Appealing to emotions - which not all ads do, anyway, and they certainly don't do it "by definition" - is not the same thing as being deceptive or misleading. If a child is standing in the road, I may yell at him "get the hell out of there! You'll get killed!" I really am appealing to his emotions (through my own), but I'm not misleading. The truth content is orthogonal to the affective content.
You can't leave it to the market. Not a popular view, I know, but...
I think there needs to be something like an NEA grant to create original games. The market will never provide the incentive to move things forward, not when the risk/reward ratio is so questionable.
The thing is, it is almost impossible to make the current batch of mainstream market gamers into aesthetically sophisticated consumers. After having believed otherwise, I now believe it will be easier to turn aesthetically sophisticated people into gamers.
Actually, I think that there are big differences between western fantasy games and Japanese fantasy games (with non-Japanese Asian fantasy games coming in somewhere between them.) Japanese games seem more truly original, use pastiche in their references of real-world cultures much more colorfully, have more distinctive narratives. Their limits are part of their features, too: the characters are too richly described which allows virtually no customization, and you have to re-learn the basic mechanics with each title.
I think that the main problem is that the western genre fans have completely naturalized the conventions of that genre. A lot of them still think that the Tolkeinesque fantasy schtick is somehow classical, when it is very much built up from 19th century fantastic literature.
To be more exact, Nietzsche repudiated racialists and hyper-nationalists. There were not Nazis as such until well after his death. At the same time, his writing was at times ambiguous: selective reading can turn him into a number of things. It could be argued that he still relied on ethno-characterological profiles that were compatible with Nazism.
Marx wrote very little about what might follow capitalism. For him, the political control of the means of production by the proletariat was the first and last condition. There was very little to deviate from: Lenin believed he was, really, creating a communist society: he may have been authoritarian, anti-democratic, arrogant and violent, but he wasn't cynical. (Stalin, on the other hand, was all that and cynical.)
It is always easier to praise the book-writers than the people who do the dirty work of history. We praise Rousseau and Voltaire and vilify Robespierre; adore Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and repudiate the fascists (Adolph H. was fonder of the latter than the former, surprisingly.) We exalt Locke and Hobbes as thinkers yet excoriate British colonialism (read Edmund Burke to understand the relationship between the European enlightenment thinkers and Imperialism, if you must.) Heck, we like Jesus and don't like the Crusades. The list goes on.
There's a circularity to arguing that deriving pleasure from an altruistic act makes it non-altruistic. If one derives pleasure - even if it is the pleasure of a more comfortable self-image, from the knowledge that one simply has helped another, then it is an altruistic pleasure. Even simply knowing that one's own altruism creates the possibility of another's altruism which may someday benefit you may generate a kind of pleasure. What is important is that the pleasure not derive from another direct source - an expected quid pro quo, for example.
The demand that an action is altruistic only if it benefits another while the actor receive absolutely no benefit whatsoever is an absurd demand. What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat; I expend time and energy to save the life of someone to whom I have no obligation), nor an expected reciprocity. These conditions are adequate for a fully functional conception of altruism. "Enlightened selfishness" introduces the expectation of reciprocity.
Wikipedia is not entirely secondary sources, when the topic is very contemporary or recent. In some cases (e.g., videogames, comics and other popular culture topics) it is the only aggregation of information that is available, when the primary source is ephemeral (like a web or popular magazine interview.)
I teach classes that involve a great deal of popular culture material, and I encourage students to cite Wikipedia when writing on those topic after ascertaining the original source is no longer available, checking the history of the post, and including reasonable caveats in their own texts.
I hate cliches that have been drained of meaning, and "pot, kettle, black" is among the worst. (It's also bad habit of geek thinking, along with the gratuitous use of the word "basically.")
In a discussion about some topic or other, it's even more annoying, because the original expression, "the pot calling the kettle black," suggests a situation where the target of the claim is being described as a kind of hypocrite, of characterizing someone else of a flaw they themselves possess. But that doesn't mean the original accusation is false: the pot may be calling the kettle 'black,' but that doesn't make the kettle any less black. (Viz: "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.")
I think the GPs post was a rather serious, unhysterical summary of the elements of the current regime that could well be described as proto-fascist. No accusations of Nazism, which includes an explicitly racial conception of the nation, were bandied about.
Mussolini's Italy could only be called benign in comparison with Germany. It was feckless, which makes it seem benign, but it still was militaristic and autocratic, engaging in military adventures in Africa and south-eastern Europe, and jailing and suppressing many of its own citizens.
The redeeming feature in the current US case is the sense of "waking up" I get from some people in the middle of the road.
I've seen more overweight in poor flatlands in Mexico and Peru, definitely. I don't know Brazil's flatlands quite as well (I just know Sao Paulo and Rio), but Peru and Mexico also have hilly "favela"-type informal cities.
As far as "hills" go - this is simply an impression, but hills account for differences in body shape that transcend even socioeconomic status. We associate obesity with the lower classes, but even in those societies where the hills are occupied by the poor (as in the favelas in Brazil and in other Latin American regions) those hill-dwellers seem to be in better shape.
Well, I wouldn't call it "unfair." I'd call it "poor product design" or "flawed market analysis." Us not being able to afford Playstation 3s hurts them much more than it hurts us.
The Dalai Lama himself has stated that life in pre-PRC Tibet was life in a rather oppressive, cruel feudal state; he also does not seek the independence of Tibet or his own re-establishment as a ruler, but simply the relaxation of restrictions on the practice of Buddhism and the promotion of Tibetan culture. He has expressed willingness to work with the Beijing government. He even views Marxism as compatible with Buddhism!
These are not views that the dreadlocked Free Tibet crowd likes to know about.
But genes don't have brains. People do. I understand Dawkins' metaphor, that humanity, and all species, are epiphenomena of the mechanist processes of evolution. I think he overstates his case. You may as well discuss the "selfish quark."
The whole claim is built on a suspect modularist model, by which one finds a "center" for everything. High-level behaviors may correspond with certain activations in certain regions in neuro-typical people, but that's by no means the same thing as finding an "x" center, either. It could be that what is being activated is responsible for something far simpler - such as facial recognition, or even the production of affect - but that the altruistic behavior per se is considerably more distributed. The remarkable plasticity of brain function suggests that this search for "x" centers is fraught with problems.
FPS are hardly the stem and core of videogame history. The original poster was correct: home systems came directly from the arcade, and were in widespread use while most people still did not have PCs. The Atari VCS (later called the 2600) was ubiquitous while home PCs (Altairs, Commodores, Apples, Tandys, etc) were still a rarity - and before the age of MS-DOS, the PC market was fractured. Not until the early/mid-90s did PC gaming really pick up, when one could actually upgrade the graphics card for a moderate price and the dominance of MS created a sort-of kind-of "stable" target for development.
In Japan, the Famicom and other consoles actually replaced the PC for some functions, as well.
The arcades are more important to the history of videogames than the PC is, and the genres which came from the arcades are the ones that are more central to the console. As keyboards become more common on consoles and HD televisions become more widespread, I think we'll see more of those genres which rely on them also expand there. In any case, the PCs role in videogame history is not completely insignificant, but it is still peripheral.
I think he's getting it from having lost a girlfriend to a beret-wearing, cappuccino-sipping, book-reading, liberal grad-student. At least, that's the characterization I was getting from his post.
No, actually, he does. And if you put Japan into the equation, the role of the PC diminishes even more.
In a couple of genres - RTS, simulation, FPS - the PC is historically more important, although again the Japanese game industry has a large history of simulation on consoles. Halo is a 3rd person shooter, a genre which essentially skipped the PC. RTS and especially FPS have become somewhat moribund genres, as well.
What the PC drove, until recently, has been the quality of graphics. We're getting to an epoch of diminishing returns with that.
I've addressed this above. Sometimes there are political truths that really are findings of fact are that cut and dry: whether a substance is carcinogenic, whether slavery deprives a human of their civil rights, whether a budget will leave you in debt, whether a certain tin-pot dictator is actually in possession of weapons of mass destruction, etc. There are many more that aren't like that, of course. But too often half-measures are worse than none. And my other critique of moderation is that it limits thinking to a range created by two arbitrary poles, when better political thinking may lie outside them.
Well, most political discourse isn't even about findings of fact (although when empirical claims run up against seated interests - global warming, nicotine as a carcinogen - sometimes it is.) For the most part, it is about competing values and visions of human nature, usually rooted in different stakes and situations. I don't think political discourse can even be reduced to rationality: there are affective components which determine positions as well.
But my critique of "moderation" is the assumption that there is always a spectrum of extreme values with a "best" value in the middle. For my part, despite the bloodshed involved, I'm rather glad that abolitionists didn't accept the "moderate" position regarding slavery. Newt Gingrich in 1994 credited the liberal wing of the democratic party with recognizing the need for and advocating the civil rights movement. When the Iraq invasion fails, it really will be because of moderates, who were neither willing to introduce a draft that would have created the level of force required to truly secure that country (under an iron heel), nor have the sense to not invade in the first place. There are many situations where a poor, half-hearted intervention is worse than none at all. A recent mass transit project in the north of the San Francisco Bay Area was fortunately voted down, because it would have actually been worse than nothing: both the advocates of mass transit (myself included) and its foes agreed that it was "designed to fail", but the middle thought it was a good "compromise" - though it would only carry a handful of people at a time, and only along a fraction of the commute corridor. It was, as per my example, a unicycle: inferior both to walking and bicycling.
As someone on the left, I have to agree that this is exactly the problem with this proposal: it enshrines the very narrow range of difference between the two parties as if it were the entire spectrum of political thought. Which produces a very harmless notion of what the center is, as well.
My attitudes toward moderates: if I say 2 + 2 = 4, and you say it's 6, does the truth "lie in the middle?"
Or, more pointedly, if you tell a pedestrian that they might go farther and faster on a bicycle, are they right to say, "well, perhaps, but in the interest of moderation, I'll take a safe, gradual approach - and ride a unicycle"?
See, that's the problem - you can't compete with those who work their people to the bone. It's called the "race to the bottom." It relies on the existence of borders and pure distance, which prevents workers from relocating to places where labor conditions are better - as well as the fact that as long as consumers don't see the working conditions, they will shop driven by the pocket book (and resist any tariffs that raise the prices of goods coming from places with inadequate labor laws.)
The growth of the Chinese manufacturing sector is, indeed, a good thing. But your justification of globalization falls on the fact that, absent some tariff structure, there will always be a competitive disadvantage to pay a decent wage as long as there's one country, somewhere, where they don't. Your "50 years" claim is really as much of an act of quasi-religious faith as the old Communist promises of a worker's paradise and the withering away of the state.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it's because public labs, rather than Big Pharma, is backing the research.
Appealing to emotions - which not all ads do, anyway, and they certainly don't do it "by definition" - is not the same thing as being deceptive or misleading. If a child is standing in the road, I may yell at him "get the hell out of there! You'll get killed!" I really am appealing to his emotions (through my own), but I'm not misleading. The truth content is orthogonal to the affective content.
You can't leave it to the market. Not a popular view, I know, but...
I think there needs to be something like an NEA grant to create original games. The market will never provide the incentive to move things forward, not when the risk/reward ratio is so questionable.
The thing is, it is almost impossible to make the current batch of mainstream market gamers into aesthetically sophisticated consumers. After having believed otherwise, I now believe it will be easier to turn aesthetically sophisticated people into gamers.
Actually, I think that there are big differences between western fantasy games and Japanese fantasy games (with non-Japanese Asian fantasy games coming in somewhere between them.) Japanese games seem more truly original, use pastiche in their references of real-world cultures much more colorfully, have more distinctive narratives. Their limits are part of their features, too: the characters are too richly described which allows virtually no customization, and you have to re-learn the basic mechanics with each title.
I think that the main problem is that the western genre fans have completely naturalized the conventions of that genre. A lot of them still think that the Tolkeinesque fantasy schtick is somehow classical, when it is very much built up from 19th century fantastic literature.
To be more exact, Nietzsche repudiated racialists and hyper-nationalists. There were not Nazis as such until well after his death. At the same time, his writing was at times ambiguous: selective reading can turn him into a number of things. It could be argued that he still relied on ethno-characterological profiles that were compatible with Nazism.
Marx wrote very little about what might follow capitalism. For him, the political control of the means of production by the proletariat was the first and last condition. There was very little to deviate from: Lenin believed he was, really, creating a communist society: he may have been authoritarian, anti-democratic, arrogant and violent, but he wasn't cynical. (Stalin, on the other hand, was all that and cynical.)
It is always easier to praise the book-writers than the people who do the dirty work of history. We praise Rousseau and Voltaire and vilify Robespierre; adore Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and repudiate the fascists (Adolph H. was fonder of the latter than the former, surprisingly.) We exalt Locke and Hobbes as thinkers yet excoriate British colonialism (read Edmund Burke to understand the relationship between the European enlightenment thinkers and Imperialism, if you must.) Heck, we like Jesus and don't like the Crusades. The list goes on.
There's a circularity to arguing that deriving pleasure from an altruistic act makes it non-altruistic. If one derives pleasure - even if it is the pleasure of a more comfortable self-image, from the knowledge that one simply has helped another, then it is an altruistic pleasure. Even simply knowing that one's own altruism creates the possibility of another's altruism which may someday benefit you may generate a kind of pleasure. What is important is that the pleasure not derive from another direct source - an expected quid pro quo, for example.
The demand that an action is altruistic only if it benefits another while the actor receive absolutely no benefit whatsoever is an absurd demand. What is important is that there is no expectation of the benefit created directly by the action for the actor (e.g., I pay for a meal for another that I do not eat; I expend time and energy to save the life of someone to whom I have no obligation), nor an expected reciprocity. These conditions are adequate for a fully functional conception of altruism. "Enlightened selfishness" introduces the expectation of reciprocity.
Wikipedia is not entirely secondary sources, when the topic is very contemporary or recent. In some cases (e.g., videogames, comics and other popular culture topics) it is the only aggregation of information that is available, when the primary source is ephemeral (like a web or popular magazine interview.)
I teach classes that involve a great deal of popular culture material, and I encourage students to cite Wikipedia when writing on those topic after ascertaining the original source is no longer available, checking the history of the post, and including reasonable caveats in their own texts.
Then you don't understand the study. It isn't about smart people.
I hate cliches that have been drained of meaning, and "pot, kettle, black" is among the worst. (It's also bad habit of geek thinking, along with the gratuitous use of the word "basically.")
In a discussion about some topic or other, it's even more annoying, because the original expression, "the pot calling the kettle black," suggests a situation where the target of the claim is being described as a kind of hypocrite, of characterizing someone else of a flaw they themselves possess. But that doesn't mean the original accusation is false: the pot may be calling the kettle 'black,' but that doesn't make the kettle any less black. (Viz: "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.")
I think the GPs post was a rather serious, unhysterical summary of the elements of the current regime that could well be described as proto-fascist. No accusations of Nazism, which includes an explicitly racial conception of the nation, were bandied about.
Mussolini's Italy could only be called benign in comparison with Germany. It was feckless, which makes it seem benign, but it still was militaristic and autocratic, engaging in military adventures in Africa and south-eastern Europe, and jailing and suppressing many of its own citizens.
The redeeming feature in the current US case is the sense of "waking up" I get from some people in the middle of the road.
I've seen more overweight in poor flatlands in Mexico and Peru, definitely. I don't know Brazil's flatlands quite as well (I just know Sao Paulo and Rio), but Peru and Mexico also have hilly "favela"-type informal cities.
As far as "hills" go - this is simply an impression, but hills account for differences in body shape that transcend even socioeconomic status. We associate obesity with the lower classes, but even in those societies where the hills are occupied by the poor (as in the favelas in Brazil and in other Latin American regions) those hill-dwellers seem to be in better shape.
Well, I wouldn't call it "unfair." I'd call it "poor product design" or "flawed market analysis." Us not being able to afford Playstation 3s hurts them much more than it hurts us.
The Dalai Lama himself has stated that life in pre-PRC Tibet was life in a rather oppressive, cruel feudal state; he also does not seek the independence of Tibet or his own re-establishment as a ruler, but simply the relaxation of restrictions on the practice of Buddhism and the promotion of Tibetan culture. He has expressed willingness to work with the Beijing government. He even views Marxism as compatible with Buddhism!
These are not views that the dreadlocked Free Tibet crowd likes to know about.
But genes don't have brains. People do. I understand Dawkins' metaphor, that humanity, and all species, are epiphenomena of the mechanist processes of evolution. I think he overstates his case. You may as well discuss the "selfish quark."
The whole claim is built on a suspect modularist model, by which one finds a "center" for everything. High-level behaviors may correspond with certain activations in certain regions in neuro-typical people, but that's by no means the same thing as finding an "x" center, either. It could be that what is being activated is responsible for something far simpler - such as facial recognition, or even the production of affect - but that the altruistic behavior per se is considerably more distributed. The remarkable plasticity of brain function suggests that this search for "x" centers is fraught with problems.
I find this observation fatuous. What "self" are we talking about, then?
It's adaptive, yes. Just about every aspect of any organism that's made it this far is adaptive. That's not the same thing as "selfish."
FPS are hardly the stem and core of videogame history. The original poster was correct: home systems came directly from the arcade, and were in widespread use while most people still did not have PCs. The Atari VCS (later called the 2600) was ubiquitous while home PCs (Altairs, Commodores, Apples, Tandys, etc) were still a rarity - and before the age of MS-DOS, the PC market was fractured. Not until the early/mid-90s did PC gaming really pick up, when one could actually upgrade the graphics card for a moderate price and the dominance of MS created a sort-of kind-of "stable" target for development.
In Japan, the Famicom and other consoles actually replaced the PC for some functions, as well.
The arcades are more important to the history of videogames than the PC is, and the genres which came from the arcades are the ones that are more central to the console. As keyboards become more common on consoles and HD televisions become more widespread, I think we'll see more of those genres which rely on them also expand there. In any case, the PCs role in videogame history is not completely insignificant, but it is still peripheral.
Is that substantial enough a reply to you?
I think he's getting it from having lost a girlfriend to a beret-wearing, cappuccino-sipping, book-reading, liberal grad-student. At least, that's the characterization I was getting from his post.
No, actually, he does. And if you put Japan into the equation, the role of the PC diminishes even more.
In a couple of genres - RTS, simulation, FPS - the PC is historically more important, although again the Japanese game industry has a large history of simulation on consoles. Halo is a 3rd person shooter, a genre which essentially skipped the PC. RTS and especially FPS have become somewhat moribund genres, as well.
What the PC drove, until recently, has been the quality of graphics. We're getting to an epoch of diminishing returns with that.
I've addressed this above. Sometimes there are political truths that really are findings of fact are that cut and dry: whether a substance is carcinogenic, whether slavery deprives a human of their civil rights, whether a budget will leave you in debt, whether a certain tin-pot dictator is actually in possession of weapons of mass destruction, etc. There are many more that aren't like that, of course. But too often half-measures are worse than none. And my other critique of moderation is that it limits thinking to a range created by two arbitrary poles, when better political thinking may lie outside them.
Well, most political discourse isn't even about findings of fact (although when empirical claims run up against seated interests - global warming, nicotine as a carcinogen - sometimes it is.) For the most part, it is about competing values and visions of human nature, usually rooted in different stakes and situations. I don't think political discourse can even be reduced to rationality: there are affective components which determine positions as well.
But my critique of "moderation" is the assumption that there is always a spectrum of extreme values with a "best" value in the middle. For my part, despite the bloodshed involved, I'm rather glad that abolitionists didn't accept the "moderate" position regarding slavery. Newt Gingrich in 1994 credited the liberal wing of the democratic party with recognizing the need for and advocating the civil rights movement. When the Iraq invasion fails, it really will be because of moderates, who were neither willing to introduce a draft that would have created the level of force required to truly secure that country (under an iron heel), nor have the sense to not invade in the first place. There are many situations where a poor, half-hearted intervention is worse than none at all. A recent mass transit project in the north of the San Francisco Bay Area was fortunately voted down, because it would have actually been worse than nothing: both the advocates of mass transit (myself included) and its foes agreed that it was "designed to fail", but the middle thought it was a good "compromise" - though it would only carry a handful of people at a time, and only along a fraction of the commute corridor. It was, as per my example, a unicycle: inferior both to walking and bicycling.
As someone on the left, I have to agree that this is exactly the problem with this proposal: it enshrines the very narrow range of difference between the two parties as if it were the entire spectrum of political thought. Which produces a very harmless notion of what the center is, as well.
My attitudes toward moderates: if I say 2 + 2 = 4, and you say it's 6, does the truth "lie in the middle?"
Or, more pointedly, if you tell a pedestrian that they might go farther and faster on a bicycle, are they right to say, "well, perhaps, but in the interest of moderation, I'll take a safe, gradual approach - and ride a unicycle"?
See, that's the problem - you can't compete with those who work their people to the bone. It's called the "race to the bottom." It relies on the existence of borders and pure distance, which prevents workers from relocating to places where labor conditions are better - as well as the fact that as long as consumers don't see the working conditions, they will shop driven by the pocket book (and resist any tariffs that raise the prices of goods coming from places with inadequate labor laws.)
The growth of the Chinese manufacturing sector is, indeed, a good thing. But your justification of globalization falls on the fact that, absent some tariff structure, there will always be a competitive disadvantage to pay a decent wage as long as there's one country, somewhere, where they don't. Your "50 years" claim is really as much of an act of quasi-religious faith as the old Communist promises of a worker's paradise and the withering away of the state.