Let me tell you a short story. I joined WoW in July and got promptly recruited into a guild. (Some people seem to spam everyone in sight with invites.) I was a warrior. So I mention that I've taken up smithing, so I can someday make items for myself.
The unanimous guild mates' answer? "Dude, don't be stupid. You can buy better stuff at the auction house than you'll ever be able to craft."
Even better yet? "Ditch smithing and get mining and skinning. Sell skins and metals at the AH and buy better stuff."
Now I'm not opposed to crafting being, say, equal to dropped stuff. But the fact is, crafted items are _inferior_ to even drops from normal non-elite non-instance NPCs.
Yes, you can set some silly goal for yourself to have an inferior weapon crafted by yourself, instead of something better you could get from an instance or PvP. I do that kind of thing myself. Believe me, I usually love crafts, so I tried hard to believe that this time I'm doing something useful and meaningful. It's called "denial".
In reality there is no _logical_ reason to actually bother gathering/buying/bartering all those reagents instead of just farming whatever instance is apropriate for your level. The time and effort to get something better are actually lower.
At the moment, instances and PvP are the alpha and the omega, and that's that. The difference is just nuts in terms of rewards between those and _anything_ else you can do, crafting or questing included, other than for the purpose of getting an instance quest. (E.g., for a low level example that anyone should be familiar with, if you're gonna do the Deadmines, you might as well get a reward from Gryan Stoutmantle too.)
(And unrelated, while I'm at it, here's my wish for Blizzard: I wish that they'd balance the damn things against the rest of the game. Let's stop the silly pretense that everyone goes there because of the sheer fun, challenge and social experience. Most people are there for one single reason: because the rewards are so utterly unbalanced.)
"Again if you spent an inordinate amount of time in your "real life" on a hobby that had nothing to do with computers people would still tell you there's an inbalance. If you keep yourself entertained doing ANY one thing, and neglect other aspects of your life, its called ADDICTION."
Well, we can aggree on that, but then you don't need the whole rhetoric about games. If the point you're trying to make applies to doing _anything_ in excess (including then fishing or going to the pub or anything else) then wth was the purpose of the whole speech about how those are superior to games?
"If you don't understand what I'm saying by now, I don't think there's much point. I promise you there is no anti-gaming propaganda consipiracy."
Oh, I'm not saying there's a "conspiracy". Some people just need to attack anything new: comics, D&D, rock-and-roll music, computer games, they're all examples of stuff that was or is attacked as being some menace to society. People don't really need a conspiracy to act irrational and/or defend the status-quo.
And so far what I understand, is what was annoying me all along: it's a bunch of fallacies strung together to serve some preconceived notion. Fallacies such as:
1. Most importantly, this kind of argumentation tends to be just a textbook case of Begging The Question
You have already decided that gaming is in some way "worse" (less important, "not real", whatever) than RL, and you use "facts" (read: personal judgment calls) are _based_ on that premise. E.g., that skills that apply in a game don't count, that's already based on the above premise. They're only less important _because_ you've decided already that gaming is less important.
Yet you use them to "prove" the very proposition they were based on. Circular "logic", here we come.
2. Starting from a false premise.
E.g., You claim that what happens IRL has consequences, good or bad, but gaming doesn't have any. Therefore RL is somehow "better".
Yet such RL consequences as losing a friend, losing a job, flunking exams, or even such stuff as "those chinese guys killed each other for a sword" or Columbine, are waved around all the time as just that: consequences of gaming. So gaming does have consequences. (Not surprising, since gaming is one of the things your RL self does. So if RL has consequences, it stands to reason that this one should too.)
There goes that premise right out the window, and with it the supposed conclusion. "A => B" doesn't really prove anything when A is false.
3. Verbal fallacies: puns and semantic plays. A.k.a., Equivocation
Pretty much half your arguments are _based_ on the semantic ambiguity of "rewards" between "in-game rewards" and "RL rewards", or "skills" between "in-game skills" and "RL skills", or between gaming as in "what happens on the screen" (your airplane did an Immelman) and in "what you do IRL" (you sat there and pushed buttons.) The whole fallacy is trying to sneak through one meaning as a replacement for the other.
E.g., basically the whole flawed logic that (rephrased) goes basically like "(in-game) rewards stay in the game, therefore you have no (Real Life) rewards when the game ends." Which is just a bogus case of switching a word's meaning is the middle.
What translates to the real world were _never_ supposed to be the in-game results. The RL results were, if nothing else, simply the fact that I was entertained for X hours. That's all. Not unlike spending the same X hours watching movies, mowing the lawn, watching the news, or any other non-productive occupation.
E.g., trying to redefine "skills" (which is a very broad term) as "the skill to duplicate IRL the exact action on the screen."
No, you didn't learn how to fly an F16, but you might have gotten better reflexes, better eye-hand coordination in the
Well, all that tantrum would be good and fine, if it wasn't answering some completely imaginary point that I never made.
I'm not even sure where you got that idea from the paragraph you quoted. Exactly _how_ does my using going to a pub (in real life, not a pub in a game) or walking the dog (in real life again) or watching soccer (on your real life tv) as non-gaming examples of stuff people do to "escape reality", lead to all that "then you can't tell the difference between games and reality" tantrum? No, serously, you got me curious now.
What I wrote is basically that there is no such thing as "living a virtual life". You never really "escaped to a virtual world", other than in a metaphoric sense. Definitely not taken literally, as bullshit journalists love to use it.
In your example, _all_ that happened is just what you wrote here: "What did I do in my real life? I caught the train to and from work and played A FEW GAMES on my laptop. I also played games a little when I got home."
What I'm saying is that in the end that's _all_ that happened. All that virtual life never "existed", other than as a metaphor. You were just spending some time in RL, with a RL hobby: gaming. And the gaming itself (not the F16 stuff in the game, but the RL act of sitting there and pushing buttons) _is_ a part of your real life.
Basically my rant is aimed at the whole "you should go do stuff IRL instead of living in a game" propaganda. Well, I _am_ living In Real Life _am_ doing something IRL. I'm sitting at a keyboard and playing a game.
I never left Real Life. I'm right here with a mouse and keyboard, having fun.
Just because my kind of fun involves a computer game, doesn't mean I live inside the game, or any other silliness being waved around. My sitting on a chair and gaming isn't any less "real" than someone else's going to the pub or mowing the lawn.
Basically what annoys me is the whole anti-gaming rhetoric that's one big text-book example of a "proof" by puns and plays on semantics.
E.g., there's a (not so) subtle sleight of hand used to switch the meaning of goals/rewards/achievements/etc between in-game ones and my RL ones. Then the logic goes something like "the new armour your character got in WoW doesn't exist IRL, therefore you spent the whole evening doing/achieving nothing". That's quite literally a verbal fallacy: it switches between "in game reward" and "real life reward". In reality, I achieved something (different) IRL: I kept myself entertained for a couple of hours.
E.g., The whole "you should stop gaming and do something 'real' instead" is based upon some sleight of hand in moving the "not real" part from game contents to gaming itself as an activity. And that's what I'm contesting. Yes, the flying an F16 never happened (IRL), but my sitting there pushing buttons did. The sitting and pushing buttons _is_ real.
I could go on, but methinks you got the idea by now.
And before D&D, it was comics that are evil and turn people into murderers. No, seriously. And at some point it was Rock & Roll music that is evil. Etc.
But the general pattern is more like "new = evil".
In a lot of cases it's not that hard to find something that's a very close equivalent of the stuff they damn, but is socially acceptable.
E.g., take chess. It was supposed all along to be basically a strategy game, modelled closely after the armies of the time. What we call a "bishop" today, was an elephant, pawns were footmen, etc.
(Pointless trivia: originally a 4 player game, each starting with half the pieces on the 4 edges of the board. But then it was too hard to find 4 players, so two armies were joined in one, and one King became Grand Vizier. It's the piece we now call "Queen". That's, in a nutshell, why you have two of all other pieces.)
What I'm getting at is that it's not that different from, say, Warhammer or Battletech.
However one is socially acceptable, one supposedly makes you a nerd and a loser. And by "socially acceptable", I mean that if the CEO of a corporation said they've spent an evening playing chess at the club, it would be ok. Now picture a CEO of a bank saying they've spent an evening at the game shop playing Warhammer and Battletech, and you'll have some shocked and outraged shareholders and clients.
And from there to computers the step isn't even as big as some people would paint it. A lot of games are a verbatim implementation of some existing board game. (E.g., see Megamek for an excellent Battletech implementation. And allegedly Europa Universalis was also mostly a board game to PC game conversion.) Others are more complex and making better use of what a computer can do, but still not _that_ far from those boardgame roots.
Except this time I'm expected to believe that the mere addition of a computer into the mix, makes the game not just "nerdy" but outright evil and/or a mental health hazard.
Why? What's that different? What makes the exact same Battletech boards and rules and pieces so dangerous because they're on a computer?
Seems to me like the difference is whether it's already filed under "socially acceptable" or new and deviating from the comfortable norm. Basically that the newer something is, the more people will feel a need to attack it and shout you back into the conformist herd.
Basically what I'm saying is that the real underlying problem isn't that 3-4 people stabbed each other with knitting needles. The problem is just whether something is new. If knitting had just been invented in the 80's and growing in popularity ever since, then yes, you'd most likely have people feeling a need to fight against this new threat to "normality".
Then they'd drag out every single case where someone stabbed someone with a knitting needle, or even merely pricked their own finger, and put those on display as definitive proof that knitting is evil. And every case where someone lost their job and, unrelated, had knitting as a hobby, would be dragged out as "proof" that knitting makes people lose contact with reality. And so on.
And then 30 years pass, and people find another new thing to treat as a threat.
"But most people would agree that if you've got a great "online" life and a terrible real life, it's time to stop the escapism for long enough to give your real life a go."
The problem with that point of view is still assuming there is a sharp distinction between "online life" and "real life".
Whereas I'd argue that there is _no_ such thing as a separate "online life". Whatever you do, whatever you fill your time with, _is_ a part of your "real life". Whether you spent two hours getting plastered at the (RL) pub, or watching soccer, or mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, or whatever, it _is_ an hour of your "real life" and it _is_ something you did in "real life".
The whole "it's not real life" distinction is, to put it very undiplomatically, just anti-gaming propaganda. (Which makes it even more weird to see some gamers propagating it too.) It's just a case of "my hobby is better than yours", or rather of a dubious premise that that case is built upon. "Your hobby isn't 'real life', therefore mine is better than yours".
And in that "A => B" proposition, I'd contest the very premise A. It _is_ real life, I just chose to spend that time playing a game. That's all.
So I'd say there is no such thing as having a great "online life" and a terrible "real life", other than as a very thin metaphor. In the end it _is_ real life, and you get to choose how you wish to live it. Playing games is one of the many things you can do in it.
Yes, in any passtime, there are some trade-offs that might be involved. You spend too much money on a hobby (e.g., modding your car), you have less left for other stuff. You spend too much time on that hobby, it leaves you with less time for something else, e.g., for talking to other people, so they leave. You start skipping work for that hobby, you might get fired. Etc.
But as with any trade-off, it's in the end something _you_ decide for yourself, rather than the clear cut case of "category A is wrong, category B is right" that the anti-gaming propaganda tries to paint it as. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, there is _no_ right and wrong in a matter of personal choices and preferences.
E.g., if you think you need a wing on your car more than you need the money, there is no "right" or "wrong" in that personal preference. It's just something you chose for yourself.
The same applies about most other trade-offs waved around as some kind of "proof" that gaming is bad. They're just trade-offs someone made for themselves. If someone chose to spend the evening playing a game, instead of, say, doing overtime to impress the boss, that's their choice and preference. No more. They decided that they need the fun more than they need to compete with the local brown-noser for a promotion. That's all.
"If you want to make the case that an MMO has to be a game, be my guest, I agree with you."
Well, that's all the case I was trying to make, yes.
"You don't need to turn the discussion into a rant against UO to make that case though."
I was just trying to give some examples from the categories (A) it has more world/community than game, vs (B) it has more game and the world itself doesn't even take itself seriously.
Basically UO was just supposed to be there an example of what sorta looks like the former. It has an _outstanding_ community, _the_ best interface for a social player, lots of social options (e.g., housing), and very friendly and very social players. I've praised UO (the UO after non-PK facets were introduced, anyway) as a social place myself, you know. But... well, even if I don't rant about what happened in 1999 again, we can aggree that at the moment (even if by virtue of being 8 year old) it lacks most gameplay elements of the newer ones. Right?
Being 8 years old (or 2 years old in 1999 when EQ took over) does give it an excuse, but it might actually be good for the point I was trying to make there. If you took a new player, say, from the 5 million that joined in the last year, and gave him a choice of "hey, you can choose between (A) this game which is old and pretty much outdated as a game, but has this great community and lots of social stuff, and (B) this new game with all the _gameplay_ devices and all, but no community yet, and lacks a lot of social stuff", most of them have already chosen B.
Basically people chose the more modern game, over the outdated one with the great community. I think we can at least aggree that it's no big surprise that people chose a more modern game, right?
Well, in the end that was the whole point I was making (even if we disaggree about what happened with UO in 1999): that the game part matters. The one with a better _game_ (even if by sheer virtue of being 7 years newer) got more subscribers.
"There are lots of reasons why EQ and WoW have more subscribers than UO. To isolate one difference ("world" vs. "game"), and suggest that it is the only, or even primary, reason for the difference is ridiculous."
Well, other than TSO, noone has that clear cut a distinction to make it a 100% case of "world" vs "game". So, yes, the best I can do is say that UO sorta falls somewhere in that quadrant, and WoW sorta falls somewhere in the other quadrant. Or it looks to me like it falls there.
"Then you go on to rant about things like PKs and the usefulness of tinkering, which serve no purpose other than to further bash UO; they're completely irrelevant to the discussion."
No, they were not irrelevant at all. They were aimed to illustrate the case that UO was a "world" but not that great a "game". If you don't want examples from the "lack of game" department, here are three from the "more like a world" department: self-sustaining ecology, advanced management/allocation of resources for the economy, player-run IC justice. All three were hyped by Origin itself as making it a better/more realistic "world", and all three got removed by Origin itself because it made it a worse "game".
Yes, personal opinion, etc. Still, just saying: that's why it was there, not as some sort of axe-grinding or anything equally silly.
"But you have to admit it's pretty silly to expect an 8-year-old game to compete favorably with a brand new one."
According to Game Spy Stats, Half Life still tops their chart for number of active players right now. Of course, that's because of Counter-Strike, which is sorta the whole point: a game or mod that invented a sub-genre, even after 8 years kept more players than its much-more modern clones. (And in an also interesting twist, Top Mods For Half Life By Players says the original CounterStrike beats the newer CS: Condition Zero clone by 10 to 1.)
Still, ok, I'll admit, for most games time isn't that kind.
Everytime somebody disproves GALLANT's theories, people like you spout forth [list you posted] to kill it off. Lather, rinse, repeat."
So basically you're not even able to distinguish between (A) actually disproving a theory, and (B) an ad-hominem attack against the person saying it. If the whole "GALLANT vs GOOFUS" ad-hominem and fallacies counts for you as having disproved GALLANT's _theories_ (even though they're not even mentioned in there, much less analyzed)... wth, I rest my case. QED, indeed.
Well, ok, upon re-reading it all, I guess I can see your point.
Still, just to nitpick of the choice of an example:
Hmm... A quick trip to http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/ says "Habbos in the hotel: 5315". Doesn't look to me like that great an active population. I'm sure not only WoW, but even more minor players like CoH or AO can boast more players logged in at any given time. (At a wild guess, WoW only needs some 50 people or so on each server to beat that number.)
I'm assuming that's not total active population, but people currently logged in.
For an (admittedly not apples-to-apples) comparison to more traditional games, I went to Game Spy and looked at the box on the right side of the page. "192,921 gamers are online right now." at roughly the same moment. Half life alone clocks in at 54,228 players online ATM on the servers scanned by GameSpy. (I.e., excluding those who play it on a lan, or single-player, or whatever.)
I don't know, 5315 sounds like roughly 10 times less people in the successful non-game, compared to a 8 years old _game_. Maybe I chose the wrong moment to check, but it doesn't like sound _that_ impressive a success.
Some quick (and admittedly bogus) maths says that if the average player spent only 2 hours a day there (and ignoring variations like that now it's friday afternoon and it might have more players than at, say, 4 AM, but probably less than at 8 PM)... well, that would put the active population at some some 60,000 Habbos total.
I'm talking this time _active_ players, not just people who created an account last year and in the meantime forgot about it. By comparison, TSO was considered a flop when it peaked at 100,000 active accounts.
Also for something that's basically IRC with cutesy graphics, it kinda looks thin compared to the real IRC without graphics.
So not as a flame, but as genuine curiosity: by which criterion do you count it as the most successful virtual world, and more successful than WoW? In which metric did it beat WoW?
First of all, before I get started, no, I don't have an axe to grind against UO. I'm just questioning the whole idea that a MMO is supposed to be a anything _but_ a game. That it has to be a world, a platform, a community, a time-sink, everything _but_ a game. Oh, really? Personally I'd highly question that.
UO just happens to be a prime example of that. It was a world, a platform, a great community, and... absolutely piss-poor as a _game_. And cared more about their world and platform than about what the players wanted.
I'm sure other games make equally, if not better examples of that. UO just happens to be an example that's very well known (and hopefully very well known to Mr Koster.)
But OK, if you want to talk UO, let's talk UO. I did bring it up, so I'm not gonna back away from discussing the point, obviously.
1. So you're telling me that UO stayed in first place _only_ as long as it had _no_ competition? Heh. I'm sure you can see what's wrong with that. It's not hard to be in the first place when you're not competing against anyone, is it? It's like saying "I was the fastest runner on Earth until they made me compete against other people."
2. Ok, the point about the engine getting old is well taken. But what about all the engine upgrades UO had, including an update to 3D? Let me remind you that even then, stuff that looked like complete ass (e.g., AC looked horrible) _still_ stole UO's players.
So, no, I feel it's entirely fair to compare them when UO had all the chances in the world to change and improve, to stay in the competition. We're not talking comparing UO of 1997 to WoW of 2005. We're talking a UO that had literally hundreds of patches, and more expansion packs than The Sims to stay competitive and comparable to the newer games.
3. Only because of graphics? Heh. Dude, graphics were the _least_ of complaints about UO. UO was, for a long while, known as "the place you go if you want to be harrassed by idiot griefers and PK'ers." EQ and AC pretty much made it their _main_ message and _main_ reason to switch, that they're the place where you won't have to deal with idiot PKers like in UO. (Along with other messages like actually having quests and world events. I.e., being a _game_.)
4. Yes, the point is taken that some 250,000 people still like UO. (Or that was the number some time ago, when I last saw some numbers.) But see, that's actually the whole point: 14 times more people like WoW a lot more.
Between (A) a world which is little more than a world and a damn good community, and (B) a world which also has a damn good game, even if it lacks a lot of the social stuff like player housing... it seems to me that a _lot_ more people have chosen (B). Even if we leave UO out, TSO is an even better example: 35 times more people chose a _game_ like WoW over a pure community/social _platform_ like TSO.
That's in the end the whole point: only being a world and a world just doesn't cut it. A good community helps keep the players there, yes (and UO does make a good example of that), but actually being an enjoyable game is what gets them there and playing in the first place. Before you even get to have online friends and guild-mates that make you go back there, comes a month or so when you don't even know many people and you just run around killing bears and making potions. If that month isn't much fun as a _game_, not many people will even make it into the other half.
Well, then it shouldn't be hard to attack GALLANT's _theories_, instead of spewing ad-hominem attacks. If GALLANT theories are indeed just a collection of fallacies, then please point out _those_, instead of going on a whole "he's less likable than GOOFUS, so don't trust him" fallacy spree.
That's really my whole problem with this kind of rhetoric. I'm _not_ saying "trust GALLANT instead", I'm just saying it would be nice if it stayed science instead of a mud-slinging contest. That's all.
I don't necessarily trust GALLANT to be the only one right or anything, and yes, I'm all for cleaning up the stuff that we dump into the air. Global warming or not, we breathe that shit.
But I very much like to see his measurements too, just in case. And if someone wants to enlighten me in which ways those measurements are wrong, or mis-interpreted, then please, please, please tell me just that: exactly which measurements calculations are wrong. _Not_ a religious case of "noo, don't even look at that evil data, it's the Devil's work."
And that goes for both sides, really. The true believer camp just happens to be better represented, but, yes, you're right: the other camp pulls fallacies and political speeches too.
And I'm not happy about those either. "Noo, don't look at that pinko-commie liberal data" isn't really any better than "noo, don't look at those corporate-paid evil data." Both are what happens when science ends and politics/religion have stolen the show.
I'd like to see the whole global warming stuff just for once discused based on the facts, and _only_ the facts. For once not by quickly manufacturing a diversion and reaching for the handy-dandy fallacies.
Yes, I don't doubt that a true religious zealot would feel a need to get violent on the heretics. After all, we've already seen that in the form of the Inquisition. Nothing new there. If anything, it just proves my point that some people found _religion_, not science, there.
However, the question is, can you actually argue a point without crap like "I wanted to slap you like a bitch" or "you stupid cunt"? Zealot tantrums are an amusing read, but sadly prove nothing in science.
"You know what the problem with phone-support people is? All the good ones will have moved on to better jobs within the same company within 18 months."
Bingo. That was more or less the whole point: anyone who actually had any computer skills, or acquired any on the job, has moved higher up the food chain.
Hence I find the whole rampant "I work tech support, so I'm TEH COMPUTER GURU" arrogance to be undeserved. Tech support is to IT jobs what being a waiter in Hollywood is to acting jobs. It's something you do while waiting to get into the _real_ thing.
Not that there's anything wrong with starting there. A lot of good actors (e.g., Jean Claude Van Dam comes to mind) started by washing dishes in Hollywood. But so did a lot who never amounted to more than washing dishes.
Basically I'm willing to accept someone's claim to skills and glory _after_ they moved up from that job. Before, saying "I'm a tech guru (and the customers are idiots) because I work(ed) tech support" is like saying "I'm a great actor because I got hired as a waiter in a Hollywood pizzeria." Doesn't really prove much yet.
"So, ehmm, this is all the fault of the employees themselves?"
_If_ anyone's complaint is basically "auugh, but now I won't be able to insult the customers by phone", then yes. Those who were reasonably polite, I don't think they'll have anything to fear from this kind of software.
"Not the rotten company they work for and which you have chosen to keep in business by granting them your patronage, or their moronic manager who did a quick afternoon study, but the poor sod on the phone?"
Oh, I despise that company too, no doubt about it. And indeed, it was the company's crappy systems and policies that caused both problems in the first place.
I just don't think that letting tech support people _also_ insult the customers would have made it a better company, though.
*shrug* I must confess I was actually _expecting_ an answear like this. So I'm not disappointed.
Yes, it can't be that some monkey couldn't even tell me that something's wrong, after I politely explained the problem and read that number to them. Again. For the 20'th time. Or that some other clueless monkey in the PA story couldn't even comprehend that there is no fucking gateway between the computer and the modem.
Nah, it _must_ be the customer who's to blame, and generally an idiot. Right?
Well, you just made my point as to what's wrong with tech support.
While no individual scientist has the time to question every single theory in existence, a real scientist will _accept_ that any given theory _can_ be questioned. No matter how old, how established, how popular, or how well it fits his political party's doctrine.
There's a reason why even established stuff like gravity is called a "theory" and never renamed to "fact". It's always just a "theory" (ok, in the scientific sense, not in the common usage of "just a theory", which is more like "hypothesis".) It can _always_ be a candidate to be better understood, revised or outright discarded.
The moment one theory is put on a pedestal, it's suddenly taken as a 100% finished and definitive fact, that noone should ever question, it stopped being science.
So when I see a whole bloody thread and a whole bloody disertation aimed openly at discrediting anyone who dares question the sacred truth, and based on such fine fallacies as:
- Ad Hominem and more speciffically a very verbose case of Poisoning The Well (The _whole_ purpose of the whole GALLANT vs GOOFUS thing is to ridicule and undermine the credibility of GALLANT, instead of whether his theories might or might not be right. So most of the other fallacies are just there to serve this one.)
- Appeal to Numbers (More of us believe X instead of Y, so X must be true. Or conversely, don't even consider Y, since it doesn't have a "consensus".)
- Appeal to Motive (Let's divert the question from whether a theory is right to the possibility that anyone supporting it _might_ have some hidden motives.)
- Argumentum ad Lazarum and other forms of Appeal to Emotion to paint GOOFUS as _likeable_, as the only proof needed that his is the right theory. (Surely the poor guy who earns less and doesn't wear a suit must be right, because he's the one your average slashdotter can sympathise more.)
- Appeal To Spite and/or Association Fallacy (Surely the _only_ ones supporting those theories are those evil conservatives/oil cartels/whatever supporting those theories. And because they're evil, anyone or any theory associated with them is automatically evil and discredited.)
(You can also add the Begging The Question to the last one, since there's a bit of circular logic and assuming that you already know they're evil, in classifying them as evil in the first place.)
- Appeal To Fear (While not directly a theme of the GOOFUS vs GALLANT story, it _is_ the _main_ theme waved around in this whole using ecology as political capital. If you don't imediately stop believing all else and do as we say, we're all doomed!)
And so on, and so forth.
Sorry, that is _not_ science. It's politics and religion, but science it sure as heck ain't. I don't know which is the correct theory there, but it sure as heck ain't decided by such GALLANT-vs-GOOFUS Poisoning the Well rhetoric.
(Which of course, doesn't invalidate the fact that global warming might (or might not) be real. Like anything which is just a string of fallacies, it really doesn't prove anything. It does, however, disgust me profoundly.)
Well, good. The thought that this software will be used for that just made my day. Because it's bad enough to deal with utterly clueless tech-support people without them being jerks on the phone too.
Yes, I know, everyone who's ever worked in tech support thinks the're THE God of computing, and know it all. That being able to boot their mom's computer makes them the uber IT sage.
Who knows, maybe some actually do know their shit. But let me break the nasty news: most don't. While I do have all the respect for anyone who can take that stress, that's it: it's a high-stress low-pay job that _only_ has something to do with being desperate enough to accept it, not with being a computer guru. If you actually have _any_ knowledge or skill with computers, that's purely coincidental to that job, and frankly, then you're in the wrong job. You have my compassion.
For every "this and that clueless idiot called me when I was working tech support" story, there are 1000 stories where the clueless one was manning the hell desk. (And a lot of stories from the former category, really belong in the latter.)
Stories like the recent one on Penny Arcade, where some clueless ISP support insisted that the problem is with some gateway that's unsuported by that ISP. The only problem there: a gateway that they didn't even have. That's it, folks: a non-existing piece of hardware was what's causing the problems, according to her list.
Or like my personal favourite, where the bunch of clueless monkeys at my ISP's call-centre took a fucking _month_ to reset my password. (After a glitch in their "change your password online" page mangled it.) See, the invoice number they had in their computer didn't match the one I had received. So even though they send the new password by snail-mail to my home address (so who the heck else could get it anyway), and the line is tied to that physical address (being DSL), and they're the same company providing the phone line I'm calling over, so they can know it's me... nah, they can't fucking change my password because the answer to the magic question "what's your invoice number" was wrong.
But that's not what's the saddest. The saddest is that they don't even tell me there's a problem, so I can talk to someone and fix it. No, they just let me call again and again for a whole fucking month, while the problem obviously doesn't fix itself.
And no, I'm not making it up. It's way too sad to make up.
And so on.
So now you're telling me that some are also jerks on the phone? That in addition to dealing with some buggy software/hardware/internet access from a crap company, and receiving some canned answers that don't even apply to their problem... someone would _also_ be insulted over phone by tech-support? Well, gee, then I'm all for that software.
"While that's true in general, you must eventually accept things as true, leave them and move on. For example, you're not going to get very far trying to disprove the laws of thermodynamics. They may not be held as a "sacred truth", but you'd be hard pressed to find someone reputable who's willing to seriously dispute them."
Actually, it happens more often than you'd think in the _real_ science.
The whole of relativity or quantum mechanics, for example, exist because someone dared question Newtonian mechanics. Those in turn existed because some people (e.g., Galileo) dared question the existing model, and prove that no, regardless of what the official doctrine says, a rock 10 times heavier doesn't fall 10 times faster, and one dropped from the top of the mast doesn't actually fall towards the rear of the ship.
And even relativity and quantum mechanics were not the end of the road. We have even newer theories, such as dark matter (the accepted one) or a proposed revision to gravity (still just a "contender", because someone didn't take those as set in stone. Someone (a lot of someones, actually) measured what happens up there, and saw that the accepted theories just don't explain it. So they came up with better theories.
Or you have stuff like chemistry and electronics at the level they are today, because some guy called Ernest Rutherford dared question the pie-with-electrons-in-it model of the atom. Which in turn existed because someone dared assume that the atom isn't in fact indivisible. ("atomos" = indivisible)
Without such "heretics" we'd still be at most at alchemy level, and assuming that chemical reactions are 1 atom of A + 1 atom of B = 1 atom of C. And still not seeing why if A is lead and C is gold, a B can't exist that can make that reaction work.
That's how science works, and "my theory is more popular than yours, so I'll try to discredit you by tons of self-righteous protests" was never a part of the scientific process. Science is _not_ supposed to be a popularity contest, nor resolved by popular vote and political speeches. (Not that it wasn't tried before, mind you. Relativity was described as bolshevism, for example.)
If someone wants to disprove the laws of thermodynamics, they _are_ perfectly allowed to do so. They just have to present a ton of convincing data, from experiments which others can duplicate and/or try to falsify or explain otherwise.
And if that new theory is gonna be proved right or wrong, it will have to do with testing their data and their calculations, and maybe devising even better experiments and calculations. _Not_ via "auugh, you dare question my sacred proof, therefore you must be a pinko-commie heretic paid by astroturf groups" self-righteous protests.
"Online worlds are a PLATFORM first and foremost. Putting games in that platform is certainly one of the top things you can do, and if you do so, you had better make sure those games are fun, certainly. But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands--there's plenty of examples of that."
But in practice there are plenty of examples to the opposite too.
E.g., TSO comes to mind. It had a world, it was designed to be more of a community than any MMO ever made (there wasn't much else than social interaction in it anyway), and it was based on _the_ biggest franchise name in PC gaming history. (The Sims outsold all Warcraft games combined.) And it flopped. It peaked at about 35 times less players than WoW has, and again, WoW started from a less big franchise name.
The problem: well, it was everything _except_ a game. The "game" part was about as exciting and fun as watching paint dry.
E.g., to be nasty: UO. It _invented_ a genre (not to mention was based on the biggest RPG franchise name) and quickly ended up in third place. It peaked at about 1/14 as many players as WoW currently has, or 1/2 of what Everquest had without a franchise name or anything.
And again, we're talking about inventing a genre. Look at what Wolfenstein 3D did for Id, to understand by contrast the _massive_ failure of UO.
The problems were many, including, yes, an utter failure to even try being fun or balanced as a game. Gameplay was pretty much non-existent, whole skills were utterly useless (e.g., was there _any_ use for tinkering, except traps to kill newbies?) or conversely had 2/3 of the possible actions in the game under one single skill (ever seen even miners or sheepherds without magic skill in UO?), and so on.
Oh yes, it concentrated on being a world and a platform instead. At all cost. Even if it meant alienating the players. _Years_ were spent into trying to justify why it's good and realistic for newbies to be pk-ed on sight, for example, while players were leaving en-masse to AC and EQ because of it. Or in various failed band-aid experiments which were _already_ proven not to work on MUDs. Had the world and platform ahead of what the players wanted for so long, that it just lost most of those players.
"Online worlds encompass game worlds like EQ and WoW, social worlds like There.com and Habbo Hotel, user-created worlds like Second Life and Furcadia, educational worlds like MOOse Crossing and military training sims, research-oriented worlds like MediaMOO, and much more. Thinking that they are all games is exactly the point of this law."
Heh. Compared to the population of even the worst MMO flop, a MUD is a spit in the bucket. Even if some of those are examples of "but look, you can make an online world even without much of a game", then the rightful second half of that phrase is "and be an utter and total flop, compared to worlds which _do_ have a game."
We can learn a lot of valuable lessons about human interactions and such from MUDs, yes. But if we're talking about designing a world that's a _commercial_ _success_ on any reasonable scale, let's stick to the likes of EQ and WoW, please.
Plus, it's a skewed comparison anyway to compare a world which has a 15$ per month price tag, to a MUD that works for free through Telnet. Something that requires people to reach into their wallet and _stull_ has 3000 times more players, well, I'd say it did something a _lot_ better than those research MOOs.
Plus, if we are including free online worlds like MUDs and MOOs, and consider the genre as broad as to include pretty much anything online including those... then we also get plenty of games which are counter-examples to the "But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands" point. Th
"I know gamers love to bitch about games, but how about instead of the Worst Of lists we see a Things We Like the Most About Gaming list? Just a thought."
Well, I don't know if it's actually been put in a numbered list yet, but, eh, just go read a review from any major site. They'll spend _pages_ telling you what they loved about a game. (And it's usually the same things. "Whoa, this time it has 5% more polygons per character!")
Then give everything a score between 90% and 100%. (Doubly so if it's one of those sites/magazines which blatantly tries to please EA's and Vivendi's marketting. It doesn't pay to give their games a bad score, because then they'll cut your ads, you know.)
Now think about it. On a scale of 0% to 100%, then 50% would mean average. A 100% score would mean so utter perfection that even God Himself couldn't improve it. So a site where most scores are between 90% and 100%, and no game since Daikatana dipped under 80%, is trying to tell me... what? That _all_ games are way above average? Then how is it an average?
The problem is the whole focus on what's good and perfect, and barely touching (if at all) what's sub-par. Everyone concentrates on telling me the same half the news: what's good.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about praising the neighbour's kid or making smalltalk to your co-workers, or anything else where "if you can't say anything good, better not say anything" might apply. We're talking blowing some 40 to 60 Euro for a game. But I damn well like to know the _whole_ story, including what's _bad_, when I choose one.
So I like reading a good "bitching". It gives me that much-needed insight into that other half of the story. What's bad, what's been done better in another game, what becomes boring at level 40, what doesn't live up to the massive hype that the publisher spewed.
And if someone's feelings are hurt by that "bitching", well, they could just keep their marketting on a leash next time. If the hype squad didn't promise the moon and the stars for 2-3 years straight, you wouldn't get people "bitching" when its released with half the stars missing and the moon being just a painted frisbee on a pole.
But in the meantime, that's just the kind of thing I'd like to know when I buy a game. If it takes wading through someone's "bitching" to get to that info, so be it.
"And if you have dialup, why are you playing an MMO?"
I'll bite. Where did the game say on the box that you need broadband to play the game?
"If you're playing an MMO, why are you on dialup?"
I don't even understand that question. Does subscribing to a MMO also give you a broadband subscription, or even just a broadband provider in your area? Or wth is the if-then relationship there?
"If you're not on dialup, why do you care about patches?"
I'm on DSL, and it seems to me like download times _are_ a problem even if you're not on Dialup. (In fact, are such a pain in the butt on DSL, that the mere thought of someone getting those on dialup makes me cringe.)
I got into WoW in July 2005. I had to let Blizzard's sucky slow downloader run over night before I could even create a character.
I also reinstalled City Of Heroes recently. There goes another couple of hours of just downloading patches.
I'm not going to even try to be diplomatic about it: basically your whole post, like most of the eco-scare propaganda, boils down to "everyone who disaggrees with my Holy Truth is an heretic, and furthermore _paid_ to attack our Holy Truth."
Which, sad to say, isn't how science works. Science has _no_ absolute set-in-stone sacred truths. In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, regardless of why. (Research into, say, magnetic materials paid for by IBM isn't any less valid than any other research, just because it's paid for by a corporation.) Science is that-a-way, absolute truths that noone should dare question are that other way, through the door marked "Religion."
And another thing these whole pseudo-science political/religious groups don't seem to get either: science isn't a prom-queen popularity contest either. Whether a theory looks valid or not, that will be decided by scientists, based on the data it has. Not by piling enough "it contradicts my _dogma_, so let's drown it into self-righteous protests" pieces of garbage like what you just wrote.
Do _you_ have a Ph.D. in the domain? I'm willing to bet the answer is "nope". Yet you feel qualified to judge someone and their calculations (which you probably didn't even see, much less understand) and damn them just because they contradict with what your religious leaders told you. It _has_ to be some sinister plot, because god forbid that your religion could possibly be less than 100% right, or that its answers might be anything less than 100% definitive.
Yes, it may be wrapped in pretentious-sound pseudo-science babble, and use funny graphs as its holy symbols, but religion it is. I don't care how many words it borrowed (and perverted) from the real science, the moment it has definitive truths that noone should dare question, it's nowhere _near_ being science any more.
So which is the real scientist? Well, after reading that "everyone disaggreeing with me is a paid astroturfer" piece of brain-damage, it sure as hell isn't you. So go back to your "church of the global warming", and leave judging who's a scientist and who isn't to the real scientists.
"I don't have a problem with it - if you have a genetic issue that could prevent you from doing the job you're being hired for, I don't think they should have any reason to hire you over someone who doesn't have it. It's not any different than not having to hire someone in a wheelchair to sweep and mop the steps in your building."
1. If the condition was that overt as to outright prevent you from doing your job _now_, I'd like to think it would be obvious enough without genetic testing. E.g., you don't need need genetic testing to see that your prospective janitor is in a wheelchair. E.g., you don't need genetic testing to see that someone has Down's syndrome, or to put it otherwise that he's genetically retarded, which is pretty much one of the very few conditions that would make one unfit for, say, IT or programming work. (If you need genetic testing to not hire a retard, in the medical sense of the word, as, say, a programmer, frankly you should leave someone else do the hiring.)
2. What it's a lot more likely to end up used as, is as to discriminate against people who _might_ sometime in the future have problems. E.g., someone who's more likely to have heart problems later or whatever. But might just as well never actually have a problem. Or against someone whose genes say he's more likely to get addicted, _if_ they ever try drugs, even if at the moment they're not doing any drugs.
Which, frankly, is like discriminating against drivers because they _might_ end up in a wheelchair someday. Or against computer gamers because they _might_ turn up into violent criminals and shoot up the office, as the media keeps assuring us.
Frankly, I'd rather see people judged for what they've done or what they are qualified/motivated to do now, than upon wild guesses as to what they might (but just as well might not) do in the future.
3. It's also opening the gate for a stuff that's just a case of personal morals/prejudices/whatever than actually affecting the job in any way, and in this case preemptively.
E.g., assuming that there actually is a "predisposed to homosexuality" gene, or at least that anyone can suspect one to be it, what's to keep an employer from refusing to employ those? Again, it's just a personal morals/religion call, not something that affects one's ability to do most jobs. And again it's something that would just say "predisposed", and doesn't mean that someone actually _is_ actively homosexual.
4. But what scares me the _most_ is the opportunity to just turn it into one more work-avoidance technique on the part of management.
Already if you think everyone actually hires by comparing everyone's merits and experience, you're sadly mistaken. The first thing that gets applied is some arbitrary bogus criterion of getting rid of most applications, just to make the job easier.
And I don't even mean just stuff like appearance, or filtering them by how much you like the supplied email address, or whatever. There are some truly abhominable criteria out there.
There was a documentary on it on some French channel, some years ago. The mind boggled. At least one company used numerology to select a pool of suitable candidates. (No, really. Assign numbers to the letters in the candidate's name, add them up, see if it matches the sum for the company's name. Literally.) A few used Tarot. (Yes, literally. They had a seer which used Tarot cards to see which candidates have that magical match to the company.) Etc.
I can just see Genetics being used in the same way.
And, frankly, the world doesn't need more bogus hiring criteria.
"Blizzard could clearly prohibit you from mailing an alt money."
And that wouldn't solve anything whatsoever. COH for example doesn't even have a mail service at all, and people still transfer money nevertheless.
"Being able to send alts money does cause inflation, but does not significantly alter the game."
In a lot of games, it does. E.g., COH is already being rebalanced for people who have all the best gear, and having anything less than _perfect_ equipment ("enhancements" in COH lingo) will already get you booted out of some groups.
E.g., if you're a fire tank at level 22 and you don't have 1 million to pay for all the best gear (and you can't possibly have earned that much yourself yet, since there are no trade skills) the effects in COH will be that you "only" take 3 times as much damage per second from enemies, and do only half as much damage per second to them. I.e., it's not that you're slightly less effective, you're not even in the same bloody _class_ as someone who got their money from someone else.
And, frankly, even in WOW I'll call bullshit on that. If you're telling me that getting a 50%+ more HP and other massive stats bonuses from green-class (bind-on-equip) equipment from the auction house, and even more from blue-class equipment, doesn't signifficantly alter your level-up speed... you obviously haven't thought much about it. The extra health alone can make a whole world of a difference.
It may not be totally unbalanced like in COH, but it does offer a signifficant advantage.
And I'm not even getting into the PvP aspect where lamers with equipment bought on ebay are parked in front of the inn and duelling everyone in sight. Yeah, it sooo says "fair" to pit people with blue equipment worth hundreds of gold against people who still can't afford a replacement for their newbie sword.
"Now you're completely crazy. In the general case, in real life, YES, some people have more money, and some people have less. NO, it's not a bad thing that the people on the low end want a part of that money, and are willing to perform duties in exchange for some of that money. Velocity of money is a GOOD thing."
Velocity of money IRL is one thing, having in-game benefits you didn't earn in-game is a _completely_ other thing.
I don't care what economic theories say what about how the money should flow IRL. Yes, I _know_ that the RL economy is pretty much based on imbalances.
But (A) games don't need it, and (B) in games I'd very much like someone's achievements, especially when they're then pitted against other players, to be based on their in-game prowess, not on their credit card (including not on having a power-levelled alt to get money and resources from.)
That kind of money dynamics is, simply put, cheating. No more, no less. It's an in-game advantage based on something from RL. (RL credit card, credit card for example.) And frankly, I have nothing but sheer disgust towards someone who cheats in multiplayer. Doubly so for someone who actually _pays_ to cheat.
I mean, ffs, even the lamers with aimbots and wall-hacks in CS or manually-edited items in Diablo, at least they downloaded those for free. Actually paying on ebay to have the balls to kill a newbie in PvP, is a whole new level of lameness. It redefines the word "lame" to a whole new level.
So there you have it in a nutshell why I hope some game will do away with that money dynamics. I don't care what it does for the RL economy, it does nothing useful in a game.
There was something nagging me about his number of deviations above the mean, and I mean above and beyond it being just a case of Skinner's Constant (Flannegan's Finagling Factor). ( That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten.)
Then I've read it again: "But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class."
And that just gave me a fit of laughter.
Assuming that any job requires one to not only be in the top 5% to be considered a genius, but to actually be in the top 0.01% most intelligent/skilled/whatever people... is at best ego masturbation. Sorry to bust his bubble, but _no_ job, and least of all a lousy teaching job, needs _that_ kind of qualifications.
But to need _that_ kind of a factor as a justification for job discrimination across the economy is already at best giving me the idea that it's really discrimination that's the real problem.
To put into perspective what _that_ kind of a requirement would mean: in the USA then there would be only some 30,000 people _total_ qualified to do it. No more, no less.
Now subtract those of them who are still children, or already retired. Also consider the fact that no job or field will get _all_ geniuses wanting to work in it, and you're left with a total pool of maybe 1000 - 2000 people in the whole USA that are actually available to work in that field at all.
So if anyone wants to tell me that that kind of maths is, say, why there are so few women in IT or any other field, I'd want to see some damn convincing numbers that show there's a total of 1000-2000 IT workers in the USA. Again, keyword is: total. Not graduates per year or whatever. Total. That's it. That better be _all_ the jobs economy-wide that any given field has, before they can say with a straight face that they're really a job for only the 0.01% most intelligent people.
That applies to his university too: if we stretch the maybe a couple of thousand that are both (A) in that top 0.01% of the population, _and_ (B) interested in an academic job, there just isn't enough of them to go around between all the top-25 universities on the various profiles. It's not like all the intelligent humans work only in physics universities. If you consider that some will go into maths instead, some into social sciences, some into medicine, some into marketting/management universities, some into chemistry, etc, it just doesn't add up. Even taking the top 25 universities in each field, there just aren't enough people in that 0.01% bracket to staff them all.
So while I still won't tar and feather him for sexism (hey, it's not my job to worry about sexism), I _will_ laugh my ass at him for that kind of snotty elitism. He's one in 10,000, my ass. Yeah, right. He's just an ego-masturbating buffoon, that's all.
See, I have no problem accepting any fact if there's solid _scientific_ data to support it. But the keyword there is: scientific. Drawing conclusions based on any data only makes _any_ sense if you know (A) what you're measuring, (B) what are the external influences and factors there, and (C) it's an "all else being equal" situation.
E.g., if I wanted to draw the conclusion that gravity doesn't work that like Newtonian and Einstein mechanics say, and my "proof" was that a feather still falls slower than an anvil, I'd have every scientist laughing in my face. What did I really measure there? The different drag factor, actually, not gravity.
Doubly so when it involves "proof" where one thing was measured in air, a different one in water, and a third one in a vaccuum, and I still pretended it's a valid apples-to-apples comparison.
That's the kind of data that would convince me here too: one which can make a case that the very data it uses it's scientific, and that all else is being understood, factored in, and reasonably equal. Otherwise, starting from dubious data and making some hand-waving maths on it, is at best worth a chuckle to anyone with a scientific background.
"Garbage In, Garbage Out" applies to more than computing. physics, maths, social sciences, you name it, if you start with bogus data, the results are worth exactly nothing.
I mean, take the very maths he does: ok, how many standard deviations above the norm _is_ he using in those calculations? Is it 2? 3? 4? How did he measure it? Seems to me like he's just taking an wild guess -- i.e., pulling a random number out of the hat -- and using it as the very _base_ of those calculations. So the very parameter that determines whether the correlation is correct or not... is just a fudged guess that noone ever measured? Can you say... "Garbage In"?
Now let's look at the actual grades he's based that maths on.
Let's even skip over his own admission that "Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right." (Although that would be enough to nail it as at best an interesting hypothesis, but nothing more. GIGO all the way, if he himself admits the "GI" part.)
What about other factors?
E.g., I can tell you first hand that how motivated you are in school makes a _lot_ of difference. In two consecutive years I personally swung from having the best grades in the year to barely getting a passing grade, and then back again to the top in the third year. The difference? Well, one year of "bah, school is stupid and boring anyway. As long as I pass, what does it matter with which grade?" mentality. You set your aim low, you hit low.
There are a myriad ways in which Group A could be more or less motivated than Group B. E.g., seeing different rewards for the same effort. The least rewarded group will be motivated a lot less. E.g., a general cultural failure in which being a skinny airhead and marrying a rich guy trumps academic achievement any day. Or at least is seen as way cooler. E.g., a very different degree of support and encouragement at home towards certain fields. Etc.
Basically I'm not gonna tar and feather him for polytical correctness sake, but I _am_ gonna take his conclusions as at most a wild unproven hypothesis. Could be true, could be false, but as long as his data is a clear-cut case of "Garbage In", we're never going to know.
And justifying further discrimination based on such a proven hypothesis is shaky at best. "A => B" only says something about B when you know A to be true. As long as A isn't, the whole implication says nothing whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me tell you a short story. I joined WoW in July and got promptly recruited into a guild. (Some people seem to spam everyone in sight with invites.) I was a warrior. So I mention that I've taken up smithing, so I can someday make items for myself.
The unanimous guild mates' answer? "Dude, don't be stupid. You can buy better stuff at the auction house than you'll ever be able to craft."
Even better yet? "Ditch smithing and get mining and skinning. Sell skins and metals at the AH and buy better stuff."
Now I'm not opposed to crafting being, say, equal to dropped stuff. But the fact is, crafted items are _inferior_ to even drops from normal non-elite non-instance NPCs.
Yes, you can set some silly goal for yourself to have an inferior weapon crafted by yourself, instead of something better you could get from an instance or PvP. I do that kind of thing myself. Believe me, I usually love crafts, so I tried hard to believe that this time I'm doing something useful and meaningful. It's called "denial".
In reality there is no _logical_ reason to actually bother gathering/buying/bartering all those reagents instead of just farming whatever instance is apropriate for your level. The time and effort to get something better are actually lower.
At the moment, instances and PvP are the alpha and the omega, and that's that. The difference is just nuts in terms of rewards between those and _anything_ else you can do, crafting or questing included, other than for the purpose of getting an instance quest. (E.g., for a low level example that anyone should be familiar with, if you're gonna do the Deadmines, you might as well get a reward from Gryan Stoutmantle too.)
(And unrelated, while I'm at it, here's my wish for Blizzard: I wish that they'd balance the damn things against the rest of the game. Let's stop the silly pretense that everyone goes there because of the sheer fun, challenge and social experience. Most people are there for one single reason: because the rewards are so utterly unbalanced.)
I'm thinking there are other areas of a female android that could use this technology too.
To start with the important part:
"Again if you spent an inordinate amount of time in your "real life" on a hobby that had nothing to do with computers people would still tell you there's an inbalance. If you keep yourself entertained doing ANY one thing, and neglect other aspects of your life, its called ADDICTION."
Well, we can aggree on that, but then you don't need the whole rhetoric about games. If the point you're trying to make applies to doing _anything_ in excess (including then fishing or going to the pub or anything else) then wth was the purpose of the whole speech about how those are superior to games?
"If you don't understand what I'm saying by now, I don't think there's much point. I promise you there is no anti-gaming propaganda consipiracy."
Oh, I'm not saying there's a "conspiracy". Some people just need to attack anything new: comics, D&D, rock-and-roll music, computer games, they're all examples of stuff that was or is attacked as being some menace to society. People don't really need a conspiracy to act irrational and/or defend the status-quo.
And so far what I understand, is what was annoying me all along: it's a bunch of fallacies strung together to serve some preconceived notion. Fallacies such as:
1. Most importantly, this kind of argumentation tends to be just a textbook case of Begging The Question
You have already decided that gaming is in some way "worse" (less important, "not real", whatever) than RL, and you use "facts" (read: personal judgment calls) are _based_ on that premise. E.g., that skills that apply in a game don't count, that's already based on the above premise. They're only less important _because_ you've decided already that gaming is less important.
Yet you use them to "prove" the very proposition they were based on. Circular "logic", here we come.
2. Starting from a false premise.
E.g., You claim that what happens IRL has consequences, good or bad, but gaming doesn't have any. Therefore RL is somehow "better".
Yet such RL consequences as losing a friend, losing a job, flunking exams, or even such stuff as "those chinese guys killed each other for a sword" or Columbine, are waved around all the time as just that: consequences of gaming. So gaming does have consequences. (Not surprising, since gaming is one of the things your RL self does. So if RL has consequences, it stands to reason that this one should too.)
There goes that premise right out the window, and with it the supposed conclusion. "A => B" doesn't really prove anything when A is false.
3. Verbal fallacies: puns and semantic plays. A.k.a., Equivocation
Pretty much half your arguments are _based_ on the semantic ambiguity of "rewards" between "in-game rewards" and "RL rewards", or "skills" between "in-game skills" and "RL skills", or between gaming as in "what happens on the screen" (your airplane did an Immelman) and in "what you do IRL" (you sat there and pushed buttons.) The whole fallacy is trying to sneak through one meaning as a replacement for the other.
E.g., basically the whole flawed logic that (rephrased) goes basically like "(in-game) rewards stay in the game, therefore you have no (Real Life) rewards when the game ends." Which is just a bogus case of switching a word's meaning is the middle.
What translates to the real world were _never_ supposed to be the in-game results. The RL results were, if nothing else, simply the fact that I was entertained for X hours. That's all. Not unlike spending the same X hours watching movies, mowing the lawn, watching the news, or any other non-productive occupation.
E.g., trying to redefine "skills" (which is a very broad term) as "the skill to duplicate IRL the exact action on the screen."
No, you didn't learn how to fly an F16, but you might have gotten better reflexes, better eye-hand coordination in the
Well, all that tantrum would be good and fine, if it wasn't answering some completely imaginary point that I never made.
I'm not even sure where you got that idea from the paragraph you quoted. Exactly _how_ does my using going to a pub (in real life, not a pub in a game) or walking the dog (in real life again) or watching soccer (on your real life tv) as non-gaming examples of stuff people do to "escape reality", lead to all that "then you can't tell the difference between games and reality" tantrum? No, serously, you got me curious now.
What I wrote is basically that there is no such thing as "living a virtual life". You never really "escaped to a virtual world", other than in a metaphoric sense. Definitely not taken literally, as bullshit journalists love to use it.
In your example, _all_ that happened is just what you wrote here: "What did I do in my real life? I caught the train to and from work and played A FEW GAMES on my laptop. I also played games a little when I got home."
What I'm saying is that in the end that's _all_ that happened. All that virtual life never "existed", other than as a metaphor. You were just spending some time in RL, with a RL hobby: gaming. And the gaming itself (not the F16 stuff in the game, but the RL act of sitting there and pushing buttons) _is_ a part of your real life.
Basically my rant is aimed at the whole "you should go do stuff IRL instead of living in a game" propaganda. Well, I _am_ living In Real Life _am_ doing something IRL. I'm sitting at a keyboard and playing a game.
I never left Real Life. I'm right here with a mouse and keyboard, having fun.
Just because my kind of fun involves a computer game, doesn't mean I live inside the game, or any other silliness being waved around. My sitting on a chair and gaming isn't any less "real" than someone else's going to the pub or mowing the lawn.
Basically what annoys me is the whole anti-gaming rhetoric that's one big text-book example of a "proof" by puns and plays on semantics.
E.g., there's a (not so) subtle sleight of hand used to switch the meaning of goals/rewards/achievements/etc between in-game ones and my RL ones. Then the logic goes something like "the new armour your character got in WoW doesn't exist IRL, therefore you spent the whole evening doing/achieving nothing". That's quite literally a verbal fallacy: it switches between "in game reward" and "real life reward". In reality, I achieved something (different) IRL: I kept myself entertained for a couple of hours.
E.g., The whole "you should stop gaming and do something 'real' instead" is based upon some sleight of hand in moving the "not real" part from game contents to gaming itself as an activity. And that's what I'm contesting. Yes, the flying an F16 never happened (IRL), but my sitting there pushing buttons did. The sitting and pushing buttons _is_ real.
I could go on, but methinks you got the idea by now.
And before D&D, it was comics that are evil and turn people into murderers. No, seriously. And at some point it was Rock & Roll music that is evil. Etc.
But the general pattern is more like "new = evil".
In a lot of cases it's not that hard to find something that's a very close equivalent of the stuff they damn, but is socially acceptable.
E.g., take chess. It was supposed all along to be basically a strategy game, modelled closely after the armies of the time. What we call a "bishop" today, was an elephant, pawns were footmen, etc.
(Pointless trivia: originally a 4 player game, each starting with half the pieces on the 4 edges of the board. But then it was too hard to find 4 players, so two armies were joined in one, and one King became Grand Vizier. It's the piece we now call "Queen". That's, in a nutshell, why you have two of all other pieces.)
What I'm getting at is that it's not that different from, say, Warhammer or Battletech.
However one is socially acceptable, one supposedly makes you a nerd and a loser. And by "socially acceptable", I mean that if the CEO of a corporation said they've spent an evening playing chess at the club, it would be ok. Now picture a CEO of a bank saying they've spent an evening at the game shop playing Warhammer and Battletech, and you'll have some shocked and outraged shareholders and clients.
And from there to computers the step isn't even as big as some people would paint it. A lot of games are a verbatim implementation of some existing board game. (E.g., see Megamek for an excellent Battletech implementation. And allegedly Europa Universalis was also mostly a board game to PC game conversion.) Others are more complex and making better use of what a computer can do, but still not _that_ far from those boardgame roots.
Except this time I'm expected to believe that the mere addition of a computer into the mix, makes the game not just "nerdy" but outright evil and/or a mental health hazard.
Why? What's that different? What makes the exact same Battletech boards and rules and pieces so dangerous because they're on a computer?
Seems to me like the difference is whether it's already filed under "socially acceptable" or new and deviating from the comfortable norm. Basically that the newer something is, the more people will feel a need to attack it and shout you back into the conformist herd.
Basically what I'm saying is that the real underlying problem isn't that 3-4 people stabbed each other with knitting needles. The problem is just whether something is new. If knitting had just been invented in the 80's and growing in popularity ever since, then yes, you'd most likely have people feeling a need to fight against this new threat to "normality".
Then they'd drag out every single case where someone stabbed someone with a knitting needle, or even merely pricked their own finger, and put those on display as definitive proof that knitting is evil. And every case where someone lost their job and, unrelated, had knitting as a hobby, would be dragged out as "proof" that knitting makes people lose contact with reality. And so on.
And then 30 years pass, and people find another new thing to treat as a threat.
"But most people would agree that if you've got a great "online" life and a terrible real life, it's time to stop the escapism for long enough to give your real life a go."
The problem with that point of view is still assuming there is a sharp distinction between "online life" and "real life".
Whereas I'd argue that there is _no_ such thing as a separate "online life". Whatever you do, whatever you fill your time with, _is_ a part of your "real life". Whether you spent two hours getting plastered at the (RL) pub, or watching soccer, or mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, or whatever, it _is_ an hour of your "real life" and it _is_ something you did in "real life".
The whole "it's not real life" distinction is, to put it very undiplomatically, just anti-gaming propaganda. (Which makes it even more weird to see some gamers propagating it too.) It's just a case of "my hobby is better than yours", or rather of a dubious premise that that case is built upon. "Your hobby isn't 'real life', therefore mine is better than yours".
And in that "A => B" proposition, I'd contest the very premise A. It _is_ real life, I just chose to spend that time playing a game. That's all.
So I'd say there is no such thing as having a great "online life" and a terrible "real life", other than as a very thin metaphor. In the end it _is_ real life, and you get to choose how you wish to live it. Playing games is one of the many things you can do in it.
Yes, in any passtime, there are some trade-offs that might be involved. You spend too much money on a hobby (e.g., modding your car), you have less left for other stuff. You spend too much time on that hobby, it leaves you with less time for something else, e.g., for talking to other people, so they leave. You start skipping work for that hobby, you might get fired. Etc.
But as with any trade-off, it's in the end something _you_ decide for yourself, rather than the clear cut case of "category A is wrong, category B is right" that the anti-gaming propaganda tries to paint it as. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, there is _no_ right and wrong in a matter of personal choices and preferences.
E.g., if you think you need a wing on your car more than you need the money, there is no "right" or "wrong" in that personal preference. It's just something you chose for yourself.
The same applies about most other trade-offs waved around as some kind of "proof" that gaming is bad. They're just trade-offs someone made for themselves. If someone chose to spend the evening playing a game, instead of, say, doing overtime to impress the boss, that's their choice and preference. No more. They decided that they need the fun more than they need to compete with the local brown-noser for a promotion. That's all.
"If you want to make the case that an MMO has to be a game, be my guest, I agree with you."
Well, that's all the case I was trying to make, yes.
"You don't need to turn the discussion into a rant against UO to make that case though."
I was just trying to give some examples from the categories (A) it has more world/community than game, vs (B) it has more game and the world itself doesn't even take itself seriously.
Basically UO was just supposed to be there an example of what sorta looks like the former. It has an _outstanding_ community, _the_ best interface for a social player, lots of social options (e.g., housing), and very friendly and very social players. I've praised UO (the UO after non-PK facets were introduced, anyway) as a social place myself, you know. But... well, even if I don't rant about what happened in 1999 again, we can aggree that at the moment (even if by virtue of being 8 year old) it lacks most gameplay elements of the newer ones. Right?
Being 8 years old (or 2 years old in 1999 when EQ took over) does give it an excuse, but it might actually be good for the point I was trying to make there. If you took a new player, say, from the 5 million that joined in the last year, and gave him a choice of "hey, you can choose between (A) this game which is old and pretty much outdated as a game, but has this great community and lots of social stuff, and (B) this new game with all the _gameplay_ devices and all, but no community yet, and lacks a lot of social stuff", most of them have already chosen B.
Basically people chose the more modern game, over the outdated one with the great community. I think we can at least aggree that it's no big surprise that people chose a more modern game, right?
Well, in the end that was the whole point I was making (even if we disaggree about what happened with UO in 1999): that the game part matters. The one with a better _game_ (even if by sheer virtue of being 7 years newer) got more subscribers.
"There are lots of reasons why EQ and WoW have more subscribers than UO. To isolate one difference ("world" vs. "game"), and suggest that it is the only, or even primary, reason for the difference is ridiculous."
Well, other than TSO, noone has that clear cut a distinction to make it a 100% case of "world" vs "game". So, yes, the best I can do is say that UO sorta falls somewhere in that quadrant, and WoW sorta falls somewhere in the other quadrant. Or it looks to me like it falls there.
"Then you go on to rant about things like PKs and the usefulness of tinkering, which serve no purpose other than to further bash UO; they're completely irrelevant to the discussion."
No, they were not irrelevant at all. They were aimed to illustrate the case that UO was a "world" but not that great a "game". If you don't want examples from the "lack of game" department, here are three from the "more like a world" department: self-sustaining ecology, advanced management/allocation of resources for the economy, player-run IC justice. All three were hyped by Origin itself as making it a better/more realistic "world", and all three got removed by Origin itself because it made it a worse "game".
Yes, personal opinion, etc. Still, just saying: that's why it was there, not as some sort of axe-grinding or anything equally silly.
"But you have to admit it's pretty silly to expect an 8-year-old game to compete favorably with a brand new one."
According to Game Spy Stats, Half Life still tops their chart for number of active players right now. Of course, that's because of Counter-Strike, which is sorta the whole point: a game or mod that invented a sub-genre, even after 8 years kept more players than its much-more modern clones. (And in an also interesting twist, Top Mods For Half Life By Players says the original CounterStrike beats the newer CS: Condition Zero clone by 10 to 1.)
Still, ok, I'll admit, for most games time isn't that kind.
"QED
Everytime somebody disproves GALLANT's theories, people like you spout forth [list you posted] to kill it off. Lather, rinse, repeat."
So basically you're not even able to distinguish between (A) actually disproving a theory, and (B) an ad-hominem attack against the person saying it. If the whole "GALLANT vs GOOFUS" ad-hominem and fallacies counts for you as having disproved GALLANT's _theories_ (even though they're not even mentioned in there, much less analyzed)... wth, I rest my case. QED, indeed.
Well, ok, upon re-reading it all, I guess I can see your point.
Still, just to nitpick of the choice of an example:
Hmm... A quick trip to http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/ says "Habbos in the hotel: 5315". Doesn't look to me like that great an active population. I'm sure not only WoW, but even more minor players like CoH or AO can boast more players logged in at any given time. (At a wild guess, WoW only needs some 50 people or so on each server to beat that number.)
I'm assuming that's not total active population, but people currently logged in.
For an (admittedly not apples-to-apples) comparison to more traditional games, I went to Game Spy and looked at the box on the right side of the page. "192,921 gamers are online right now." at roughly the same moment. Half life alone clocks in at 54,228 players online ATM on the servers scanned by GameSpy. (I.e., excluding those who play it on a lan, or single-player, or whatever.)
I don't know, 5315 sounds like roughly 10 times less people in the successful non-game, compared to a 8 years old _game_. Maybe I chose the wrong moment to check, but it doesn't like sound _that_ impressive a success.
Some quick (and admittedly bogus) maths says that if the average player spent only 2 hours a day there (and ignoring variations like that now it's friday afternoon and it might have more players than at, say, 4 AM, but probably less than at 8 PM)... well, that would put the active population at some some 60,000 Habbos total.
I'm talking this time _active_ players, not just people who created an account last year and in the meantime forgot about it. By comparison, TSO was considered a flop when it peaked at 100,000 active accounts.
Also for something that's basically IRC with cutesy graphics, it kinda looks thin compared to the real IRC without graphics.
So not as a flame, but as genuine curiosity: by which criterion do you count it as the most successful virtual world, and more successful than WoW? In which metric did it beat WoW?
First of all, before I get started, no, I don't have an axe to grind against UO. I'm just questioning the whole idea that a MMO is supposed to be a anything _but_ a game. That it has to be a world, a platform, a community, a time-sink, everything _but_ a game. Oh, really? Personally I'd highly question that.
UO just happens to be a prime example of that. It was a world, a platform, a great community, and... absolutely piss-poor as a _game_. And cared more about their world and platform than about what the players wanted.
I'm sure other games make equally, if not better examples of that. UO just happens to be an example that's very well known (and hopefully very well known to Mr Koster.)
But OK, if you want to talk UO, let's talk UO. I did bring it up, so I'm not gonna back away from discussing the point, obviously.
1. So you're telling me that UO stayed in first place _only_ as long as it had _no_ competition? Heh. I'm sure you can see what's wrong with that. It's not hard to be in the first place when you're not competing against anyone, is it? It's like saying "I was the fastest runner on Earth until they made me compete against other people."
2. Ok, the point about the engine getting old is well taken. But what about all the engine upgrades UO had, including an update to 3D? Let me remind you that even then, stuff that looked like complete ass (e.g., AC looked horrible) _still_ stole UO's players.
So, no, I feel it's entirely fair to compare them when UO had all the chances in the world to change and improve, to stay in the competition. We're not talking comparing UO of 1997 to WoW of 2005. We're talking a UO that had literally hundreds of patches, and more expansion packs than The Sims to stay competitive and comparable to the newer games.
3. Only because of graphics? Heh. Dude, graphics were the _least_ of complaints about UO. UO was, for a long while, known as "the place you go if you want to be harrassed by idiot griefers and PK'ers." EQ and AC pretty much made it their _main_ message and _main_ reason to switch, that they're the place where you won't have to deal with idiot PKers like in UO. (Along with other messages like actually having quests and world events. I.e., being a _game_.)
4. Yes, the point is taken that some 250,000 people still like UO. (Or that was the number some time ago, when I last saw some numbers.) But see, that's actually the whole point: 14 times more people like WoW a lot more.
Between (A) a world which is little more than a world and a damn good community, and (B) a world which also has a damn good game, even if it lacks a lot of the social stuff like player housing... it seems to me that a _lot_ more people have chosen (B). Even if we leave UO out, TSO is an even better example: 35 times more people chose a _game_ like WoW over a pure community/social _platform_ like TSO.
That's in the end the whole point: only being a world and a world just doesn't cut it. A good community helps keep the players there, yes (and UO does make a good example of that), but actually being an enjoyable game is what gets them there and playing in the first place. Before you even get to have online friends and guild-mates that make you go back there, comes a month or so when you don't even know many people and you just run around killing bears and making potions. If that month isn't much fun as a _game_, not many people will even make it into the other half.
5. Yes, of course it's my personal opinion.
Well, then it shouldn't be hard to attack GALLANT's _theories_, instead of spewing ad-hominem attacks. If GALLANT theories are indeed just a collection of fallacies, then please point out _those_, instead of going on a whole "he's less likable than GOOFUS, so don't trust him" fallacy spree.
That's really my whole problem with this kind of rhetoric. I'm _not_ saying "trust GALLANT instead", I'm just saying it would be nice if it stayed science instead of a mud-slinging contest. That's all.
I don't necessarily trust GALLANT to be the only one right or anything, and yes, I'm all for cleaning up the stuff that we dump into the air. Global warming or not, we breathe that shit.
But I very much like to see his measurements too, just in case. And if someone wants to enlighten me in which ways those measurements are wrong, or mis-interpreted, then please, please, please tell me just that: exactly which measurements calculations are wrong. _Not_ a religious case of "noo, don't even look at that evil data, it's the Devil's work."
And that goes for both sides, really. The true believer camp just happens to be better represented, but, yes, you're right: the other camp pulls fallacies and political speeches too.
And I'm not happy about those either. "Noo, don't look at that pinko-commie liberal data" isn't really any better than "noo, don't look at those corporate-paid evil data." Both are what happens when science ends and politics/religion have stolen the show.
I'd like to see the whole global warming stuff just for once discused based on the facts, and _only_ the facts. For once not by quickly manufacturing a diversion and reaching for the handy-dandy fallacies.
Yes, I don't doubt that a true religious zealot would feel a need to get violent on the heretics. After all, we've already seen that in the form of the Inquisition. Nothing new there. If anything, it just proves my point that some people found _religion_, not science, there.
However, the question is, can you actually argue a point without crap like "I wanted to slap you like a bitch" or "you stupid cunt"? Zealot tantrums are an amusing read, but sadly prove nothing in science.
"You know what the problem with phone-support people is? All the good ones will have moved on to better jobs within the same company within 18 months."
Bingo. That was more or less the whole point: anyone who actually had any computer skills, or acquired any on the job, has moved higher up the food chain.
Hence I find the whole rampant "I work tech support, so I'm TEH COMPUTER GURU" arrogance to be undeserved. Tech support is to IT jobs what being a waiter in Hollywood is to acting jobs. It's something you do while waiting to get into the _real_ thing.
Not that there's anything wrong with starting there. A lot of good actors (e.g., Jean Claude Van Dam comes to mind) started by washing dishes in Hollywood. But so did a lot who never amounted to more than washing dishes.
Basically I'm willing to accept someone's claim to skills and glory _after_ they moved up from that job. Before, saying "I'm a tech guru (and the customers are idiots) because I work(ed) tech support" is like saying "I'm a great actor because I got hired as a waiter in a Hollywood pizzeria." Doesn't really prove much yet.
"So, ehmm, this is all the fault of the employees themselves?"
_If_ anyone's complaint is basically "auugh, but now I won't be able to insult the customers by phone", then yes. Those who were reasonably polite, I don't think they'll have anything to fear from this kind of software.
"Not the rotten company they work for and which you have chosen to keep in business by granting them your patronage, or their moronic manager who did a quick afternoon study, but the poor sod on the phone?"
Oh, I despise that company too, no doubt about it. And indeed, it was the company's crappy systems and policies that caused both problems in the first place.
I just don't think that letting tech support people _also_ insult the customers would have made it a better company, though.
*shrug* I must confess I was actually _expecting_ an answear like this. So I'm not disappointed.
Yes, it can't be that some monkey couldn't even tell me that something's wrong, after I politely explained the problem and read that number to them. Again. For the 20'th time. Or that some other clueless monkey in the PA story couldn't even comprehend that there is no fucking gateway between the computer and the modem.
Nah, it _must_ be the customer who's to blame, and generally an idiot. Right?
Well, you just made my point as to what's wrong with tech support.
While no individual scientist has the time to question every single theory in existence, a real scientist will _accept_ that any given theory _can_ be questioned. No matter how old, how established, how popular, or how well it fits his political party's doctrine.
There's a reason why even established stuff like gravity is called a "theory" and never renamed to "fact". It's always just a "theory" (ok, in the scientific sense, not in the common usage of "just a theory", which is more like "hypothesis".) It can _always_ be a candidate to be better understood, revised or outright discarded.
The moment one theory is put on a pedestal, it's suddenly taken as a 100% finished and definitive fact, that noone should ever question, it stopped being science.
So when I see a whole bloody thread and a whole bloody disertation aimed openly at discrediting anyone who dares question the sacred truth, and based on such fine fallacies as:
- Ad Hominem and more speciffically a very verbose case of Poisoning The Well (The _whole_ purpose of the whole GALLANT vs GOOFUS thing is to ridicule and undermine the credibility of GALLANT, instead of whether his theories might or might not be right. So most of the other fallacies are just there to serve this one.)
- Appeal to Numbers (More of us believe X instead of Y, so X must be true. Or conversely, don't even consider Y, since it doesn't have a "consensus".)
- Appeal to Motive (Let's divert the question from whether a theory is right to the possibility that anyone supporting it _might_ have some hidden motives.)
- Argumentum ad Lazarum and other forms of Appeal to Emotion to paint GOOFUS as _likeable_, as the only proof needed that his is the right theory. (Surely the poor guy who earns less and doesn't wear a suit must be right, because he's the one your average slashdotter can sympathise more.)
- Appeal To Spite and/or Association Fallacy (Surely the _only_ ones supporting those theories are those evil conservatives/oil cartels/whatever supporting those theories. And because they're evil, anyone or any theory associated with them is automatically evil and discredited.)
(You can also add the Begging The Question to the last one, since there's a bit of circular logic and assuming that you already know they're evil, in classifying them as evil in the first place.)
- Appeal To Fear (While not directly a theme of the GOOFUS vs GALLANT story, it _is_ the _main_ theme waved around in this whole using ecology as political capital. If you don't imediately stop believing all else and do as we say, we're all doomed!)
And so on, and so forth.
Sorry, that is _not_ science. It's politics and religion, but science it sure as heck ain't. I don't know which is the correct theory there, but it sure as heck ain't decided by such GALLANT-vs-GOOFUS Poisoning the Well rhetoric.
(Which of course, doesn't invalidate the fact that global warming might (or might not) be real. Like anything which is just a string of fallacies, it really doesn't prove anything. It does, however, disgust me profoundly.)
Well, good. The thought that this software will be used for that just made my day. Because it's bad enough to deal with utterly clueless tech-support people without them being jerks on the phone too.
Yes, I know, everyone who's ever worked in tech support thinks the're THE God of computing, and know it all. That being able to boot their mom's computer makes them the uber IT sage.
Who knows, maybe some actually do know their shit. But let me break the nasty news: most don't. While I do have all the respect for anyone who can take that stress, that's it: it's a high-stress low-pay job that _only_ has something to do with being desperate enough to accept it, not with being a computer guru. If you actually have _any_ knowledge or skill with computers, that's purely coincidental to that job, and frankly, then you're in the wrong job. You have my compassion.
For every "this and that clueless idiot called me when I was working tech support" story, there are 1000 stories where the clueless one was manning the hell desk. (And a lot of stories from the former category, really belong in the latter.)
Stories like the recent one on Penny Arcade, where some clueless ISP support insisted that the problem is with some gateway that's unsuported by that ISP. The only problem there: a gateway that they didn't even have. That's it, folks: a non-existing piece of hardware was what's causing the problems, according to her list.
Or like my personal favourite, where the bunch of clueless monkeys at my ISP's call-centre took a fucking _month_ to reset my password. (After a glitch in their "change your password online" page mangled it.) See, the invoice number they had in their computer didn't match the one I had received. So even though they send the new password by snail-mail to my home address (so who the heck else could get it anyway), and the line is tied to that physical address (being DSL), and they're the same company providing the phone line I'm calling over, so they can know it's me... nah, they can't fucking change my password because the answer to the magic question "what's your invoice number" was wrong.
But that's not what's the saddest. The saddest is that they don't even tell me there's a problem, so I can talk to someone and fix it. No, they just let me call again and again for a whole fucking month, while the problem obviously doesn't fix itself.
And no, I'm not making it up. It's way too sad to make up.
And so on.
So now you're telling me that some are also jerks on the phone? That in addition to dealing with some buggy software/hardware/internet access from a crap company, and receiving some canned answers that don't even apply to their problem... someone would _also_ be insulted over phone by tech-support? Well, gee, then I'm all for that software.
"While that's true in general, you must eventually accept things as true, leave them and move on. For example, you're not going to get very far trying to disprove the laws of thermodynamics. They may not be held as a "sacred truth", but you'd be hard pressed to find someone reputable who's willing to seriously dispute them."
Actually, it happens more often than you'd think in the _real_ science.
The whole of relativity or quantum mechanics, for example, exist because someone dared question Newtonian mechanics. Those in turn existed because some people (e.g., Galileo) dared question the existing model, and prove that no, regardless of what the official doctrine says, a rock 10 times heavier doesn't fall 10 times faster, and one dropped from the top of the mast doesn't actually fall towards the rear of the ship.
And even relativity and quantum mechanics were not the end of the road. We have even newer theories, such as dark matter (the accepted one) or a proposed revision to gravity (still just a "contender", because someone didn't take those as set in stone. Someone (a lot of someones, actually) measured what happens up there, and saw that the accepted theories just don't explain it. So they came up with better theories.
Or you have stuff like chemistry and electronics at the level they are today, because some guy called Ernest Rutherford dared question the pie-with-electrons-in-it model of the atom. Which in turn existed because someone dared assume that the atom isn't in fact indivisible. ("atomos" = indivisible)
Without such "heretics" we'd still be at most at alchemy level, and assuming that chemical reactions are 1 atom of A + 1 atom of B = 1 atom of C. And still not seeing why if A is lead and C is gold, a B can't exist that can make that reaction work.
That's how science works, and "my theory is more popular than yours, so I'll try to discredit you by tons of self-righteous protests" was never a part of the scientific process. Science is _not_ supposed to be a popularity contest, nor resolved by popular vote and political speeches. (Not that it wasn't tried before, mind you. Relativity was described as bolshevism, for example.)
If someone wants to disprove the laws of thermodynamics, they _are_ perfectly allowed to do so. They just have to present a ton of convincing data, from experiments which others can duplicate and/or try to falsify or explain otherwise.
And if that new theory is gonna be proved right or wrong, it will have to do with testing their data and their calculations, and maybe devising even better experiments and calculations. _Not_ via "auugh, you dare question my sacred proof, therefore you must be a pinko-commie heretic paid by astroturf groups" self-righteous protests.
"Online worlds are a PLATFORM first and foremost. Putting games in that platform is certainly one of the top things you can do, and if you do so, you had better make sure those games are fun, certainly. But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands--there's plenty of examples of that."
But in practice there are plenty of examples to the opposite too.
E.g., TSO comes to mind. It had a world, it was designed to be more of a community than any MMO ever made (there wasn't much else than social interaction in it anyway), and it was based on _the_ biggest franchise name in PC gaming history. (The Sims outsold all Warcraft games combined.) And it flopped. It peaked at about 35 times less players than WoW has, and again, WoW started from a less big franchise name.
The problem: well, it was everything _except_ a game. The "game" part was about as exciting and fun as watching paint dry.
E.g., to be nasty: UO. It _invented_ a genre (not to mention was based on the biggest RPG franchise name) and quickly ended up in third place. It peaked at about 1/14 as many players as WoW currently has, or 1/2 of what Everquest had without a franchise name or anything.
And again, we're talking about inventing a genre. Look at what Wolfenstein 3D did for Id, to understand by contrast the _massive_ failure of UO.
The problems were many, including, yes, an utter failure to even try being fun or balanced as a game. Gameplay was pretty much non-existent, whole skills were utterly useless (e.g., was there _any_ use for tinkering, except traps to kill newbies?) or conversely had 2/3 of the possible actions in the game under one single skill (ever seen even miners or sheepherds without magic skill in UO?), and so on.
Oh yes, it concentrated on being a world and a platform instead. At all cost. Even if it meant alienating the players. _Years_ were spent into trying to justify why it's good and realistic for newbies to be pk-ed on sight, for example, while players were leaving en-masse to AC and EQ because of it. Or in various failed band-aid experiments which were _already_ proven not to work on MUDs. Had the world and platform ahead of what the players wanted for so long, that it just lost most of those players.
"Online worlds encompass game worlds like EQ and WoW, social worlds like There.com and Habbo Hotel, user-created worlds like Second Life and Furcadia, educational worlds like MOOse Crossing and military training sims, research-oriented worlds like MediaMOO, and much more. Thinking that they are all games is exactly the point of this law."
Heh. Compared to the population of even the worst MMO flop, a MUD is a spit in the bucket. Even if some of those are examples of "but look, you can make an online world even without much of a game", then the rightful second half of that phrase is "and be an utter and total flop, compared to worlds which _do_ have a game."
We can learn a lot of valuable lessons about human interactions and such from MUDs, yes. But if we're talking about designing a world that's a _commercial_ _success_ on any reasonable scale, let's stick to the likes of EQ and WoW, please.
Plus, it's a skewed comparison anyway to compare a world which has a 15$ per month price tag, to a MUD that works for free through Telnet. Something that requires people to reach into their wallet and _stull_ has 3000 times more players, well, I'd say it did something a _lot_ better than those research MOOs.
Plus, if we are including free online worlds like MUDs and MOOs, and consider the genre as broad as to include pretty much anything online including those... then we also get plenty of games which are counter-examples to the "But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands" point. Th
"I know gamers love to bitch about games, but how about instead of the Worst Of lists we see a Things We Like the Most About Gaming list? Just a thought."
Well, I don't know if it's actually been put in a numbered list yet, but, eh, just go read a review from any major site. They'll spend _pages_ telling you what they loved about a game. (And it's usually the same things. "Whoa, this time it has 5% more polygons per character!")
Then give everything a score between 90% and 100%. (Doubly so if it's one of those sites/magazines which blatantly tries to please EA's and Vivendi's marketting. It doesn't pay to give their games a bad score, because then they'll cut your ads, you know.)
Now think about it. On a scale of 0% to 100%, then 50% would mean average. A 100% score would mean so utter perfection that even God Himself couldn't improve it. So a site where most scores are between 90% and 100%, and no game since Daikatana dipped under 80%, is trying to tell me... what? That _all_ games are way above average? Then how is it an average?
The problem is the whole focus on what's good and perfect, and barely touching (if at all) what's sub-par. Everyone concentrates on telling me the same half the news: what's good.
Unfortunately, we're not talking about praising the neighbour's kid or making smalltalk to your co-workers, or anything else where "if you can't say anything good, better not say anything" might apply. We're talking blowing some 40 to 60 Euro for a game. But I damn well like to know the _whole_ story, including what's _bad_, when I choose one.
So I like reading a good "bitching". It gives me that much-needed insight into that other half of the story. What's bad, what's been done better in another game, what becomes boring at level 40, what doesn't live up to the massive hype that the publisher spewed.
And if someone's feelings are hurt by that "bitching", well, they could just keep their marketting on a leash next time. If the hype squad didn't promise the moon and the stars for 2-3 years straight, you wouldn't get people "bitching" when its released with half the stars missing and the moon being just a painted frisbee on a pole.
But in the meantime, that's just the kind of thing I'd like to know when I buy a game. If it takes wading through someone's "bitching" to get to that info, so be it.
"And if you have dialup, why are you playing an MMO?"
I'll bite. Where did the game say on the box that you need broadband to play the game?
"If you're playing an MMO, why are you on dialup?"
I don't even understand that question. Does subscribing to a MMO also give you a broadband subscription, or even just a broadband provider in your area? Or wth is the if-then relationship there?
"If you're not on dialup, why do you care about patches?"
I'm on DSL, and it seems to me like download times _are_ a problem even if you're not on Dialup. (In fact, are such a pain in the butt on DSL, that the mere thought of someone getting those on dialup makes me cringe.)
I got into WoW in July 2005. I had to let Blizzard's sucky slow downloader run over night before I could even create a character.
I also reinstalled City Of Heroes recently. There goes another couple of hours of just downloading patches.
I'm not going to even try to be diplomatic about it: basically your whole post, like most of the eco-scare propaganda, boils down to "everyone who disaggrees with my Holy Truth is an heretic, and furthermore _paid_ to attack our Holy Truth."
Which, sad to say, isn't how science works. Science has _no_ absolute set-in-stone sacred truths. In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, regardless of why. (Research into, say, magnetic materials paid for by IBM isn't any less valid than any other research, just because it's paid for by a corporation.) Science is that-a-way, absolute truths that noone should dare question are that other way, through the door marked "Religion."
And another thing these whole pseudo-science political/religious groups don't seem to get either: science isn't a prom-queen popularity contest either. Whether a theory looks valid or not, that will be decided by scientists, based on the data it has. Not by piling enough "it contradicts my _dogma_, so let's drown it into self-righteous protests" pieces of garbage like what you just wrote.
Do _you_ have a Ph.D. in the domain? I'm willing to bet the answer is "nope". Yet you feel qualified to judge someone and their calculations (which you probably didn't even see, much less understand) and damn them just because they contradict with what your religious leaders told you. It _has_ to be some sinister plot, because god forbid that your religion could possibly be less than 100% right, or that its answers might be anything less than 100% definitive.
Yes, it may be wrapped in pretentious-sound pseudo-science babble, and use funny graphs as its holy symbols, but religion it is. I don't care how many words it borrowed (and perverted) from the real science, the moment it has definitive truths that noone should dare question, it's nowhere _near_ being science any more.
So which is the real scientist? Well, after reading that "everyone disaggreeing with me is a paid astroturfer" piece of brain-damage, it sure as hell isn't you. So go back to your "church of the global warming", and leave judging who's a scientist and who isn't to the real scientists.
"I don't have a problem with it - if you have a genetic issue that could prevent you from doing the job you're being hired for, I don't think they should have any reason to hire you over someone who doesn't have it. It's not any different than not having to hire someone in a wheelchair to sweep and mop the steps in your building."
1. If the condition was that overt as to outright prevent you from doing your job _now_, I'd like to think it would be obvious enough without genetic testing. E.g., you don't need need genetic testing to see that your prospective janitor is in a wheelchair. E.g., you don't need genetic testing to see that someone has Down's syndrome, or to put it otherwise that he's genetically retarded, which is pretty much one of the very few conditions that would make one unfit for, say, IT or programming work. (If you need genetic testing to not hire a retard, in the medical sense of the word, as, say, a programmer, frankly you should leave someone else do the hiring.)
2. What it's a lot more likely to end up used as, is as to discriminate against people who _might_ sometime in the future have problems. E.g., someone who's more likely to have heart problems later or whatever. But might just as well never actually have a problem. Or against someone whose genes say he's more likely to get addicted, _if_ they ever try drugs, even if at the moment they're not doing any drugs.
Which, frankly, is like discriminating against drivers because they _might_ end up in a wheelchair someday. Or against computer gamers because they _might_ turn up into violent criminals and shoot up the office, as the media keeps assuring us.
Frankly, I'd rather see people judged for what they've done or what they are qualified/motivated to do now, than upon wild guesses as to what they might (but just as well might not) do in the future.
3. It's also opening the gate for a stuff that's just a case of personal morals/prejudices/whatever than actually affecting the job in any way, and in this case preemptively.
E.g., assuming that there actually is a "predisposed to homosexuality" gene, or at least that anyone can suspect one to be it, what's to keep an employer from refusing to employ those? Again, it's just a personal morals/religion call, not something that affects one's ability to do most jobs. And again it's something that would just say "predisposed", and doesn't mean that someone actually _is_ actively homosexual.
4. But what scares me the _most_ is the opportunity to just turn it into one more work-avoidance technique on the part of management.
Already if you think everyone actually hires by comparing everyone's merits and experience, you're sadly mistaken. The first thing that gets applied is some arbitrary bogus criterion of getting rid of most applications, just to make the job easier.
And I don't even mean just stuff like appearance, or filtering them by how much you like the supplied email address, or whatever. There are some truly abhominable criteria out there.
There was a documentary on it on some French channel, some years ago. The mind boggled. At least one company used numerology to select a pool of suitable candidates. (No, really. Assign numbers to the letters in the candidate's name, add them up, see if it matches the sum for the company's name. Literally.) A few used Tarot. (Yes, literally. They had a seer which used Tarot cards to see which candidates have that magical match to the company.) Etc.
I can just see Genetics being used in the same way.
And, frankly, the world doesn't need more bogus hiring criteria.
"Blizzard could clearly prohibit you from mailing an alt money."
And that wouldn't solve anything whatsoever. COH for example doesn't even have a mail service at all, and people still transfer money nevertheless.
"Being able to send alts money does cause inflation, but does not significantly alter the game."
In a lot of games, it does. E.g., COH is already being rebalanced for people who have all the best gear, and having anything less than _perfect_ equipment ("enhancements" in COH lingo) will already get you booted out of some groups.
E.g., if you're a fire tank at level 22 and you don't have 1 million to pay for all the best gear (and you can't possibly have earned that much yourself yet, since there are no trade skills) the effects in COH will be that you "only" take 3 times as much damage per second from enemies, and do only half as much damage per second to them. I.e., it's not that you're slightly less effective, you're not even in the same bloody _class_ as someone who got their money from someone else.
And, frankly, even in WOW I'll call bullshit on that. If you're telling me that getting a 50%+ more HP and other massive stats bonuses from green-class (bind-on-equip) equipment from the auction house, and even more from blue-class equipment, doesn't signifficantly alter your level-up speed... you obviously haven't thought much about it. The extra health alone can make a whole world of a difference.
It may not be totally unbalanced like in COH, but it does offer a signifficant advantage.
And I'm not even getting into the PvP aspect where lamers with equipment bought on ebay are parked in front of the inn and duelling everyone in sight. Yeah, it sooo says "fair" to pit people with blue equipment worth hundreds of gold against people who still can't afford a replacement for their newbie sword.
"Now you're completely crazy. In the general case, in real life, YES, some people have more money, and some people have less. NO, it's not a bad thing that the people on the low end want a part of that money, and are willing to perform duties in exchange for some of that money. Velocity of money is a GOOD thing."
Velocity of money IRL is one thing, having in-game benefits you didn't earn in-game is a _completely_ other thing.
I don't care what economic theories say what about how the money should flow IRL. Yes, I _know_ that the RL economy is pretty much based on imbalances.
But (A) games don't need it, and (B) in games I'd very much like someone's achievements, especially when they're then pitted against other players, to be based on their in-game prowess, not on their credit card (including not on having a power-levelled alt to get money and resources from.)
That kind of money dynamics is, simply put, cheating. No more, no less. It's an in-game advantage based on something from RL. (RL credit card, credit card for example.) And frankly, I have nothing but sheer disgust towards someone who cheats in multiplayer. Doubly so for someone who actually _pays_ to cheat.
I mean, ffs, even the lamers with aimbots and wall-hacks in CS or manually-edited items in Diablo, at least they downloaded those for free. Actually paying on ebay to have the balls to kill a newbie in PvP, is a whole new level of lameness. It redefines the word "lame" to a whole new level.
So there you have it in a nutshell why I hope some game will do away with that money dynamics. I don't care what it does for the RL economy, it does nothing useful in a game.
There was something nagging me about his number of deviations above the mean, and I mean above and beyond it being just a case of Skinner's Constant (Flannegan's Finagling Factor). ( That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by,
added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten.)
Then I've read it again: "But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class."
And that just gave me a fit of laughter.
Assuming that any job requires one to not only be in the top 5% to be considered a genius, but to actually be in the top 0.01% most intelligent/skilled/whatever people... is at best ego masturbation. Sorry to bust his bubble, but _no_ job, and least of all a lousy teaching job, needs _that_ kind of qualifications.
But to need _that_ kind of a factor as a justification for job discrimination across the economy is already at best giving me the idea that it's really discrimination that's the real problem.
To put into perspective what _that_ kind of a requirement would mean: in the USA then there would be only some 30,000 people _total_ qualified to do it. No more, no less.
Now subtract those of them who are still children, or already retired. Also consider the fact that no job or field will get _all_ geniuses wanting to work in it, and you're left with a total pool of maybe 1000 - 2000 people in the whole USA that are actually available to work in that field at all.
So if anyone wants to tell me that that kind of maths is, say, why there are so few women in IT or any other field, I'd want to see some damn convincing numbers that show there's a total of 1000-2000 IT workers in the USA. Again, keyword is: total. Not graduates per year or whatever. Total. That's it. That better be _all_ the jobs economy-wide that any given field has, before they can say with a straight face that they're really a job for only the 0.01% most intelligent people.
That applies to his university too: if we stretch the maybe a couple of thousand that are both (A) in that top 0.01% of the population, _and_ (B) interested in an academic job, there just isn't enough of them to go around between all the top-25 universities on the various profiles. It's not like all the intelligent humans work only in physics universities. If you consider that some will go into maths instead, some into social sciences, some into medicine, some into marketting/management universities, some into chemistry, etc, it just doesn't add up. Even taking the top 25 universities in each field, there just aren't enough people in that 0.01% bracket to staff them all.
So while I still won't tar and feather him for sexism (hey, it's not my job to worry about sexism), I _will_ laugh my ass at him for that kind of snotty elitism. He's one in 10,000, my ass. Yeah, right. He's just an ego-masturbating buffoon, that's all.
See, I have no problem accepting any fact if there's solid _scientific_ data to support it. But the keyword there is: scientific. Drawing conclusions based on any data only makes _any_ sense if you know (A) what you're measuring, (B) what are the external influences and factors there, and (C) it's an "all else being equal" situation.
E.g., if I wanted to draw the conclusion that gravity doesn't work that like Newtonian and Einstein mechanics say, and my "proof" was that a feather still falls slower than an anvil, I'd have every scientist laughing in my face. What did I really measure there? The different drag factor, actually, not gravity.
Doubly so when it involves "proof" where one thing was measured in air, a different one in water, and a third one in a vaccuum, and I still pretended it's a valid apples-to-apples comparison.
That's the kind of data that would convince me here too: one which can make a case that the very data it uses it's scientific, and that all else is being understood, factored in, and reasonably equal. Otherwise, starting from dubious data and making some hand-waving maths on it, is at best worth a chuckle to anyone with a scientific background.
"Garbage In, Garbage Out" applies to more than computing. physics, maths, social sciences, you name it, if you start with bogus data, the results are worth exactly nothing.
I mean, take the very maths he does: ok, how many standard deviations above the norm _is_ he using in those calculations? Is it 2? 3? 4? How did he measure it? Seems to me like he's just taking an wild guess -- i.e., pulling a random number out of the hat -- and using it as the very _base_ of those calculations. So the very parameter that determines whether the correlation is correct or not... is just a fudged guess that noone ever measured? Can you say... "Garbage In"?
Now let's look at the actual grades he's based that maths on.
Let's even skip over his own admission that "Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right." (Although that would be enough to nail it as at best an interesting hypothesis, but nothing more. GIGO all the way, if he himself admits the "GI" part.)
What about other factors?
E.g., I can tell you first hand that how motivated you are in school makes a _lot_ of difference. In two consecutive years I personally swung from having the best grades in the year to barely getting a passing grade, and then back again to the top in the third year. The difference? Well, one year of "bah, school is stupid and boring anyway. As long as I pass, what does it matter with which grade?" mentality. You set your aim low, you hit low.
There are a myriad ways in which Group A could be more or less motivated than Group B. E.g., seeing different rewards for the same effort. The least rewarded group will be motivated a lot less. E.g., a general cultural failure in which being a skinny airhead and marrying a rich guy trumps academic achievement any day. Or at least is seen as way cooler. E.g., a very different degree of support and encouragement at home towards certain fields. Etc.
Basically I'm not gonna tar and feather him for polytical correctness sake, but I _am_ gonna take his conclusions as at most a wild unproven hypothesis. Could be true, could be false, but as long as his data is a clear-cut case of "Garbage In", we're never going to know.
And justifying further discrimination based on such a proven hypothesis is shaky at best. "A => B" only says something about B when you know A to be true. As long as A isn't, the whole implication says nothing whatsoever.