I know the exceptions. I've lived in Texas and North Carolina, sometimes in places like Austin, sometimes in places that were more conservative.
Trust me, it's an issue. Coastal metropoli are frankly more attractive to a lot of this demographic.
And I'm sorry - there are very good reasons to associate social conservatism with the South (and Midwest and Mountain areas). I know a lot of people who've moved to the South for career reasons - and they too note the difference. Sometimes it's even a matter of legal differences - can an openly gay person teach elementray school there? Enjoy domestic partner benefits? Can an atheist get elected to public office?
They're trying to draw game development. Not only are game programmers more artistically/creatively inclined than other programmers, but much of the talent you need to make a game is art (in the more traditional sense) itself: musicians, 3d artists, voice actors, writers.
For the most part, people not interested in red state culture. Many are gay, or non-Christian, or lefty, or some combination of the above.
Hey, you're still going to see it, right? Then why should Lucas care? He's still getting your dollars - and Wes Anderson and/or a dozen other deserving film makers aren't.
Seems like people are getting exactly what they deserve.
Oh, cry me a river. So you wait 2 months. If you are so immature that this is traumatic for you, then you are definitely too immature to be playing an M rated game.
Do I give media-effects theory much truck? No, I don't. Do I have a problem with limiting minors' access to some media without explicit guardian approval? Not a lick.
I'm a non-Christian who backs the rhetoric, up to a point: staying in a destructive relationship doesn't help anyone, but the data shows rather strongly that children of single parents of the opposite gender are far more likely to run into difficulties: a single mother raising a boy, or a single father raising a girl, is a situation which predicts for high-risk and destructive behavior more than income, education level, or even an "unhappy" marriage.
Data in general suggests that, even barring that, children are better off in a non-abusive 2-parent household (even if there's an absence of inter-parental affection) than in a single parent household.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when it comes to the benefits of a two-parent household, I think the Christians and the social conservatives may be right on this one.
I have no qualms with the adaptations made for the LOTR: I think Jackson knew what he was doing, and that fidelty to JRRT would not have made a good film.
That said, Hollywood does rip the heart out off good stories in order to fit within formulae all the time. I'm getting a good look at this first-hand, as I see my friend's first screenplay change under pressure from the studio he's working with; much that was interesting, challenging, and thought-provoking being replaced with formulaic tropes and reassuringly familiar elements.
The thing is, the public - the market - doesn't really want work that is challenging or thought-provoking. It wants to be told that its prejudices and beliefs and values are good and true, that the enemies are bad, that you are on the side of virtue, that history is made by A Few Good Folks Just Like You, and that the world is pretty much like you think it is, only fast-paced and exciting.
And the screenwriter friend in this case half recognizes that his original vision is being castrated, while at the same time being swept away in the excitement of actually breaking into Hollywood. The mainstream movie industry is often filled with clever people who spend much of their time trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance of creating entertainment for people who, frankly, are not as smart or sophisticated as they are. That's part of the SoCal ethic, really: act dumb, even if you're smart. It's an adaptation that comes of serving a market of people that you, secretly, have little but contempt for.
No, he does not see kids slacking off and whining.
Have you ever been to Japan? In a Japanese household? I suspect you haven't. You'll be shocked, but children do not behave identically around the world. In my experience, as early as the age 4, there are stark differences in the way that children from different cultures behave. The hard-working, not-complaining Japanese child is typical, not some sort of paragon set out as an example to emulate.
That's not the "moral," that's the background of Japanese culture from which it's created. It may be shocking to you, but working hard and not complaining are actual values (for both genders) that are very much embodied in Japanese child-rearing.
From the Japanese perspective, the moral of American media is "slack off and whine a lot."
There's something interesting in the geekish horror about physical violence and their Darwinian attitude towards non-physical acts of aggression. When it comes to any kind of victimization that uses mental or social methods, it's the fault of the victim for being unprepared, undefended, uninformed - maybe it's a sort of vicarious revenge fantasy, a larcenous "Revenge of the Nerds" or something. But on the physical level, oh no - nothing could be more horrible than being punched or hurt than someone bigger than you.
And frankly, the fear of physical violence is exaggaerated. Yes, injury and death are understandably horrifying, but to here some geeks speak, losing $10,000 is preferable to getting a broken nose. Is it body-horror? The fantasy of being pure mind? People, bones mend and cuts heal, but some of the damage done to spirit (and the loss of time that theft from someone who has worked for it implies) don't always heal so well.
John Williams is not that great a composer by any means.
It doesn't preclude you from being a great composer, but it's not sufficient to make you one - and some of the people on my list made music for films. But if your scope of contemporary orchestral music is limited to videogame and movie soundtracks, you're probably not well qualified to produce an informed judgement on just who a great contemporary composer is.
I like Final Fantasy music and Nobuo Uematsu as much as anyone, but it is program music, like film soundtracks - fun, but "one of the best composers of the present time?" I'm afraid that suggests you know a lot about videogames, and not so much about contemporary composition.
Terry Riley, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Arvo Part, John Zorn, John Taverner, Giya Kancheli, Luciano Berio, Koji Asano, Gavin Bryers, Elliot Carter, Yoshio Ojima, Don Van Vliet, Gyorgy Ligeti, Henryky Gorecki - any one of these and others probably deserves that title more.
An Uematsu concert does, in fact, bring a lot of people who otherwise do not see classical musical live, and it's apparent when you see how people did, in fact, dress in the Los Angelese concert.
It's no accident that it's the Chicago Pops Orchestra performing here - this is program music. Which is fine - I would probably go if I was in the area, and I have Final Fantasy soundtracks myself. But it's hyperbole to call him on of the best composers of the present time. It's well crafted fun, but more sentimental than serious.
No more than you should sue someone who kills you in a PVP game for murder. However, if the *player* in a PVP game says, "I'm going to kill YOU, Mister Player who lives at," then I think you could take legal remedy.
Fantasy is often about racial conflict - it may be a way we can talk about and address racial conflict in a safer way, through analogy (I think Tolkein's racial essentialism is a big problem, for example.) It's totally appropriate to "play that out," as long as the translation is distant enough... if an elf referred to an orc using language associated with white racism against black people, I'd think a line had been crossed. The Drakthrone case is perfectly acceptable, and rather interesting.
I don't buy it. People who care about music and films end up learning which critics they trust, who share the same tastes as them, and listen accordingly. Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert all have different audiences, and depending on who you are and what your tastes are, you'll listen to one more than another.
That's something that videogame criticism need: trusted reviewers whose tastes you feel mirror your own enough that you'll listen to what they say. Obviously, if you're into FPS, you aren't going to care about the review written by someone who has only played some HL years ago but really likes RTS and RPGs.
Also, if I really like a game's first 4 hours, I think I've gotten my money's worse. If it goes straight to hell after that, well, that's a shame. I think it's highly unlikely that something can drop off that precipitously, though. Again, being able to trust specific reviewers deals with that issue.
No, it's experiential reporting that addresses gameplay in its full context, including cultural, social, and technical (from a gameplay mechanics sense.) It may be in a blog or in PC GAMER, which, surprise surpise, one of the pieces cited actually was. Or it may be on Insertcredit.com or anywhere else.
It's partially derived from Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism," but it seems to be both more coherent and more relevant to the subject being addressed.
The article "Bow Nigger," however, was partially about racism. So describing the race of the people involved is completely appropriate.
"African-American" is a quirky term, of course, because it's sort of a fusion-word for a some dark-skinned people of African descent who happen to be citizens of a certain country, and the culture of those individuals whose ancestors were brought into this country by slavery. It's both an ethnicity partially defined by race and a race-category constrained by nationality.
As far as complaining about "needing to classify people," well, those classifications have occurred for hundreds of years, and entire communities and cultures were constructed around those classifications. To think that you can blank out all that history by wishful thinking is, well, wishful thinking. Of course, race is a fiction: there's more genetic variation within so-called "races" than between them. But nationality is also a fiction of sorts "made true" by history, by armies and governments.
Perhaps. But that may be more information than most reviews give. Instead of a bland piece about the game as a piece of software, you get something about the game experience in total here: what it actually feels like to play it (for this person, at this time.) That's far more information than I usually get.
And the fact that, at the end, he won over that race-baiting creep, made it very satisfying.
Actually, I think it's quite the opposite. Creationism is left alone in remote areas because it doesn't threaten the education of the technological and economic elite on the coasts. If Mississippi and Alabama local school boards want to hamstring their own scientific education, what does that matter to people in Chicago, New York, Silicon Valley, etc.? But if the battleground were federal, you could bet that the pharmaceutical, health care, and other institutions would do their damnedest to keep the curriculum in science.
It would make push come to shove, and I think that would be a good thing. As it is, people in backwards areas are being left behind - with the kind of society of widespread ignorance we see now.
In some cases, yes, it does. The most successful educational systems in the world seem to be "one size fits all." It's not like Finland doesn't also have very urban and very rural areas.
There's a couple big difference: the US has a documented poor K-12 system, compared to other countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan top the list right now.)
The US higher education system - particularly at the graduate level - may be the best in the world, or close to it.
And to get a doctorate, you usually have to do some teaching. I'm working on a PhD now, and will have taught sections for at least 4 quarters before I get it.
Any teacher worth keeping can make a lot more doing just about anything else. I'm for extensive reform of the US K-12 educational system - including a nationalized curriculum and a professionalized teacher's corp (along the French model, in which teaching is part of a heirarchical civil service), and the end to local school boards (populated by political failures with no background in education whatsoever.)
I would accompany all these changes with a dramatic increase in teacher's salaries and benefits. Then competition for jobs would improve performance. Teachers' jobs are secure because there is virtually no competition for them - school districts will take almost anyone they can get.
But it's the school boards and administrations that are the biggest problem. They politicize - in the worst way, the local way - education in a very destructive way. Administration of schools should be run by a very professionalized administration with a strong background in educational theory and practice, not a group of yahoos.
Small spelling errors and relatively minor errors in punctuation do not bother me. They are, as often as not, "brain-farts": someone who knows better, and is otherwise coherent, mis-thinking or mis-typing a couple words. Even most professional writers make those sorts of mistakes - that's why they have editors.
That's not the issue at hand. We're talking about writing that is so bad, it's incoherent. It's about a complete disinterest in standard grammar and sentence structure, much less punctuation. About people who must barely read, because they don't seem to understand the practice of written communication.
I'm with the cynics regarding the value of this memo.
In the meantime, take a look at the kinds of contracts that the upper echelons at Electronic Arts enjoy - including $4 million forgiveable loans, and bonuses to compensate spouses that have to relocate and change jobs. It doesn't look like they are being asked to work extra for nothing, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
Mathematical, logical and computational proofs are positive.
I know the exceptions. I've lived in Texas and North Carolina, sometimes in places like Austin, sometimes in places that were more conservative.
Trust me, it's an issue. Coastal metropoli are frankly more attractive to a lot of this demographic.
And I'm sorry - there are very good reasons to associate social conservatism with the South (and Midwest and Mountain areas). I know a lot of people who've moved to the South for career reasons - and they too note the difference. Sometimes it's even a matter of legal differences - can an openly gay person teach elementray school there? Enjoy domestic partner benefits? Can an atheist get elected to public office?
They're trying to draw game development. Not only are game programmers more artistically/creatively inclined than other programmers, but much of the talent you need to make a game is art (in the more traditional sense) itself: musicians, 3d artists, voice actors, writers.
For the most part, people not interested in red state culture. Many are gay, or non-Christian, or lefty, or some combination of the above.
Hey, you're still going to see it, right? Then why should Lucas care? He's still getting your dollars - and Wes Anderson and/or a dozen other deserving film makers aren't.
Seems like people are getting exactly what they deserve.
Oh, cry me a river. So you wait 2 months. If you are so immature that this is traumatic for you, then you are definitely too immature to be playing an M rated game.
Do I give media-effects theory much truck? No, I don't. Do I have a problem with limiting minors' access to some media without explicit guardian approval? Not a lick.
I'm a non-Christian who backs the rhetoric, up to a point: staying in a destructive relationship doesn't help anyone, but the data shows rather strongly that children of single parents of the opposite gender are far more likely to run into difficulties: a single mother raising a boy, or a single father raising a girl, is a situation which predicts for high-risk and destructive behavior more than income, education level, or even an "unhappy" marriage.
Data in general suggests that, even barring that, children are better off in a non-abusive 2-parent household (even if there's an absence of inter-parental affection) than in a single parent household.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when it comes to the benefits of a two-parent household, I think the Christians and the social conservatives may be right on this one.
I have no qualms with the adaptations made for the LOTR: I think Jackson knew what he was doing, and that fidelty to JRRT would not have made a good film.
That said, Hollywood does rip the heart out off good stories in order to fit within formulae all the time. I'm getting a good look at this first-hand, as I see my friend's first screenplay change under pressure from the studio he's working with; much that was interesting, challenging, and thought-provoking being replaced with formulaic tropes and reassuringly familiar elements.
The thing is, the public - the market - doesn't really want work that is challenging or thought-provoking. It wants to be told that its prejudices and beliefs and values are good and true, that the enemies are bad, that you are on the side of virtue, that history is made by A Few Good Folks Just Like You, and that the world is pretty much like you think it is, only fast-paced and exciting.
And the screenwriter friend in this case half recognizes that his original vision is being castrated, while at the same time being swept away in the excitement of actually breaking into Hollywood. The mainstream movie industry is often filled with clever people who spend much of their time trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance of creating entertainment for people who, frankly, are not as smart or sophisticated as they are. That's part of the SoCal ethic, really: act dumb, even if you're smart. It's an adaptation that comes of serving a market of people that you, secretly, have little but contempt for.
Looking at a lot of those humans, next time I'm rooting for the machines.
No, he does not see kids slacking off and whining.
Have you ever been to Japan? In a Japanese household? I suspect you haven't. You'll be shocked, but children do not behave identically around the world. In my experience, as early as the age 4, there are stark differences in the way that children from different cultures behave. The hard-working, not-complaining Japanese child is typical, not some sort of paragon set out as an example to emulate.
That's not the "moral," that's the background of Japanese culture from which it's created. It may be shocking to you, but working hard and not complaining are actual values (for both genders) that are very much embodied in Japanese child-rearing.
From the Japanese perspective, the moral of American media is "slack off and whine a lot."
There's something interesting in the geekish horror about physical violence and their Darwinian attitude towards non-physical acts of aggression. When it comes to any kind of victimization that uses mental or social methods, it's the fault of the victim for being unprepared, undefended, uninformed - maybe it's a sort of vicarious revenge fantasy, a larcenous "Revenge of the Nerds" or something. But on the physical level, oh no - nothing could be more horrible than being punched or hurt than someone bigger than you.
And frankly, the fear of physical violence is exaggaerated. Yes, injury and death are understandably horrifying, but to here some geeks speak, losing $10,000 is preferable to getting a broken nose. Is it body-horror? The fantasy of being pure mind? People, bones mend and cuts heal, but some of the damage done to spirit (and the loss of time that theft from someone who has worked for it implies) don't always heal so well.
Slashdot needs a Fight Club.
John Williams is not that great a composer by any means.
It doesn't preclude you from being a great composer, but it's not sufficient to make you one - and some of the people on my list made music for films. But if your scope of contemporary orchestral music is limited to videogame and movie soundtracks, you're probably not well qualified to produce an informed judgement on just who a great contemporary composer is.
I like Final Fantasy music and Nobuo Uematsu as much as anyone, but it is program music, like film soundtracks - fun, but "one of the best composers of the present time?" I'm afraid that suggests you know a lot about videogames, and not so much about contemporary composition.
Terry Riley, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Arvo Part, John Zorn, John Taverner, Giya Kancheli, Luciano Berio, Koji Asano, Gavin Bryers, Elliot Carter, Yoshio Ojima, Don Van Vliet, Gyorgy Ligeti, Henryky Gorecki - any one of these and others probably deserves that title more.
An Uematsu concert does, in fact, bring a lot of people who otherwise do not see classical musical live, and it's apparent when you see how people did, in fact, dress in the Los Angelese concert.
It's no accident that it's the Chicago Pops Orchestra performing here - this is program music. Which is fine - I would probably go if I was in the area, and I have Final Fantasy soundtracks myself. But it's hyperbole to call him on of the best composers of the present time. It's well crafted fun, but more sentimental than serious.
No more than you should sue someone who kills you in a PVP game for murder. However, if the *player* in a PVP game says, "I'm going to kill YOU, Mister Player who lives at ," then I think you could take legal remedy.
Fantasy is often about racial conflict - it may be a way we can talk about and address racial conflict in a safer way, through analogy (I think Tolkein's racial essentialism is a big problem, for example.) It's totally appropriate to "play that out," as long as the translation is distant enough... if an elf referred to an orc using language associated with white racism against black people, I'd think a line had been crossed. The Drakthrone case is perfectly acceptable, and rather interesting.
I don't buy it. People who care about music and films end up learning which critics they trust, who share the same tastes as them, and listen accordingly. Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert all have different audiences, and depending on who you are and what your tastes are, you'll listen to one more than another.
That's something that videogame criticism need: trusted reviewers whose tastes you feel mirror your own enough that you'll listen to what they say. Obviously, if you're into FPS, you aren't going to care about the review written by someone who has only played some HL years ago but really likes RTS and RPGs.
Also, if I really like a game's first 4 hours, I think I've gotten my money's worse. If it goes straight to hell after that, well, that's a shame. I think it's highly unlikely that something can drop off that precipitously, though. Again, being able to trust specific reviewers deals with that issue.
No, it's experiential reporting that addresses gameplay in its full context, including cultural, social, and technical (from a gameplay mechanics sense.) It may be in a blog or in PC GAMER, which, surprise surpise, one of the pieces cited actually was. Or it may be on Insertcredit.com or anywhere else.
It's partially derived from Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism," but it seems to be both more coherent and more relevant to the subject being addressed.
The article "Bow Nigger," however, was partially about racism. So describing the race of the people involved is completely appropriate.
"African-American" is a quirky term, of course, because it's sort of a fusion-word for a some dark-skinned people of African descent who happen to be citizens of a certain country, and the culture of those individuals whose ancestors were brought into this country by slavery. It's both an ethnicity partially defined by race and a race-category constrained by nationality.
As far as complaining about "needing to classify people," well, those classifications have occurred for hundreds of years, and entire communities and cultures were constructed around those classifications. To think that you can blank out all that history by wishful thinking is, well, wishful thinking. Of course, race is a fiction: there's more genetic variation within so-called "races" than between them. But nationality is also a fiction of sorts "made true" by history, by armies and governments.
Perhaps. But that may be more information than most reviews give. Instead of a bland piece about the game as a piece of software, you get something about the game experience in total here: what it actually feels like to play it (for this person, at this time.) That's far more information than I usually get.
And the fact that, at the end, he won over that race-baiting creep, made it very satisfying.
Actually, I think it's quite the opposite. Creationism is left alone in remote areas because it doesn't threaten the education of the technological and economic elite on the coasts. If Mississippi and Alabama local school boards want to hamstring their own scientific education, what does that matter to people in Chicago, New York, Silicon Valley, etc.? But if the battleground were federal, you could bet that the pharmaceutical, health care, and other institutions would do their damnedest to keep the curriculum in science.
It would make push come to shove, and I think that would be a good thing. As it is, people in backwards areas are being left behind - with the kind of society of widespread ignorance we see now.
I'll just briefly state that part of the problem with school boards is that they are too responsive. To the wrong people.
In some cases, yes, it does. The most successful educational systems in the world seem to be "one size fits all." It's not like Finland doesn't also have very urban and very rural areas.
There's a couple big difference: the US has a documented poor K-12 system, compared to other countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan top the list right now.)
The US higher education system - particularly at the graduate level - may be the best in the world, or close to it.
And to get a doctorate, you usually have to do some teaching. I'm working on a PhD now, and will have taught sections for at least 4 quarters before I get it.
Any teacher worth keeping can make a lot more doing just about anything else. I'm for extensive reform of the US K-12 educational system - including a nationalized curriculum and a professionalized teacher's corp (along the French model, in which teaching is part of a heirarchical civil service), and the end to local school boards (populated by political failures with no background in education whatsoever.)
I would accompany all these changes with a dramatic increase in teacher's salaries and benefits. Then competition for jobs would improve performance. Teachers' jobs are secure because there is virtually no competition for them - school districts will take almost anyone they can get.
But it's the school boards and administrations that are the biggest problem. They politicize - in the worst way, the local way - education in a very destructive way. Administration of schools should be run by a very professionalized administration with a strong background in educational theory and practice, not a group of yahoos.
Small spelling errors and relatively minor errors in punctuation do not bother me. They are, as often as not, "brain-farts": someone who knows better, and is otherwise coherent, mis-thinking or mis-typing a couple words. Even most professional writers make those sorts of mistakes - that's why they have editors.
That's not the issue at hand. We're talking about writing that is so bad, it's incoherent. It's about a complete disinterest in standard grammar and sentence structure, much less punctuation. About people who must barely read, because they don't seem to understand the practice of written communication.
I'm with the cynics regarding the value of this memo.
In the meantime, take a look at the kinds of contracts that the upper echelons at Electronic Arts enjoy - including $4 million forgiveable loans, and bonuses to compensate spouses that have to relocate and change jobs. It doesn't look like they are being asked to work extra for nothing, does it?