I don't want them to be there, either. I don't like pandering and hype (what was I doing at E3? That's a good question - ultimately, I realized that it's about meeting other people in the media, and in the industry, which is why I try not to spend too much time on the floor.) That's not the point. The point is that you are attributing to them the characteristics that they are being projected onto them by the situation they are in. The author's approach - treating their presence as symptomatic of a wider dysfunction in the game industry culture, is exactly the right one. Your disappointment that the booth babes aren't your dream dates is messed up beyond recognition.
And unless you are taking orders for the channel, they aren't even selling the game there. Just under what auspices did you go? Are you another fanboy that fanagled a pass hoping for a Gaming Wonderland?
Um, the point seems to have flown completely over your head.
The piece was largely about just how human the booth babes were. They had jobs that presented them as mindless pieces of meat, but the interviewer went passed it. The main story is how stilted geek-sexuality is and how it ends up framing the question of gender among geeks as "how do I get a girlfriend" and "what kind of girl do I like."
The booth babes are the nth degree example of positioning women entirely in terms of male desire instead of being subjects of their own. The author of the story was able to break that down by giving the booth babes a chance to speak on their own, and many came across as self-aware, intelligent, and poised.
Of course they are being "false." They have to be pleasant, attractive, and vaguely sexualized for each of the hundreds of people who come to the booth every day. You expected them to put down the styrofoam broadsword and give a heart-to-heart with you about their inner lives? In a way, you're as selfish as the slavvering lechers.
Well, that's the thing. For geeks, the route to somewhat-less-failure in dating is in not pretending you aren't a dork, but acting as if you're not even as you are admitting you are. It's a fine line, but it really works.
Completely wrong. The world is far less fractionalized (um?) than it used to be, the US included. The cultural barriers between black Americans in the South, Chinese workers in California, even people in different classes in the same place, used to be far higher and less permeable than they are now. Black english used to be even less like "standard" english, when it was a pidgen, then later a criolle/patois used among slaves.
Mass media is removing many regional accents, as well. The bland part-western, part-Midwestern accent that developed when displaced Okies moved to Los Angeles is now the standard accent of American TV, and thus of much of the English speaking world.
An importance difference is that OS licenses are a reflection of ethical philosophy and ideas of freedom. They aren't simple matters of taste, unlike one's preferences for one desktop metaphor over another.
Check out the Alex Papers, about a cognitive scientist, Irene Pepperberg, and her African gray parrot.
The African gray can use language - and otherwise demonstrate the reasoning and conceptual ability - at a level comparable to that of a human 2 to 3 year old.
Miyamoto could be considered the first video game auteur, but he's definitely not the "father" of videogames. I don't even think Miyamoto knows how to code: he's an artist, but the ground was laid for him earlier. Baer was early enough that he had to do everything, soup to nuts.
No, it will spend the endd of cybercafe gaming using Valve products. It's incredibly short-sighted, and I doubt that Valve's competitors would go along with it.
One of the requirements - in fact, the central requirement - for a PhD is making a meaningful contribution to your field.
That's what the dissertation is. It's meant to advance the field for which the doctorate is awarded.
If his dissertation fails to do that due to falsified data, then his doctorate itself is defective.
What has happened is that, retroactively, it has been determined that there was no PhD-earning accomplishment. He may still be a very good scientist in some other ways, but he hasn't demonstrated the ability to contibute to the field in the way that a PhD is expected to.
If he was being stripped of his degree for work since his dissertation and the dissertation itself was valid, then I'd agree with you.
The thing is, of course, that the non-Muslim West apparently wants the moderate Muslims to pipe up only when it's to condemn other Muslims. They certainly provide no real outlet for them to criticize Israel or the US or Europe, but after essentially blacking out any pro-Palestinian perspective from the media, all the Americans disingenously cluck "where are the moderate Muslims? Why aren't they crying out?" Well, where was the moderate Christian and Jewish outcry about the occupation and the activities of the IDF? Is that the only time the western media has room for Muslims - when it's time for them to criticize extremists?
Shirking their duties? It's the US Congress constituencies that are pushing for this kind of crap. Follow the money: who do you think benefits from this sort of thing? What's really needed is non-US legislatures to stand up to threats of sanctions and trade barriers. Do you have any idea of how much pressure the US put on Brazil and Canada regarding the pharmaceutical industry's intellectual property?
If you look on the Slashdot games What We're Playing sidebar, you'll notice that Timothy lists his game, as of this writing, as frozen bubble, flightgear, and Kbounce - all open source, linux-based games - while the rest of the/. crew is playing Final Fantasy X-2, Unreal Tournament 2002, KOTOR, RtCW, and the like.
I can draw a few tenatitve inferences from this: that Timothy doesn't have a game console or a windows machine, that he's perhaps exclusively dedicated to open source software, and that he's probably too busy recompiling his kernel to actually read Slashdot.
As someone who travels to Japan, South America, and Europe, this is my advice:
Almost no phone will work in Japan and Europe and the Americas, at least without being very clunky, due to differences in protocols. Japan's cellular system is very different from the rest of the world's.
Cheaper and more effective would be to get either 2 or 3 phones, and an account with T-Mobile. You could get a tri-band GSM phone for the Americas and Europe, and a Vodaphone J-Phone for Japan, and move the SIMS card between them - T-Mobile has coverage throughout the Americas and Europe and a deal with Vodaphone to provide coverage in Japan - to keep the same number and roam anywhere. Or, if you will be spending enough time overseas that that could be pricey, better to get a pay-as-you-go account on some of the places to which you will be travelling, and set up call forwarding.
T-Mobile is willing to unlock your SIMS after about 2 months, much quicker than other GSM providers.
If you are interested in the gaming bit, a Nokia original N-Gage is tri-band. The new one is dual-band, so it wouldn't work in Europe (or, the European one won't work in the US - they are different models). If you want a high-end phone that will roam to the US and Europe and you don't care about games,, you could get T-Mobile for a Nokia 6600, and then when in Japan you could buy a low-end Vodaphone device.
Because you can't, for the most part, play a console videogame after having given it away (at least not without heavily modded systems and cracks and the like that very, very few people have and use - and which do not exist for the GameCube, anyway), they are more like 'hardware' than like 'software'. You can only enjoy the benefits of the product if you have it in your material possession, and I imagine that people who sell their games really have finished playing it. What you say might be more true of PC games, and of music CDs, but it's effectively not true for console games.
Also, in terms of the economics involved, you are exactly wrong about depreciation. A used couch (or car) is worth significantly less than a new one, while at most game stores, the discount on a used game is only about 10% off the value of the new game or so. So, until there's a new generation of videogame platform, the depreciation of the couch is considerably higher.
I think one reason for the anti-American rhetoric is the tone that American critics of other countries take. There is too much readiness to cast aspersions on "the bad guys," not to identify bad actions as bad actions, but to see them as indicators of 1. the essential moral superiority of the US and 2. the essential wrongness of Chinese (or Arab, or French, or whatever) society. In other words, when the US puts in a policy of torture to get information, or imprisons hundreds of innocent people or does all the things that the US has in the past like My Lai or Jim Crow or whatever, or does now in the name of the war on terror, it's treated like an aberration ("oh, we've learned from the past, and besides %99.99 of our boys are good as gold.") When it's a suicide bomber, or a censorious or heavy-handed tactic on the part of the Chinese, it's an indictment of Islam, of Arab culture, of Communism, of socialism, of non-western societies. It's the "my problem is a little problem, your problem is a fatal flaw".
It wouldn't be as compelling to pick on the US if it weren't for the feeling of hypocrisy and exceptionalism. The US isn't really worse than other countries on the average (although remember, a mild-mannered, gentle polar bear having a bad day is far more destructive than the most angry, hateful hamster in the world), but too often its citizens really believes it is far better, in a way than members of other countries do not about their own.
And as we see from the rhetoric and actions in Iraq, the US is only moral and restrained when they can be so while still getting what they want. That's not really very ethical - in fact, it's the psychology of an abuser. "If you just did what I say, I wouldn't get mad."
There are a number of things that must be published in the public record, almost always a newspaper. Fictitious name statements for businesses being the most common one.
Applies to snowboarding, golf, football, pretty much everything that one could do in real life and can do in a game - it isn't as if the pleasures of the game are identical with the pleasures of the simulation target. (And you can go racing karts without the same risks.)
And, your protest about cost can be extended - going to a real milonga costs money, as does appropriate clothes, etc.
Getting a PhD, unless you're going into Google or a biotech company, isn't the road to riches. For the most part, you take a pay cut when you go from a Master's to a PhD.
I actually know how to dance tango, and the theme is a big plus for me. Tango is an intense, dark, very passionate dance - and a difficult one. One dance turns strangers into lovers and lovers into foes.
In Japan and Korea, ballroom dance is already huge. Gaming couples or gamers with dates will be a big market (and one for which virtually no games exist, apart from the usual music-games that require bringing out the dance pad.)
This could be gaming as foreplay.
This was definitely my favorite game at E3. The people who are going to be turned off by the theme are already being pretty well served by the game industry - this is going to be attractive to a lot of people who aren't in the traditional target market, and may wind up getting them to get an Xbox. I'd rather it came out for the GC, personally, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
This game was cool from a gameplay perspective, not just from an aesthetic one.
One player leads, the other follows. The person who leads puts in a key combo - maybe up + X, or left + Y + A, or something. Different combos cause different dance steps, and more complicated combos create more points.
The next player follows - which means she has to repeat the combination input by the first player.
So the lead needs to come up with a combination that is complicated enough to give lots of points, but not so complicated that the other player can't imitate it within the same measure.
So the lead should be a good fighting-game player, and the follower should be a good rhythm/dance game player. This is an excellent simulation of dance-as-a-communication-game, and a lot of fun. Definitely my favorite game of E3 - and the first truly killer-app for the Xbox I've found.
There is single-player mode, in which either side, it seems, is replaced by an AI, but I wouldn't see the point really. You can play with dance pads, but I don't think that would be optimal, either. This is tango, not the Cabbage Patch.
I can also see this not being too popular among gamers without significant others - I imagine a lot of the more shaky-about-their-sexuality types would freak out about playing it with their buddies. But for those who have a usually-not-interested-in-gaming partner, it's a godsend. And I suspect that you wouldn't have predicted that DDR would have been as successful in the arcades as it was, too - a romantic game that you can play with your date could be a pretty big hit.
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I don't want them to be there, either. I don't like pandering and hype (what was I doing at E3? That's a good question - ultimately, I realized that it's about meeting other people in the media, and in the industry, which is why I try not to spend too much time on the floor.) That's not the point. The point is that you are attributing to them the characteristics that they are being projected onto them by the situation they are in. The author's approach - treating their presence as symptomatic of a wider dysfunction in the game industry culture, is exactly the right one. Your disappointment that the booth babes aren't your dream dates is messed up beyond recognition.
And unless you are taking orders for the channel, they aren't even selling the game there. Just under what auspices did you go? Are you another fanboy that fanagled a pass hoping for a Gaming Wonderland?
Um, the point seems to have flown completely over your head.
The piece was largely about just how human the booth babes were. They had jobs that presented them as mindless pieces of meat, but the interviewer went passed it. The main story is how stilted geek-sexuality is and how it ends up framing the question of gender among geeks as "how do I get a girlfriend" and "what kind of girl do I like."
The booth babes are the nth degree example of positioning women entirely in terms of male desire instead of being subjects of their own. The author of the story was able to break that down by giving the booth babes a chance to speak on their own, and many came across as self-aware, intelligent, and poised.
Of course they are being "false." They have to be pleasant, attractive, and vaguely sexualized for each of the hundreds of people who come to the booth every day. You expected them to put down the styrofoam broadsword and give a heart-to-heart with you about their inner lives? In a way, you're as selfish as the slavvering lechers.
Well, that's the thing. For geeks, the route to somewhat-less-failure in dating is in not pretending you aren't a dork, but acting as if you're not even as you are admitting you are. It's a fine line, but it really works.
Completely wrong. The world is far less fractionalized (um?) than it used to be, the US included. The cultural barriers between black Americans in the South, Chinese workers in California, even people in different classes in the same place, used to be far higher and less permeable than they are now. Black english used to be even less like "standard" english, when it was a pidgen, then later a criolle/patois used among slaves.
Mass media is removing many regional accents, as well. The bland part-western, part-Midwestern accent that developed when displaced Okies moved to Los Angeles is now the standard accent of American TV, and thus of much of the English speaking world.
An importance difference is that OS licenses are a reflection of ethical philosophy and ideas of freedom. They aren't simple matters of taste, unlike one's preferences for one desktop metaphor over another.
Hmmn. You may want to consider ABAP programming. Because after a while, you'll envy the dead.
Check out the Alex Papers, about a cognitive scientist, Irene Pepperberg, and her African gray parrot.
The African gray can use language - and otherwise demonstrate the reasoning and conceptual ability - at a level comparable to that of a human 2 to 3 year old.
Miyamoto could be considered the first video game auteur, but he's definitely not the "father" of videogames. I don't even think Miyamoto knows how to code: he's an artist, but the ground was laid for him earlier. Baer was early enough that he had to do everything, soup to nuts.
Exactly, which is why I had a dependent clause that said "I doubt that Valve's competitors would go along with it."
No, it will spend the endd of cybercafe gaming using Valve products. It's incredibly short-sighted, and I doubt that Valve's competitors would go along with it.
One of the requirements - in fact, the central requirement - for a PhD is making a meaningful contribution to your field.
That's what the dissertation is. It's meant to advance the field for which the doctorate is awarded.
If his dissertation fails to do that due to falsified data, then his doctorate itself is defective.
What has happened is that, retroactively, it has been determined that there was no PhD-earning accomplishment. He may still be a very good scientist in some other ways, but he hasn't demonstrated the ability to contibute to the field in the way that a PhD is expected to.
If he was being stripped of his degree for work since his dissertation and the dissertation itself was valid, then I'd agree with you.
The thing is, of course, that the non-Muslim West apparently wants the moderate Muslims to pipe up only when it's to condemn other Muslims. They certainly provide no real outlet for them to criticize Israel or the US or Europe, but after essentially blacking out any pro-Palestinian perspective from the media, all the Americans disingenously cluck "where are the moderate Muslims? Why aren't they crying out?" Well, where was the moderate Christian and Jewish outcry about the occupation and the activities of the IDF? Is that the only time the western media has room for Muslims - when it's time for them to criticize extremists?
If I were Muslim, I'd say "screw that."
Shirking their duties? It's the US Congress constituencies that are pushing for this kind of crap. Follow the money: who do you think benefits from this sort of thing? What's really needed is non-US legislatures to stand up to threats of sanctions and trade barriers. Do you have any idea of how much pressure the US put on Brazil and Canada regarding the pharmaceutical industry's intellectual property?
If you look on the Slashdot games What We're Playing sidebar, you'll notice that Timothy lists his game, as of this writing, as frozen bubble, flightgear, and Kbounce - all open source, linux-based games - while the rest of the /. crew is playing Final Fantasy X-2, Unreal Tournament 2002, KOTOR, RtCW, and the like.
I can draw a few tenatitve inferences from this: that Timothy doesn't have a game console or a windows machine, that he's perhaps exclusively dedicated to open source software, and that he's probably too busy recompiling his kernel to actually read Slashdot.
As someone who travels to Japan, South America, and Europe, this is my advice:
Almost no phone will work in Japan and Europe and the Americas, at least without being very clunky, due to differences in protocols. Japan's cellular system is very different from the rest of the world's.
Cheaper and more effective would be to get either 2 or 3 phones, and an account with T-Mobile. You could get a tri-band GSM phone for the Americas and Europe, and a Vodaphone J-Phone for Japan, and move the SIMS card between them - T-Mobile has coverage throughout the Americas and Europe and a deal with Vodaphone to provide coverage in Japan - to keep the same number and roam anywhere. Or, if you will be spending enough time overseas that that could be pricey, better to get a pay-as-you-go account on some of the places to which you will be travelling, and set up call forwarding.
T-Mobile is willing to unlock your SIMS after about 2 months, much quicker than other GSM providers.
If you are interested in the gaming bit, a Nokia original N-Gage is tri-band. The new one is dual-band, so it wouldn't work in Europe (or, the European one won't work in the US - they are different models). If you want a high-end phone that will roam to the US and Europe and you don't care about games,, you could get T-Mobile for a Nokia 6600, and then when in Japan you could buy a low-end Vodaphone device.
Because you can't, for the most part, play a console videogame after having given it away (at least not without heavily modded systems and cracks and the like that very, very few people have and use - and which do not exist for the GameCube, anyway), they are more like 'hardware' than like 'software'. You can only enjoy the benefits of the product if you have it in your material possession, and I imagine that people who sell their games really have finished playing it. What you say might be more true of PC games, and of music CDs, but it's effectively not true for console games.
Also, in terms of the economics involved, you are exactly wrong about depreciation. A used couch (or car) is worth significantly less than a new one, while at most game stores, the discount on a used game is only about 10% off the value of the new game or so. So, until there's a new generation of videogame platform, the depreciation of the couch is considerably higher.
Because god knows that an Australian living in the US or the UK wouldn't be patriotic about Australia anymore, right?
I think one reason for the anti-American rhetoric is the tone that American critics of other countries take. There is too much readiness to cast aspersions on "the bad guys," not to identify bad actions as bad actions, but to see them as indicators of 1. the essential moral superiority of the US and 2. the essential wrongness of Chinese (or Arab, or French, or whatever) society. In other words, when the US puts in a policy of torture to get information, or imprisons hundreds of innocent people or does all the things that the US has in the past like My Lai or Jim Crow or whatever, or does now in the name of the war on terror, it's treated like an aberration ("oh, we've learned from the past, and besides %99.99 of our boys are good as gold.") When it's a suicide bomber, or a censorious or heavy-handed tactic on the part of the Chinese, it's an indictment of Islam, of Arab culture, of Communism, of socialism, of non-western societies. It's the "my problem is a little problem, your problem is a fatal flaw".
It wouldn't be as compelling to pick on the US if it weren't for the feeling of hypocrisy and exceptionalism. The US isn't really worse than other countries on the average (although remember, a mild-mannered, gentle polar bear having a bad day is far more destructive than the most angry, hateful hamster in the world), but too often its citizens really believes it is far better, in a way than members of other countries do not about their own.
And as we see from the rhetoric and actions in Iraq, the US is only moral and restrained when they can be so while still getting what they want. That's not really very ethical - in fact, it's the psychology of an abuser. "If you just did what I say, I wouldn't get mad."
That's funny, the US has controlled its chunk of North America for only about 200 years of the thousands of years it was populated, too.
There are a number of things that must be published in the public record, almost always a newspaper. Fictitious name statements for businesses being the most common one.
You're pretty naive, you know that?
Applies to snowboarding, golf, football, pretty much everything that one could do in real life and can do in a game - it isn't as if the pleasures of the game are identical with the pleasures of the simulation target. (And you can go racing karts without the same risks.)
And, your protest about cost can be extended - going to a real milonga costs money, as does appropriate clothes, etc.
Getting a PhD, unless you're going into Google or a biotech company, isn't the road to riches. For the most part, you take a pay cut when you go from a Master's to a PhD.
1. Living room not big enough for dance floor.
2. Never said I was good at tango.
It's kind of like asking why you would play Gran Turismo instead of going driving.
I actually know how to dance tango, and the theme is a big plus for me. Tango is an intense, dark, very passionate dance - and a difficult one. One dance turns strangers into lovers and lovers into foes.
In Japan and Korea, ballroom dance is already huge. Gaming couples or gamers with dates will be a big market (and one for which virtually no games exist, apart from the usual music-games that require bringing out the dance pad.)
This could be gaming as foreplay.
This was definitely my favorite game at E3. The people who are going to be turned off by the theme are already being pretty well served by the game industry - this is going to be attractive to a lot of people who aren't in the traditional target market, and may wind up getting them to get an Xbox. I'd rather it came out for the GC, personally, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
This game was cool from a gameplay perspective, not just from an aesthetic one.
One player leads, the other follows. The person who leads puts in a key combo - maybe up + X, or left + Y + A, or something. Different combos cause different dance steps, and more complicated combos create more points.
The next player follows - which means she has to repeat the combination input by the first player.
So the lead needs to come up with a combination that is complicated enough to give lots of points, but not so complicated that the other player can't imitate it within the same measure.
So the lead should be a good fighting-game player, and the follower should be a good rhythm/dance game player. This is an excellent simulation of dance-as-a-communication-game, and a lot of fun. Definitely my favorite game of E3 - and the first truly killer-app for the Xbox I've found.
There is single-player mode, in which either side, it seems, is replaced by an AI, but I wouldn't see the point really. You can play with dance pads, but I don't think that would be optimal, either. This is tango, not the Cabbage Patch.
I can also see this not being too popular among gamers without significant others - I imagine a lot of the more shaky-about-their-sexuality types would freak out about playing it with their buddies. But for those who have a usually-not-interested-in-gaming partner, it's a godsend. And I suspect that you wouldn't have predicted that DDR would have been as successful in the arcades as it was, too - a romantic game that you can play with your date could be a pretty big hit.