Perhaps if we all send the researchers involved in the project emails entitled "stfu noob!!!11" they will be moved to reverse their position on gamers.
Well, yes, actually. I fall into that trap constantly. I thought it was "Dragonball Zed" for about a year, until I started watching it. But, then, I'm not American.
Not until the outdoors engine this RL(tm) uses implements credible FSAA, and seemless zoning without the use of 'doors' (which can be hard no muscles long since atrophied by use of only mouse and keyboard). And going outside on a sunny day just loses all its charm when you don't get a nice lens flare...
Can we make this 'MTV Lone Gunmyns Movie Awards,' or possibly 'MTV Lone Gunpersons Movie Awards,' for that matter, just so those attentive to such things don't get on our backs?
Also, the Myst team had come under minor attacks from various Civil Rights unions stating that if they were to come up with a multiplayer game, the players would have needed to be available in different races and cultures, so as not to promote "racial supremacy" among any certain player.
Really, if anyone's worried about racial issues coming into gaming and Myst is what occurs them, they certainly haven't taken a look at Dark Age of Camelot. I like Dark Age of Camelot a great deal. But let's face it. Dark Age of Camelot's 'realm vs. realm' theme is all about genocide, race-hatred and racial supremacy. Hoorah. And the emotions attached to that slip into people's real-life feelings relating to the game. There are players who will honestly say they 'hate mids' (hate members of the 'Midgard' realm) and there are players who will honestly say they 'hate albs' (hate members of the 'Albion' realm). Occasionally, on the Roleplay servers, someone will bother to yell something like 'death to all normemen!' in the heat of battle. That helps add to the charm of the game.
I don't know if that should be worrisome, but I know I get a kick out of DAoC and I'll continue to get a kick out of killing every member of a nation that is not mine, in the context of that game. Hmm...
If sitting through Jar-Jar's scenes directly results in periods of prolonged wretching accompanied by violent mood-swings in a large percentage of Star Wars fans, does that constitute adequate grounds for calling in sick? I think it does.
Is this a video game? If so, will my scribbly pictures of pretty houses and pretty trees be a protected form of speech under new legal precedent?
Think about it people! Kids could draw anything in this video game. They could draw offensive words, or lewd sexual acts. They might even hack the device to install a free operating system that in every way contradicts the principles on which our capitalist nation is based. They could visually depict violent acts and criminal behaviour! Are these the kinds of things we want our kids seeing? Hell, no. Expose your kids to this kind of medium, and they'll be sexually retrograde serial killers in no time. Censor the art of drawing! Now!
The problem that frequently occurs to me, as I do my ISP support job, is that I cannot possibly see how ISP support, in any recognisable form or at any reasonable wage, is profitable to my employer. If I have to spend even half-an-hour on my minimal wage dealing with a given residential DSL customer, that customer has just eaten up the margin by which my employer makes a profit. Broadband access is currently an extremely competitive market, where I live, and any additional costs incurred by the company with regard to a given customer are likely to push that customer's profitability into the red. It is an inevitable conclusion that many individuals at my office have come to: customers who consume tech support time in any appreciable quantity due to their own ineptitude would be better off 'fired'. And that conclusion, in some extreme cases (e.g., bare-bones web hosting customers who call in every day because their faulty CGI scripts aren't working and they need help with their coding, which is not forthcoming) it has been necessary to more or less 'fire' a customer (at the end of their contract, of course). The same goes for DSL users who have Gnutella running 24/7. They are doing that at a large cost to us, and it doesn't make sense for us to take a huge loss on principle. If they want to use that kind of bandwidth, they can buy a business DSL line. We'd be happy to sell it to them.
If a customer calls in and coherently state a specific high-level issue, he will be quickly and efficiently escalated, likely to an administrator. But if a residential DSL customer needs what could be $50 of tech support in a month on a $20 account because he installs Norton, Zonealarm or something else he doesn't know how to use, which ruins his connectivity every other day, I don't see the point. It seems to me that tech support and basic services need to be separated. Regarding my two current broadband connections, I have called my ISPs for support, IIRC, two times in 3 years. Both times they told me they were down; I asked for their ETA, said thanks and hung up. I don't see why I should pay for the users who call two times per week for half an hour per session. Some companies do offer tech support at a charge. Why not ISPs? Does anyone know of any that do?
The problem with enquiring as to the relative ability of a customer is that most people just don't really know how much they know. I know my opinion of my own knowledge changes drastically over time. In my experience, the less I knew, the more I THOUGHT that I knew. IMHO, the phenomenon works something like this:
1) 90% of users have significantly more knowledge about computing than they did six or seven years ago. 2) Therefore, 90% of users, by process of comparison, judge themselves to have significant technical knowledge.*
*[Where (2) does not prove to be the case, user will direct the issue to the attention of their 6-year-old, who they indicate is an 'expert' (which may actually prove to be true).]
Having said that, here's my 'where do they get these people?' story for the day:
I'm contacted via email and telephone, almost simultaneously, at the ISP I work for, by a woman who entitles herself 'Senior NT Network Administrator' and holds that position at a fairly large and reputable company (her email's header and callerID confirm her identity). She is forwarding me an email sent by one of my users which she judges to be 'abusive' and 'spam'. She says that this user is using my employer's mail servers for the sending of such spam.
I take a look at the mail's header. The gentleman in question is sending mail NOT through my employers SMTP servers NOT even on an SMTP server hosted by us and NOT originating from an IP that we service. The mail identifies itself as FROM: an address on our domain.
I inform Senior NT Network Administrator that the SMTP server being used for this abusive email is not even located in the same country as my employer and we have nothing to do with it. Senior NT Network Administrator is unaware that the FROM: field can lie.
Senior NT Network Administrator would like to know whether I can give her any information on who IS hosting the domain it is originating from. I tell her to do a WHOIS.
[silence]
I establish that Senior NT Network Administrator does not know what WHOIS is. She asks me if I can do one for her. I do. I email her the info.
Now I'm a lowly DSL/hosting tech support drudge. I have enough basic knowledge to get by at that level, but I haven't the know-how to do much more. My question is, how can it possibly be that Ms. Senior NT Network Administrator acquires this title and position in a world that pays any attention to occupational ability at all? The individual with whom I spoke would presumably be the person you talk to when you get escalated ABOVE tech support, and she doesn't seem to have adequate knowledge to do bottom-tier support. Do employers mistake an MCSE for a credible credential? For an administrator, yet? (Administratrix, rather?) I'm relatively uninformed about the hiring process for such positions, so I find it somewhat startling that this can be the case.
That's my rant. Thank you. Tech support drudge signing off.
Nah. Slashdot can do better than this. A real Slashdotting would necessitate us not being able to get to the page which tells us that we can't get to the page:
Temporarily Unavailable
The Angelfire Excessive Bandwidth Consumption Page you are trying to reach has been temporarily suspended due to excessive bandwidth consumption.
The error will be accessible again in approximately 1 hours!
This story has wildly variant versions and no one seems to agree on it, but it seems to be the case that Napoleon pursued this strategy when he faced the Turk (of Slashdot, and otherwise, fame):
Maelzel held a special command demonstration of the Automaton for Napoleon in 1806 in Berlin -- a city which Napoleon was occupying for the moment. The general tried to upset the machine by performing illegal moves -- for which the protocol laws well-prepared, since the understanding was that the figure would nod three times if such a thing were to happen, and when Napoleon persisted in making the wrong moves again and again, the Automaton finally swept all the pieces to the floor, and the game was over. Later, when the general was behaving himself and obeying the rules, he lost his game -- and was reportedly not happy.
Another version, provided by the Sunday Times goes
Napoleon placed a magnet on the chess board before the second game because he had heard that the Turk relied on magnets for its operation. But Maelzel removed it, and the Turk won. Before the third match, Napoleon wrapped a shawl around the Turk's head and torso, thinking there might be an operator hidden inside. But the Turk won a third time, at which point Napoleon swept the chess pieces to the floor and walked out.
This page cites "Chess: Man Versus Machine, a book by Bradley Ewart" as providing the following version:
"The automaton responded by politely bowing his (mechanical) head, replacing the piece, and signalling Napoleon to continue. The game continued, but soon Napoleon made another illegal move. the Turk removed the troublesome piece and, without allowing Napoleon another chance, made a move of his own. Napoleon made a third incorrect move just to see what would happen next."
Perhaps the new book out on the subject provides an authoritative version of this story. Maybe there is no authoritative version. At any rate, it looks like Napoleon was presented with the same problem of playing out a Turing Test, whatever the real story is.
It's really sad to see people (and media) presenting as demonstrably accurate history what is not at all certain.
In other news, this evening, entropy has become too disorderly, the absolute value of Pi has become too unwieldy and Jon Katz' arguments have become a tad specious.
(I'm not saying that the point isn't understood. Rather, I'm saying the words it's expressed in are meaningless.)
It's a shame to see good people making good comments get bad karma for posting useful information, but it's also a shame to see a message board filled with 30 people all saying the exact same thing. How many checked to see whether someone else had posted regarding the code being just game source and not engine source before repeating that fact? Not many, seemingly. 30 people can't have all posted that comment simultaneously. It looks like slashdot is all soapbox and no audience, especially seeing as virtually everyone seems to be well aware of the existing policy on releasing source, anyway.
My only concern with giFT is with the age of the current build, which, if the Download page is to be believed, was completed on January 1, 1900. Nostalgic computing is great and all, but...
Consoles do need less memory to run games because of the more efficient OS.
But console graphics chips are in more or less the same boat as PC graphics chips. And, as far as memory issues, we're probably first and foremost talking about textures there. A 5K texture is 5K texture whether or not you're running a 'more efficient OS'. The only case in which a 5K texture is not a 5K texture is when it's subject to compression. Proprietary texture compression schemes will certainly help but, if I recall correctly, the PS2 has no hardware texture compression whatsoever. This makes it worse than pretty much every other chipset on the market for the purpose of economising on memory. Furthermore, I read correctly that the PS2 has 4MB of VRAM, right? I'm assuming half of that has to be framebuffer. So does the PS2 actually have no more texture memory than my Diamond Monster 3D (circa 1996)?
I upgraded from my Geforce and 256MBs of DDR RAM because Dark Age of Camelot came to a halt in any sort of relatively busy scene. Now, with 1GB of DDR and an ATI 8500, DAoC only slows down sometimes, in extremely busy scenes.
No matter how efficient your OS is, bringing an MMORPG that manages somehow to fill 64MB of video RAM and 1GB of system RAM (god only knows how) on a PC to a "more efficient OS" is not going to squeeze the same data into 4MB of video RAM and 32MB of System RAM.
Everquest is another story. Older technology, smaller textures and fewer polys. But the fact remains the same. There are some hardware shortcomings no OS could make up for.
It may happen yet. The Olsen Twins could be subject to the same phenomenon that prevented Shirley Temple from ever becoming a successful adult actress, that being that they will always be seen by the public as some kind of pre-pubescent ideal. When an icon of pre-pubescent virtue like Shirley Temple or the Olsen Twins becomes publicly sexual the public gets creeped out. I know I do. And I'm not even heterosexual. If I were heterosexual, I'd probably be forced to sever my genitalia out of sheer terror upon seeing things like this.
At any rate, we need Jon "My Sworn Duty To Explain The World To Its Oblivious Residents" Katz to handle this kind of social pontification.
Dr. Evil: Gentlemen, it's come to my attention that a malicious distributed computing scheme called Brilliant Digital will be setting into motion their trojan in a few days. Here's the plan. We R00T their server, and we hold the world ransom... (dramatic pause) Dr. Evil:...FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for more than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't that much money these days.
Dr. Evil: All right then... (dramatic pause) Dr. Evil:...FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!
(uncomfortable pause)
Number Two: Jon Katz alone makes over nine billion dollars a year.
Dr. Evil: Oh, really? Dr. Evil: One-hundred billion dollars. (pause) Dr. Evil: OK, make it happen. Anything else?
I'm an epileptic. Have been all my life. I've had my brain picked constantly from the age of two by neurosurgeons and neurologists from far and wide. I've had a segment of my left temporal lobe excised in a failed attempt to remove scarring causative of epilepsy. I think I've read everything there is to read on epilepsy, and I simply do not know how a game can cause it. Certainly, photo-sensitive epilepsy (i.e., the variety of epilepsy in which light can provoke seizures) can be provoked by viewing of a monitor, especially at a lower refresh rate. The same goes for flourescent lighting. But I've never known a photo-sensitive epileptic who could not come up with any solution to the monitor problem. And "the game" isn't provoking the seizure in that case anyway. If that were the case, the mother should be suing her monitor manufacturer, or perhaps just giving herself a whack in the head for letting her unprecedentedly and dubiously photo-sensitive son use a screen of any sort. Sleep deprivation can often increase the frequency of seizures - it was in fact subtly recommended to me by a neurologist when I was once under observation for two weeks, waiting for a seizure to occur so that the neurologists might observe it that sleep deprivation might speed up the process - and MMORPGs can deprive one of sleep, but that doesn't precisely constitute "the game" causing seizures, either, anymore than ill-health due to sleep deprivation constitutes Everquest causing the common cold. Frankly, I think the mother is just looking for pity, here. And she's making specious arguments about her son's serious medical condition in order to further her profit-seeking. You don't have to be any sort of medical professional to conclude that Everquest doesn't "cause", in any precise sense, seizures.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if we all send the researchers involved in the project emails entitled "stfu noob!!!11" they will be moved to reverse their position on gamers.
Well, yes, actually. I fall into that trap constantly. I thought it was "Dragonball Zed" for about a year, until I started watching it. But, then, I'm not American.
Alternatively, digitise, for us British imperial types.
Not until the outdoors engine this RL(tm) uses implements credible FSAA, and seemless zoning without the use of 'doors' (which can be hard no muscles long since atrophied by use of only mouse and keyboard). And going outside on a sunny day just loses all its charm when you don't get a nice lens flare...
(insert obligatory 2001 reference here)
Can we make this 'MTV Lone Gunmyns Movie Awards,' or possibly 'MTV Lone Gunpersons Movie Awards,' for that matter, just so those attentive to such things don't get on our backs?
It's not like there aren't readily available sources for information on older OSs, after all.
Also, the Myst team had come under minor attacks from various Civil Rights unions stating that if they were to come up with a multiplayer game, the players would have needed to be available in different races and cultures, so as not to promote "racial supremacy" among any certain player.
Really, if anyone's worried about racial issues coming into gaming and Myst is what occurs them, they certainly haven't taken a look at Dark Age of Camelot. I like Dark Age of Camelot a great deal. But let's face it. Dark Age of Camelot's 'realm vs. realm' theme is all about genocide, race-hatred and racial supremacy. Hoorah. And the emotions attached to that slip into people's real-life feelings relating to the game. There are players who will honestly say they 'hate mids' (hate members of the 'Midgard' realm) and there are players who will honestly say they 'hate albs' (hate members of the 'Albion' realm). Occasionally, on the Roleplay servers, someone will bother to yell something like 'death to all normemen!' in the heat of battle. That helps add to the charm of the game.
I don't know if that should be worrisome, but I know I get a kick out of DAoC and I'll continue to get a kick out of killing every member of a nation that is not mine, in the context of that game. Hmm...
If sitting through Jar-Jar's scenes directly results in periods of prolonged wretching accompanied by violent mood-swings in a large percentage of Star Wars fans, does that constitute adequate grounds for calling in sick? I think it does.
Think about it people! Kids could draw anything in this video game. They could draw offensive words, or lewd sexual acts. They might even hack the device to install a free operating system that in every way contradicts the principles on which our capitalist nation is based. They could visually depict violent acts and criminal behaviour! Are these the kinds of things we want our kids seeing? Hell, no. Expose your kids to this kind of medium, and they'll be sexually retrograde serial killers in no time. Censor the art of drawing! Now!
If a customer calls in and coherently state a specific high-level issue, he will be quickly and efficiently escalated, likely to an administrator. But if a residential DSL customer needs what could be $50 of tech support in a month on a $20 account because he installs Norton, Zonealarm or something else he doesn't know how to use, which ruins his connectivity every other day, I don't see the point. It seems to me that tech support and basic services need to be separated. Regarding my two current broadband connections, I have called my ISPs for support, IIRC, two times in 3 years. Both times they told me they were down; I asked for their ETA, said thanks and hung up. I don't see why I should pay for the users who call two times per week for half an hour per session. Some companies do offer tech support at a charge. Why not ISPs? Does anyone know of any that do?
1) 90% of users have significantly more knowledge about computing than they did six or seven years ago.
2) Therefore, 90% of users, by process of comparison, judge themselves to have significant technical knowledge.*
*[Where (2) does not prove to be the case, user will direct the issue to the attention of their 6-year-old, who they indicate is an 'expert' (which may actually prove to be true).]
Having said that, here's my 'where do they get these people?' story for the day:
I'm contacted via email and telephone, almost simultaneously, at the ISP I work for, by a woman who entitles herself 'Senior NT Network Administrator' and holds that position at a fairly large and reputable company (her email's header and callerID confirm her identity). She is forwarding me an email sent by one of my users which she judges to be 'abusive' and 'spam'. She says that this user is using my employer's mail servers for the sending of such spam.
I take a look at the mail's header. The gentleman in question is sending mail NOT through my employers SMTP servers NOT even on an SMTP server hosted by us and NOT originating from an IP that we service. The mail identifies itself as FROM: an address on our domain.
I inform Senior NT Network Administrator that the SMTP server being used for this abusive email is not even located in the same country as my employer and we have nothing to do with it. Senior NT Network Administrator is unaware that the FROM: field can lie.
Senior NT Network Administrator would like to know whether I can give her any information on who IS hosting the domain it is originating from. I tell her to do a WHOIS.
[silence]
I establish that Senior NT Network Administrator does not know what WHOIS is. She asks me if I can do one for her. I do. I email her the info.
Now I'm a lowly DSL/hosting tech support drudge. I have enough basic knowledge to get by at that level, but I haven't the know-how to do much more. My question is, how can it possibly be that Ms. Senior NT Network Administrator acquires this title and position in a world that pays any attention to occupational ability at all? The individual with whom I spoke would presumably be the person you talk to when you get escalated ABOVE tech support, and she doesn't seem to have adequate knowledge to do bottom-tier support. Do employers mistake an MCSE for a credible credential? For an administrator, yet? (Administratrix, rather?) I'm relatively uninformed about the hiring process for such positions, so I find it somewhat startling that this can be the case.
That's my rant. Thank you. Tech support drudge signing off.
Nah. Slashdot can do better than this. A real Slashdotting would necessitate us not being able to get to the page which tells us that we can't get to the page:
Temporarily Unavailable
The Angelfire Excessive Bandwidth Consumption Page you are trying to reach has been temporarily suspended due to excessive bandwidth consumption.
The error will be accessible again in approximately 1 hours!
The version propounded by jrandi.org goes
Maelzel held a special command demonstration of the Automaton for Napoleon in 1806 in Berlin -- a city which Napoleon was occupying for the moment. The general tried to upset the machine by performing illegal moves -- for which the protocol laws well-prepared, since the understanding was that the figure would nod three times if such a thing were to happen, and when Napoleon persisted in making the wrong moves again and again, the Automaton finally swept all the pieces to the floor, and the game was over. Later, when the general was behaving himself and obeying the rules, he lost his game -- and was reportedly not happy.
Another version, provided by the Sunday Times goes
Napoleon placed a magnet on the chess board before the second game because he had heard that the Turk relied on magnets for its operation. But Maelzel removed it, and the Turk won. Before the third match, Napoleon wrapped a shawl around the Turk's head and torso, thinking there might be an operator hidden inside. But the Turk won a third time, at which point Napoleon swept the chess pieces to the floor and walked out.
This page cites "Chess: Man Versus Machine, a book by Bradley Ewart" as providing the following version:
"The automaton responded by politely bowing his (mechanical) head, replacing the piece, and signalling Napoleon to continue. The game continued, but soon Napoleon made another illegal move. the Turk removed the troublesome piece and, without allowing Napoleon another chance, made a move of his own. Napoleon made a third incorrect move just to see what would happen next."
Perhaps the new book out on the subject provides an authoritative version of this story. Maybe there is no authoritative version. At any rate, it looks like Napoleon was presented with the same problem of playing out a Turing Test, whatever the real story is.
It's really sad to see people (and media) presenting as demonstrably accurate history what is not at all certain.
The market has become too competitive
In other news, this evening, entropy has become too disorderly, the absolute value of Pi has become too unwieldy and Jon Katz' arguments have become a tad specious.
(I'm not saying that the point isn't understood. Rather, I'm saying the words it's expressed in are meaningless.)
It's a shame to see good people making good comments get bad karma for posting useful information, but it's also a shame to see a message board filled with 30 people all saying the exact same thing. How many checked to see whether someone else had posted regarding the code being just game source and not engine source before repeating that fact? Not many, seemingly. 30 people can't have all posted that comment simultaneously. It looks like slashdot is all soapbox and no audience, especially seeing as virtually everyone seems to be well aware of the existing policy on releasing source, anyway.
Unfortunately, bad software also takes ten years to write, especially when you never rewrite code from scratch.
(In all seriousness, though, very interesting article)
Are you saying that being a vagina tester will "make me hate playing vaginas"? If so, I must withdraw my job application forthwith.
My only concern with giFT is with the age of the current build, which, if the Download page is to be believed, was completed on January 1, 1900. Nostalgic computing is great and all, but...
Consoles do need less memory to run games because of the more efficient OS.
But console graphics chips are in more or less the same boat as PC graphics chips. And, as far as memory issues, we're probably first and foremost talking about textures there. A 5K texture is 5K texture whether or not you're running a 'more efficient OS'. The only case in which a 5K texture is not a 5K texture is when it's subject to compression. Proprietary texture compression schemes will certainly help but, if I recall correctly, the PS2 has no hardware texture compression whatsoever. This makes it worse than pretty much every other chipset on the market for the purpose of economising on memory. Furthermore, I read correctly that the PS2 has 4MB of VRAM, right? I'm assuming half of that has to be framebuffer. So does the PS2 actually have no more texture memory than my Diamond Monster 3D (circa 1996)?
I upgraded from my Geforce and 256MBs of DDR RAM because Dark Age of Camelot came to a halt in any sort of relatively busy scene. Now, with 1GB of DDR and an ATI 8500, DAoC only slows down sometimes, in extremely busy scenes.
No matter how efficient your OS is, bringing an MMORPG that manages somehow to fill 64MB of video RAM and 1GB of system RAM (god only knows how) on a PC to a "more efficient OS" is not going to squeeze the same data into 4MB of video RAM and 32MB of System RAM.
Everquest is another story. Older technology, smaller textures and fewer polys. But the fact remains the same. There are some hardware shortcomings no OS could make up for.
The Olsen Twins.. Grown up.. and XXX-RATED
It may happen yet. The Olsen Twins could be subject to the same phenomenon that prevented Shirley Temple from ever becoming a successful adult actress, that being that they will always be seen by the public as some kind of pre-pubescent ideal. When an icon of pre-pubescent virtue like Shirley Temple or the Olsen Twins becomes publicly sexual the public gets creeped out. I know I do. And I'm not even heterosexual. If I were heterosexual, I'd probably be forced to sever my genitalia out of sheer terror upon seeing things like this.
At any rate, we need Jon "My Sworn Duty To Explain The World To Its Oblivious Residents" Katz to handle this kind of social pontification.
Dr. Evil: Gentlemen, it's come to my attention that a malicious distributed computing scheme called Brilliant Digital will be setting into motion their trojan in a few days. Here's the plan. We R00T their server, and we hold the world ransom... ...FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
...FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!
(dramatic pause)
Dr. Evil:
Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for more than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't that much money these days.
Dr. Evil: All right then...
(dramatic pause)
Dr. Evil:
(uncomfortable pause)
Number Two: Jon Katz alone makes over nine billion dollars a year.
Dr. Evil: Oh, really?
Dr. Evil: One-hundred billion dollars.
(pause)
Dr. Evil: OK, make it happen. Anything else?
...but I fear there's such a vast quantity of prior art in this area, I would be without a case.
...and the game would cause seizures
I'm an epileptic. Have been all my life. I've had my brain picked constantly from the age of two by neurosurgeons and neurologists from far and wide. I've had a segment of my left temporal lobe excised in a failed attempt to remove scarring causative of epilepsy. I think I've read everything there is to read on epilepsy, and I simply do not know how a game can cause it. Certainly, photo-sensitive epilepsy (i.e., the variety of epilepsy in which light can provoke seizures) can be provoked by viewing of a monitor, especially at a lower refresh rate. The same goes for flourescent lighting. But I've never known a photo-sensitive epileptic who could not come up with any solution to the monitor problem. And "the game" isn't provoking the seizure in that case anyway. If that were the case, the mother should be suing her monitor manufacturer, or perhaps just giving herself a whack in the head for letting her unprecedentedly and dubiously photo-sensitive son use a screen of any sort. Sleep deprivation can often increase the frequency of seizures - it was in fact subtly recommended to me by a neurologist when I was once under observation for two weeks, waiting for a seizure to occur so that the neurologists might observe it that sleep deprivation might speed up the process - and MMORPGs can deprive one of sleep, but that doesn't precisely constitute "the game" causing seizures, either, anymore than ill-health due to sleep deprivation constitutes Everquest causing the common cold. Frankly, I think the mother is just looking for pity, here. And she's making specious arguments about her son's serious medical condition in order to further her profit-seeking. You don't have to be any sort of medical professional to conclude that Everquest doesn't "cause", in any precise sense, seizures.
You didn't read my post. The very next sentence subsequent to the one you quoted read
Even the OED now acknowledges the use of split infinitives to be perfectly grammatical.
But so have you reiterated it:
Even the Oxford English Dictionary approves of split infinitives now.
At least we concur.