The probability of a fossil forming is actually pretty slim. First of all, the organism needs to be at least partially solid -- bones do the trick, or a nice big shell, but squishy invertebrates, for example, are extremely unlikely to leave any trace of their passing. The organism also needs to die under the correct conditions and stay there relatively undisturbed for millions of years until human scientists get around to digging it up.
Given that billions and billions of species have existed on this planet, it's not surprising that we've found some fossils, most notably those of the dinosaurs (ie. big, numerous boney things that lived at a time when Earth was conveniently swampy), but that doesn't mean that there's even the slightest possiblity that we'll ever find the remains of everything that ever existed.
Also, I've read about scientists observing evolution in action. Sure, they're only going to be able to observe relatively small changes in their lifetimes, but that doesn't mean that the changes didn't happen... though they obviously don't have a complete fossil record to go along with their notes:)
What games do you have for your DS? I've found that the dual screen is utilized well in some games and poorly in others. I currently have Animal Crossing, Kirby, Nintendogs and Super Mario 64 for my DS, and I've found that being able to see the map on Kirby and Mario can be quite handy (it's something that I like to glance at from time to time without interrupting my gameplay)... whereas in Animal Crossing and Nintendogs, the second screen is just a nice but mostly unnecessary feature.
I would like to see more games that fully utilize the DS's technology, however. Most of the games that I've seen/played with use some aspects of the DS while ignoring the rest of it -- ie. they'll use the touch screen, but not the microphone, or they'll use the microphone, but only really use one screen... that kind of thing.
You know... a lot of us don't actually want it to be used by the majority of people. Oh, it would be nice, but the major appeal of Linux around here is that it caters to the nerdy minority a lot more than Windows does. It fills a niche, and a lot of us are happy with it doing just that.
Also... I hate to say it, but doing a Google search usually IS the best way to get a Linux box configured. I have Linux on my laptop (it's a Dell, so I had to go through multiple distros to even get something sorta working -- eventually settled on FC4), and when I was setting up the few things that didn't work perfectly out of the box, I just did a couple of really quick Google searches, copied/pasted a few lines from somebody else's config file, and installed some packages containing the necessary drivers.. and then everything worked perfectly. Maybe it's still more than you would want to do to get a computer up and running, but meh, it made me feel smart and let me learn a bit more about my computer than I would have by mindlessly clicking through a Windows install, and I just happen to like that kind of thing.
I still use Windows, though, and I may end up getting Vista when it comes out -- my Windows box is my gaming box, so the system requirements shouldn't be a problem, and MS will likely force my hand when games start coming out that only run in Vista. I just hope that we'll see some decent backwards compatibility -- there are already too many really awesome old games that I can't play, and sometimes even emulators aren't enough.
Depends on what aspect of a game you're working on. I'm currently on a co-op work term (that's an internship, for you American types) doing some tools programming at a small game company, so the math that I use is very basic, minimal, and usually limited to the judicious use of.NET Math:: functions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is just that even if you're not uber strong in math, you can still work in the games industry... you just probably won't end up working with the rendering guys. There's a lot more to the average game than just graphics, after all... but you might want to develop some other marketable skills, like network programming for example:)
It's not that women don't want porn... it's that few will admit it, and female "porn" is often written rather than visual. I don't waste my time on it, personally, (my addictions are all game-related these days) but I've stumbled upon FAR too many fangirl websites stuffed full of horrible horrible Snape/Harry/Frodo fanfics.
Because, y'know, reading or writing about men getting pregnant and shagging teenage boys and/or hobbits is so much healthier and more ethical than watching consenting (and well-paid) adults have sex in a porno video.
There may well be a causal relationship involved, but I seriously doubt that pornography is the cause. More likely, a man's obsession with his own sexual gratification and the effect of sex on unwilling women will cause him to seek out both porn and rape victims.
Removing the porn won't solve the problem, just give him one less outlet... and as a woman, I would prefer if all the creeps stayed inside with their kinky porn collections (internet or otherwise) and left me alone.
It always irks me when I read about poor real life friends being abandoned in favour of an online game, but not for the reasons you might expect. See, I've abandoned plenty of real life "friends" and made friends online too, but although I met plenty of my online friends via various games (especially MUDs), the games were not the reason why my real life friendships began to suffer. If anything, it was because the people who I had previously hung out with just didn't click with me anymore, and playing a game was a way to distance myself from them. If any of them had attempted an "intervention," I would have been pretty damn pissed -- meeting me in real life does NOT give anyone the right to try and pry me away from my chosen form of entertainment. It's my life, and I get to choose who I want to be friends with and what I want to do in my spare time.
Incidentally, my life has never particularly suffered as a result of the small amount of game addiction that I have experienced. Maybe my marks would have been a bit higher (I usually get low to mid A's and high B's, with the odd A+ for flavour) if I'd spent less time gaming and more time doing homework, but realistically, if I hadn't been gaming or wasting time doing other hardcore nerd stuff, I would have been out dancing, getting drunk, and having random unprotected sex like the average university student -- not exactly my cup of tea.
Quite honestly, having a chance to play a game, interact with people all over the world, roleplay, and gank the hell out of a bunch of noobs is a LOT more important to me than getting laid or frying a bunch of brain cells, even though the latter activities might be more "normal" or even "healthy." If gaming makes me happy and sex/drinking doesn't, my former friends don't need to intervene... if they truly care, they need to let me be happy on my own terms.
There are certainly people who do need help breaking a game addiction, specifically the ones who are actually depressed by the prospect of losing aspects of their real lives, but the point I'm trying to make is that not all game addicts either want or need help. I'd rather let people be happy doing what they love than force them to take part in more socially-accepted activities that I know they're going to hate. Maybe they will lose their jobs, marriages, and friends, but if they're still happy, why does it matter? Isn't it better to be unemployed, alone and happy than rich, married, and depressed?
(Sorry for being so incoherent, but I hope you'll get the idea -- I'm at work, and I'm sleepy from skating during my lunch break and spending the rest of the day coding, so my brain isn't exactly working at full capacity.)
I've heard of this kind of thing happening before, actually -- a while back, Anne McCaffrey was squelching fan artists left and right, angry that people should even try to make money off illustrating scenes from her novels. The vast majority of authors (and other IP owners) habitually turn a blind eye to this type of copyright infringement, mainly because it benefits them, but the point is that they can put a stop to it if they want, and some of them have in the past.
I think that he's speaking AS a developer there. Sure, regular authors can write alternate endings too, but Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books are a lot more limited than modern games.
"You don't want to frag your significant other, you want to frag the NPC that layed a hand on her."
Speak for yourself:) If I'd managed to get my Horde rogue to 60 while I was still with my last boyfriend, his Alliance priest would have been going down.
I've ganked/fragged previous boyfriends in online games too, and been ganked/fragged by them too -- I find it more fun than cooperating, actually, because I get to show off, be as vicious as I want, and ideally become a better player while I'm at it.
My computer at work has an Antec case with sound dampening (offhand I don't know if it's the model that you mentioned, but it may well be), and although it's not completely silent, it's pretty close. I generally don't notice it making noise unless it's particularly busy with something, and even then, it's not nearly enough to bother me.
Yes... as much as portraying the exact same thing in a movie, novel, song, play, or painting is art.
Most people consider Shakespearean or Dickensian portrayals of murder and warfare (which were written for the enjoyment of the unwashed masses, no less) to be art, so why is it so different when essentially the same story is told through modern media?
Of course, the average game may not be good art, but then again, neither is the average novel, song, movie, play, or painting.
I like WoW mainly for the little things, particularly the geeky jokes thrown in by the area designers. For example, the punchcards in Gnomeregan have messages on them in ASCII-encoded binary ("Thrall and Jaina sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G"), and Un'goro Crater is absolutely filled with Nintendo references, complete with Luigi and Mario (technically, Muigin and Larion) NPCs and apes that drop empty barrels. They even have an owl in Tanaris named O'Reilly.
However, most review/preview sites don't pick up on those kinds of details, and will instead wax on about the wonders of far more mundane and generic features. I rarely trust previews unless they're of sequels to games that I have lived up to my expectations in the past, and even then, I take everything with a grain of salt. I got WoW the first day it came out since I'd been in the beta previously, but with most games, unless I've had a chance to play 'em pre-launch, I'll wait at least a couple of weeks and find out what other people think first.
It's already happened -- rape is an extremely common theme in hentai games, and more often than not, the main character is the one who does it. Although such games are predominantly made in Japan, they can be legally imported into North America, and plenty of kids download pirated versions. I used to know a guy in junior high who apparently (according to a friend of mine who claimed to have seen the games) had a quite impressive collection.
There are reviews of some of 'em on Something Awful in case you're curious... they're pretty amusing actually, though certainly NSFW.
Yes, in Asian countries, and to some extent in North America. I've seen it on menus, and when I went to the Tokyo fishmarket on a family vacation in Japan, and I saw plenty of dead octopuses amongst the usual fish.
I couldn't eat one myself, though. Not only do I not like most sea food, I've done too much reading about them, so I find them far too cute and I marvel at their intelligence. They're like little boneless ninja with their impressive subtlety, escape artistry, and hunting abilities. They can even change colour and body texture to better match their surroundings... they're far too cool to eat.
And yes, I am a biology nerd. It's a lot harder to view animals as mere objects and automatically less intelligent or aware than every single human when I've read about countless studies that prove otherwise.
Although I consider research on animals an unfortunate necessity, I do have some issues with your argument. For example, you say that animals can be treated as objects because they lack self-awareness... but what about animals that are more intelligent/aware than some humans? A mentally retarded child might be less self-aware than the average octopus, but an octopus is food, and a child somehow fits in a special moral category even though, logically, he/she might be more oblivious to being eaten/used for experiments/otherwise abused. It would also be possible to intentionally engineer humans to be less aware than animals, but would that be ethical? They would feel no pain and be unaware of their suffering, after all, so wouldn't that make them better test subjects?
It just irks me when people try to claim that it's ok do experiment on animals because of their mental capacity or whatever but refuse to apply the same arguments to our own species. If your perspective is that humans are automagically better/sacred/whatever, that's fine, just don't try to justify it with arguments that make no sense.
Let's just say that I was up until 6am on both Friday and Saturday nights last week because I finally got Black & White 2 to work on my computer. That game is just amazing -- probably one of the best I've ever played.
I like other genres too, though. I've wasted long hours on adventure games (King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.), virtual pet games (Petz, Creatures), and various multiplayer RPGs (MUDs in the past, WoW these days). I enjoy Civilization too, and I used to play Prince of Persia, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and Castle Wolfenstein when I was little.
I'm not sure if there's any one big secret behind female gamers. Just as there is no one genre that all men want, there isn't any one thing that every woman will like/want/buy. I mean, we're half the freakin' population -- why do people expect us to somehow NOT be as divided in our likes and dislikes as our male counterparts?
Seriously, just make good games in a variety of different genres and girls will play them.... and at least then you won't lose your entire male audience (along with a lot of girls as well) by dumbing everything down and coating it with pink.
I like being required to do time-consuming things sometimes, mainly for the sense of accomplishment afterwards, plus it gives me an opportunity to socialize while I'm at it. You aren't required to play anyway -- if you don't like farming/grinding games, don't play them. It's just another genre with its own demographic, and if you don't happen to be in that demographic... well... I'm sure you have better things to do than insulting the games that other people prefer.
There will always be people who want to get ahead, no matter what the game design is. Even if you started everyone at level 60, there would always be kids whining about how getting gear was boring. If you gave them l33t gear, they'd whine about how walking all the way over to members of the opposing faction was boring. They all want to be the best, and they don't want to put in the time to do it. You see them sitting in Ironforge begging for hundreds of gold at level 10, you see them sitting in Goldshire begging for a port to Stormwind or whining because they can't just teleport everywhere at will... and you see them using speed hacks and ganking merrily in noob zones.
Perhaps gold buying should be allowed/encouraged to keep those people happy, but I don't think that changing the game design to make it easier for them would be a good thing, particularly because it would ruin the game for everyone else. Some of us happen to like the sense of accomplishment after running a long instance or the risk of stealthing through a contested zone just to do a quest or get a nice item.
I think that the negative effects of farming could (and should) be lessened, however. Although I don't exactly approve of buying gold, if the farmers could be kept out of sight in instances, I'd be a lot happier. I couldn't care less about the 60 rogues perpetually farming Uldaman, but the farmers in Azshara who'll run me off if I even try to do a quest near there... that just irritates me. I don't like the idea of people being paid real world money to basically ruin my fun, and I'd like to see more game designers take farmers (and the effects that they will have on legitimate players) into consideration.
I disagree, primarily because you seem to be working under the assumption that all objectively good games should require little time. Perhaps your ideal game is that way, but I'm the kind of person who prefers to savour my entertainment. I like long books that take weeks to read, and similarly, I like games that require a lot of my time. Something that lets me get to the top quickly just bores me -- I don't feel like I've accomplished much, I haven't had a character long enough to grow attached to it, and I get a distinct feeling of "Oh, is that all there is?".
I would like to see more games of the sort that you like, however. Casual players who want a quick fix should have options too... but not at the expense of players like me. Catering to one demographic instead of another is not a game design "fault": it's a game design "decision."
Incidentally, I'm a university student who's currently on a work term, working full-time. I just choose to spend pretty much all of my free time on gaming:)
Slashdot Mirror
what's going to convince them that this is a bad idea?
;)
You mean aside from the fact that you just posted your intentions on Slashdot?
The probability of a fossil forming is actually pretty slim. First of all, the organism needs to be at least partially solid -- bones do the trick, or a nice big shell, but squishy invertebrates, for example, are extremely unlikely to leave any trace of their passing. The organism also needs to die under the correct conditions and stay there relatively undisturbed for millions of years until human scientists get around to digging it up.
:)
Given that billions and billions of species have existed on this planet, it's not surprising that we've found some fossils, most notably those of the dinosaurs (ie. big, numerous boney things that lived at a time when Earth was conveniently swampy), but that doesn't mean that there's even the slightest possiblity that we'll ever find the remains of everything that ever existed.
Also, I've read about scientists observing evolution in action. Sure, they're only going to be able to observe relatively small changes in their lifetimes, but that doesn't mean that the changes didn't happen... though they obviously don't have a complete fossil record to go along with their notes
What games do you have for your DS? I've found that the dual screen is utilized well in some games and poorly in others. I currently have Animal Crossing, Kirby, Nintendogs and Super Mario 64 for my DS, and I've found that being able to see the map on Kirby and Mario can be quite handy (it's something that I like to glance at from time to time without interrupting my gameplay)... whereas in Animal Crossing and Nintendogs, the second screen is just a nice but mostly unnecessary feature.
I would like to see more games that fully utilize the DS's technology, however. Most of the games that I've seen/played with use some aspects of the DS while ignoring the rest of it -- ie. they'll use the touch screen, but not the microphone, or they'll use the microphone, but only really use one screen... that kind of thing.
You know... a lot of us don't actually want it to be used by the majority of people. Oh, it would be nice, but the major appeal of Linux around here is that it caters to the nerdy minority a lot more than Windows does. It fills a niche, and a lot of us are happy with it doing just that.
Also... I hate to say it, but doing a Google search usually IS the best way to get a Linux box configured. I have Linux on my laptop (it's a Dell, so I had to go through multiple distros to even get something sorta working -- eventually settled on FC4), and when I was setting up the few things that didn't work perfectly out of the box, I just did a couple of really quick Google searches, copied/pasted a few lines from somebody else's config file, and installed some packages containing the necessary drivers.. and then everything worked perfectly. Maybe it's still more than you would want to do to get a computer up and running, but meh, it made me feel smart and let me learn a bit more about my computer than I would have by mindlessly clicking through a Windows install, and I just happen to like that kind of thing.
I still use Windows, though, and I may end up getting Vista when it comes out -- my Windows box is my gaming box, so the system requirements shouldn't be a problem, and MS will likely force my hand when games start coming out that only run in Vista. I just hope that we'll see some decent backwards compatibility -- there are already too many really awesome old games that I can't play, and sometimes even emulators aren't enough.
Depends on what aspect of a game you're working on. I'm currently on a co-op work term (that's an internship, for you American types) doing some tools programming at a small game company, so the math that I use is very basic, minimal, and usually limited to the judicious use of .NET Math:: functions.
:)
I guess what I'm trying to say is just that even if you're not uber strong in math, you can still work in the games industry... you just probably won't end up working with the rendering guys. There's a lot more to the average game than just graphics, after all... but you might want to develop some other marketable skills, like network programming for example
Uh, dude... you do know ThinkGeek sells those, right? ;)
It's not that women don't want porn... it's that few will admit it, and female "porn" is often written rather than visual. I don't waste my time on it, personally, (my addictions are all game-related these days) but I've stumbled upon FAR too many fangirl websites stuffed full of horrible horrible Snape/Harry/Frodo fanfics.
Because, y'know, reading or writing about men getting pregnant and shagging teenage boys and/or hobbits is so much healthier and more ethical than watching consenting (and well-paid) adults have sex in a porno video.
Ugh. Why must be so many hypocrites in the world?
There may well be a causal relationship involved, but I seriously doubt that pornography is the cause. More likely, a man's obsession with his own sexual gratification and the effect of sex on unwilling women will cause him to seek out both porn and rape victims.
Removing the porn won't solve the problem, just give him one less outlet... and as a woman, I would prefer if all the creeps stayed inside with their kinky porn collections (internet or otherwise) and left me alone.
Hah!
No, I've made an informed decision about how I want to spend my time... and gaming is a lot more fun.
It always irks me when I read about poor real life friends being abandoned in favour of an online game, but not for the reasons you might expect. See, I've abandoned plenty of real life "friends" and made friends online too, but although I met plenty of my online friends via various games (especially MUDs), the games were not the reason why my real life friendships began to suffer. If anything, it was because the people who I had previously hung out with just didn't click with me anymore, and playing a game was a way to distance myself from them. If any of them had attempted an "intervention," I would have been pretty damn pissed -- meeting me in real life does NOT give anyone the right to try and pry me away from my chosen form of entertainment. It's my life, and I get to choose who I want to be friends with and what I want to do in my spare time.
Incidentally, my life has never particularly suffered as a result of the small amount of game addiction that I have experienced. Maybe my marks would have been a bit higher (I usually get low to mid A's and high B's, with the odd A+ for flavour) if I'd spent less time gaming and more time doing homework, but realistically, if I hadn't been gaming or wasting time doing other hardcore nerd stuff, I would have been out dancing, getting drunk, and having random unprotected sex like the average university student -- not exactly my cup of tea.
Quite honestly, having a chance to play a game, interact with people all over the world, roleplay, and gank the hell out of a bunch of noobs is a LOT more important to me than getting laid or frying a bunch of brain cells, even though the latter activities might be more "normal" or even "healthy." If gaming makes me happy and sex/drinking doesn't, my former friends don't need to intervene... if they truly care, they need to let me be happy on my own terms.
There are certainly people who do need help breaking a game addiction, specifically the ones who are actually depressed by the prospect of losing aspects of their real lives, but the point I'm trying to make is that not all game addicts either want or need help. I'd rather let people be happy doing what they love than force them to take part in more socially-accepted activities that I know they're going to hate. Maybe they will lose their jobs, marriages, and friends, but if they're still happy, why does it matter? Isn't it better to be unemployed, alone and happy than rich, married, and depressed?
(Sorry for being so incoherent, but I hope you'll get the idea -- I'm at work, and I'm sleepy from skating during my lunch break and spending the rest of the day coding, so my brain isn't exactly working at full capacity.)
I've heard of this kind of thing happening before, actually -- a while back, Anne McCaffrey was squelching fan artists left and right, angry that people should even try to make money off illustrating scenes from her novels. The vast majority of authors (and other IP owners) habitually turn a blind eye to this type of copyright infringement, mainly because it benefits them, but the point is that they can put a stop to it if they want, and some of them have in the past.
I think that he's speaking AS a developer there. Sure, regular authors can write alternate endings too, but Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books are a lot more limited than modern games.
Is it really any worse than watching other people play sports?
"You don't want to frag your significant other, you want to frag the NPC that layed a hand on her."
:) If I'd managed to get my Horde rogue to 60 while I was still with my last boyfriend, his Alliance priest would have been going down.
Speak for yourself
I've ganked/fragged previous boyfriends in online games too, and been ganked/fragged by them too -- I find it more fun than cooperating, actually, because I get to show off, be as vicious as I want, and ideally become a better player while I'm at it.
My computer at work has an Antec case with sound dampening (offhand I don't know if it's the model that you mentioned, but it may well be), and although it's not completely silent, it's pretty close. I generally don't notice it making noise unless it's particularly busy with something, and even then, it's not nearly enough to bother me.
Yes... as much as portraying the exact same thing in a movie, novel, song, play, or painting is art.
Most people consider Shakespearean or Dickensian portrayals of murder and warfare (which were written for the enjoyment of the unwashed masses, no less) to be art, so why is it so different when essentially the same story is told through modern media?
Of course, the average game may not be good art, but then again, neither is the average novel, song, movie, play, or painting.
I like WoW mainly for the little things, particularly the geeky jokes thrown in by the area designers. For example, the punchcards in Gnomeregan have messages on them in ASCII-encoded binary ("Thrall and Jaina sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G"), and Un'goro Crater is absolutely filled with Nintendo references, complete with Luigi and Mario (technically, Muigin and Larion) NPCs and apes that drop empty barrels. They even have an owl in Tanaris named O'Reilly.
However, most review/preview sites don't pick up on those kinds of details, and will instead wax on about the wonders of far more mundane and generic features. I rarely trust previews unless they're of sequels to games that I have lived up to my expectations in the past, and even then, I take everything with a grain of salt. I got WoW the first day it came out since I'd been in the beta previously, but with most games, unless I've had a chance to play 'em pre-launch, I'll wait at least a couple of weeks and find out what other people think first.
It's already happened -- rape is an extremely common theme in hentai games, and more often than not, the main character is the one who does it. Although such games are predominantly made in Japan, they can be legally imported into North America, and plenty of kids download pirated versions. I used to know a guy in junior high who apparently (according to a friend of mine who claimed to have seen the games) had a quite impressive collection.
There are reviews of some of 'em on Something Awful in case you're curious... they're pretty amusing actually, though certainly NSFW.
Tell that to my Undead Rogue :(
Yes, in Asian countries, and to some extent in North America. I've seen it on menus, and when I went to the Tokyo fishmarket on a family vacation in Japan, and I saw plenty of dead octopuses amongst the usual fish.
I couldn't eat one myself, though. Not only do I not like most sea food, I've done too much reading about them, so I find them far too cute and I marvel at their intelligence. They're like little boneless ninja with their impressive subtlety, escape artistry, and hunting abilities. They can even change colour and body texture to better match their surroundings... they're far too cool to eat.
And yes, I am a biology nerd. It's a lot harder to view animals as mere objects and automatically less intelligent or aware than every single human when I've read about countless studies that prove otherwise.
Although I consider research on animals an unfortunate necessity, I do have some issues with your argument. For example, you say that animals can be treated as objects because they lack self-awareness... but what about animals that are more intelligent/aware than some humans? A mentally retarded child might be less self-aware than the average octopus, but an octopus is food, and a child somehow fits in a special moral category even though, logically, he/she might be more oblivious to being eaten/used for experiments/otherwise abused. It would also be possible to intentionally engineer humans to be less aware than animals, but would that be ethical? They would feel no pain and be unaware of their suffering, after all, so wouldn't that make them better test subjects?
It just irks me when people try to claim that it's ok do experiment on animals because of their mental capacity or whatever but refuse to apply the same arguments to our own species. If your perspective is that humans are automagically better/sacred/whatever, that's fine, just don't try to justify it with arguments that make no sense.
I'm with you on that one... to some extent.
Let's just say that I was up until 6am on both Friday and Saturday nights last week because I finally got Black & White 2 to work on my computer. That game is just amazing -- probably one of the best I've ever played.
I like other genres too, though. I've wasted long hours on adventure games (King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.), virtual pet games (Petz, Creatures), and various multiplayer RPGs (MUDs in the past, WoW these days). I enjoy Civilization too, and I used to play Prince of Persia, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and Castle Wolfenstein when I was little.
I'm not sure if there's any one big secret behind female gamers. Just as there is no one genre that all men want, there isn't any one thing that every woman will like/want/buy. I mean, we're half the freakin' population -- why do people expect us to somehow NOT be as divided in our likes and dislikes as our male counterparts?
Seriously, just make good games in a variety of different genres and girls will play them.... and at least then you won't lose your entire male audience (along with a lot of girls as well) by dumbing everything down and coating it with pink.
I like being required to do time-consuming things sometimes, mainly for the sense of accomplishment afterwards, plus it gives me an opportunity to socialize while I'm at it. You aren't required to play anyway -- if you don't like farming/grinding games, don't play them. It's just another genre with its own demographic, and if you don't happen to be in that demographic... well... I'm sure you have better things to do than insulting the games that other people prefer.
There will always be people who want to get ahead, no matter what the game design is. Even if you started everyone at level 60, there would always be kids whining about how getting gear was boring. If you gave them l33t gear, they'd whine about how walking all the way over to members of the opposing faction was boring. They all want to be the best, and they don't want to put in the time to do it. You see them sitting in Ironforge begging for hundreds of gold at level 10, you see them sitting in Goldshire begging for a port to Stormwind or whining because they can't just teleport everywhere at will... and you see them using speed hacks and ganking merrily in noob zones.
Perhaps gold buying should be allowed/encouraged to keep those people happy, but I don't think that changing the game design to make it easier for them would be a good thing, particularly because it would ruin the game for everyone else. Some of us happen to like the sense of accomplishment after running a long instance or the risk of stealthing through a contested zone just to do a quest or get a nice item.
I think that the negative effects of farming could (and should) be lessened, however. Although I don't exactly approve of buying gold, if the farmers could be kept out of sight in instances, I'd be a lot happier. I couldn't care less about the 60 rogues perpetually farming Uldaman, but the farmers in Azshara who'll run me off if I even try to do a quest near there... that just irritates me. I don't like the idea of people being paid real world money to basically ruin my fun, and I'd like to see more game designers take farmers (and the effects that they will have on legitimate players) into consideration.
I disagree, primarily because you seem to be working under the assumption that all objectively good games should require little time. Perhaps your ideal game is that way, but I'm the kind of person who prefers to savour my entertainment. I like long books that take weeks to read, and similarly, I like games that require a lot of my time. Something that lets me get to the top quickly just bores me -- I don't feel like I've accomplished much, I haven't had a character long enough to grow attached to it, and I get a distinct feeling of "Oh, is that all there is?".
:)
I would like to see more games of the sort that you like, however. Casual players who want a quick fix should have options too... but not at the expense of players like me. Catering to one demographic instead of another is not a game design "fault": it's a game design "decision."
Incidentally, I'm a university student who's currently on a work term, working full-time. I just choose to spend pretty much all of my free time on gaming