Ah, but you would not have been caught by my friend, for you learned the concepts under the questions. When you memorize the third question is "A", imo, that's cheating. Ultimately it's cheating yourself.
--Ray
How exactly does one cheat in the Humanities?
I mean it's not like there's a "right" and "wrong" answer, like in Math and Engineering.
As someone who taught Assembler to undergrads, I never had a real problem with cheating, because of the way I structured the assignments to encourage groups to work together, and because I gave really hard tests that I made up every quarter, so there was no test recycling.
Well that and they were all engineering students... Sure a few may fudge an assignment here and there, but I made it clear that if I saw students putting forth effort to learn the materials in labs and during my office hours, that I would grade their efforts accordingly. It was amazing how many students did extra work because they felt like I was actually paying attention to the work they were doing, and it mattered.
A buddy of mine, had the "privilege" of teaching one of those required JAVA computer programming classes to Business students. They were infamous for "hiring" someone to do their homework for them, or for downloading an answer on the internet. He also would catch many grad students (often of foreign nationalities) who kept batteries of his tests on archive, by giving a test that "appeared to be identical" to the last test he gave the quarter prior, with very slight changes. He said it was amusing how many students just memorized the answers in multiple choice tests(A B C or D), never even bothering to learn the material or even read the questions. It was killer for those who had issues with the language... because he could tell they'd studied an old test, rather than the actual topic of the question...
--Ray
In the grand tradition of choosing words like, "pluton," forever more, those of us who refuse to demote Pluto from planetary status shall forever be known as "Plutocrats!"
You make a good point.
It is quite complicated explaining how to choose a good initial spot for Settlers. Then again, I play Settlers with three boards combined, plus the gold fiends and we made our own homegrown rules that you can build a bridge across one link of water with a Road+Sheep (to feed the troll under the bridge)... so in a way we've kinda customised the game to our liking.
And you're right, nothing sucks worse than being doomed to go nowhere in Settlers after the second or third turn. It has led to some bad feelings as a result.
Still, for some reason we've returned to Settlers more often than Carcassonne...;)
--Ray
I think the rules to the basic Settlers of Catan are much simpler to explain to a newbie, than Carcassonne. Perhaps it's just because one doesn't fully understand the impact of your moves in Carcassonne until after you've entirely completed a game, and scored everything... so you are forced to play through an entire game or two before you can really get the strategy... Settlers of Catan, you just say, "Be the first to get X points..." (which has always been something of an arbitrary and unfulfilling end to an otherwise enjoyable game).:)
--Ray
Clearly, this is what the founding fathers (of art) meant to communicate in secret and cryptic paintings... now we'd best get Intel cracking on the DaVinci code...
--Ray
I love this game, but honestly haven't played it for a long time, because I have to look at the rules everytime I play it (after a break). I had the original RIO game, plus an expansion, but now... I can't remember the rules that well. Further, not only is it bad that I don't entirely remember the rules, but it just got so difficult to explain to folks how to score it, and friends come and go, and well... I was never quite sure I was scoring it right by the end... when we want to play a quick game, games with difficult scoring, tend to take a backseat to the easier-to-explain variety.
--Ray
Actually it would probably further criminalize content that is revealed via hacks. Thus imposing stiffer penalties on developers who bent the rules for the sake of a few laughs. Producers would then feel more obligated to go after their developers to recoup their costs, thus shutting down irresponsible developers.
--Ray
They're also from states where adults make parenting a priority. If this were just about parents who didn't do "enough" for their kids, you'd think it'd come from some place like Seattle, where the per capita of dual income households that raise DOGS is higher than those that raise children, cuz they're too busy making money to give a darn about actually raising a family.
If you have kids, you know that your ability to monitor what your kids are exposed to is only as stringent as the standards of your neighbors. This issue didn't just materialize out of thin air.
Everyone knows that videogame developers pander to certain basic tendencies, often in the target market of pubescent boys attacted to bouncy silicon and gore.
I sometimes wonder if the folks who have the hardest time with the idea of more stringent and reliable rating systems are just afraid to admit that they like to watch perverted stuff, and don't want to be reminded at the checkout counter that they are buying a game that their mother would more appropriately deem 'for perverts only'.
With scientific research now demonstrating that things like explicit lyrics to songs correlate strongly to promiscuous behaviors, across all family dynamics, The need for tools in which parents can establish homes free from the most lude and prurient content is only going to increase. Technology is making it easier to get the stuff into the home, and what's coming in, often doesn't come with a warning label. But then gamers don't care about that, they want a game that will sell, and too often rather than provide decent gameplay they pander to inflatable bosoms, and more realistic 3D breast action.
It's time the game industry was held accountable for its crap. Good games will continue to be good games. Bad games will still be bad games. Games with questionable content should be given a little sticker. Maybe that seems like a trifle, but it's a start. Clueless parents might even get a clue.
I'm all for the freedom from restrictions, but again, in the industry it's long been a gag of developers if they want to catch the eye of a certain target market to add more gore and babes.
I have to totally agree with the comments and article. Having worked with Age of Wonders in all three carnations that hit the market, one of the most common criticisms we received was "It's ALMOST as good as Master of Magic (MOM)". Even after the third release (Age of Wonders; Shadow Magic) which had so many unique and interesting ideas in it, and a completely different concept of magical domains, etc... there were so many who wanted to turn the game into MOM. While I personally believe AOW:SM was leagues better than MOM (having played and liked both), I think folks get hooked on nostalgia and forget about clunky blocky unintelligible graphics, poor AIs, and relatively poor gameplay, in favor of remembering that when they were ten years younger they had a lot more free time, and what they really want is to go back to a time when things less complicated. --Ray
Though no doubt there were plenty of games prior to it, for me, it was the original text adventure, and those magic words, "XYZZY".:) The very thought of creating a game absolutely captivated me, and enticed me to the point where now I'm willing to sit and stare at a screen all day long and go home and do the same... not exactly healthy, but ah... it's a happy place to be...:)
--Ray
Well, any game with cut scenes has to have at least it's overarcing story defined before the end of the game. But there's little room for tweaking, and truthfully developers don't like to pay for cutscenes. The example you give is the type of game that requires a lot of storyboarding, and is very story centric, but a lot of developers think that kind of dollhouse type of game isn't interesting to develop.
If you have only three artists (and many developers get squeamish to have too many artists on the development team, cuz they start to get vocal and assert themselves into the design process (heaven forbid!)), do you want them spending their time developing a fancy cutscene that looks crappy compared to Final Fantasy, when they could be working on content?
I really think ultimately this comes down to the fact that because our computer graphics have become so expert with a few, the bar has been raised too high for smaller developers.
To contract out graphics is money that could've gone elsewhere (and seems exorbident when you see what they charge you for a 30 second video clip). Anyhow I just can't dismiss the notion that these growing trends dissing story are based on financials...
Where story really gets discarded is where it's left up to the level designers cuz those guys are almost always the last on the totempole... and by the time level design is done, producers wanna ship it...
--Ray
I remember when folks got online to share information about challenging technological problems... they exchanged code... and shared configuration tips... wanted to hear what other folks were doing... back in the daze of Usenet, you could find all sorts of folks from experts to beginners, and there was no deep psychological basis for those who stuck around to help... we were just glad to have them online... a bunch of nerds... Nowadays, we'd probably call these guys sickos needed to substitute their lack of self-esteem... blah blah blah...
Could it be that some folks still do that?
--Ray
I would think this would be an easy thing to prove, but you're right I just 'assumed' that a significant percentage of consumers don't finish games. This would probably vary according to the different platform and gamer. I once considered myself a big gamer, and I can count on one hand the number of games I've actually finished to the very end... of course if you were playing a game on anything from Nintendo, you probably finished it, cuz they tend to make short games...:) (This was a complaint among users of the gamecube...)
Heck, I wrote the story to games that I never finsished... which shows you how well we tested those last few levels...:) I've worked with developers and they've told me, "Don't worry about it, it's in the last few levels." When a game is near completion, the pressure to get done is enormous... to the point of absurd.
I don't agree with it, and further I can't speak for everyone, nor do I think it's the same on ever platform... in pc games, where you can just issue a patch if there's a problem, this is a common practice, however.... or so I believe.:)
--Ray
Sure does... but games cost money to develop, when it could be on the shelves collecting dust, and just like testing, story tends to be the last thing most game developers think about... often when they've cobbled together an engine and such, the story is something pinned to the engine, anywhooo...
In my experience (and it's limited to things like turnbased strategy games) the story has to fit the game, one doesn't start with a story idea. That comes last... in a way it's more an exercise in rational apologetics than actual story development.
--Ray
You make a good point, but I think in terms of game development, it's so much easier to ditch story. It is costly and you've gotta find some poor bloke to do the story. (I've written stories for games, and well... even when I tried to leave a certain franchise, I got pulled back in at the last minute, because the guy that thought he could do it just stopped returning emails, etc...) Story is a pain, because you have to have all these extra features through which to communicate it, and because stories are sequential they they tend not to loan themselves to games... because if the choices you make in a game "matter" they will inherently change the ending of the story.
So either you make a story and the actions in each "level" have no real impact. Or you provide a limited number of choices. Or you try to leave the game open-ended and the story often doesn't make sense... It's a balancing act between the game choices and a scripted "meaningfulness" provided by players.
Some games allow players to make their own stories. They tend to be open environments with lots of features, and the players create their own worlds and craft their own stories. Or they provide level editors so that if players want a story they can create it themselves, thus absolving the developers the need of creating such things.
Finally, RPGs tend to have no story, save a few catastrophic events that players are expected to "show up at" and stop and fight, and if you're strong enough you succeed, and they play the beautifully rendered siliconized barbiedoll cut-scenes... and well... with the success of games like Final Fantasy, I can't see this type of game disappearing anytime soon... but for smaller developers, such extravagant graphical eyecandy is still too expensive.
Best to stick to tight and fast games... until folks get tired of those, and ressurrect Space Quest IV
--Ray
PS. What makes you think a game developers WANTS you to finish their game? They just want you to buy it, and few gamers actually finish games to the end, even with story...
The point of Episodic content is to sell you on the characters and story. THis has been a long raging debate in the game industry, as to whether story has ANYTHING to do with the creation and promotion of decent game.
Personally I like stories in which I can develop characters and then transfer them to the next "episode", but they're rare, and they require a type of "retcon" (as the comic biz calls it) because characters and scores tend to get so high that starting characters can't compete with these automatic advantages from folks who bought all the prior sequels.
But if your old characters are scaled down to size, it only annoys the folks who put all their energy into munchkinizing their characters. Some games attempt to solve these problems by continuing the game story but over time, not allowing any type of character porting. This is just a weak/cheap way, but some folks enjoy the continuity, especially where the "world" that was created was immersive and interesting.
In the end, it's probably best to just start over with a whole new set of characters, different game mechanic, different engine, whole new game story (or no story at all), etc...
--Ray
We live in an age when information comes the way we want it. If religious folks want movies that abide their standards let them have it. News outlets, shopping, entertainment, speech patterns, spelling, language, interperative dance, all of it's gotta eventually adapt or folks will find another way around it.
Better a bunch of religious folks step part way into the 21st century than that they choose to remain in the 14th and start blowing stuff up......oh wait...
--Ray
The greatest years of gaming will always be relative to your age. (though I was a little old when Pokemon came out and I still love that.:) ) It is no surprise that this particular article is more or less written to the website's key demographic (the gamers with money).
Star Control 2 forever!!
--Ray
Leaving aside the question of the addictive nature of pornography, and its corrosive effects on family values, and all that, I have to admit that I'd like to see this change, just because of the fact that there are websites out there that expect you to accidentally type.com instead of.net or.org...
In the past, a popular band of dolls was one domain away from a popular brand of porn.
And while it might be "funny" that there was a porn site that was one domain away from the official Boy Scouts of America, I think it's pretty obvious the intent was not to teach people to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent...
It's not like the porn industry hasn't brought this down upon it's own head. If the internet is EVER to be a legitimate place for all people, we've gotta respect each other's space. This seems like a reasonable approach, to avoid confusion.
--Ray
This would be especially so for girls, and all that comes along with puberty. Boys have a tendency to deflect physical changes more, because of the "cool" factor... (and the increased physical strength...;) Of course it is physically hazardous to be a late-bloomer and a boy...
I have to wonder if there aren't legalities in question here. The game is not intended to be a "dating service" and those types of services have certain legal protections that I would imagine Blizzard might be unwilling to look at. Imagine if some person's teenage son was "recruited" by such a group, I would imagine the lawsuits would focus on Blizzard... and that could get costly.
Knowing how project managers tend to exaggerate product schedules, I'm thinking that such innovations, if they come, are probably four times the estimated dates away... which places them securely outside of my lifetime.:)
--Ray
Why should a scientist's feelings impact the facts of the story. I agree with the assessment this is flamebait, and is a great disservice to the discovery.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you would not have been caught by my friend, for you learned the concepts under the questions. When you memorize the third question is "A", imo, that's cheating. Ultimately it's cheating yourself. --Ray
How exactly does one cheat in the Humanities? I mean it's not like there's a "right" and "wrong" answer, like in Math and Engineering. As someone who taught Assembler to undergrads, I never had a real problem with cheating, because of the way I structured the assignments to encourage groups to work together, and because I gave really hard tests that I made up every quarter, so there was no test recycling. Well that and they were all engineering students... Sure a few may fudge an assignment here and there, but I made it clear that if I saw students putting forth effort to learn the materials in labs and during my office hours, that I would grade their efforts accordingly. It was amazing how many students did extra work because they felt like I was actually paying attention to the work they were doing, and it mattered. A buddy of mine, had the "privilege" of teaching one of those required JAVA computer programming classes to Business students. They were infamous for "hiring" someone to do their homework for them, or for downloading an answer on the internet. He also would catch many grad students (often of foreign nationalities) who kept batteries of his tests on archive, by giving a test that "appeared to be identical" to the last test he gave the quarter prior, with very slight changes. He said it was amusing how many students just memorized the answers in multiple choice tests(A B C or D), never even bothering to learn the material or even read the questions. It was killer for those who had issues with the language... because he could tell they'd studied an old test, rather than the actual topic of the question... --Ray
In the grand tradition of choosing words like, "pluton," forever more, those of us who refuse to demote Pluto from planetary status shall forever be known as "Plutocrats!"
Unite Plutocrats!
--Ray
You make a good point. It is quite complicated explaining how to choose a good initial spot for Settlers. Then again, I play Settlers with three boards combined, plus the gold fiends and we made our own homegrown rules that you can build a bridge across one link of water with a Road+Sheep (to feed the troll under the bridge)... so in a way we've kinda customised the game to our liking. And you're right, nothing sucks worse than being doomed to go nowhere in Settlers after the second or third turn. It has led to some bad feelings as a result. Still, for some reason we've returned to Settlers more often than Carcassonne... ;)
--Ray
I think the rules to the basic Settlers of Catan are much simpler to explain to a newbie, than Carcassonne. Perhaps it's just because one doesn't fully understand the impact of your moves in Carcassonne until after you've entirely completed a game, and scored everything... so you are forced to play through an entire game or two before you can really get the strategy... Settlers of Catan, you just say, "Be the first to get X points..." (which has always been something of an arbitrary and unfulfilling end to an otherwise enjoyable game). :)
--Ray
Clearly, this is what the founding fathers (of art) meant to communicate in secret and cryptic paintings... now we'd best get Intel cracking on the DaVinci code... --Ray
I love this game, but honestly haven't played it for a long time, because I have to look at the rules everytime I play it (after a break). I had the original RIO game, plus an expansion, but now... I can't remember the rules that well. Further, not only is it bad that I don't entirely remember the rules, but it just got so difficult to explain to folks how to score it, and friends come and go, and well... I was never quite sure I was scoring it right by the end... when we want to play a quick game, games with difficult scoring, tend to take a backseat to the easier-to-explain variety. --Ray
Actually it would probably further criminalize content that is revealed via hacks. Thus imposing stiffer penalties on developers who bent the rules for the sake of a few laughs. Producers would then feel more obligated to go after their developers to recoup their costs, thus shutting down irresponsible developers. --Ray
They're also from states where adults make parenting a priority. If this were just about parents who didn't do "enough" for their kids, you'd think it'd come from some place like Seattle, where the per capita of dual income households that raise DOGS is higher than those that raise children, cuz they're too busy making money to give a darn about actually raising a family.
If you have kids, you know that your ability to monitor what your kids are exposed to is only as stringent as the standards of your neighbors. This issue didn't just materialize out of thin air.
Everyone knows that videogame developers pander to certain basic tendencies, often in the target market of pubescent boys attacted to bouncy silicon and gore.
I sometimes wonder if the folks who have the hardest time with the idea of more stringent and reliable rating systems are just afraid to admit that they like to watch perverted stuff, and don't want to be reminded at the checkout counter that they are buying a game that their mother would more appropriately deem 'for perverts only'.
With scientific research now demonstrating that things like explicit lyrics to songs correlate strongly to promiscuous behaviors, across all family dynamics, The need for tools in which parents can establish homes free from the most lude and prurient content is only going to increase. Technology is making it easier to get the stuff into the home, and what's coming in, often doesn't come with a warning label. But then gamers don't care about that, they want a game that will sell, and too often rather than provide decent gameplay they pander to inflatable bosoms, and more realistic 3D breast action.
It's time the game industry was held accountable for its crap. Good games will continue to be good games. Bad games will still be bad games. Games with questionable content should be given a little sticker. Maybe that seems like a trifle, but it's a start. Clueless parents might even get a clue.
I'm all for the freedom from restrictions, but again, in the industry it's long been a gag of developers if they want to catch the eye of a certain target market to add more gore and babes.
--Ray
I have to totally agree with the comments and article. Having worked with Age of Wonders in all three carnations that hit the market, one of the most common criticisms we received was "It's ALMOST as good as Master of Magic (MOM)". Even after the third release (Age of Wonders; Shadow Magic) which had so many unique and interesting ideas in it, and a completely different concept of magical domains, etc... there were so many who wanted to turn the game into MOM. While I personally believe AOW:SM was leagues better than MOM (having played and liked both), I think folks get hooked on nostalgia and forget about clunky blocky unintelligible graphics, poor AIs, and relatively poor gameplay, in favor of remembering that when they were ten years younger they had a lot more free time, and what they really want is to go back to a time when things less complicated. --Ray
Though no doubt there were plenty of games prior to it, for me, it was the original text adventure, and those magic words, "XYZZY". :) The very thought of creating a game absolutely captivated me, and enticed me to the point where now I'm willing to sit and stare at a screen all day long and go home and do the same... not exactly healthy, but ah... it's a happy place to be... :)
--Ray
So wait a bunch of nerds are mocking Walmart? We should be grateful. It gets tiresome just mocking AOL users.
Well, any game with cut scenes has to have at least it's overarcing story defined before the end of the game. But there's little room for tweaking, and truthfully developers don't like to pay for cutscenes. The example you give is the type of game that requires a lot of storyboarding, and is very story centric, but a lot of developers think that kind of dollhouse type of game isn't interesting to develop. If you have only three artists (and many developers get squeamish to have too many artists on the development team, cuz they start to get vocal and assert themselves into the design process (heaven forbid!)), do you want them spending their time developing a fancy cutscene that looks crappy compared to Final Fantasy, when they could be working on content? I really think ultimately this comes down to the fact that because our computer graphics have become so expert with a few, the bar has been raised too high for smaller developers. To contract out graphics is money that could've gone elsewhere (and seems exorbident when you see what they charge you for a 30 second video clip). Anyhow I just can't dismiss the notion that these growing trends dissing story are based on financials... Where story really gets discarded is where it's left up to the level designers cuz those guys are almost always the last on the totempole... and by the time level design is done, producers wanna ship it... --Ray
I remember when folks got online to share information about challenging technological problems... they exchanged code... and shared configuration tips... wanted to hear what other folks were doing... back in the daze of Usenet, you could find all sorts of folks from experts to beginners, and there was no deep psychological basis for those who stuck around to help... we were just glad to have them online... a bunch of nerds... Nowadays, we'd probably call these guys sickos needed to substitute their lack of self-esteem... blah blah blah... Could it be that some folks still do that? --Ray
I would think this would be an easy thing to prove, but you're right I just 'assumed' that a significant percentage of consumers don't finish games. This would probably vary according to the different platform and gamer. I once considered myself a big gamer, and I can count on one hand the number of games I've actually finished to the very end... of course if you were playing a game on anything from Nintendo, you probably finished it, cuz they tend to make short games... :) (This was a complaint among users of the gamecube...)
Heck, I wrote the story to games that I never finsished... which shows you how well we tested those last few levels... :) I've worked with developers and they've told me, "Don't worry about it, it's in the last few levels." When a game is near completion, the pressure to get done is enormous... to the point of absurd.
I don't agree with it, and further I can't speak for everyone, nor do I think it's the same on ever platform... in pc games, where you can just issue a patch if there's a problem, this is a common practice, however.... or so I believe. :)
--Ray
Sure does... but games cost money to develop, when it could be on the shelves collecting dust, and just like testing, story tends to be the last thing most game developers think about... often when they've cobbled together an engine and such, the story is something pinned to the engine, anywhooo... In my experience (and it's limited to things like turnbased strategy games) the story has to fit the game, one doesn't start with a story idea. That comes last... in a way it's more an exercise in rational apologetics than actual story development. --Ray
You make a good point, but I think in terms of game development, it's so much easier to ditch story. It is costly and you've gotta find some poor bloke to do the story. (I've written stories for games, and well... even when I tried to leave a certain franchise, I got pulled back in at the last minute, because the guy that thought he could do it just stopped returning emails, etc...) Story is a pain, because you have to have all these extra features through which to communicate it, and because stories are sequential they they tend not to loan themselves to games... because if the choices you make in a game "matter" they will inherently change the ending of the story.
So either you make a story and the actions in each "level" have no real impact. Or you provide a limited number of choices. Or you try to leave the game open-ended and the story often doesn't make sense... It's a balancing act between the game choices and a scripted "meaningfulness" provided by players.
Some games allow players to make their own stories. They tend to be open environments with lots of features, and the players create their own worlds and craft their own stories. Or they provide level editors so that if players want a story they can create it themselves, thus absolving the developers the need of creating such things.
Finally, RPGs tend to have no story, save a few catastrophic events that players are expected to "show up at" and stop and fight, and if you're strong enough you succeed, and they play the beautifully rendered siliconized barbiedoll cut-scenes... and well... with the success of games like Final Fantasy, I can't see this type of game disappearing anytime soon... but for smaller developers, such extravagant graphical eyecandy is still too expensive.
Best to stick to tight and fast games... until folks get tired of those, and ressurrect Space Quest IV
--Ray
PS. What makes you think a game developers WANTS you to finish their game? They just want you to buy it, and few gamers actually finish games to the end, even with story...
The point of Episodic content is to sell you on the characters and story. THis has been a long raging debate in the game industry, as to whether story has ANYTHING to do with the creation and promotion of decent game. Personally I like stories in which I can develop characters and then transfer them to the next "episode", but they're rare, and they require a type of "retcon" (as the comic biz calls it) because characters and scores tend to get so high that starting characters can't compete with these automatic advantages from folks who bought all the prior sequels. But if your old characters are scaled down to size, it only annoys the folks who put all their energy into munchkinizing their characters. Some games attempt to solve these problems by continuing the game story but over time, not allowing any type of character porting. This is just a weak/cheap way, but some folks enjoy the continuity, especially where the "world" that was created was immersive and interesting. In the end, it's probably best to just start over with a whole new set of characters, different game mechanic, different engine, whole new game story (or no story at all), etc... --Ray
We live in an age when information comes the way we want it. If religious folks want movies that abide their standards let them have it. News outlets, shopping, entertainment, speech patterns, spelling, language, interperative dance, all of it's gotta eventually adapt or folks will find another way around it. Better a bunch of religious folks step part way into the 21st century than that they choose to remain in the 14th and start blowing stuff up... ...oh wait...
--Ray
The greatest years of gaming will always be relative to your age. (though I was a little old when Pokemon came out and I still love that. :) ) It is no surprise that this particular article is more or less written to the website's key demographic (the gamers with money).
Star Control 2 forever!!
--Ray
Leaving aside the question of the addictive nature of pornography, and its corrosive effects on family values, and all that, I have to admit that I'd like to see this change, just because of the fact that there are websites out there that expect you to accidentally type .com instead of .net or .org ...
In the past, a popular band of dolls was one domain away from a popular brand of porn.
And while it might be "funny" that there was a porn site that was one domain away from the official Boy Scouts of America, I think it's pretty obvious the intent was not to teach people to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent...
It's not like the porn industry hasn't brought this down upon it's own head. If the internet is EVER to be a legitimate place for all people, we've gotta respect each other's space. This seems like a reasonable approach, to avoid confusion.
--Ray
This would be especially so for girls, and all that comes along with puberty. Boys have a tendency to deflect physical changes more, because of the "cool" factor... (and the increased physical strength... ;) Of course it is physically hazardous to be a late-bloomer and a boy...
I have to wonder if there aren't legalities in question here. The game is not intended to be a "dating service" and those types of services have certain legal protections that I would imagine Blizzard might be unwilling to look at. Imagine if some person's teenage son was "recruited" by such a group, I would imagine the lawsuits would focus on Blizzard... and that could get costly.
Knowing how project managers tend to exaggerate product schedules, I'm thinking that such innovations, if they come, are probably four times the estimated dates away... which places them securely outside of my lifetime. :)
--Ray
Why should a scientist's feelings impact the facts of the story. I agree with the assessment this is flamebait, and is a great disservice to the discovery.
--Ray