You know, the older I get, the more I realize that everyone should be allowed to do whatever makes them feel good, as long as it's not directly hurting other people.
As a high school student, I was in a sort of ambiguous popular-nerd category. Then there were the people who played D&D. Even the nerds picked on the role players who were unashamed to admit what they were doing. And as I look back, I realize that the people who were doing terrible, horrible things weren't the people that were doing what they wanted to do and having fun with it, they were the people who felt that they needed to shoulder some enormous weight of being popular and fitting every societal norm.
In my experience, people who do what they want, regardless of societal pressure, end up happier, less stressed out, and more productive because they don't spend half their time regretting what they do. If what they want to do is prance around and wield sticks, the more power to them.
I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
My particular bone to pick is the way several professors handle their classes. The way I view it, I pay for a semester-long seminar in certain subjects. Since employers want to be able to evaluate how much I've learned, letter grades/GPAs are assigned. The professor must be able to validate how much I've learned, so he hands out projects, tests, and quizzes along the way as a gauge.
However, the way it works, I've been railroaded into attending several pointless classes by several misguided professors. The most obvious is Differential Equations, which is taught by an aging faculty member and is meant for engineering students (of which we have many). The professor goes at a ridiculously slow pace and doesn't muck around in any proofs, choosing to validate theorems by example. As a math major, I used to have a good time sitting in class and proving what he was content to demonstrate while he meandered through example after example.
Soon, I realized that he went at the rate of approximately one theorem per week, meaning that we spent a full week of classes just learning how to use one formula. It was like being in high school again. As the managing editor of the paper and a double major, I have better things to be doing with my time than watching this man repeat himself endlessly, so I started showing up intermittently to the class, still with a 100% on every single test and assignment (no attendence policy).
This man then went and spoke with a professor that I'm researching with, who told me that if I didn't begin showing up to my class, he was going to have to cut me off from the project. I was then informed by one of my classmates that he had given pop quizzes for the first three times, 3/4 of the way through the semester, on three of the days I had missed (coincidence?). This man is either misguidedly trying to get me to come to class or has some sort of ego problem with me doing well in his class and not showing up.
Let me get this straight: we're paying in the tens of thousands to be here, you're getting paid tens of thousands of dollars to teach this class, and you're dropping the grades of people who choose not to avail themselves of your class, not because the discussion in the class is valuable or integral to the materal, but because you don't like them not being here. It's just not right.
While it is a lot easier to read the current statement of theorems and their condensed, concise proofs, it's very educational to go back and read the original proofs.
I've just begun my foray into mathematical research, and a lot of times you'll get a result that makes absolute sense if you look at the thought process behind it and the steps leading up to it, but that all gets cut out in the end in favor of a more minimalist paper (and rightly so). However, that extra background information is what gives you the understanding that you need to be able to work in that field or on similar problems yourself, and answers the age-old question, "How the hell would anyone ever come up with this?"
I think a lot of the reason why people believe that they can't "do math" right now is because the great results as presented in textbooks seem to have popped out of nowhere, when in actuality they were mostly logical extensions of the work that was going on in the day.
As a college radio DJ and news director, I think radio still has a very valid place. It's a way to gain exposure to new music (again, talking independent stations), expose others to your kind of music, hear the thoughts of others on the air, and it has a human component that can't be simulated with a playlist.
Radio does not require changing a CD while driving, booting up your computer, or buying any expensive equipment. All you need is a $20 stereo.
I think what we will see is a movement towards more non-traditional radio distribution methods. For example, more satellite and Internet stations that can be tuned into easily with a cheap device. Then you'll be able to listen to the station of your choice on-demand without worrying about leaving the signal range or going behind a hill.
None of which has anything to do with the capabilities of calculators themselves. I refuse to believe that there does not exist an algebra book on the market that doesn't rely heavily on the usage of calculators, and even so, a class can be taught without the use of a textbook (for some reason it seems hard to believe, but true), especially for algebra.
And, let's face it, a person taking algebra in college is most likely looking to fulfill their math requirement and get the hell out of Dodge. An engineering, chemistry, or physics major, let alone a math major, would find it impossible to complete the program credit-wise and time-wise if they had not even completed algebra by the time they entered college.
As an interesting side note, I wonder how long it will be before computing derivatives and integrals is viewed as purely a matter of calculation. If you look at it, back in the "good old days" it was necessary to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions either by table or by carrying out a lengthy numerical approximation by hand.
Perhaps any operation that can be carried out algorithmically will eventually be viewed as work for calculators rather than people.
Well, I have to agree with you as far as grammar school, middle school, and high school go. When you mentioned sitting for exams, I assumed you meant on college level boards, since the only standardized exams I sat for in high school were the utterly trivial SATs and High School Proficiency Tests.
However, I believe the blame has been pinned on the wrong party. The problem doesn't rest on the calculators' shoulders, but on the teachers'.
I can't remember ever using a calculator until ninth grade, because there was simply no point. I wouldn't even have been able to figure out the correct syntax to plug things into it, much less permitted to use it on a test that was about graphing, factoring, and such.
In high school, geometry was purely proofs. Any calculations were of the type that would allow you to prove something, and being able to verify that the identity that you used was correct by plugging it into a calculator isn't bad, it's realistic.
I was fortunate enough to have a teacher for pre-calc and calc that taught us the fundamentals of mathematical induction, complex trigonometry, generating the binomial series (and along with it, combinatorics), and much more (Calc, of course, hehe). Many of the things that would have been introduced in a college class I am instead seeing for the second time.
I think the problem is that these HS level teachers give in to the math phobia and the whiny students and don't challenge the class enough. I've seen relatively smart college-aged seniors fail a necessary math class for their major that some of my less intelligent friends conquered as one part of a course in high school.
Rather than lowering high school classes, where the grades don't mean much ultimately, to the lowest common denominator, every student in the class should be challenged. Does that mean that use of calculators should be limited? Maybe, on some exams. But that doesn't mean that calculators are degenerating the math skills of the youth of America, it means that teachers are allowing them to use calculators as a crutch, among other things.
Not ridiculous at all, because the majority of the things you can do on calculators are donkey work. Taking derivatives, taking straightforward integrals, solving simple differential equations, plotting directional fields, etc, is not high-level math. When the calculator can do proofs for you, then come back and talk to me.
High-level problems are things for which there are no algorithms, and solutions aren't a simple matter of calculation. The skills you need are logic, the ability to translate symbols into meaning, and a fair amount of intuition. Those are the things they should be testing you on.
It makes it much easier to be able to do these things without using a calculator, and I find myself almost never pulling out my TI-89 (great investment, hehe; I was young and stupid), but it makes more sense to see if students actually understand the kernel of the idea rather than memorizing tables. It's the same exact reasoning that says we shouldn't be memorizing log tables.
Those criteria are nothing new, they've been around for decades as part of the Miller Test to determine whether material is obscene.
In... 1973, in Miller v. California, I believe, the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity is not free speech, and established three guidelines (including those mentioned above, minus the "minors" part) to determine what exactly obscenity is. States can restrict obscene material as much as their hearts desire.
The major problem, recently, has come from the Internet. What exactly is the community?
Bike Doc's Biker Java site has now been hopelessly googledotted as millions of potential novelty motorcyle-shaped candle owners are redirected towards an innocent vendor of coffee.
What gives you the right, Google? What gives you the right?!
Nerd alert!
Ah, but you must be unaware of the weaponry he used to escape, at great personal injury, and the scrap scrounging bounty hunter Dengar who collected him half-dead from the deserts of Tatooine to eventually resuccitate him. Common mistake.
I have to disagree. I almost never touch a Graphing Calc now that I'm in upper level math classes (abstract algebra, etc), but it comes in handy very often.
Back in high school, my calc was a periodic table (with a database of relevant information about each element), did accurate numerical approximations that would've taken me an hour of time to do that accurately by hand, collected real-time data from probes in physics class, and confirmed answers that I had calculated by hand.
Furthermore, log and trigonometric functions mean you don't have to memorize a long list of trivial numbers. Symbolic manipulation means that you can validate identities that you're a little fuzzy on, among a mass of other things.
It's enough work catching up on the monumental leap forward mathematics has taken over the past several centuries (there are some interesting articles on the increasing generativity from older mathematicians being linked to the volume of knowledge to be learned). There's no reason to pretend we're back in the 16th century and spend four years on tables and algorithms that are better duplicated by calculator, unless we're in a course on numerical approximations.
Maple is $80 for a student licensed version, and nothing you're going to be doing as a student is going to make a difference whether you're in Mathematica or Maple. The only reason to prefer one over the other, especially as an undergrad, is that your school or place of employment uses it.
To throw my (ass) hat into the ring as well, I'm going to agree that this is a good decision on Comcast's part. My school's internet connect was horrible last year. Games were unplayable, websites would often take a long time loading, etc.
Downloads had been capped very low, especially on P2P software, but the situation wasn't getting any better. It turned out one person (someone I was friends with, actually) was downloading so many files at the same time over IRC that he managed to use 70% of the school's network resources all by himself. It wasn't that the rest of us didn't need or want to use some of that bandwidth, it was that he was hogging all of it to himself.
The school implemented a solution similar to Comcast's, and this year games are giving out good pings with low latency and everything is loading up pretty fast. Downloads are also a lot faster, since one or two people can't dominate all the resources. I'm more than willing to make the trade-off.
Why does it seem that every single proposed or actual law targeted at "cybercrime" puts absurd limitations on legitimate research while having absolutely no effect on the criminals?
Yea, but Newton won his copyright case the good ol' fashioned way. He got all his friends to denounce Leibniz by publishing articles that he wrote through their names, got himself appointed to the head of a mathematical commission, and then blacklisted him, forcing him to die as a pauper. He reputedly laughed at him after the funeral.
Terribly nice fellow, though, I heard he made these fabulous cookies...
But there are zero controls in MMORPGs and zero accountability. The site you linked to has facts and figures. They obtained those "facts" from a voluntary questionaire given over the Internet. I don't have to go into the problems with voluntary response polls, but the Internet also offers a perfect chance for complete anonymity. None of that information, or very little of it, is directly verifiable.
Now, you could go out on a limb and say "Well, people responding to a voluntary response poll on the Internet are more likely to tell the truth than to lie." Even if you've tested out a conjecture like that, you're making a conjecture based on a conjecture based on a conjecture all conducted through an anonymous channel.
While it might have merit, I think the merit lies mostly in graduate thesis papers and undergraduate research than in any serious endeavor with applicability to the real world.
Now, these studies probably do hold weight in the MMORPG community, but the reason they would be conducted would be to find better hooks and create new addicts for the sole purpose of attracting more money. It's not useful information unless you're SoE.
I have mixed reactions about analyzing MMORPGs as microcosms of the real world. First thing, half of the people playing them are below the age of 25 and a significant amount below 18, and almost all are drawn from middle to upper class backgrounds. The account names given with the credit card numbers might say otherwise (how often do kids under 13 check the "I'm a kid under 13" box?), but I'm not buying it.
Secondly, the MMORPG market is still one specific sector of gamers, despite their success. The pool of players behind the characters does not include a proportionate amount of elderly people, non-technophiles, and the less nerdy. Yes, there are a lot of examples to the contrary, but in general you're drawing your players from the nerdy youths of the populace.
So any speculations made about society based on MMORPGs can only really be used to accurately predict how a stereotypically (and in reality) more socially inept and fiscally sound portion of the population will react in a given situation.
Additionally, I would hate to see MMORPGs turned into work. They're already moving that way with account and character selling, plus the leveling treadmill already in place to hook in addicts. I can see this going in a bad direction.
"Billy, your sister made $500 selling her Dark Elf Cleric on EQ2 last week! Why aren't you working as hard as she is?"
"Aw, mom, I just want to go outside and play! Don't make me go on EverQuest again!"
I think carefully crafted quests will be much better than the treadmill. For example, in Everquest in Qeynos there wis a series of quests implemented a while ago dealing with badges that you get for performing tasks. You get a little manual of the laws, and then you get an investigator as a pet and travel around to various suspects. You retrieve a warrant, hand it to them, try and get them to sign a confession, etc. There's also action, in that some of them don't want to come willingly. You have to punch one guy out (not kill him). In one of them you have to solve a puzzle by manipulating tokens in the game world.
The reward is pretty snazzy, but even people that don't really want it end up doing it (despite its relative bugginess) because it is a fun quest. MMORPGs are rooted into the idea of quests being the same ol' hack-in-slash with a story behind it. EQ used to have horrible "dynamic events" where three DMs would spawn in powerful creatures in a newbie zone and corpse camp them. SWG, Sony's latest, has more types of missions but they all come from one of five or six molds. Eventually you stop reading the story because you realize that it's just a weak pretense to get you to do another deliver quest or destroy mission.
What MMORPGs need to do is wise up and break the quest formula. Have some themed DM or scripted events every year. One great example was the plaguebringer quest from EQ (the one that prompted the investigator quests). Another was one where zones became infested with evil creatures around Halloween time. Anything to make the world dynamic and interesting without resorting to randomly generated NPC or missions (it just makes everything phony and there's nothing of permanence).
I may be interpreting the original patent wrong (IANAIPL), but it seems like the intent of the patent was to establish a series of franchised nodes throughout the US through which consumers would put up items, buy items outright, or bid on auctioned items. Sort of like a little kiosk at a local store that you would go to visit (the patent used the example of a man visiting a card store and putting up one of his cards for sale, while the owner was using it as an online storefront), complete with a digital camera and a printer to put out a bar code that could be affixed to the product to track the order (I'm guessing for purposes of sales fraud). It doesn't even seem to be very similar to EBay's business model.
... at a conference full of transvestites. It was good for the five minutes of entertainment it provided me and my three brave Tech Crew companions faced with hosting a party for drag queens in scary outfits.
And after that, I went and played a REAL game! Yeah! Natural-Selection. Just promise me you want/. it:)
Slashdot Mirror
You know, the older I get, the more I realize that everyone should be allowed to do whatever makes them feel good, as long as it's not directly hurting other people.
As a high school student, I was in a sort of ambiguous popular-nerd category. Then there were the people who played D&D. Even the nerds picked on the role players who were unashamed to admit what they were doing. And as I look back, I realize that the people who were doing terrible, horrible things weren't the people that were doing what they wanted to do and having fun with it, they were the people who felt that they needed to shoulder some enormous weight of being popular and fitting every societal norm.
In my experience, people who do what they want, regardless of societal pressure, end up happier, less stressed out, and more productive because they don't spend half their time regretting what they do. If what they want to do is prance around and wield sticks, the more power to them.
I love the wooshing sound they don't make as they noiselessly float out of the airlock into space.
I love the thought of lawyers penetrating into space, exploding in a cloud of court orders and subpoenas as they're jettisoned out of the back of the shuttle.
My particular bone to pick is the way several professors handle their classes. The way I view it, I pay for a semester-long seminar in certain subjects. Since employers want to be able to evaluate how much I've learned, letter grades/GPAs are assigned. The professor must be able to validate how much I've learned, so he hands out projects, tests, and quizzes along the way as a gauge.
However, the way it works, I've been railroaded into attending several pointless classes by several misguided professors. The most obvious is Differential Equations, which is taught by an aging faculty member and is meant for engineering students (of which we have many). The professor goes at a ridiculously slow pace and doesn't muck around in any proofs, choosing to validate theorems by example. As a math major, I used to have a good time sitting in class and proving what he was content to demonstrate while he meandered through example after example.
Soon, I realized that he went at the rate of approximately one theorem per week, meaning that we spent a full week of classes just learning how to use one formula. It was like being in high school again. As the managing editor of the paper and a double major, I have better things to be doing with my time than watching this man repeat himself endlessly, so I started showing up intermittently to the class, still with a 100% on every single test and assignment (no attendence policy).
This man then went and spoke with a professor that I'm researching with, who told me that if I didn't begin showing up to my class, he was going to have to cut me off from the project. I was then informed by one of my classmates that he had given pop quizzes for the first three times, 3/4 of the way through the semester, on three of the days I had missed (coincidence?). This man is either misguidedly trying to get me to come to class or has some sort of ego problem with me doing well in his class and not showing up.
Let me get this straight: we're paying in the tens of thousands to be here, you're getting paid tens of thousands of dollars to teach this class, and you're dropping the grades of people who choose not to avail themselves of your class, not because the discussion in the class is valuable or integral to the materal, but because you don't like them not being here. It's just not right.
Well, I'm going to have to agree and disagree.
While it is a lot easier to read the current statement of theorems and their condensed, concise proofs, it's very educational to go back and read the original proofs.
I've just begun my foray into mathematical research, and a lot of times you'll get a result that makes absolute sense if you look at the thought process behind it and the steps leading up to it, but that all gets cut out in the end in favor of a more minimalist paper (and rightly so). However, that extra background information is what gives you the understanding that you need to be able to work in that field or on similar problems yourself, and answers the age-old question, "How the hell would anyone ever come up with this?"
I think a lot of the reason why people believe that they can't "do math" right now is because the great results as presented in textbooks seem to have popped out of nowhere, when in actuality they were mostly logical extensions of the work that was going on in the day.
As a college radio DJ and news director, I think radio still has a very valid place. It's a way to gain exposure to new music (again, talking independent stations), expose others to your kind of music, hear the thoughts of others on the air, and it has a human component that can't be simulated with a playlist.
Radio does not require changing a CD while driving, booting up your computer, or buying any expensive equipment. All you need is a $20 stereo.
I think what we will see is a movement towards more non-traditional radio distribution methods. For example, more satellite and Internet stations that can be tuned into easily with a cheap device. Then you'll be able to listen to the station of your choice on-demand without worrying about leaving the signal range or going behind a hill.
Yarr, don't get your cables tied up in knots, that gets messy.
None of which has anything to do with the capabilities of calculators themselves. I refuse to believe that there does not exist an algebra book on the market that doesn't rely heavily on the usage of calculators, and even so, a class can be taught without the use of a textbook (for some reason it seems hard to believe, but true), especially for algebra.
And, let's face it, a person taking algebra in college is most likely looking to fulfill their math requirement and get the hell out of Dodge. An engineering, chemistry, or physics major, let alone a math major, would find it impossible to complete the program credit-wise and time-wise if they had not even completed algebra by the time they entered college.
As an interesting side note, I wonder how long it will be before computing derivatives and integrals is viewed as purely a matter of calculation. If you look at it, back in the "good old days" it was necessary to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions either by table or by carrying out a lengthy numerical approximation by hand.
Perhaps any operation that can be carried out algorithmically will eventually be viewed as work for calculators rather than people.
Well, I have to agree with you as far as grammar school, middle school, and high school go. When you mentioned sitting for exams, I assumed you meant on college level boards, since the only standardized exams I sat for in high school were the utterly trivial SATs and High School Proficiency Tests.
However, I believe the blame has been pinned on the wrong party. The problem doesn't rest on the calculators' shoulders, but on the teachers'.
I can't remember ever using a calculator until ninth grade, because there was simply no point. I wouldn't even have been able to figure out the correct syntax to plug things into it, much less permitted to use it on a test that was about graphing, factoring, and such.
In high school, geometry was purely proofs. Any calculations were of the type that would allow you to prove something, and being able to verify that the identity that you used was correct by plugging it into a calculator isn't bad, it's realistic.
I was fortunate enough to have a teacher for pre-calc and calc that taught us the fundamentals of mathematical induction, complex trigonometry, generating the binomial series (and along with it, combinatorics), and much more (Calc, of course, hehe). Many of the things that would have been introduced in a college class I am instead seeing for the second time.
I think the problem is that these HS level teachers give in to the math phobia and the whiny students and don't challenge the class enough. I've seen relatively smart college-aged seniors fail a necessary math class for their major that some of my less intelligent friends conquered as one part of a course in high school.
Rather than lowering high school classes, where the grades don't mean much ultimately, to the lowest common denominator, every student in the class should be challenged. Does that mean that use of calculators should be limited? Maybe, on some exams. But that doesn't mean that calculators are degenerating the math skills of the youth of America, it means that teachers are allowing them to use calculators as a crutch, among other things.
Not ridiculous at all, because the majority of the things you can do on calculators are donkey work. Taking derivatives, taking straightforward integrals, solving simple differential equations, plotting directional fields, etc, is not high-level math. When the calculator can do proofs for you, then come back and talk to me.
High-level problems are things for which there are no algorithms, and solutions aren't a simple matter of calculation. The skills you need are logic, the ability to translate symbols into meaning, and a fair amount of intuition. Those are the things they should be testing you on.
It makes it much easier to be able to do these things without using a calculator, and I find myself almost never pulling out my TI-89 (great investment, hehe; I was young and stupid), but it makes more sense to see if students actually understand the kernel of the idea rather than memorizing tables. It's the same exact reasoning that says we shouldn't be memorizing log tables.
Those criteria are nothing new, they've been around for decades as part of the Miller Test to determine whether material is obscene.
In... 1973, in Miller v. California, I believe, the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity is not free speech, and established three guidelines (including those mentioned above, minus the "minors" part) to determine what exactly obscenity is. States can restrict obscene material as much as their hearts desire.
The major problem, recently, has come from the Internet. What exactly is the community?
I dunno, when I enter in "to be or not to be," including the quotes, I get a pageful of results, all including the phrase "to be or not to be." Hmm...
Bike Doc's Biker Java site has now been hopelessly googledotted as millions of potential novelty motorcyle-shaped candle owners are redirected towards an innocent vendor of coffee.
What gives you the right, Google? What gives you the right?!
Nerd alert! Ah, but you must be unaware of the weaponry he used to escape, at great personal injury, and the scrap scrounging bounty hunter Dengar who collected him half-dead from the deserts of Tatooine to eventually resuccitate him. Common mistake.
I have to disagree. I almost never touch a Graphing Calc now that I'm in upper level math classes (abstract algebra, etc), but it comes in handy very often.
Back in high school, my calc was a periodic table (with a database of relevant information about each element), did accurate numerical approximations that would've taken me an hour of time to do that accurately by hand, collected real-time data from probes in physics class, and confirmed answers that I had calculated by hand.
Furthermore, log and trigonometric functions mean you don't have to memorize a long list of trivial numbers. Symbolic manipulation means that you can validate identities that you're a little fuzzy on, among a mass of other things.
It's enough work catching up on the monumental leap forward mathematics has taken over the past several centuries (there are some interesting articles on the increasing generativity from older mathematicians being linked to the volume of knowledge to be learned). There's no reason to pretend we're back in the 16th century and spend four years on tables and algorithms that are better duplicated by calculator, unless we're in a course on numerical approximations.
Maple is $80 for a student licensed version, and nothing you're going to be doing as a student is going to make a difference whether you're in Mathematica or Maple. The only reason to prefer one over the other, especially as an undergrad, is that your school or place of employment uses it.
Ah man, it's just too easy.
To throw my (ass) hat into the ring as well, I'm going to agree that this is a good decision on Comcast's part. My school's internet connect was horrible last year. Games were unplayable, websites would often take a long time loading, etc.
Downloads had been capped very low, especially on P2P software, but the situation wasn't getting any better. It turned out one person (someone I was friends with, actually) was downloading so many files at the same time over IRC that he managed to use 70% of the school's network resources all by himself. It wasn't that the rest of us didn't need or want to use some of that bandwidth, it was that he was hogging all of it to himself.
The school implemented a solution similar to Comcast's, and this year games are giving out good pings with low latency and everything is loading up pretty fast. Downloads are also a lot faster, since one or two people can't dominate all the resources. I'm more than willing to make the trade-off.
Why does it seem that every single proposed or actual law targeted at "cybercrime" puts absurd limitations on legitimate research while having absolutely no effect on the criminals?
Yea, but Newton won his copyright case the good ol' fashioned way. He got all his friends to denounce Leibniz by publishing articles that he wrote through their names, got himself appointed to the head of a mathematical commission, and then blacklisted him, forcing him to die as a pauper. He reputedly laughed at him after the funeral. Terribly nice fellow, though, I heard he made these fabulous cookies...
But there are zero controls in MMORPGs and zero accountability. The site you linked to has facts and figures. They obtained those "facts" from a voluntary questionaire given over the Internet. I don't have to go into the problems with voluntary response polls, but the Internet also offers a perfect chance for complete anonymity. None of that information, or very little of it, is directly verifiable.
Now, you could go out on a limb and say "Well, people responding to a voluntary response poll on the Internet are more likely to tell the truth than to lie." Even if you've tested out a conjecture like that, you're making a conjecture based on a conjecture based on a conjecture all conducted through an anonymous channel.
While it might have merit, I think the merit lies mostly in graduate thesis papers and undergraduate research than in any serious endeavor with applicability to the real world.
Now, these studies probably do hold weight in the MMORPG community, but the reason they would be conducted would be to find better hooks and create new addicts for the sole purpose of attracting more money. It's not useful information unless you're SoE.
I have mixed reactions about analyzing MMORPGs as microcosms of the real world. First thing, half of the people playing them are below the age of 25 and a significant amount below 18, and almost all are drawn from middle to upper class backgrounds. The account names given with the credit card numbers might say otherwise (how often do kids under 13 check the "I'm a kid under 13" box?), but I'm not buying it. Secondly, the MMORPG market is still one specific sector of gamers, despite their success. The pool of players behind the characters does not include a proportionate amount of elderly people, non-technophiles, and the less nerdy. Yes, there are a lot of examples to the contrary, but in general you're drawing your players from the nerdy youths of the populace. So any speculations made about society based on MMORPGs can only really be used to accurately predict how a stereotypically (and in reality) more socially inept and fiscally sound portion of the population will react in a given situation. Additionally, I would hate to see MMORPGs turned into work. They're already moving that way with account and character selling, plus the leveling treadmill already in place to hook in addicts. I can see this going in a bad direction. "Billy, your sister made $500 selling her Dark Elf Cleric on EQ2 last week! Why aren't you working as hard as she is?" "Aw, mom, I just want to go outside and play! Don't make me go on EverQuest again!"
I think carefully crafted quests will be much better than the treadmill. For example, in Everquest in Qeynos there wis a series of quests implemented a while ago dealing with badges that you get for performing tasks. You get a little manual of the laws, and then you get an investigator as a pet and travel around to various suspects. You retrieve a warrant, hand it to them, try and get them to sign a confession, etc. There's also action, in that some of them don't want to come willingly. You have to punch one guy out (not kill him). In one of them you have to solve a puzzle by manipulating tokens in the game world.
The reward is pretty snazzy, but even people that don't really want it end up doing it (despite its relative bugginess) because it is a fun quest. MMORPGs are rooted into the idea of quests being the same ol' hack-in-slash with a story behind it. EQ used to have horrible "dynamic events" where three DMs would spawn in powerful creatures in a newbie zone and corpse camp them. SWG, Sony's latest, has more types of missions but they all come from one of five or six molds. Eventually you stop reading the story because you realize that it's just a weak pretense to get you to do another deliver quest or destroy mission.
What MMORPGs need to do is wise up and break the quest formula. Have some themed DM or scripted events every year. One great example was the plaguebringer quest from EQ (the one that prompted the investigator quests). Another was one where zones became infested with evil creatures around Halloween time. Anything to make the world dynamic and interesting without resorting to randomly generated NPC or missions (it just makes everything phony and there's nothing of permanence).
I may be interpreting the original patent wrong (IANAIPL), but it seems like the intent of the patent was to establish a series of franchised nodes throughout the US through which consumers would put up items, buy items outright, or bid on auctioned items. Sort of like a little kiosk at a local store that you would go to visit (the patent used the example of a man visiting a card store and putting up one of his cards for sale, while the owner was using it as an online storefront), complete with a digital camera and a printer to put out a bar code that could be affixed to the product to track the order (I'm guessing for purposes of sales fraud). It doesn't even seem to be very similar to EBay's business model.
:)
Then again, I could be misinterpreting it
... at a conference full of transvestites. It was good for the five minutes of entertainment it provided me and my three brave Tech Crew companions faced with hosting a party for drag queens in scary outfits.
/. it :)
And after that, I went and played a REAL game! Yeah! Natural-Selection. Just promise me you want