You know, when I look at the graph in TFA the Search Share for Google increased just as much as Bing did! In Dec-08, MS sites were at 8.3%, up to 10.7% in Dec-09. During that same timespan, Google went from 63.5% to 65.7%.
And in that timespan, Yahoo dropped from 20.5% to 17.3%. AOL also dropped from 3.8% to 2.6%. Guess what - MSN isn't stealing Google's shares yet. It's stealing from Google's competitors.
"...every time I feel like bitching about Comcast I'll remember DirecTV and tell myself it could be worse."
Seriously, how did we reach the point where Comcast is the best we can get? We thought Comcast had lowered the bar for customer service - how is it that everyone else in the industry still manages to trip over that bar?
The trinity can make gaming EASIER, but it's NOT required. Learn to play!
The problem is that "Learn to play!" so often morphs into "Choose the right spec!" You know, go play Street Fighter 4. You enjoy playing El Fuerte? Heck, maybe you're the best El Fuerte player in the country. You go to a tournament, you're going to get beat by someone two levels less your talent who's playing Rufus or C.Viper.
This is, again, an issue with Champions Online. There's lots of room to make a "fun" character, one who builds from certain abilities to fit your favorite archetype. But once you stop playing for fun and start playing to win, so to speak, the game becomes easy, because it's balanced against fun characters rather than the right characters. PvP has hence become difficult since players who build for PvP rather than to an archetype are heads and shoulders above standard players.
Unfortunately, balance matters. If your game includes competitive PvP, then balance matters double. Yes, a good player can take an off-spec and run it through high-end content just as if he was playing one of the best builds. However, the best players are the ones who are skilled at what they do and apply that skill to the best builds rather than off-specs - much like the guys winning SF4 tournaments are the best C.Vipers and Sagats of the world, skilled players playing the best characters, rather than the best Chun-Lis and best Blankas. Sure, you see Chun-li and Blanka at the tournament, and they're competitive. It'd be nice to see one win a major tourney once in a while.
Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.
Submitted for evidence, Champions Online. The idea, give people the ability to create any archetypal character they want. Great for casual players to go in and mess around as they wish, but the game has become "easy" as it's become quickly evident which powers from different sets benefit each other the most. Whereas class-based games might have a few different classes with ways to do things their own, in CO, once one ability is marked as strong, then everybody has it. Ask people how they feel about Swallowtail Cut in PvP, for example.
Actually, I think there's a few very positive things about the way 4th edition deals with the three main classes.
For one, in 3rd edition D&D, it was sort of useless to constantly fret over your armor and hit points if there were rogues or wizards on your team. A fighter might be a tougher character, but he had no way of actually stopping the bad guy from just running away and going after the squishy wizard instead. 4th edition introduced a form of "soft tanking" where high-armor defenders got free attacks when their targets switched away. It made the defensive class viable without making it necessary.
They also rethought the way that healing worked. Recognizing that few people really enjoy playing straight healers, they gave most support the classes the ability to deal damage while boosting teammates at the same time. They also reduced the power of overall healing - limiting the amount of healing that could be done per day based on a player's constitution - and placed a greater emphasis on tactics and defense. This also changed the way that the game was balanced and lead to "leader" classes that had more interesting roles than simply being a box of bandages.
On top of that, damage characters rarely focus on pure damage, either. Now that armor no longer hinders spellcasting, many players consider it a "feat tax" that wizards should take proficiency with leather armor. I've seen plenty of discussion on the Wizards boards about the best way to boost the armor class of your rogue (proficiency in parrying daggers seems like the most popular), something that few WoW rogues ever worry about. On top of that, the manner that armor class and other defenses can be tallied has changed, such that wizards can gain armor/"dodge" from their Intelligence, so that it's also possible for every class to have decent defenses if they don't min/max into one direction.
I think there's some important lessons here that might find their way into a good MMO someday. You don't have to force characters to be jack-of-all-trades in order to get them to consider both their offensive and defensive roles and simply be more than one-dimensional. For example, I might consider an MMO where the "threat" that a character generates might also stack with the NPCs' intelligence. Some animals might not be smart enough to break away from their current targets, while packs of humans might know to target specific characters right off the bat as being dangerous. Or rather than having a threat meter, simply make it clear than certain enemies wil recognize that there's danger in breaking away from your defenders and won't ever do it... until the wizard gets a few good hits in a row. At which point that character getting hit might still not break away - he would order a lackey to deal with the issue.
One of the commenters on TFA stated that he felt the trinity was a product of the whole aggro system, the need to simply decide which player should be getting hit - which leads players to recognize how to game the system, or to build the game AROUND gaming the aggro system. There's some truth to that, I think, but the overall whole should really be a whole new balancing in the way that healing defending works.
Basically, each set now has about five or ten "mythic rare" cards, many of which are game-changers, like the planeswalker cards, or see how popular the Lotus Cobra is in the new set Zendikar. I'll let you google the term from there.
There's a couple of other points to be noted in here, I think. For one thing, we're seeing the real takeoff of XBox Live Arcade. If these cheap downloadable games for $15 are getting so much good credit, then what's the use to upgrade the system for them, especially if new hardware could force a change in the XBLA standard when people still aren't fully integrated with the standard they have? Not to mention that they're still waiting to see if anything materializes out of the small indie games area.
On Sony's end, people are finally buying Blu-Ray discs. That drop in price for the PS3 has had a bunch of people (my coworkers, at least) talking about picking up the system as a hi-def movie player. To update to a new system with a premium price again, they might end up losing the customers that were just about ready to hop in for the new movie player.
For the most part, I agree with you. Less time in the day would mean not only would students have more time to concentrate on individual classes (and extracurriculars that can really eat up your time), but it would also mean more planning time and open office hours for the teachers. Throwing in the deterioration of many students' ability over the summer, where so much as forgotten, and a school year that keeps the same amount of time up by trading hours for days sounds like a fantastic idea. It would still cost more, though, since you'd need janitorial staff, cafeteria staff, etc. that do a certain amount of work each day and would have more days to do it, on top of air conditioning, electricity bills, etc.
The only downside I see to such a change would be parents wouldn't be able to use school as a substitute for daycare as much anymore.
This, though, shouldn't be so quickly dismissed. Even if it doesn't directly affect the educational process, time spent at school is time not spent idle for many children. As much as we whine that the parents just aren't involved enough, or that time spent in poor / high-crime neighborhoods negatively impacts some kids' performance, school still gives somewhere to go and be productive. The answer many give here is to leave the schools "open" even if class isn't necessarily in session, so that the libraries or classrooms are available for study, collaboration, or social time. This still requires money, of course, and it's going to be funny to see anything making improvements to schools while local education budgets continue to be cut.
Dumb liberal: Hey, health care costs are too high! It must be because we don't have a single-payer program!
Dumb conservative: No, our health care is the best in the world! It's just that Americans don't take care of themselves and drive up their own costs with the unhealthiness! We need to just encourage better behavior!
Dumb liberal: Okay then, let's put a tax on unhealthy goods to encourage better consumption!
Dumb conservative: What, are you crazy? You can't tell people what they can and can't eat! That's fascism!
Dumb liberal: All right, then if we can't tell people what to eat, then we'll have to deal with the consequences. It's time for a national health plan!
Dumb conservative: You're a socialist! Our health care will get better if we just start eating better!
Dumb liberal: Then let's encourage better food!
Dumb conservative: Communism!
While I'm typing this up on a MacBook Pro, I can't help but wonder if this price spent on high-end PCs also endorses self-built PCs. People who spend a lot of money on Windows machines often prefer to buy a basic package and then buy the high-end cards, RAM, and other plug-in parts to outfit it from there. I'd seriously be surprised to find out that any high percentage of expensive PCs currently owned by people is on Mac OS.
Granted, that was one of the strengths of WoW after the Burning Crusade expansion, in that there were much less "tank and spank" encounters and more requirement for interaction amongst members of the group and their environments. You could read all about encounters on wowhead and thottbot and have all the right gear and still end up dying repeatedly if... well, how hard was it to NOT move when flame wreath is cast?
Scan down on this series of graphs that Nintendo showed at the GDC to the graph titled "Nintendo driving US Growth." The level of sales of games across all platforms has been fairly flat for most of the decade... up until the Wii came out, at which point the other two consoles continued to sell at a mostly flat rate but Nintendo's went up and up.
It's sort of a harbinger and a point of relief. On the one hand, When you've hit a wall on the number of people who are really interested in devoting so much of their time to a 40+ hour game, the only way to go up is with people who aren't in that group. Microsoft wants more money just like everyone else, so they have to expand into the same area. But it's still a mark that there's a solid base of hardcore fans as well that are always going to need to be served, and when Microsoft's plans to make the XBox wii-ish fails to bring in a large new audience because they realize that they're not the Wii, they're going to have to think about serving the base that they've got already.
I'm also a bit loathe to decry the sudden death of hardcore gaming when just last year, 2008, we were decrying the fact that we were trying to find time to play Fable 2, MGS4, GTA4, Fallout 3, and a host of other solid games. The fact that release schedules aren't lining up very well in this year's favor isn't going to scare me off just yet, and that's just about the only real evidence that he offers that the hardcore gamer is about to die. What's more likely is that we just won't have the same glut of triple-A-grade content devoted to them.
I don't know why the hardcore gamers are worried, though. They're just gonna spend all their time playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 in a couple of years anyway.
It's noteworthy that not too long after this event, Mr. Della Rocca left the IGDA. I haven't had the time to watch the whole video yet since I'm on my way out the door to work, but a few days ago, Della Rocca put a large rant up on his website excoriating members of the IGDA for not wanting to get anything done. Summary at Kotaku:
Sorry for not having the leadership skills to beat the barriers of participation inequality. Less than 1% of the IGDA membership are truly active in driving the org forward. Sorry for not doing a better job building up a strong pipeline of community leaders and volunteers. Sorry for not overcoming your general apathy and laziness.
Sorry for not doing a better job of roping in all the snipers from the sidelines. Turns out you are all pretty damn good at bitching and complaining and being critical. But then you don't actually do anything about it and you don't get involved. Sorry for not bringing critics under the tent and getting them to work at improving things.
Sorry for not getting you to be more serious about the profession of game development. You are no longer a bunch of hacks. This is a real art and science. We need to be way more deliberate and control the path the profession takes as it evolves into the future.
It's a bit worrisome. In an industry that seems pretty staunch against unionization, who's going to make any change if even the groups that do exists for the rank and file aren't willing to take any voice in the matter?
And if I'm not mistaken, burnout is pretty much just as consistent as overtime in the industry at the moment. So there's also a big question of just how much the companies want to retain talent as well. I've known two people in the industry who left jobs at some very prestigious game companies and went to work at unknown, small-time publishers because those jobs just allowed them to see their families more often. Of course, those people were working positions on teams that were persistantly understaffed, so they were in constant crunch time - they'd finish shipping one project out the door and immediately get transferred to another team's crunch to get their product shipped on time. Either way, the, ah, "spiritual" growth of the industry has been kinda stunted lately.
It seems that these days, if you speak ill against Obama (the chosen one), you will be smitten down and piled up upon by anyone that was a fervent disciple during the election or of a democratic leaning.
Glenn Greenwald, Keith Olbermann, Crooks & Liars, DailyKos, and Huffington Post have all had something to say about this issue in the past week. Believe it or not, the progressives are entirely NOT happy about this turn of events and have not been gracious to the president about it.
M:tG was "dumbed down" near a decade ago when they depowered the counterspell and put a de-emphasis on control decks in favor of more active, less-solitaire-ish decks. You might want to argue that the game has changed over time, but it's been running about the same since... what, since just about Masques block, really. With a weird detour into artifact zaniness in one block.
(Though, personally, I like the newer sets they've been putting out, as they've generally been fun for limited. This next set that's coming out at the end of April that's 100% gold cards should be amusing.)
You raise a good point that other people are missing, though, in that Wizards is more than just DnD. Who are these people saying "Wizards always fails!" when M:tG still has a solid following? And last I heard, the Avalon Hill line was doing pretty decently, including the re-release of Robo Rally a few years back. The real criticism of Wizards might be that they've lost most of their appetite for branching out with their RPGs, that they've stuck tight to the formula and aren't going much beyond it - though stuff like d20 Modern, d20 Star Wars, and support for the "old" version of L5R along with the d20 version negate that a bit, and it's also somewhat understandable since most of the RPGs that WotC picked up before the Hasbro buyout just flat out didn't sell. WotC as a whole, though, is still pretty much doing all right. They're probably just having the same knee-jerk reaction to piracy that everyone else is.
Part of it, I think, is that there's also not much incentive or social reward put on learning new materials at that age. I mean, I know it sounds kind of obvious to say, "Well, why didn't you just start teaching yourself to code in high school?" But in high school, we were in student dramas and band camps, and we had part-time jobs, and we were volunteering for non-profits to build up our resumes. A lot of us knew that we were going to college someday, but we weren't thinking about the skills we might need for college. A lot of us just flat out didn't have it inour heads to get the kind of head start that you did.
If I could go back in time and be my own high school counselor, I would ask Little Me, "What are you thinking about doing in college? Computers? Y'know, you're pretty smart. Maybe you should go pick up a book on programming and start learning alittle on your own. What book? Well, I'll bet if you go talk to the math teacher that does our low-level PASCAL class, he could give you some ideas." I bet that I would've really enjoyed it, especially if I had some basic idea of where to start looking, but I just didn't.
It's a really base thing to suggest that someone needs to TELL these kids to start preparing on their own, but... you know, kids are inexperienced. Or to be less kind, they're stupid. On the whole, they really don't know these things. It could really make a world of difference if someone would only suggest it to them at that age, but a lot of counselors aren't really equipped to deal with individual needs, either.
Exactly the reason why educational funding was included as a large part of the stimulus bill - because schools are generally locally and statewide funded. But local and statewide funds are currently drying up with the sudden downturn, so we're looking at a lot of major communities being forced to trim education spending in order to balance their budgets, since they're generally not allowed to take out loans and sell bonds like the fed can. Let's see how well it serves the local economy when teachers start losing their jobs.
Much of the article seems to be less concerned with the notion of proving that Dvorak isn't the better typing system as it is with proving that the market is very good at choosing winner systems. Or that the market isn't as dumb as we think about choosing losers. Or something.
Clearly, typists other than McGurrin could touch type, and machines other than Remington were competitive. These events have largely been ignored. But if we are interested in whether the QWERTY keyboard's existence can be attributed to more than happenstance or an inventor's whim, these events are crucial. The other keyboards did compete. They just couldn't surpass QWERTY. So we cannot attribute the success of the QWERTY keyboard either to a lack of alternatives or to the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only touch typist or the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Unfortunately, the author's analysis of the QWERTY advantage seems to end here. He seems to assume that because QWERTY beat its competition, it must have won on the basis of being a better typing system. Not on the marketing power or fiscal strength of the business backing it. The author cites that the machines were being brought into office for people that had never typed before and cited competitions where non-QWERTY systems were used to great speed. His study doesn't really detail what factors allowed QWERTY to beat out the other contenders.
In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.
Moreover, while the author has done something of a service in showing some of the deficiencies of the AMAZING SUPERIORITY! of Dvorak over QWERTY, he seems to fall into much the same trap himself by correlating a lack of worth in retraining people onto a new system (I'm sure it would take me quite a while to get up to speed on a system of typing that I hadn't been using since I was in elementary school) to a lack of worth for using the new system as a whole. While it may be true that it's not terribly worth spending effort and money to retrain yourself on a new system, he doesn't examine much which system would actually be better to train a new typist on.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
As ergonomics often seems to be a greater concern than high-end performance for people who do very large amounts of typing work, the mention of ergonomics only as an afterthought doesn't help his case much. If that "difference of a few percentage points" falls in Dvorak's favor, then that would hurt his argument somewhat for people who would really prefer to have the 5% more comforta
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You know, when I look at the graph in TFA the Search Share for Google increased just as much as Bing did! In Dec-08, MS sites were at 8.3%, up to 10.7% in Dec-09. During that same timespan, Google went from 63.5% to 65.7%.
And in that timespan, Yahoo dropped from 20.5% to 17.3%. AOL also dropped from 3.8% to 2.6%. Guess what - MSN isn't stealing Google's shares yet. It's stealing from Google's competitors.
>>It's just a matter of time until the United States Department of Defense gets outsourced
You mean like Blackwater?
...as the GNAA. Those guys used to be everywhere.
"...every time I feel like bitching about Comcast I'll remember DirecTV and tell myself it could be worse."
Seriously, how did we reach the point where Comcast is the best we can get? We thought Comcast had lowered the bar for customer service - how is it that everyone else in the industry still manages to trip over that bar?
The trinity can make gaming EASIER, but it's NOT required. Learn to play!
The problem is that "Learn to play!" so often morphs into "Choose the right spec!" You know, go play Street Fighter 4. You enjoy playing El Fuerte? Heck, maybe you're the best El Fuerte player in the country. You go to a tournament, you're going to get beat by someone two levels less your talent who's playing Rufus or C.Viper.
This is, again, an issue with Champions Online. There's lots of room to make a "fun" character, one who builds from certain abilities to fit your favorite archetype. But once you stop playing for fun and start playing to win, so to speak, the game becomes easy, because it's balanced against fun characters rather than the right characters. PvP has hence become difficult since players who build for PvP rather than to an archetype are heads and shoulders above standard players.
Unfortunately, balance matters. If your game includes competitive PvP, then balance matters double. Yes, a good player can take an off-spec and run it through high-end content just as if he was playing one of the best builds. However, the best players are the ones who are skilled at what they do and apply that skill to the best builds rather than off-specs - much like the guys winning SF4 tournaments are the best C.Vipers and Sagats of the world, skilled players playing the best characters, rather than the best Chun-Lis and best Blankas. Sure, you see Chun-li and Blanka at the tournament, and they're competitive. It'd be nice to see one win a major tourney once in a while.
Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.
Submitted for evidence, Champions Online. The idea, give people the ability to create any archetypal character they want. Great for casual players to go in and mess around as they wish, but the game has become "easy" as it's become quickly evident which powers from different sets benefit each other the most. Whereas class-based games might have a few different classes with ways to do things their own, in CO, once one ability is marked as strong, then everybody has it. Ask people how they feel about Swallowtail Cut in PvP, for example.
Actually, I think there's a few very positive things about the way 4th edition deals with the three main classes.
For one, in 3rd edition D&D, it was sort of useless to constantly fret over your armor and hit points if there were rogues or wizards on your team. A fighter might be a tougher character, but he had no way of actually stopping the bad guy from just running away and going after the squishy wizard instead. 4th edition introduced a form of "soft tanking" where high-armor defenders got free attacks when their targets switched away. It made the defensive class viable without making it necessary.
They also rethought the way that healing worked. Recognizing that few people really enjoy playing straight healers, they gave most support the classes the ability to deal damage while boosting teammates at the same time. They also reduced the power of overall healing - limiting the amount of healing that could be done per day based on a player's constitution - and placed a greater emphasis on tactics and defense. This also changed the way that the game was balanced and lead to "leader" classes that had more interesting roles than simply being a box of bandages.
On top of that, damage characters rarely focus on pure damage, either. Now that armor no longer hinders spellcasting, many players consider it a "feat tax" that wizards should take proficiency with leather armor. I've seen plenty of discussion on the Wizards boards about the best way to boost the armor class of your rogue (proficiency in parrying daggers seems like the most popular), something that few WoW rogues ever worry about. On top of that, the manner that armor class and other defenses can be tallied has changed, such that wizards can gain armor/"dodge" from their Intelligence, so that it's also possible for every class to have decent defenses if they don't min/max into one direction.
I think there's some important lessons here that might find their way into a good MMO someday. You don't have to force characters to be jack-of-all-trades in order to get them to consider both their offensive and defensive roles and simply be more than one-dimensional. For example, I might consider an MMO where the "threat" that a character generates might also stack with the NPCs' intelligence. Some animals might not be smart enough to break away from their current targets, while packs of humans might know to target specific characters right off the bat as being dangerous. Or rather than having a threat meter, simply make it clear than certain enemies wil recognize that there's danger in breaking away from your defenders and won't ever do it... until the wizard gets a few good hits in a row. At which point that character getting hit might still not break away - he would order a lackey to deal with the issue.
One of the commenters on TFA stated that he felt the trinity was a product of the whole aggro system, the need to simply decide which player should be getting hit - which leads players to recognize how to game the system, or to build the game AROUND gaming the aggro system. There's some truth to that, I think, but the overall whole should really be a whole new balancing in the way that healing defending works.
Basically, each set now has about five or ten "mythic rare" cards, many of which are game-changers, like the planeswalker cards, or see how popular the Lotus Cobra is in the new set Zendikar. I'll let you google the term from there.
There's a couple of other points to be noted in here, I think. For one thing, we're seeing the real takeoff of XBox Live Arcade. If these cheap downloadable games for $15 are getting so much good credit, then what's the use to upgrade the system for them, especially if new hardware could force a change in the XBLA standard when people still aren't fully integrated with the standard they have? Not to mention that they're still waiting to see if anything materializes out of the small indie games area.
On Sony's end, people are finally buying Blu-Ray discs. That drop in price for the PS3 has had a bunch of people (my coworkers, at least) talking about picking up the system as a hi-def movie player. To update to a new system with a premium price again, they might end up losing the customers that were just about ready to hop in for the new movie player.
For the most part, I agree with you. Less time in the day would mean not only would students have more time to concentrate on individual classes (and extracurriculars that can really eat up your time), but it would also mean more planning time and open office hours for the teachers. Throwing in the deterioration of many students' ability over the summer, where so much as forgotten, and a school year that keeps the same amount of time up by trading hours for days sounds like a fantastic idea. It would still cost more, though, since you'd need janitorial staff, cafeteria staff, etc. that do a certain amount of work each day and would have more days to do it, on top of air conditioning, electricity bills, etc.
The only downside I see to such a change would be parents wouldn't be able to use school as a substitute for daycare as much anymore.
This, though, shouldn't be so quickly dismissed. Even if it doesn't directly affect the educational process, time spent at school is time not spent idle for many children. As much as we whine that the parents just aren't involved enough, or that time spent in poor / high-crime neighborhoods negatively impacts some kids' performance, school still gives somewhere to go and be productive. The answer many give here is to leave the schools "open" even if class isn't necessarily in session, so that the libraries or classrooms are available for study, collaboration, or social time. This still requires money, of course, and it's going to be funny to see anything making improvements to schools while local education budgets continue to be cut.
Dumb liberal: Hey, health care costs are too high! It must be because we don't have a single-payer program!
Dumb conservative: No, our health care is the best in the world! It's just that Americans don't take care of themselves and drive up their own costs with the unhealthiness! We need to just encourage better behavior!
Dumb liberal: Okay then, let's put a tax on unhealthy goods to encourage better consumption!
Dumb conservative: What, are you crazy? You can't tell people what they can and can't eat! That's fascism!
Dumb liberal: All right, then if we can't tell people what to eat, then we'll have to deal with the consequences. It's time for a national health plan!
Dumb conservative: You're a socialist! Our health care will get better if we just start eating better!
Dumb liberal: Then let's encourage better food!
Dumb conservative: Communism!
I'm suddenly reminded of how much the "real worth" of a new car is the moment you drive it off the dealer's lot.
...Crap, I've never been in a D&D game that lasted more than two months.
While I'm typing this up on a MacBook Pro, I can't help but wonder if this price spent on high-end PCs also endorses self-built PCs. People who spend a lot of money on Windows machines often prefer to buy a basic package and then buy the high-end cards, RAM, and other plug-in parts to outfit it from there. I'd seriously be surprised to find out that any high percentage of expensive PCs currently owned by people is on Mac OS.
Granted, that was one of the strengths of WoW after the Burning Crusade expansion, in that there were much less "tank and spank" encounters and more requirement for interaction amongst members of the group and their environments. You could read all about encounters on wowhead and thottbot and have all the right gear and still end up dying repeatedly if... well, how hard was it to NOT move when flame wreath is cast?
I plan on quoting this, thank you.
Scan down on this series of graphs that Nintendo showed at the GDC to the graph titled "Nintendo driving US Growth." The level of sales of games across all platforms has been fairly flat for most of the decade... up until the Wii came out, at which point the other two consoles continued to sell at a mostly flat rate but Nintendo's went up and up.
It's sort of a harbinger and a point of relief. On the one hand, When you've hit a wall on the number of people who are really interested in devoting so much of their time to a 40+ hour game, the only way to go up is with people who aren't in that group. Microsoft wants more money just like everyone else, so they have to expand into the same area. But it's still a mark that there's a solid base of hardcore fans as well that are always going to need to be served, and when Microsoft's plans to make the XBox wii-ish fails to bring in a large new audience because they realize that they're not the Wii, they're going to have to think about serving the base that they've got already.
I'm also a bit loathe to decry the sudden death of hardcore gaming when just last year, 2008, we were decrying the fact that we were trying to find time to play Fable 2, MGS4, GTA4, Fallout 3, and a host of other solid games. The fact that release schedules aren't lining up very well in this year's favor isn't going to scare me off just yet, and that's just about the only real evidence that he offers that the hardcore gamer is about to die. What's more likely is that we just won't have the same glut of triple-A-grade content devoted to them.
I don't know why the hardcore gamers are worried, though. They're just gonna spend all their time playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 in a couple of years anyway.
It's noteworthy that not too long after this event, Mr. Della Rocca left the IGDA. I haven't had the time to watch the whole video yet since I'm on my way out the door to work, but a few days ago, Della Rocca put a large rant up on his website excoriating members of the IGDA for not wanting to get anything done. Summary at Kotaku:
Sorry for not having the leadership skills to beat the barriers of participation inequality. Less than 1% of the IGDA membership are truly active in driving the org forward. Sorry for not doing a better job building up a strong pipeline of community leaders and volunteers. Sorry for not overcoming your general apathy and laziness.
Sorry for not doing a better job of roping in all the snipers from the sidelines. Turns out you are all pretty damn good at bitching and complaining and being critical. But then you don't actually do anything about it and you don't get involved. Sorry for not bringing critics under the tent and getting them to work at improving things.
Sorry for not getting you to be more serious about the profession of game development. You are no longer a bunch of hacks. This is a real art and science. We need to be way more deliberate and control the path the profession takes as it evolves into the future.
It's a bit worrisome. In an industry that seems pretty staunch against unionization, who's going to make any change if even the groups that do exists for the rank and file aren't willing to take any voice in the matter?
And if I'm not mistaken, burnout is pretty much just as consistent as overtime in the industry at the moment. So there's also a big question of just how much the companies want to retain talent as well. I've known two people in the industry who left jobs at some very prestigious game companies and went to work at unknown, small-time publishers because those jobs just allowed them to see their families more often. Of course, those people were working positions on teams that were persistantly understaffed, so they were in constant crunch time - they'd finish shipping one project out the door and immediately get transferred to another team's crunch to get their product shipped on time. Either way, the, ah, "spiritual" growth of the industry has been kinda stunted lately.
It seems that these days, if you speak ill against Obama (the chosen one), you will be smitten down and piled up upon by anyone that was a fervent disciple during the election or of a democratic leaning.
Glenn Greenwald, Keith Olbermann, Crooks & Liars, DailyKos, and Huffington Post have all had something to say about this issue in the past week. Believe it or not, the progressives are entirely NOT happy about this turn of events and have not been gracious to the president about it.
M:tG was "dumbed down" near a decade ago when they depowered the counterspell and put a de-emphasis on control decks in favor of more active, less-solitaire-ish decks. You might want to argue that the game has changed over time, but it's been running about the same since... what, since just about Masques block, really. With a weird detour into artifact zaniness in one block.
(Though, personally, I like the newer sets they've been putting out, as they've generally been fun for limited. This next set that's coming out at the end of April that's 100% gold cards should be amusing.)
You raise a good point that other people are missing, though, in that Wizards is more than just DnD. Who are these people saying "Wizards always fails!" when M:tG still has a solid following? And last I heard, the Avalon Hill line was doing pretty decently, including the re-release of Robo Rally a few years back. The real criticism of Wizards might be that they've lost most of their appetite for branching out with their RPGs, that they've stuck tight to the formula and aren't going much beyond it - though stuff like d20 Modern, d20 Star Wars, and support for the "old" version of L5R along with the d20 version negate that a bit, and it's also somewhat understandable since most of the RPGs that WotC picked up before the Hasbro buyout just flat out didn't sell. WotC as a whole, though, is still pretty much doing all right. They're probably just having the same knee-jerk reaction to piracy that everyone else is.
If we can find a diagnostic, we might find a way to help prevent/prolong onset, so learning earlier might give a person a better chance to prepare.
Part of it, I think, is that there's also not much incentive or social reward put on learning new materials at that age. I mean, I know it sounds kind of obvious to say, "Well, why didn't you just start teaching yourself to code in high school?" But in high school, we were in student dramas and band camps, and we had part-time jobs, and we were volunteering for non-profits to build up our resumes. A lot of us knew that we were going to college someday, but we weren't thinking about the skills we might need for college. A lot of us just flat out didn't have it inour heads to get the kind of head start that you did.
If I could go back in time and be my own high school counselor, I would ask Little Me, "What are you thinking about doing in college? Computers? Y'know, you're pretty smart. Maybe you should go pick up a book on programming and start learning alittle on your own. What book? Well, I'll bet if you go talk to the math teacher that does our low-level PASCAL class, he could give you some ideas." I bet that I would've really enjoyed it, especially if I had some basic idea of where to start looking, but I just didn't.
It's a really base thing to suggest that someone needs to TELL these kids to start preparing on their own, but... you know, kids are inexperienced. Or to be less kind, they're stupid. On the whole, they really don't know these things. It could really make a world of difference if someone would only suggest it to them at that age, but a lot of counselors aren't really equipped to deal with individual needs, either.
Exactly the reason why educational funding was included as a large part of the stimulus bill - because schools are generally locally and statewide funded. But local and statewide funds are currently drying up with the sudden downturn, so we're looking at a lot of major communities being forced to trim education spending in order to balance their budgets, since they're generally not allowed to take out loans and sell bonds like the fed can. Let's see how well it serves the local economy when teachers start losing their jobs.
Much of the article seems to be less concerned with the notion of proving that Dvorak isn't the better typing system as it is with proving that the market is very good at choosing winner systems. Or that the market isn't as dumb as we think about choosing losers. Or something.
Clearly, typists other than McGurrin could touch type, and machines other than Remington were competitive. These events have largely been ignored. But if we are interested in whether the QWERTY keyboard's existence can be attributed to more than happenstance or an inventor's whim, these events are crucial. The other keyboards did compete. They just couldn't surpass QWERTY. So we cannot attribute the success of the QWERTY keyboard either to a lack of alternatives or to the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only touch typist or the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Unfortunately, the author's analysis of the QWERTY advantage seems to end here. He seems to assume that because QWERTY beat its competition, it must have won on the basis of being a better typing system. Not on the marketing power or fiscal strength of the business backing it. The author cites that the machines were being brought into office for people that had never typed before and cited competitions where non-QWERTY systems were used to great speed. His study doesn't really detail what factors allowed QWERTY to beat out the other contenders.
In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.
Moreover, while the author has done something of a service in showing some of the deficiencies of the AMAZING SUPERIORITY! of Dvorak over QWERTY, he seems to fall into much the same trap himself by correlating a lack of worth in retraining people onto a new system (I'm sure it would take me quite a while to get up to speed on a system of typing that I hadn't been using since I was in elementary school) to a lack of worth for using the new system as a whole. While it may be true that it's not terribly worth spending effort and money to retrain yourself on a new system, he doesn't examine much which system would actually be better to train a new typist on.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
As ergonomics often seems to be a greater concern than high-end performance for people who do very large amounts of typing work, the mention of ergonomics only as an afterthought doesn't help his case much. If that "difference of a few percentage points" falls in Dvorak's favor, then that would hurt his argument somewhat for people who would really prefer to have the 5% more comforta