative associations between the self-reported grades and all of the covariates are internally valid. The study was conducted in a limited geographic area, so it is possible that the findings may not hold true for children in other areas of the country. A national sample would be needed to determine whether the relationships between media use and school performance apply across populations, especially among minority populations. In addition, it is always possible that there are other unmeasured confounders that would explain the association between television exposure and school performance. Notably, our study did not include any measure of child intelligence quotient. It is possible that children with low intelligence quotient perform more poorly in school and, as a result, have less interest in school and greater interest in television, movie, and video game use. Finally, whereas we have established a relationship between exposure to adult content in television and movies and poorer school performance, because of our cross-sectional design, we cannot infer a before-and-after relationship between content exposure and school performance. Additional work is needed to clarify directionality, along with the intervening processes between adult content exposure and school performance. A longitudinal study, with data on potential mediators, as well as school performance, could be helpful in studying this relationship.
The authors themselves do a better job of critiquing their work than you do. With a correlation coefficient on self-reporting of grades this high, I am confident in kids' abilities to assess their own performance. Of course, I'm happy to be impartial. I'm not sure any piece of information would be sufficient to reverse your clearly strong beliefs (based on anecdotal evidence).
The conclusion they draw is correct, which is that more research should be done which controls for other factors. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the results were even more conclusive if they did this.
It seems recently that folks are starting to put Warcraft in the same "unfashionable" category as Madden, sequels, and the PS3. For the first year of it's life, WoW was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Now it's being called an uncreative treadmill with a poor combat system.
Don't you think it's a bit unfair to indict all of humanity based on the actions of a couple people? Fundamentally, you're making a judgement based on the coverage of one news story with little to no consideration of the thousands of companies that don't make the news.
Considering the judgement was handed down by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, one would hope the they're subject to US jurisdiction.
It is probably a bad idea to draw conclusions on the success of the editing protocol of Wikipedia based on this observation of yours.
I'm not taking sides here. I would simply like to point out that no one has an obligation to respond to your challenge, especially when the tone of your statement indicates you've already made your mind up on this particular issue.
This only begs the question - why were these numbers removed? Perhaps because it would have signaled to anyone reading the study that it was hopelessly flwed?
I think you and 99% of the posters have not read the research and really have no familiarity with how medical research is done. The author is a specialist in public health, and, as such, her interest here is in the developmental health of children playing these games.
1) Your primary question - If you look at the methodology of the report, the researchers' data set only examined first games published after 2001 (re-realases were not counted). This is the reason Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Centipede were not included in the statistical findings of the report published. The researchers fully understood that games published prior to 2001 were on a completely different scale of "abstract depiction of violence" than current games are. They full understood and attempted to rate not only the time spent killing, but the magnitude and visual accuracy of human suffering were depicted.
2) Anyone who has done any kind of statistical research fully understands that it is dangerous and incorrect to apply conclusions from one data set to the universe of possible data sets. The author clearly states in her rebuttal, "We did not include the arcade games that you're asking about in our statistical analyses of E-rated games and we are well aware that these games were created well before the industry established the ESRB and during an era with vastly different visual technology that makes comparison with modern games problematic."
What you're trying to do is invalidate her methodology by applying her techniques to games she herself says is not applicable. It doesn't mean the methodology is incorrect. Medical researchers all the time will publish results that say something along the lines of "for people 50-55 in such and such weight ranges, the following drug was found to be 95% effective at such and such concentration." Your primary beef with the research is the equivalent of proclaiming "That article I read in JAMA is bogus! That drug didn't work at all on my obese, diabetic 17-year old son!"
3) Finally, even if Pac-Man and Dig Dug were applied in the statistical findings, it does not invalidate the research. Every statistical model applied to a problem will have outliers it failed to accurately assess for one reason or another. It does not invalidate the model. You may as well condemn every medical test or predictive model ever published for not having 100% accuracy. People love to point out the failures of a model and ignore the majority of cases where it succeeds.
The results of the study led to some fairly insightful recommendations. We all know the ESRB ratings are broken in one way or the other, whether it is the mere classification or simply the fact that most parents don't fully understand the ratings they way they understand G, PG, PG-13, and R-ratings. Anything that leads to an overhaul of the broken ESRB is a step in the right direction to prevent politicians from imposing their own agenda-driven ideology.
At what point does the advancement of technology become either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive, too complex, or some combination thereof? This has already happened in audio -- how many people out there really are vested in SACD? How many people do you know who even know what SACD is?
All this indicates is that the industry has maxed out on one particular dimension of a customer need: sound quality. Product designers are always coming up with revolutionary new ways to satisfy customers in ways the customers themselves never imagined they wanted or needed. MP3's and iPods are a great example of an area where the 'Audio' industry completely reinvented itself- some were winners and some big losers.
This has been and will probably always be the case. A hundred years ago, Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said Faster Horses."
Actually, both of those industries have suffered terribly from crappy local and federal laws designed to "protect minors". Ask yourself why you can't purchase wine over the internet from small vineyards in California or France. Ask youself where all the local breweries have gone. The control of alcohol has severely limited the quality and choice you have when you want any. I'm no friend of the porn industry, but they too suffer from an amazing and contradictory raft of both specific and vague legislation.
It really depends on who you classify as "the industry." Beer/Wine/Distributors have a state granted oligopoly that ends up being an incredibly lucritive business. Wholesales are VERY interested in keeping it this way. I was personally interested to find that for Political Action Committee contributions to candidates, the National Beer Wholesalers Assocation PAC was the 2nd largest.
As you say, it really is frustrating that these laws benefit a few lucky businesses to the detriment of the public good.
All of those pieces of information (calendar, contacts, sales leads) are stored in the Salesforce.com database, which is a development partner for this project.
But you are on to something, which is unless you have the connectors, this this is worse than useless.
This is just a way to start a game with little funding hoping that you will make enough money to complete it. It is what I'll call the current PC "patch model" of distribution taken to its logical extreme.
The article addresses this issue, "We believe it is less about the big guy vs. the small guy, or the mitigation of risk in the face of escalating development cost. It is about controlling the subscription model for gaming."
Their contention is that this is all about redistribution of the value chain, or more precisely, what share will retailers get in the future?
I would tend to agree with them, in that the majority of game development expenses are not in building levels, but in creating the foundation for those levels- graphics/physics models, game rules, etc. It doesn't take blizzard anywhere near the resources to pump out the umpteenth instance as it did to create the first few. It doesn't make sense to use patches as a risk mitigation technique if you plunk down the majority of your expenses before you get an indication from the market as to whether the title will be a winner or loser.
To your first point, I think he acknowledges that the data only goes to the end of the year. However, I agree with the overall sentiment. The primary source for his data is publicly released information, and, as we know, PR mouthpieces rarely trumpet bad news.
If you examine each individual MMORPG, very rarely do you see declines in subscriber base. Typically, you see a growth period followed by an eternal plateau. I'm suspicious that the lack of news isbeing interpreted by the author as a "no change" when in reality, it could be a significant decline which is not announced by the publisher. Users moving around between MMORPGs would result in them being double/triple counted for these purposes.
Has anyone compared the total subscriber numbers to numbers obtained through other methodologies (incidence surveys?). The chart (which excludes Lineage I/II) above extrapolated using his method would predict something like 15-20 million total subscribers by December of this year.
If you knew anything about American history, you'd know it's been like this for the entire history of the country. For every example you cite, there's an example in our history that is significantly worse. That does not excuse the behavior, but it does invalidate your claim that things are getting worse.
I would be interested to know if you be willing to express this opinion on behalf of groups you vigorously disagreed with? NAMBLA, Neo-Nazis, Klan, etc. Should a KKK group be allowed to recuit publicly on WoW so that they can then talk amonst themselves in guild chat about how much they hate other races? It's really no different in principle- any group that seeks to be exclusive to others could be found offensive by a paying customer not in that group.
And yes, it IS sexual harassment for a GLBT person to run around at work constantly talking about their sex life if they've been asked to stop. Why should it be any different in a MMORPG world?
Good point. In fact, I've played WoW since Day 1, and I've never heard anyone say that something was "gay." Maybe it's because I chose an RP server in the hopes of finding more mature players, maybe not. Nonetheless, it seems suspicious that one would need to specifically form and market a guild as GLBT friendly guild simply to avoid bigotry. What would have made more sense would have been to start and guild, make it clear during recruiting that such language would not be tolerated, and go about one's business. Instead, the group seems to have raised the war flag and claiming discrimination, when in fact, WoW seems to deliver equal opportunity banning of guilds that talk about sexuxality. Americans have a soft spot when it comes to any sort of situation where a minority group may be being discriminated against, and there are some folks out there who are more than happy to exploit this to further their own aims and finances. Expect to see a lawsuit seeking damages within 6 months.
The Auction houses in Wow for instance, represent a capitalist economy with all the dynamics of supply and demand. That hardly eliminates gold farmers.
No, the auction house represents a market system. Markets have been around since the dawn of civilization. Supply and demand is a market force, but not necessarily and indicator of capitalism. Socialist counties also have markets you know.
Capitalism implies that the means of production (factories, farms, etc) are privately owned. WoW is definitely not capitalist in that there are no in game assets that produce income, AKA Capital.
Slashdot Mirror
You're being paid per post by Sony, aren't you? Admit it!
I cannot think of another reason anyone would rationally post so many times about the definition of the word flimsy and its profound difference from the words "cheap" and "plasticky."
That, or you are a philosophy major in a liberal arts college.
who has come out with something "different" in a console system in the past few years? other than the DS (dual screens + touchscreen) i can't really think of anything.
I may be alone, but I feel that Sony's EyeToy was fairly innovative. It may not have been the first camera system for on-screen gaming, but they did a nice job with ease of use and supporting it with some fun games. Very much in the same vein, Apple may not have made the first portable digital music player, but they made a nice software/hardware package that made the thing mainstream.
I would show the EyeToy to folks who are non-gamers, and they thought it was interesting enough to buy a Playstation 2. Mind you, these were folks who would never consider playing typical console games. If Sony had packaged an improved EyeToy with the PS3 (maybe with a Fitness Game), I think they would have gotten a lot of good coverage from the mainstream press.
Making your point twice enforces it...
More telling, in my opinion, is the number of original (>20 year old) NES machines that can still be made to work perfectly with just this trick.
All electronics manufactured in this era tend to have longer lives than electronics manufactured today. A TV manufactured in 1985 probably still works today, whereas one manufactured yesterday will probably only last you 10 years.
The conclusion of this study should have been that kids who routinely play computer games perceive they're doing worse in school than those who don't.
The Publication
This study is also subject to several limitations. We used a self-report measure of school performance as our main outcome. Use of self-report for school performance is supported by previous studies showing that, whereas students may inflate their grades,14, 38 self-reports generally correlate with teacher reports. Specifically, Anderson et al14 reported that whereas self-reported grades were inflated from 0.26 to 0.37 points on a 4-point scale, they were highly correlated with transcript grades (r = 0.71-0.82). Hence, we believe that despite the probable grade inflation, the substantial and statistically significant correlative associations between the self-reported grades and all of the covariates are internally valid. The study was conducted in a limited geographic area, so it is possible that the findings may not hold true for children in other areas of the country. A national sample would be needed to determine whether the relationships between media use and school performance apply across populations, especially among minority populations. In addition, it is always possible that there are other unmeasured confounders that would explain the association between television exposure and school performance. Notably, our study did not include any measure of child intelligence quotient. It is possible that children with low intelligence quotient perform more poorly in school and, as a result, have less interest in school and greater interest in television, movie, and video game use. Finally, whereas we have established a relationship between exposure to adult content in television and movies and poorer school performance, because of our cross-sectional design, we cannot infer a before-and-after relationship between content exposure and school performance. Additional work is needed to clarify directionality, along with the intervening processes between adult content exposure and school performance. A longitudinal study, with data on potential mediators, as well as school performance, could be helpful in studying this relationship.
The authors themselves do a better job of critiquing their work than you do. With a correlation coefficient on self-reporting of grades this high, I am confident in kids' abilities to assess their own performance. Of course, I'm happy to be impartial. I'm not sure any piece of information would be sufficient to reverse your clearly strong beliefs (based on anecdotal evidence).
The conclusion they draw is correct, which is that more research should be done which controls for other factors. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the results were even more conclusive if they did this.
Sorry... I didn't mean to diss you personally.
It seems recently that folks are starting to put Warcraft in the same "unfashionable" category as Madden, sequels, and the PS3. For the first year of it's life, WoW was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Now it's being called an uncreative treadmill with a poor combat system.
I love how the elite nerd community feels the need to bash WoW now that it's become mainstream.
Don't you think it's a bit unfair to indict all of humanity based on the actions of a couple people? Fundamentally, you're making a judgement based on the coverage of one news story with little to no consideration of the thousands of companies that don't make the news.
Considering the judgement was handed down by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, one would hope the they're subject to US jurisdiction.
And you know what ? I never get an answer...
It is probably a bad idea to draw conclusions on the success of the editing protocol of Wikipedia based on this observation of yours.
I'm not taking sides here. I would simply like to point out that no one has an obligation to respond to your challenge, especially when the tone of your statement indicates you've already made your mind up on this particular issue.
This only begs the question - why were these numbers removed? Perhaps because it would have signaled to anyone reading the study that it was hopelessly flwed?
I think you and 99% of the posters have not read the research and really have no familiarity with how medical research is done. The author is a specialist in public health, and, as such, her interest here is in the developmental health of children playing these games.
1) Your primary question - If you look at the methodology of the report, the researchers' data set only examined first games published after 2001 (re-realases were not counted). This is the reason Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Centipede were not included in the statistical findings of the report published. The researchers fully understood that games published prior to 2001 were on a completely different scale of "abstract depiction of violence" than current games are. They full understood and attempted to rate not only the time spent killing, but the magnitude and visual accuracy of human suffering were depicted.
2) Anyone who has done any kind of statistical research fully understands that it is dangerous and incorrect to apply conclusions from one data set to the universe of possible data sets. The author clearly states in her rebuttal, "We did not include the arcade games that you're asking about in our statistical analyses of E-rated games and we are well aware that these games were created well before the industry established the ESRB and during an era with vastly different visual technology that makes comparison with modern games problematic."
What you're trying to do is invalidate her methodology by applying her techniques to games she herself says is not applicable. It doesn't mean the methodology is incorrect. Medical researchers all the time will publish results that say something along the lines of "for people 50-55 in such and such weight ranges, the following drug was found to be 95% effective at such and such concentration." Your primary beef with the research is the equivalent of proclaiming "That article I read in JAMA is bogus! That drug didn't work at all on my obese, diabetic 17-year old son!"
3) Finally, even if Pac-Man and Dig Dug were applied in the statistical findings, it does not invalidate the research. Every statistical model applied to a problem will have outliers it failed to accurately assess for one reason or another. It does not invalidate the model. You may as well condemn every medical test or predictive model ever published for not having 100% accuracy. People love to point out the failures of a model and ignore the majority of cases where it succeeds.
The results of the study led to some fairly insightful recommendations. We all know the ESRB ratings are broken in one way or the other, whether it is the mere classification or simply the fact that most parents don't fully understand the ratings they way they understand G, PG, PG-13, and R-ratings. Anything that leads to an overhaul of the broken ESRB is a step in the right direction to prevent politicians from imposing their own agenda-driven ideology.
At what point does the advancement of technology become either irrelevant, unnecessary to the casual user, too expensive, too complex, or some combination thereof? This has already happened in audio -- how many people out there really are vested in SACD? How many people do you know who even know what SACD is?
All this indicates is that the industry has maxed out on one particular dimension of a customer need: sound quality. Product designers are always coming up with revolutionary new ways to satisfy customers in ways the customers themselves never imagined they wanted or needed. MP3's and iPods are a great example of an area where the 'Audio' industry completely reinvented itself- some were winners and some big losers.
This has been and will probably always be the case. A hundred years ago, Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said Faster Horses."
Look at the source for the bundle article:
A Toys R Us Canada employee
Canadian jokes aside, I'm somewhat skeptical.
Actually, both of those industries have suffered terribly from crappy local and federal laws designed to "protect minors". Ask yourself why you can't purchase wine over the internet from small vineyards in California or France. Ask youself where all the local breweries have gone. The control of alcohol has severely limited the quality and choice you have when you want any. I'm no friend of the porn industry, but they too suffer from an amazing and contradictory raft of both specific and vague legislation.
It really depends on who you classify as "the industry." Beer/Wine/Distributors have a state granted oligopoly that ends up being an incredibly lucritive business. Wholesales are VERY interested in keeping it this way. I was personally interested to find that for Political Action Committee contributions to candidates, the National Beer Wholesalers Assocation PAC was the 2nd largest.
As you say, it really is frustrating that these laws benefit a few lucky businesses to the detriment of the public good.
That was a right-pretty speech, sir. But I ask you, what is a contract?
Webster's defines it as "an agreement under the law which is unbreakable."
Which is unbreakable!
Excuse me, I must use the restroom.
All of those pieces of information (calendar, contacts, sales leads) are stored in the Salesforce.com database, which is a development partner for this project.
But you are on to something, which is unless you have the connectors, this this is worse than useless.
Every cloud has a silver lining- your friend now has more time to play WoW.
Time and time again, I've seen a coin land heads up. That does not mean there is a bias for that coin to land heads up.
Perhaps you're suffering from selective memory? Don't worry... it happens to all of us- we only remember information that confirms our biases.
This is just a way to start a game with little funding hoping that you will make enough money to complete it. It is what I'll call the current PC "patch model" of distribution taken to its logical extreme.
The article addresses this issue, "We believe it is less about the big guy vs. the small guy, or the mitigation of risk in the face of escalating development cost. It is about controlling the subscription model for gaming."
Their contention is that this is all about redistribution of the value chain, or more precisely, what share will retailers get in the future?
I would tend to agree with them, in that the majority of game development expenses are not in building levels, but in creating the foundation for those levels- graphics/physics models, game rules, etc. It doesn't take blizzard anywhere near the resources to pump out the umpteenth instance as it did to create the first few. It doesn't make sense to use patches as a risk mitigation technique if you plunk down the majority of your expenses before you get an indication from the market as to whether the title will be a winner or loser.
Females everywhere would be interested if the Revolution wand had a built in rumble-pack...
To your first point, I think he acknowledges that the data only goes to the end of the year. However, I agree with the overall sentiment. The primary source for his data is publicly released information, and, as we know, PR mouthpieces rarely trumpet bad news.
If you examine each individual MMORPG, very rarely do you see declines in subscriber base. Typically, you see a growth period followed by an eternal plateau. I'm suspicious that the lack of news isbeing interpreted by the author as a "no change" when in reality, it could be a significant decline which is not announced by the publisher. Users moving around between MMORPGs would result in them being double/triple counted for these purposes.
Has anyone compared the total subscriber numbers to numbers obtained through other methodologies (incidence surveys?). The chart (which excludes Lineage I/II) above extrapolated using his method would predict something like 15-20 million total subscribers by December of this year.
America is rapidly deteriorating.
If you knew anything about American history, you'd know it's been like this for the entire history of the country. For every example you cite, there's an example in our history that is significantly worse. That does not excuse the behavior, but it does invalidate your claim that things are getting worse.
I would be interested to know if you be willing to express this opinion on behalf of groups you vigorously disagreed with? NAMBLA, Neo-Nazis, Klan, etc. Should a KKK group be allowed to recuit publicly on WoW so that they can then talk amonst themselves in guild chat about how much they hate other races? It's really no different in principle- any group that seeks to be exclusive to others could be found offensive by a paying customer not in that group.
And yes, it IS sexual harassment for a GLBT person to run around at work constantly talking about their sex life if they've been asked to stop. Why should it be any different in a MMORPG world?
Good point. In fact, I've played WoW since Day 1, and I've never heard anyone say that something was "gay." Maybe it's because I chose an RP server in the hopes of finding more mature players, maybe not. Nonetheless, it seems suspicious that one would need to specifically form and market a guild as GLBT friendly guild simply to avoid bigotry. What would have made more sense would have been to start and guild, make it clear during recruiting that such language would not be tolerated, and go about one's business. Instead, the group seems to have raised the war flag and claiming discrimination, when in fact, WoW seems to deliver equal opportunity banning of guilds that talk about sexuxality. Americans have a soft spot when it comes to any sort of situation where a minority group may be being discriminated against, and there are some folks out there who are more than happy to exploit this to further their own aims and finances. Expect to see a lawsuit seeking damages within 6 months.
The Auction houses in Wow for instance, represent a capitalist economy with all the dynamics of supply and demand. That hardly eliminates gold farmers.
No, the auction house represents a market system. Markets have been around since the dawn of civilization. Supply and demand is a market force, but not necessarily and indicator of capitalism. Socialist counties also have markets you know.
Capitalism implies that the means of production (factories, farms, etc) are privately owned. WoW is definitely not capitalist in that there are no in game assets that produce income, AKA Capital.