See, the original scare of something that's turning children into delinquents was... comic books. Nowadays we'd probably laugh and say it causes at most keeping one's virginity, but in 1954 Fredric Wertham made a whole book out of and massaging dubious anecdotes and flawed logic into "proof" that kids imitate every all those antisocial acts from comic books. Some not even as much actually having anecdotes to show any link, but just reproducing gruesome comic-book panels out of context and providing his own hand-waving that basically you just know that a kid seeing something like that will become some kind of monster.
Or using his own kind of freudian divination to argue that there are hidden sexual images in there. Basically that if you squint just right at a drawing of a tree, you can get a pareidolia kinda of seeing a naked woman in the bark pattern. (And puritan America being still scared shitless that a kid seeing a boob will be the end of the world, you can imagine how much worse that was in 1954.)
And he was a psychiatrist, so if he said something about how the brain works, a lot were only too ready to swallow it without any other evidence or clinical data. Especially if he said what they wanted to hear.
He went even in front of a congressional committee, and actually got those whipped up in a frenzy too.
The comic industry crippled itself with a code of what it can show and what not, and of course America was free of crime ever after and kids grew up upstraight. I kid. Obviosly it made no difference whatsoever.
Not that it made a dent in Wertham's claim, since to him the code was just not enough. And apparently anything short of stopping printing anything even remotely violent would be enough.
After that it's been "satanic" rock music, often supposedly in the form of hidden messages you can hear only when playing it backwards. Never mind that there still is no evidence that the brain can decode such messages at all without actually playing the record backwards. But supposedly makes kids kill, rape and commit suicide anyway.
And then D&D. Now that was a big piece of bullshit. Though it spawned such mildly amusing stupidities as that Chick tract where kids actually get taught real spells when their char gets to a certain level. Yeah, right.
And violent TV shows. And god knows what else.
Video games are just one in such a long list of bullshit scares about the next generation.
So if I'm to take a prediction, when generation Y firmly takes over the world and stops giving two shits about violent games making people evil... it'll promptly get scared shitless about some new thing that generation Z does.
As I keep saying, if people just imitated what they see on the screen, then a chunk of those who grew up with PacMan would be popping pills in the dark to the sound of repetitive music... err... wait a minute;)
Nah, if it depended on her reactions, it wouldn't be objective any more. And besides, it wouldn't fair to downgrade _my_ rating just because on some days _she_ can't fake quickly enough;)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." -- Obi Wan, Star Wars Episode IV
That's what I tell the missus. Her anecdotes can't be true, according to my metrics, my sexual performance is not just great, it improved by an order of two in the last 5 years.
Of course, I can't tell you or her what my numbers are, or what I measured, or how, because it's proprietary and a trade secret.
I'm not sure about that. I'm pretty sure one of the admins here has been trying a similar test for the last 10 years or so. albeit in 12 month runs by the looks of it. It's kinda hard not to notice that once a year his hair goes from, pretty much, something almost solidified in a helmet to fluffy and you can tell the pattern on his shirt.
So far he hasn't published anything in a microbiology journal, but I'm sure that when he does, the results of all those twelve-month runs will advance science seriously;)
Yes, well, I never said that the two are perfectly on par. Analogies are only supposed to illustrate one aspect, not be a 100% equivalence between two things. The only thing perfectly equivalent to MS's monopoly is MS's monopoly, which kinda isn't a very useful analogy.
But in the end we have plenty of other crimes around that don't involve axe murder and we still don't like them. We have the likes of, say, Ken Lay who "only" cooked the books and scammed a bunch of investors. Would it be ok if _those_ got to keep their ill gotten gains and pass for philantropy heroes with the money gained from that scam?
1. The comparison to chemicals is misleading. There are some chemicals which are simply the brain's normal signals for stuff like "I like this", "this is fun", or basically, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing it."
Some drugs mimic the effect of such normal brain signals, by binding to the same receptors. E.g., THC binds to the same receptors as the canabinoids in the brain, so it creates the same euphoria, without it being actually a normal signal released by the brain. (Whereas nicotine merely inhibits the production of MAO-B, an enzime which neutralizes those canabinoids, so it makes you higher by prolonging the effect of the natural ones.)
So basically it's a signal as normal as, dunno, the interrupts in a computer. You can probably find a reason to say it's wrong to simulate interrupts that never happened as part of the normal operation (e.g., wiring a front switch to the NMI trace on the mobo), but railing against a situation where they happened as intended (as this or the "OMG, games produce dopamine" hysteria) is fucking stupid.
2. Dopamine is _not_ a reward signal, so it doesn't even produce such an euphoria.
Dopamine is a motivation signal. Remember when I said that some signals basically say, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing it"? That's what dopamine does.
Just about anything that is interesting, captivating or fun by itself is producing dopamine. It's just the brain's way of signalling, "heeyy, I like this! please continue this or stay in the current situation, as apropriate."
Even though dopamine does fire up when an unexpected reward happens (as you'd expect), and is a part of the reward and reinforcement functions, it is not itself a reward signal. It doesn't even seem to play any role in perceiving pleasure.
3. A lot of bullshit around dopamine revolves around its use by the brain in such stuff as sex, or that some stimulants like cocaine also increase dopamine, or that very high levels are associated with manias and psychosis. You just need to drop a mention of one or more of those, and everyone is already ready to lap up "OMG, addiction" bullshit.
In reality that's not very surprising. That sex would also fire up a signal that says "don't stop" when that's a reproduction (hence, natural selection) advantage, is actually as expected as it gets. If the animal were likely to just stop in the middle of sex and go "you know, this is actually quite boring, I'll go pounce on something instead", you'd soon have an evolutionary dead end. (Cue "you've met my ex?" wisecracks;) That it would fire up in conjunction with artificial reward signals, when its normal function _is_ to signal "ok, keep doing whatever gave you the reward", is again rather mundane, and rather uninteresting for its use the rest of the time. And that an abnormal level of it would lead to abnormal effects, again, is actually kind of the normal state for any hormone in the body.
4. But at the end of the day, the fact still remains that it's a signal involved in desire/drive/motivation, and in acknowledging reward/pleasure. Whether you actually subscribe to the school of thought that it does or doesn't take part in actually experiencing that pleasure, the fact remains something has to already be pleasant or interesting to cause a dopamine shot.
That some music you like or a video game or watching Star Trek or really whatever enjoyable activity produces a dopamine shot, just says that you do like it.
Just about the only kind of life that would be free from such "intoxication" would be to never experience anything pleasant or any kind of drive/desire. Also, you'd probably have Parkinson. It's not the kind of existence almost anyone actually has, nor the kind of existence anyone would want.
Well, except if it's those evil music/comics/games addicts. Then their having an existence which includes any fun is obviously eeeevil.
That's a heck of a stretch. Raskolnikov believed himself superior to the great masses, not because he was a student or because of any great aim, but inherently superior. (At least during part of the story; Raskolnikov is nothing if not a tortured and introspective soul).
And you'll find that a lot of the sociopaths and narcisists at the top of various corporations believe themselves to be superior to the mass of unwashed plebs. Well, they don't do much introspection, though, so I guess there's still a difference.
Bill Gates did not plan murder, and he did not plan something evil. He started a software company, probably for no other reason than he wanted to make money and this seemed to be something he was good at doing.
Actually, you'll find that Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour was very much planned and deliberate. They actually deliberately introduced code to break other programs for example. That's the kind of thing they got on trial for, not just being good at something.
Well, except when that something is "breaking the law to protect a monopoly." They were actually very good at that.
Minus several million for usurping one of my favorite classics, Moraelin. You cheapen Bill Gates, Dostoevsky, and evil-doers in general.
Yes, I'm sure that fans of Palpatine, Lex Luthor and the Joker will have their day ruined by this;)
Have you actually RTFA? Because the gizmo there _isn't_ attached to the face, and is a verbatim repeat of everything that was wrong and stupid with the ones that failed, including basically all the factors I've listed, from lag to being unable to get rid of the previously produced smells.
So, sorry, my assessment that it's yet another idiot who thinks he's the first to do the same stupidity, is still very much true. Or to quote everyone's favourite wisecracker, Bejamin Franklin, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Yes, maybe someone else can do it right, but these particular ass-clowns aren't it.
That's got yet another significant difference, though.
The likes of Robin Hood and later Dick Turpin were lionized precisely because of a rise in popular sentiment against the era's equivalent of Bill Gates. Especially in the 18'th and 19'th centuries, as the slow rise of industrialism created a class of people even poorer and more exploited than even the medieval serfs had ever been.
And we're also talking an age when child labour rose to the extent of deliberately planning some mine shafts so they could only fit a child crawling to pull a cart of coal, because, you know, fuck you, it would be too expensive to do that for/with adults. It was an age when the parliament ruled that setting a house on fire with people still in, as a way to kick out them and make room for more pasture land where the hose was, is perfectly within the rights of the owner and in fact it would be a violation of their property rights if you told them not to. (A bit later they relented and did stipulate that you must give them 24 hour notice before doing that, which just drives home the point that before that just showing up with a torch was perfectly ok.)
It was an age where it was ok to "adopt" or even just kidnap a small army of orphans and use them as basically slave labour (no law said you had to pay your children, after all.) Including for some jobs like cleaning under mechanical looms while they're still running, and routinely mangled or scalped one of those children. (Having hair and crawling under fast spinning wheels and shafts kinda produced the results you'd expect.) Or for such delightful jobs as chimney sweep... and just light a fire under them if they don't want to go up the chimney. Etc.
The class who made vast fortunes at the expense of others, and then made public displays of piety and charity with those money, wasn't loved at all by the poor and even middle class.
Any criminal who robbed from the rich -- also giving to the poor was just icing on the cake, rather than a necessary ingredient -- was an instant darling of that mass of discontent poor. And I mean, seriously, forget Robin Hood, they lionized the likes of Dick Turpin which was as base and vile a criminal as it gets. Even with the spiral to the bottom in Hollywood, it's not the kind of guy you'd call even an anti-hero these days, and certainly not the Han Solo kind of lovable rogue. But he robbed from the rich and that was enough.
So that nowdays someone like Bill Gates could pass for a Robin Hood, rather than the villain... is... proof that times have changed a lot, to say the least.
With one important difference: Jean Valjean's fortune isn't a direct result of his crimes. He doesn't get to be the good guy by robbing Paul to give to Peter, no matter how far apart the two events are. Whereas Gates is getting to be the public philantropist hero with money made by breaking the antitrust laws in the '90's.
You know, I can't shake the feeling that I've read that kind of argumentation before. Is it ok to do something evil, just because then you'll use (some of) the ill gotten gains to do something good? Oh, right, that's Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment".
Turns out that in America you can actually be admired for being a modern day Raskolnikov.
It also turns out that you don't even have to do all that soul-searching and all, either.
Well, it's not that hard to be more admired than the head of an organization that's gotten lots of attention for paedophilia and child abuse lately -- not to mention such revelations like they were running glorified slave camps even in the west and in the 20'th century, see the Magdalene asylums in Ireland -- not to mention the revelation that said head of the organization was personally involved in covering up the paedophilia incidents. Add such stuff as his telling places in Africa that have an AIDS pandemic to not use condoms, and the like. And really, I'm surprised that the Pope has any respect at all.
I think even for most devout Catholics he's more like the guy who unfortunately happens to be at the head of their church for the moment, than a shining example of sainthood.
So, really, being more admired than the Pope is a bit like being more admired than Kim Jong Il ("president" of N. Korea.) Even if technically true, it doesn't really say much.
Add the fact that Bill Gates does get some genuine admiration from a lot of people, ranging from those who only heard that he "made" Windows and Word and of his charity stunts, to apologists of ruthless unregulated capitalism for whom breaking the rules and making a monopoly actually kinda makes one a hero. Which again, is actually more than the current Pope has to show as a claim to fame or infamy.
1. Don't worry much. This is one of the ideas that's been popping up again and again since the early 90. And every time it went nowhere, precisely because the awful downsides are that obvious and nobody wants it.
But, as is the case with stupid ideas, just as you think you buried it at the crossroads with a stake through its chest, never to rise again, along comes an idiot investor and drops a drop of blood... err... a wad of cash, and it does rise again. I'm seriously starting to think there's some Dunning-Kruger explanation to it. There must be a sweet spot of ignorance and stupidity where one can look at such an idea that was possible actually for many years, just too stupid to sell to anyone, and genuinely think "well, nobody did it only because they're not THE UBER-GENIUS like me!"
2. And the problems are even bigger than just getting to smell the mandatory sewer levels, or have the olfactory realism in the more than one quest to search through shit in WoW, and so on. Off the top of my head:
- it's unreliable, if anything depends on it. With other senses, you can kinda depend that most players won't be temporarily blind or deaf. By comparison having cold that makes your nose useless, or an allergy, or just being a smoker, or whatever, is quite common.
- MAJOR lag. Unless you literally gas the room with that smell, it depends on air currents and such to propagate. You're not going to experience stepping into a meadow full of flowers in real time. You step into that room and... 2-3 minutes later you actually start to notice the smell from your computer's gizmo. At which point you're actually out of it.
- smells don't dissipate that readily. With, say, sound, when you stop playing it, it stopped. With smells, well, that's why you need kitchen fans and generally ventilation. If you just cooked something, the room will smell like it for a long time. Ditto for any smells such a gizmo would produce.
- strong smells tend to be unpleasant, no matter what they are. (Just remember the last time some lady stunk the whole bus of some perfume that in moderation might have been even pleasant.) Unless you actually also analyse the air continuously and/or actively filter the old smells out, just keeping dumping more of that in the air can accumulate and become nasty even if it's just smelling of flowers and strawberries.
- because of the above factors, it's actually more likely to produce an olfactory cacophony. An average hour of playing, say, City Of Heroes, sees me popping through the sewers, going through some park, flying over the smoke stacks of the factories in King's Row, etc. Since smells tend to stick around for a while, you'll end up with a mixture of all those that not only isn't realistic for any of those areas, it's unlikely to be a particularly pleasant mix no matter what the components are.
Having more than one gamer going at it in the house, will only make it even worse.
- smells tend to stick in clothes, carpets, etc, for a while. That's another reason why people turn on the fan, use filters and/or open the window when cooking, instead of just letting the whole house soak in it. Even without the obvious stuff like going to work smelling like shit after doing those WoW quests, it's one more factor to create an unwanted olfactory cacophony.
- allergies. I don't know of anyone who has an actual allergy to light, but real allergies to the chemicals that constitute any given smell, are actually not very uncommon.
Etc.
3. But yeah, that's even assuming that nobody would pull a realistic sewer level, nor a goatse/rickrolling to some clip of them doing a nasty fart, nor write some virus that makes such a device put out a continuous smell of shit at full power, etc. In practice, I'd expect such things to be more of a given than the exception. The same kind of idiot who posts a goatse link, now will likely do it with smell too.
But, oh well... as I was saying, I still wouldn't worry much. This will die a silent death like all the others before it, and likely the only inconvenience will be reading the exact same stupid idea in 2-3 years again, from yet another idiot who thinks he's so smart that he's the first to think that up.
As opposed to the current kind of population on some of those sites, which has ridiculous numbers of accounts that are anywhere between those of people who've been inactive for ages and just plain old bogus accounts created by staff members, and (as in the lawsuit against Match.com) even periodically use romantic come-ons from such accounts to make lonely people stick around?
I think my biggest LOL moment was when one ad for some site showed me a picture of porn actress Gianna Michaels as one of the girls looking for sex in my area. I mean, somehow I wish I could believe that she moved to Germany and is actually looking for a random fuck on the Internet in addition to what she gets during her job, but I somehow doubt that.
For some sites out there actually having 20% people who _can_ be contacted and actually answer, even if they're fat, ugly and mean, would actually be an improvement.
It's even more perverse than that, even if you assume that all kids answered 100% truthfully and objectively. (Yeah, right.)
Let's say you ask a few thousands people how many miles they drove in the last year. Then you ask something like "did a bird ever crap on your windshield while driving?" That conditional right there is what you can do a pseudo-correlation for morons with. Of course the guys who drove only 1000 miles will be a lot less likely to say "yes" than the ones who drove 100,000 miles. So, there we go, we just proved that driving causes crap on your windshield. QED.
That's exactly what that kind of questions does in the survey too.
They don't actually establish that those "addicts" actually skip chores more than other kids, for example. The only thing that is asked is if that ever happened in conjunction with video games. Of course those who play more hours are more likely to say "yes", even without needing any other correlation involved. Even if they were perfectly uncorrelated, you'd still be looking at P(X)*P(Y), which goes up as P(X) goes up. It's just to be expected.
A more perverse effect is that you can use that forced conditional to associate anything with anything.
E.g., questions boiling down to "have you skipped homework in conjunction with X" or "have you done X while depressed" can show a false correlation between any X and bad school performance. A child more likely to skip homework or more depressed is likely to have poorer results in school, whatever activity X may be. Whether it's gaming or not. It could be walking, reading books, or playing with the cat, or whatever.
Whatever that activity X may be, what remains is that you found a sub-group of kids who do one or more of skipping homework, not studying for tests, etc, and some may also be depressed too. Of course they'll do worse in school than the larger mass of kids who aren't selected for those traits.
Essentially now we're seeing the effect of P(Y) on that P(X)*P(Y). Those with a higher P(X)*P(Y) are likely to have a higher P(Y) too. By choosing enough activities Y1, Y2, Y3, etc, with a bad effect on kids' grades, you can make it sound like you're seeing the effects on X on grades, but really you just selected a group likely to do all those bad things.
I mean, you could do a similar trick for making anything else sound bad. E.g., let's say I want to prove that listening to music while driving is bad. Lemme see:
- were you fined for speeding while listening to music?
- did you run a red light while listening to music?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to calm down when angry at another driver?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to stay awake on very long trips?
Etc.
So first I do such a list of, let's call them "music addicts" and then I can objectively show that that group is more likely to cause accidents and costs insurance more money, so, you know, maybe music in cars is a bad thing. But in reality I didn't show that. I just selected a sub-group of those that have one or more problems like routinely speeding, running red lights, driving while extremely tired, and getting road rage. And of course they'll be more likely to have accident than the group which wasn't selected for those traits. Whether there is any correlation between music and doing those things, I didn't actually prove it. The only connection was in imposing a bias in those who can say "yes".
Same for the kids in the study. Any correlation between their group and grades is pretty much tautological.
In fact, I'd say that they have to do the intermediate step of that survey is what should have been a red flag to people. If there is actually a correlation between gaming and either school performance or mental problems, such a survey would have been unneeded. Then you could just use the first set of questions and correlate number of hours played to grades. That they must do such a "have you done things that might indicate depression or lower your grades, in conjunction with gaming" survey and then correlate that result with... depression and lower grades, is the whole sleight of hand right there.
As someone else already mentioned, they hadn't even proven mental problems. The whole thing is a survey which depends on exactly how accurate those people self-assessed (e.g., I can see how depressed people would be more likely to blame themselves than those who aren't depressed), and largely circular logic anyway. The survey is largely of the form, if you answered "yes" to 5 of 10 questions to the effect of "did you ever do X to avoid Y" then you're an addict to X, without any attempt at distinguishing "too much" or "to the extent of affecting one's school performance" or anything.
They took pretty much a list of what kids _do_, and slapped "to play games" next to them, and defined that as a problem, while the same without games was obviously not a problem and not even asked about. The real common denominator there is "video games are bad", and it's a mental problem only because they say so.
Even if someone could argue that _some_ of the things they asked about are bad if you do them too much or regularly (like skipping homework) -- but I don't see them trying to establish if that's the case -- others are pretty much stuff that a catch-all and far from being necessarily a problem. I'd like to see anyone who can say with a straight face that they never had anything that can count as "bad feelings" or that they never resorted to something more fun instead of dwelling on them. Sure, "playing games to make bad feelings go away" lets one paint their own mental image of some terminally depressed kid who has no other escape from some horrible feelings, but someone could answer "yes" to that for just, dunno, playing a game (or reading a book or whatever) because they're bored or lonely when the parents are away, or just when having an occasional bad day, like everyone has now and then.
They don't actually either establish addiction _or_ mental problems, except for an audience which is already prepared to go "OMG addiction" if anyone's idea of a more fun time includes video games at all.
I mean, I was a kid myself. At that age you don't understand why those adults insist that you should sit through boring maths classes (I could do maths very well, but I hated it anyway) or history classes (which, as I discovered later could even be great fun if it weren't turned into rote memorizations of dates and places in school) or geography classes (I mean, in history at least something happens, but geography just lies there anyway) and the like. An the argument that you'll regret not doing it when you'll be in your mid 20's is kinda moot when we're talking about a date as far in the future as 3 times your total life span so far, and time perception for kids is proven to be dilated. It seemed like, dunno, telling you that you must do something today or there will be consequences some 200 years in the future. Fuck that, it's like an eternity away.
Of course I tried to skip school or skip chores and do something more fun, even before there was a computer around in my parents' home.
In fact, you could substitute computer with "cat" in their kind of questionnaire, and I'd have to answer truthfully that:
- I had sometimes skipped chores to play with the cat
- I sometimes skipped homework to play with the cat
- I could have done better in an exam or test or two if I hadn't played with the cat (mom still tells everyone about when she thought I was learning for an important exam and then she finds me playing with the cat under the table in my room)
- If I'm to go all introspective about it, I could honestly I sometimes played with the cat to avoid some bad feelings that are undefined enough to include just about anything (e.g., boredom or loneliness. Pets are great against both.)
Etc. I mean, I don't even know their whole list of questions, but I batted 4 out of 4 questions that are mentioned in the Reuters article. That's a 100% score, right?
OMG, cat addict. Right?
But somehow I didn't grow up to raise 100 cats in my flat and snort furballs instead of going to work, or anything, and I haven't attacked anyone with a cat either. It didn't even cause me to flunk anything in school.
Maybe, but I don't get the impression that the survey actually delved into that kind of details.
The question wasn't if you've played games to the point that you have to be dragged kicking and screamin to do homework or any chores, but rather whether you've done it at all. Which, yes, glosses over that important difference.
Actually, it seems to me you illustrate an even bigger problem.
The way I remember it, a correlation in statistics (as opposed to the usual "I have a couple of anecdotes and watch me leap to a conclusion") involve looking at the covariance of two variables vs their normal distribution for _both_ variables. Even in binary terms, you'd have to look at the set of people who, say, do bad in school, people who play games, and the intersection. Though a more useful correlation would look at something like SAT grades vs hours played, or some such.
And even then, you know, actual measured variables than someone's self-assessment. See for example Dunning Krueger for one problem with self-assessments.
Basically you don't have to look at just how many people skipped school for gaming, but basically at whether you're seeing more than the product of two unrelated probabilities. The relevant question is, basically, are people who play video games more likely to skip school than those who don't?
What I'm getting at is that asking "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" without also asking "have you ever skipped school?" is pretty worthless. A questionnaire like yours which asks, or _also_ asks, about the distribution of that variable without the conditional, would actually be a better exercise.
IOW, asking just "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" will produce a semblance of a correlation just because there is no way to say, "does it count if I skipped school to smoke behind the school instead?" It's like asking "have you ever masturbated in the bathroom?" and concluding that bathrooms cause masturbation. It's not a real covariance if they're together simply because the question is phrased to only allow a "yes" if they appear together.
I'm not getting even that from the article. I was hoping I'd go there and see some serious (if possibly misguided) attempts at innovation, but it turns out that at least half of them were never meant to be more than a scam in the first place.
The Peep guy for example seems to be a character who made a surrealistic string of companies punting surrealistic and often blatantly impossible products, especially where there were grant money to be won, but never actually had more of a product than some faked videos and sleight of hand tricks like peeling the logo off a fob and showing it as their super range-boosting gizmo for phones. He's gone through everything including impossible flying cars before. No, seriously. And actually seems to have gotten a huge grant for that too.
After following the link to more info about him (yeah, I know, I'll hand in my nerd card now for reading even more than TFA;) I just ended up having more respect for the dot-con bubble guys, or the likes of those behind the Phantom console, or that guy faking being almost there with a flying car for the last couple of decades. At least those stuck with a scam longer, which, if nothing else, takes chutzpah. This guy seems to average more than one scam company a year, and actually goes for several per such scam idea looking for funding.
In all fairness, I'm happier to know that money is locked up by the major players, than given to such scammers.
Actually, no, that's false. Virtually _all_ Go games end in recognizing that there's no point in continuing.
Another thing that separates the newbies from those who have at least minimal clue is to recognize when the only smart move is not to play. Yeah, you may recognize that from the movie Wargames, but it's also how Go works. It's very valid to just pass your turn, to _not_ make a move at all, if it's actually more disadvantageous to make one.
A Go game ends when both don't want to make a move any more, even if often that means one of them being fully aware they're conceding defeat. Just because continuing would at best achieve nothing, and at worst just increase the opponent's score some more.
Then you move to scoring, which again consists of both players conceding whole chunks that they consider impossible to defend. Yeah, sure, that group of my pieces are dead even if they didn't get removed from the table, just add the whole chunk to your score. If there is a disagreement as to whether a chunk can be defended or not, they resume play for it, but again that may actually be the worse choice if they are indeed impossible to defend.
The notion of hanging in there to the bitter end and not being a quitter is pretty stupid in Go, all around.
Not really. I don't get a second chance at the couple of hours of redoing since the point when I should have taken some gizmo or did a party member's quest differently. I still have X hours a week to get entertained, and no reloading will give me those back.
And really, I could use them to redo that stupid game, or I could use them to do something more entertaining. If such a more entertaining thing exists that I could dump those hours into, then it's a stupid use of them to dump them into the less entertaining alternative out of just some stupid idea of not being a quitter.
Slashdot Mirror
So a new scare will come by.
See, the original scare of something that's turning children into delinquents was... comic books. Nowadays we'd probably laugh and say it causes at most keeping one's virginity, but in 1954 Fredric Wertham made a whole book out of and massaging dubious anecdotes and flawed logic into "proof" that kids imitate every all those antisocial acts from comic books. Some not even as much actually having anecdotes to show any link, but just reproducing gruesome comic-book panels out of context and providing his own hand-waving that basically you just know that a kid seeing something like that will become some kind of monster.
Or using his own kind of freudian divination to argue that there are hidden sexual images in there. Basically that if you squint just right at a drawing of a tree, you can get a pareidolia kinda of seeing a naked woman in the bark pattern. (And puritan America being still scared shitless that a kid seeing a boob will be the end of the world, you can imagine how much worse that was in 1954.)
And he was a psychiatrist, so if he said something about how the brain works, a lot were only too ready to swallow it without any other evidence or clinical data. Especially if he said what they wanted to hear.
He went even in front of a congressional committee, and actually got those whipped up in a frenzy too.
The comic industry crippled itself with a code of what it can show and what not, and of course America was free of crime ever after and kids grew up upstraight. I kid. Obviosly it made no difference whatsoever.
Not that it made a dent in Wertham's claim, since to him the code was just not enough. And apparently anything short of stopping printing anything even remotely violent would be enough.
After that it's been "satanic" rock music, often supposedly in the form of hidden messages you can hear only when playing it backwards. Never mind that there still is no evidence that the brain can decode such messages at all without actually playing the record backwards. But supposedly makes kids kill, rape and commit suicide anyway.
And then D&D. Now that was a big piece of bullshit. Though it spawned such mildly amusing stupidities as that Chick tract where kids actually get taught real spells when their char gets to a certain level. Yeah, right.
And violent TV shows. And god knows what else.
Video games are just one in such a long list of bullshit scares about the next generation.
So if I'm to take a prediction, when generation Y firmly takes over the world and stops giving two shits about violent games making people evil... it'll promptly get scared shitless about some new thing that generation Z does.
As I keep saying, if people just imitated what they see on the screen, then a chunk of those who grew up with PacMan would be popping pills in the dark to the sound of repetitive music... err... wait a minute ;)
Man, that makes me feel inadequate. They're still trying to sell me Viagra and penis enlargements kits >.
Nah, if it depended on her reactions, it wouldn't be objective any more. And besides, it wouldn't fair to downgrade _my_ rating just because on some days _she_ can't fake quickly enough ;)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." -- Obi Wan, Star Wars Episode IV
That's what I tell the missus. Her anecdotes can't be true, according to my metrics, my sexual performance is not just great, it improved by an order of two in the last 5 years.
Of course, I can't tell you or her what my numbers are, or what I measured, or how, because it's proprietary and a trade secret.
I'm not sure about that. I'm pretty sure one of the admins here has been trying a similar test for the last 10 years or so. albeit in 12 month runs by the looks of it. It's kinda hard not to notice that once a year his hair goes from, pretty much, something almost solidified in a helmet to fluffy and you can tell the pattern on his shirt.
So far he hasn't published anything in a microbiology journal, but I'm sure that when he does, the results of all those twelve-month runs will advance science seriously ;)
Yes, well, I never said that the two are perfectly on par. Analogies are only supposed to illustrate one aspect, not be a 100% equivalence between two things. The only thing perfectly equivalent to MS's monopoly is MS's monopoly, which kinda isn't a very useful analogy.
But in the end we have plenty of other crimes around that don't involve axe murder and we still don't like them. We have the likes of, say, Ken Lay who "only" cooked the books and scammed a bunch of investors. Would it be ok if _those_ got to keep their ill gotten gains and pass for philantropy heroes with the money gained from that scam?
To further and clarify some more on your point:
1. The comparison to chemicals is misleading. There are some chemicals which are simply the brain's normal signals for stuff like "I like this", "this is fun", or basically, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing it."
Some drugs mimic the effect of such normal brain signals, by binding to the same receptors. E.g., THC binds to the same receptors as the canabinoids in the brain, so it creates the same euphoria, without it being actually a normal signal released by the brain. (Whereas nicotine merely inhibits the production of MAO-B, an enzime which neutralizes those canabinoids, so it makes you higher by prolonging the effect of the natural ones.)
So basically it's a signal as normal as, dunno, the interrupts in a computer. You can probably find a reason to say it's wrong to simulate interrupts that never happened as part of the normal operation (e.g., wiring a front switch to the NMI trace on the mobo), but railing against a situation where they happened as intended (as this or the "OMG, games produce dopamine" hysteria) is fucking stupid.
2. Dopamine is _not_ a reward signal, so it doesn't even produce such an euphoria.
Dopamine is a motivation signal. Remember when I said that some signals basically say, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing it"? That's what dopamine does.
Just about anything that is interesting, captivating or fun by itself is producing dopamine. It's just the brain's way of signalling, "heeyy, I like this! please continue this or stay in the current situation, as apropriate."
Even though dopamine does fire up when an unexpected reward happens (as you'd expect), and is a part of the reward and reinforcement functions, it is not itself a reward signal. It doesn't even seem to play any role in perceiving pleasure.
3. A lot of bullshit around dopamine revolves around its use by the brain in such stuff as sex, or that some stimulants like cocaine also increase dopamine, or that very high levels are associated with manias and psychosis. You just need to drop a mention of one or more of those, and everyone is already ready to lap up "OMG, addiction" bullshit.
In reality that's not very surprising. That sex would also fire up a signal that says "don't stop" when that's a reproduction (hence, natural selection) advantage, is actually as expected as it gets. If the animal were likely to just stop in the middle of sex and go "you know, this is actually quite boring, I'll go pounce on something instead", you'd soon have an evolutionary dead end. (Cue "you've met my ex?" wisecracks;) That it would fire up in conjunction with artificial reward signals, when its normal function _is_ to signal "ok, keep doing whatever gave you the reward", is again rather mundane, and rather uninteresting for its use the rest of the time. And that an abnormal level of it would lead to abnormal effects, again, is actually kind of the normal state for any hormone in the body.
4. But at the end of the day, the fact still remains that it's a signal involved in desire/drive/motivation, and in acknowledging reward/pleasure. Whether you actually subscribe to the school of thought that it does or doesn't take part in actually experiencing that pleasure, the fact remains something has to already be pleasant or interesting to cause a dopamine shot.
That some music you like or a video game or watching Star Trek or really whatever enjoyable activity produces a dopamine shot, just says that you do like it.
Just about the only kind of life that would be free from such "intoxication" would be to never experience anything pleasant or any kind of drive/desire. Also, you'd probably have Parkinson. It's not the kind of existence almost anyone actually has, nor the kind of existence anyone would want.
Well, except if it's those evil music/comics/games addicts. Then their having an existence which includes any fun is obviously eeeevil.
And you'll find that a lot of the sociopaths and narcisists at the top of various corporations believe themselves to be superior to the mass of unwashed plebs. Well, they don't do much introspection, though, so I guess there's still a difference.
Actually, you'll find that Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour was very much planned and deliberate. They actually deliberately introduced code to break other programs for example. That's the kind of thing they got on trial for, not just being good at something.
Well, except when that something is "breaking the law to protect a monopoly." They were actually very good at that.
Yes, I'm sure that fans of Palpatine, Lex Luthor and the Joker will have their day ruined by this ;)
Awww ;)
Have you actually RTFA? Because the gizmo there _isn't_ attached to the face, and is a verbatim repeat of everything that was wrong and stupid with the ones that failed, including basically all the factors I've listed, from lag to being unable to get rid of the previously produced smells.
So, sorry, my assessment that it's yet another idiot who thinks he's the first to do the same stupidity, is still very much true. Or to quote everyone's favourite wisecracker, Bejamin Franklin, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Yes, maybe someone else can do it right, but these particular ass-clowns aren't it.
That's got yet another significant difference, though.
The likes of Robin Hood and later Dick Turpin were lionized precisely because of a rise in popular sentiment against the era's equivalent of Bill Gates. Especially in the 18'th and 19'th centuries, as the slow rise of industrialism created a class of people even poorer and more exploited than even the medieval serfs had ever been.
And we're also talking an age when child labour rose to the extent of deliberately planning some mine shafts so they could only fit a child crawling to pull a cart of coal, because, you know, fuck you, it would be too expensive to do that for/with adults. It was an age when the parliament ruled that setting a house on fire with people still in, as a way to kick out them and make room for more pasture land where the hose was, is perfectly within the rights of the owner and in fact it would be a violation of their property rights if you told them not to. (A bit later they relented and did stipulate that you must give them 24 hour notice before doing that, which just drives home the point that before that just showing up with a torch was perfectly ok.)
It was an age where it was ok to "adopt" or even just kidnap a small army of orphans and use them as basically slave labour (no law said you had to pay your children, after all.) Including for some jobs like cleaning under mechanical looms while they're still running, and routinely mangled or scalped one of those children. (Having hair and crawling under fast spinning wheels and shafts kinda produced the results you'd expect.) Or for such delightful jobs as chimney sweep... and just light a fire under them if they don't want to go up the chimney. Etc.
The class who made vast fortunes at the expense of others, and then made public displays of piety and charity with those money, wasn't loved at all by the poor and even middle class.
Any criminal who robbed from the rich -- also giving to the poor was just icing on the cake, rather than a necessary ingredient -- was an instant darling of that mass of discontent poor. And I mean, seriously, forget Robin Hood, they lionized the likes of Dick Turpin which was as base and vile a criminal as it gets. Even with the spiral to the bottom in Hollywood, it's not the kind of guy you'd call even an anti-hero these days, and certainly not the Han Solo kind of lovable rogue. But he robbed from the rich and that was enough.
So that nowdays someone like Bill Gates could pass for a Robin Hood, rather than the villain... is... proof that times have changed a lot, to say the least.
With one important difference: Jean Valjean's fortune isn't a direct result of his crimes. He doesn't get to be the good guy by robbing Paul to give to Peter, no matter how far apart the two events are. Whereas Gates is getting to be the public philantropist hero with money made by breaking the antitrust laws in the '90's.
You know, I can't shake the feeling that I've read that kind of argumentation before. Is it ok to do something evil, just because then you'll use (some of) the ill gotten gains to do something good? Oh, right, that's Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment".
Turns out that in America you can actually be admired for being a modern day Raskolnikov.
It also turns out that you don't even have to do all that soul-searching and all, either.
Well, it's not that hard to be more admired than the head of an organization that's gotten lots of attention for paedophilia and child abuse lately -- not to mention such revelations like they were running glorified slave camps even in the west and in the 20'th century, see the Magdalene asylums in Ireland -- not to mention the revelation that said head of the organization was personally involved in covering up the paedophilia incidents. Add such stuff as his telling places in Africa that have an AIDS pandemic to not use condoms, and the like. And really, I'm surprised that the Pope has any respect at all.
I think even for most devout Catholics he's more like the guy who unfortunately happens to be at the head of their church for the moment, than a shining example of sainthood.
So, really, being more admired than the Pope is a bit like being more admired than Kim Jong Il ("president" of N. Korea.) Even if technically true, it doesn't really say much.
Add the fact that Bill Gates does get some genuine admiration from a lot of people, ranging from those who only heard that he "made" Windows and Word and of his charity stunts, to apologists of ruthless unregulated capitalism for whom breaking the rules and making a monopoly actually kinda makes one a hero. Which again, is actually more than the current Pope has to show as a claim to fame or infamy.
1. Don't worry much. This is one of the ideas that's been popping up again and again since the early 90. And every time it went nowhere, precisely because the awful downsides are that obvious and nobody wants it.
But, as is the case with stupid ideas, just as you think you buried it at the crossroads with a stake through its chest, never to rise again, along comes an idiot investor and drops a drop of blood... err... a wad of cash, and it does rise again. I'm seriously starting to think there's some Dunning-Kruger explanation to it. There must be a sweet spot of ignorance and stupidity where one can look at such an idea that was possible actually for many years, just too stupid to sell to anyone, and genuinely think "well, nobody did it only because they're not THE UBER-GENIUS like me!"
2. And the problems are even bigger than just getting to smell the mandatory sewer levels, or have the olfactory realism in the more than one quest to search through shit in WoW, and so on. Off the top of my head:
- it's unreliable, if anything depends on it. With other senses, you can kinda depend that most players won't be temporarily blind or deaf. By comparison having cold that makes your nose useless, or an allergy, or just being a smoker, or whatever, is quite common.
- MAJOR lag. Unless you literally gas the room with that smell, it depends on air currents and such to propagate. You're not going to experience stepping into a meadow full of flowers in real time. You step into that room and... 2-3 minutes later you actually start to notice the smell from your computer's gizmo. At which point you're actually out of it.
- smells don't dissipate that readily. With, say, sound, when you stop playing it, it stopped. With smells, well, that's why you need kitchen fans and generally ventilation. If you just cooked something, the room will smell like it for a long time. Ditto for any smells such a gizmo would produce.
- strong smells tend to be unpleasant, no matter what they are. (Just remember the last time some lady stunk the whole bus of some perfume that in moderation might have been even pleasant.) Unless you actually also analyse the air continuously and/or actively filter the old smells out, just keeping dumping more of that in the air can accumulate and become nasty even if it's just smelling of flowers and strawberries.
- because of the above factors, it's actually more likely to produce an olfactory cacophony. An average hour of playing, say, City Of Heroes, sees me popping through the sewers, going through some park, flying over the smoke stacks of the factories in King's Row, etc. Since smells tend to stick around for a while, you'll end up with a mixture of all those that not only isn't realistic for any of those areas, it's unlikely to be a particularly pleasant mix no matter what the components are.
Having more than one gamer going at it in the house, will only make it even worse.
- smells tend to stick in clothes, carpets, etc, for a while. That's another reason why people turn on the fan, use filters and/or open the window when cooking, instead of just letting the whole house soak in it. Even without the obvious stuff like going to work smelling like shit after doing those WoW quests, it's one more factor to create an unwanted olfactory cacophony.
- allergies. I don't know of anyone who has an actual allergy to light, but real allergies to the chemicals that constitute any given smell, are actually not very uncommon.
Etc.
3. But yeah, that's even assuming that nobody would pull a realistic sewer level, nor a goatse/rickrolling to some clip of them doing a nasty fart, nor write some virus that makes such a device put out a continuous smell of shit at full power, etc. In practice, I'd expect such things to be more of a given than the exception. The same kind of idiot who posts a goatse link, now will likely do it with smell too.
But, oh well... as I was saying, I still wouldn't worry much. This will die a silent death like all the others before it, and likely the only inconvenience will be reading the exact same stupid idea in 2-3 years again, from yet another idiot who thinks he's so smart that he's the first to think that up.
As opposed to the current kind of population on some of those sites, which has ridiculous numbers of accounts that are anywhere between those of people who've been inactive for ages and just plain old bogus accounts created by staff members, and (as in the lawsuit against Match.com) even periodically use romantic come-ons from such accounts to make lonely people stick around?
I think my biggest LOL moment was when one ad for some site showed me a picture of porn actress Gianna Michaels as one of the girls looking for sex in my area. I mean, somehow I wish I could believe that she moved to Germany and is actually looking for a random fuck on the Internet in addition to what she gets during her job, but I somehow doubt that.
For some sites out there actually having 20% people who _can_ be contacted and actually answer, even if they're fat, ugly and mean, would actually be an improvement.
It's even more perverse than that, even if you assume that all kids answered 100% truthfully and objectively. (Yeah, right.)
Let's say you ask a few thousands people how many miles they drove in the last year. Then you ask something like "did a bird ever crap on your windshield while driving?" That conditional right there is what you can do a pseudo-correlation for morons with. Of course the guys who drove only 1000 miles will be a lot less likely to say "yes" than the ones who drove 100,000 miles. So, there we go, we just proved that driving causes crap on your windshield. QED.
That's exactly what that kind of questions does in the survey too.
They don't actually establish that those "addicts" actually skip chores more than other kids, for example. The only thing that is asked is if that ever happened in conjunction with video games. Of course those who play more hours are more likely to say "yes", even without needing any other correlation involved. Even if they were perfectly uncorrelated, you'd still be looking at P(X)*P(Y), which goes up as P(X) goes up. It's just to be expected.
A more perverse effect is that you can use that forced conditional to associate anything with anything.
E.g., questions boiling down to "have you skipped homework in conjunction with X" or "have you done X while depressed" can show a false correlation between any X and bad school performance. A child more likely to skip homework or more depressed is likely to have poorer results in school, whatever activity X may be. Whether it's gaming or not. It could be walking, reading books, or playing with the cat, or whatever.
Whatever that activity X may be, what remains is that you found a sub-group of kids who do one or more of skipping homework, not studying for tests, etc, and some may also be depressed too. Of course they'll do worse in school than the larger mass of kids who aren't selected for those traits.
Essentially now we're seeing the effect of P(Y) on that P(X)*P(Y). Those with a higher P(X)*P(Y) are likely to have a higher P(Y) too. By choosing enough activities Y1, Y2, Y3, etc, with a bad effect on kids' grades, you can make it sound like you're seeing the effects on X on grades, but really you just selected a group likely to do all those bad things.
I mean, you could do a similar trick for making anything else sound bad. E.g., let's say I want to prove that listening to music while driving is bad. Lemme see:
- were you fined for speeding while listening to music?
- did you run a red light while listening to music?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to calm down when angry at another driver?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to stay awake on very long trips?
Etc.
So first I do such a list of, let's call them "music addicts" and then I can objectively show that that group is more likely to cause accidents and costs insurance more money, so, you know, maybe music in cars is a bad thing. But in reality I didn't show that. I just selected a sub-group of those that have one or more problems like routinely speeding, running red lights, driving while extremely tired, and getting road rage. And of course they'll be more likely to have accident than the group which wasn't selected for those traits. Whether there is any correlation between music and doing those things, I didn't actually prove it. The only connection was in imposing a bias in those who can say "yes".
Same for the kids in the study. Any correlation between their group and grades is pretty much tautological.
In fact, I'd say that they have to do the intermediate step of that survey is what should have been a red flag to people. If there is actually a correlation between gaming and either school performance or mental problems, such a survey would have been unneeded. Then you could just use the first set of questions and correlate number of hours played to grades. That they must do such a "have you done things that might indicate depression or lower your grades, in conjunction with gaming" survey and then correlate that result with... depression and lower grades, is the whole sleight of hand right there.
As someone else already mentioned, they hadn't even proven mental problems. The whole thing is a survey which depends on exactly how accurate those people self-assessed (e.g., I can see how depressed people would be more likely to blame themselves than those who aren't depressed), and largely circular logic anyway. The survey is largely of the form, if you answered "yes" to 5 of 10 questions to the effect of "did you ever do X to avoid Y" then you're an addict to X, without any attempt at distinguishing "too much" or "to the extent of affecting one's school performance" or anything.
They took pretty much a list of what kids _do_, and slapped "to play games" next to them, and defined that as a problem, while the same without games was obviously not a problem and not even asked about. The real common denominator there is "video games are bad", and it's a mental problem only because they say so.
Even if someone could argue that _some_ of the things they asked about are bad if you do them too much or regularly (like skipping homework) -- but I don't see them trying to establish if that's the case -- others are pretty much stuff that a catch-all and far from being necessarily a problem. I'd like to see anyone who can say with a straight face that they never had anything that can count as "bad feelings" or that they never resorted to something more fun instead of dwelling on them. Sure, "playing games to make bad feelings go away" lets one paint their own mental image of some terminally depressed kid who has no other escape from some horrible feelings, but someone could answer "yes" to that for just, dunno, playing a game (or reading a book or whatever) because they're bored or lonely when the parents are away, or just when having an occasional bad day, like everyone has now and then.
They don't actually either establish addiction _or_ mental problems, except for an audience which is already prepared to go "OMG addiction" if anyone's idea of a more fun time includes video games at all.
I mean, I was a kid myself. At that age you don't understand why those adults insist that you should sit through boring maths classes (I could do maths very well, but I hated it anyway) or history classes (which, as I discovered later could even be great fun if it weren't turned into rote memorizations of dates and places in school) or geography classes (I mean, in history at least something happens, but geography just lies there anyway) and the like. An the argument that you'll regret not doing it when you'll be in your mid 20's is kinda moot when we're talking about a date as far in the future as 3 times your total life span so far, and time perception for kids is proven to be dilated. It seemed like, dunno, telling you that you must do something today or there will be consequences some 200 years in the future. Fuck that, it's like an eternity away.
Of course I tried to skip school or skip chores and do something more fun, even before there was a computer around in my parents' home.
In fact, you could substitute computer with "cat" in their kind of questionnaire, and I'd have to answer truthfully that:
- I had sometimes skipped chores to play with the cat
- I sometimes skipped homework to play with the cat
- I could have done better in an exam or test or two if I hadn't played with the cat (mom still tells everyone about when she thought I was learning for an important exam and then she finds me playing with the cat under the table in my room)
- If I'm to go all introspective about it, I could honestly I sometimes played with the cat to avoid some bad feelings that are undefined enough to include just about anything (e.g., boredom or loneliness. Pets are great against both.)
Etc. I mean, I don't even know their whole list of questions, but I batted 4 out of 4 questions that are mentioned in the Reuters article. That's a 100% score, right?
OMG, cat addict. Right?
But somehow I didn't grow up to raise 100 cats in my flat and snort furballs instead of going to work, or anything, and I haven't attacked anyone with a cat either. It didn't even cause me to flunk anything in school.
Maybe, but I don't get the impression that the survey actually delved into that kind of details.
The question wasn't if you've played games to the point that you have to be dragged kicking and screamin to do homework or any chores, but rather whether you've done it at all. Which, yes, glosses over that important difference.
Actually, it seems to me you illustrate an even bigger problem.
The way I remember it, a correlation in statistics (as opposed to the usual "I have a couple of anecdotes and watch me leap to a conclusion") involve looking at the covariance of two variables vs their normal distribution for _both_ variables. Even in binary terms, you'd have to look at the set of people who, say, do bad in school, people who play games, and the intersection. Though a more useful correlation would look at something like SAT grades vs hours played, or some such.
And even then, you know, actual measured variables than someone's self-assessment. See for example Dunning Krueger for one problem with self-assessments.
Basically you don't have to look at just how many people skipped school for gaming, but basically at whether you're seeing more than the product of two unrelated probabilities. The relevant question is, basically, are people who play video games more likely to skip school than those who don't?
What I'm getting at is that asking "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" without also asking "have you ever skipped school?" is pretty worthless. A questionnaire like yours which asks, or _also_ asks, about the distribution of that variable without the conditional, would actually be a better exercise.
IOW, asking just "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" will produce a semblance of a correlation just because there is no way to say, "does it count if I skipped school to smoke behind the school instead?" It's like asking "have you ever masturbated in the bathroom?" and concluding that bathrooms cause masturbation. It's not a real covariance if they're together simply because the question is phrased to only allow a "yes" if they appear together.
I'm not getting even that from the article. I was hoping I'd go there and see some serious (if possibly misguided) attempts at innovation, but it turns out that at least half of them were never meant to be more than a scam in the first place.
The Peep guy for example seems to be a character who made a surrealistic string of companies punting surrealistic and often blatantly impossible products, especially where there were grant money to be won, but never actually had more of a product than some faked videos and sleight of hand tricks like peeling the logo off a fob and showing it as their super range-boosting gizmo for phones. He's gone through everything including impossible flying cars before. No, seriously. And actually seems to have gotten a huge grant for that too.
After following the link to more info about him (yeah, I know, I'll hand in my nerd card now for reading even more than TFA;) I just ended up having more respect for the dot-con bubble guys, or the likes of those behind the Phantom console, or that guy faking being almost there with a flying car for the last couple of decades. At least those stuck with a scam longer, which, if nothing else, takes chutzpah. This guy seems to average more than one scam company a year, and actually goes for several per such scam idea looking for funding.
In all fairness, I'm happier to know that money is locked up by the major players, than given to such scammers.
Actually, no, that's false. Virtually _all_ Go games end in recognizing that there's no point in continuing.
Another thing that separates the newbies from those who have at least minimal clue is to recognize when the only smart move is not to play. Yeah, you may recognize that from the movie Wargames, but it's also how Go works. It's very valid to just pass your turn, to _not_ make a move at all, if it's actually more disadvantageous to make one.
A Go game ends when both don't want to make a move any more, even if often that means one of them being fully aware they're conceding defeat. Just because continuing would at best achieve nothing, and at worst just increase the opponent's score some more.
Then you move to scoring, which again consists of both players conceding whole chunks that they consider impossible to defend. Yeah, sure, that group of my pieces are dead even if they didn't get removed from the table, just add the whole chunk to your score. If there is a disagreement as to whether a chunk can be defended or not, they resume play for it, but again that may actually be the worse choice if they are indeed impossible to defend.
The notion of hanging in there to the bitter end and not being a quitter is pretty stupid in Go, all around.
Not really. I don't get a second chance at the couple of hours of redoing since the point when I should have taken some gizmo or did a party member's quest differently. I still have X hours a week to get entertained, and no reloading will give me those back.
And really, I could use them to redo that stupid game, or I could use them to do something more entertaining. If such a more entertaining thing exists that I could dump those hours into, then it's a stupid use of them to dump them into the less entertaining alternative out of just some stupid idea of not being a quitter.
Hmm. Good question. Still, both seem to love that kind of twist, so the point is kinda moot.