This kind of thing of thing gives me a little hope that if I can just hold on 40 more years or so, they'll keep inventing better and better stuff that could keep me alive for several more (former) lifetimes.
Honestly, dying right before that stuff really gets going would be quite a shame.
I want to disagree that Tetris and Minesweeper are the immediate candidates for "Best Games". I've played both, but only about 5 hours each. They are ultra-simple. Compare that to games like Civilization, Knights of the Old Republic, or World of Warcraft, all in the hundreds of hours.
I guess the "problem" with Tetris, Minesweeper, even things like Pac*Man is to me they are way too sparse and limited. Inorganic. They just play like a limited algebra problem with a slightly prettier graphical interface. That comes across as mental busywork to me, emphasis _work_, not play. I perfer games with either more story to them, or else complicated, open-ended strategy that can bloom outwards into choices wider than "Hmm, should I put this piece in column 1 or 8? And if so, which of 4 rotations?" Or "Which X,Y coordinate should I click on next using deductive, sudoku-like reasoning?" I prefer "What is my grand strategy for this next entire phase of the game?"
So, according to some, teachers aren't supposed to be allowed to teach sex education with an approved, professionally developed curriculum? Well, ok. With today's level of internet tech, teens can just turn to YouTube.
The video is just Kicesie laying there in her flannel pajamas talking to the camera on her thoughts on virginity, having sex, some of the considerations on when might be a good time. It's the internet, and as Dan Savage sometimes says, the only qualification on giving advice is to give "a suggestion about what could or should be done" and have people who are willing to seek you out for advice. She doesn't claim to be a teacher or a doctor or anything. She's more like a big sister just talking about what's on her mind.
But the above video has about 1.8 million page views at the time of this post. What does this say? I think it says that we have some starvation-level hunger for sexual knowledge that isn't being met anywhere else, and this includes schools, which are SUPPOSED to be the sources of critical life knowledge for children and teens.
We could make sex ed entirely illegal. That will leave a gap of needed knowledge that teens will crave to fill. Youtube and other sites like it will be one way to try and fill the gap, although they aren't held to nearly the same academic standards that our public school systems are. Do we really want to outsource responsibility for critical life skills like understanding sex and contraception to Youtube? Making sex ed illegal or focusing on abstinence-only education will do exactly that. Either our teachers will teach teens about sex or Kicesie and her successors will. And either of those are preferable to NOBODY doing it and them just stumbling through unprepared.
Condoms/contraceptives are to sex as seat belts are to driving: useful tools that can prevent unplanned, life-altering events.
Some people might argue that teaching teens how to use seatbelts somehow makes them more likely to drive recklessly. Or that teaching about seat belts will increase their feelings of invincibility and trivialize the risks related to driving. I would say that teens that are aware of the reason for seatbelts will be more sober about the realities behind them. Those responsible enough to buckle up are those more likely to drive safely instead of recklessly.
DA Southworth wants to criminilize knowledge of sexual protection for teens at the same age we allow them to begin driving. We can't pretend that ignoring the teen desire to drive cars is going to reduce it. Teens naturally want freedom, want to drive, and they will even if we ignore proper training. If anything, it should be criminal NOT to teach teens critical skills that can prevent derailing lives- and these skills include driver safety and safe sex both.
Flawed thinking. You are using the mechanics of only brain waves and heart beat as the only metric of if a brain is operating. (Forgivable, the ancient Egyptians were sure the heartbeat was the only measure of thinking.) The brain operates on a lot of other levels- ionic salt transfer, radio waves from the tips of dendrites, and probably a dozen other processes including some on the quantam level we don't know the slightest thing about yet.
Analogy: Using primitive instruments from a seismic sensing station a mile away, we decide if a car is turned on if we can sense the engine rumbling. Then we see the rumbling stop. Is anything else happening in the car? You are in effect saying "Well, the engine is turned off, therefore there is no WAY the radio could be on!" But the battery works for a while even if the engine is off. The radio/CD player could be turned up to 11, and it happens to be a CD about peacefulness and light. If anything, the passengers can hear it clearer than ever because the background engine noise is turned off. But you can't hear it from the seismic station. You can only ask someone who was in the car at the time.
Just because the seismic station can't sense the engine rumbling doesn't mean the car doesn't have other more subtle processes going on.
This is like saying that although I live outside my computer, I am irrelevant to the lives of the Sims living in it.
I could never enter their world in person, and maybe I will just watch them and let them live their entire lives on autopilot without any input. But for them, my whims are absolute. Get in the shower! Go have a snack! My power increases if I get a trainer to alter them more directly.
If they displease me I am totally building an unescapable maze house around them while they sleep ("For the love of God, Montressor!"), or pulling out the pool ladder while they swim. Does their code have anything where they feel a rush of hormones and peacefulness as they die? > : -)>
Maybe I will play the game as a benevolent guide, helping them meet their needs and finding love and progressing through their career. But nothing in the game says I have to do that. I'm just as free to make their lives a living hell for my amusement.
What is really interesting is, what if a Sim somehow achieved sentience? They somehow reverse engineered that they were in a program, figured out their linear address in RAM and so forth, realized I was watching. What if they looked directly at the screen and addressed me by my user name, begging for me to sypmathize with and help them?
That would probably be akward. But it could also be touching. Would they ask me to help guide their life, or butt out and live it the best they could? Could the Sim who figured out s/he was a program convince has family and neighbors or would s/he just be seen as insane? Would they become a Prophet? Would they end up nailed to a SimCross for being too insane? Maybe they could ask the user to open up their code and change the WillDieIfThisOld{76) variable to 100,000 or something. Then the NDE hormones wouldn't be needed!
Welp, there's whatever UbiSoft spent on this scheme down the drain. What did they spend on this thing? A million bucks? I hope the one day of protection they got out of it was worth it.
The way I've always seen it is, every pirated copy MIGHT be a lost sale. Sure, some people who would have otherwise bought it will pirate it and not pay. But many of the pirates are people who had zero intention of buying the game anyway, but will give it a spin just to see what it is about if the only cost is one click and a few minutes of bandwidth. A small percentage of those may actually like it enough to pay for it. Myself, I'm not going to pay for nor even pirate Assassin's Creed 2. What does it say when I don't even care enough to show interest in the game for free?
Now, the people who make their living convincing the UbiSofts of the world to buy DRM are of course going to try to assume that every pirate represents a lost sale. "Heck, some of these people would probably have bought a copy for the kids too- so we'll just go ahead and say each pirated copy equals _1.2_ lost sales! That's like a kajillion sales lost! Give us that cool million dollars, and all those pirated copies will immediately convert back to cold, hard cash! You'll be RICH!!!" UbiSoft's decisionmakers have their eyes turn into dollar signs and fork over the million bucks.
Then some guys crack the thing in a day. Does the DRM team give the cool million bucks back if their DRM gets cracked that fast? I seriously doubt it. So all UbiSoft really did was lose a million bucks on DRM and annoy their legitimate customers.
From this alone, no one can tell _your_ habits. They could learn the habits of Panzofran the Blood Elf Warlock, and conclude certain patterns of play time. (Like that the character plays most during evenings in EST- but who's to say it's not the middle of the night in Europe, or mornings in East Asia?)
People can't easily make the jump to stalking _your_ habits unless you reveal your person-character connection somewhere else: 1) Tell people your real name in game or on guild forums or something 2) Write about your character on Livejournal 3) Meet people IRL at Blizzcon or something
Much, much, MUCH better a pile of metal and plastic shaped like a 13 year old child than a REAL 13-year old child.
If someone could get out all their urges on the former, maybe they'd never bother with the latter. The counter argument is that getting a taste of the former might increase one's hunger to try the latter. But is that really true?
A lot of people I know play games to take a BREAK from realism! Most games aren't meant so simulate reality, they're meant to tap into a world that is a mix of dreams and math.
Games as math- in chess, the logic of one piece "attacking" another is mainly that the board position change. When my knight "takes" a queen, I don't need a realistic depiction of him raping her to death and then beheading her. I just need to know that 4C now contains -1 queens and +1 knights. It's the same in first person shooters or World of Warcraft. In Warsong, I don't care if you fight the flag carrier "realistically" with swords or with awesome beams of color shooting from your hands. I just want to know how much damage it all added up to and if they dropped the flag or not.
Being able to fly in my dreams isn't realistic. But I'm glad it's not. I can jump down flights of stairs in my dreams, I don't want my brain to realistically simulate my shin bones splintering when I do it. I just want the fun. And I want that same dream-fun in my games.
River City Ransom- Two-player human circus. Player1 standing on a rolling tire, holding Player 2, who is himself holding an enemy holding trash can.
Super Mario 2- Building giant bridges out of mushroom blocks instead of using them to crush bosses.
Legend of Zelda- Link to the Past- Doing the Dark World Dungeons as out-of-order as possible. IE, 1,6,7,2,5,4,3. Also doing "hard mode", beating entire game with 0 saves and 0 deaths so that it says "000" at the end screen.
Duke Nukem- Defining hideous, spike-encrusted tractor-harvestors with no set travel path. Without a path, they just went crazy driving in circles- gibbing all enemies they hit. Place in the center of an enemy-filled room.
Super Mario Kart- Red shell orbit drills. Place one player in center of battle map at rest. Other player can fire red shell perpendicular to player such that its maximum degrees/second turning radius cannot lock into player. Juggle as many red shells in "orbit" as possible. Also, run drills where you deliberately allow one player to fire red shell after red shell at you, deploying banana peel or green shell behind you at last second in "flak defense" drills.
Oh, you want to have an intervention to play LESS WoW??? (It's a comic sketch where some guildmates are trying to lure their friend back into the game- as a result, he misses a three-some with two sexy ladies.)
We're not necessarily trying to kill all the mosquitos ON EARTH, just the.000001% within say 5m of a human. I'd position a little point-defense laser turrent in my room while I sleep if it existed. Especially since I live in the first world and can easily afford electricity to run it.
On the off-chance laser-resistant (reflective/ablative skin??) mosquito stumbles into and out of the kill zone alive, it still has to compete with the other 99.999% of mosquitos who didn't get in here.
Maybe we should be asking "should we even bother with swap files?". I took a class on that where we calculated the steps it takes to get the final memory address in a paged memory system. It was something like 36 steps per address! We had PDEs, PTEs, convert this, change that. I didn't grok all the steps, but I do know there were a lot of them. I know 36 steps per little itty bitty piece of memory is a lot, even if you are a very fast CPU, when you have to do this hundreds of millions of times.
Back in the day, it made sense to convince your programs you had an extra 100 megs of RAM, because a lot of programs needed that and didn't have it in memory. Today, memory is more abundant than things we would really need it for at the non-industrial level. I don't personally have any non-industrial applications that will fill up 4 gigs of RAM. Even Vista + WoW won't take up all that.
So, and my professor suggested this, maybe the ideal swap size is ZERO. What if your operating system just operated under the concept of "If you can't fit it in 4 gigs, tough. Just wait until memory is free. I'm not even going to bother to split memory into pages because I'm always going to use RAM, not a hard drive page. Case closed." We could save so much overhead and complexity if we just admit that we never need to pretend hard drive is RAM. With 4 gigs or more of RAM, why even have a glacial slow hard drive in the mix?
In a seemingly sleazy move, GameStop has added a $15 "Handling Fee" to the WotLK Collector's Edition. Not a SHIPPING and Handling fee mind you, shipping is extra. This is just straight grafting in the style of:
"Oh HO, it seems some of you WANT this product do you? And we're the only one with the Collector's Edition right now! Weeellp, the box is all the way over there on the shelf and I'm kinda tired... maybe an extra $15 could motivate me to lean over there and get it for you. If you don't, I'm sure someone else will pay extra for the LIMITED SUPPLY of these! You've made the right choice."
If Royal Society students were blank slates, who were helpless but to believe exactly the words any sacred professor spilled into their brains like a blank hard drive being formatted with an operating system, then a professor espousing a controversial or even ridiculous viewpoint would be dangerous indeed.
I'd like to think the average Society student is a capable student already familiar with skepticism and the scientific who could handle dismantling the logical flaws of untenable positions.
It makes me think of an academy of legendary knights and wizards. Do they need to be protected from any and all threats? If the occaisional monster wonders in, they should be able to subdue it with their budding hero skills. In fact, one might go as far to say that occaisionally monsters should be introduced DELIBERATELY, so the students don't get too comfortable or cloistered. Diplomatically disagreeing with someone in a position to cut your funding (or GPA anyway, in this case) is actually a useful real-world skill to have.
This is the kind of thought that is almost true, yet subtly totally wrong, like what someone who had read about or seen the game would come up with.
The best gear and status in the game does not come from "random drops". That category is called "World Drops", and it is the lowest end of the upper end tier loot. It might be purple, but no one takes it seriously Sort of like how a Mini-Cooper is technically a BMW but at under $20k is the entry-level one.
No, the very best gear in the game comes from two sources- the top end 25 man raids (T6 gear) and the very top of the Arena (S4 gear). Neither of these is random and in fact niether is particularly time-consuming in and of itself. T6 is gauranteed in that Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, Mother Shazzrah and all the rest are GAURANTEED to drop 2 or 3 pieces of T6 each per kill, plus two other good things. Exactly which version of the two T6 pieces they drop is random per week, but guilds totally abstract this randomness with internal DKP systems that tell you when you'll get the next thing you want based on your contributions. The point here is a good team clears Black Temple, and the gauranteed 32 pieces of loot in about three hours. Once it is clear, you can't run it again for a week. So Operant Conditioning driving people to play 100 hours a week simply doesn't apply to Black Temple. Guilds clear it and say "Ok, see you guys next Sunday."
The best S4 pieces are gotten by being in the top 1% of arena PvP teams. Again, there is a fixed point schedule per week. Playing every waking hour is not optimal. Actually, you are only required to play a minimum of 10 games a week at a few minutes a game, and playing more than that could easily become a non-optimal strategy.
In both cases, the meta-game is recognizing, seeking out and socializing with people with elite skills and gaming with them. The payoff is that joining an effective team has a payoff 100x greater than an ineffective one. Being part of that effective teamwork dynamic is an amazing thrill. A well-oiled team can defeat Illidan in one shot without anyone dying. A poor one won't be able to get past his fourth or fifth outer guards in ten hours.
Most people who play WoW will never be on a Super Bowl-winning football team, in an award-winning choir or orchestra, on the management team of a Fortune 500 company. But people naturally seem to like being part of greater whole. Even the most basic 5-man dungeon or 10 man battleground team can give a player this. Each character has strengths and weaknesses that make it so they can only succeed by complementing the abilities of others. If they do their part of the job, the entire team will shine and they'll feel like maybe people really can work together sometimes. And this experience is magnified again if some of the people in game are your friends and family. Anyone who understands the social experience can share it with others. WoW is good at making little stories that are a fun shared social experience with anyone else who plays. "Oh man last night I accidentally pulled three mobs..." "So THEN this rogue decides to sneak up on me..."
You can ding 68 in a million other single player games. There are plenty of operant conditioning games that aren't as addictive to people. But as fun as Braid or any Operant game might be single player, fun in-game mechanics aren't the only reward. WoW shows us that social mechanics are a desirable reward unto themselves.
I suppose they could try and tell use what devices we are allowed to play their stuff on, but then we're allowed to tell them where they can stick all the surplus unsold copies that we aren't buying because it won't play on the devices we want to play them on. If the stuff stops selling, they'll probably stop telling us what to play them on anymore.
If memory serves, the human brain consumes about 60 watts of power. When I game at my hardest, I'm sure my brain uses more energy than average. It feels intense while I'm playing, but I feel "burned out" when I'm done too.
The program has no purpose on its own, it's parasitic. Without the existence of WoW, it has no function. And the function it does in WoW is specifically forbidden by WoW's creators...
That being said, I guess you're allowed to write useless, even parasitic things.
Ok, so you don't want the large-scale bootlegger to sell half a million copies of your game. But does copy protection ever actually do that? I can't think of a game that was never cracked, and usually they're cracked 0 day or earlier. If even one person on earth can crack your game and put it into the warez channels, the bootlegger got the copy anyway. All they need is one. Does paying all that money for copy protection slow down the bootlegger? Of course, if you ask the copy protection people you are paying money to, they will say "Oh yes, it's working great!"
This clip is a guy screaming his head off as his guild nears victory and then kills Ragnaros in World of Warcraft for the first time (and lots of his guildmates cheer too.)
Somehow, I can't imagine many women getting THIS worked up over what amounts to some orange pixels on a screen.
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of thing of thing gives me a little hope that if I can just hold on 40 more years or so, they'll keep inventing better and better stuff that could keep me alive for several more (former) lifetimes.
Honestly, dying right before that stuff really gets going would be quite a shame.
I want to disagree that Tetris and Minesweeper are the immediate candidates for "Best Games". I've played both, but only about 5 hours each. They are ultra-simple. Compare that to games like Civilization, Knights of the Old Republic, or World of Warcraft, all in the hundreds of hours.
I guess the "problem" with Tetris, Minesweeper, even things like Pac*Man is to me they are way too sparse and limited. Inorganic. They just play like a limited algebra problem with a slightly prettier graphical interface. That comes across as mental busywork to me, emphasis _work_, not play. I perfer games with either more story to them, or else complicated, open-ended strategy that can bloom outwards into choices wider than "Hmm, should I put this piece in column 1 or 8? And if so, which of 4 rotations?" Or "Which X,Y coordinate should I click on next using deductive, sudoku-like reasoning?" I prefer "What is my grand strategy for this next entire phase of the game?"
So, according to some, teachers aren't supposed to be allowed to teach sex education with an approved, professionally developed curriculum? Well, ok. With today's level of internet tech, teens can just turn to YouTube.
Kicesie- "Virginity Part 2" 9:24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x09G3xEgifs
The video is just Kicesie laying there in her flannel pajamas talking to the camera on her thoughts on virginity, having sex, some of the considerations on when might be a good time. It's the internet, and as Dan Savage sometimes says, the only qualification on giving advice is to give "a suggestion about what could or should be done" and have people who are willing to seek you out for advice. She doesn't claim to be a teacher or a doctor or anything. She's more like a big sister just talking about what's on her mind.
But the above video has about 1.8 million page views at the time of this post. What does this say? I think it says that we have some starvation-level hunger for sexual knowledge that isn't being met anywhere else, and this includes schools, which are SUPPOSED to be the sources of critical life knowledge for children and teens.
We could make sex ed entirely illegal. That will leave a gap of needed knowledge that teens will crave to fill. Youtube and other sites like it will be one way to try and fill the gap, although they aren't held to nearly the same academic standards that our public school systems are. Do we really want to outsource responsibility for critical life skills like understanding sex and contraception to Youtube? Making sex ed illegal or focusing on abstinence-only education will do exactly that. Either our teachers will teach teens about sex or Kicesie and her successors will. And either of those are preferable to NOBODY doing it and them just stumbling through unprepared.
Condoms/contraceptives are to sex as seat belts are to driving: useful tools that can prevent unplanned, life-altering events.
Some people might argue that teaching teens how to use seatbelts somehow makes them more likely to drive recklessly. Or that teaching about seat belts will increase their feelings of invincibility and trivialize the risks related to driving. I would say that teens that are aware of the reason for seatbelts will be more sober about the realities behind them. Those responsible enough to buckle up are those more likely to drive safely instead of recklessly.
DA Southworth wants to criminilize knowledge of sexual protection for teens at the same age we allow them to begin driving. We can't pretend that ignoring the teen desire to drive cars is going to reduce it. Teens naturally want freedom, want to drive, and they will even if we ignore proper training. If anything, it should be criminal NOT to teach teens critical skills that can prevent derailing lives- and these skills include driver safety and safe sex both.
Flawed thinking. You are using the mechanics of only brain waves and heart beat as the only metric of if a brain is operating. (Forgivable, the ancient Egyptians were sure the heartbeat was the only measure of thinking.) The brain operates on a lot of other levels- ionic salt transfer, radio waves from the tips of dendrites, and probably a dozen other processes including some on the quantam level we don't know the slightest thing about yet.
Analogy: Using primitive instruments from a seismic sensing station a mile away, we decide if a car is turned on if we can sense the engine rumbling. Then we see the rumbling stop. Is anything else happening in the car? You are in effect saying "Well, the engine is turned off, therefore there is no WAY the radio could be on!" But the battery works for a while even if the engine is off. The radio/CD player could be turned up to 11, and it happens to be a CD about peacefulness and light. If anything, the passengers can hear it clearer than ever because the background engine noise is turned off. But you can't hear it from the seismic station. You can only ask someone who was in the car at the time.
Just because the seismic station can't sense the engine rumbling doesn't mean the car doesn't have other more subtle processes going on.
This is like saying that although I live outside my computer, I am irrelevant to the lives of the Sims living in it.
I could never enter their world in person, and maybe I will just watch them and let them live their entire lives on autopilot without any input. But for them, my whims are absolute. Get in the shower! Go have a snack! My power increases if I get a trainer to alter them more directly.
If they displease me I am totally building an unescapable maze house around them while they sleep ("For the love of God, Montressor!"), or pulling out the pool ladder while they swim. Does their code have anything where they feel a rush of hormones and peacefulness as they die? > : -)>
Maybe I will play the game as a benevolent guide, helping them meet their needs and finding love and progressing through their career. But nothing in the game says I have to do that. I'm just as free to make their lives a living hell for my amusement.
What is really interesting is, what if a Sim somehow achieved sentience? They somehow reverse engineered that they were in a program, figured out their linear address in RAM and so forth, realized I was watching. What if they looked directly at the screen and addressed me by my user name, begging for me to sypmathize with and help them?
That would probably be akward. But it could also be touching. Would they ask me to help guide their life, or butt out and live it the best they could? Could the Sim who figured out s/he was a program convince has family and neighbors or would s/he just be seen as insane? Would they become a Prophet? Would they end up nailed to a SimCross for being too insane? Maybe they could ask the user to open up their code and change the WillDieIfThisOld{76) variable to 100,000 or something. Then the NDE hormones wouldn't be needed!
There's probably a good movie in this somewhere.
Welp, there's whatever UbiSoft spent on this scheme down the drain. What did they spend on this thing? A million bucks? I hope the one day of protection they got out of it was worth it.
The way I've always seen it is, every pirated copy MIGHT be a lost sale. Sure, some people who would have otherwise bought it will pirate it and not pay. But many of the pirates are people who had zero intention of buying the game anyway, but will give it a spin just to see what it is about if the only cost is one click and a few minutes of bandwidth. A small percentage of those may actually like it enough to pay for it. Myself, I'm not going to pay for nor even pirate Assassin's Creed 2. What does it say when I don't even care enough to show interest in the game for free?
Now, the people who make their living convincing the UbiSofts of the world to buy DRM are of course going to try to assume that every pirate represents a lost sale. "Heck, some of these people would probably have bought a copy for the kids too- so we'll just go ahead and say each pirated copy equals _1.2_ lost sales! That's like a kajillion sales lost! Give us that cool million dollars, and all those pirated copies will immediately convert back to cold, hard cash! You'll be RICH!!!" UbiSoft's decisionmakers have their eyes turn into dollar signs and fork over the million bucks.
Then some guys crack the thing in a day. Does the DRM team give the cool million bucks back if their DRM gets cracked that fast? I seriously doubt it. So all UbiSoft really did was lose a million bucks on DRM and annoy their legitimate customers.
From this alone, no one can tell _your_ habits. They could learn the habits of Panzofran the Blood Elf Warlock, and conclude certain patterns of play time. (Like that the character plays most during evenings in EST- but who's to say it's not the middle of the night in Europe, or mornings in East Asia?)
People can't easily make the jump to stalking _your_ habits unless you reveal your person-character connection somewhere else: 1) Tell people your real name in game or on guild forums or something 2) Write about your character on Livejournal 3) Meet people IRL at Blizzcon or something
Much, much, MUCH better a pile of metal and plastic shaped like a 13 year old child than a REAL 13-year old child.
If someone could get out all their urges on the former, maybe they'd never bother with the latter.
The counter argument is that getting a taste of the former might increase one's hunger to try the latter. But is that really true?
A lot of people I know play games to take a BREAK from realism! Most games aren't meant so simulate reality, they're meant to tap into a world that is a mix of dreams and math.
Games as math- in chess, the logic of one piece "attacking" another is mainly that the board position change. When my knight "takes" a queen, I don't need a realistic depiction of him raping her to death and then beheading her. I just need to know that 4C now contains -1 queens and +1 knights. It's the same in first person shooters or World of Warcraft. In Warsong, I don't care if you fight the flag carrier "realistically" with swords or with awesome beams of color shooting from your hands. I just want to know how much damage it all added up to and if they dropped the flag or not.
Being able to fly in my dreams isn't realistic. But I'm glad it's not. I can jump down flights of stairs in my dreams, I don't want my brain to realistically simulate my shin bones splintering when I do it. I just want the fun. And I want that same dream-fun in my games.
River City Ransom- Two-player human circus. Player1 standing on a rolling tire, holding Player 2, who is himself holding an enemy holding trash can.
Super Mario 2- Building giant bridges out of mushroom blocks instead of using them to crush bosses.
Legend of Zelda- Link to the Past- Doing the Dark World Dungeons as out-of-order as possible. IE, 1,6,7,2,5,4,3. Also doing "hard mode", beating entire game with 0 saves and 0 deaths so that it says "000" at the end screen.
Duke Nukem- Defining hideous, spike-encrusted tractor-harvestors with no set travel path. Without a path, they just went crazy driving in circles- gibbing all enemies they hit. Place in the center of an enemy-filled room.
Super Mario Kart- Red shell orbit drills. Place one player in center of battle map at rest. Other player can fire red shell perpendicular to player such that its maximum degrees/second turning radius cannot lock into player. Juggle as many red shells in "orbit" as possible. Also, run drills where you deliberately allow one player to fire red shell after red shell at you, deploying banana peel or green shell behind you at last second in "flak defense" drills.
You could have an intervention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpkQSB_h5lY
Oh, you want to have an intervention to play LESS WoW??? (It's a comic sketch where some guildmates are trying to lure their friend back into the game- as a result, he misses a three-some with two sexy ladies.)
Good luck competing in today's information economy with nothing but food, water and shelter.
We're not necessarily trying to kill all the mosquitos ON EARTH, just the .000001% within say 5m of a human. I'd position a little point-defense laser turrent in my room while I sleep if it existed. Especially since I live in the first world and can easily afford electricity to run it.
On the off-chance laser-resistant (reflective/ablative skin??) mosquito stumbles into and out of the kill zone alive, it still has to compete with the other 99.999% of mosquitos who didn't get in here.
I'll field this one: The answer is "Daboo."
Maybe we should be asking "should we even bother with swap files?". I took a class on that where we calculated the steps it takes to get the final memory address in a paged memory system. It was something like 36 steps per address! We had PDEs, PTEs, convert this, change that. I didn't grok all the steps, but I do know there were a lot of them. I know 36 steps per little itty bitty piece of memory is a lot, even if you are a very fast CPU, when you have to do this hundreds of millions of times.
Back in the day, it made sense to convince your programs you had an extra 100 megs of RAM, because a lot of programs needed that and didn't have it in memory. Today, memory is more abundant than things we would really need it for at the non-industrial level. I don't personally have any non-industrial applications that will fill up 4 gigs of RAM. Even Vista + WoW won't take up all that.
So, and my professor suggested this, maybe the ideal swap size is ZERO. What if your operating system just operated under the concept of "If you can't fit it in 4 gigs, tough. Just wait until memory is free. I'm not even going to bother to split memory into pages because I'm always going to use RAM, not a hard drive page. Case closed." We could save so much overhead and complexity if we just admit that we never need to pretend hard drive is RAM. With 4 gigs or more of RAM, why even have a glacial slow hard drive in the mix?
"Your honor, I move that the disbarred be teabagged."
"I'm going to allow this."
In a seemingly sleazy move, GameStop has added a $15 "Handling Fee" to the WotLK Collector's Edition. Not a SHIPPING and Handling fee mind you, shipping is extra. This is just straight grafting in the style of:
"Oh HO, it seems some of you WANT this product do you? And we're the only one with the Collector's Edition right now! Weeellp, the box is all the way over there on the shelf and I'm kinda tired... maybe an extra $15 could motivate me to lean over there and get it for you. If you don't, I'm sure someone else will pay extra for the LIMITED SUPPLY of these! You've made the right choice."
http://www.gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=72700
If Royal Society students were blank slates, who were helpless but to believe exactly the words any sacred professor spilled into their brains like a blank hard drive being formatted with an operating system, then a professor espousing a controversial or even ridiculous viewpoint would be dangerous indeed.
I'd like to think the average Society student is a capable student already familiar with skepticism and the scientific who could handle dismantling the logical flaws of untenable positions.
It makes me think of an academy of legendary knights and wizards. Do they need to be protected from any and all threats? If the occaisional monster wonders in, they should be able to subdue it with their budding hero skills. In fact, one might go as far to say that occaisionally monsters should be introduced DELIBERATELY, so the students don't get too comfortable or cloistered. Diplomatically disagreeing with someone in a position to cut your funding (or GPA anyway, in this case) is actually a useful real-world skill to have.
This is the kind of thought that is almost true, yet subtly totally wrong, like what someone who had read about or seen the game would come up with.
The best gear and status in the game does not come from "random drops". That category is called "World Drops", and it is the lowest end of the upper end tier loot. It might be purple, but no one takes it seriously Sort of like how a Mini-Cooper is technically a BMW but at under $20k is the entry-level one.
No, the very best gear in the game comes from two sources- the top end 25 man raids (T6 gear) and the very top of the Arena (S4 gear). Neither of these is random and in fact niether is particularly time-consuming in and of itself. T6 is gauranteed in that Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, Mother Shazzrah and all the rest are GAURANTEED to drop 2 or 3 pieces of T6 each per kill, plus two other good things. Exactly which version of the two T6 pieces they drop is random per week, but guilds totally abstract this randomness with internal DKP systems that tell you when you'll get the next thing you want based on your contributions. The point here is a good team clears Black Temple, and the gauranteed 32 pieces of loot in about three hours. Once it is clear, you can't run it again for a week. So Operant Conditioning driving people to play 100 hours a week simply doesn't apply to Black Temple. Guilds clear it and say "Ok, see you guys next Sunday."
The best S4 pieces are gotten by being in the top 1% of arena PvP teams. Again, there is a fixed point schedule per week. Playing every waking hour is not optimal. Actually, you are only required to play a minimum of 10 games a week at a few minutes a game, and playing more than that could easily become a non-optimal strategy.
In both cases, the meta-game is recognizing, seeking out and socializing with people with elite skills and gaming with them. The payoff is that joining an effective team has a payoff 100x greater than an ineffective one. Being part of that effective teamwork dynamic is an amazing thrill. A well-oiled team can defeat Illidan in one shot without anyone dying. A poor one won't be able to get past his fourth or fifth outer guards in ten hours.
Most people who play WoW will never be on a Super Bowl-winning football team, in an award-winning choir or orchestra, on the management team of a Fortune 500 company. But people naturally seem to like being part of greater whole. Even the most basic 5-man dungeon or 10 man battleground team can give a player this. Each character has strengths and weaknesses that make it so they can only succeed by complementing the abilities of others. If they do their part of the job, the entire team will shine and they'll feel like maybe people really can work together sometimes. And this experience is magnified again if some of the people in game are your friends and family. Anyone who understands the social experience can share it with others. WoW is good at making little stories that are a fun shared social experience with anyone else who plays. "Oh man last night I accidentally pulled three mobs..." "So THEN this rogue decides to sneak up on me..."
You can ding 68 in a million other single player games. There are plenty of operant conditioning games that aren't as addictive to people. But as fun as Braid or any Operant game might be single player, fun in-game mechanics aren't the only reward. WoW shows us that social mechanics are a desirable reward unto themselves.
I suppose they could try and tell use what devices we are allowed to play their stuff on, but then we're allowed to tell them where they can stick all the surplus unsold copies that we aren't buying because it won't play on the devices we want to play them on. If the stuff stops selling, they'll probably stop telling us what to play them on anymore.
If memory serves, the human brain consumes about 60 watts of power. When I game at my hardest, I'm sure my brain uses more energy than average. It feels intense while I'm playing, but I feel "burned out" when I'm done too.
The program has no purpose on its own, it's parasitic. Without the existence of WoW, it has no function. And the function it does in WoW is specifically forbidden by WoW's creators...
That being said, I guess you're allowed to write useless, even parasitic things.
Ok, so you don't want the large-scale bootlegger to sell half a million copies of your game. But does copy protection ever actually do that? I can't think of a game that was never cracked, and usually they're cracked 0 day or earlier. If even one person on earth can crack your game and put it into the warez channels, the bootlegger got the copy anyway. All they need is one. Does paying all that money for copy protection slow down the bootlegger? Of course, if you ask the copy protection people you are paying money to, they will say "Oh yes, it's working great!"
http://orangehammer.ytmnd.com/
This clip is a guy screaming his head off as his guild nears victory and then kills Ragnaros in World of Warcraft for the first time (and lots of his guildmates cheer too.)
Somehow, I can't imagine many women getting THIS worked up over what amounts to some orange pixels on a screen.