Actually, if you define an RPG as simply being a game in which you take on a role, then just about every videogame out there is an RPG.
And that's precisely the problem. Like so many other terms related to computers, decades of marketspeak have rendered the term essentially meaningless.
So I'll say it again; this time try to read what I've written instead of looking for ways to be offended. In the U.S., in the current political climate, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to successfully secure funding, create, and sell a game wherein the player is dedicated to committing truly evil deeds.
I *did* read what you wrote - and replied to what you wrote. And what you wrote was wrong - it's not the current political climate, the inability to be 'truly evil' goes back decades. The current 'anti-free expression' is but the current manifestation of something far deeper and older.
200 million years is a long time. I'm guessing the statue of liberty, barring some perfect preservation disaster, will be an oblong mass of blue-ish powder, and the golden gate bridge will be a square-ish patch of whatever color its metal will corrode to. Most likely a zigzag shape, what with the earthquakes etc. over that period of time. Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone - another 100k years, they'll just be piles of rubble.
It's worth pointing out that the [Egyptian] pyramids are in the shape they are mostly because of human activity. Their outer surfaces are gone because they were removed for building material, they weren't eroded. The inner surface thus revealed has been damaged by thousands of years of tourist activities.
In short, the closest thing you're going to get to the game you're asking for is probably Civilization or some such, where you can be an evil dictator "from above," without actually seeing your evil deeds enacted. Actually getting down-and-dirty in a game? Not in the U.S., not in the current political climate.
Here's a free clue for you, (as you need one badly) - that attitude far predates either the current political climate or the current Administration. But I understand your motivation - taking cheap shots is far easier than actually engaging your brain and bothering with pesky facts.
Aaah, the age-old discussion about what is an RPG. To some people, a computer RPG is a game you play with other people where you all pretend to be in a made-up world. To other people, a CRPG is a game where, like a book, there is a clear story and a clear protagonist---the player.
There's no debate or discussion. Without other players present, in meatspace or cyberspace, you aren't playing a role - period. Decades of marketdroidspeak have caused some folks to consider a tail as a leg - but that doesn't make it so.
The first group of people are transfers from tabletop RPGs. They don't see the point of pretending to be a paladin/ninja/timelord without having the occasional irreverent out-of-character fun or computer equivalent of drinking beer with buddies.
Incorrect. Many role players find such things distasteful - as they are outside of the role.
The second group of people are folks who want a story above all else, and usually want to be the focus of that story. They don't like OOC talk, and for them the ideal game isn't about being with other people---it's more like reading a good book.
It's fascinating that somehow these people are roleplayers in your eyes - even though they are not playing a role.
Yeah, Oblivion has great graphics, ten billion sidequests, and a crazy-detailed gigantor world to play in, but the biggest plus is the fact that I don't have to share the game world with other people--no 1337-sp33k, no chat spamming, no people out of character, no griefing, and none of the other jackassery that plagues every MMORPG in the universe.
On the other hand - without other people, it's not a RPG. It's just clicking on a keyboard.
I wonder how good their access to news is considering that 85% of our troops think that their role in Iraq is to retaliate against Saddam for his role in 9-11. There seems to be a disconnect between what the troops believe and what the President has publicly stated before and after the war started.
It's unsurprising that a large proportion of the troops think that - when nearly as large a percentage of the general population believes the same thing!
Modern art may be meaningless unless you take the time to try and understand it, much like any other human activity that's evolved for thousands of years.
Incorrect. I understand Medieval art almost effortlessly. I understand Roman and Egyptian and Eutruscan art almost effortlessly. (I can even understand Japanese art with very little effort.) I understand many kinds of art viscerally - modern art is the sole exception. Why? because prior the early-middle twentieth century, art was aimed at being understood by the common man. Since that period, art has been aimed at the critic the self important popinjay.
One problem I think is, no one likes feeling stupid, so, if you don't understand a work of art, what do you choose to blame? the artist, the work or yourself? (Imo it has nothing to do with stupidity, just for the record)
Given the above - the source of the fault is obvious.
And what exactly would art be like if it was playing for the public? Is it possible for art to be easily accessible and still have substance?
Art played for the public for centuries - sucessfully, and with great substance and power. But all that changed when artists stopped working for money and started working for critics.
I don't know. I kind of hope so,
Frankly, a statement like that shows utter ignorance of the history of art.
but what I do know is that if you want to read a book, you gotta know the basics of reading first.
That's a statement I'll never debate. But before the twentieth century, art was created in a powerful and nearly universal lingua fraca - one understandable with little education even today. Modern art is created in a deeply obscured dialect aimed at gaining favor with critics and the in crowd - they've turned wilfully away from the common man.
Considering that the museums that display modern art are getting bigger and have plenty of visitors (atleast here in Europe), I'd say that infact the general public's view on art isn't as bad as you would have us believe.
Having many visitors means it's popular, at least as a destination - not that it's favored or understood.
Kind of like my parents visiting the Getty when they visited my sister in LA - not because they were interested, but because they were told they 'must see it'. Or like the folks I talked with at Cape Canaveral - they cared little for spaceflight, or history - but it was an attraction in the Orlando area and they were dutifully checking it off their list.
Before pop art, art may have been for the selected few, but since then it's been on the rise as far as I know.
In fact - the situation is exactly the opposite. Before the early-middle twentieth centery - art was aimed at the common man, from the lower middle class and up. (Non commercial art has never anywhere been aimed at the lowest common denominator.) Pop Art was aimed at an intellectual elite.
Today, art is very much about reference and association
Unsurprising - since artists have been playing to the peanut gallery rather than the public for decades now. (And one of the largest reasons why the general public views modern art as meaningless and pointless - because it is, unless you are in the 'in crowd'.)
(sorry, no, it's not really about the pretty pictures)
So there, I said it. I was born here, went to college here, gained expeience here...
And 1.5 years and 1000s of resumes (with college degrees and experience and all) later, I am still without employment in the US.
Of course your mishmash of experience and lack of a clear focus couldn't possibly be part of the problem. (What exactly kind of work are you looking for? Your degree indicates CS, yet the experience you cite is IT.)
"As a young person considering various choices for the future career I'd like to pursue, IT and computer science continually reappear near the top of the list of fields I'm interested in. In fact, one of my only hesitations is the suspected ease by which programming and other related tasks can be sent to other countries for pennies on the dollar. How much of a threat do the readers of Slashdot feel outsourcing is to the American programmer? Should I and other young people be pursuing something more specialized or have I simply been watching too much CNN?"
Someone who isn't clear on the difference between IT and Computer Science should consider an alternate career.
If you can find an MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC, or WAV, or...) copy of "Deep Note," try playing it backwards and/or at various different speeds. If it's played at around 14x the original speed it actually sounds sorta neat. And backwards it sounds like a nuclear reactor going down.
(Uh... not that I'd know what a nuclear reactor would sound like... yeah, uh, you can get back to dealing with Iran now...)
I *do* know what a nuclear reactor sounds like... (sound of utter silence). The ancillary machinery (pumps, blowers, etc... etc...) do make some noise however.
Gosh, in the good old days, the popular bands all wrote their own music and performed it live.
And all women were June Cleaver back then too... (I.E. No, their has never been a time when 'all the popular bands wrote their own music and peformed it live'.)
Either way, this sounds a *lot* like the stories about Wikipedia's Office account and the stuff that goes on there. Slashdot has had it's share of accusations of administrator manipulations behind the scenes. The question then comes down to: what should the power of the administrator be?
The problem is - there is two different editorial/administration models being lumped together here.
Slashdot - 'accused of manipulations'. Huh? How can you be 'accused of' something that is proudly boasted of? It's never been a secret that Slashdot is Taco's playground, always has been and will be for the foreseable future. I suspect one of the reasons that Taco's brief transperancy (the two 'State of Slashdot' articles of a couple of months back) ended is because he's learned just how far his vision and that of the userbase has diverged.
Digg and the Wikipedia are not supposed to have administrators in the first place! Their model is (theoretically) complete democracy and consensus.
I figure the proportion from this study was about 25% of Americans can be considered intellectually curious. Frankly, until I went back to school, most of the people I dealt with on a daily basis weren't intellectually curious. Certainly, I'd say the number was under 25%, and that's with a job in computers (programming and consulting).
That's because you buy into the dual (and false) stereotype 'computer job == geek' and 'geek == intellectually curious'. (Most soi disant computer geeks perpetuate this myth as it allows them feel superior.)
In my experience however, 'geeks' are the least intellectually curious people I've met. They spend their intellectual capital on the minutiae of computers and one or more mass market science fiction fads. (On of the main reasons I dropped out fandom - discussion at cons gradually changed from the Big Ideas common in golden and silver era SF to debating where Kirk was born, and what was canon and what was not in Star Wars.)
Fully aware that the singular of data isn't anecdote; The most intellectually curious people I know are respectively - a lawyer, a cop, an auto mechanic, an accountant, and a graphic artist. Pretty much a broad spectrum of education, income levels, sexes, races, and ages.
What I got out of a Google search is that she decided to become a crusader for the music industry and stronger copyrights, then her electorate declined to have her as their representative in parliament in the last election.
What my comment referred to, is that it's unclear the two are related in any fashion - beyond the press releases of the activist press.
What is the Sam Bulte incident anyway? (Not trolling, I just don't know)
As near as I can figure, from following the links, a tempest in a teapot. Some figures in the Canadian activist industry chose her as their poster child - and she declined to accept their invitation. (Just like in the US and here on Slashdot the activist press makes out like the whole world hangs on their every press release. They don't.)
Ever since I got married, I don't have time to play games as much anymore. At least that's what I've been told.
But, in all seriousness, it is true. My life no longer focuses on, "What should I do tonight?", it became, "What should we do tonight?" Otherwise, if I was to tell my wife that I was going to sit down for a few hours and game, my marriage would not be as happy as it is.
Frankly, you show the classic signs of an immature relationship with an overdependency on each other.
Many is the time when my answer to the question 'what am I going to do tonight' involves a solo activity, sometimes even outside the home. When my wife gets home, we talk over dinner and proceed forward - sometimes with my plans altered, sometimes not. (The exception is Wednesday, because I'm going to fighter practice that night unless one of us is ill or the weather is truly beastly bad. No discussion required.) Sometimes we are solo in seperate rooms, sometimes solo in the same room, sometimes a shared activity of some kind.
If your (post marriage) life consists solely of shared activities - with no chance to 'tell your wife you are going to game for a few hours' - then (IMO) your marriage is extremely unhealthy.
To forestall the inevitable peanut gallery: We've been married for sixteen years, were last mistaken in public for newlyweds in April, and last held hands in public Sunday while shopping. Our marriage is healthy, happy, and stable. Tonight will probably match our usual routine during baseball season - the game will be on in the background while I read and she works on one of her puzzles.
I have no problems with police patrolling a beat. If they see someone doing something illegal, they should intervene. However, I don't thing cops should be allowed to troll for crimes in a public space.
MySpace, (or Slashdot), is (in the virtual world) a 'beat'. No different than your physical street, or the parking lot of the local mall.
You can't have it both ways - either the cops can follow up on evidence found on the 'beat' (public space, [MySpace|street]), or they can't.
If you are lawfully walking down the street, should a cop be able to come up to you and give you a "white glove" inspection? Take your ID, call in to check for any warrants, call your ISP to check for bittorrent traffic, ask your boss if any equipment has come up missing, call the DMV to make sure your car is properly licensed, and check with the IRS to ensure you don't owe taxes?
If that was what they were doing - you'd have a point. But it's not. In the case of the TFA, they merely did in virtual space what they'd do in meatspace - examine the evidence and look for clues and/or holes in people's stories. In the instance of scanning MySpace for pedophiles (or idiots who firebomb buildings and brag of it), that's the internet equivalent of pulling over the driver who is weaving all over the road.
When they pull up your blog, how many bad things will they find?
In my case, absolutely none. Not because I haven't posted anything - but because I haven't done anything.
Also, what seperates truth from fiction? How do they know that I didn't read about a recent arson attack and decide to write some fiction placing myself at the scene?
It's called investigation and evidence - something the cops and educated people are aware of, and fearmongering slashdot posters seem not to be.
If you threaten to investigate everything that everyone says that *might* be illegal, then how is that different from placing restrictions on my First Amendment rights?
As far as I can tell, Jimbo Wales got fed up with all the organizational problems the Pepper article was causing -- far out of proportion to the value of the article. This is not JFK assassination theory. Rather, it's a particularly ugly picture that will probably float around the Internet for a month and then vanish. There are *hordes* of Web fads like this, and while someone writing a book on Web fads might still find this useful in a couple of years, I personally doubt that most people will ever think about it again after two years.
You'd have a point - if other internet fads were treated the same way. They aren't, just to name one example. Oops, make that two. Not to mention the respectful treatment given the fads and memes of a tiny subculture.
I think that Jimbo Wales was less interested in making a judgement about whether something was valuable or not and more interested in keeping WP functioning. So he made the call that he felt resolved the WP organizational issue and caused the least damage.
The existence of the Pepper page did no damage to the organization, nor did it impede the functioning of the Wikipedia in any way.
Actually - it did both, *after* it was deleted and locked. Because it reveals the hypocrisy that stands at the heart of Wikipedia.
For what it's worth, I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia, and I did disagree with the decision to delete Brian Peppers. But there's lots of much more important things to worry about, and I've agreed with Jimbo Wales on a number of other situations, so life goes on.
Once again, as with the Siegenthaler case, the 'pedia is caught in an embarassing bind... And once again the attitude of the administrators is "these aren't the droids you are looking for, move along"...
And the reason Justin Berry was deleted and rewritten was because it was originally written by self-identified pedophiles and could've potentially gotten Wikimedia into trouble because it was a biography of a living person and did not cite everything properly, thus possibly leaving Wikipedia open to libel lawsuits.
A fascinating peek into the attitude of the administrators - Siegenthaler's page is defaced, and the blame is placed on the victim, evn though it too could expose the 'pedia to lawsuits. Here, we find a proactive attitude towards distasteful articles.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of like my parents visiting the Getty when they visited my sister in LA - not because they were interested, but because they were told they 'must see it'. Or like the folks I talked with at Cape Canaveral - they cared little for spaceflight, or history - but it was an attraction in the Orlando area and they were dutifully checking it off their list.
In fact - the situation is exactly the opposite. Before the early-middle twentieth centery - art was aimed at the common man, from the lower middle class and up. (Non commercial art has never anywhere been aimed at the lowest common denominator.) Pop Art was aimed at an intellectual elite.In my experience however, 'geeks' are the least intellectually curious people I've met. They spend their intellectual capital on the minutiae of computers and one or more mass market science fiction fads. (On of the main reasons I dropped out fandom - discussion at cons gradually changed from the Big Ideas common in golden and silver era SF to debating where Kirk was born, and what was canon and what was not in Star Wars.)
Fully aware that the singular of data isn't anecdote; The most intellectually curious people I know are respectively - a lawyer, a cop, an auto mechanic, an accountant, and a graphic artist. Pretty much a broad spectrum of education, income levels, sexes, races, and ages.
From An Tir, Greetings.
Many is the time when my answer to the question 'what am I going to do tonight' involves a solo activity, sometimes even outside the home. When my wife gets home, we talk over dinner and proceed forward - sometimes with my plans altered, sometimes not. (The exception is Wednesday, because I'm going to fighter practice that night unless one of us is ill or the weather is truly beastly bad. No discussion required.) Sometimes we are solo in seperate rooms, sometimes solo in the same room, sometimes a shared activity of some kind.
If your (post marriage) life consists solely of shared activities - with no chance to 'tell your wife you are going to game for a few hours' - then (IMO) your marriage is extremely unhealthy.
To forestall the inevitable peanut gallery: We've been married for sixteen years, were last mistaken in public for newlyweds in April, and last held hands in public Sunday while shopping. Our marriage is healthy, happy, and stable. Tonight will probably match our usual routine during baseball season - the game will be on in the background while I read and she works on one of her puzzles.
You can't have it both ways - either the cops can follow up on evidence found on the 'beat' (public space, [MySpace|street]), or they can't.
If that was what they were doing - you'd have a point. But it's not. In the case of the TFA, they merely did in virtual space what they'd do in meatspace - examine the evidence and look for clues and/or holes in people's stories. In the instance of scanning MySpace for pedophiles (or idiots who firebomb buildings and brag of it), that's the internet equivalent of pulling over the driver who is weaving all over the road.In my case, absolutely none. Not because I haven't posted anything - but because I haven't done anything.It's called investigation and evidence - something the cops and educated people are aware of, and fearmongering slashdot posters seem not to be.It only fails to be different to the fearmongers.Actually - it did both, *after* it was deleted and locked. Because it reveals the hypocrisy that stands at the heart of Wikipedia.