In any case even if we go with the argument that we need more yield, etc, etc, then there will still be a much larger second problem we need to address: where the fsck is the water going to come from?
Nowhere. We're not going to get any additional water. In fact we're liable to have a lot less of it, and a lot less arable land, as time goes on.
So doesn't it make a lot more sense to concentrate on improving yields from the land and water we do have, rather than switching to land- and water-intensive, wasteful forms of farming like so-called "organic"?
I just simply don't trust the likes of Monsanto to ensure that they don't release something into the wild that could potentially fsck the food chain in its entirety guarunteeing that we really wouldn't be able to feed the resultant starving billions.
Monsanto isn't any more likely to release an agricultural super-plague than regular old evolution is. The so-called "terminator genes" are far more likely to keep proprietary germplasm out of the wild populations than introduce it.
That's the most hilarious thing. Monsanto is actually addressing your concerns about losing control of proprietary genetics, and that's precisely the one thing you choose to attack them for. Unbelievable.
I spent a significant part of my childhood in wheat farming country and the effects of the previous round of technological "improvements" to farming practices to improve yield, throwing herbicides and pesticides around like they were water, extreme mono-culture and the loss of the technique of crop rotation has turned once beautifully productive land into salt filled desert.
Yes, exactly. It's the 50's-era farming techniques that scare the shit out of me; the return to Silent Spring-type pesticide use that anti-GM hysteria will necessitate. GM modification of crops helps prevent the stuff you're talking about. Pesticides poisoning the water table. Monocultures leeching nutrients out of the land. GMO's are the solution to those problems - and you want to take us back to those days!
You're expert wouldn't contract to Monsanto by any chance?
It's a known fact Monsanto produces and sells terminator seeds.
They don't, actually, sell terminator seeds. The hysterical, science-free public hysteria fanned by luddites like you saw to that. (As a result, one potential safeguard against GM germplasm entering the wild is lost.)
The point is farmers must re-buy seeds each year - instead of the time honored tradition of saving seed.
That "time-honored tradition" went by the wayside 50 years ago, when farmers started using high-yield hybrids that don't breed true, anyway. Farmers buy seed every year because they're cutting their yields in half if they don't.
That DNA in this case, contains inserted elements designed to cause sterility.
If they're reproducing, they're not sterile! Sterile means "can't reproduce." A sterile man can't produce sperm. A sterile corn plant can't produce pollen. I know this because I've sterilized corn plants, and the result was corn plants that couldn't pollinate. That was the point.
This is what you are supporting - the spread of DNA know to cause infertility.
If it causes infertility it can't spread! That's the point, and it's exasperating to have to repeat these points to you. Suicide genes remove themselves from the population - that's evolutionary fact. That's an indisputable fact of population genetics. They don't spread, except in a universe where natural selection doesn't exist, somehow.
It's not the same thing as naturally seedless plants - not all plants grow from seeds...
Grapes, watermelons, and oranges do - which is why seedless varieties were desired - and yet, the existence of seedlessness genes in some varietals hasn't caused the extinction of all fruit.
Clearly I have no idea what I'm talking about and should bow to your great agricultural knowledge...
Well, I wasn't going to say it. But you really don't know what you're talking about.
Sterile means the plant produces no seed from which a new plant may be grown.
Even if that's true, we already have seedless grapes, oranges and watermelons - had 'em for decades - and it doesn't seem to have precipitated a vast epidemic of sterility in the world's fruit crops.
The whole thing is hysteria.
Also your "definition" doesn't make any sense. The point of growing corn, or any cereal grain, is to produce seed. Why would Monsanto produce cereal crops that don't every produce any seed when you grow them?
It doesn't make sense. Did you stop and think about this stuff before you wrote it?
You fail to understand - the engineered genes which make Monsanto plants sterile can also be passed to natural plants through pollination.
Sterile plants are pollinating?
How does that work, in your mind? Is it possible you don't understand what "sterile" means?
Truly, the reactionary nonsense I've seen in this thread continues to astound. If you people would think about your arguments and objections for even just a second you might get a sense of how totally ridiculous they sound.
The US, Canada and, the EU have literally 100's of millions of tons of stockpiled grain
I learned today - from an expert plant breeder - that the United States has less than a 30-day supply of wheat, currently, and that Indonesia is rolling back rice exportation to ensure adequate local supply.
So, yeah. Is there a single thing in your post that actually turns out to be true?
Here I am growing organic corn, saving seed, doing things the wholesome old-fashioned way, when a bunch of Terminator pollen blows from your field across mine.
Here I am, growing mainstream hybrids with double the yield, feeding people (which I consider "wholesome"), when a bunch of organic pollen blows from your field across mine. Now I have half the yield from contamination with your less-efficient but hardier organic varietals.
See, it works both ways. Organic farming relies on unique hybrids - otherwise you're simply growing lunch for European corn borers - with pest-resistant properties, and those can interfere with the yield-enhancing properties of mainstream hybrids.
Your organic crops are no less the result of genetic modification than mine are; simply the result of different methods of manipulation. So why do I have to spend the money to build a greenhouse, but your crops get to shoot their genetic payloads all over the countryside?
Because you have an irrational bias against GMO's and towards organic farming, despite the facts.
See? My corn is a "biohazard." Your corn is "wholesome." The bias is pretty apparent.
There's a rather major difference between selective breeding (domestication over thousands of years, selection of certain traits, etc.) and actually going into the DNA and messing with it.
No, actually, there's not. Either way you're changing the content of DNA. Whether you're waiting for the characteristics you desire to arise through mutation and then amplifying the gene through selective breeding; or going in and deliberately specifying the precise sequence you want, the end result is the same - arbitrary changes to DNA.
For one thing, the former won't create traits that didn't exist in the first place
What, you're a creationist now? Mutation is the source of new traits. The only difference with GM is that you're not waiting around for the one random mutation you want - you're specifying it directly, or borrowing it from another species.
Either way - arbitrary changes to DNA.
For one thing, the former won't create traits that didn't exist in the first place, whereas the latter allows arbitrary traits, from almost any species, to be introduced into corn.
Plants can and have absorbed DNA from other species without the intervention of man. You've never heard of a retrovirus? (Plants get them too.) Plant hybridization is nothing new. You have these ideas about plant genome "purity" that have nothing at all to do with reality - the reality is that plants, like bacteria, have always been fairly promiscuous with their genetics.
No, it's not, as your local plant breeder (or Gregor Mendel) can tell you. None of the modern hybrids breed true - the next generation all but lacks the characteristics you chose the hybrid for, in the first place.
It's possible to do that with heirloom crops, but that's pretty much a niche market anyway. Modern farmers buy seed every year because they make more money using hybrids with higher yields than they would using true-breeding crops they could hold over for seed. Ask a farmer.
I agree with the lack of arable land and water issue, but where does the less safe come from?
1) Use of manure (often human waste) instead of chemical fertilizers exposes organic crops to e. coli.
2) Crop varietals for organic farming have elevated levels of natural pesticides, and humans have had adverse reactions in some cases. In one case, organic celery had to be recalled from shelves for having such high levels of celery's natural pesticides that people had allergic reactions.
First in GM seeds with its 'Roundup Ready' crops designed to sell more of its Roundup herbicide
"Roundup Ready" or glyphosphate-resistant crops actually weren't developed by GM techniques, but by regular selective breeding. And the point of RR is not that you use more pesticide, but actually that you use less - because you can treat the field at a stage when the plants are younger, and more susceptible to a smaller dosage, than you can when you have to wait for your crops to be hardy enough to withstand indirect exposure.
At least with Microsoft the buyer of a program can use it over and over again. But farmers who buy Monsanto's seeds can't even do that.'
No modern farmer "reuses" seeds, GM or no. Modern hybrids don't breed true, for one thing. And by planting part of the harvest, you miss out on protective seed-coat treatments, and terrestrial pests eat your crops before they've even sprouted.
For some reason Monsanto comes under fire from people who would rather distort the facts, or argue from a position of hostile ignorance, than debate the case on its merits. Monsanto does plenty of things I think are wrong, particularly their legal department, but figuring out ways for farmers to get larger yields with less pesticide use, less land use, and less water use certainly isn't one of them. For christ's sake, when did feeding people become something "evil"? What, you thought we could feed a world of 6 billion people organically? Forgetting for a moment the fact that organic crops are less safe, there's simply not enough arable land and water for that to be realistic.
The problem is, the parts of your post that aren't just your opinion simply aren't true. The business about monarch butterflies is a myth, an urban legend.
It doesn't even make ecological sense. Butterflies weren't exposed to the bT toxin in corn pollen because they don't eat corn pollen, it's well-known that milkweed is the food source for monarchs.
There's not a single serious entomologist - crop or otherwise - who puts any credence in the "Monsanto is killing teh butterflies!" nonsense. It's been universally discredited.
For those not aware, Monsanto has been avidly continuing to research ways to ensure that crops will die and not reproduce.
Right - as a safety protocol. I mean, it's amazing - the very same post where you complain about the possibilities and dangers of GM genes entering the wild, and Monsanto comes up with a way to allay that concern - and to you, that's just more evidence that they're "evil."
This company is messing around with the very code of life itself.
And so were the meso-American farmers who originally created corn, 7500 years ago. You don't seem to bat an eye when pre-industrial peoples are doing it for profit - or maybe you're just, as is indicated, completely ignorant about the history of crop husbandry and genetics - but the minute modern people are doing it for profit, suddenly that's "evil."
You're a reactionary, ignorant luddite.
An example might be getting rid of Dengue Fever, or the elimination of Malaria, etc.
How about feeding people? Starvation is the root cause of the top five causes of death, worldwide. It kills far, far more people than those two diseases. Combined.
We're talking genetics here.
Well, I am. God only knows what the fuck you're on about, but it certainly has no basis in scientific, genetic reality.
If you'd like to gamble 50 dollars on essentially no hope of having a good time, you can simply paypal it to my email address.
If your capacity to have fun in a game is inversely related to how many other people are having fun, too, then you're a disturbed person. And if you're willingly volunteering to be the guy who doesn't have fun so that others might, then you're even more fucked up.
What a delightful thread. I've never seen so many totally bullshit, idiotic game ideas in one place.
to worlds where people could control every aspect of it.
That sounds like a potentially shitty game.
Second Life seems to fall prey to the same problem. In a world where you can basically make or do anything, people wind up doing only two things - come up with ways to scam other people out of the Linden bucks, or come up with weird new ways to pretend to have sex with each other.
It's like an amusement park where patrons are asked to design and build the rides. What you wind up with is a parking lot full of hookers.
computer games causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more.
Oh, really? What changes, specifically, to what part of the brain? How are these changes stimulated? Magic rays from the computer screen? I trust you can provide sample brains to substantiate these claims.
Every feel the need to do just one more level? the need to get the highscore?
Ever feel the need to watch just one more episode of Battlestar Galactica? Is that because the program causes a physical change in your brain - or is that because watching the program is fun, and therefore you're motivated to keep having fun for a little while longer?
By these metrics it's impossible to imagine anything entertaining that you couldn't dismiss as an addictive drug. What a pleasureless life you must lead.
Like most of your post, this is a logical fallacy.
No, it's a statement of fact intended to establish my credibility to comment on the game. It cannot be a fallacy because the quoted section is not an argument. It's a statement of facts.
I'm not saying it is an addiction, just that you poses exactly ZERO points against that statement.
Except for the argument, which you have not rebutted, that people can and are motivated to continue behaviors for reasons other than "addiction" - in this case, because the behavior is enjoyable. Do you really find it so pernicious that human beings prefer to experience pleasure over boredom? Do you really find the production of entertainment every bit a moral wrong as the production of toxic, addictive drugs?
Really? Like I said, you people crack me the fuck up.
What makes you think psychological dependencies aren't "real"?
I don't think they're not "real", but by definition they're "all in your head". And they can be anything. So it seems unfair to single out Blizzard as purveyors of habit-forming products when, indeed, anything in the universe can become the focus of a psychological dependency.
Blizz makes entertaining products. As a result, lots of people play and pay for their games. I don't understand why that makes people so god damned angry.
You need to look up what endorphins are, how they're generated, and their effects on the body.
I know how they're generated - and I find it significant that WoW has far, far less potential to generate endorphins than running, yet Blizzard are considered the online drug pushers and Nike is just an outfit that puts their logo on shoes.
It has a psychological component, too, and anyone who helps rehabilitate addicts will tell you that dealing with the *cause* of the addiction is just as important as dealing with the effects on the body, or the addict will relapse in short order.
Honestly? I think the vast failure rate of the treatment perspective you refer to - where addiction is construed as simply a bad choice, a moral failing, or the result of poor life habits - basically proves how wrong you and those you refer to, are. When you consider addiction to be the physical manifestation of a mental problem, relapse rates are very, very high. On the other hand, the inverse treatment perspective, where the psychological component is understood as a natural reaction to the physiological problem (which is then treated with ibogaine or other medications) have been incredibly effective.
So I contest your view of addiction. I think you're mired in the counterfactual, ineffective regimen of the past, the one that allows moral condemnation of drug addicts as people of weak character and moral failing, rather than people with psychological issues stemming from a profound physiological disorder.
That said, WoW (and most other MMORPGS) is essentially a form of variable schedule operant conditioning.
So is the universe. It's difficult to imagine how you could craft any kind of compelling entertainment product that wasn't rewarding in some way, and did so on some variable schedule. Your favorite TV show certainly delivers rewarding story insights, and unless it's a children's program, it delivers them on a variable basis (say, "Lost" for instance, where plot twists and revelations are heavy in some episodes and light in others.)
To say that WoW is "entertaining" is to say that it is conditioning, just like everything else is. WoW isn't doing anything special except adhering to understood concepts in game and story design, concepts that have served as guides to the creation of compelling experiences for thousands of years.
Specifically Star Wars Galaxies originally created a great sandbox like environment where people could be politicians, dancers, tradesmen.
If any of that had actually been fun, though, Galaxies wouldn't have been a total failure.
I don't understand why you need a computer game in order to pretend to be a dancer or a politician. Indeed, dancer or politician are roles you could take on in real life; but nonetheless, if you find those roles compelling, you have the greatest tool available - your own imagination.
I love WoW as a dungeon crawler, but there are much better Role Playing oriented MMOs.
I guess, if that's your experience, but I don't see how real role-playing is something that could even be done at a computer, or in the context of a virtual game world. It's something to do at the table-top where your actions aren't constrained by what programmers decided to allow you to do, and the world is maintained by the imagination of a human being who can react flexibly to your actions.
So I don't blame WoW for not being something that no computer game could really be. For that role-playing experience I grab the dice and hit the table-top; that's really the only place it can be done.
WoW is boring, killing 20 boars, then 20 super-boars, then 30 mega-boars is not fun.
If you didn't like it, then you didn't like it. That's fine. I'm not threatened by the fact that we have different tastes in games.
The only thing I'm defending is Blizzard, and I'm responding to allegations that they're a company of drug peddlers, when in fact they're a company of artists and programmers who put the time in to release a product that people like to play. I'm not saying that's an achievement for which they deserve medals, but it's certainly one for which they deserve to have some of my money.
It's a MMO with permanent training wheels and it's killing what was a fun genre.
You're complaining about grinding but holding up MMO's as a "fun genre"? I don't think there's an MMO out there that's less grindy than WoW, it's a feature of the genre. And I don't know what you think you mean by "real PvP", trust me, those Horde guys are all played by real people.
The only games WoW killed off were the ones that were less fun to play. Simple as that. If they had been more fun, people would have left WoW to play them.
But they didn't. It's a free market. Blizz doesn't have a monopoly on MMO's. They just have the one that the market (including a lot of people who never expected to ever enjoy a video game) has overwhelmingly preferred. It's not a mystery, it's not a trick of brain chemistry, it's just what happens when you get a bunch of people with talent together and demand that they create an exceptional product. Why get so angry about that?
You can get addicted to almost ANYTHING, including a computer, a person, a sound, an emotion...
That's not addiction, that's dependence. Addiction is a physiological state with a precise clinical definition. It doesn't apply to WoW except by the shysters peddling "game addiction" clinics and the people, like you, who enable them.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case even if we go with the argument that we need more yield, etc, etc, then there will still be a much larger second problem we need to address: where the fsck is the water going to come from?
Nowhere. We're not going to get any additional water. In fact we're liable to have a lot less of it, and a lot less arable land, as time goes on.
So doesn't it make a lot more sense to concentrate on improving yields from the land and water we do have, rather than switching to land- and water-intensive, wasteful forms of farming like so-called "organic"?
I just simply don't trust the likes of Monsanto to ensure that they don't release something into the wild that could potentially fsck the food chain in its entirety guarunteeing that we really wouldn't be able to feed the resultant starving billions.
Monsanto isn't any more likely to release an agricultural super-plague than regular old evolution is. The so-called "terminator genes" are far more likely to keep proprietary germplasm out of the wild populations than introduce it.
That's the most hilarious thing. Monsanto is actually addressing your concerns about losing control of proprietary genetics, and that's precisely the one thing you choose to attack them for. Unbelievable.
I spent a significant part of my childhood in wheat farming country and the effects of the previous round of technological "improvements" to farming practices to improve yield, throwing herbicides and pesticides around like they were water, extreme mono-culture and the loss of the technique of crop rotation has turned once beautifully productive land into salt filled desert.
Yes, exactly. It's the 50's-era farming techniques that scare the shit out of me; the return to Silent Spring-type pesticide use that anti-GM hysteria will necessitate. GM modification of crops helps prevent the stuff you're talking about. Pesticides poisoning the water table. Monocultures leeching nutrients out of the land. GMO's are the solution to those problems - and you want to take us back to those days!
You're expert wouldn't contract to Monsanto by any chance?
No, he wouldn't, actually.
It's a known fact Monsanto produces and sells terminator seeds.
They don't, actually, sell terminator seeds. The hysterical, science-free public hysteria fanned by luddites like you saw to that. (As a result, one potential safeguard against GM germplasm entering the wild is lost.)
The point is farmers must re-buy seeds each year - instead of the time honored tradition of saving seed.
That "time-honored tradition" went by the wayside 50 years ago, when farmers started using high-yield hybrids that don't breed true, anyway. Farmers buy seed every year because they're cutting their yields in half if they don't.
That DNA in this case, contains inserted elements designed to cause sterility.
If they're reproducing, they're not sterile! Sterile means "can't reproduce." A sterile man can't produce sperm. A sterile corn plant can't produce pollen. I know this because I've sterilized corn plants, and the result was corn plants that couldn't pollinate. That was the point.
This is what you are supporting - the spread of DNA know to cause infertility.
If it causes infertility it can't spread! That's the point, and it's exasperating to have to repeat these points to you. Suicide genes remove themselves from the population - that's evolutionary fact. That's an indisputable fact of population genetics. They don't spread, except in a universe where natural selection doesn't exist, somehow.
It's not the same thing as naturally seedless plants - not all plants grow from seeds...
Grapes, watermelons, and oranges do - which is why seedless varieties were desired - and yet, the existence of seedlessness genes in some varietals hasn't caused the extinction of all fruit.
Clearly I have no idea what I'm talking about and should bow to your great agricultural knowledge...
Well, I wasn't going to say it. But you really don't know what you're talking about.
Sterile means the plant produces no seed from which a new plant may be grown.
Even if that's true, we already have seedless grapes, oranges and watermelons - had 'em for decades - and it doesn't seem to have precipitated a vast epidemic of sterility in the world's fruit crops.
The whole thing is hysteria.
Also your "definition" doesn't make any sense. The point of growing corn, or any cereal grain, is to produce seed. Why would Monsanto produce cereal crops that don't every produce any seed when you grow them?
It doesn't make sense. Did you stop and think about this stuff before you wrote it?
You fail to understand - the engineered genes which make Monsanto plants sterile can also be passed to natural plants through pollination.
Sterile plants are pollinating?
How does that work, in your mind? Is it possible you don't understand what "sterile" means?
Truly, the reactionary nonsense I've seen in this thread continues to astound. If you people would think about your arguments and objections for even just a second you might get a sense of how totally ridiculous they sound.
Genetics is NEW
Yes, that's right. Gregor Mendel never existed. DNA only came about in 1950.
You people crack me the fuck up.
It is not a toy to be played with and we don't know jack.
Oh, I agree that you definitely don't.
The US, Canada and, the EU have literally 100's of millions of tons of stockpiled grain
I learned today - from an expert plant breeder - that the United States has less than a 30-day supply of wheat, currently, and that Indonesia is rolling back rice exportation to ensure adequate local supply.
So, yeah. Is there a single thing in your post that actually turns out to be true?
Here I am growing organic corn, saving seed, doing things the wholesome old-fashioned way, when a bunch of Terminator pollen blows from your field across mine.
Here I am, growing mainstream hybrids with double the yield, feeding people (which I consider "wholesome"), when a bunch of organic pollen blows from your field across mine. Now I have half the yield from contamination with your less-efficient but hardier organic varietals.
See, it works both ways. Organic farming relies on unique hybrids - otherwise you're simply growing lunch for European corn borers - with pest-resistant properties, and those can interfere with the yield-enhancing properties of mainstream hybrids.
Your organic crops are no less the result of genetic modification than mine are; simply the result of different methods of manipulation. So why do I have to spend the money to build a greenhouse, but your crops get to shoot their genetic payloads all over the countryside?
Because you have an irrational bias against GMO's and towards organic farming, despite the facts.
See? My corn is a "biohazard." Your corn is "wholesome." The bias is pretty apparent.
they become chemically dependent
This is where I stopped reading. Plant physiology is actually a science, you know, you could study it instead of just making it up as you go along.
There's a rather major difference between selective breeding (domestication over thousands of years, selection of certain traits, etc.) and actually going into the DNA and messing with it.
No, actually, there's not. Either way you're changing the content of DNA. Whether you're waiting for the characteristics you desire to arise through mutation and then amplifying the gene through selective breeding; or going in and deliberately specifying the precise sequence you want, the end result is the same - arbitrary changes to DNA.
For one thing, the former won't create traits that didn't exist in the first place
What, you're a creationist now? Mutation is the source of new traits. The only difference with GM is that you're not waiting around for the one random mutation you want - you're specifying it directly, or borrowing it from another species.
Either way - arbitrary changes to DNA.
For one thing, the former won't create traits that didn't exist in the first place, whereas the latter allows arbitrary traits, from almost any species, to be introduced into corn.
Plants can and have absorbed DNA from other species without the intervention of man. You've never heard of a retrovirus? (Plants get them too.) Plant hybridization is nothing new. You have these ideas about plant genome "purity" that have nothing at all to do with reality - the reality is that plants, like bacteria, have always been fairly promiscuous with their genetics.
Wrong. Just flat out wrong.
No, it's not, as your local plant breeder (or Gregor Mendel) can tell you. None of the modern hybrids breed true - the next generation all but lacks the characteristics you chose the hybrid for, in the first place.
It's possible to do that with heirloom crops, but that's pretty much a niche market anyway. Modern farmers buy seed every year because they make more money using hybrids with higher yields than they would using true-breeding crops they could hold over for seed. Ask a farmer.
I agree with the lack of arable land and water issue, but where does the less safe come from?
1) Use of manure (often human waste) instead of chemical fertilizers exposes organic crops to e. coli.
2) Crop varietals for organic farming have elevated levels of natural pesticides, and humans have had adverse reactions in some cases. In one case, organic celery had to be recalled from shelves for having such high levels of celery's natural pesticides that people had allergic reactions.
Well, two major ones, at least:
First in GM seeds with its 'Roundup Ready' crops designed to sell more of its Roundup herbicide
"Roundup Ready" or glyphosphate-resistant crops actually weren't developed by GM techniques, but by regular selective breeding. And the point of RR is not that you use more pesticide, but actually that you use less - because you can treat the field at a stage when the plants are younger, and more susceptible to a smaller dosage, than you can when you have to wait for your crops to be hardy enough to withstand indirect exposure.
At least with Microsoft the buyer of a program can use it over and over again. But farmers who buy Monsanto's seeds can't even do that.'
No modern farmer "reuses" seeds, GM or no. Modern hybrids don't breed true, for one thing. And by planting part of the harvest, you miss out on protective seed-coat treatments, and terrestrial pests eat your crops before they've even sprouted.
For some reason Monsanto comes under fire from people who would rather distort the facts, or argue from a position of hostile ignorance, than debate the case on its merits. Monsanto does plenty of things I think are wrong, particularly their legal department, but figuring out ways for farmers to get larger yields with less pesticide use, less land use, and less water use certainly isn't one of them. For christ's sake, when did feeding people become something "evil"? What, you thought we could feed a world of 6 billion people organically? Forgetting for a moment the fact that organic crops are less safe, there's simply not enough arable land and water for that to be realistic.
The parent post is not troll, just because someone feels passionately about something does not make them wrong.
The parent is a troll because he's allowed his passionate hatred for modern food science to get in the way of the facts.
What the Nazis did was on a different level; a very different level
Gosh, you mean, the level where they were killing people because of differences in belief?
You know, like the parent post proposed doing?
The problem is, the parts of your post that aren't just your opinion simply aren't true. The business about monarch butterflies is a myth, an urban legend.
It doesn't even make ecological sense. Butterflies weren't exposed to the bT toxin in corn pollen because they don't eat corn pollen, it's well-known that milkweed is the food source for monarchs.
There's not a single serious entomologist - crop or otherwise - who puts any credence in the "Monsanto is killing teh butterflies!" nonsense. It's been universally discredited.
For those not aware, Monsanto has been avidly continuing to research ways to ensure that crops will die and not reproduce.
Right - as a safety protocol. I mean, it's amazing - the very same post where you complain about the possibilities and dangers of GM genes entering the wild, and Monsanto comes up with a way to allay that concern - and to you, that's just more evidence that they're "evil."
This company is messing around with the very code of life itself.
And so were the meso-American farmers who originally created corn, 7500 years ago. You don't seem to bat an eye when pre-industrial peoples are doing it for profit - or maybe you're just, as is indicated, completely ignorant about the history of crop husbandry and genetics - but the minute modern people are doing it for profit, suddenly that's "evil."
You're a reactionary, ignorant luddite.
An example might be getting rid of Dengue Fever, or the elimination of Malaria, etc.
How about feeding people? Starvation is the root cause of the top five causes of death, worldwide. It kills far, far more people than those two diseases. Combined.
We're talking genetics here.
Well, I am. God only knows what the fuck you're on about, but it certainly has no basis in scientific, genetic reality.
Besides, I feel a lot smarter as an an atheist, taking comfort in the fact that the greatest minds agree with me.
Really? As an atheist, I feel a lot smarter simply being right. (In all likelihood.)
If you'd like to gamble 50 dollars on essentially no hope of having a good time, you can simply paypal it to my email address.
If your capacity to have fun in a game is inversely related to how many other people are having fun, too, then you're a disturbed person. And if you're willingly volunteering to be the guy who doesn't have fun so that others might, then you're even more fucked up.
What a delightful thread. I've never seen so many totally bullshit, idiotic game ideas in one place.
to worlds where people could control every aspect of it.
That sounds like a potentially shitty game.
Second Life seems to fall prey to the same problem. In a world where you can basically make or do anything, people wind up doing only two things - come up with ways to scam other people out of the Linden bucks, or come up with weird new ways to pretend to have sex with each other.
It's like an amusement park where patrons are asked to design and build the rides. What you wind up with is a parking lot full of hookers.
computer games causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more.
Oh, really? What changes, specifically, to what part of the brain? How are these changes stimulated? Magic rays from the computer screen? I trust you can provide sample brains to substantiate these claims.
Every feel the need to do just one more level? the need to get the highscore?
Ever feel the need to watch just one more episode of Battlestar Galactica? Is that because the program causes a physical change in your brain - or is that because watching the program is fun, and therefore you're motivated to keep having fun for a little while longer?
By these metrics it's impossible to imagine anything entertaining that you couldn't dismiss as an addictive drug. What a pleasureless life you must lead.
Like most of your post, this is a logical fallacy.
No, it's a statement of fact intended to establish my credibility to comment on the game. It cannot be a fallacy because the quoted section is not an argument. It's a statement of facts.
I'm not saying it is an addiction, just that you poses exactly ZERO points against that statement.
Except for the argument, which you have not rebutted, that people can and are motivated to continue behaviors for reasons other than "addiction" - in this case, because the behavior is enjoyable. Do you really find it so pernicious that human beings prefer to experience pleasure over boredom? Do you really find the production of entertainment every bit a moral wrong as the production of toxic, addictive drugs?
Really? Like I said, you people crack me the fuck up.
What makes you think psychological dependencies aren't "real"?
I don't think they're not "real", but by definition they're "all in your head". And they can be anything. So it seems unfair to single out Blizzard as purveyors of habit-forming products when, indeed, anything in the universe can become the focus of a psychological dependency.
Blizz makes entertaining products. As a result, lots of people play and pay for their games. I don't understand why that makes people so god damned angry.
You need to look up what endorphins are, how they're generated, and their effects on the body.
I know how they're generated - and I find it significant that WoW has far, far less potential to generate endorphins than running, yet Blizzard are considered the online drug pushers and Nike is just an outfit that puts their logo on shoes.
It has a psychological component, too, and anyone who helps rehabilitate addicts will tell you that dealing with the *cause* of the addiction is just as important as dealing with the effects on the body, or the addict will relapse in short order.
Honestly? I think the vast failure rate of the treatment perspective you refer to - where addiction is construed as simply a bad choice, a moral failing, or the result of poor life habits - basically proves how wrong you and those you refer to, are. When you consider addiction to be the physical manifestation of a mental problem, relapse rates are very, very high. On the other hand, the inverse treatment perspective, where the psychological component is understood as a natural reaction to the physiological problem (which is then treated with ibogaine or other medications) have been incredibly effective.
So I contest your view of addiction. I think you're mired in the counterfactual, ineffective regimen of the past, the one that allows moral condemnation of drug addicts as people of weak character and moral failing, rather than people with psychological issues stemming from a profound physiological disorder.
That said, WoW (and most other MMORPGS) is essentially a form of variable schedule operant conditioning.
So is the universe. It's difficult to imagine how you could craft any kind of compelling entertainment product that wasn't rewarding in some way, and did so on some variable schedule. Your favorite TV show certainly delivers rewarding story insights, and unless it's a children's program, it delivers them on a variable basis (say, "Lost" for instance, where plot twists and revelations are heavy in some episodes and light in others.)
To say that WoW is "entertaining" is to say that it is conditioning, just like everything else is. WoW isn't doing anything special except adhering to understood concepts in game and story design, concepts that have served as guides to the creation of compelling experiences for thousands of years.
Specifically Star Wars Galaxies originally created a great sandbox like environment where people could be politicians, dancers, tradesmen.
If any of that had actually been fun, though, Galaxies wouldn't have been a total failure.
I don't understand why you need a computer game in order to pretend to be a dancer or a politician. Indeed, dancer or politician are roles you could take on in real life; but nonetheless, if you find those roles compelling, you have the greatest tool available - your own imagination.
I love WoW as a dungeon crawler, but there are much better Role Playing oriented MMOs.
I guess, if that's your experience, but I don't see how real role-playing is something that could even be done at a computer, or in the context of a virtual game world. It's something to do at the table-top where your actions aren't constrained by what programmers decided to allow you to do, and the world is maintained by the imagination of a human being who can react flexibly to your actions.
So I don't blame WoW for not being something that no computer game could really be. For that role-playing experience I grab the dice and hit the table-top; that's really the only place it can be done.
WoW is boring, killing 20 boars, then 20 super-boars, then 30 mega-boars is not fun.
If you didn't like it, then you didn't like it. That's fine. I'm not threatened by the fact that we have different tastes in games.
The only thing I'm defending is Blizzard, and I'm responding to allegations that they're a company of drug peddlers, when in fact they're a company of artists and programmers who put the time in to release a product that people like to play. I'm not saying that's an achievement for which they deserve medals, but it's certainly one for which they deserve to have some of my money.
It's a MMO with permanent training wheels and it's killing what was a fun genre.
You're complaining about grinding but holding up MMO's as a "fun genre"? I don't think there's an MMO out there that's less grindy than WoW, it's a feature of the genre. And I don't know what you think you mean by "real PvP", trust me, those Horde guys are all played by real people.
The only games WoW killed off were the ones that were less fun to play. Simple as that. If they had been more fun, people would have left WoW to play them.
But they didn't. It's a free market. Blizz doesn't have a monopoly on MMO's. They just have the one that the market (including a lot of people who never expected to ever enjoy a video game) has overwhelmingly preferred. It's not a mystery, it's not a trick of brain chemistry, it's just what happens when you get a bunch of people with talent together and demand that they create an exceptional product. Why get so angry about that?
You can get addicted to almost ANYTHING, including a computer, a person, a sound, an emotion...
That's not addiction, that's dependence. Addiction is a physiological state with a precise clinical definition. It doesn't apply to WoW except by the shysters peddling "game addiction" clinics and the people, like you, who enable them.