At least, that's what I got from my dad, who was a union member for 30 years, and a union steward for part of that. (Communications Workers of America, in case you're curious.)
And it sounded to me like the ultimate goal was "An honest day's pay for an honest day's work". And that presumes that everyone is doing an honest day's work, rather than surfing the net or posting on slashdot. Ooops.
I saw him go to bat for a guy who showed up drunk at work. Helped to get him involved in AA or whatever, and managed to save his job. It happened again, and that was it, not promising anything again. Not all unions are about keeping the slackers around, and I think that programmers should be bright enough people to handle that concept.
As a woman, I am as insulted by the suggestion that I'm just out to find a man to be a good father as many men are at the suggestion that they just looks for big breasts and the like. This study wasn't looking at which men women would really date - it looked at their reaction to pictures. Whooptefreakingdo.
Perhaps I'm spoiled by having a lot of intelligent female friends, but we're looking for someone to spend time with, not just someone to make a baby with.
I suggest looking here. It's the mailing list set up for your state for people who play RPGA campaigns. The RPGA is an organization run by WOTC that run a number of shared world kind of campaigns. My personal favorite is Arcanis (which is pretty high roleplay, but still has some deadly combats), but there is also Living Greyhawk, Living Spycraft and some others.
Which is why, thank God, there are different game systems out there, so that I can go play D&D, or Ironclaw (a skill based system), or throw it all out the window and play Amber, which has four stats, powers and no dice at all. Or heck, go play on a MUSH or forum online game, where there aren't even stats much of the time.
Others have addressed some of your points, but there are a few that I'll throw my opinion on. Oh, and I'll note that I was introduced to D&D with 2nd edition, but frankly, I don't recall how it works very well because it was so stupidly complicated, taking 47 charts to play (in contrast to a few charts needed to level up), that shortly after I started playing 3.0, it all dribbled out my ear.
Ahem.
"Skills - which complicate the process of character creation and level advancement, as players often spend considerable time figuring out which skills they should put skill points into. A simpler mechanism was employed back before the Skills and Powers option was created for 2e, you either had the ability, or you didn't. There was nothing else to keep track of. 3e's mechanism involves too much beancounting. "
Skills are one of the things I love best about 3.x. I can actually be better or worse than someone else at a skill, so that I can, for example, make a character who is an apprentice blacksmith, or a diplomat in training or whathaveyou, rather than "I have the skill, the only difference between someone else with that skill is what my attribute score is".
The mechanics of D20 are very simple to learn, since they almost universely consist of rolling a D20 and adding something. The only exceptions are damage dice, stabilizing when unconscious, and miss chances, that I can think of.
D20 allows me to build a character exactly, instead of popping a few different pieces into the cookie cutter mold, and while you can roleplay without numbers to back something up, it's much easier to do so when, for example, your steppe barbarian really CAN ride a horse muchmuch better than someone else (maximum ranks in the ride skill + a campaign feat called Saddle Warrior).
A third party setting that I whole heartedly endorse is the Arcanis setting by Paradigm Concepts. To me, it seems to have a backstory nearly as rich as Forgotten Realms (it's to get to that mark without having a hundred books or so), but it's also set up for things to happen. Players get a lot of input into what does happen through their RPGA campaign, Living Arcanis, including some characters from that being included in flavor sections of one of the main books, the Player's Guide to Arcanis.
I know a lot of female gamers, but maybe that's because I am one. Programmer, too. But I'm a slight anomoly - most of the women gamers I know are tabletop gamers, while I play both, in nearly even amounts. So for players, I can buy the viewpoint that far too many games drive away women with big boobs and scanty costumes. Female armor in most MMORPGs, for example, tends to get a lot of jokes, just like really bad fantasy novel covers.
Regarding women as programmers, I think that there are two things to consider: a) programmers are geeky and particularly at the moment, teenagers frown on people being smart, as the opposite of cool. Women tend to be more socially aware (or socially malleable) than their male counterparts in high school, so while they may quietly get good grades, they probably won't choose a geeky path like CS in college.
b) there are still, believe it or not, teachers who discourage women from fields related to math or science. I was lucky enough not to have that problem in high school (now a fading ten years in the past), but I have heard plenty of first hand stories on the subject.
There's a little gadget that skims the XML version of livejournal and examines the standard moods from all public posts. (You can type whatever you want into the mood box, but it disregards these custom moods.)
Here it is, for which it's author will be eternally grateful for me posting, I'm sure.
Anyway, I realize that it's not the same thing, but in my small deluded brain, I can dream that something I knew about was the inspiration.
I remember Ultima III (on the Atari 800, IIRC, in my case), and if that taught me violence, tile floors, treasure chests and tall grass would be toast.
While I've never tried to find a root cause, I started off doing well in tests very early (infant ones, like get the safety pin out of the jar, okay, now get it out of the baby bottle where you can't just get it out by reaching), got A's all through elementary and high school...
And hit college, and found that never having had to study to do well has some huge drawbacks when all the classes are dramatically more difficult than high school. I had to re-learn how to learn, because it was much more information than I could just soak up.
And I think everyone is interested in seeing how they measure up to this new cortex-growth yardstick.
... who's hackles rear up everytime they try to call these things rpgs? It is not a roleplaying game when you are handed some character to play that isn't yours, it's not a roleplaying game when you don't get to chose what comes out of your mouth, or it's part of a canned set of lines. How do you define who your character is, when you're restricted in what you can do?
Of course, one could also argue that there's as much point in roleplaying by yourself with a computer as performing a play in an empty room.
CRPGs are storyline based adventure (and sometimes puzzle) games.
Yes, the Psylons have been replaced, but a Pylon snuck through. I'm picturing tying a rope to Sharon. (As a female, that does not put my mind in the gutter, thank you very much. It puts my mind at the boat dock.)
And if you HAVE to group up with people in this game... I know that I would rather get that group together in the real world and play some real D&D.
I am confused by your need to emphasize that a woman plays D&D with you. It's really not that odd anymore - I'm a woman, and one third to half of my gaming buddies are women (depending on how wide we draw the circle). Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't seem to get that, so they keep putting out books with women in chainmail bikinis on them.
But there are two parts to that: all of these bigger and better things are cheaper, and I would say that it's difficult in some cases to not get the Bigger and Better.
I bought a house a few short years ago. I wanted something new, since it was my first house. While ultimately I wanted something sizable, it's almost impossible to find a new, small house, at least in the Midwest.
I realize that doesn't apply to, say, computers, but it's pretty difficult to be disconnected from so much by not having a computer. No Email = higher long distance bills, can't check the internet for movies and news, so then you have newspaper subscription bills, all kinds of miscellaneous costs - encyclopedias, mapbooks, greeting cards, typewriters... (okay, for some of those it involves having a school age kid. Add in the therapy for the teasing for not having a computer and internet access.)
Indeed. I went to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technlogy, located in the same town, Terre Haute, IN. (Which, incidentally, required laptops in 1995, my freshman year and the first year they accepted incoming female students.) Anyway, we used to joke that if you made it through your freshman (or was it sophomore?) year at Rose, you could go pick up your bachelor's degree in math at ISU.
Niven's early Known Space books, about Gil the ARM are the ones to read. In them, after they found the ultimate anti-rejection meds, everyone could get anything replaced. Before you knew it, they started having criminals executed in hospitals, so they could be harvested for the organ banks. But then there weren't enough parts, so more and more crimes were punished with death. Before you knew it, that wasn't enough either, so that's where the organleggers came in, kidnapping people to harvet their organs.
Ah, the memories. Actually, the biggest one was that my dad hacked Tunnels of Doom and changed the names of the monsters and weapons. Ball and Chain -> Bazooka and Rockets, Dagger -> Machete, Dragon -> Ronald Reagan, for example.
We ended up with Wico joysticks for our Atari as well, and those things were just workhorses.
We were playing something on it, and my dad just snapped the stick off. So he turned around and broke the other one.
He then created a patch cable so we could use our Atari 2600 joysticks with the TI. Because they were THAT MUCH BETTER. (And eventually, as I mentioned in another comment, we eventually replaced them with third party steelpost joysticks.)
The Atari controllers were easy to use, but they did suffer from cracks in the little plastic thingy inside that translated your moves into making the necessary circuit connections. The best solution for that was to buy the third party WYCO joysticks, which had a top of stick button AND a steel post for the stick as well.
I think one thing that helped was the professor always having something for us to look at on our machines - if not something more actively using it, then at least lecture notes in word or powerpoint.
The college I attended went to Laptops for every student in 1995. There were very few thefts, mostly off campus.
Because my campus was safe. Most people didn't bother to lock their dorm doors. The joke was that it was one of the few places where it was safer to leave a $20 sitting on a table than it was to leave your computer logged in.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, that's what I got from my dad, who was a union member for 30 years, and a union steward for part of that. (Communications Workers of America, in case you're curious.)
And it sounded to me like the ultimate goal was "An honest day's pay for an honest day's work". And that presumes that everyone is doing an honest day's work, rather than surfing the net or posting on slashdot. Ooops.
I saw him go to bat for a guy who showed up drunk at work. Helped to get him involved in AA or whatever, and managed to save his job. It happened again, and that was it, not promising anything again. Not all unions are about keeping the slackers around, and I think that programmers should be bright enough people to handle that concept.
As a woman, I am as insulted by the suggestion that I'm just out to find a man to be a good father as many men are at the suggestion that they just looks for big breasts and the like. This study wasn't looking at which men women would really date - it looked at their reaction to pictures. Whooptefreakingdo.
Perhaps I'm spoiled by having a lot of intelligent female friends, but we're looking for someone to spend time with, not just someone to make a baby with.
Ultima III was better, before they got rid of the non-human races. And we could hack the data files for all the clues. Ah, my old Atari 800...
I suggest looking here. It's the mailing list set up for your state for people who play RPGA campaigns. The RPGA is an organization run by WOTC that run a number of shared world kind of campaigns. My personal favorite is Arcanis (which is pretty high roleplay, but still has some deadly combats), but there is also Living Greyhawk, Living Spycraft and some others.
Which is why, thank God, there are different game systems out there, so that I can go play D&D, or Ironclaw (a skill based system), or throw it all out the window and play Amber, which has four stats, powers and no dice at all. Or heck, go play on a MUSH or forum online game, where there aren't even stats much of the time.
Others have addressed some of your points, but there are a few that I'll throw my opinion on. Oh, and I'll note that I was introduced to D&D with 2nd edition, but frankly, I don't recall how it works very well because it was so stupidly complicated, taking 47 charts to play (in contrast to a few charts needed to level up), that shortly after I started playing 3.0, it all dribbled out my ear.
Ahem.
"Skills - which complicate the process of character creation and level advancement, as players often spend considerable time figuring out which skills they should put skill points into. A simpler mechanism was employed back before the Skills and Powers option was created for 2e, you either had the ability, or you didn't. There was nothing else to keep track of. 3e's mechanism involves too much beancounting. "
Skills are one of the things I love best about 3.x. I can actually be better or worse than someone else at a skill, so that I can, for example, make a character who is an apprentice blacksmith, or a diplomat in training or whathaveyou, rather than "I have the skill, the only difference between someone else with that skill is what my attribute score is".
The mechanics of D20 are very simple to learn, since they almost universely consist of rolling a D20 and adding something. The only exceptions are damage dice, stabilizing when unconscious, and miss chances, that I can think of.
D20 allows me to build a character exactly, instead of popping a few different pieces into the cookie cutter mold, and while you can roleplay without numbers to back something up, it's much easier to do so when, for example, your steppe barbarian really CAN ride a horse muchmuch better than someone else (maximum ranks in the ride skill + a campaign feat called Saddle Warrior).
A third party setting that I whole heartedly endorse is the Arcanis setting by Paradigm Concepts. To me, it seems to have a backstory nearly as rich as Forgotten Realms (it's to get to that mark without having a hundred books or so), but it's also set up for things to happen. Players get a lot of input into what does happen through their RPGA campaign, Living Arcanis, including some characters from that being included in flavor sections of one of the main books, the Player's Guide to Arcanis.
Blows Eberron out of the water, IMHO.
Richard Hatch is apparently pretty happy withe show and enjoying his role as Zarek. Now, Dirk Benedict on the other hand...
I know a lot of female gamers, but maybe that's because I am one. Programmer, too. But I'm a slight anomoly - most of the women gamers I know are tabletop gamers, while I play both, in nearly even amounts. So for players, I can buy the viewpoint that far too many games drive away women with big boobs and scanty costumes. Female armor in most MMORPGs, for example, tends to get a lot of jokes, just like really bad fantasy novel covers.
Regarding women as programmers, I think that there are two things to consider:
a) programmers are geeky and particularly at the moment, teenagers frown on people being smart, as the opposite of cool. Women tend to be more socially aware (or socially malleable) than their male counterparts in high school, so while they may quietly get good grades, they probably won't choose a geeky path like CS in college.
b) there are still, believe it or not, teachers who discourage women from fields related to math or science. I was lucky enough not to have that problem in high school (now a fading ten years in the past), but I have heard plenty of first hand stories on the subject.
There's a little gadget that skims the XML version of livejournal and examines the standard moods from all public posts. (You can type whatever you want into the mood box, but it disregards these custom moods.)
Here it is, for which it's author will be eternally grateful for me posting, I'm sure.
Anyway, I realize that it's not the same thing, but in my small deluded brain, I can dream that something I knew about was the inspiration.
I remember Ultima III (on the Atari 800, IIRC, in my case), and if that taught me violence, tile floors, treasure chests and tall grass would be toast.
While I've never tried to find a root cause, I started off doing well in tests very early (infant ones, like get the safety pin out of the jar, okay, now get it out of the baby bottle where you can't just get it out by reaching), got A's all through elementary and high school...
And hit college, and found that never having had to study to do well has some huge drawbacks when all the classes are dramatically more difficult than high school. I had to re-learn how to learn, because it was much more information than I could just soak up.
And I think everyone is interested in seeing how they measure up to this new cortex-growth yardstick.
No, but I did play Morrowind, and I wasn't impressed.
... who's hackles rear up everytime they try to call these things rpgs? It is not a roleplaying game when you are handed some character to play that isn't yours, it's not a roleplaying game when you don't get to chose what comes out of your mouth, or it's part of a canned set of lines. How do you define who your character is, when you're restricted in what you can do?
Of course, one could also argue that there's as much point in roleplaying by yourself with a computer as performing a play in an empty room.
CRPGs are storyline based adventure (and sometimes puzzle) games.
Yes, the Psylons have been replaced, but a Pylon snuck through. I'm picturing tying a rope to Sharon. (As a female, that does not put my mind in the gutter, thank you very much. It puts my mind at the boat dock.)
And if you HAVE to group up with people in this game... I know that I would rather get that group together in the real world and play some real D&D.
I am confused by your need to emphasize that a woman plays D&D with you. It's really not that odd anymore - I'm a woman, and one third to half of my gaming buddies are women (depending on how wide we draw the circle). Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't seem to get that, so they keep putting out books with women in chainmail bikinis on them.
But there are two parts to that: all of these bigger and better things are cheaper, and I would say that it's difficult in some cases to not get the Bigger and Better.
I bought a house a few short years ago. I wanted something new, since it was my first house. While ultimately I wanted something sizable, it's almost impossible to find a new, small house, at least in the Midwest.
I realize that doesn't apply to, say, computers, but it's pretty difficult to be disconnected from so much by not having a computer. No Email = higher long distance bills, can't check the internet for movies and news, so then you have newspaper subscription bills, all kinds of miscellaneous costs - encyclopedias, mapbooks, greeting cards, typewriters... (okay, for some of those it involves having a school age kid. Add in the therapy for the teasing for not having a computer and internet access.)
... they teach discrete and combinatorial math at Japanese high schools? Wow.
Indeed. I went to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technlogy, located in the same town, Terre Haute, IN. (Which, incidentally, required laptops in 1995, my freshman year and the first year they accepted incoming female students.) Anyway, we used to joke that if you made it through your freshman (or was it sophomore?) year at Rose, you could go pick up your bachelor's degree in math at ISU.
Niven's early Known Space books, about Gil the ARM are the ones to read. In them, after they found the ultimate anti-rejection meds, everyone could get anything replaced. Before you knew it, they started having criminals executed in hospitals, so they could be harvested for the organ banks. But then there weren't enough parts, so more and more crimes were punished with death. Before you knew it, that wasn't enough either, so that's where the organleggers came in, kidnapping people to harvet their organs.
Ah, the memories. Actually, the biggest one was that my dad hacked Tunnels of Doom and changed the names of the monsters and weapons. Ball and Chain -> Bazooka and Rockets, Dagger -> Machete, Dragon -> Ronald Reagan, for example.
We ended up with Wico joysticks for our Atari as well, and those things were just workhorses.
We were playing something on it, and my dad just snapped the stick off. So he turned around and broke the other one.
He then created a patch cable so we could use our Atari 2600 joysticks with the TI. Because they were THAT MUCH BETTER. (And eventually, as I mentioned in another comment, we eventually replaced them with third party steelpost joysticks.)
The Atari controllers were easy to use, but they did suffer from cracks in the little plastic thingy inside that translated your moves into making the necessary circuit connections. The best solution for that was to buy the third party WYCO joysticks, which had a top of stick button AND a steel post for the stick as well.
I think one thing that helped was the professor always having something for us to look at on our machines - if not something more actively using it, then at least lecture notes in word or powerpoint.
The college I attended went to Laptops for every student in 1995. There were very few thefts, mostly off campus.
Because my campus was safe. Most people didn't bother to lock their dorm doors. The joke was that it was one of the few places where it was safer to leave a $20 sitting on a table than it was to leave your computer logged in.