The solution is obvious! Paint all male models with a bra on. That way, if some kid swaps the male texture for the female one, they'll be foiled. Of course, then someone's 4 ft wide barbarian with a huge beard will also wear a bra, but that's a small price to pay to keep kids safe from, god forbid, seeing a female breast.
Yes, I know, I've just single-handedly saved the industry. All in a day's work.
First of all, yes, there is blood in Oblivion and occasionally blood skidmarks as the corpse is thrown back by the Havok engine.
But also try stuff like this:
- decayed corpses in cages, corpses hanged over a flame, corpses hanged from ropes (sometimes with a kicked chair underneath, meaning the bugger was alive when he got hanged), a burning corpse looking like he tried crawling out of a lava pool right in the very first oblivion gate. Skeletons in spiked cages. I'm told there's even one with a tiny skeleton inside it, presumably a pregnant woman was left to die in that cage. People or corpses in cages whose bottom you can open and let them fall on some spikes below. Etc.
- the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest arc was already mentioned, so lemme detail a bit more: they hanged the bugger upside down and gutted him like sardine. Alive. Literally. The fresh corpse is basically hollowed. They'll even talk about it.
- towards the end of the Figher's Guild quest arc you get to experience getting drugged out of your mind, and in that hallucinating state going and slaughtering a whole village of innocents, including going in each and every single house and slaughtering every single villager.
- heck, if blood was bad, you can also set people on fire and watch them running around burning. (Try enchanting your bow for maximum fire damage, for example, watch people bursting in bright flames every time they get hit by an arrow. Or make a potion of fire damage and "poison" your arrow with it, same effect.)
- torturing people. Spoiler warning, btw. In one quest along the main line you get to explore a madman's "paradise". In fact, it's closer to our idea of "hell", and one section has people in cages in or over lava. And you can play with the levers to lower them into the lava, or raise them out of it. In the previous section you get to watch people be hunted by demons for sport, and you get one quest to free an even nastier demon and sic it on them.
That's just off the top of my head. Basically I'd say it's a _very_ gruesome game at times, not a super happy fun escapade through flower-filled meadows where deer bounce around.
So _if_ violence is considered a reason to keep kids from playing a game, then, yes, I fail to see why this game wasn't M to start with.
Re:I've been wondering about that too
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Sims the New Dolls?
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· Score: 3, Informative
"A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female."
I am, in fact, male. I do however try to compare various human cultures, instead of rationalizing "why my culture is right (biologically predetermined, god-given, bla, bla, bla), and yours is wrong". It's just anthropology, one of the social sciences, and the purpose is to find out what humans do, not to make little girls feel better.
And if you look at what hundreds of cultures do, world-wide, instead of idealizing your own, you start to find pretty much no common denominator. The ways humans behave, organize themselves, what they idealize, what they pose as, etc, vary _massively_ across time and space, and in some cases you can find complete opposites taken for granted by different people at different times.
The problem with most such rationalizing one's own culture is that they're a bit of a tunnel view. Everyone looks just at people from the same country, maybe even just the same town, and sees them all doing the same thing. And draws the false conclusion that that's what _all_ humans do, and obviously that's the biological/god-given/whatever way.
It's like a Japanese guy looking around him and deciding that all humans world-wide are 5.5 ft tall and have slanted eyes and black hair. That's how god or the evolution intended humans to be. There are obviously no blacks, no red-heads, no 6 ft tall swedish blonde girls, because he personally hasn't seen any in his home town. Or if he eventually sees one, he'll decree that it must be some disease ("hormonal imbalance" maybe?) that caused that poor man to be black or have red hair. Surely there can be no country or continent where that's "normal".
To get back to the point, yes, the greek culture was very different from hours, in more than one way, but that's actually the whole point: humans can be educated to view radically different things as normal. They were educated to view the females with _small_ breasts as beautiful, and, no, if you gave them the same choices, they wouldn't have chosen the same one you'd choose.
Yes, they had a bit different views on homosexuality too. That's just the point: people raised in a different culture can view different things as "normal", "repulsive", or whatever. They didn't need to find "they must have some hormone imbalance" euphemisms for "well, I find that abnormal". They just weren't educated to find that abnormal.
In fact, I'll up the ante there. Forget the greeks. IIRC, there was (is?) at least one tribe, I think in Oceania, where homosexuality and paedophilia were considered the _right_ way. The local myths was that a young man can't produce his own sperm until he's basically acquired it orally from a grown up man. Tribal customs also pretty much dictated, presumably to keep population low, that most sex happened between men.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending those cultures or anything. I'm just saying they exist. Nothing more. The whole point is just that it's learned behaviour. Educate a bunch of people that homosexuality is the right way, and you get 100% of a tribe's males having mostly homosexual sex.
The fact is, humans are a very programmable animal. Yes, we all have biological signals, like getting hungry or horny, but we're all very able to control them. (You don't see people humping in the streets whenever they get horny, nor shitting on the sidewalk like dogs when they felt a need to shit.) That's biology, but it doesn't really control humans that much.
What comes on top of that is a set of learned behaviours. There are thousands of little rituals in everyone's day that have nothing to do with biology. There was nothing of evolution importance that said, for example, to bring your girlfriend flowers or to wear a suit and tie to a job interview. (If anything, most animals would try to get rid of a rope around their neck, not make it a thing of pride and fashion.) You learn what clothes to wear to be fashionable, what kind of girlfriend to look for, again to be fashionable
I've been wondering about that too
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Sims the New Dolls?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sometimes I wonder how much of human behaviour isn't as much "growing up" as groupthink. Trying to act as they think the group expects a grown up to act. My guess is that most of it is just that: groupthink.
And dolls are just a particular case of it all. Other examples include:
- girls moving from childhood dreams of becoming a scientist or a teacher to... pretending to be a completely retarded airhead, because that's what's popular in nowadays' broken culture. (Showing any interest for science would make one, like, a nerd. And that's sooo unfashionable.)
And here's what makes me wonder about that: in the Soviet block, for whatever other faults they had, they promoted a culture where being smart and educated, being a part of the "inteligentsia", was _good_. And what do you know? Girls could show interest in maths, physics, chemistry, etc, too, and that system produced almost equal quantities of male and female scientists or programmers. Some pretty damn good ones too. (Again, I'm not saying it was a good system or necessarily a good culture. Just that it was proof that, when trying to fit in a different kind of group, girls _can_ use a computer or do maths.)
- guys learning that they have to act all macho and aggressive and be obsessive about Real Man stuff, like football or cars.
And here's the thing that makes me think it's not as much "testosterone" as learning to behave like what the group expects a testosterone-soaked macho man to behave: the bushmen. Funny little culture, that, in that they don't seem to have discovered fighting each other, dominating each other and generally being more macho than thou. Or maybe it's just that life in that area is hard enough even without that kind of thing. At any rate, their culture is about _cooperating_ with the Joneses, rather than trying to humble them. So all their conflicts are sold peacefully, or if two just can't stand each other, one will move to another tribe.
Or here's another funny example: there was a documentary at some point (take it with a grain of salt, as with any media documentary, but still...) featuring a town in Italy where the culture was such, that a macho and potent man was pretty much expected to have a mistress. So they interviewed among others one guy who was obviously smart enough to realize it, and admitted that he's happily married and loves his wife, but... he just had to get a mistress or the other men would think he's impotent or something.
- for that matter, guys learning that they must be obsessive about thin women with huge breasts. (A biological improbability. Within the normal parameter of a human, someone with extremely few body fat will also have less fat in that area, i.e., small breasts.)
It may seem like there must be some biological reason, since it's _the_ norm in our culture. But the funny thing is that other cultures had _massively_ different ideals of beauty. E.g., the Greeks and Romans liked _small_ breasts. Look at the greek statues, they're A cup or so. The Romans went one step further. They are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but what they really invented was a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to _hide_ them. They really liked their women as flat as an ironing board.
Other cultures, in fact _most_ cultures, liked their women fat. In some parts of the world the introduction of the western thin woman ideal is actually very recent, as in, the last decades of the 20'th century. There have been articles about women and young girls in those parts ending up with severe nutrition problems as they attempted to switch from one image to another fast.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically that's that funny thing: pretty much any behaviour you take for granted looking around in your culture -- and even has its apologists proclaiming it biological or god-given -- other cultures can have something else, or the exact opposite. "Growing up" to do them is just enculturation (learning to act and think as your culture expects you to), rather than anything having to do with brain or body evolutiont.
As a programmer I write macros and functions and objects all the time too, but:
- I do not find them appealing in inter-human communications. Sure, I can understand their use in some situations where time is of critical importance (e.g., "pull", "regroup", "heal please" macros in combat), but that's about it. If talking to anyone -- regardless of whether it's on a board, MUD, IRC, whatever -- if the bulk of someone's communication was cut-and-pasted phrases, or macros to the same effect, I'd quickly find that person very boring and uninteresting to talk to.
- Repeated text, macroed or otherwise, does not good prose make. Read your favourite fantasy novel and imagine that all the battle scenes were replaced by loops MUD-like automated text:
YOU slash a A Scrawny Goblin for 5 points of damage. YOU pierce a A Scrawny Goblin for 4 point of damage. A Scrawny Goblin's punch hits you for 9 point of damage. YOU slash a A Scrawny Goblin for 3 points of damage. YOU pierce a A Scrawny Goblin for 6 point of damage. A Scrawny Goblin's punch hits you for 12 point of damage. A Scrawny Goblin attempts to flee! YOU slash a A Scrawny Goblin for 4 points of damage. YOUR pierce MISSES a A Scrawny Goblin! A Scrawny Goblin attempts to flee! A Scrawny Goblin is dead! YOU earn 31 experience points. YOU loot a squeaky codpiece and 5 gold from the corpse of A Scrawny Goblin.
It would be one very boring book. The sheer unimaginative repetition would get mind-numbing. Which is why good novels don't do that. They find some new and descriptive way of describing each slash, dodge and feint, or skip describing them altogether.
The same applies to role-playing. People who think they're T3H L33T ROL3PL4Y3RZ because they're spamming with fixed texts each time they click on a power, are actually crap role-players and end up just annoying instead of cool or interesting. The first time you see someone's "Moraelin kneels before his holy symbol and prays for the spell of Cure Light Wounds." emote before healing as a paladin, it's cool. The 12'th time you see it, before every single heal, it's annoying.
And the same goes for sex. If anyone tried writing an erotic novel the same way as the goblin fight is described above, I'd venture a guess that it wouldn't actually sell well. And assuming that Bartle's intention for it was to appeal to women in the same kind of way an erotic novel does, then... dunno, I can't predict if it would turn anyone on, but at the very least I can say it would be _very_ different from one of those novels.
There was a joke that went something like this: "One-shot case study: a study made on a single test subject, from which it is concluded that all clovers have four leaves."
Point in case: yeah, so your new character created on an empty server still has no problems. Whop-de-freakin'-do. Big surprise that. Mine had no problems after a week either.
Skip forward a month or two, and the server was already full to the brim. Yay for 30 minutes waiting in a queue. Well, ok, that still worked. Then it was occasionally 1 or 2 hours waiting in a fucking queue. Let me tell you, that had started to suck heap plenty, as my tribal shaman would say. And then some more.
Seeing that other new realms were still empty, didn't help the morale either. Sure, lemme move there, then. Nope, sorry, Blizzard didn't consider my server full enough yet to allow a transfer.
Skip some time forward and some RL friends join WoW too. They can't create their characters on the server I was on, because it's full. (And honestly, with the unholy time spent in the queue, I wouldn't have advised them to start there.) So they start somewhere else. And Blizzard _still_ doesn't allow me to copy my existing character there.
Apparently the server is still not full enough, their page would have me believe, as I play Solitaire and with Thottbot's talent planner, to pass the time while I wait in the queue.
OK, wth, then I'll kiss my existing characters and guild goodbye and start new ones on that server. Skip two months forward and it's full too. Watch me wait 30 minutes in a queue again.
Yes, it's a good game and all, but queues and stability issues _aren't_ fun. They're at best an annoying price we have to pay to get to the actual game. It does say something that people are willing to pay that price, but annoying it still is.
So generalizing that because your one-week-old character is still ok, then surely everyone else is just evil and demonizing Blizzard... heh. Get a clue. It's like saying that since a one-week old ballpoint pen still has ink, surely noone else ever ran out of ink for theirs. Surely all those "refills" are just a myth created by evil people demonizing the pen manufacturers.
As for the utterly irrelevant and incoherent rest of your rant... heh. I'm not even going to be polite about it. I don't know what kind of a psychiatric condition (ADHD maybe?) would cause one to run amok through irrelevant rants about UO PKers and all the way to rants about Stallman when starting at server stability. Unable to just follow a simple train of thought, or just desperate for straw men?
Trust me, virtually noone on WoW gives a shit about bnetd or Stallman, nor whether corporations are good and evil, and I certainly don't. Maybe those in the Linux section of/. care about that kinda ideologic crusades, but the vast majority of WoW players couldn't care less. We just care about playing the fucking game, that's all. Anything that lets me play the game is good, anything that keeps me tied (like a medieval serf) to a realm where queues run amok, isn't good. That's all.
Or to put it otherwise, if, in your own words, you don't want to hear about bnetd coders and Stallman's crusades, then don't be the one starting about them. It's that simple, really.
So in a nutshell, that's the best straw-man you can pull to justify your "it's just evil people demonizing Blizzard!!!" troll rant, you're not even funny. You're preaching to the wrong group. If you're going to use a straw man, at least please do your research and pull a fitting one.
I'm wondering if that article is some elaborate form of trolling, or what. Even _if_ someone bought a game just to "cyber" (sad as it may be), if I put on my thinking cap and try to think about it with a straight face, it seems like a collection of bad ideas and missing the point by a mile.
E.g., his #1 reason for text-based sex is that it's free form... then he mentions implementing it as a modification of the combat system. WTF? There goes "free form" right out the window.
E.g., his #3 reason is that women prefer their sex in text form. Yes, that means novels and stories, not some automatized spam. I'm not sure if even any guy would actually get off on replacing MUD combat with some spam of "You thrust your tool in." and "You pull your tool out." If anything, just thinking about some automated macro there seems to me a major turn off.
Also I don't know what studies he's read there, because all that _I've_ read points at women being put off by "R U A GRL??? WANNA CYBER???" kids in online games. It pops up again and again as the reason why they're playing a male character.
(Oh, yes, there are women playing online games all right. But the funny thing is, the naked elf chick dancing in the Stormwind fountain probably isn't a RL woman. Chances are higher that the dwarf male with the beard down to his knees or the massive tauren male with a huge mallet are the RL women.)
Basically I can hardly believe that this is the same guy who had the insight to describe the types of MUD players, or create the first MUD in the first place. Oh yes, I can believe that he's seen plenty of cybering on his MUD. Can give one the idea of just making a game around that. But then, didn't they have meetings of MUD players and such? Might give one suspicions when the only ones that show up and are female (again, yes, they did exist) are the ones who weren't playing a virtual prostitute.
IMHO the whole situation also exists because of a massive dose of public hypocrisy.
Take 1000 people separately, on their own, and you might notice that they _are_, after all, capable of thinking for themselves. Make a town or "community" out of them, and groupthink happens. Watch them shout against X or pro Y or swear that they'd never even consider Z, just because that's what they think the group opinion is. Even if taken separately they couldn't care less about X, or don't find Y that great, in a group they'll try to be the ones who shout the loudest, because that way lies being a fashionable upstanding member of the community.
And I'm not going to single any one nation, because hypocrites happen everywhere. People are people all over the globe.
But to stick to this particular topic, in America the hypocrisy of the century is about sex and religion. Guns are cool, being a violent "gangsta" is way cool (ever listened to Rap in the last decade?), but sex or nudity? OMG!!! THE HORROR!!! JESUS CHRIST SAVE US!!!
That includes not only why seeing a boob warrants Mature or AO, but braining people with a crowbar is Teen. This also includes why the industry is so scared of applying a M label on a game in America. Because of hypocrites. Including the likes of Wal Mart who'll refuse selling a M game because "OMG, IT COULD BE PORN!!! WE DON'T WANT THAT AS OUR CORPORATE IMAGE!!!" And including the many John Does who are basically all like "OMG, I CAN'T BE SEEN BUYING A M OR AO RATED GAME!!! PEOPLE MIGHT THINK I'M BUYING PORN!!!"
See all the outrage and "chilling effect" demagogy whenever someone proposes that more games get a M label, or that the label be made bigger. Invariably at the heart of the long tirade is something like "OMG!!! IF THE LABEL IS BIGGER, PEOPLE WILL SEE ME BUYING AN M GAME!!! THEY'LL THINK I BOUGHT PORN!!!" Yep, it's hypocrisy all right. It's not about whether they want to buy the game or not, but god forbid that it might affect their fake image of upstanding pillars of the community.
See, the funny thing is, nowhere else than in America that particular association happens. E.g., around here GTA games had a big 18+ rating and some stores (e.g., Saturn) put them in red plastic boxes. (So presumably the cashier would know to look at who's buying it, when they opened the box for you.) So everyone saw you taking a red plastic box to the cashier. It had no chilling effect, and noone made the association that it might be porn. But try even proposing something like that in America, and you get a whole "chilling effect" tirade, along the lines of "OMG!!! PEOPLE MIGHT THINK I'M BUYING PORN THEN!!!"
Again, I'm not saying that other parts of the world don't have their hypocrites, but each one's hypocrisy of the century is different. The American one is pretending to be horrified by breasts or anything even vaguely associated with sex. And god help you if you don't pretend to be horrified by the very idea of it.
See, grasshopper, the ESRB isn't the enemy. The ESRB is a sort of reaction of the industry against an external attack. Because, make no mistake, the industry is under attack.
See, there's a lot of political capital in bravely fighting off a bogus but very visible threat. So there are a lot of demagogue politicians (think not only of top level figures like Lieberman, but also at local levels, lobby levels, and "non-political" organizations), two-bit media hacks, and parasitic lawyers jumping on any such target like sharks on a bloody piece of meat. And there are some trained sharks out there. They can smell the blood in the water even in homoeopathic quantities.
It's been so for a while. For example, long before video games even _existed_, politicians were savaging comics and presenting them as the great Satan that turns innocent kids into savage mass-murderers, rapists, etc. And then it was, in no particular order, tabletop games, music, movies, etc. And now it's video games. There's a lot of political capital in attacking video games.
And the main thrust of attack is invariably: "think of the children!!!" It's invariably been that somehow children are deceived into buying something inapropriate. Invariably the "villain" (be it a cartoonist, a rock musician or an overworked game developper) is presented as lurking sinister in the shadows, luring unsuspecting children into his spider web. Invariably it's painted as if little Billy thinks he's buying a Mickey Mouse comic or Barbie video game, but *WHAM* those dastardly villains gave him something that'll mind-control him into sacrificing all his classmates to Satan.
And games make a particularly good target there, because despite the statistics saying stuff like "the average gamer is 30", it's easy to present them as something that's by definition for kids. Once you've hand-waved that in, the rest is much easier. After that, by definition any game containing any kind of nudity, violence, etc, is obviously a devious attempt to peddle that kind of thing to the children.
The ESRB isn't the enemy, it's the industry's _defense_ to that attack. (As incompetent a defense as it may be at times.) The ESRB is the industry's way of being able to retort "well, fuck off. We wrote right on the box that it's a bloody gory game and it's not for pre-schoolers. We even told people where to look for that label. What more do you want? Blood?"
And for that to work, the ESRB _must_ basically overshoot. The sharks would _love_ to have even one single game that was labelled lower than its content warrants. Look at the media circus that happened about the GTA mod. (Even there, the ESRB were _not_ the ones that started it. They just reacted to the attack.) And make no mistake, that was a mod too. Now imagine what those scumbag politicians would do with a game where inapropriate content is available in the game as bought.
So again, the ESRB _must_ overshoot. If there's as little as two characters slapping each other, the ESRB _must_ have "Violence" written on the box. If two characters as little as kiss each other (and I don't even mean some particularly hot tongue-sucking two-hands-under-her-blouse kinda kiss), the ESRB _must_ have "Sexual Themes" written on the box. (Point in case, "The Sims" had both written on the box, and before the expansion packs slapping or occasionally kissing were _all_ a sim could do in both aspects.) Because, again, otherwise the consequences could be a lot worse.
So, no, if there's someone I'm disgusted with, it's the hypocrites that are the cause of it all, not with ESRB.
Regardless of how those textures got there, the semantics of it are sorta like this:
1. There's the game as you bought it, and it doesn't show any nipples.
2. You download a mod which, regardless of HOW, replaces the bra texture with a skin and nipple texture.
Exactly what difference does it make where that texture was? If the mod was 100k larger to include its own textures, would that have prohibited anyone from downloading it? Well, no. Would an extra 100k have made the parent pay more attention to what little Billy is playing? Hah.
Or does anyone imagine that if the game shipped without that texture, someone else wouldn't have painted it? It's been done before for countless games which _didn't_ include nipple textures, and which in fact had the bra as an integral part of the texture. So what? It didn't stop anyone from recolouring that area, or swapping in a naked texture from another game.
So exactly what conceptual difference does it make? Why is it ok to have a naked mod for The Sims 2 or Morrowind or (don't laugh) SWG, but not in Oblivion? It's still something you have to explicitly search for, download and install, not something you can discover by accident.
If it was a case of "Oops, I bought this "Test Clothes" from a vendor hidden in a valley, and now my character is naked", _then_ I'd understand it. Well, ok, then it would be something that people (kids or otherwise) could stumble upon in the game as it was shipped. But that wasn't the case.
So let me tell you what it really is: idiotic hypocrisy. That's all. Bunch of retards trying to look more moralistic and puritan than the Joneses. "*GASP* You mean those nasty game developpers were playing with naked textures? Why, the evil perverts... let's punish them! Let's gather an outraged mob with pitchforks and torches!" That's all there is to it. A bunch of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) and prom queens trying to be fashionably outraged, when they think it's fashionable to be outraged.
Groupthink is a funny thing. Or as Terry Pratchett once wrote, the IQ of a mob equals that of the most stupid member divided by the number of members. It's funny how whole towns or whole countries can be such a mob. Take a bunch of people who, taken individually, have nothing against X or pro Y, put them in a group where they think it's fashionable to be pro Y and against X, and watch them try to be the ones who scream the loudest against X and pro Y. Just to fit in the perceived group standards.
In this case, the perceived standard (at least in huge areas of the USA, but not only) is that to be a fashionable pillar of the community you have to be fashionably outraged by nudity, sex, etc. Watch the bunch of hypocrites try to outdo each other in being outraged of it.
Welcome to the Real World. See, you don't make that much money with just one replaceable product (i.e., a commodity), no matter how good it is. Someone else soon makes a better or cheaper one. Even if it's a piss-poor replacement, if it's just one stand-alone product, probably enough people can live with it. E.g., even if you somehow cornered the bread market, you can't milk and gouge it for every penny, because more people would start eating their food with rice or potatoes instead.
This is one thing that "there is no such thing as a monopoly, the government is just persecuting successful businessmen" apologists -- e.g., every MS-funded think-tank -- loves to repeat over and over again, pretending that all products were by definition stand-alone and replaceable.
So that's not where everyone wants to be. Where you want to be is having an interlocking whole of several things, to raise the entry barriers _massively_ for everyone trying to compete with you. So anyone trying to compete with your Product A, would _also_ have to have a replacement for products B, C, and D. And in the process you use Product A to drive up sales of Product B, and viceversa.
E.g., when you look at MS, their monopoly isn't just about Windows. If MS sold _only_ Windows, and it was a commodity stand-alone product, it would have been replaced long ago. Most people don't care about the OS as such, they just care about what programs they can run on it. So the way to keep it a monopoly is to control several other things that run only on Windows.
And file formats, connectors, etc, are the WMDs of such a monopoly. Owning, or better yet patenting, one makes it that much harder for someone to compete with one product, and thus with the interlocking whole.
That's why for example Sony always wanted to have its own audio codecs, its own disc/tape/whatever formats, and so on. That's the way to pwn the market. If any of those formats actually succeeded you'd have people saying "yeah, the iPod is cute and all, but can it play the songs I just bought on mini-disk? Without re-converting them to MP3/AAC/whatever with more audio loss?" or "yeah, the DS is cute in its gimmicky way, but what about all these shelves of UMD movies I bought? Can it play _those_?"
And while you already knew that about Sony, the point is that's where everyone else wants to be. That's what everyone is talking about when they talk about "vertical integration" and the like. Occasionally "synergy" too. They're not just meaningless marketting buzzwords, they're veiled ways of saying "we want to be a monopoly, and thus in a position to gouge and milk the customer for every penny.
That's why, for example, in the OS arena the Unix fragmentation happened: noone wanted to be yet another replaceable Unix box vendor. They wanted people to have a really painful time replacing a Solaris box with an AIX box or viceversa. They wanted managers to get goosebumps just thinking of porting all their programs, some which were bought without sources or were an obfuscated mess and the original programmer had quit, and re-training the whole IT department. And beancounters vetoing any such plan in any case.
Or since we're talking formats, there's been at least one connector patent.
The fun of a successful monopoly is that you can even make one product a loss leader, just to ensure that anyone would go bankrupt trying to compete with that part. But the fun part is that while product A doesn't make you much money, product B depends on it and costs an arm and a leg.
E.g., that's why MS cheerfully bundles the network client in their OS, because that helps sell the _much_ more expensive server products. And viceversa, ensures that once you have their servers, your IT department will only consider MS Windows on all workstations.
E.g., let's just say that the DRM-cemented union between iPod and iTunes works like this: on the average Apple sells something like 10 songs for each iPod. So while they made less than 1 dollar profit from each iPod buyer
"Studies have shown that the average age of a gamer has gone up to the mid 30's."
Well, I'm a gamer right in the middle of the 30's, and I also find myself less attracted to games lately. So while this is just one guy, so not a statistic or analysis or anything, I'll still go ahead and post my impressions. Namely that it isn't "broadening", it isn't waiting for the next console, it's just interest seems to fade at my end of the market too:
A) less and less games are any good.
- Sequels, f-ing sequels. And verbatim clones of other games. That's been the story of the whole decade. I was for example one of the first to get fanatical about RTS back in the 90's, and... also among the first to get burned out and hate the whole genre, as every single bloody RTS was a verbatim clone of Dune 2. I find I'm getting fed up with other genres too, lately, for much the same reasons. FPS for example is another genre I'm not touching with a 10 ft pole any more.
- Games are getting shorter. Maybe playing 80 hours a week is bad, but getting 70-80 hours out of a game (spread over a few weeks) was actually getting good value for my money.
Games one can finish in 10 hours used to be considered too short even a couple of years ago (read some reviews of the first Max Payne or VTMR), while now they're the norm and going downhill fast. In another couple of years we'll probably look forward to games one can finish in 5 hours. Sorry, that's just not good value for my money. (And would be even less so for a teen on an allowance.)
And then there were the masterpieces, games like Fallout 2 or Arena, to quote just two, where I've spent hundreds of hours on each, just because they offered that many different possibilities. E.g., playing a diplomat in Fallout 2 was a _very_ different experience from playing a gunslinger, and that in turn was entirely different from playing a stealthy thief/assassin. There was a damn good reason to replay, because it actually opened new avenues to explore. Whereas for the 10 hour games of nowadays, once you've finished it, that's that.
- Games are getting less diverse. Everything is not just yet another RTS, FPS or action-adventure, it's the _same_ RTS, FPS or action-adventure I've played before. In the early 90's there were more than a dozen different genres, and countless variations and quirks inside each genre. Nowadays everything converges towards the same freakin' game that sold well last year. For example both RPG and platformers have already converged into the same "action-RPG" genre, as far as the western publishers are concerned. Not only the sub-genres of each (e.g., turn based vs real time, or team-based vs single-character) have disappeared, but the whole goddamn genres disappeared.
This lack of variety makes for a very boring experience. It used to be that each game I played was _different_ and thus interesting. There were new things to explore and discover, and new sets of tools to solve a problem with. Now it's like I'm playing the same game over and over again, and at some point it just gets boring. It also doesn' help that:
- Games are getting "dumbed down", so to speak. And don't give me the line that it's to make them accessible to casual gamers and female gamers, because that's not it. A simple intuitive interface is what casual gamers need, but what I'm talking about here is lack of content, which is an entirely different thing and won't make a casual gamer happier either. He'll get bored just as well.
A good game should be like chess: a simple interface and simple rules, but lots of ways to combine them. What we see today in the game market is the exact opposite: what went down is the number of things you can do with them. A lot of the complexity and alternate ingenious ways to solve a problem just disappeared, and you're left with a game on rails that doesn't even require any thinking.
E.g., the ingenious puzzles of the 80's and early 90's have been replaced by FPS "jump puzzles" that require exactly zero thinking, a
See, the same rationale could have been made about Linux games. Yet tell that to Loki games. Oh wait, they went out of business, didn't they?
See, the issue isn't one of right vs wrong, nor game _developpers_ assuming that everyone has Windows. Noone is that stupid. The issue is simple one of market size and _publishers_ deciding if it promises much of a ROI.
To illustrate it, even without booting Windows, you didn't see many games released for Macs. Sure, there was the occasional big company deciding to go the extra mile and release a Mac version too, but by and large most publishers ignored the Mac market completely. At best they did't have anything against someone else porting their 3 year old PC game to the Mac. (I.e., long after it ceased making any revenue on the PC, so, sure, knock yourself out.) But that was about the extent of the importance the Mac market had for the average game publisher.
Why? Because it just wasn't a big enough market. There was no "but you could pay $300 for Windows" rationalization involved or anything. They didn't actually _care_ if you paid an extra $300 for Windows or for a game console or just stopped playing games completely. All that mattered is whether the market size promised enough of a ROI or not. Period.
So the same will happen here. If enough of the new people buying Macs also buy Windows, well, then the effective market has't really grown much.
And again, it won't be a matter of assumptions ("surely they all bought Windows"), it won't be a matter of morals ("surely it's morally OK to tell someone to go pay $300 for Windows to be able to play games"), it will just be a matter of money. It will just be measured in copies sold and dollars income.
On an ATI card they're not mutually exclusive, it's just prohibitively slow to use both. Only on NVidia cards they're exclusive. I have no idea why.
About overclocking and unlocking pipelines, they're quite different things. Overclocking means just upping the clock frequency. Unlocking pipelines usually involves flashing the BIOS, since it has to activate a piece of silicon that the normal BIOS disables.
In both cases, however, as you probably realize, there are no guarantees. There _are_ chips which are sold deliberately under-clocked or with perfectly good pipelines disabled, but there also are chips for which really, that's all that works there. I.e., they really can't work stably at higher frequencies, and/or they genuinely have deffects in the disabled pipelines.
You probably also realize that, as in anything that's used for bragging rights and willy waving, there's a lot of creative exaggeration involved. While I like to think that most people won't outright lie, there's a lot of conveniently forgetting to mention inconvenient details. Such as that it does work at that frequency for 10 minutes in a benchmark, but it severely overheats after playing a game for 1-2 hours. Or that while in one game it may run perfectly well at that frequency, in another one it doesn't work at that frequency at all. Etc. I.e., take any numbers in such claims with a grain of salt.
I.e., it's pretty much a gamble and involves some time investment too. Me, I eventually decided I'd rather play a game in that time, rather than play with overclocking utilities.
Eh, FSAA="Full Screen Anti-Aliasing" (makes the edges look less jagged) and HDR="High Dynamic Range" (uses more bits to calculate the lighting and stuff). Both can severely limit frame rate (or not, if something else was the bottleneck.)
And the new transparency rendering option in the 7800 series basically lets one choose between the old way, which was faster but only really helps the edges of the polygons, and the new way, which make textures with lots of transparent parts (chainlink fences, grass, etc) look smoother but uses a lot more fill rate to achieve that. And playing a short character (e.g., bosmer male) while sneaking through tall grass makes the whole screen be filled with layers upon layers of textures with transparency, amplifying that performance penalty.
Or scroll down in the options page
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Living In Oblivion
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· Score: 2, Informative
It took me two days to realize the obvious, so I'm posting it here, in case it helps someone else: you can also scroll down in the video options page for more options, such as grass density.
Basically while editing the INI file is more flexible indeed, one doesn't even have to go that far to turn off grass. A quick scroll down to that slider is something any gamer can do, if they feel intimidated by editing INI files.
The 7800 series has some additional options, such as transparency anti-aliasing. On one hand it does make textures with transparent bits (e.g., Oblivion's grass) look better, on the other hand it results in more of a slow-down when you render a few hundred layers worth of transparent stuff all over the screen. To illustrate the impact, switching to HDR rendering instead of FSAA actually raised frame rates in those areas with lots of grass. (But, allas, I can't play without FSAA any more.)
That and raising the resolution enough, together with 16x Aniso, anti-aliasing and v-sync can bring any graphics card to its knees.
The rest of the system is an A64 4000+, 2 GB of CL2.5 RAM, and two WD Raptor hard drives (a 150 GB and a 74 GB). Not _the_ absolute latest, but not worse than your example either. So, seriously, it _is_ the overkill graphics rather than some other fault of the computer.
"ome people with cutting edge hardware are having low fps issues whilesome people with lower end video cards are running fine."
As someone who actually has Oblivion and a pretty high end system, including a 7800 GTX, I can also tell you why: because us with high-end bastards pull the graphics details sliders to the max, while those low-end guys know how to be sane and tweak it.
Yeah, I've had performance problems too, because of too much grass. "Auugh! The game stutters on my high-end system! It must be buggy!" Not so. It was just that my settings made it draw half a million grass sprites, with transparency anti-aliasing at that, 16x aniso, and v-sync. Turning grass off made the game play smooth as silk even at maximum visual settings otherwise, and as an added bonus, it also made alchemy plants easier to spot.
And the funny thing is, I could swear that it actually looks better this way. All the flowers and rocks and mushrooms and fallen logs, actually look better and more diverse than a fairly uniform sea of grass.
So basically, the hint is: even if you have a top-end system, do take the time to experiment with the quality settings. Most games nowadays allow for detail levels that would need at least top-end SLI, the latest Athlon 64 FX and 2-4 GB RAM. But just because it's there, doesn't mean you _must_ use it. Unless you actually have that kind of overkill hardware, well, settle for something more suitable to what you actually have. Chances are it won't look that much worse anyway.
MMORPGs and MUDs before them, are _very_ different beasts. They don't usually catter to the same kind of a group as a tabletop GM does, and don't have the same goals.
For a start they don't aim to have a small group that has fun together, but really aim for numbers.
E.g., as early as Bartle's extremely insightful paper about MUD-player types (and it should be required reading for any wannabe MMO designer), he described "killers" as basically what we call "griefers" nowadays. And he explicitly didn't mean "PvP players", but really the kind that thrives on making everyone else's life miserable and whose greatest achievement is driving someone off the game completely. Basically "killing" them off the game permanently. Hence the name. Yet he then went on about how a MUD needs them too, and ways to keep them interested in your MUD.
Now I'm not arguing with Bartle this time, and he certainly has more experience and insight than I do, but just illustrating a major difference between a MMO/MUD and a tabletop role-playing session. If you had a player whose only interest is humiliating and harrassing the others in your tabletop RP session, chances are you'd ask him to leave, or at least never invite him again. Yet in a MMO/MUD there's interest in how to _keep_ them there.
And on a MMO there is a financial interest to keep people in your game for as long as possible, because that translates directly and linearly into money they're paying you. So the _primary_ interest becomes how to keep them in the game longer, including how to play on their hoarding instincts and fears to keep them there long after they're not even having any fun any more.
On a MMO you _want_ them to feel attached to their level 60 character and to their small hoard of epic items. Each extra day they're in a "but I'll lose all that if I quit!" phase, is one extra day you get their money. (I know the fees are paid monthly, but over large numbers of players it averages out that way. If you have 300,000 players, an extra day squeezed out of each means 10,000 extra monthly fees cashed in.)
And before that, each day they're playing just for the slim chance of getting another piece of epic gear, is another paid day too. It doesn't matter if they're even playing any role at that point. (It's night impossible to play any interesting role in a 40-man raid. Some classes, e.g., priests, can go through the whole raid without even using more than one spell. Two if they also had to res someone.) It doesn't even matter if they're having any fun. All that matters is that they log in.
If you force them to restart at level 8, and they didn't even have much rare stuff at that point anyway, you've just made that decision very easy for them. Sure, they were getting bored anyway, had seen all the content that was available for a level 8 anyway, so it's a good time to cancel the account. So no corporate beancounter will let you design a game that way.
MMos are games run like a business, by the numbers, not like a table-top session. You have the statistics saying how much an average player stays in the game, how many percent do it because they're attached to their hoard, etc, and your job is to turn that into a machine that milks the last cent out of that.
Interesting content and quests are certainly expected, but only as a means to that goal. If a choice becomes exclusively between (A) making the game more fun, and (B) milking more money out of the players, you're supposed to choose B every time.
As an extreme example, again, almost every modern MMO is fitted with "endgame content" explicitly designed to keep players there long after they've ceased to have any fun. At that point you're actually supposed to play with the players' hoarding instincts and anxieties to keep them there, fully knowing that they won't have fun in the process.
That is correct. Most substances that are addictive -- e.g., morphin or alcohol or even cigarettes -- cause physiological modifications, in which the body gets used to higher quantities of a substance (or to having its receptors inhibited by some substance, or whatever) and may even basically be able to reach equilibrium only in its presence.
E.g., if you're a smoker, it won't just directly make you "happier", but it will inhibit the enzyme MAO-B in your brains, which in turns is responsible for breaking down Phenethylamie in your brains. Basically that enzyme is responsible for not letting you stay permanently happy that way.
You can alter that equilibrium in two ways. You can directly get some Phenethylamine, for example, from some foods, such as chocolate, but that pleasure won't last long, because MAO-B immediately starts destroying it. Most of it, in fact, before it even reaches your brains. Or smoking can momentarily all but completely deplete the enzyme that destroys it, raising Phenethylamine levels in your brains and making it last longer.
However, the body eventually adjusts its equilibrium for the new situation. I.e., if MAO-B is permanently in short supply, it will start producing more of it.
Now let's say you quit smoking.
MAO-B is no longer depleted by smoking, but it's still produced in excessive quantities and that in turn severely depletes your Phenethylamine in the brains. Which basically drives your mood all the way down. So you have a very physiological reason for the resulting withdrawal syndrome, not just missing the fun/pleasure/whatever of lighting up a cigarette. You're not just missing the good times of lighting a cigarette, you're actually in a bigger discomfort than someone who's never smoked in the first place.
By contrast, you can't really get addicted to chocolate or get withdrawal syndrome from it, although it's involved in the same chain.
That's one thing that all these "anything fun is drug addiction" scare-mongers seem to miss (in a long list of things they conveniently miss). Some substances actually cause physical addiction, while others are just things you do for fun. Cigarettes cause actual physical addiction, while chocolate is something you _can_ go without, much as it's nice.
Lumping it all together as one big "anything that people can get stuck on for fun is some dangerously addictive thing, so games/sex/whatever are just as dangerous as alcohol and heroin" is missing most of the point and underlying mechanisms. It makes for some good bullshit AA-type motivational speeches or propaganda ("oh, you're only doing it because you got used to the reward. You could quit if you wanted to") or some equally bullshit propaganda against anything you want to speak against ("oh, those poor gamers are just a bunch of junkies doing it just for the quick rewards, same as the alcoholics. It's just a scream for help, really.") But in the end it's missing the whole underlying mechanisms and fundamental differences by a mile.
And some don't even involve an influx of an external substance, making that link even more tenuous. E.g., unlike getting phenethylamine from chocolate, the dopamine response when doing something fun doesn't involve introducing anything from outside. It's just the way a perfectly normal brain works.
"No kidding. There IS no such thing as an "Eastern RPG" - they're NOT RPGs! The best description of them I heard was "rail-playing game". They're cliched stories which are viewed by repeatedly hitting the "Action" button."
Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play. The stats were _not_ the whole point of the game, and in fact they were just props in that interactive fiction. What made one a fun guy to play with was _not_ accumulating the most loot or levels ("woot! my char is level 60 and PvP rank 14 before yours!"), but coming up with interesting lines for your character and/or interesting ways to solve a situation. Even if that character was level 1.
So making a game that's all about the props (stats, levels, whatever) is _not_ an RPG. And that pretty much sums up most of the Western games that some marketroid called "RPG" in the last years: some action game (be it arcade-like, action/adventure, or FPS) with some stats strapped on. You'd be surprised what got called an RPG. Let's just say even Daikatana claimed to have "RPG elements.
And turning it all into a fast-paced action game where all you ever have time for is mashing the attack button, and occasionally blocking, is _not_ what makes an RPG. _The_ thing that made table-top RP fun was having the time to come up with some smart and innovative solution. Having just enough time to reload and aim for a headshot before the enemy finishes charging you in real time is not exactly making that possible, even if the game actually gave you the possibilities. Most don't.
So basically there never was much RP in either Eastern or Western games. All they could offer was a good story, with some (different) ways of pretending that you're a part of it. Actually, in the Western most games didn't even offer that, as they focused mainly on having an action game with some stats thrown in. (You can feel free to point at Bethesda and Bioware games, but they're not the majority by any kind of counting.) So basically if you want to define RPG as "If you don't play a role in the story, it's not a role-playing game", then most western games didn't even _have_ much of a story to play a role in.
And even those exercises in storytelling, on both the eastern and the western sides of the map, are on a path to extinction, as more and more companies turn their games into MMOs (even Bioware announced one) and the afore-mentioned action-games-with stats. Presumably to catter to the large mass of CS kids who don't actually have the attention span for a story ("Auugh! It says 'press START to continue'! If I wanted to read that much text, I'd get a book!") or the interest for anything that doesn't involve willy-waving ("I managed to head-shot you, so you suck and are gay too! Oh, and your mom is a fat whore!") Though the western ones seem to have a head-start there.
"If anything, Eastern "RPGs" are going out of favor. Japan may love FFXII, but other than that recent fan-boy "defence of FFXII" article on Slashdot, I've yet to hear ANYONE in the US who's at all interested in that game. Oblivion, on the other hand, had/has people saving up money to purchase. Can't wait until I can afford a new computer..."
It might also be worth noting, that the western RPG that you so seem to cherish also is a pretty recent invention. Having much of a story in a RPG didn't even exist in the West until the mid or late 90's. Before Bethesda's "TES: Arena" and Interplay's acquiring the rights to D&D, there was no such thing as a western RPG with enough of a story to play a part in, or any freedom in playing that part. E.g., SSI's D&D exercises swung between being some kind of squad-based tactics game with D&D rules in the beginning, and some kind of dumb square-based proto-FPS in later games like the "Eye Of The Behold
All drugs trigger the same pathways? Really? Heh. And here we had doctors thinking that Opioid and Cannabinoid transmitters and receptors, i.e., those involved in getting pleasure and addiction from morphin and marijuana respectively, were entirely different from each other, and from Dopamine. Or that they trigger completely different pathways (see how antipsychotics may inhibit the dopamine pathways, but won't block cannabinoid or opioid pathways), and are differently present in different parts of the brains. (E.g., why you'd need to eat several kilos of marijuana to overdose: because the centres that control vital functions like breathing have very little receptors for that, so they're very hard to influence.)
Or that even drugs that influence the same pathways, do so in wildly different ways. (E.g., that cocaine and amphetamines influence the dopamine pathways in completely different ways.)
Or that some drugs (e.g., morphine) really cause physical dependency (addiction), as in they actually cause long-lasting effects and changes to the organism, which in turn cause withdrawl syndrome when the drug is no longer present. _Not_ just some "oh, I just find it pleasant, so I'll do it some more" pleasure-seeking decision. While for others it is indeed just the reward seeking.
I.e., that there are some actual physiological effects as a reason of why morphin is considered more addictive than THC. Actual physiological changes, not some bullshit pseudo-science explanation about getting the reward faster.
But nah, you know better, because an addicted friend guessed so. Well, that has to count as an expert medical opinion. Just imagine how much money we all could have saved by asking your addicted friend, instead of letting real doctors research that stuff. (Heavy sarcasm there.)
Yes, there are certain types of people which get addicted or obsessive to anything. Your friend may have had a good common reason why he would seek escape from reality in anything whatsoever, rather than deal with reality. Or maybe your friend is (or maybe isn't, as it's impossible to tell from just one symptom) a psychopath. A lot of those exhibit exactly that kind of above-average propensity for getting addicted on drugs, alcohol and/or sex. (And a lot die from an overdose of one of the first two. Luckily it's not that easy to get killed by the third.)
But at any rate, concluding that because one person got addicted to all three, then all three must stimulate the same pathways... heh... it's just plain old funny. It's like concluding that because a candle, the sun and a lightbulb all give light, then there's no difference between chemical reactions, nuclear fusion and electrical phenomena.
And at any rate, deciding that a normal brain signal (present in all mammals) is some dangerous drug to be avoided... well, that's not even funny.
Here's some friendly advice, lemming: go actually read a bit on the topic before talking out the ass. Make sure you have any clue what you're talking about first. Doubly so before passing swift judgment on who's right and who's wrong.
All you're saying is very insightful and true, so we can aggree on that very quickly.
Humans do indeed learn, no arguments there. (And actually most animals "learn" or at least form reflexes. That's why we learn in school about this guy called Pavlov and his dog.) So, yes, humans can learn easy or "sure" ways to achive a result (be it how to get some quick fun or how to get groceries from the nearest supermarket), and some can get stuck in a rut doing that easy and guaranteed thing.
And yes, WoW does take pushing the players' buttons to an art form. It's taken every single observation about what makes people stay on a MMO even _after_ the fun stopped, e.g., "but I'll lose my level 60 mage" or "but I'll lose all my online friends and guild-mates", and refined that to incredible extremes. E.g., if on other games you were just worried about losing your friends, now your friends actually _need_ you for those 40-man raids. They start messaging you that they need a healer for MC. I.e., Blizzard took it to the extreme where you can (depending on inclination or personality) even feel like you've let someone down if you don't log on.
It's very complex indeed.
But in the end that's the whole point: it's a very complex social and psychological issue, not just a case of the "auugh, they're addicted to dopamine, which is, like, a drug! They're junkies!" bullshit being waved around. That's all that annoys me: the drug-scare bullshit. It's just a bunch of falsehoods and non-sequiturs whose only merit is that it makes for very easy propaganda, once everyone has already been indoctrinated that drugs are evil. It just requires a bit of sleight of hand, and voila, every single fun activity can be now mis-presented as drug addiction.
I have nothing against it if someone wants to tackle the real issues that you've mentioned. The learning, the reluctance to throw away some time investment, the social ties, etc. Sure, go ahead. But dopamine isn't explaing any of those.
Worse yet, the dopamine scare paints an image that's outright counter-productive if taken to its logical conclusion: oh, those guys are addicted to a drug, let's help them go cold turkey on that. And let's not give them a different fun source instead, because that would still give them the same drug, if from another source. And it just doesn't work that way.
That's basically all that I was trying to say there.
Having addressed what dopamine really is, let's move on to the actual topic of addiction.
If someone ends up retreating into a game, or into any other kind of compulsively seeking one kind of fun instead of dealing with RL, blaming it on the dopamine is addressing the symptom instead of the cause. The real cause there is the sharp contrast in how much fun that is in contrast to their RL problems. The real problem there is that basically they find that the rest of their life sucks and doesn't give them much reason for joy.
Even if you want to stick to the "dopamine addiction" pseudo-scientific explanation to the bitter end, the fact still remains: you won't get someone stuck on games who gets plenty of dopamine in their life otherwise. You won't get someone to call in sick to play MMO if they find their job interesting and fun.
E.g., I remember days back in university when I had real fun, and months of it, coding new and interesting stuff, and believe me, no game could have pulled me away from that. In fact, it was in my free time, instead of games. There was a challenge, there was the discovering new stuff, and there was the reward or achievement, i.e., much the same elements that make games fun. (And thus trigger the dopamine response.) Some of it was "multiplayer" too, involving competition or bragging rights among fellow students and members of a local wannabe-"hacker" group. (Bearing in mind that "hacker" still mostly meant talent and hard-work, rather than "cracker" or "script-kiddie", or at least for some people.) Being the only student whose parser for a term assignment was a full BASIC-like language _including_ an IDE and debugger (yeah, I was that much of an over-achiever) was more reward and bragging rights than any game could possibly offer. I even skipped a boring christmas party to work on that IDE.
Basically you won't see any game, and least of all a MMO, pulling someone from a fun job like that.
On the other hand, it's easy to seek refuge somewhere else (be it games, karma-whoring on slashdot, whatever) if your job sucks more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle, your "friends" are boring and in fact not much more than "acquaintances", your girlfriend is a pain in the ass, the neighbours are nosy gits that only get suddenly friendly when they need you to clean their computer of spyware, etc.
I.e., to have that kind of a sharp contrast you need _two_ halves. No matter how much fun games may be, the alternatives still need to be a lot less fun to create that kind of clear-cut avoidance response.
In which case seeking refuge in a game (or in anything else) is really just the lowest resistance path. It's easier to just jump into the one activity that's fun, than to deal with what makes the rest of your life non-fun. E.g., it's easier to just day-dream from 9 to 5 through a crap job, and then jump into WoW, than quit and find a better job. It's easier to put Azeroth as a separation layer between you and your friends, even if you're in the same guild, than to find yourself real friends you have some common topics with.
And IMHO any kind of "cure" should address that underlying topic, rather than the symptom. Depriving someone of their sole source of fun, no matter how you may rationalize it as protecting them from some bullshit dopamine addiction, isn't solving their problems, it's just pushing them towards depression if nothing else fills that void. As long as they don't start dealing with their RL problems, being stuck with them 24h a day isn't an improvement in any form or shape.
I.e., basically the way is to help them find dopamine somewhere else, rather than protect them from it. Because again, the only way you could possibly keep someone dopamine-free is making sure they never have any joy in their life.
Which, come to think of it, seems to be the goal of some of the busibodies and moralistic groups.
Ah, I never get enough of the drug-scare where anything that's a chemical -- even normal brain mediators -- is suddenly scary and to be avoided.
Get this: dopamine is just a non-specific "I'm happy" signal in your brain. No more, no less. It's not some dope hit as a reward, or whatever bullshit you may have heard from ignorant scare mongers. It's _the_ natural "I'm happy" signal that the brain uses. (Some drugs immitate its effects, yes, which is why they also make one happy. But that's the correct relationship: drugs are a substitute for the brain's normal chemicals, not the other way around.)
It's also non-specific. It doesn't fire just for MMOs, it fires every time you're glad about something. When the village gossip-monger found a good listener, or when the amateur photograph finds a cool thing to photograph, or when the Slashdot karma-whore sees that he's been moderated +5 Insightful... guess what? The exact same kind of dopamine response is involved. And not just in humans. When your cat is glad that she found a nice comfy place to sleep in, or when your dog is glad that the pack leader (i.e., you) gives him attention, yep, it's dopamine again.
And yes, you're sorta pre-addicted to it from even before you were born. Everyone seeks to do the things they find pleasant, as opposed to the things they dislike. And yes, the dopamine levels immediately start to decay so you'll have to find the next fun thing to do, instead of being happy for your whole life that you once played a game. Go figure.
Natural selection used that kind of stimulus to keep one doing the "good" things, as opposed to randomly doing dumb things. E.g., wolves have to feel glad about getting back near the pack, so they don't get spread.
So the only way to not feed that scary dopamine addiction would be to avoid having any fun in your life.
There is no such thing as being "addicted to MMOs" strictly, as is the case with other drugs. When you're addicted to, say, Alcohol or cigarettes, there is only one substance that can satisfy the addiction. In the "dopamine addiction" anything fun will work just as well.
Again, it's just that humans (and all other animals) are pre-"addicted" to doing fun stuff, and to avoid non-fun stuff. _Any_ fun stuff will do. Sure, some get in a rut about how they get their fun, but then non-gamers find their own ruts too. (E.g., the village gossip-monger can get stuck on looking for the next listener, or the Slashdot karma whore can get stuck on refreshing the page.) But from the dopamine point of view, _anything_ fun will trigger it just the same anyway. That's all.
And saying that "These games are designed to create that kind of response" is just a pretentious way of saying: games are designed to be fun. That's all.
It's not just computer games, and it's not just humans. Most animals have their own games, tailored around what natural selection pre-programmed them to find fun.
E.g., cats are predators, so the natural selection advantage was to be pre-programmed along the lines of "go chase something that moves and, if needed, fight it." So that's what they get, surprise, a dopamine hit for. So they have their own games where they wrestle each other. (When it looks like your cats are beating the living snot out of each other, chances are good that that's their idea of a game, not actual fighting.) Or everyone has played with their cat by making her chase something, be it a piece of paper on a string or a spot of light or whatever. Yep, that's dopamine for your cat. Somewhere in her feline brain there'll be a "yay, I chased it and caught it! I'm happy!" response, which means dopamine.
E.g., rabbits are prey and their fun stuff is along the lines of "yay, I successfully ran away from some menace". So if you observe them, you'll see that they actually play games along those lines. They actually chase each other, effectively playing the role of a "menace" for each other.
Etc.
So, yes, humans are pre-addicted to fun (_all_ humans, including non-gamers), and games are designed to be great fun. It doesn't sound as pretentious and pseudo-scientiffic as the "addiction to dopamine" bullshit, but that's really all there is to it. Big whopping surprise there.
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The solution is obvious! Paint all male models with a bra on. That way, if some kid swaps the male texture for the female one, they'll be foiled. Of course, then someone's 4 ft wide barbarian with a huge beard will also wear a bra, but that's a small price to pay to keep kids safe from, god forbid, seeing a female breast.
Yes, I know, I've just single-handedly saved the industry. All in a day's work.
First of all, yes, there is blood in Oblivion and occasionally blood skidmarks as the corpse is thrown back by the Havok engine.
But also try stuff like this:
- decayed corpses in cages, corpses hanged over a flame, corpses hanged from ropes (sometimes with a kicked chair underneath, meaning the bugger was alive when he got hanged), a burning corpse looking like he tried crawling out of a lava pool right in the very first oblivion gate. Skeletons in spiked cages. I'm told there's even one with a tiny skeleton inside it, presumably a pregnant woman was left to die in that cage. People or corpses in cages whose bottom you can open and let them fall on some spikes below. Etc.
- the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest arc was already mentioned, so lemme detail a bit more: they hanged the bugger upside down and gutted him like sardine. Alive. Literally. The fresh corpse is basically hollowed. They'll even talk about it.
- towards the end of the Figher's Guild quest arc you get to experience getting drugged out of your mind, and in that hallucinating state going and slaughtering a whole village of innocents, including going in each and every single house and slaughtering every single villager.
- heck, if blood was bad, you can also set people on fire and watch them running around burning. (Try enchanting your bow for maximum fire damage, for example, watch people bursting in bright flames every time they get hit by an arrow. Or make a potion of fire damage and "poison" your arrow with it, same effect.)
- torturing people. Spoiler warning, btw. In one quest along the main line you get to explore a madman's "paradise". In fact, it's closer to our idea of "hell", and one section has people in cages in or over lava. And you can play with the levers to lower them into the lava, or raise them out of it. In the previous section you get to watch people be hunted by demons for sport, and you get one quest to free an even nastier demon and sic it on them.
That's just off the top of my head. Basically I'd say it's a _very_ gruesome game at times, not a super happy fun escapade through flower-filled meadows where deer bounce around.
So _if_ violence is considered a reason to keep kids from playing a game, then, yes, I fail to see why this game wasn't M to start with.
"A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female."
I am, in fact, male. I do however try to compare various human cultures, instead of rationalizing "why my culture is right (biologically predetermined, god-given, bla, bla, bla), and yours is wrong". It's just anthropology, one of the social sciences, and the purpose is to find out what humans do, not to make little girls feel better.
And if you look at what hundreds of cultures do, world-wide, instead of idealizing your own, you start to find pretty much no common denominator. The ways humans behave, organize themselves, what they idealize, what they pose as, etc, vary _massively_ across time and space, and in some cases you can find complete opposites taken for granted by different people at different times.
The problem with most such rationalizing one's own culture is that they're a bit of a tunnel view. Everyone looks just at people from the same country, maybe even just the same town, and sees them all doing the same thing. And draws the false conclusion that that's what _all_ humans do, and obviously that's the biological/god-given/whatever way.
It's like a Japanese guy looking around him and deciding that all humans world-wide are 5.5 ft tall and have slanted eyes and black hair. That's how god or the evolution intended humans to be. There are obviously no blacks, no red-heads, no 6 ft tall swedish blonde girls, because he personally hasn't seen any in his home town. Or if he eventually sees one, he'll decree that it must be some disease ("hormonal imbalance" maybe?) that caused that poor man to be black or have red hair. Surely there can be no country or continent where that's "normal".
To get back to the point, yes, the greek culture was very different from hours, in more than one way, but that's actually the whole point: humans can be educated to view radically different things as normal. They were educated to view the females with _small_ breasts as beautiful, and, no, if you gave them the same choices, they wouldn't have chosen the same one you'd choose.
Yes, they had a bit different views on homosexuality too. That's just the point: people raised in a different culture can view different things as "normal", "repulsive", or whatever. They didn't need to find "they must have some hormone imbalance" euphemisms for "well, I find that abnormal". They just weren't educated to find that abnormal.
In fact, I'll up the ante there. Forget the greeks. IIRC, there was (is?) at least one tribe, I think in Oceania, where homosexuality and paedophilia were considered the _right_ way. The local myths was that a young man can't produce his own sperm until he's basically acquired it orally from a grown up man. Tribal customs also pretty much dictated, presumably to keep population low, that most sex happened between men.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending those cultures or anything. I'm just saying they exist. Nothing more. The whole point is just that it's learned behaviour. Educate a bunch of people that homosexuality is the right way, and you get 100% of a tribe's males having mostly homosexual sex.
The fact is, humans are a very programmable animal. Yes, we all have biological signals, like getting hungry or horny, but we're all very able to control them. (You don't see people humping in the streets whenever they get horny, nor shitting on the sidewalk like dogs when they felt a need to shit.) That's biology, but it doesn't really control humans that much.
What comes on top of that is a set of learned behaviours. There are thousands of little rituals in everyone's day that have nothing to do with biology. There was nothing of evolution importance that said, for example, to bring your girlfriend flowers or to wear a suit and tie to a job interview. (If anything, most animals would try to get rid of a rope around their neck, not make it a thing of pride and fashion.) You learn what clothes to wear to be fashionable, what kind of girlfriend to look for, again to be fashionable
Sometimes I wonder how much of human behaviour isn't as much "growing up" as groupthink. Trying to act as they think the group expects a grown up to act. My guess is that most of it is just that: groupthink.
And dolls are just a particular case of it all. Other examples include:
- girls moving from childhood dreams of becoming a scientist or a teacher to... pretending to be a completely retarded airhead, because that's what's popular in nowadays' broken culture. (Showing any interest for science would make one, like, a nerd. And that's sooo unfashionable.)
And here's what makes me wonder about that: in the Soviet block, for whatever other faults they had, they promoted a culture where being smart and educated, being a part of the "inteligentsia", was _good_. And what do you know? Girls could show interest in maths, physics, chemistry, etc, too, and that system produced almost equal quantities of male and female scientists or programmers. Some pretty damn good ones too. (Again, I'm not saying it was a good system or necessarily a good culture. Just that it was proof that, when trying to fit in a different kind of group, girls _can_ use a computer or do maths.)
- guys learning that they have to act all macho and aggressive and be obsessive about Real Man stuff, like football or cars.
And here's the thing that makes me think it's not as much "testosterone" as learning to behave like what the group expects a testosterone-soaked macho man to behave: the bushmen. Funny little culture, that, in that they don't seem to have discovered fighting each other, dominating each other and generally being more macho than thou. Or maybe it's just that life in that area is hard enough even without that kind of thing. At any rate, their culture is about _cooperating_ with the Joneses, rather than trying to humble them. So all their conflicts are sold peacefully, or if two just can't stand each other, one will move to another tribe.
Or here's another funny example: there was a documentary at some point (take it with a grain of salt, as with any media documentary, but still...) featuring a town in Italy where the culture was such, that a macho and potent man was pretty much expected to have a mistress. So they interviewed among others one guy who was obviously smart enough to realize it, and admitted that he's happily married and loves his wife, but... he just had to get a mistress or the other men would think he's impotent or something.
- for that matter, guys learning that they must be obsessive about thin women with huge breasts. (A biological improbability. Within the normal parameter of a human, someone with extremely few body fat will also have less fat in that area, i.e., small breasts.)
It may seem like there must be some biological reason, since it's _the_ norm in our culture. But the funny thing is that other cultures had _massively_ different ideals of beauty. E.g., the Greeks and Romans liked _small_ breasts. Look at the greek statues, they're A cup or so. The Romans went one step further. They are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but what they really invented was a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to _hide_ them. They really liked their women as flat as an ironing board.
Other cultures, in fact _most_ cultures, liked their women fat. In some parts of the world the introduction of the western thin woman ideal is actually very recent, as in, the last decades of the 20'th century. There have been articles about women and young girls in those parts ending up with severe nutrition problems as they attempted to switch from one image to another fast.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically that's that funny thing: pretty much any behaviour you take for granted looking around in your culture -- and even has its apologists proclaiming it biological or god-given -- other cultures can have something else, or the exact opposite. "Growing up" to do them is just enculturation (learning to act and think as your culture expects you to), rather than anything having to do with brain or body evolutiont.
- I do not find them appealing in inter-human communications. Sure, I can understand their use in some situations where time is of critical importance (e.g., "pull", "regroup", "heal please" macros in combat), but that's about it. If talking to anyone -- regardless of whether it's on a board, MUD, IRC, whatever -- if the bulk of someone's communication was cut-and-pasted phrases, or macros to the same effect, I'd quickly find that person very boring and uninteresting to talk to.
- Repeated text, macroed or otherwise, does not good prose make. Read your favourite fantasy novel and imagine that all the battle scenes were replaced by loops MUD-like automated text:It would be one very boring book. The sheer unimaginative repetition would get mind-numbing. Which is why good novels don't do that. They find some new and descriptive way of describing each slash, dodge and feint, or skip describing them altogether.
The same applies to role-playing. People who think they're T3H L33T ROL3PL4Y3RZ because they're spamming with fixed texts each time they click on a power, are actually crap role-players and end up just annoying instead of cool or interesting. The first time you see someone's "Moraelin kneels before his holy symbol and prays for the spell of Cure Light Wounds." emote before healing as a paladin, it's cool. The 12'th time you see it, before every single heal, it's annoying.
And the same goes for sex. If anyone tried writing an erotic novel the same way as the goblin fight is described above, I'd venture a guess that it wouldn't actually sell well. And assuming that Bartle's intention for it was to appeal to women in the same kind of way an erotic novel does, then... dunno, I can't predict if it would turn anyone on, but at the very least I can say it would be _very_ different from one of those novels.
There was a joke that went something like this: "One-shot case study: a study made on a single test subject, from which it is concluded that all clovers have four leaves."
/. care about that kinda ideologic crusades, but the vast majority of WoW players couldn't care less. We just care about playing the fucking game, that's all. Anything that lets me play the game is good, anything that keeps me tied (like a medieval serf) to a realm where queues run amok, isn't good. That's all.
Point in case: yeah, so your new character created on an empty server still has no problems. Whop-de-freakin'-do. Big surprise that. Mine had no problems after a week either.
Skip forward a month or two, and the server was already full to the brim. Yay for 30 minutes waiting in a queue. Well, ok, that still worked. Then it was occasionally 1 or 2 hours waiting in a fucking queue. Let me tell you, that had started to suck heap plenty, as my tribal shaman would say. And then some more.
Seeing that other new realms were still empty, didn't help the morale either. Sure, lemme move there, then. Nope, sorry, Blizzard didn't consider my server full enough yet to allow a transfer.
Skip some time forward and some RL friends join WoW too. They can't create their characters on the server I was on, because it's full. (And honestly, with the unholy time spent in the queue, I wouldn't have advised them to start there.) So they start somewhere else. And Blizzard _still_ doesn't allow me to copy my existing character there.
Apparently the server is still not full enough, their page would have me believe, as I play Solitaire and with Thottbot's talent planner, to pass the time while I wait in the queue.
OK, wth, then I'll kiss my existing characters and guild goodbye and start new ones on that server. Skip two months forward and it's full too. Watch me wait 30 minutes in a queue again.
Yes, it's a good game and all, but queues and stability issues _aren't_ fun. They're at best an annoying price we have to pay to get to the actual game. It does say something that people are willing to pay that price, but annoying it still is.
So generalizing that because your one-week-old character is still ok, then surely everyone else is just evil and demonizing Blizzard... heh. Get a clue. It's like saying that since a one-week old ballpoint pen still has ink, surely noone else ever ran out of ink for theirs. Surely all those "refills" are just a myth created by evil people demonizing the pen manufacturers.
As for the utterly irrelevant and incoherent rest of your rant... heh. I'm not even going to be polite about it. I don't know what kind of a psychiatric condition (ADHD maybe?) would cause one to run amok through irrelevant rants about UO PKers and all the way to rants about Stallman when starting at server stability. Unable to just follow a simple train of thought, or just desperate for straw men?
Trust me, virtually noone on WoW gives a shit about bnetd or Stallman, nor whether corporations are good and evil, and I certainly don't. Maybe those in the Linux section of
Or to put it otherwise, if, in your own words, you don't want to hear about bnetd coders and Stallman's crusades, then don't be the one starting about them. It's that simple, really.
So in a nutshell, that's the best straw-man you can pull to justify your "it's just evil people demonizing Blizzard!!!" troll rant, you're not even funny. You're preaching to the wrong group. If you're going to use a straw man, at least please do your research and pull a fitting one.
I'm wondering if that article is some elaborate form of trolling, or what. Even _if_ someone bought a game just to "cyber" (sad as it may be), if I put on my thinking cap and try to think about it with a straight face, it seems like a collection of bad ideas and missing the point by a mile.
E.g., his #1 reason for text-based sex is that it's free form... then he mentions implementing it as a modification of the combat system. WTF? There goes "free form" right out the window.
E.g., his #3 reason is that women prefer their sex in text form. Yes, that means novels and stories, not some automatized spam. I'm not sure if even any guy would actually get off on replacing MUD combat with some spam of "You thrust your tool in." and "You pull your tool out." If anything, just thinking about some automated macro there seems to me a major turn off.
Also I don't know what studies he's read there, because all that _I've_ read points at women being put off by "R U A GRL??? WANNA CYBER???" kids in online games. It pops up again and again as the reason why they're playing a male character.
(Oh, yes, there are women playing online games all right. But the funny thing is, the naked elf chick dancing in the Stormwind fountain probably isn't a RL woman. Chances are higher that the dwarf male with the beard down to his knees or the massive tauren male with a huge mallet are the RL women.)
Basically I can hardly believe that this is the same guy who had the insight to describe the types of MUD players, or create the first MUD in the first place. Oh yes, I can believe that he's seen plenty of cybering on his MUD. Can give one the idea of just making a game around that. But then, didn't they have meetings of MUD players and such? Might give one suspicions when the only ones that show up and are female (again, yes, they did exist) are the ones who weren't playing a virtual prostitute.
IMHO the whole situation also exists because of a massive dose of public hypocrisy.
Take 1000 people separately, on their own, and you might notice that they _are_, after all, capable of thinking for themselves. Make a town or "community" out of them, and groupthink happens. Watch them shout against X or pro Y or swear that they'd never even consider Z, just because that's what they think the group opinion is. Even if taken separately they couldn't care less about X, or don't find Y that great, in a group they'll try to be the ones who shout the loudest, because that way lies being a fashionable upstanding member of the community.
And I'm not going to single any one nation, because hypocrites happen everywhere. People are people all over the globe.
But to stick to this particular topic, in America the hypocrisy of the century is about sex and religion. Guns are cool, being a violent "gangsta" is way cool (ever listened to Rap in the last decade?), but sex or nudity? OMG!!! THE HORROR!!! JESUS CHRIST SAVE US!!!
That includes not only why seeing a boob warrants Mature or AO, but braining people with a crowbar is Teen. This also includes why the industry is so scared of applying a M label on a game in America. Because of hypocrites. Including the likes of Wal Mart who'll refuse selling a M game because "OMG, IT COULD BE PORN!!! WE DON'T WANT THAT AS OUR CORPORATE IMAGE!!!" And including the many John Does who are basically all like "OMG, I CAN'T BE SEEN BUYING A M OR AO RATED GAME!!! PEOPLE MIGHT THINK I'M BUYING PORN!!!"
See all the outrage and "chilling effect" demagogy whenever someone proposes that more games get a M label, or that the label be made bigger. Invariably at the heart of the long tirade is something like "OMG!!! IF THE LABEL IS BIGGER, PEOPLE WILL SEE ME BUYING AN M GAME!!! THEY'LL THINK I BOUGHT PORN!!!" Yep, it's hypocrisy all right. It's not about whether they want to buy the game or not, but god forbid that it might affect their fake image of upstanding pillars of the community.
See, the funny thing is, nowhere else than in America that particular association happens. E.g., around here GTA games had a big 18+ rating and some stores (e.g., Saturn) put them in red plastic boxes. (So presumably the cashier would know to look at who's buying it, when they opened the box for you.) So everyone saw you taking a red plastic box to the cashier. It had no chilling effect, and noone made the association that it might be porn. But try even proposing something like that in America, and you get a whole "chilling effect" tirade, along the lines of "OMG!!! PEOPLE MIGHT THINK I'M BUYING PORN THEN!!!"
Again, I'm not saying that other parts of the world don't have their hypocrites, but each one's hypocrisy of the century is different. The American one is pretending to be horrified by breasts or anything even vaguely associated with sex. And god help you if you don't pretend to be horrified by the very idea of it.
See, grasshopper, the ESRB isn't the enemy. The ESRB is a sort of reaction of the industry against an external attack. Because, make no mistake, the industry is under attack.
See, there's a lot of political capital in bravely fighting off a bogus but very visible threat. So there are a lot of demagogue politicians (think not only of top level figures like Lieberman, but also at local levels, lobby levels, and "non-political" organizations), two-bit media hacks, and parasitic lawyers jumping on any such target like sharks on a bloody piece of meat. And there are some trained sharks out there. They can smell the blood in the water even in homoeopathic quantities.
It's been so for a while. For example, long before video games even _existed_, politicians were savaging comics and presenting them as the great Satan that turns innocent kids into savage mass-murderers, rapists, etc. And then it was, in no particular order, tabletop games, music, movies, etc. And now it's video games. There's a lot of political capital in attacking video games.
And the main thrust of attack is invariably: "think of the children!!!" It's invariably been that somehow children are deceived into buying something inapropriate. Invariably the "villain" (be it a cartoonist, a rock musician or an overworked game developper) is presented as lurking sinister in the shadows, luring unsuspecting children into his spider web. Invariably it's painted as if little Billy thinks he's buying a Mickey Mouse comic or Barbie video game, but *WHAM* those dastardly villains gave him something that'll mind-control him into sacrificing all his classmates to Satan.
And games make a particularly good target there, because despite the statistics saying stuff like "the average gamer is 30", it's easy to present them as something that's by definition for kids. Once you've hand-waved that in, the rest is much easier. After that, by definition any game containing any kind of nudity, violence, etc, is obviously a devious attempt to peddle that kind of thing to the children.
The ESRB isn't the enemy, it's the industry's _defense_ to that attack. (As incompetent a defense as it may be at times.) The ESRB is the industry's way of being able to retort "well, fuck off. We wrote right on the box that it's a bloody gory game and it's not for pre-schoolers. We even told people where to look for that label. What more do you want? Blood?"
And for that to work, the ESRB _must_ basically overshoot. The sharks would _love_ to have even one single game that was labelled lower than its content warrants. Look at the media circus that happened about the GTA mod. (Even there, the ESRB were _not_ the ones that started it. They just reacted to the attack.) And make no mistake, that was a mod too. Now imagine what those scumbag politicians would do with a game where inapropriate content is available in the game as bought.
So again, the ESRB _must_ overshoot. If there's as little as two characters slapping each other, the ESRB _must_ have "Violence" written on the box. If two characters as little as kiss each other (and I don't even mean some particularly hot tongue-sucking two-hands-under-her-blouse kinda kiss), the ESRB _must_ have "Sexual Themes" written on the box. (Point in case, "The Sims" had both written on the box, and before the expansion packs slapping or occasionally kissing were _all_ a sim could do in both aspects.) Because, again, otherwise the consequences could be a lot worse.
So, no, if there's someone I'm disgusted with, it's the hypocrites that are the cause of it all, not with ESRB.
Regardless of how those textures got there, the semantics of it are sorta like this:
1. There's the game as you bought it, and it doesn't show any nipples.
2. You download a mod which, regardless of HOW, replaces the bra texture with a skin and nipple texture.
Exactly what difference does it make where that texture was? If the mod was 100k larger to include its own textures, would that have prohibited anyone from downloading it? Well, no. Would an extra 100k have made the parent pay more attention to what little Billy is playing? Hah.
Or does anyone imagine that if the game shipped without that texture, someone else wouldn't have painted it? It's been done before for countless games which _didn't_ include nipple textures, and which in fact had the bra as an integral part of the texture. So what? It didn't stop anyone from recolouring that area, or swapping in a naked texture from another game.
So exactly what conceptual difference does it make? Why is it ok to have a naked mod for The Sims 2 or Morrowind or (don't laugh) SWG, but not in Oblivion? It's still something you have to explicitly search for, download and install, not something you can discover by accident.
If it was a case of "Oops, I bought this "Test Clothes" from a vendor hidden in a valley, and now my character is naked", _then_ I'd understand it. Well, ok, then it would be something that people (kids or otherwise) could stumble upon in the game as it was shipped. But that wasn't the case.
So let me tell you what it really is: idiotic hypocrisy. That's all. Bunch of retards trying to look more moralistic and puritan than the Joneses. "*GASP* You mean those nasty game developpers were playing with naked textures? Why, the evil perverts... let's punish them! Let's gather an outraged mob with pitchforks and torches!" That's all there is to it. A bunch of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) and prom queens trying to be fashionably outraged, when they think it's fashionable to be outraged.
Groupthink is a funny thing. Or as Terry Pratchett once wrote, the IQ of a mob equals that of the most stupid member divided by the number of members. It's funny how whole towns or whole countries can be such a mob. Take a bunch of people who, taken individually, have nothing against X or pro Y, put them in a group where they think it's fashionable to be pro Y and against X, and watch them try to be the ones who scream the loudest against X and pro Y. Just to fit in the perceived group standards.
In this case, the perceived standard (at least in huge areas of the USA, but not only) is that to be a fashionable pillar of the community you have to be fashionably outraged by nudity, sex, etc. Watch the bunch of hypocrites try to outdo each other in being outraged of it.
It's freaking sad, that's what it is.
Welcome to the Real World. See, you don't make that much money with just one replaceable product (i.e., a commodity), no matter how good it is. Someone else soon makes a better or cheaper one. Even if it's a piss-poor replacement, if it's just one stand-alone product, probably enough people can live with it. E.g., even if you somehow cornered the bread market, you can't milk and gouge it for every penny, because more people would start eating their food with rice or potatoes instead.
This is one thing that "there is no such thing as a monopoly, the government is just persecuting successful businessmen" apologists -- e.g., every MS-funded think-tank -- loves to repeat over and over again, pretending that all products were by definition stand-alone and replaceable.
So that's not where everyone wants to be. Where you want to be is having an interlocking whole of several things, to raise the entry barriers _massively_ for everyone trying to compete with you. So anyone trying to compete with your Product A, would _also_ have to have a replacement for products B, C, and D. And in the process you use Product A to drive up sales of Product B, and viceversa.
E.g., when you look at MS, their monopoly isn't just about Windows. If MS sold _only_ Windows, and it was a commodity stand-alone product, it would have been replaced long ago. Most people don't care about the OS as such, they just care about what programs they can run on it. So the way to keep it a monopoly is to control several other things that run only on Windows.
And file formats, connectors, etc, are the WMDs of such a monopoly. Owning, or better yet patenting, one makes it that much harder for someone to compete with one product, and thus with the interlocking whole.
That's why for example Sony always wanted to have its own audio codecs, its own disc/tape/whatever formats, and so on. That's the way to pwn the market. If any of those formats actually succeeded you'd have people saying "yeah, the iPod is cute and all, but can it play the songs I just bought on mini-disk? Without re-converting them to MP3/AAC/whatever with more audio loss?" or "yeah, the DS is cute in its gimmicky way, but what about all these shelves of UMD movies I bought? Can it play _those_?"
And while you already knew that about Sony, the point is that's where everyone else wants to be. That's what everyone is talking about when they talk about "vertical integration" and the like. Occasionally "synergy" too. They're not just meaningless marketting buzzwords, they're veiled ways of saying "we want to be a monopoly, and thus in a position to gouge and milk the customer for every penny.
That's why, for example, in the OS arena the Unix fragmentation happened: noone wanted to be yet another replaceable Unix box vendor. They wanted people to have a really painful time replacing a Solaris box with an AIX box or viceversa. They wanted managers to get goosebumps just thinking of porting all their programs, some which were bought without sources or were an obfuscated mess and the original programmer had quit, and re-training the whole IT department. And beancounters vetoing any such plan in any case.
Or since we're talking formats, there's been at least one connector patent.
The fun of a successful monopoly is that you can even make one product a loss leader, just to ensure that anyone would go bankrupt trying to compete with that part. But the fun part is that while product A doesn't make you much money, product B depends on it and costs an arm and a leg.
E.g., that's why MS cheerfully bundles the network client in their OS, because that helps sell the _much_ more expensive server products. And viceversa, ensures that once you have their servers, your IT department will only consider MS Windows on all workstations.
E.g., let's just say that the DRM-cemented union between iPod and iTunes works like this: on the average Apple sells something like 10 songs for each iPod. So while they made less than 1 dollar profit from each iPod buyer
"Studies have shown that the average age of a gamer has gone up to the mid 30's."
Well, I'm a gamer right in the middle of the 30's, and I also find myself less attracted to games lately. So while this is just one guy, so not a statistic or analysis or anything, I'll still go ahead and post my impressions. Namely that it isn't "broadening", it isn't waiting for the next console, it's just interest seems to fade at my end of the market too:
A) less and less games are any good.
- Sequels, f-ing sequels. And verbatim clones of other games. That's been the story of the whole decade. I was for example one of the first to get fanatical about RTS back in the 90's, and... also among the first to get burned out and hate the whole genre, as every single bloody RTS was a verbatim clone of Dune 2. I find I'm getting fed up with other genres too, lately, for much the same reasons. FPS for example is another genre I'm not touching with a 10 ft pole any more.
- Games are getting shorter. Maybe playing 80 hours a week is bad, but getting 70-80 hours out of a game (spread over a few weeks) was actually getting good value for my money.
Games one can finish in 10 hours used to be considered too short even a couple of years ago (read some reviews of the first Max Payne or VTMR), while now they're the norm and going downhill fast. In another couple of years we'll probably look forward to games one can finish in 5 hours. Sorry, that's just not good value for my money. (And would be even less so for a teen on an allowance.)
And then there were the masterpieces, games like Fallout 2 or Arena, to quote just two, where I've spent hundreds of hours on each, just because they offered that many different possibilities. E.g., playing a diplomat in Fallout 2 was a _very_ different experience from playing a gunslinger, and that in turn was entirely different from playing a stealthy thief/assassin. There was a damn good reason to replay, because it actually opened new avenues to explore. Whereas for the 10 hour games of nowadays, once you've finished it, that's that.
- Games are getting less diverse. Everything is not just yet another RTS, FPS or action-adventure, it's the _same_ RTS, FPS or action-adventure I've played before. In the early 90's there were more than a dozen different genres, and countless variations and quirks inside each genre. Nowadays everything converges towards the same freakin' game that sold well last year. For example both RPG and platformers have already converged into the same "action-RPG" genre, as far as the western publishers are concerned. Not only the sub-genres of each (e.g., turn based vs real time, or team-based vs single-character) have disappeared, but the whole goddamn genres disappeared.
This lack of variety makes for a very boring experience. It used to be that each game I played was _different_ and thus interesting. There were new things to explore and discover, and new sets of tools to solve a problem with. Now it's like I'm playing the same game over and over again, and at some point it just gets boring. It also doesn' help that:
- Games are getting "dumbed down", so to speak. And don't give me the line that it's to make them accessible to casual gamers and female gamers, because that's not it. A simple intuitive interface is what casual gamers need, but what I'm talking about here is lack of content, which is an entirely different thing and won't make a casual gamer happier either. He'll get bored just as well.
A good game should be like chess: a simple interface and simple rules, but lots of ways to combine them. What we see today in the game market is the exact opposite: what went down is the number of things you can do with them. A lot of the complexity and alternate ingenious ways to solve a problem just disappeared, and you're left with a game on rails that doesn't even require any thinking.
E.g., the ingenious puzzles of the 80's and early 90's have been replaced by FPS "jump puzzles" that require exactly zero thinking, a
See, the same rationale could have been made about Linux games. Yet tell that to Loki games. Oh wait, they went out of business, didn't they?
See, the issue isn't one of right vs wrong, nor game _developpers_ assuming that everyone has Windows. Noone is that stupid. The issue is simple one of market size and _publishers_ deciding if it promises much of a ROI.
To illustrate it, even without booting Windows, you didn't see many games released for Macs. Sure, there was the occasional big company deciding to go the extra mile and release a Mac version too, but by and large most publishers ignored the Mac market completely. At best they did't have anything against someone else porting their 3 year old PC game to the Mac. (I.e., long after it ceased making any revenue on the PC, so, sure, knock yourself out.) But that was about the extent of the importance the Mac market had for the average game publisher.
Why? Because it just wasn't a big enough market. There was no "but you could pay $300 for Windows" rationalization involved or anything. They didn't actually _care_ if you paid an extra $300 for Windows or for a game console or just stopped playing games completely. All that mattered is whether the market size promised enough of a ROI or not. Period.
So the same will happen here. If enough of the new people buying Macs also buy Windows, well, then the effective market has't really grown much.
And again, it won't be a matter of assumptions ("surely they all bought Windows"), it won't be a matter of morals ("surely it's morally OK to tell someone to go pay $300 for Windows to be able to play games"), it will just be a matter of money. It will just be measured in copies sold and dollars income.
On an ATI card they're not mutually exclusive, it's just prohibitively slow to use both. Only on NVidia cards they're exclusive. I have no idea why.
About overclocking and unlocking pipelines, they're quite different things. Overclocking means just upping the clock frequency. Unlocking pipelines usually involves flashing the BIOS, since it has to activate a piece of silicon that the normal BIOS disables.
In both cases, however, as you probably realize, there are no guarantees. There _are_ chips which are sold deliberately under-clocked or with perfectly good pipelines disabled, but there also are chips for which really, that's all that works there. I.e., they really can't work stably at higher frequencies, and/or they genuinely have deffects in the disabled pipelines.
You probably also realize that, as in anything that's used for bragging rights and willy waving, there's a lot of creative exaggeration involved. While I like to think that most people won't outright lie, there's a lot of conveniently forgetting to mention inconvenient details. Such as that it does work at that frequency for 10 minutes in a benchmark, but it severely overheats after playing a game for 1-2 hours. Or that while in one game it may run perfectly well at that frequency, in another one it doesn't work at that frequency at all. Etc. I.e., take any numbers in such claims with a grain of salt.
I.e., it's pretty much a gamble and involves some time investment too. Me, I eventually decided I'd rather play a game in that time, rather than play with overclocking utilities.
Eh, FSAA="Full Screen Anti-Aliasing" (makes the edges look less jagged) and HDR="High Dynamic Range" (uses more bits to calculate the lighting and stuff). Both can severely limit frame rate (or not, if something else was the bottleneck.)
And the new transparency rendering option in the 7800 series basically lets one choose between the old way, which was faster but only really helps the edges of the polygons, and the new way, which make textures with lots of transparent parts (chainlink fences, grass, etc) look smoother but uses a lot more fill rate to achieve that. And playing a short character (e.g., bosmer male) while sneaking through tall grass makes the whole screen be filled with layers upon layers of textures with transparency, amplifying that performance penalty.
It took me two days to realize the obvious, so I'm posting it here, in case it helps someone else: you can also scroll down in the video options page for more options, such as grass density.
Basically while editing the INI file is more flexible indeed, one doesn't even have to go that far to turn off grass. A quick scroll down to that slider is something any gamer can do, if they feel intimidated by editing INI files.
The 7800 series has some additional options, such as transparency anti-aliasing. On one hand it does make textures with transparent bits (e.g., Oblivion's grass) look better, on the other hand it results in more of a slow-down when you render a few hundred layers worth of transparent stuff all over the screen. To illustrate the impact, switching to HDR rendering instead of FSAA actually raised frame rates in those areas with lots of grass. (But, allas, I can't play without FSAA any more.)
That and raising the resolution enough, together with 16x Aniso, anti-aliasing and v-sync can bring any graphics card to its knees.
The rest of the system is an A64 4000+, 2 GB of CL2.5 RAM, and two WD Raptor hard drives (a 150 GB and a 74 GB). Not _the_ absolute latest, but not worse than your example either. So, seriously, it _is_ the overkill graphics rather than some other fault of the computer.
"ome people with cutting edge hardware are having low fps issues whilesome people with lower end video cards are running fine."
As someone who actually has Oblivion and a pretty high end system, including a 7800 GTX, I can also tell you why: because us with high-end bastards pull the graphics details sliders to the max, while those low-end guys know how to be sane and tweak it.
Yeah, I've had performance problems too, because of too much grass. "Auugh! The game stutters on my high-end system! It must be buggy!" Not so. It was just that my settings made it draw half a million grass sprites, with transparency anti-aliasing at that, 16x aniso, and v-sync. Turning grass off made the game play smooth as silk even at maximum visual settings otherwise, and as an added bonus, it also made alchemy plants easier to spot.
And the funny thing is, I could swear that it actually looks better this way. All the flowers and rocks and mushrooms and fallen logs, actually look better and more diverse than a fairly uniform sea of grass.
So basically, the hint is: even if you have a top-end system, do take the time to experiment with the quality settings. Most games nowadays allow for detail levels that would need at least top-end SLI, the latest Athlon 64 FX and 2-4 GB RAM. But just because it's there, doesn't mean you _must_ use it. Unless you actually have that kind of overkill hardware, well, settle for something more suitable to what you actually have. Chances are it won't look that much worse anyway.
MMORPGs and MUDs before them, are _very_ different beasts. They don't usually catter to the same kind of a group as a tabletop GM does, and don't have the same goals.
For a start they don't aim to have a small group that has fun together, but really aim for numbers.
E.g., as early as Bartle's extremely insightful paper about MUD-player types (and it should be required reading for any wannabe MMO designer), he described "killers" as basically what we call "griefers" nowadays. And he explicitly didn't mean "PvP players", but really the kind that thrives on making everyone else's life miserable and whose greatest achievement is driving someone off the game completely. Basically "killing" them off the game permanently. Hence the name. Yet he then went on about how a MUD needs them too, and ways to keep them interested in your MUD.
Now I'm not arguing with Bartle this time, and he certainly has more experience and insight than I do, but just illustrating a major difference between a MMO/MUD and a tabletop role-playing session. If you had a player whose only interest is humiliating and harrassing the others in your tabletop RP session, chances are you'd ask him to leave, or at least never invite him again. Yet in a MMO/MUD there's interest in how to _keep_ them there.
And on a MMO there is a financial interest to keep people in your game for as long as possible, because that translates directly and linearly into money they're paying you. So the _primary_ interest becomes how to keep them in the game longer, including how to play on their hoarding instincts and fears to keep them there long after they're not even having any fun any more.
On a MMO you _want_ them to feel attached to their level 60 character and to their small hoard of epic items. Each extra day they're in a "but I'll lose all that if I quit!" phase, is one extra day you get their money. (I know the fees are paid monthly, but over large numbers of players it averages out that way. If you have 300,000 players, an extra day squeezed out of each means 10,000 extra monthly fees cashed in.)
And before that, each day they're playing just for the slim chance of getting another piece of epic gear, is another paid day too. It doesn't matter if they're even playing any role at that point. (It's night impossible to play any interesting role in a 40-man raid. Some classes, e.g., priests, can go through the whole raid without even using more than one spell. Two if they also had to res someone.) It doesn't even matter if they're having any fun. All that matters is that they log in.
If you force them to restart at level 8, and they didn't even have much rare stuff at that point anyway, you've just made that decision very easy for them. Sure, they were getting bored anyway, had seen all the content that was available for a level 8 anyway, so it's a good time to cancel the account. So no corporate beancounter will let you design a game that way.
MMos are games run like a business, by the numbers, not like a table-top session. You have the statistics saying how much an average player stays in the game, how many percent do it because they're attached to their hoard, etc, and your job is to turn that into a machine that milks the last cent out of that.
Interesting content and quests are certainly expected, but only as a means to that goal. If a choice becomes exclusively between (A) making the game more fun, and (B) milking more money out of the players, you're supposed to choose B every time.
As an extreme example, again, almost every modern MMO is fitted with "endgame content" explicitly designed to keep players there long after they've ceased to have any fun. At that point you're actually supposed to play with the players' hoarding instincts and anxieties to keep them there, fully knowing that they won't have fun in the process.
That is correct. Most substances that are addictive -- e.g., morphin or alcohol or even cigarettes -- cause physiological modifications, in which the body gets used to higher quantities of a substance (or to having its receptors inhibited by some substance, or whatever) and may even basically be able to reach equilibrium only in its presence.
E.g., if you're a smoker, it won't just directly make you "happier", but it will inhibit the enzyme MAO-B in your brains, which in turns is responsible for breaking down Phenethylamie in your brains. Basically that enzyme is responsible for not letting you stay permanently happy that way.
You can alter that equilibrium in two ways. You can directly get some Phenethylamine, for example, from some foods, such as chocolate, but that pleasure won't last long, because MAO-B immediately starts destroying it. Most of it, in fact, before it even reaches your brains. Or smoking can momentarily all but completely deplete the enzyme that destroys it, raising Phenethylamine levels in your brains and making it last longer.
However, the body eventually adjusts its equilibrium for the new situation. I.e., if MAO-B is permanently in short supply, it will start producing more of it.
Now let's say you quit smoking.
MAO-B is no longer depleted by smoking, but it's still produced in excessive quantities and that in turn severely depletes your Phenethylamine in the brains. Which basically drives your mood all the way down. So you have a very physiological reason for the resulting withdrawal syndrome, not just missing the fun/pleasure/whatever of lighting up a cigarette. You're not just missing the good times of lighting a cigarette, you're actually in a bigger discomfort than someone who's never smoked in the first place.
By contrast, you can't really get addicted to chocolate or get withdrawal syndrome from it, although it's involved in the same chain.
That's one thing that all these "anything fun is drug addiction" scare-mongers seem to miss (in a long list of things they conveniently miss). Some substances actually cause physical addiction, while others are just things you do for fun. Cigarettes cause actual physical addiction, while chocolate is something you _can_ go without, much as it's nice.
Lumping it all together as one big "anything that people can get stuck on for fun is some dangerously addictive thing, so games/sex/whatever are just as dangerous as alcohol and heroin" is missing most of the point and underlying mechanisms. It makes for some good bullshit AA-type motivational speeches or propaganda ("oh, you're only doing it because you got used to the reward. You could quit if you wanted to") or some equally bullshit propaganda against anything you want to speak against ("oh, those poor gamers are just a bunch of junkies doing it just for the quick rewards, same as the alcoholics. It's just a scream for help, really.") But in the end it's missing the whole underlying mechanisms and fundamental differences by a mile.
And some don't even involve an influx of an external substance, making that link even more tenuous. E.g., unlike getting phenethylamine from chocolate, the dopamine response when doing something fun doesn't involve introducing anything from outside. It's just the way a perfectly normal brain works.
"No kidding. There IS no such thing as an "Eastern RPG" - they're NOT RPGs! The best description of them I heard was "rail-playing game". They're cliched stories which are viewed by repeatedly hitting the "Action" button."
Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play. The stats were _not_ the whole point of the game, and in fact they were just props in that interactive fiction. What made one a fun guy to play with was _not_ accumulating the most loot or levels ("woot! my char is level 60 and PvP rank 14 before yours!"), but coming up with interesting lines for your character and/or interesting ways to solve a situation. Even if that character was level 1.
So making a game that's all about the props (stats, levels, whatever) is _not_ an RPG. And that pretty much sums up most of the Western games that some marketroid called "RPG" in the last years: some action game (be it arcade-like, action/adventure, or FPS) with some stats strapped on. You'd be surprised what got called an RPG. Let's just say even Daikatana claimed to have "RPG elements.
And turning it all into a fast-paced action game where all you ever have time for is mashing the attack button, and occasionally blocking, is _not_ what makes an RPG. _The_ thing that made table-top RP fun was having the time to come up with some smart and innovative solution. Having just enough time to reload and aim for a headshot before the enemy finishes charging you in real time is not exactly making that possible, even if the game actually gave you the possibilities. Most don't.
So basically there never was much RP in either Eastern or Western games. All they could offer was a good story, with some (different) ways of pretending that you're a part of it. Actually, in the Western most games didn't even offer that, as they focused mainly on having an action game with some stats thrown in. (You can feel free to point at Bethesda and Bioware games, but they're not the majority by any kind of counting.) So basically if you want to define RPG as "If you don't play a role in the story, it's not a role-playing game", then most western games didn't even _have_ much of a story to play a role in.
And even those exercises in storytelling, on both the eastern and the western sides of the map, are on a path to extinction, as more and more companies turn their games into MMOs (even Bioware announced one) and the afore-mentioned action-games-with stats. Presumably to catter to the large mass of CS kids who don't actually have the attention span for a story ("Auugh! It says 'press START to continue'! If I wanted to read that much text, I'd get a book!") or the interest for anything that doesn't involve willy-waving ("I managed to head-shot you, so you suck and are gay too! Oh, and your mom is a fat whore!") Though the western ones seem to have a head-start there.
"If anything, Eastern "RPGs" are going out of favor. Japan may love FFXII, but other than that recent fan-boy "defence of FFXII" article on Slashdot, I've yet to hear ANYONE in the US who's at all interested in that game. Oblivion, on the other hand, had/has people saving up money to purchase. Can't wait until I can afford a new computer..."
It might also be worth noting, that the western RPG that you so seem to cherish also is a pretty recent invention. Having much of a story in a RPG didn't even exist in the West until the mid or late 90's. Before Bethesda's "TES: Arena" and Interplay's acquiring the rights to D&D, there was no such thing as a western RPG with enough of a story to play a part in, or any freedom in playing that part. E.g., SSI's D&D exercises swung between being some kind of squad-based tactics game with D&D rules in the beginning, and some kind of dumb square-based proto-FPS in later games like the "Eye Of The Behold
All drugs trigger the same pathways? Really? Heh. And here we had doctors thinking that Opioid and Cannabinoid transmitters and receptors, i.e., those involved in getting pleasure and addiction from morphin and marijuana respectively, were entirely different from each other, and from Dopamine. Or that they trigger completely different pathways (see how antipsychotics may inhibit the dopamine pathways, but won't block cannabinoid or opioid pathways), and are differently present in different parts of the brains. (E.g., why you'd need to eat several kilos of marijuana to overdose: because the centres that control vital functions like breathing have very little receptors for that, so they're very hard to influence.)
Or that even drugs that influence the same pathways, do so in wildly different ways. (E.g., that cocaine and amphetamines influence the dopamine pathways in completely different ways.)
Or that some drugs (e.g., morphine) really cause physical dependency (addiction), as in they actually cause long-lasting effects and changes to the organism, which in turn cause withdrawl syndrome when the drug is no longer present. _Not_ just some "oh, I just find it pleasant, so I'll do it some more" pleasure-seeking decision. While for others it is indeed just the reward seeking.
I.e., that there are some actual physiological effects as a reason of why morphin is considered more addictive than THC. Actual physiological changes, not some bullshit pseudo-science explanation about getting the reward faster.
But nah, you know better, because an addicted friend guessed so. Well, that has to count as an expert medical opinion. Just imagine how much money we all could have saved by asking your addicted friend, instead of letting real doctors research that stuff. (Heavy sarcasm there.)
Yes, there are certain types of people which get addicted or obsessive to anything. Your friend may have had a good common reason why he would seek escape from reality in anything whatsoever, rather than deal with reality. Or maybe your friend is (or maybe isn't, as it's impossible to tell from just one symptom) a psychopath. A lot of those exhibit exactly that kind of above-average propensity for getting addicted on drugs, alcohol and/or sex. (And a lot die from an overdose of one of the first two. Luckily it's not that easy to get killed by the third.)
But at any rate, concluding that because one person got addicted to all three, then all three must stimulate the same pathways... heh... it's just plain old funny. It's like concluding that because a candle, the sun and a lightbulb all give light, then there's no difference between chemical reactions, nuclear fusion and electrical phenomena.
And at any rate, deciding that a normal brain signal (present in all mammals) is some dangerous drug to be avoided... well, that's not even funny.
Here's some friendly advice, lemming: go actually read a bit on the topic before talking out the ass. Make sure you have any clue what you're talking about first. Doubly so before passing swift judgment on who's right and who's wrong.
All you're saying is very insightful and true, so we can aggree on that very quickly.
Humans do indeed learn, no arguments there. (And actually most animals "learn" or at least form reflexes. That's why we learn in school about this guy called Pavlov and his dog.) So, yes, humans can learn easy or "sure" ways to achive a result (be it how to get some quick fun or how to get groceries from the nearest supermarket), and some can get stuck in a rut doing that easy and guaranteed thing.
And yes, WoW does take pushing the players' buttons to an art form. It's taken every single observation about what makes people stay on a MMO even _after_ the fun stopped, e.g., "but I'll lose my level 60 mage" or "but I'll lose all my online friends and guild-mates", and refined that to incredible extremes. E.g., if on other games you were just worried about losing your friends, now your friends actually _need_ you for those 40-man raids. They start messaging you that they need a healer for MC. I.e., Blizzard took it to the extreme where you can (depending on inclination or personality) even feel like you've let someone down if you don't log on.
It's very complex indeed.
But in the end that's the whole point: it's a very complex social and psychological issue, not just a case of the "auugh, they're addicted to dopamine, which is, like, a drug! They're junkies!" bullshit being waved around. That's all that annoys me: the drug-scare bullshit. It's just a bunch of falsehoods and non-sequiturs whose only merit is that it makes for very easy propaganda, once everyone has already been indoctrinated that drugs are evil. It just requires a bit of sleight of hand, and voila, every single fun activity can be now mis-presented as drug addiction.
I have nothing against it if someone wants to tackle the real issues that you've mentioned. The learning, the reluctance to throw away some time investment, the social ties, etc. Sure, go ahead. But dopamine isn't explaing any of those.
Worse yet, the dopamine scare paints an image that's outright counter-productive if taken to its logical conclusion: oh, those guys are addicted to a drug, let's help them go cold turkey on that. And let's not give them a different fun source instead, because that would still give them the same drug, if from another source. And it just doesn't work that way.
That's basically all that I was trying to say there.
Having addressed what dopamine really is, let's move on to the actual topic of addiction.
If someone ends up retreating into a game, or into any other kind of compulsively seeking one kind of fun instead of dealing with RL, blaming it on the dopamine is addressing the symptom instead of the cause. The real cause there is the sharp contrast in how much fun that is in contrast to their RL problems. The real problem there is that basically they find that the rest of their life sucks and doesn't give them much reason for joy.
Even if you want to stick to the "dopamine addiction" pseudo-scientific explanation to the bitter end, the fact still remains: you won't get someone stuck on games who gets plenty of dopamine in their life otherwise. You won't get someone to call in sick to play MMO if they find their job interesting and fun.
E.g., I remember days back in university when I had real fun, and months of it, coding new and interesting stuff, and believe me, no game could have pulled me away from that. In fact, it was in my free time, instead of games. There was a challenge, there was the discovering new stuff, and there was the reward or achievement, i.e., much the same elements that make games fun. (And thus trigger the dopamine response.) Some of it was "multiplayer" too, involving competition or bragging rights among fellow students and members of a local wannabe-"hacker" group. (Bearing in mind that "hacker" still mostly meant talent and hard-work, rather than "cracker" or "script-kiddie", or at least for some people.) Being the only student whose parser for a term assignment was a full BASIC-like language _including_ an IDE and debugger (yeah, I was that much of an over-achiever) was more reward and bragging rights than any game could possibly offer. I even skipped a boring christmas party to work on that IDE.
Basically you won't see any game, and least of all a MMO, pulling someone from a fun job like that.
On the other hand, it's easy to seek refuge somewhere else (be it games, karma-whoring on slashdot, whatever) if your job sucks more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle, your "friends" are boring and in fact not much more than "acquaintances", your girlfriend is a pain in the ass, the neighbours are nosy gits that only get suddenly friendly when they need you to clean their computer of spyware, etc.
I.e., to have that kind of a sharp contrast you need _two_ halves. No matter how much fun games may be, the alternatives still need to be a lot less fun to create that kind of clear-cut avoidance response.
In which case seeking refuge in a game (or in anything else) is really just the lowest resistance path. It's easier to just jump into the one activity that's fun, than to deal with what makes the rest of your life non-fun. E.g., it's easier to just day-dream from 9 to 5 through a crap job, and then jump into WoW, than quit and find a better job. It's easier to put Azeroth as a separation layer between you and your friends, even if you're in the same guild, than to find yourself real friends you have some common topics with.
And IMHO any kind of "cure" should address that underlying topic, rather than the symptom. Depriving someone of their sole source of fun, no matter how you may rationalize it as protecting them from some bullshit dopamine addiction, isn't solving their problems, it's just pushing them towards depression if nothing else fills that void. As long as they don't start dealing with their RL problems, being stuck with them 24h a day isn't an improvement in any form or shape.
I.e., basically the way is to help them find dopamine somewhere else, rather than protect them from it. Because again, the only way you could possibly keep someone dopamine-free is making sure they never have any joy in their life.
Which, come to think of it, seems to be the goal of some of the busibodies and moralistic groups.
Ah, I never get enough of the drug-scare where anything that's a chemical -- even normal brain mediators -- is suddenly scary and to be avoided.
Get this: dopamine is just a non-specific "I'm happy" signal in your brain. No more, no less. It's not some dope hit as a reward, or whatever bullshit you may have heard from ignorant scare mongers. It's _the_ natural "I'm happy" signal that the brain uses. (Some drugs immitate its effects, yes, which is why they also make one happy. But that's the correct relationship: drugs are a substitute for the brain's normal chemicals, not the other way around.)
It's also non-specific. It doesn't fire just for MMOs, it fires every time you're glad about something. When the village gossip-monger found a good listener, or when the amateur photograph finds a cool thing to photograph, or when the Slashdot karma-whore sees that he's been moderated +5 Insightful... guess what? The exact same kind of dopamine response is involved. And not just in humans. When your cat is glad that she found a nice comfy place to sleep in, or when your dog is glad that the pack leader (i.e., you) gives him attention, yep, it's dopamine again.
And yes, you're sorta pre-addicted to it from even before you were born. Everyone seeks to do the things they find pleasant, as opposed to the things they dislike. And yes, the dopamine levels immediately start to decay so you'll have to find the next fun thing to do, instead of being happy for your whole life that you once played a game. Go figure.
Natural selection used that kind of stimulus to keep one doing the "good" things, as opposed to randomly doing dumb things. E.g., wolves have to feel glad about getting back near the pack, so they don't get spread.
So the only way to not feed that scary dopamine addiction would be to avoid having any fun in your life.
There is no such thing as being "addicted to MMOs" strictly, as is the case with other drugs. When you're addicted to, say, Alcohol or cigarettes, there is only one substance that can satisfy the addiction. In the "dopamine addiction" anything fun will work just as well.
Again, it's just that humans (and all other animals) are pre-"addicted" to doing fun stuff, and to avoid non-fun stuff. _Any_ fun stuff will do. Sure, some get in a rut about how they get their fun, but then non-gamers find their own ruts too. (E.g., the village gossip-monger can get stuck on looking for the next listener, or the Slashdot karma whore can get stuck on refreshing the page.) But from the dopamine point of view, _anything_ fun will trigger it just the same anyway. That's all.
And saying that "These games are designed to create that kind of response" is just a pretentious way of saying: games are designed to be fun. That's all.
It's not just computer games, and it's not just humans. Most animals have their own games, tailored around what natural selection pre-programmed them to find fun.
E.g., cats are predators, so the natural selection advantage was to be pre-programmed along the lines of "go chase something that moves and, if needed, fight it." So that's what they get, surprise, a dopamine hit for. So they have their own games where they wrestle each other. (When it looks like your cats are beating the living snot out of each other, chances are good that that's their idea of a game, not actual fighting.) Or everyone has played with their cat by making her chase something, be it a piece of paper on a string or a spot of light or whatever. Yep, that's dopamine for your cat. Somewhere in her feline brain there'll be a "yay, I chased it and caught it! I'm happy!" response, which means dopamine.
E.g., rabbits are prey and their fun stuff is along the lines of "yay, I successfully ran away from some menace". So if you observe them, you'll see that they actually play games along those lines. They actually chase each other, effectively playing the role of a "menace" for each other.
Etc.
So, yes, humans are pre-addicted to fun (_all_ humans, including non-gamers), and games are designed to be great fun. It doesn't sound as pretentious and pseudo-scientiffic as the "addiction to dopamine" bullshit, but that's really all there is to it. Big whopping surprise there.