Yeah, but due to the law of unintended consequences, Canada has incredibly liberal copyright laws thanks to earlier lobbying efforts by the music and movie industries.
It's not a real balance. Greeks were notorious for this. Even when arguing for moderation, it was this sort of tyrannical moderation, a philosophical ideal based on their own preconcieved notions, rather than any sort of natural equalibrium based on deeper truths.
My post applies to the guy who spent 4800 hours playing the game. The guy who gave up his social life. The guy who started to consider the achievements in-game to be worth more than achievements in real-life. I'm a gamer, and I'm a game developer, and there are even times I get sucked into a game. I spent weeks of free time recently playing Fallout 3.
If you have things you enjoy and you can find balance, that's good. Life isn't about just finding all the most productive things you can do. If you have things that you enjoy but they become shackles, then that's bad. Life needs to be lived, and finding love (and losing love, and thinking you've found love but finding it wasn't what you expected) is a part of being alive.
If you're worried about spawn, vasectomies are less expensive and more effective than a crate of condoms.
Aristotle and all his contemporaries made the mistake of laying a shaky foundation. His virtues are based on "These are the things I like". He and his intellectual descendants (Nietzsche was a philologist) break down the current and only replace it with their own airy ideals, ignoring the fact that their theoretical ideals aren't based on anything.
"The good life" without moderation can be as dangerous and dehumanizing as any video game. One of the hardest things for me has been prying my foot off the accelerator pedal, trying to do things that aren't directly in pursuit of a goal I've set. You can lose your humanity in the glow of a computer monitor on the hundredth late night power-levelling. You can just as easily lose your humanity in the glow of your desk lamp on the hundredth late night studying in pursuit of that career, or in the soft glow of the setting sun as you finish up your hundred mile bike ride in pursuit of that body you just have to get. If you drive everyone away with your relentless pursuit of superhuman goals, it's no different than if you drive everyone away with your relentless pursuit of WoW achievements.
I'm not using humour, because it isn't funny. It's not funny at all. Another poster estimated that OP would have had to spend the 4800 hours in the game over about 2 years. That's 6.5 hours a day every single day for years.
4800 hours is half the time it takes to become a bonified expert on something. If you spent 4800 hours working on your car, you'd be half way towards being an expert mechanic. If you spent 4800 hours talking to people, you'd be half way towards being an expert politician or salesman or social worker, depending on how you're talking to them. If you spent 4800 hours working on a college degree, you'd be half way towards a career. If you spent 4800 hours working on open source projects, you'd be half way towards being an expert in the field. Hell, spend 4800 hours on slashdot and you'd be half way towards being a master of rhetoric or logic, depending on how you argue.
When people dedicate that sort of time to a video game -- or television or novels or sudoku or anything really, it ends careers, ends marriages, breaks up families. I've seen it and it's fucking tragedy.
So here's my response. If you're spending 2400 hours a year playing the game, then you're not playing a healthy amount, and you are hurting your family whether you like it or not. You're neglecting your family even if you're playing video games with them if you're spending 2400 hours a year doing it. If you're not spending 6 hours every single day in the video game, shut the fuck up. I play video games like the next guy. I'm not saying all video games are inherently evil(In fact, I spent a good number of weeks engrossed in Fallout 3 very recently), nor that any video games are an automatic curse. I'm saying that spending thousands of hours in a video game, becoming a recluse (like OP admits -- Gee, for someone so self-righteous, you sure have low reading comprehension), and letting the game become 6.5 hours of your life every single day for years is the reason he didn't have pay-off in any other hobby.
Who says I'm being dismissive? I'm saying I've got the same drive towards achievement that a MMORPG addict would have, but mine is based upon more tangible rewards, so intangible rewards in a video game aren't enough to feed me.
I went from 400lbs to 160lbs after deciding I wasn't happy being fat. At the end of that, you're looking at the scale, and you realise that people become famous for that sort of achievement. You look at an entire world filled with people who spend every moment wishing they could do the same thing. You can't get that sort of feeling of achievement from a video game. You start looking for accomplishments moving forward. It becomes a drive, to find the next achievement -- becoming debt-free, buying the car you want, or taking a trip around the world.
The only difference is, my addiction is stronger because there's almost no element of "This is bad for me" I can fall back on to get some balance, sort of like cigarettes before they cost a million dollars and before anyone knew they caused cancer. At the end of the day the achievements are nearly as meaningless(I bought a sports car last week. To what end? I'm going on a trip from coast to coast in a few weeks. Where's the thumbs up from God?), but it's the same compulsion.
Or it could be that my addiction is to the feeling of going out and making what I want to happen happen.
Doing things that people spend their lives dreaming about is sort of addictive. It's an incredible feeling that you can't get from a badly paced MMORPG.
I was totally addicted to Calculus back in college.
It was such a neat power, nobody understood it, it was like being part of a secret club.
Then Quantum Physics came along and made all the answers right and wrong at the same time. It's all fun and games until Quantum Physics comes along and ruins the party. You either don't know where it'll strike or when it'll strike.
So it's even more ridiculous then, isn't it? 4800 hours over 2 years is almost half the 10,000 hours it's said you need to become an expert at something.
I think I just have a unique worldview. I'm one of the few people who can say "I want to do this" and just go do it.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but Monkey toaster! Read the coffee pencil with ramen glasses! Sting the urine-soaked wallet of Satan's baby while the dead eyes of the loop drawings raze the helmet of the sonar!
AC wasn't saying they were addicted in the sense that they needed to play, they said they were addicted in the sense that their values were twisted such that the new sword was worth more than a similar real-world reward. In that case, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Spend 200 days playing as one character in the game, and you won't have time for anything else you do to produce worthwhile results.
There are two modes of game addiction, in my opinion. I'll use two different games to illustrate then I'll bring it back to WoW compared to Guild Wars.
I once played this freeware game where you built up characters slowly. The fundamental design was based on Final Fantasy Tactics or something and it was actually a very sound and fun design, but you'd spend hours levelling up, so it was very VERY slow. The game was addicting, but only because a fundamentally good design was slowed down so much you'd spend hours progressing. It was less fun, but more addictive.
By contrast, Fallout 3 was addicting because I'd want to know what I could find next. I'd leave megaton and start walking in a random direction, excited about finding the next unfilled triangle on my HUD. I maxed out my level by the end of the game through sheer exploration.
Guild Wars and WoW seem to me part of the same spectrum of addictive through content vs. addictive through pacing.
I played Guild Wars a bit in College. It was a very fast-paced game. You could easily slam through 2-3 locales in a session, and without playing a lot, I was rapidly approaching L20. I kept coming back because there was always something new to see down the road, and the depth of multi-classing was really cool.
By contrast, after college I played WoW for a short time, and found it to be a painfully slow-paced game. After playing through Bioshock in a weekend, playing WoW for a weekend and finding myself at the second area of the game was a cruel joke. The fundamentals of the game are terrific(Which is why Diablo and Diablo 2 were so fun), but the game slowed it all down so much it become intolerable to me. Someone with more patience would likely find it addictive in the same "This game is paced wrong but fun otherwise" way the freeware game I referenced earlier was.
So basically, it's because you play guild wars, a game properly paced, that you've got the time to find a girl who will accept cunnilingus for black dye.
Face it, all three were fun, even if you didn't walk out of any vaults for quite some time in Fallout 2.
A huge part of it is pacing. Compare the rate at which you progress in terms of character, plot, and scenery between the two. I could imagine being trapped in a vault for days killing mole rats if Fallout took the WoW method of pacing.
Sounds more like "Fucking moron is a moron" to me.
The guy makes 6-figures, barely ever has free time, and instead of seeing the actual world, decides instead to play a video game about seeing the virtual world?
Hell, if you put the same time into talking to girls that you did playing WoW, you'd probably have sex, which is better than a +1 sword of compensatingforsomethingosity.
La wine is only good if you're being taxed so hard it makes your nose bleed! You want to spend 10 Euros for CRAP wine. Otherwise it's just not good wine.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing. I just breathed some hydrogen, and I figure those puppies(The hydrogen atoms) are about as old as old gets.
Saying something like that on the internet, expect to be V&.
Jesus, you only need 3 LEDs to work for it to run just like the day it came out of the box!
Yeah, but due to the law of unintended consequences, Canada has incredibly liberal copyright laws thanks to earlier lobbying efforts by the music and movie industries.
It's not a real balance. Greeks were notorious for this. Even when arguing for moderation, it was this sort of tyrannical moderation, a philosophical ideal based on their own preconcieved notions, rather than any sort of natural equalibrium based on deeper truths.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
My post applies to the guy who spent 4800 hours playing the game. The guy who gave up his social life. The guy who started to consider the achievements in-game to be worth more than achievements in real-life. I'm a gamer, and I'm a game developer, and there are even times I get sucked into a game. I spent weeks of free time recently playing Fallout 3.
If you have things you enjoy and you can find balance, that's good. Life isn't about just finding all the most productive things you can do. If you have things that you enjoy but they become shackles, then that's bad. Life needs to be lived, and finding love (and losing love, and thinking you've found love but finding it wasn't what you expected) is a part of being alive.
If you're worried about spawn, vasectomies are less expensive and more effective than a crate of condoms.
Aristotle and all his contemporaries made the mistake of laying a shaky foundation. His virtues are based on "These are the things I like". He and his intellectual descendants (Nietzsche was a philologist) break down the current and only replace it with their own airy ideals, ignoring the fact that their theoretical ideals aren't based on anything.
"The good life" without moderation can be as dangerous and dehumanizing as any video game. One of the hardest things for me has been prying my foot off the accelerator pedal, trying to do things that aren't directly in pursuit of a goal I've set. You can lose your humanity in the glow of a computer monitor on the hundredth late night power-levelling. You can just as easily lose your humanity in the glow of your desk lamp on the hundredth late night studying in pursuit of that career, or in the soft glow of the setting sun as you finish up your hundred mile bike ride in pursuit of that body you just have to get. If you drive everyone away with your relentless pursuit of superhuman goals, it's no different than if you drive everyone away with your relentless pursuit of WoW achievements.
I'm not using humour, because it isn't funny. It's not funny at all. Another poster estimated that OP would have had to spend the 4800 hours in the game over about 2 years. That's 6.5 hours a day every single day for years.
4800 hours is half the time it takes to become a bonified expert on something. If you spent 4800 hours working on your car, you'd be half way towards being an expert mechanic. If you spent 4800 hours talking to people, you'd be half way towards being an expert politician or salesman or social worker, depending on how you're talking to them. If you spent 4800 hours working on a college degree, you'd be half way towards a career. If you spent 4800 hours working on open source projects, you'd be half way towards being an expert in the field. Hell, spend 4800 hours on slashdot and you'd be half way towards being a master of rhetoric or logic, depending on how you argue.
When people dedicate that sort of time to a video game -- or television or novels or sudoku or anything really, it ends careers, ends marriages, breaks up families. I've seen it and it's fucking tragedy.
So here's my response. If you're spending 2400 hours a year playing the game, then you're not playing a healthy amount, and you are hurting your family whether you like it or not. You're neglecting your family even if you're playing video games with them if you're spending 2400 hours a year doing it. If you're not spending 6 hours every single day in the video game, shut the fuck up. I play video games like the next guy. I'm not saying all video games are inherently evil(In fact, I spent a good number of weeks engrossed in Fallout 3 very recently), nor that any video games are an automatic curse. I'm saying that spending thousands of hours in a video game, becoming a recluse (like OP admits -- Gee, for someone so self-righteous, you sure have low reading comprehension), and letting the game become 6.5 hours of your life every single day for years is the reason he didn't have pay-off in any other hobby.
Who says I'm being dismissive? I'm saying I've got the same drive towards achievement that a MMORPG addict would have, but mine is based upon more tangible rewards, so intangible rewards in a video game aren't enough to feed me.
I went from 400lbs to 160lbs after deciding I wasn't happy being fat. At the end of that, you're looking at the scale, and you realise that people become famous for that sort of achievement. You look at an entire world filled with people who spend every moment wishing they could do the same thing. You can't get that sort of feeling of achievement from a video game. You start looking for accomplishments moving forward. It becomes a drive, to find the next achievement -- becoming debt-free, buying the car you want, or taking a trip around the world.
The only difference is, my addiction is stronger because there's almost no element of "This is bad for me" I can fall back on to get some balance, sort of like cigarettes before they cost a million dollars and before anyone knew they caused cancer. At the end of the day the achievements are nearly as meaningless(I bought a sports car last week. To what end? I'm going on a trip from coast to coast in a few weeks. Where's the thumbs up from God?), but it's the same compulsion.
Or it could be that my addiction is to the feeling of going out and making what I want to happen happen.
Doing things that people spend their lives dreaming about is sort of addictive. It's an incredible feeling that you can't get from a badly paced MMORPG.
I was totally addicted to Calculus back in college.
It was such a neat power, nobody understood it, it was like being part of a secret club.
Then Quantum Physics came along and made all the answers right and wrong at the same time. It's all fun and games until Quantum Physics comes along and ruins the party. You either don't know where it'll strike or when it'll strike.
So it's even more ridiculous then, isn't it? 4800 hours over 2 years is almost half the 10,000 hours it's said you need to become an expert at something.
I think I just have a unique worldview. I'm one of the few people who can say "I want to do this" and just go do it.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but Monkey toaster! Read the coffee pencil with ramen glasses! Sting the urine-soaked wallet of Satan's baby while the dead eyes of the loop drawings raze the helmet of the sonar!
AC wasn't saying they were addicted in the sense that they needed to play, they said they were addicted in the sense that their values were twisted such that the new sword was worth more than a similar real-world reward. In that case, it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Spend 200 days playing as one character in the game, and you won't have time for anything else you do to produce worthwhile results.
There are two modes of game addiction, in my opinion. I'll use two different games to illustrate then I'll bring it back to WoW compared to Guild Wars.
I once played this freeware game where you built up characters slowly. The fundamental design was based on Final Fantasy Tactics or something and it was actually a very sound and fun design, but you'd spend hours levelling up, so it was very VERY slow. The game was addicting, but only because a fundamentally good design was slowed down so much you'd spend hours progressing. It was less fun, but more addictive.
By contrast, Fallout 3 was addicting because I'd want to know what I could find next. I'd leave megaton and start walking in a random direction, excited about finding the next unfilled triangle on my HUD. I maxed out my level by the end of the game through sheer exploration.
Guild Wars and WoW seem to me part of the same spectrum of addictive through content vs. addictive through pacing.
I played Guild Wars a bit in College. It was a very fast-paced game. You could easily slam through 2-3 locales in a session, and without playing a lot, I was rapidly approaching L20. I kept coming back because there was always something new to see down the road, and the depth of multi-classing was really cool.
By contrast, after college I played WoW for a short time, and found it to be a painfully slow-paced game. After playing through Bioshock in a weekend, playing WoW for a weekend and finding myself at the second area of the game was a cruel joke. The fundamentals of the game are terrific(Which is why Diablo and Diablo 2 were so fun), but the game slowed it all down so much it become intolerable to me. Someone with more patience would likely find it addictive in the same "This game is paced wrong but fun otherwise" way the freeware game I referenced earlier was.
So basically, it's because you play guild wars, a game properly paced, that you've got the time to find a girl who will accept cunnilingus for black dye.
Face it, all three were fun, even if you didn't walk out of any vaults for quite some time in Fallout 2.
A huge part of it is pacing. Compare the rate at which you progress in terms of character, plot, and scenery between the two. I could imagine being trapped in a vault for days killing mole rats if Fallout took the WoW method of pacing.
There's a difference between having ten minutes to post on slashdot and having hundreds of days to dedicate to a video game.
That makes more sense than you'd think.
People with real jobs don't like coming home to work more.
Sounds more like "Fucking moron is a moron" to me.
The guy makes 6-figures, barely ever has free time, and instead of seeing the actual world, decides instead to play a video game about seeing the virtual world?
Sounds to me like you need better hobbies.
Hell, if you put the same time into talking to girls that you did playing WoW, you'd probably have sex, which is better than a +1 sword of compensatingforsomethingosity.
So WoW is only addictive after you've spent a ridiculous amount of time levelling?
Son, you gotta play a good game. Fallout 3 was fun from the moment I walked out of the vault.
Yes that's the proper spelling, and it's a damn shame that you ignorant yankees can't spell it correctly.
After sticking the DVDs into a pressurized glass vessel with pitot tubes to measure air movement, there was no difference between DRM and control.
Therefore, DRM doesn't suck. It is ridiculous, however. We ridicule it on a daily basis.
Haven't you heard? Everybody knows that the bird is the word.
La wine is only good if you're being taxed so hard it makes your nose bleed! You want to spend 10 Euros for CRAP wine. Otherwise it's just not good wine.