This is precisely the sort of thing that Sagan worries about in Demon-Haunted World.
When science is a distrusted, mysterious thing that only people in white coats and with proper licenses can hope to understand, let alone do, how can we educate new scientists? Will we encourage children to enter the profession? Can we make informed decisions in our political process if we view science in this way?
The PC devs bitch about piracy and such, but as a PC gamer primarily, just about the only games I buy new are PC games.
Oh, I play console games, too, but I buy them used, then trade those for store credit to buy other used games. I can count the number of console titles I've purchased new on one hand, yet I've played probably 50-60 or more since the N64/PSX days.
Pretty soon I'll likely have an X-Box 360 and a PS3. Guess how many games I'll probably buy new for the two systems in the first two years of ownership? Well, seeing as this is much earlier than I usually get in on new consoles, I'll guess a little high and say 4-6, combined.
I spend WAY more money on new PC games. Yes, I still *ahem* creatively acquire some of them, and am not bothered by borrowing from friends or letting them borrow mine, but I *still* buy a higher percentage of them new than I do console games.
I can't imagine I'm the only person like this--"serious" PC gamer but casual console gamer.
Without the used market, I doubt I'd bother with consoles at all. I'd just borrow them a couple years after launch from a friend who didn't mind parting with them for a few weeks, and play the handful of title's I can't go without that way.
...but I liked CoD and CoD:UO. They were (and are) the best WWII shooters around, IMO. I don't much like the genre, and IMO you can toss out most of the rest (including CoD2), but those are keepers. Cinematic when they needed to be, action-packed at other times. Just good.
They've gone downhill since, but man, those first ones had some great moments and some intense gameplay. I didn't read anything about the games before getting them on a whim, and when one level in UO faded in and I realized they'd put me on a friggin' B-17... man, that was some good stuff! Battle of Stalingrad, also excellent. The shelling on that hill.... Jesus, no wonder people came back messed up from that kind of thing. Trench fighting on the eastern front--man, just good. The game offers experiences more than anything else, which is what I like about it, and what I think those sorts of games should do. I think it helps them communicate better, and makes them more than just a mindless shooter (if only for a few moments here and there).
The only weak parts, IMO, were the tank levels, and only because they were too small to get a feel for the machine. I kept trying to go in what I thought were reasonable directions for the levels, and running in to invisible walls:(
I'm just saying, if you're going to take one low-numbered intro class, you're probably better off reading a book or two, and I happen to think that Russell's is exceptionally approachable without dumbing down the material too much, and gives a good overview many major ideas that you're likely to see in other material outside the field of philosophy proper.
As for the biases: yeah, he's got them, most notably with Nietzsche. In that case, he flat-out says that he finds Nietzsche's philosophy and ethics "unsatisfying", and goes on to explain why, but he does do a decent (though not perfect) job of describing them.
And his chapter on Bergson is hilarious, largely due to his bias. He opens it by essentially, in as careful language as he can manage, apologizing to the reader for any deficiencies in his ability to explain such a damn stupid mess. Of course, I happen to think that he's right, so maybe that's why I like it:)
I don't know how it is at most universities, but at the one I went to, for (nearly) any course under the 300 level that you were interested in but didn't need for graduation, you'd be better off reading one or two good books on the subject. It'd take less time, and you'd learn more, unless you're someone who has trouble learning from books, I guess.
For philosophy, I'd recommend Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. It's widely available, fairly cheap, thorough and a bit long but still small enough for one volume, and, perhaps most importantly, well written and entertaining. For someone who's famous in the field, Russell manages to maintain a respectable level of objectivity, while not wholly avoiding addressing the problems present in many of the philosophical systems and views discussed in the book.
One might wish to supplement this with a couple books on more recent developments, as a few big names are omitted due to the book's age (Sartre, for example, and Kierkegaard). Most people should be able to finish a thorough reading of the material in free time over a couple months, tops. Way less time than a class, certainly.
Deus Ex. Just the first one, the second is terrible.
The engine is fairly old and a bit ugly by modern standards, but the story played out in the game--especially if you pay attention to non-essential conversations and written materials, and do a bit more looking around than you strictly have to--is fairly deep for an FPS. It's easily the most "literary" game I've played in the genre; n fact, I can't think of any others offhand that have that quality to any large degree--even Bioshock isn't at its level.
I played it probably ten times before I felt confident in saying I'd gotten everything out of it that I could.
Other FPS-type games that I enjoy, though they are not comparable to Deus Ex:
Bioshock Thief series, all 3 games Max Payne & Max Payne 2 (especially the second one, though it'll have less meaning if you haven't played the first. They're flashy and may not transcend adolescence in the way that you mean, but they are heavily atmospheric, full of dark humor, and have decent stories.)
Probably some others that I'm forgetting, but those are the biggies.
Another nod to Deus Ex here. My favorite games provide "literary" qualities alongside good gameplay, and Deus Ex is a perfect example of that, exploring political and individual philosophy in surprisingly great depth.
Bits of Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday are scattered around the game. Moral choices are made. Free will and the nature of humanity is examined. The final decision in the game is essentially picking which of Aristotle's "good" governments you'd prefer (democratic city-states (Tong), aristocracy (Illuminati), or Philosopher-King (merge with AI)). Very deep, especially for a game that's primarily an FPS.
Looked to me like the glass was only on the sides. Was there some in front as well?
As for the possibility of assassination, I can't help but think about it every time I see the guy speak. I've resigned myself to always expecting to see history made--in a bad way--every single time I watch him live on TV in the next 4-8 years.
Davenport, Iowa, here. Downtown. Went at ~8:10. No line whatsoever. Fed the ballot in to a Diebold scanner thingy that presumably kept it in a bin underneath. A little uneasy seeing that brand on the box, but at least it wasn't an electronic voting machine.
I must say, it's nice to vote in a place where it counts. I was in Kansas last time, so my only somewhat meaningful choice was a protest vote for a third party.
I'd say wait until at least the first patch, if not until the construction set is released.
The game is VERY rough. Further, many people (myself included) are experiencing crashes so frequent that it renders the game unplayable--I suffered through the too-frequent-but-bearable crashes in unpatched Morrowind and Oblivion because the games were so good (well, Morrowind was anyway, and I kept holding out hope for Oblivion right up to the end of the main quest), and I would do the same for this, but we're talking every 2 minutes. Worse, no-one's figured out what's causing it yet, and it doesn't appear to be tied to hardware, so you can't look at a list of video cards or what have you to verify that yours isn't on the list before buying. People are having this problem on XP SP2, SP3, Vista, Nvidia 8xxx and 9xxx series, ATI, Intel and AMD processors, etc. Who knows what's causing it.
My guess is that there are actually SEVERAL crash-to-desktop bugs, but their behavior is so similar that no-one in the community can tell the difference. In fact, a few very specific, common bugs (notably a reproducible CTD on clicking the "new game" button) have workarounds as a result efforts by the fine people on the Fallout 3 forums. I appear to have been hit with one (or more, I suspect) of one of the as-yet-unfixed ones, though:(
I remember when SecuROM and the like were a big deal, back when they first came out.
On Morrowind, for instance, they used something similar--it may even have been an early version of SecuROM--before anything beyond a very simple disc check was common, and it made the game unusable for some paying customers who had CD-ROM drives that the game didn't like. The friend who introduced me to that (otherwise) great game had to swap in a different drive to play it at all, and it was a big deal at the time, because such game-breaking anti-piracy measures were not yet common.
Now, we consider a game practically DRM-free when that's all they have on it. At least these DRM companies seem to have gotten better about the whole not-working-with-certain-drives thing.
Bought mine on Steam, not supposed to have any Securom.
Worked fine for ~2-3 hours, now crashes ever 2 minutes or so, every single time I fire it up. Tried all the solutions I can find, not going to keep looking, because I really shouldn't have to be dicking with this.
I've not seen a PC release from a major publisher have problems this severe in years. I guess it's partially my fault, since Bethesda's known for releasing beta-quality software and fixing it in the 1.1 patch, but for me their poor QA had usually manifested itself in a crash every 1-2 hours, not an entirely unplayable game. Especially since they're just using the now-sort-of-old and well-tested Oblivion engine, I thought this was their best chance at a solid release, but they still managed to fuck it up.
Yeah, I got sick of the recompiling. That was always incidental to me, anyway--I liked Gentoo because the "just works" options of the time (Mandrake and the like) rarely "just worked" and were full of annoying crap, while my favorite techy-oriented distro--namely Debian--had, relative to Gentoo (and IMHO, of course) an inferior package management system and way, WAY fewer packages. The whole, "it's faster because we compile EVERYTHING!" deal never really appealed to me.
I still miss the breadth of Gentoo's package selection, and I still prefer Portage to Dpkg+apt, but Ubuntu saves me the compiling, finally delivers on the "just works" promise (mostly), and gives me automation where I want it (discs automount, network config is hassle free, hardware autodetection, etc.) without bogging my system down. I switched when I realized that Ubuntu was almost exactly the system I'd like to custom-build my Gentoo to be.
Ok, I should have been more explicit. My complaint is that there isn't a good reason for using three diferent syntax where one would have been enough nor there is a good reason to use "$" only for variables but not on classes or namespaces.
"$" is used on an instance of a class.
As in:
$user = new userClass; $user->load($_REQUEST['id']); echo "Hello " . $user->firstName;
(yes, I'm passing a raw form request to what is probably a database. Before someone bitches about how bad PHP programmers are, let me assure you that this imaginary class contains automatic, imaginary input verification and scrubbing, and will turn control over to an imaginary error-handling class in the event of a hypothetical datatype mismatch on an integer SQL row ID)
I got through the whole game, and I must say that the first one or two encounters with Big Daddies are horribly balanced. In one of the cases, I had to respawn ~10 times to kill the damned thing. I watched a friend play it for the first time, and he had almost exactly the same experience at that spot.
IMO, the rest of the game just gets easier the farther you go. None of the others gave me trouble like that; I think I died maybe 5 or 6 more times in the whole rest of the game, and maybe less. Those first couple fights with big daddies, though, are far harder than the final boss fight.
I don't care what they do to the boxed version, but if they can manage to get their heads out of their asses and put the game on Steam without their own stupid DRM on top of the Steam DRM, then they'll have my $50 (or $60, maybe, though I might hesitate at that price) on launch day.
Otherwise, I guess I'll just find some other way to play it. Like I did for the last one, minutes after I was on the "buy" page in Steam but remembered hearing about extra DRM, checked Wikipedia, and bought STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl instead.
Worse still, one of the unreleased mods listed is a Goldeneye mod for Crysis.
Hint to the author: there are about 500 Goldeneye mods for just about every modable PC FPS since that game came out, and, AFAIK, none of them have actually been finished.
(incidentally, if anyone knows of one that is totally or mostly complete, or better yet a Perfect Dark mod that's decent, I'd love to play them)
I'm not a "former" gamer, but better than 95% of my gaming time is in single-player games or in multiplayer with people in the same room (Smash Brothers, Wii Sports, things like that).
The only time I play online with strangers is when I've also got at least one friend in the game, which doesn't happen too often (most of my friends have the same gaming patterns as me and prefer living-room multiplayer, playing a single player game together, or just playing alone to playing online).
I get much more enjoyment out of a marathon playthrough of a single-player game, switching off with a friend, than I do playing an online FPS or whatever with said friend. My wife loves JRPGs, so we usually play those together, even though they're single player. Done similar things with a couple of the Zelda games, and with some 3rd-person games.
The rest of the time (the majority of it) I play PC-RPGs (single player--I *hate* that this market is so small, since it's produced some of my favorite games), strategy games (currently enjoying Hearts of Iron 2), and single-player atmospheric or story-heavy FPS games like the Half Life series, Deus Ex (I replay it every year or so, took me several playthroughs over a few years before I finally felt like I'd experienced the entire game), Portal, the Thief series, Bioshock, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This is precisely the sort of thing that Sagan worries about in Demon-Haunted World.
When science is a distrusted, mysterious thing that only people in white coats and with proper licenses can hope to understand, let alone do, how can we educate new scientists? Will we encourage children to enter the profession? Can we make informed decisions in our political process if we view science in this way?
The PC devs bitch about piracy and such, but as a PC gamer primarily, just about the only games I buy new are PC games.
Oh, I play console games, too, but I buy them used, then trade those for store credit to buy other used games. I can count the number of console titles I've purchased new on one hand, yet I've played probably 50-60 or more since the N64/PSX days.
Pretty soon I'll likely have an X-Box 360 and a PS3. Guess how many games I'll probably buy new for the two systems in the first two years of ownership? Well, seeing as this is much earlier than I usually get in on new consoles, I'll guess a little high and say 4-6, combined.
I spend WAY more money on new PC games. Yes, I still *ahem* creatively acquire some of them, and am not bothered by borrowing from friends or letting them borrow mine, but I *still* buy a higher percentage of them new than I do console games.
I can't imagine I'm the only person like this--"serious" PC gamer but casual console gamer.
Without the used market, I doubt I'd bother with consoles at all. I'd just borrow them a couple years after launch from a friend who didn't mind parting with them for a few weeks, and play the handful of title's I can't go without that way.
I dug the gunship mission. If they made a whole game that was mostly or entirely stuff like that, I'd play it.
...but I liked CoD and CoD:UO. They were (and are) the best WWII shooters around, IMO. I don't much like the genre, and IMO you can toss out most of the rest (including CoD2), but those are keepers. Cinematic when they needed to be, action-packed at other times. Just good.
They've gone downhill since, but man, those first ones had some great moments and some intense gameplay. I didn't read anything about the games before getting them on a whim, and when one level in UO faded in and I realized they'd put me on a friggin' B-17... man, that was some good stuff! Battle of Stalingrad, also excellent. The shelling on that hill.... Jesus, no wonder people came back messed up from that kind of thing. Trench fighting on the eastern front--man, just good. The game offers experiences more than anything else, which is what I like about it, and what I think those sorts of games should do. I think it helps them communicate better, and makes them more than just a mindless shooter (if only for a few moments here and there).
The only weak parts, IMO, were the tank levels, and only because they were too small to get a feel for the machine. I kept trying to go in what I thought were reasonable directions for the levels, and running in to invisible walls :(
I'm just saying, if you're going to take one low-numbered intro class, you're probably better off reading a book or two, and I happen to think that Russell's is exceptionally approachable without dumbing down the material too much, and gives a good overview many major ideas that you're likely to see in other material outside the field of philosophy proper.
As for the biases: yeah, he's got them, most notably with Nietzsche. In that case, he flat-out says that he finds Nietzsche's philosophy and ethics "unsatisfying", and goes on to explain why, but he does do a decent (though not perfect) job of describing them.
And his chapter on Bergson is hilarious, largely due to his bias. He opens it by essentially, in as careful language as he can manage, apologizing to the reader for any deficiencies in his ability to explain such a damn stupid mess. Of course, I happen to think that he's right, so maybe that's why I like it :)
I don't know how it is at most universities, but at the one I went to, for (nearly) any course under the 300 level that you were interested in but didn't need for graduation, you'd be better off reading one or two good books on the subject. It'd take less time, and you'd learn more, unless you're someone who has trouble learning from books, I guess.
For philosophy, I'd recommend Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. It's widely available, fairly cheap, thorough and a bit long but still small enough for one volume, and, perhaps most importantly, well written and entertaining. For someone who's famous in the field, Russell manages to maintain a respectable level of objectivity, while not wholly avoiding addressing the problems present in many of the philosophical systems and views discussed in the book.
One might wish to supplement this with a couple books on more recent developments, as a few big names are omitted due to the book's age (Sartre, for example, and Kierkegaard). Most people should be able to finish a thorough reading of the material in free time over a couple months, tops. Way less time than a class, certainly.
Deus Ex. Just the first one, the second is terrible.
The engine is fairly old and a bit ugly by modern standards, but the story played out in the game--especially if you pay attention to non-essential conversations and written materials, and do a bit more looking around than you strictly have to--is fairly deep for an FPS. It's easily the most "literary" game I've played in the genre; n fact, I can't think of any others offhand that have that quality to any large degree--even Bioshock isn't at its level.
I played it probably ten times before I felt confident in saying I'd gotten everything out of it that I could.
Other FPS-type games that I enjoy, though they are not comparable to Deus Ex:
Bioshock
Thief series, all 3 games
Max Payne & Max Payne 2 (especially the second one, though it'll have less meaning if you haven't played the first. They're flashy and may not transcend adolescence in the way that you mean, but they are heavily atmospheric, full of dark humor, and have decent stories.)
Probably some others that I'm forgetting, but those are the biggies.
Another nod to Deus Ex here. My favorite games provide "literary" qualities alongside good gameplay, and Deus Ex is a perfect example of that, exploring political and individual philosophy in surprisingly great depth.
Bits of Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday are scattered around the game. Moral choices are made. Free will and the nature of humanity is examined. The final decision in the game is essentially picking which of Aristotle's "good" governments you'd prefer (democratic city-states (Tong), aristocracy (Illuminati), or Philosopher-King (merge with AI)). Very deep, especially for a game that's primarily an FPS.
Looked to me like the glass was only on the sides. Was there some in front as well?
As for the possibility of assassination, I can't help but think about it every time I see the guy speak. I've resigned myself to always expecting to see history made--in a bad way--every single time I watch him live on TV in the next 4-8 years.
Davenport, Iowa, here. Downtown. Went at ~8:10. No line whatsoever. Fed the ballot in to a Diebold scanner thingy that presumably kept it in a bin underneath. A little uneasy seeing that brand on the box, but at least it wasn't an electronic voting machine.
I must say, it's nice to vote in a place where it counts. I was in Kansas last time, so my only somewhat meaningful choice was a protest vote for a third party.
I'd say wait until at least the first patch, if not until the construction set is released.
The game is VERY rough. Further, many people (myself included) are experiencing crashes so frequent that it renders the game unplayable--I suffered through the too-frequent-but-bearable crashes in unpatched Morrowind and Oblivion because the games were so good (well, Morrowind was anyway, and I kept holding out hope for Oblivion right up to the end of the main quest), and I would do the same for this, but we're talking every 2 minutes. Worse, no-one's figured out what's causing it yet, and it doesn't appear to be tied to hardware, so you can't look at a list of video cards or what have you to verify that yours isn't on the list before buying. People are having this problem on XP SP2, SP3, Vista, Nvidia 8xxx and 9xxx series, ATI, Intel and AMD processors, etc. Who knows what's causing it.
My guess is that there are actually SEVERAL crash-to-desktop bugs, but their behavior is so similar that no-one in the community can tell the difference. In fact, a few very specific, common bugs (notably a reproducible CTD on clicking the "new game" button) have workarounds as a result efforts by the fine people on the Fallout 3 forums. I appear to have been hit with one (or more, I suspect) of one of the as-yet-unfixed ones, though :(
I remember when SecuROM and the like were a big deal, back when they first came out.
On Morrowind, for instance, they used something similar--it may even have been an early version of SecuROM--before anything beyond a very simple disc check was common, and it made the game unusable for some paying customers who had CD-ROM drives that the game didn't like. The friend who introduced me to that (otherwise) great game had to swap in a different drive to play it at all, and it was a big deal at the time, because such game-breaking anti-piracy measures were not yet common.
Now, we consider a game practically DRM-free when that's all they have on it. At least these DRM companies seem to have gotten better about the whole not-working-with-certain-drives thing.
I did the exact same thing.
"oh, weird, you can piss in this one. I guess I'll go ahead and try it."
"uh, wait, why am I looking in to the toilet bowl?"
"heh, I didn't notice that, why does it give me any rads for taking a pi... OH. Oh, wow. Gross."
Bought mine on Steam, not supposed to have any Securom.
Worked fine for ~2-3 hours, now crashes ever 2 minutes or so, every single time I fire it up. Tried all the solutions I can find, not going to keep looking, because I really shouldn't have to be dicking with this.
I've not seen a PC release from a major publisher have problems this severe in years. I guess it's partially my fault, since Bethesda's known for releasing beta-quality software and fixing it in the 1.1 patch, but for me their poor QA had usually manifested itself in a crash every 1-2 hours, not an entirely unplayable game. Especially since they're just using the now-sort-of-old and well-tested Oblivion engine, I thought this was their best chance at a solid release, but they still managed to fuck it up.
Yeah, I got sick of the recompiling. That was always incidental to me, anyway--I liked Gentoo because the "just works" options of the time (Mandrake and the like) rarely "just worked" and were full of annoying crap, while my favorite techy-oriented distro--namely Debian--had, relative to Gentoo (and IMHO, of course) an inferior package management system and way, WAY fewer packages. The whole, "it's faster because we compile EVERYTHING!" deal never really appealed to me.
I still miss the breadth of Gentoo's package selection, and I still prefer Portage to Dpkg+apt, but Ubuntu saves me the compiling, finally delivers on the "just works" promise (mostly), and gives me automation where I want it (discs automount, network config is hassle free, hardware autodetection, etc.) without bogging my system down. I switched when I realized that Ubuntu was almost exactly the system I'd like to custom-build my Gentoo to be.
1999 called, they miss you and want you to come back ;)
"$" is used on an instance of a class.
As in:
$user = new userClass;
$user->load($_REQUEST['id']);
echo "Hello " . $user->firstName;
(yes, I'm passing a raw form request to what is probably a database. Before someone bitches about how bad PHP programmers are, let me assure you that this imaginary class contains automatic, imaginary input verification and scrubbing, and will turn control over to an imaginary error-handling class in the event of a hypothetical datatype mismatch on an integer SQL row ID)
Another ex-Gentooer-turned-Ubuntuer here. I had no idea we were so common.
Hm, maybe it wasn't the first one. It was the first one that could shoot at you.
I got through the whole game, and I must say that the first one or two encounters with Big Daddies are horribly balanced. In one of the cases, I had to respawn ~10 times to kill the damned thing. I watched a friend play it for the first time, and he had almost exactly the same experience at that spot.
IMO, the rest of the game just gets easier the farther you go. None of the others gave me trouble like that; I think I died maybe 5 or 6 more times in the whole rest of the game, and maybe less. Those first couple fights with big daddies, though, are far harder than the final boss fight.
I don't care what they do to the boxed version, but if they can manage to get their heads out of their asses and put the game on Steam without their own stupid DRM on top of the Steam DRM, then they'll have my $50 (or $60, maybe, though I might hesitate at that price) on launch day.
Otherwise, I guess I'll just find some other way to play it. Like I did for the last one, minutes after I was on the "buy" page in Steam but remembered hearing about extra DRM, checked Wikipedia, and bought STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl instead.
Worse still, one of the unreleased mods listed is a Goldeneye mod for Crysis.
Hint to the author: there are about 500 Goldeneye mods for just about every modable PC FPS since that game came out, and, AFAIK, none of them have actually been finished.
(incidentally, if anyone knows of one that is totally or mostly complete, or better yet a Perfect Dark mod that's decent, I'd love to play them)
I played that for a while, but switched to Europa Barbarorum.
I recommend you check it out. Much better than Total Realism, IMO.
Drazen Isle and Tower for the win!
That's the only game I've ever gotten good enough at to be (regularly) accused of "hacking". Heh.
I'm not a "former" gamer, but better than 95% of my gaming time is in single-player games or in multiplayer with people in the same room (Smash Brothers, Wii Sports, things like that).
The only time I play online with strangers is when I've also got at least one friend in the game, which doesn't happen too often (most of my friends have the same gaming patterns as me and prefer living-room multiplayer, playing a single player game together, or just playing alone to playing online).
I get much more enjoyment out of a marathon playthrough of a single-player game, switching off with a friend, than I do playing an online FPS or whatever with said friend. My wife loves JRPGs, so we usually play those together, even though they're single player. Done similar things with a couple of the Zelda games, and with some 3rd-person games.
The rest of the time (the majority of it) I play PC-RPGs (single player--I *hate* that this market is so small, since it's produced some of my favorite games), strategy games (currently enjoying Hearts of Iron 2), and single-player atmospheric or story-heavy FPS games like the Half Life series, Deus Ex (I replay it every year or so, took me several playthroughs over a few years before I finally felt like I'd experienced the entire game), Portal, the Thief series, Bioshock, etc.