...you'd prefer they LARP for the benefit of an ethereal third party instead of play an MMO? Whether you're grinding faction with god or with dwarves, it's all the same shit. Just a different carrot on a stick.
Developing a code of ethics that doesn't rely on someone else's approval, now that's actually impressive.
And the game is designed to take up as much of your time as is possible. After all, all games like it charge people for the time they spend online.
Actually, it's a flat monthly fee in 90% of these games, including WoW. Their #1 subscriber would be some guy that pays the monthly fees and never logs in. Of course, they need more content to keep people paying month after month, and thus the carrots on a stick.
Well said. I don't know why everyone on the internet wants to be an Ayn Rand protagonist.
As much as I disagree with Rand, it's because she lived in a fantasy land of multitalented, competent businessmen whose ethical standards prohibited exploiting others for profit.
Step 1 to quitting is taking personal responsibility. The guy in the article lives for other people's praise, wants to be that crucial guy that always put in the time to get the skills/items/info they needed for the raid, loves having other people dependent on him. He says as much in the article. I'm familiar with that playstyle because that's what I enjoy too.
Posting that article was just another way for him to elevate himself above his former guildmates (you're still playing that old game?) and get a lot of praise from the easily-wooed MMO community. If he doesn't get over that, he's just going to keep going back to the easy fix in a couple months when reality doesn't accomodate him anymore. No one can ultimately stop him from reinstalling and setting up another account besides him.
It's never been hard -- just suitably difficult. But the trolls with access to my exclusive network, what can they do? They're only allowed to send me a friends invite, and I can keep them waiting in the queue forever. Plus you can make it so that the only people allowed to send you friend invite are friends-of-friends. Then these trolls can literally do nothing.
While the innovative changes always result in some backlash before people get used to them, none have been so large as against the idea of Facebook "going public". Now much of the user protest was hot air as few truly intended to stop using the site. However it may well result in a decline in popularity among uni students who no longer view it as an exclusive network serving to their needs. If its open to everyone anyway, why not just bite the bullet and join MySpace...
The user experience on Facebook has changed by literally zero since it opened it up to everyone. The privacy settings are very robust. You still need a school or work e-mail address to join a school or work network. Basically, if you hadn't told me and the circle of friends I have on Facebook that it was opening up to a broader audience, none of us would have noticed. College kids got on board the bandwagon complaining about opening it up to everyone without knowing the facts: surprise, surprise. Another huge surprise is that most of them are still using it. The hype might've brought Facebook down, but it's moved beyond the crisis zone now and apathy won out in their favor.
Well, you may be right, but does it make a whole lot of difference if the end result is the same?
Yes. The goal is to find the actual causation so that you can figure out how to fix it. Losing weight and becoming healthier is a good idea for obese people no matter what, but if there's some confounding factor that just happens to correlate with obesity, pinpointing it might help lots of other people.
Conversely, let me ask this: have you encountered a subject in school that was so opaque, arbitrary and ridiculous that you thought that the people involved in it must be fooling a lot of people into thinking that this was a serious academic subject, instead of a bunch of hoakum? That they must just be making it up, because it really didn't make any sense at all?
High school biology, where they told us "facts" about the structure of microscopic organisms without actually giving us any of the research supporting it. In college, sociology and psychology. Never have I seen so much research presented as fact, based on so little evidence, with so many confounding variables. Perhaps it was the presentation of the course material; I'm sure there's a more precise science that could be developed out of either of the two than was demonstrated to us. Then again, perhaps your difficulties with math are based around the same.
Mathematics is literally logic applied to axiomatic systems. Whether it's just "made up" or not is actually a pretty intensive philosophical debate that actually crops up in many other areas of education, but in your meaning of someone making shit up, mathematics is a subject where you, yourself, can start from first principles and verify that everything they're saying is correct. It's what attracts many people to math initially. This property of mathematics was actually referenced in a popular political speech by Lincoln during the Illinois debates in 1858. You have to wonder whether he was speaking over the audience's heads or people have taken a step downward in the intellectual department.
I don't really keep up with algorithms for calculating pi, but I think even if you were able to perform such a calculation on the fly without the aid of a computer to arbitrary decimal places, it would take a lot longer. They said it took him 16 hours for 100k digits, which is 1.75 digits per second. It'd have to be a really quick calculation to match that.
I actually did like O'Reilly a lot when Fox News first started. I dunno if it was because it was back in my impressionable high school days or because it was more moderate. I've gone from being able to watch television network news to getting a pounding headache at the thought of all the flashing graphics and red alerts, so maybe that's part of it too. Every time CNN's little media emergency center with the wall-o-TVs comes up I want to do something drastic:P
If they had a news channel that had moderate people talking instead of shouting at each other with minimal graphics, I'd be there in a second.
What MMORPGS need is a "leave-me-the-hell-alone" mode - the ability to automatically, without even asking me, reject party invitations, guild invitations, etc. Let me turn it on and off according to my mood -- if I want to run with a small group that thinks alike, let me do that -- if I feel like solo questing for a bit, let me do that without being interrupted every 2 minutes with "so-and-so has invited you to join whatever raid/guild/party" popups.
EQ2 and City of Heroes let you toggle off invitations. EQ2 at least lets you manually choose between each and every kind of invitation, and has an anon mode that takes your class and level off every kind of search. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I can't fathom why any other modern MMO wouldn't have these features, not that most people ever random invite unless they're botters.
Yeah actually it's not too hard, you fix the center in R^3, S^2 (two-dimensional sphere) gives you all the possible alignments of the controller's "horizontal" axis if you pick an orientation, and S^1 (one-dimensional circle) gives you the tilt, so you get R^3 X S^2 X S^1 = R^3 X S^3. Not entirely sure what that is or if I really want to know what that is:P
The six degrees of freedom means that your configuration space is a six dimensional space, with six basis elements, and thus six "axis." Probably a torus with a couple holes, I dunno, it's been a long day and I'm tired:P
It was a fun, challenging combination of a puzzle game and a driving game. Learning all the individual car mechanics was a blast. The whole concept behind the game was just great. And then there were the moon levels, and the additional levels, and all that kind of stuff... lots to keep you busy, hehe.
CoX is actually a pretty quick grind, I just found it missing... I dunno, something, in the way of substance. I love the idea, I love the character creation, gameplay's not bad, the lore even is pretty good, I just found it hard to get into. Soloing is so accessible that you get the two-edged sword that actual people are hard to interact with sometimes at lower levels. And because of sidekicking and exemping, unless you manage to get into a community, once you break out of the Hollows (newbie grind zone that lots of characters don't make it out of), teaming just dies off very quick.
Furthermore, there's no real item or levelling motivation. Once I got all the really snazzy powers (sometime around midgame), I don't really feel highly motivated to keep going. There's no awesome items I can really aim for... Hami-os aren't so exciting, especially when you consider all you're going to use them for is to complete the same content you were having no problems doing without them. And especially considering the fun you have on a Hami raid:P
Basically CoH hands you almost everything you could want from the game early on. Some people dig it, and I do to an extent. It's actually interesting how I find myself wishing for the carrot on a stick. Maybe I've been brainwashed:P
At this point I'm just waiting for something new. I don't have any desire to go back to WoW. I think MMO developers are waiting on releases because of the Burning Crusade.
EQ2 has its third expansion coming out in a month. The store box version actually includes the base game and the first two expansions, so it's a nice entry point. It's a pretty fun game that's been attracting a decent amount of new players lately, might be worth giving it a try if you're looking for something, hehe. Free trial version of the first tenish levels in the newbie zone too if you want to check out the graphics engine and the game mechanics.
How disappointing. I thought you were going to recommend philosophy be taught in high school. I in fact am of the opinion it should be taught in middle school. But I don't think it means what you think it means
The topics you describe fall under contemporary events, politics, or ethics, not philosophy. What's missing from public school is exactly what philosophy is supposed to provide: critical thinking skills.
Not to get involved in a semantics debate, but ethics can certainly be formulated as a subset of philosophy. Current events obviously play a large part in applied philosophy. Even in theoretical philosophy, concrete examples from events past and present are called upon as counterexamples. If you restrict yourself from bringing up controversial implications of your philosophical theory, you've neutered your ability to critically analyze whether this theory is morally defensible.
A class in logic and abstract philosophy would be great too, but I think interpreting current events in light of these philosophies is even more important. That is one of the major practical upshots of learning philosophy. Pure abstraction would be wasted against a lot of these kids without the application.
Just some advice freely given, that I learned far later than I should've, but not too late: you are responsible for your own education. Not a teacher, not a book, not an educational system... you.
The school system as it stands right now is better than nothing, but it sucks for a lot of people. Unfortunately, them's the breaks. It's an issue that stems from overconcerned parents, underconcerned parents, lawsuits, slacker kids, genius kids, average kids, turn-of-the-century steel magnates, bad teachers, good teachers, shitty administrators, well-intentioned school boards... and it's had a looong time to evolve. All you can do is the best you can to make sure you come out with an education. "My algebra teacher sucked" isn't going to impress a college recruiter, or a job recruiter, for that matter.
If you're in math class and your teacher's droning on, try and work out some basic number theory stuff for yourself. Try to figure out the basic relationships in calculus before you get there. If you're really advanced try and come up with theorems and prove them. In history class, when the teacher brings up a famous person or an event, try to place it on a mental timeline. Think of who else was alive at the same time. Would they have known each other? How would they have interacted? What were the immediate and future causes and effects?
English is sort of a lost cause if you're not simply reading in class, because you will always be saddled with dimwits who will lower the level of discourse, and the class is all about the discussion. But you can still play the mental game of placing it historically, figuring out themes, contrasting it with other works, all that sorta stuff.
Actually it's sorta sad, one of the classes I think that high school really could use is some kinda philosophy, but it's absent in most curricula. I'm guessing because of the parental complaint or even lawsuit factor if people started discussing gay rights, morality through religion, civil disobedience, etc. But those are the things everyone can get a handle on, because they're basic issues to human existence. And they also might challenge some preconceptions, which is what school is really all about, after all.
There's only one question: does the claim have merit, or doesn't it? On something this important you don't want to be trusting some third party's judgement. Of course they all have agendas.
Yeah, I pretty much know what I want before it even comes out, and not due to their PR shill previews, but because I have a good feel for what I, in particular, like. Then I wait half a year or so for it to come down to a reasonable price, and I take a look at the reader reviews to see if my expectations lined up with reality. If it's still a go, I buy the game.
I used to make exceptions and buy certain games as soon as they came out... but they're not as important to me anymore, so I'm still holding off on games I know I want, like, say, Suikoden V.
"Official" reviews don't factor into the process here anywhere, though, as I find they're usually trying to address every possible audience and in the process missing every possible audience. If I have five minutes to talk to a friend that's played the game I can instantly tell whether I'll like it, if I read an official review I still have no idea. At least reader reviews usually give a very diverse sampling of opinions and let me know what the lowest and highest points are going to be from the very negative and ultimate fanboy reviews.
It depends on what makes you happy. I'm in grad school right now living quite comfortably on $22k a year. I could see myself being happy living this way for quite a long time, and I'm paying for an overpriced apartment in the middle of a major city. The one thing that keeps me from freaking out about passing my qualifiers is even if I do manage to screw up and end up getting booted out of my PhD program, I'll be able to maintain my happy lifestyle elsewhere.
You need money to be happy, to an extent, but not uber legal professional six-digit-salary money.
The scenario changes if your vision of happiness has to involve popping out some kids, but even then, you don't need an uber salary to support a modest lifestyle.
Slashdot Mirror
...you'd prefer they LARP for the benefit of an ethereal third party instead of play an MMO? Whether you're grinding faction with god or with dwarves, it's all the same shit. Just a different carrot on a stick.
Developing a code of ethics that doesn't rely on someone else's approval, now that's actually impressive.
And the game is designed to take up as much of your time as is possible. After all, all games like it charge people for the time they spend online.
Actually, it's a flat monthly fee in 90% of these games, including WoW. Their #1 subscriber would be some guy that pays the monthly fees and never logs in. Of course, they need more content to keep people paying month after month, and thus the carrots on a stick.
Well said. I don't know why everyone on the internet wants to be an Ayn Rand protagonist.
As much as I disagree with Rand, it's because she lived in a fantasy land of multitalented, competent businessmen whose ethical standards prohibited exploiting others for profit.
Step 1 to quitting is taking personal responsibility. The guy in the article lives for other people's praise, wants to be that crucial guy that always put in the time to get the skills/items/info they needed for the raid, loves having other people dependent on him. He says as much in the article. I'm familiar with that playstyle because that's what I enjoy too.
Posting that article was just another way for him to elevate himself above his former guildmates (you're still playing that old game?) and get a lot of praise from the easily-wooed MMO community. If he doesn't get over that, he's just going to keep going back to the easy fix in a couple months when reality doesn't accomodate him anymore. No one can ultimately stop him from reinstalling and setting up another account besides him.
I think the bigger problem in your equation is your 80 hour-per-week worktime plus transit that you figured in there. Hooray for weekends :P
It's never been hard -- just suitably difficult. But the trolls with access to my exclusive network, what can they do? They're only allowed to send me a friends invite, and I can keep them waiting in the queue forever. Plus you can make it so that the only people allowed to send you friend invite are friends-of-friends. Then these trolls can literally do nothing.
While the innovative changes always result in some backlash before people get used to them, none have been so large as against the idea of Facebook "going public". Now much of the user protest was hot air as few truly intended to stop using the site. However it may well result in a decline in popularity among uni students who no longer view it as an exclusive network serving to their needs. If its open to everyone anyway, why not just bite the bullet and join MySpace...
The user experience on Facebook has changed by literally zero since it opened it up to everyone. The privacy settings are very robust. You still need a school or work e-mail address to join a school or work network. Basically, if you hadn't told me and the circle of friends I have on Facebook that it was opening up to a broader audience, none of us would have noticed. College kids got on board the bandwagon complaining about opening it up to everyone without knowing the facts: surprise, surprise. Another huge surprise is that most of them are still using it. The hype might've brought Facebook down, but it's moved beyond the crisis zone now and apathy won out in their favor.
Well, you may be right, but does it make a whole lot of difference if the end result is the same?
Yes. The goal is to find the actual causation so that you can figure out how to fix it. Losing weight and becoming healthier is a good idea for obese people no matter what, but if there's some confounding factor that just happens to correlate with obesity, pinpointing it might help lots of other people.
Conversely, let me ask this: have you encountered a subject in school that was so opaque, arbitrary and ridiculous that you thought that the people involved in it must be fooling a lot of people into thinking that this was a serious academic subject, instead of a bunch of hoakum? That they must just be making it up, because it really didn't make any sense at all?
High school biology, where they told us "facts" about the structure of microscopic organisms without actually giving us any of the research supporting it. In college, sociology and psychology. Never have I seen so much research presented as fact, based on so little evidence, with so many confounding variables. Perhaps it was the presentation of the course material; I'm sure there's a more precise science that could be developed out of either of the two than was demonstrated to us. Then again, perhaps your difficulties with math are based around the same.
Mathematics is literally logic applied to axiomatic systems. Whether it's just "made up" or not is actually a pretty intensive philosophical debate that actually crops up in many other areas of education, but in your meaning of someone making shit up, mathematics is a subject where you, yourself, can start from first principles and verify that everything they're saying is correct. It's what attracts many people to math initially. This property of mathematics was actually referenced in a popular political speech by Lincoln during the Illinois debates in 1858. You have to wonder whether he was speaking over the audience's heads or people have taken a step downward in the intellectual department.
I don't really keep up with algorithms for calculating pi, but I think even if you were able to perform such a calculation on the fly without the aid of a computer to arbitrary decimal places, it would take a lot longer. They said it took him 16 hours for 100k digits, which is 1.75 digits per second. It'd have to be a really quick calculation to match that.
I actually did like O'Reilly a lot when Fox News first started. I dunno if it was because it was back in my impressionable high school days or because it was more moderate. I've gone from being able to watch television network news to getting a pounding headache at the thought of all the flashing graphics and red alerts, so maybe that's part of it too. Every time CNN's little media emergency center with the wall-o-TVs comes up I want to do something drastic :P
If they had a news channel that had moderate people talking instead of shouting at each other with minimal graphics, I'd be there in a second.
What MMORPGS need is a "leave-me-the-hell-alone" mode - the ability to automatically, without even asking me, reject party invitations, guild invitations, etc. Let me turn it on and off according to my mood -- if I want to run with a small group that thinks alike, let me do that -- if I feel like solo questing for a bit, let me do that without being interrupted every 2 minutes with "so-and-so has invited you to join whatever raid/guild/party" popups.
EQ2 and City of Heroes let you toggle off invitations. EQ2 at least lets you manually choose between each and every kind of invitation, and has an anon mode that takes your class and level off every kind of search. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I can't fathom why any other modern MMO wouldn't have these features, not that most people ever random invite unless they're botters.
Yeah actually it's not too hard, you fix the center in R^3, S^2 (two-dimensional sphere) gives you all the possible alignments of the controller's "horizontal" axis if you pick an orientation, and S^1 (one-dimensional circle) gives you the tilt, so you get R^3 X S^2 X S^1 = R^3 X S^3. Not entirely sure what that is or if I really want to know what that is :P
The six degrees of freedom means that your configuration space is a six dimensional space, with six basis elements, and thus six "axis." Probably a torus with a couple holes, I dunno, it's been a long day and I'm tired :P
Did you see the 2002 Twilight Zone? Be careful what you wish for... duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh-nuh-nuh...
Blast Corps was much better than mediocre :P
It was a fun, challenging combination of a puzzle game and a driving game. Learning all the individual car mechanics was a blast. The whole concept behind the game was just great. And then there were the moon levels, and the additional levels, and all that kind of stuff... lots to keep you busy, hehe.
I'd buy an updated version in a heartbeat.
Still my favourite FPS, and I have Half Life 2 on my PC.
:P
You should try Goldeneye: Source. Not exactly the same, but closer enough that it brings back some memories
CoX is actually a pretty quick grind, I just found it missing ... I dunno, something, in the way of substance. I love the idea, I love the character creation, gameplay's not bad, the lore even is pretty good, I just found it hard to get into. Soloing is so accessible that you get the two-edged sword that actual people are hard to interact with sometimes at lower levels. And because of sidekicking and exemping, unless you manage to get into a community, once you break out of the Hollows (newbie grind zone that lots of characters don't make it out of), teaming just dies off very quick.
:P
:P
Furthermore, there's no real item or levelling motivation. Once I got all the really snazzy powers (sometime around midgame), I don't really feel highly motivated to keep going. There's no awesome items I can really aim for... Hami-os aren't so exciting, especially when you consider all you're going to use them for is to complete the same content you were having no problems doing without them. And especially considering the fun you have on a Hami raid
Basically CoH hands you almost everything you could want from the game early on. Some people dig it, and I do to an extent. It's actually interesting how I find myself wishing for the carrot on a stick. Maybe I've been brainwashed
At this point I'm just waiting for something new. I don't have any desire to go back to WoW. I think MMO developers are waiting on releases because of the Burning Crusade.
EQ2 has its third expansion coming out in a month. The store box version actually includes the base game and the first two expansions, so it's a nice entry point. It's a pretty fun game that's been attracting a decent amount of new players lately, might be worth giving it a try if you're looking for something, hehe. Free trial version of the first tenish levels in the newbie zone too if you want to check out the graphics engine and the game mechanics.
How disappointing. I thought you were going to recommend philosophy be taught in high school. I in fact am of the opinion it should be taught in middle school. But I don't think it means what you think it means
The topics you describe fall under contemporary events, politics, or ethics, not philosophy. What's missing from public school is exactly what philosophy is supposed to provide: critical thinking skills.
Not to get involved in a semantics debate, but ethics can certainly be formulated as a subset of philosophy. Current events obviously play a large part in applied philosophy. Even in theoretical philosophy, concrete examples from events past and present are called upon as counterexamples. If you restrict yourself from bringing up controversial implications of your philosophical theory, you've neutered your ability to critically analyze whether this theory is morally defensible.
A class in logic and abstract philosophy would be great too, but I think interpreting current events in light of these philosophies is even more important. That is one of the major practical upshots of learning philosophy. Pure abstraction would be wasted against a lot of these kids without the application.
NO WAI!
Just some advice freely given, that I learned far later than I should've, but not too late: you are responsible for your own education. Not a teacher, not a book, not an educational system... you.
The school system as it stands right now is better than nothing, but it sucks for a lot of people. Unfortunately, them's the breaks. It's an issue that stems from overconcerned parents, underconcerned parents, lawsuits, slacker kids, genius kids, average kids, turn-of-the-century steel magnates, bad teachers, good teachers, shitty administrators, well-intentioned school boards... and it's had a looong time to evolve. All you can do is the best you can to make sure you come out with an education. "My algebra teacher sucked" isn't going to impress a college recruiter, or a job recruiter, for that matter.
If you're in math class and your teacher's droning on, try and work out some basic number theory stuff for yourself. Try to figure out the basic relationships in calculus before you get there. If you're really advanced try and come up with theorems and prove them. In history class, when the teacher brings up a famous person or an event, try to place it on a mental timeline. Think of who else was alive at the same time. Would they have known each other? How would they have interacted? What were the immediate and future causes and effects?
English is sort of a lost cause if you're not simply reading in class, because you will always be saddled with dimwits who will lower the level of discourse, and the class is all about the discussion. But you can still play the mental game of placing it historically, figuring out themes, contrasting it with other works, all that sorta stuff.
Actually it's sorta sad, one of the classes I think that high school really could use is some kinda philosophy, but it's absent in most curricula. I'm guessing because of the parental complaint or even lawsuit factor if people started discussing gay rights, morality through religion, civil disobedience, etc. But those are the things everyone can get a handle on, because they're basic issues to human existence. And they also might challenge some preconceptions, which is what school is really all about, after all.
There's only one question: does the claim have merit, or doesn't it? On something this important you don't want to be trusting some third party's judgement. Of course they all have agendas.
Yeah, I pretty much know what I want before it even comes out, and not due to their PR shill previews, but because I have a good feel for what I, in particular, like. Then I wait half a year or so for it to come down to a reasonable price, and I take a look at the reader reviews to see if my expectations lined up with reality. If it's still a go, I buy the game.
I used to make exceptions and buy certain games as soon as they came out... but they're not as important to me anymore, so I'm still holding off on games I know I want, like, say, Suikoden V.
"Official" reviews don't factor into the process here anywhere, though, as I find they're usually trying to address every possible audience and in the process missing every possible audience. If I have five minutes to talk to a friend that's played the game I can instantly tell whether I'll like it, if I read an official review I still have no idea. At least reader reviews usually give a very diverse sampling of opinions and let me know what the lowest and highest points are going to be from the very negative and ultimate fanboy reviews.
There are still some idealistic lawyers out there, believe it or not. To change the law you have to know the law :P
It depends on what makes you happy. I'm in grad school right now living quite comfortably on $22k a year. I could see myself being happy living this way for quite a long time, and I'm paying for an overpriced apartment in the middle of a major city. The one thing that keeps me from freaking out about passing my qualifiers is even if I do manage to screw up and end up getting booted out of my PhD program, I'll be able to maintain my happy lifestyle elsewhere.
You need money to be happy, to an extent, but not uber legal professional six-digit-salary money.
The scenario changes if your vision of happiness has to involve popping out some kids, but even then, you don't need an uber salary to support a modest lifestyle.