Lots of "these kids" are already pretty successful adults. I'm of the school of thought that if you can support yourself, what you do in your downtime is really your own business. The 21-year-old that hasn't left his room in the past five years (who's supporting this guy?) and the parents that are physically afraid of their kid are definitely not new phenomena, anyway. I've got a relative that didn't get booted out of the house until he was in his thirties, spent most of his time reading in his room and using mysterious "incense," and he has to my knowledge never touched a video game.
My wife on the other hand, plays obsessively for 12-14 hours/day (usually when I'm at work or asleep) and gets really grouchy if she has to put it down even for a half hour. I'm seriously considering some iptables rules on my router to place limits on the times that WOW will function.
Are you really enjoying your marriage then? Seriously, I've heard of (and spoken to) a lot of people in situations like this on both sides, and I begin to wonder at the point of the marriage at all. A lot of 'em don't even spend their in-game time together. I've found myself encouraging lots of couples to get offline and go catch a movie, or go out to a restaurant, spend some QT in the sack, something. Of course, I'm pretty pathetic in that respect myself, but if you're going to commit to a relationship and there's some actual real-life chemistry there, go experience it in real life, for god's sake:P
Xenogears got a pass for having the first decent storyline with a lot of depth. It also had great music. Otherwise it had lackluster graphics, pretty awful gameplay, and really really boring dungeons.
Stories with games tacked onto them don't really cut it anymore, though. Especially as most gamers get older and don't want to spend 60 hours on what should've been a 40 hour game for a couple hours of plot slowly scrawling itself across the screen.
Of course, Xenosaga failed it mostly because its storyline is completely uncompelling, and any depth attributed to it is a direct result of throwing lots of biblical names around and seeing what sticks.
I think the main problem in these games is that they communicate the story almost entirely through narrative. Narrative has its place, but there's no reason we can't have truly interactive stories at this point. An FPS like Half-Life 2 does a pretty good job of this; there are story-oriented portions of the game, but most of the time you're in full control of your character during them.
"Great known writers" don't know how to write a good game. A good story makes use of the interactivity of the medium, and I'm not talking about being able to run and shoot.
An excellent, fairly recent example of this interactivity is Shadow of the Colossus, where at key points in the game you're given control over the character during a situation where you have absolutely no chance of prevailing. It dials up the dramatic tension by several notches and allows the player to experience the story rather than having it dictated to them. There have always been games where you're "supposed to lose" -- I'm looking at the standard RPG hallmark of the unwinnable battle -- but mostly these are cliched sideshows to the main action; you might as well have a cutscene for all they're worth.
Movie adaptations, by the by, have yet to turn out a game with a good story.
hah, i love customers like you. unless i'm talking out of my ass my supervisor will tell you the exact same thing and therefore there is no point whatsoever of speaking to him...so it looks like there's a little impasse going on, the difference being i'm getting while waiting for someone like you to get the message.
That's good for you, but at most companies the minimum wage grunts that staff the front-end aren't authorized for much of anything besides having their head up their ass and passing you up to a superior.
Anyhow, I'd like to see how hiring a lawyer means you can avoid paying tax in the US?
It's not necessarily cause-and-effect like that and you don't dodge it entirely, but as with any other system, once you're intimately familiar with its rules it becomes easier to work around it. Tax specialists immerse themselves in tax law, which the general public does not really have the time or the legal comprehension to completely figure out. The general public also doesn't necessarily have the cojones to exploit loopholes, not knowing which ones are "okay" and which ones will land you in court.
You're on Slashdot. Every other post is IANAL, IAAL, damn lawyers, the lawyers always win, lawyerlawyerlawyerlawyer MUSHROOM MUSHROOM. They have a hard-on for lawyer discussion. "Hire a lawyer" is pretty much as high as the escalation goes in these situations, so every sky-is-falling doom-and-gloom jaded knucklehead is going to go there first. Which is not to say they aren't useful or that this guy might have to turn to one eventually, but just that they shouldn't necessarily be a first resort. It's like "My parents have a Windows virus..." "So buy a Mac, stupid!"
Meh, I've got it done with multinational banks, the local internet monopoly... all sorts of shit. You just gotta be a bigger pain in the ass than your money is worth. Lawyers help a lot in that regard, but you can escalate it on your own pretty well. It's certainly worth trying before you start paying out, and it's a good faith effort to give discussion a spin before going to arbitration.
Then you call them up again. It's the supervisor's job to answer you, and the longer you wait, the more charges you'll rack up and the less options for recourse you'll have open. In today's economy of instant charges and massive late penalties, it's unacceptable for a business to be unable to rectify your problem, let alone merely respond to you, within 48 hours.
If they're still playing games, make it clear (politely, but firmly) that you're going to go to the bank and deny them the charges, you're going to go to the better business bureau (or canadian equivalent) and give them a black mark, and you're going to write into the local paper and tell all your friends about the awful service you're getting. Once they sense a pattern of escalation their cost versus benefit usually tells them it's worth it to give up a couple hundred dollars rather than have their CS lines tied up by you and get all the negative publicity.
Worst case scenario, you can go to a lawyer for a consultation and get something written up on a spiffy official letterhead, but services that actually cost you money should be a last resort.
I think he was using humanity as an example of something that's not deterministic in any sort of reasonably accessible sense. Sherlock Holmes deduces things based on an assumption that people act according to certain accepted logical principles. But people will often act irrationally (or at least, according to some heavily obfuscated logic).
He's saying that a machine can't become more intelligent than what the physical reality of the universe allows, and those limits might not be so much further beyond what we've achieved thus far than we think. Ultimate data aggregation, statistical mass predictions, fine, but the stereotypical godhead AI that reads minds and predicts individual actions, not so much.
And I believe you haven't read the article (which is natural : this is Slashdot) Oh well, you help all the others who haven't read the article with your post.
I wouldn't blame him, the article is a piece of crap. Umpteen pages that you click through one by one to see shot by shot comparisons of how they made simple sprite conversions. The bit where they talk about the lost levels is at the very end buried in a horribly formatted table that wrapped around an ad.
There's two trailers on there. Sat through a couple minutes of one of them (their buffering sucked or my internet sucked) and it looked like there was some sort of coherent plot based around a couple main characters, usually in MMOs they show off a bunch of different archetypes at least you can pick from. I'm guessing it's just another mana game, probably as disappointing as the last couple:P
How do you discriminate against some crimes but not others?
The same way I discriminate between anything else, common sense and my personal system of ethics. I obey laws when they're not too unreasonable. I agree with most of the regularly enforced laws in the U.S., hence me and a lot of other people in the same boat live here under a government that will enforce these laws and prevent other people from committing acts like rape, murder, theft, et al. Plus give us a fair shake if we're accused of any of that nasty stuff.
We also have a police force to investigate these crimes. If we were to start telling little Johnny to keep on the lookout for nasty copyright infringers, we've just given him the go ahead for a witch hunt and breached another hole in the healthy distrust he should have for his government.
Hell, the legal system already assigns different penalties to different crimes, ranking them by their severity. It's not really an astonishing idea.
As for old lady jaywalker, there's some old ladies that shouldn't be crossing some streets. The laws exist so the police officers can stop them. The appropriate action for a strapping young lad that sees an elderly lady having trouble crossing the street, however, is to assist her, not to call the feds on her.
So you're saying that you'll teach your children to ignore any crimes they see and just bury their head in the sand? If they see a little old lady being beaten, they should just stay out of it and not "rat" to the government on the criminal? I'm sure your children will turn out to be fine citizens.
So you're saying you'll teach your children to report every crime they see? Old lady jaywalker is SOOOOO busted.
Negativity sells more copy and attracts more attention. Once in a very long while you'll see a story that actually has journalistic merit appear on a gaming website. The rest of the time it's reviews (some dude plays a game and tells us what he thinks about it), previews (the developers jerk off onto the page), rumors (the publishers leaked a tidbit of info to raise awareness of a game), and this kind of editorializing (look ma, we're real journalists, down with teh oppressive game developars!!!).
The pundits in discussion are reporting on the front-end of an entertainment industry. There's interesting things to be said, but it's not about how many googleflops the PS3 is pushing or its pricetag. It's about the actual inner working of the companies and what drives them to do what they do. This information is harder to get. It's easier to just keep spouting random opinions and "reporting" information that reads like (and probably is) a press release.
The gaming media used to be worthwhile for publishing screenies and giving some review information. Today it's easier just to go to the game's official site for screenies and movies, and I usually find user reviews just as enlightening as the official publication reviews. They're the ones that are quickly becoming obsolete, and heming and hawing about the industry's woes is a part of their death throes.
The trend in video game "journalism" these days is asking "tough" questions for the sake of asking them. If you look like you're standing up to big corporations, you'll get the preteens who equate aggressive badgering with journalism. Just last week we had an article where some asshat "game journalist" with a blog "stood up" to some stupid and non-binding PR request from Square by writing a hostile, lengthy rant about it. And it got Slashdot front page coverage, because both parties know it'll get the hits. Zonk knows when he posts an article like this he'll get hits from people who pick up on his ludicrously obvious bias, people defending him, people trying to keep a level head, people who can't resist a good flamefest, etc.
Taking potshots at Sony right now is like shooting fish in a barrel. The aggressive interviews make sense when you're trying to get tough, meaningful answers from someone that isn't obviously in a lot of trouble. Not when you have the support of the entire community on your side. In that case it's just pageantry.
Not to place the onus on the video game media exclusively, as you can also see it on FOX News any time you flip it on.
nThen I went on one of those trips to a university where some 2nd & 3rd year students were showing of their projects. I even explained a student how to solve a particular electronics problem they were runing into, they were 3 years "ahead" of me and couldn't figure out how to use an opamp as current source (they had a set amount of components and had to build a certain thing out of it within certain specifications, they had 1 opamp still available in the chip but didn't know how to get enough current for the LED... euhm, you got an opamp available there...)
I had the pleasure of participating in a summer REU with a sixteen-year-old that knew graduate-level mathematics. He could probably run circles around all of us besides an exceptionally bright fourth-year. That doesn't make us all boobs for getting the degree. At a university what you're really paying for is access to the professors, an academically motivated environment, and proof that you're willing to work in your degree (and if you're bright enough, you're not even paying for it:P). No one can make you take advantage of it and people can certainly get along without it, but I would say your success story is a combination of talent and luck that most people do not have.
The most disturbing gameplay moment I've ever had, bar none, was over a series of RP sessions where my character's actions were drawn inexorably towards darker and more heinous acts. I was RPing with out-of-character friends of mine who were perfectly fine with that and actually enjoyed his darker side, but I eventually just found myself not enjoying it at all. I looked back at what had played out and was struck with how fucked up it was, and then thought to myself, "Shit, I came up with that?" I ended up abandoning the plotline and the character because it was just too much for me.
I think the greatest potential for a disturbing game comes in one where the character's thoughts aren't filled in for you. Things other people do don't disturb you unless you relate to them. Actually, one of the more recent games that... well, I wouldn't call it disturbing, but a game that made me think, was Shadow of the Colossus. The basic plot is that a boy rides into a temple carrying a dead girl on the back of his horse. He lays her down on an altar and is told by the resident god that if he goes out and slays sixteen giant colossi that roam the otherwise-barren land, the girl can be revived. That's it. But when you go to kill a colossus, first thing is that they're just such well-rendered, graceful creatures. When you climb up their backs to kill them, they start bucking and screaming trying to throw you off. Then when you stab your sword into them, a big black stream of blood comes flying out. And finally they come crashing to the ground, accompanied by somber music. You have control over your character (this is very important) while black tendrils snake out from the colossus towards him, but no matter how fast and what direction you run, they'll end up impaling him. He wakes up back in the temple where he started, worse for the wear -- the in-game avatar is actually visibly decaying in terms of appearance. Perhaps this is part of the price that the temple god said that he would pay.
Over the sixteen times you repeat this pattern, with plenty of time allowed for introspection as you travel across the landscape, you get to thinking that these colossi are really just trying to defend themselves. Your character seems to be paying a price as well. Is it really worth all those deaths and the hero's soul (figuratively, and perhaps even literally -- you don't know the price that will be exacted until the finale) to revive this girl?
I know this is somewhat off-point, but it proves that it's possible to make an enjoyable game that still carries a bit of philosophical weight. Truly disturbing? I'm not sure that this can be accomplished and still be commercially successful, unless the plot that makes it disturbing is carefully separated from the gameplay. Once players start actually enacting disturbing events through the guise of their character, it becomes easier to set down the game as being too disturbing. Of course there's games out there like Vice City where your main character does some pretty fucked up shit, but it's also clear from square one that it's overblown, over-the-top parody.
There IS going to be a day of reckoning, a rude awakening, and I know because MY day of awakening already came and went.
Ironically enough, your day of awakening was based on your demonstrably flawed sense perception. And if we accept that even logic is faith-based, why does it make a bit of difference if you or Kant use said logic to posit the existence of a god?
Furthermore, Kant's supposition is that morality has Meaning with a capital M. He started with the premise that humans have some inherent sense of morality. I think morality has meaning in some sense, but it's born of a complicated mixture of sociological and biological influences. So complicated that we can never know if it's deterministic or a product of free-will. So the acceptance of even that supposition is faith-based.
Finally, even if I accept that morality has Meaning and that there's some higher power governing said meaning, why am I taken necessarily to the existence of a god in anything close to the christian sense, let alone Jesus? If you say that it's just something that you "feel" once you get there, then we might as well abandon all the arguments we've made, because we've just pinned them all on a highly contested, individual perception. Which is fine, as far as universal belief systems go, but sort of pointless to argue. In science we draw conclusions from collective sense perception, things that humanity as a whole can see and verify for themselves. There is a large consensus on things like "the Rocky Mountains exist" and "this sensor dial reads 91 degrees," but for every "I found Jesus" I can point you to a "praise Allah" or even a "hail satan."
It is a bit disquieting to abandon Truth with a capital T for some sort of evolving truth based on statistical sense perception, but if you look at it, disagreement on physical reality barely ever happens when you get a group of people together and ask them to focus their senses on something at the same time. In memory things are a bit more fluid, but the fact that there's so much agreement leads me to believe that physical reality exists for humans in every reasonable sense. If there is no physical reality, either I've conjured it all up in my head (and therefore all my observations are by default correct), or I'm describing another reality that's experienced in a hallucination en masse by humanity. Either way this reality might as well be physical reality, because it's indistinguishable from it in every way.
I attended a lecture series once alongside a mathematician who was brighter than I was. He also had the respect (and fear, to some extent:P) of the community. A lot of times during lectures he'd interrupt the lecturer to point out where he was going ahead of time, throwing off the pace of the lecture and additionally circumventing a lot of the exposition for those of us - the large majority of us - who were less skilled.
I attended a college that was mediocre in a lot of respects, a smaller school but probably similar to the grandparent's. There were required classes I took where I knew most of the material already, but the others in the class did not. I could've answered every question as soon as it was asked and jumped ahead to conclusions as soon as the hypotheses were stated, but I didn't for the large part, because that would've been cheating the rest of the class out of their process of discovery. They signed up to go to a school that matched their talent more closely than it did mine. If I or this other girl couldn't hack it enough to get into a more competitive school, that doesn't give us the right to spoil the classes for the rest of the students in it.
On the other hand, I went to a summer program where I was a bit behind the curve. A lot of times the lectures would start going over my head about halfway through, but I didn't speak up to slow down the class -- I tried to work harder to catch up later.
I've also ran into my share of arrogant bastards of all levels of intelligence: the guy who comes up with some interesting stuff and treats it like it's the second coming, the guy who has no idea what the hell he's talking about but manages to sound like a snotty prick while he's saying it, the ones that think they deserve the 24/7 attention of every professor in every class.
I'm opposed to No Child Left Behind crap and all for teaching to a higher level, but there are some trade-offs that you have to be willing to accept in a group academic situation. The targeted audience of the class should be getting the most out of it; if you fall above or below that targeted range there's office hours for both extra help and higher level discussion, but it doesn't make sense to have the classtime focus on a minority. Additionally, arrogance doesn't carry along an academic penalty. It's a social penalty. And yes, sometimes in social situations you just have to shut up or people are going to be annoyed with you. This girl had a professor in her corner and the academic skills to succeed. She created an unbearable social situation for herself due to her interaction with her classmates.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of "these kids" are already pretty successful adults. I'm of the school of thought that if you can support yourself, what you do in your downtime is really your own business. The 21-year-old that hasn't left his room in the past five years (who's supporting this guy?) and the parents that are physically afraid of their kid are definitely not new phenomena, anyway. I've got a relative that didn't get booted out of the house until he was in his thirties, spent most of his time reading in his room and using mysterious "incense," and he has to my knowledge never touched a video game.
My wife on the other hand, plays obsessively for 12-14 hours/day (usually when I'm at work or asleep) and gets really grouchy if she has to put it down even for a half hour. I'm seriously considering some iptables rules on my router to place limits on the times that WOW will function.
:P
Are you really enjoying your marriage then? Seriously, I've heard of (and spoken to) a lot of people in situations like this on both sides, and I begin to wonder at the point of the marriage at all. A lot of 'em don't even spend their in-game time together. I've found myself encouraging lots of couples to get offline and go catch a movie, or go out to a restaurant, spend some QT in the sack, something. Of course, I'm pretty pathetic in that respect myself, but if you're going to commit to a relationship and there's some actual real-life chemistry there, go experience it in real life, for god's sake
Aren't graphics a part of story? Isn't the gameplay tied to what's displayed on your screen?
It's really all interrelated, and you can't say whether pitching X thousand bucks over from "graphics" to "gameplay" is going to make a big impact.
Xenogears got a pass for having the first decent storyline with a lot of depth. It also had great music. Otherwise it had lackluster graphics, pretty awful gameplay, and really really boring dungeons.
Stories with games tacked onto them don't really cut it anymore, though. Especially as most gamers get older and don't want to spend 60 hours on what should've been a 40 hour game for a couple hours of plot slowly scrawling itself across the screen.
Of course, Xenosaga failed it mostly because its storyline is completely uncompelling, and any depth attributed to it is a direct result of throwing lots of biblical names around and seeing what sticks.
I think the main problem in these games is that they communicate the story almost entirely through narrative. Narrative has its place, but there's no reason we can't have truly interactive stories at this point. An FPS like Half-Life 2 does a pretty good job of this; there are story-oriented portions of the game, but most of the time you're in full control of your character during them.
"Great known writers" don't know how to write a good game. A good story makes use of the interactivity of the medium, and I'm not talking about being able to run and shoot.
An excellent, fairly recent example of this interactivity is Shadow of the Colossus, where at key points in the game you're given control over the character during a situation where you have absolutely no chance of prevailing. It dials up the dramatic tension by several notches and allows the player to experience the story rather than having it dictated to them. There have always been games where you're "supposed to lose" -- I'm looking at the standard RPG hallmark of the unwinnable battle -- but mostly these are cliched sideshows to the main action; you might as well have a cutscene for all they're worth.
Movie adaptations, by the by, have yet to turn out a game with a good story.
hah, i love customers like you. unless i'm talking out of my ass my supervisor will tell you the exact same thing and therefore there is no point whatsoever of speaking to him...so it looks like there's a little impasse going on, the difference being i'm getting while waiting for someone like you to get the message.
That's good for you, but at most companies the minimum wage grunts that staff the front-end aren't authorized for much of anything besides having their head up their ass and passing you up to a superior.
Anyhow, I'd like to see how hiring a lawyer means you can avoid paying tax in the US?
It's not necessarily cause-and-effect like that and you don't dodge it entirely, but as with any other system, once you're intimately familiar with its rules it becomes easier to work around it. Tax specialists immerse themselves in tax law, which the general public does not really have the time or the legal comprehension to completely figure out. The general public also doesn't necessarily have the cojones to exploit loopholes, not knowing which ones are "okay" and which ones will land you in court.
There must be _some_ logical explanation.
You're on Slashdot. Every other post is IANAL, IAAL, damn lawyers, the lawyers always win, lawyerlawyerlawyerlawyer MUSHROOM MUSHROOM. They have a hard-on for lawyer discussion. "Hire a lawyer" is pretty much as high as the escalation goes in these situations, so every sky-is-falling doom-and-gloom jaded knucklehead is going to go there first. Which is not to say they aren't useful or that this guy might have to turn to one eventually, but just that they shouldn't necessarily be a first resort. It's like "My parents have a Windows virus..." "So buy a Mac, stupid!"
Meh, I've got it done with multinational banks, the local internet monopoly... all sorts of shit. You just gotta be a bigger pain in the ass than your money is worth. Lawyers help a lot in that regard, but you can escalate it on your own pretty well. It's certainly worth trying before you start paying out, and it's a good faith effort to give discussion a spin before going to arbitration.
Then you call them up again. It's the supervisor's job to answer you, and the longer you wait, the more charges you'll rack up and the less options for recourse you'll have open. In today's economy of instant charges and massive late penalties, it's unacceptable for a business to be unable to rectify your problem, let alone merely respond to you, within 48 hours.
If they're still playing games, make it clear (politely, but firmly) that you're going to go to the bank and deny them the charges, you're going to go to the better business bureau (or canadian equivalent) and give them a black mark, and you're going to write into the local paper and tell all your friends about the awful service you're getting. Once they sense a pattern of escalation their cost versus benefit usually tells them it's worth it to give up a couple hundred dollars rather than have their CS lines tied up by you and get all the negative publicity.
Worst case scenario, you can go to a lawyer for a consultation and get something written up on a spiffy official letterhead, but services that actually cost you money should be a last resort.
I haven't a clue about the sherlock bits.
I think he was using humanity as an example of something that's not deterministic in any sort of reasonably accessible sense. Sherlock Holmes deduces things based on an assumption that people act according to certain accepted logical principles. But people will often act irrationally (or at least, according to some heavily obfuscated logic).
He's saying that a machine can't become more intelligent than what the physical reality of the universe allows, and those limits might not be so much further beyond what we've achieved thus far than we think. Ultimate data aggregation, statistical mass predictions, fine, but the stereotypical godhead AI that reads minds and predicts individual actions, not so much.
And I believe you haven't read the article (which is natural : this is Slashdot) Oh well, you help all the others who haven't read the article with your post.
I wouldn't blame him, the article is a piece of crap. Umpteen pages that you click through one by one to see shot by shot comparisons of how they made simple sprite conversions. The bit where they talk about the lost levels is at the very end buried in a horribly formatted table that wrapped around an ad.
The awful movie had just about nothing to do with the video game. Chalk it up to your lack of comprehension or their shitty narrative.
There's two trailers on there. Sat through a couple minutes of one of them (their buffering sucked or my internet sucked) and it looked like there was some sort of coherent plot based around a couple main characters, usually in MMOs they show off a bunch of different archetypes at least you can pick from. I'm guessing it's just another mana game, probably as disappointing as the last couple :P
How meta is it to comment on a metacomment about the metastory?
How do you discriminate against some crimes but not others?
The same way I discriminate between anything else, common sense and my personal system of ethics. I obey laws when they're not too unreasonable. I agree with most of the regularly enforced laws in the U.S., hence me and a lot of other people in the same boat live here under a government that will enforce these laws and prevent other people from committing acts like rape, murder, theft, et al. Plus give us a fair shake if we're accused of any of that nasty stuff.
We also have a police force to investigate these crimes. If we were to start telling little Johnny to keep on the lookout for nasty copyright infringers, we've just given him the go ahead for a witch hunt and breached another hole in the healthy distrust he should have for his government.
Hell, the legal system already assigns different penalties to different crimes, ranking them by their severity. It's not really an astonishing idea.
As for old lady jaywalker, there's some old ladies that shouldn't be crossing some streets. The laws exist so the police officers can stop them. The appropriate action for a strapping young lad that sees an elderly lady having trouble crossing the street, however, is to assist her, not to call the feds on her.
So you're saying that you'll teach your children to ignore any crimes they see and just bury their head in the sand? If they see a little old lady being beaten, they should just stay out of it and not "rat" to the government on the criminal? I'm sure your children will turn out to be fine citizens.
So you're saying you'll teach your children to report every crime they see? Old lady jaywalker is SOOOOO busted.
Well, it's on 1up. I mean, if the forerunners of video game journalism think it's news... oh wait. Yeah, you're right.
Negativity sells more copy and attracts more attention. Once in a very long while you'll see a story that actually has journalistic merit appear on a gaming website. The rest of the time it's reviews (some dude plays a game and tells us what he thinks about it), previews (the developers jerk off onto the page), rumors (the publishers leaked a tidbit of info to raise awareness of a game), and this kind of editorializing (look ma, we're real journalists, down with teh oppressive game developars!!!).
The pundits in discussion are reporting on the front-end of an entertainment industry. There's interesting things to be said, but it's not about how many googleflops the PS3 is pushing or its pricetag. It's about the actual inner working of the companies and what drives them to do what they do. This information is harder to get. It's easier to just keep spouting random opinions and "reporting" information that reads like (and probably is) a press release.
The gaming media used to be worthwhile for publishing screenies and giving some review information. Today it's easier just to go to the game's official site for screenies and movies, and I usually find user reviews just as enlightening as the official publication reviews. They're the ones that are quickly becoming obsolete, and heming and hawing about the industry's woes is a part of their death throes.
The trend in video game "journalism" these days is asking "tough" questions for the sake of asking them. If you look like you're standing up to big corporations, you'll get the preteens who equate aggressive badgering with journalism. Just last week we had an article where some asshat "game journalist" with a blog "stood up" to some stupid and non-binding PR request from Square by writing a hostile, lengthy rant about it. And it got Slashdot front page coverage, because both parties know it'll get the hits. Zonk knows when he posts an article like this he'll get hits from people who pick up on his ludicrously obvious bias, people defending him, people trying to keep a level head, people who can't resist a good flamefest, etc.
Taking potshots at Sony right now is like shooting fish in a barrel. The aggressive interviews make sense when you're trying to get tough, meaningful answers from someone that isn't obviously in a lot of trouble. Not when you have the support of the entire community on your side. In that case it's just pageantry.
Not to place the onus on the video game media exclusively, as you can also see it on FOX News any time you flip it on.
nThen I went on one of those trips to a university where some 2nd & 3rd year students were showing of their projects. I even explained a student how to solve a particular electronics problem they were runing into, they were 3 years "ahead" of me and couldn't figure out how to use an opamp as current source (they had a set amount of components and had to build a certain thing out of it within certain specifications, they had 1 opamp still available in the chip but didn't know how to get enough current for the LED... euhm, you got an opamp available there...)
:P). No one can make you take advantage of it and people can certainly get along without it, but I would say your success story is a combination of talent and luck that most people do not have.
I had the pleasure of participating in a summer REU with a sixteen-year-old that knew graduate-level mathematics. He could probably run circles around all of us besides an exceptionally bright fourth-year. That doesn't make us all boobs for getting the degree. At a university what you're really paying for is access to the professors, an academically motivated environment, and proof that you're willing to work in your degree (and if you're bright enough, you're not even paying for it
The most disturbing gameplay moment I've ever had, bar none, was over a series of RP sessions where my character's actions were drawn inexorably towards darker and more heinous acts. I was RPing with out-of-character friends of mine who were perfectly fine with that and actually enjoyed his darker side, but I eventually just found myself not enjoying it at all. I looked back at what had played out and was struck with how fucked up it was, and then thought to myself, "Shit, I came up with that?" I ended up abandoning the plotline and the character because it was just too much for me.
I think the greatest potential for a disturbing game comes in one where the character's thoughts aren't filled in for you. Things other people do don't disturb you unless you relate to them. Actually, one of the more recent games that... well, I wouldn't call it disturbing, but a game that made me think, was Shadow of the Colossus. The basic plot is that a boy rides into a temple carrying a dead girl on the back of his horse. He lays her down on an altar and is told by the resident god that if he goes out and slays sixteen giant colossi that roam the otherwise-barren land, the girl can be revived. That's it. But when you go to kill a colossus, first thing is that they're just such well-rendered, graceful creatures. When you climb up their backs to kill them, they start bucking and screaming trying to throw you off. Then when you stab your sword into them, a big black stream of blood comes flying out. And finally they come crashing to the ground, accompanied by somber music. You have control over your character (this is very important) while black tendrils snake out from the colossus towards him, but no matter how fast and what direction you run, they'll end up impaling him. He wakes up back in the temple where he started, worse for the wear -- the in-game avatar is actually visibly decaying in terms of appearance. Perhaps this is part of the price that the temple god said that he would pay.
Over the sixteen times you repeat this pattern, with plenty of time allowed for introspection as you travel across the landscape, you get to thinking that these colossi are really just trying to defend themselves. Your character seems to be paying a price as well. Is it really worth all those deaths and the hero's soul (figuratively, and perhaps even literally -- you don't know the price that will be exacted until the finale) to revive this girl?
I know this is somewhat off-point, but it proves that it's possible to make an enjoyable game that still carries a bit of philosophical weight. Truly disturbing? I'm not sure that this can be accomplished and still be commercially successful, unless the plot that makes it disturbing is carefully separated from the gameplay. Once players start actually enacting disturbing events through the guise of their character, it becomes easier to set down the game as being too disturbing. Of course there's games out there like Vice City where your main character does some pretty fucked up shit, but it's also clear from square one that it's overblown, over-the-top parody.
There IS going to be a day of reckoning, a rude awakening, and I know because MY day of awakening already came and went.
Ironically enough, your day of awakening was based on your demonstrably flawed sense perception. And if we accept that even logic is faith-based, why does it make a bit of difference if you or Kant use said logic to posit the existence of a god?
Furthermore, Kant's supposition is that morality has Meaning with a capital M. He started with the premise that humans have some inherent sense of morality. I think morality has meaning in some sense, but it's born of a complicated mixture of sociological and biological influences. So complicated that we can never know if it's deterministic or a product of free-will. So the acceptance of even that supposition is faith-based.
Finally, even if I accept that morality has Meaning and that there's some higher power governing said meaning, why am I taken necessarily to the existence of a god in anything close to the christian sense, let alone Jesus? If you say that it's just something that you "feel" once you get there, then we might as well abandon all the arguments we've made, because we've just pinned them all on a highly contested, individual perception. Which is fine, as far as universal belief systems go, but sort of pointless to argue. In science we draw conclusions from collective sense perception, things that humanity as a whole can see and verify for themselves. There is a large consensus on things like "the Rocky Mountains exist" and "this sensor dial reads 91 degrees," but for every "I found Jesus" I can point you to a "praise Allah" or even a "hail satan."
It is a bit disquieting to abandon Truth with a capital T for some sort of evolving truth based on statistical sense perception, but if you look at it, disagreement on physical reality barely ever happens when you get a group of people together and ask them to focus their senses on something at the same time. In memory things are a bit more fluid, but the fact that there's so much agreement leads me to believe that physical reality exists for humans in every reasonable sense. If there is no physical reality, either I've conjured it all up in my head (and therefore all my observations are by default correct), or I'm describing another reality that's experienced in a hallucination en masse by humanity. Either way this reality might as well be physical reality, because it's indistinguishable from it in every way.
I attended a lecture series once alongside a mathematician who was brighter than I was. He also had the respect (and fear, to some extent :P) of the community. A lot of times during lectures he'd interrupt the lecturer to point out where he was going ahead of time, throwing off the pace of the lecture and additionally circumventing a lot of the exposition for those of us - the large majority of us - who were less skilled.
I attended a college that was mediocre in a lot of respects, a smaller school but probably similar to the grandparent's. There were required classes I took where I knew most of the material already, but the others in the class did not. I could've answered every question as soon as it was asked and jumped ahead to conclusions as soon as the hypotheses were stated, but I didn't for the large part, because that would've been cheating the rest of the class out of their process of discovery. They signed up to go to a school that matched their talent more closely than it did mine. If I or this other girl couldn't hack it enough to get into a more competitive school, that doesn't give us the right to spoil the classes for the rest of the students in it.
On the other hand, I went to a summer program where I was a bit behind the curve. A lot of times the lectures would start going over my head about halfway through, but I didn't speak up to slow down the class -- I tried to work harder to catch up later.
I've also ran into my share of arrogant bastards of all levels of intelligence: the guy who comes up with some interesting stuff and treats it like it's the second coming, the guy who has no idea what the hell he's talking about but manages to sound like a snotty prick while he's saying it, the ones that think they deserve the 24/7 attention of every professor in every class.
I'm opposed to No Child Left Behind crap and all for teaching to a higher level, but there are some trade-offs that you have to be willing to accept in a group academic situation. The targeted audience of the class should be getting the most out of it; if you fall above or below that targeted range there's office hours for both extra help and higher level discussion, but it doesn't make sense to have the classtime focus on a minority. Additionally, arrogance doesn't carry along an academic penalty. It's a social penalty. And yes, sometimes in social situations you just have to shut up or people are going to be annoyed with you. This girl had a professor in her corner and the academic skills to succeed. She created an unbearable social situation for herself due to her interaction with her classmates.