I had an old bundle of mac educationware when I was young. It was loads of fun. Super Muncher, Math Blaster, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, even Klick & Play was educational.
I mean, it was no replacement for a classroom but it was fun and more educational than the alternative.
I thought that nuclear power was limited mainly by fuel. That is, there simply isn't enough uranium to power the US. At the very least, uranium isn't exactly renewable, is it?
I think they can pull it off with WoW, because while the *game* moves on, various subplots don't. They could totally make a movie about Onyxia or C'thun getting pwnzored, because they can choose from any subplot they darn well please. They could even do the origin of Deathwing and the creation of the demon soul, events which have never taken place in WoW the game but are an important part of the lore.
The thing with DnD is not just that it, as a game, has no definite ending. It just doesn't have the same lore structure to back it up. DnD (from an outsider's perspective, at least) lacks NPCs with names who run around doing important stuff. WoW doesn't lack any of that because of its RTS storylines, which since day 1 have guided the path of stories that WoW has told.
Onyxia was killed, C'thun lies dead, Kiljaden was defeated, and now the Lich King has the Alliance and Horde knocking on his front door crying for blood. Stories in WoW end, even if the game itself doesn't.
The first thing that most people will think of when prompted to picture a tool is a hammer. Does that mean that someone who thinks of a chainsaw or a kitchen knife is a nutcase? Those are tools too!
Again, just because the answer is abnormal doesn't mean that you know what causes it or if it's something to worry about. And just because someone thinks of a hammer doesn't mean that they're stable.
Granted, with a sufficiently large sample size you could perhaps figure out the odds of a hammer person being a psychopath vs a chainsaw person. But this just isn't how the test is used, from what I've read, and the subjectivity involved in it invites trouble in a way a stethoscope never could. If you are an expert or know one that can correct me on this, please be my guest.
Kicking people for not being good is just bad. Yeah, noobs are a pain when they're on your team, especially in Tremulous where feeding is a problem. But for most cases, at least when I've played, you can votekick people who are really feeding or newbies who won't listen to reason.
But I really don't like automatic newb kicking, a.k.a. "winner stays on". If you're a really competitive player, than sure, having a newbie on your team sucks. Ideally you shouldn't have one and there are so many players that there's some kind of matchmaking system, or ranked/unranked servers. But the instant you start alienating new players who are trying out the game that you're playing is the instant you start strangling your game to death.
New players are, in a sense, the next generation. When you're small community you can't afford to give up your ability to grow. Can you imagine if that newbie rule was in place, 1.2 was released, and a bunch of newbies joined, but were subsequently kicked out of every other round? Most would just stop playing then and there. They don't want to be second class citizens, then ones you want just want to suck at the game in peace.
Maybe I'm conjecturing too much. I honestly don't think that being nice can actually save Tremulous, or any other game, by itself: the developers are the natural leaders who make stuff happen, and it is hard to do anything without your leaders.
Also, "loser stays on" is also kind of a bad idea, as it's really easy to fake being worse than you actually are just so that you can stay on. It wouldn't be as great in Tremulous as you'd be directly making the other team stronger, but I can still imagine people who would rather lose than be forced to not play because they're too good. The point of people playing your game is so that they can play your game! Not sit out...
The thing is that, as some studies have found, happiness isn't correlated to wealth at all once you get past feeding yourself (and your family if you're married or whatnot). Even if you don't believe the studies, understand that this is the perspective which all anti-money people come from: as long as people can eat, money simply doesn't make them much happier.
It's true, you get to do interesting things with money. But the point is more that money doesn't benefit people nearly as much as we think it does, and you can live a good and happy life without using tons of money to do "interesting" things. Though you're right in that hobbies help (at least the studies say so), the cost of your hobby also isn't proportional to how much you enjoy it, and there are a million different hobbies to choose from, from sailing on yachts to planting tomatoes.
With this kind of mindset then, what is the point of having all that extra money? The point of doing these more expensive interesting things is to be happier. At least, I think, for most people.
The article mentions that US/UK computers are more expensive and that they used a "low value" botnet. So it's possible that they simply used computers from elsewhere in the world, where they don't have that type of law that could be applied internationally.
YES. One time a friend brought over Tekken 2 to my house. Fighting games aren't my favorite, and I sucked too much to even be able to do one special move, but nonetheless after 15 minutes I had to stop playing because of weird cramps in my forearm. It happened again every time I played after that.
That said, I have played just about every *other* video game I've ever liked for more than 4 hours at a time, and have used computers for so long that my eyes ache. That's probably why I'm wearing glasses now. Seriously, moderation is important...
Does not make the long time it takes to level up any easier? Did you not notice that they decreased the experience required to go from 60 to 70? And, earlier, decreased the time it took to go from 1 to 60? And doubled the experience from quest rewards for most of your leveling? If that does not in some way make leveling easier, than what the bloody heck is easier?
Well, it's all well and good to say that since level 50 = level 50 everyone is ok and has happy days. What you fail to realize, however, that now the difference between the level buyer and the level grinder is that they have different level numbers. And since level = power, it's just the same old thing over again with money = power. Someone might possibly be able to keep up by sacrificing his life instead of his money, but who wants to sacrifice their life for a video game? In the end the game is more *honest* about the imbalance between characters, but that doesn't mean that the imbalance doesn't exist.
Now, theoretically speaking, there could be some kind of middle ground where, for the average person playing the game, time spent is effectively equal to money spent in terms of opportunity costs. But aside from the fact that most people are not the average person, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't tend to favor the money buyers more. Money buyers are where the money comes from, and it is always in the company's interest to increase the number of players buying XP. Sure, they can't just resort to forcing everyone to buy XP, but if they can get you hookaed on the game because it's free, then make you want to buy XP to keep up with everyone else... that's what they're after with these systems. A side effect to all this is that the game loses a lot of its game design flexibility and wider appeal to the gaming market. Well, the latter mostly applies to the US.
While your points about MMO mortality are interesting, I do have several objections. Firstly, pen and paper RPGs, while less niche now than they used to be, simply don't have the appeal that MMOs do. You seem to want what simply amounts to, ironically, a completely RP focused MMORPG, and you also want players to make up a lot of the story. I am not being cynical when I say that this forces the game to be niche.
How many people read books as compared to writing them? Make movies as opposed to watching them? Make games as opposed to playing them? Make their own RP characters as opposed to playing an RPG where the characters are already laid out? It is a fact that the creation of art is always done by a fewer number of people than the consumption of art. Creating art is *hard*, appreciating it is easy, so if you restrict your MMO to people who create art than you're automatically removing your chances at mass appeal.
This is the dilemma then. Does the company try to create the content while keeping everyone satisfied on their treadmills? Or do you kill the mass appeal of your MMO by forcing your players to create their own content, because most people want to read stories, not write them? The closest answer to this question is Spore, but Spore, being a single-player game with user-generated content, is the exact opposite of an MMO. Not only does it give the players the tools to create their own content but it lets them take *any* content from the other players that they want and use it. MMOs can't possibly allow this amount of freedom because they have to exist in a single, cohesive world. People would always be creating content *in the hopes of* it getting picked, either by popular vote or by editorial notice, to become part of the game. Anything not picked falls by the wayside, at the very best becoming an option in a menu somewhere, something which you can use when you hang out with your friends.
Still, the idea of harnessing user generated content for an MMO doesn't seem completely implausible. I think it would be worth investigating even if it wasn't stories in particular that players were creating.
Er, onto another point.
Your solution to PvP griefing seems to have issues. For one, unless one of those options that could get restricted is PvP, there's nothing preventing people from not doing anything but PvP griefing. Moreover, if you have a way to tell if someone is griefing or not such that you can restrict their options in a fair manner, why bother restricting options instead of restricting griefing? Moreover, I'm not sure that it's even necessary, since so long as your players can and do take up arms against the griefers your open PvP system with permanent character mortality will perhaps fix itself.
But, the fact is that no matter your griefing controls permanent player mortality alone will kill mass appeal. You may be used to death from Pen and Paper RPGs, but most people don't want to have to adapt to unplanned death, and unplanned death is unsurprisingly unfriendly to new players. Seriously. You just got the new player to step into the avatar's shoes. Then you kill the avatar. Can you blame them for thinking, "What's the point?"
Though you have some interesting points, I just have a really hard time imagining what exactly your story-driven MMO is supposed to be. Each of the few things you have stated are things that, if you implemented them in a MMO which is otherwise WoW-like, would only help to kill it. Perhaps that would be because the WoW-like crowd is a bunch of philistines, but I can't imagine how the replacement crowd would be more than a tiny minority.
I had a friend who worked with protecting least terns that nest on beaches. She often had to help with the electric fence, count the terns, etc. Perhaps because the birds were agitated by her in particular more frequently than the more anonymous beach walkers (not to mention she often had to walk around in the colony itself), the birds just *hated* her.
When you consider that they poop on you when they dive bomb you, that adds up to a lot of bird poo and a pretty gross ball cap at the end of the summer.
Saying that the *whole* concept of spirit/soul exists for the purposes of allowing us to rationalize ecological damage is a gross oversimplification even from an evolutionary standpoint. I can only suppose that you believe in some overarching generalization that any religious person who believes in a soul is somehow more inclined to trash earth, and ignore that belief in the soul is not a belief without religious baggage. You ignore motivations concerning fear of death, fear of moral relativism and pluralism, and fear of a pointless life. A lot of the third leads to suicides (certainly not favorable from an evolutionary standpoint), the effects of the first are complicated (though you can imagine that a tribal society's warriors would fight harder and better if they were not concerned with dying, leading to greater success of the society), and the second threatens people's ability to say that killing other people is wrong (which would also affect evolutionary success of societies).
Now, the three things I listed theoretically empower people to subjugate the world, but notice that it's not simply because these people get to "do whatever they want" instead of "face" their actions. Indeed, the fear of moral relativism for many people is the exact opposite motivation, as those people are unable to think of how they can be accountable for what they do on Earth *without* the soul!
This is all not to say that belief in the soul immediately leads to environmentalism or veganism or something, but... really now. You grossly oversimplify the effects of belief in the soul on the humanity
Audiosurf was the first thing I thought of when I read the last line of the summary.
I don't know if people will exactly be introduced to new stuff though. You don't really get introduced to new things in the game itself (unless you happen to have never heard of dragonforce), but it's possible people will share what songs they like to play on the forums.
In part, you're right. I guess. However, what happened with the Africanized bees (if I remember correctly) was that they put loads of boxes of European (I think that's the term for it) bees in the hopes of diluting the Africanized ones. This didn't work because although the two would breed together the more Africanized the bee the sooner the queen would hatch from the egg... and kill any other developing queens present. So the Europeanized offspring were wiped out before they could reproduce.
This is something altogether different. Their goal *is* population reduction, not domestication of the population... so as long as they get 50% of the females (like they have already in the lab) to waste their time producing offspring that will die, the job is done, they've just killed 50% of the next generation of mosquitoes. So I can't see a similar mistake happening.
My first gaming experience was punching and kicking my older brother over the Nintendo controller when I was a baby. My parents had to tell him to fight back and stop letting me act like a... spoiled baby!
(FYI, I heard this from, of course, my Mom while she was on an "embarrassing baby story" marathon)
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder...
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. - Pope Benedict XVI"
Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but I think you misunderstand what he is saying. He is not saying that homosexuality is ok. Homosexuality is still sin. What he is saying is that, assuming you're a guy, getting hard you see a guy is no more sinful than getting hard when you see a girl. Both of these are automatic responses to, well, people you see when you walk around. The problem is when it gets in your head.
Because this is such a fine line, I would look at a lot of other things he has said pertaining to the issue before concluding that the pope thinks it's "Not so bad" (whatever THAT means. Could mean anything, really). In this quote, at least, because he called it an "objective disorder" it seems more like he's comparing it to being clinically depressed, a kleptomaniac, or any other psychological disorder.
It's the difference between murdering a single person and pinching 385 people hard. One gets you life imprisonment if not capital punishment, the other just makes you a jerk.
What you say is true, and you probably said what I meant to better than I did, but I wasn't saying that having kids is always a good thing, or that it was equal to the pro-child pro-family ethos. I just see birth control as an element which allowed people to more readily act on their wishes to not have children or a family. It's a tool like any other, with both good and bad points.
Hopefully I've explained myself better this time. I'm still not very good at this...
Though, the likelihood of the court martial not punishing him isn't great. If you declare your own conflict illegal, what does that say to the soldiers? Basically, that they shouldn't go. Not exactly what Bush wants at the moment, so the court martial will probably find him guilty.
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I had an old bundle of mac educationware when I was young. It was loads of fun. Super Muncher, Math Blaster, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, even Klick & Play was educational.
I mean, it was no replacement for a classroom but it was fun and more educational than the alternative.
I thought that nuclear power was limited mainly by fuel. That is, there simply isn't enough uranium to power the US. At the very least, uranium isn't exactly renewable, is it?
Am I wrong?
I think they can pull it off with WoW, because while the *game* moves on, various subplots don't. They could totally make a movie about Onyxia or C'thun getting pwnzored, because they can choose from any subplot they darn well please. They could even do the origin of Deathwing and the creation of the demon soul, events which have never taken place in WoW the game but are an important part of the lore.
The thing with DnD is not just that it, as a game, has no definite ending. It just doesn't have the same lore structure to back it up. DnD (from an outsider's perspective, at least) lacks NPCs with names who run around doing important stuff. WoW doesn't lack any of that because of its RTS storylines, which since day 1 have guided the path of stories that WoW has told.
Onyxia was killed, C'thun lies dead, Kiljaden was defeated, and now the Lich King has the Alliance and Horde knocking on his front door crying for blood. Stories in WoW end, even if the game itself doesn't.
The first thing that most people will think of when prompted to picture a tool is a hammer. Does that mean that someone who thinks of a chainsaw or a kitchen knife is a nutcase? Those are tools too!
Again, just because the answer is abnormal doesn't mean that you know what causes it or if it's something to worry about. And just because someone thinks of a hammer doesn't mean that they're stable.
Granted, with a sufficiently large sample size you could perhaps figure out the odds of a hammer person being a psychopath vs a chainsaw person. But this just isn't how the test is used, from what I've read, and the subjectivity involved in it invites trouble in a way a stethoscope never could. If you are an expert or know one that can correct me on this, please be my guest.
I've heard of at least one game which did this until they realized that it wasn't fun to run around crippled.
That's why it was a game, I guess.
They are missing one of the most hilarious and convoluted glitches of all time.
Super Smash Bros Melee: The Black Hole Glitch
2:10 is when it starts to get interesting in the video.
Kicking people for not being good is just bad. Yeah, noobs are a pain when they're on your team, especially in Tremulous where feeding is a problem. But for most cases, at least when I've played, you can votekick people who are really feeding or newbies who won't listen to reason.
But I really don't like automatic newb kicking, a.k.a. "winner stays on". If you're a really competitive player, than sure, having a newbie on your team sucks. Ideally you shouldn't have one and there are so many players that there's some kind of matchmaking system, or ranked/unranked servers. But the instant you start alienating new players who are trying out the game that you're playing is the instant you start strangling your game to death.
New players are, in a sense, the next generation. When you're small community you can't afford to give up your ability to grow. Can you imagine if that newbie rule was in place, 1.2 was released, and a bunch of newbies joined, but were subsequently kicked out of every other round? Most would just stop playing then and there. They don't want to be second class citizens, then ones you want just want to suck at the game in peace.
Maybe I'm conjecturing too much. I honestly don't think that being nice can actually save Tremulous, or any other game, by itself: the developers are the natural leaders who make stuff happen, and it is hard to do anything without your leaders.
Also, "loser stays on" is also kind of a bad idea, as it's really easy to fake being worse than you actually are just so that you can stay on. It wouldn't be as great in Tremulous as you'd be directly making the other team stronger, but I can still imagine people who would rather lose than be forced to not play because they're too good. The point of people playing your game is so that they can play your game! Not sit out...
The thing is that, as some studies have found, happiness isn't correlated to wealth at all once you get past feeding yourself (and your family if you're married or whatnot). Even if you don't believe the studies, understand that this is the perspective which all anti-money people come from: as long as people can eat, money simply doesn't make them much happier.
It's true, you get to do interesting things with money. But the point is more that money doesn't benefit people nearly as much as we think it does, and you can live a good and happy life without using tons of money to do "interesting" things. Though you're right in that hobbies help (at least the studies say so), the cost of your hobby also isn't proportional to how much you enjoy it, and there are a million different hobbies to choose from, from sailing on yachts to planting tomatoes.
With this kind of mindset then, what is the point of having all that extra money? The point of doing these more expensive interesting things is to be happier. At least, I think, for most people.
The article mentions that US/UK computers are more expensive and that they used a "low value" botnet. So it's possible that they simply used computers from elsewhere in the world, where they don't have that type of law that could be applied internationally.
YES. One time a friend brought over Tekken 2 to my house. Fighting games aren't my favorite, and I sucked too much to even be able to do one special move, but nonetheless after 15 minutes I had to stop playing because of weird cramps in my forearm. It happened again every time I played after that.
That said, I have played just about every *other* video game I've ever liked for more than 4 hours at a time, and have used computers for so long that my eyes ache. That's probably why I'm wearing glasses now. Seriously, moderation is important...
Does not make the long time it takes to level up any easier? Did you not notice that they decreased the experience required to go from 60 to 70? And, earlier, decreased the time it took to go from 1 to 60? And doubled the experience from quest rewards for most of your leveling? If that does not in some way make leveling easier, than what the bloody heck is easier?
Well, it's all well and good to say that since level 50 = level 50 everyone is ok and has happy days. What you fail to realize, however, that now the difference between the level buyer and the level grinder is that they have different level numbers. And since level = power, it's just the same old thing over again with money = power. Someone might possibly be able to keep up by sacrificing his life instead of his money, but who wants to sacrifice their life for a video game? In the end the game is more *honest* about the imbalance between characters, but that doesn't mean that the imbalance doesn't exist.
Now, theoretically speaking, there could be some kind of middle ground where, for the average person playing the game, time spent is effectively equal to money spent in terms of opportunity costs. But aside from the fact that most people are not the average person, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't tend to favor the money buyers more. Money buyers are where the money comes from, and it is always in the company's interest to increase the number of players buying XP. Sure, they can't just resort to forcing everyone to buy XP, but if they can get you hookaed on the game because it's free, then make you want to buy XP to keep up with everyone else... that's what they're after with these systems. A side effect to all this is that the game loses a lot of its game design flexibility and wider appeal to the gaming market. Well, the latter mostly applies to the US.
While your points about MMO mortality are interesting, I do have several objections.
Firstly, pen and paper RPGs, while less niche now than they used to be, simply don't have the appeal that MMOs do. You seem to want what simply amounts to, ironically, a completely RP focused MMORPG, and you also want players to make up a lot of the story. I am not being cynical when I say that this forces the game to be niche.
How many people read books as compared to writing them? Make movies as opposed to watching them? Make games as opposed to playing them? Make their own RP characters as opposed to playing an RPG where the characters are already laid out? It is a fact that the creation of art is always done by a fewer number of people than the consumption of art. Creating art is *hard*, appreciating it is easy, so if you restrict your MMO to people who create art than you're automatically removing your chances at mass appeal.
This is the dilemma then. Does the company try to create the content while keeping everyone satisfied on their treadmills? Or do you kill the mass appeal of your MMO by forcing your players to create their own content, because most people want to read stories, not write them? The closest answer to this question is Spore, but Spore, being a single-player game with user-generated content, is the exact opposite of an MMO. Not only does it give the players the tools to create their own content but it lets them take *any* content from the other players that they want and use it. MMOs can't possibly allow this amount of freedom because they have to exist in a single, cohesive world. People would always be creating content *in the hopes of* it getting picked, either by popular vote or by editorial notice, to become part of the game. Anything not picked falls by the wayside, at the very best becoming an option in a menu somewhere, something which you can use when you hang out with your friends.
Still, the idea of harnessing user generated content for an MMO doesn't seem completely implausible. I think it would be worth investigating even if it wasn't stories in particular that players were creating.
Er, onto another point.
Your solution to PvP griefing seems to have issues. For one, unless one of those options that could get restricted is PvP, there's nothing preventing people from not doing anything but PvP griefing. Moreover, if you have a way to tell if someone is griefing or not such that you can restrict their options in a fair manner, why bother restricting options instead of restricting griefing? Moreover, I'm not sure that it's even necessary, since so long as your players can and do take up arms against the griefers your open PvP system with permanent character mortality will perhaps fix itself.
But, the fact is that no matter your griefing controls permanent player mortality alone will kill mass appeal. You may be used to death from Pen and Paper RPGs, but most people don't want to have to adapt to unplanned death, and unplanned death is unsurprisingly unfriendly to new players. Seriously. You just got the new player to step into the avatar's shoes. Then you kill the avatar. Can you blame them for thinking, "What's the point?"
Though you have some interesting points, I just have a really hard time imagining what exactly your story-driven MMO is supposed to be. Each of the few things you have stated are things that, if you implemented them in a MMO which is otherwise WoW-like, would only help to kill it. Perhaps that would be because the WoW-like crowd is a bunch of philistines, but I can't imagine how the replacement crowd would be more than a tiny minority.
So you expect level 30ishes to make a run through Tanaris to complete their quests?
You are a cruel, cruel person.
Didn't they already do that in Wall-E?
I had a friend who worked with protecting least terns that nest on beaches. She often had to help with the electric fence, count the terns, etc. Perhaps because the birds were agitated by her in particular more frequently than the more anonymous beach walkers (not to mention she often had to walk around in the colony itself), the birds just *hated* her.
When you consider that they poop on you when they dive bomb you, that adds up to a lot of bird poo and a pretty gross ball cap at the end of the summer.
Saying that the *whole* concept of spirit/soul exists for the purposes of allowing us to rationalize ecological damage is a gross oversimplification even from an evolutionary standpoint. I can only suppose that you believe in some overarching generalization that any religious person who believes in a soul is somehow more inclined to trash earth, and ignore that belief in the soul is not a belief without religious baggage. You ignore motivations concerning fear of death, fear of moral relativism and pluralism, and fear of a pointless life. A lot of the third leads to suicides (certainly not favorable from an evolutionary standpoint), the effects of the first are complicated (though you can imagine that a tribal society's warriors would fight harder and better if they were not concerned with dying, leading to greater success of the society), and the second threatens people's ability to say that killing other people is wrong (which would also affect evolutionary success of societies).
Now, the three things I listed theoretically empower people to subjugate the world, but notice that it's not simply because these people get to "do whatever they want" instead of "face" their actions. Indeed, the fear of moral relativism for many people is the exact opposite motivation, as those people are unable to think of how they can be accountable for what they do on Earth *without* the soul!
This is all not to say that belief in the soul immediately leads to environmentalism or veganism or something, but... really now. You grossly oversimplify the effects of belief in the soul on the humanity
Audiosurf was the first thing I thought of when I read the last line of the summary.
I don't know if people will exactly be introduced to new stuff though. You don't really get introduced to new things in the game itself (unless you happen to have never heard of dragonforce), but it's possible people will share what songs they like to play on the forums.
In any case, Audiosurf embodies "playing" music.
In part, you're right. I guess. However, what happened with the Africanized bees (if I remember correctly) was that they put loads of boxes of European (I think that's the term for it) bees in the hopes of diluting the Africanized ones. This didn't work because although the two would breed together the more Africanized the bee the sooner the queen would hatch from the egg... and kill any other developing queens present. So the Europeanized offspring were wiped out before they could reproduce.
This is something altogether different. Their goal *is* population reduction, not domestication of the population... so as long as they get 50% of the females (like they have already in the lab) to waste their time producing offspring that will die, the job is done, they've just killed 50% of the next generation of mosquitoes. So I can't see a similar mistake happening.
My first gaming experience was punching and kicking my older brother over the Nintendo controller when I was a baby. My parents had to tell him to fight back and stop letting me act like a... spoiled baby!
(FYI, I heard this from, of course, my Mom while she was on an "embarrassing baby story" marathon)
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder...
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. - Pope Benedict XVI"
Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but I think you misunderstand what he is saying. He is not saying that homosexuality is ok. Homosexuality is still sin. What he is saying is that, assuming you're a guy, getting hard you see a guy is no more sinful than getting hard when you see a girl. Both of these are automatic responses to, well, people you see when you walk around. The problem is when it gets in your head.
Because this is such a fine line, I would look at a lot of other things he has said pertaining to the issue before concluding that the pope thinks it's "Not so bad" (whatever THAT means. Could mean anything, really). In this quote, at least, because he called it an "objective disorder" it seems more like he's comparing it to being clinically depressed, a kleptomaniac, or any other psychological disorder.
It's the difference between murdering a single person and pinching 385 people hard. One gets you life imprisonment if not capital punishment, the other just makes you a jerk.
What you say is true, and you probably said what I meant to better than I did, but I wasn't saying that having kids is always a good thing, or that it was equal to the pro-child pro-family ethos. I just see birth control as an element which allowed people to more readily act on their wishes to not have children or a family. It's a tool like any other, with both good and bad points.
Hopefully I've explained myself better this time. I'm still not very good at this...
Though, the likelihood of the court martial not punishing him isn't great. If you declare your own conflict illegal, what does that say to the soldiers? Basically, that they shouldn't go. Not exactly what Bush wants at the moment, so the court martial will probably find him guilty.
Besides, underwater breathing doesn't prevent fatigue in the deep sea!