Work-life balance is a horrible term. It means, the company gets your time outside of business hours. You are available 24/7. In return you can have flexible work hours, work from home, or take off 1-2 office hours for the official work you did late into the night. Overall the concept isn't all that bad. Until you start crossing 60 hrs/week. At which point those 9+ hours of work every day can really cut out family, friends, and sleep time.
If you sleep & eat 8 hours of the day, you only got 16 hours left. 60 hrs/week would normally mean 14 hours work/commute, 1 hour lunch break, and 2 hours for fun. Plus you got your weekends. Imagine those 9hrs/day spread across 2 or 3 sections of the 16 hours. Exactly what are you going to do with your short free time slots and no weekends? Sacrifice your sleep to extend your free time so you can atleast enjoy your Friday night?
Work-life balance is pretty good as long as the hours stay below 45 per week... which is extremely rare in IT. Above that, the company starts winning out and it should be called "24/7 availability". If HR says they offer work-life balance, understand that they are nothing special, they are just like everyone else. You should ask what they offer that others don't. What makes their company special compared to the rest? HR rarely knows how to answer that. Understand that you probably won't get the job if you do ask that.
5000 respondents is a sufficient enough sample size to make generalizations... sometimes many non-generalizations. The size isn't the issue in as much the population it actually represents and if that population is representative of the whole IT sector. Not having read the article (who does?) but per the little in the summary, I think we are good on the sample size.
Anyway, I don't think a lot of companies are fixated on the idea that minor perks will translate to huge moral boosts. If they were, they would also understand that lack of said minor perks would result in the opposite. And I have yet to meet a client that thinks about either.
I think in IT, it is mostly the "no sense of mission" that depresses IT folks. There are "requirements documents" that aren't worth the pixels and Sharepoint storage they take up. Deadlines that assume that time machines have been invented. And "approvals" and "sign offs" that might as well be check boxes & a meeting attendee list because no one reads what they are signing off on.
All these end up with a mission path that keeps changing while not caring about the change costs. Its like taking a flight where the guys in business class keep changing where they want to land. Eventually they emergency land somewhere random or crash land somewhere or just crash and burn. Of course those business folks all have parachutes.
Whats depressing is that management is fully aware of the "reasons" why something went off rails, but continues to make the same mistake on all subsequent projects. We document lessons learned for the sake of write-only documentation and nothing more.
I am sorry, but that statement just is so stupid on face value. I understand that most people say "Oh company X doesn't really do scrum" or "Scrum isn't done right anywhere." etc. But if your formal process is to actually have a meeting AFTER business hours... you have a pretty serious problem; least of which is that you aren't implementing scrum. I can understand if you got an off shore team in India/Turkey/Whocaresville. If you need to sync with them during their business hours, then you formally adjust YOUR business hours. You don't come in at 8am... you come on at 3pm and work till midnight.
Forget the IT "Mythical Man month" the other poster said. How do century old disciplines like HR, Legal, and "common sense" not find the above stupid as shit? You are implementing scrum because you have stupid processes that lead to the above and as proven a billion times, decreases return & productivity. But you can't get out of the inefficiency by using the same stupid processes and just labeling it "scrum".
Lower interest rates do not make a home cheaper. Its basically offset by a rise in the house price. The monthly payment affordability of someone doesn't change with rates or house prices. All that happens is what percent of that payment goes to interest and what to the loan. Lower interest rates, higher house price. Sure you can "afford" a more expensive home, but with all prices going up, you basically end up with the same "value". So if the rates today all of a sudden jumped to 7%, you can bet the home prices get depressed.
What will more likely happen is that house prices are supposed to go up by 5% but will only go up by 1% due to the interest rate correction. Keeping it low just "inflates" the house price. There are winners and loses when interest rates change. From an investment view point: rates going down, good time to sell; going up, good time to buy). The problem is moving out of the norm. And we been out of the norm too long.
On a personal network... I don't care, your choice. But on a business network, this is a no brainer. Its clearly from IBM's "No shit Sherlock" department. Some intern needed to write a security recommendation. Few enterprises have a business need for Tor, so why not block it? What good reason is there to have it unblocked?
As for where it stops ummm... when it actually hinders your business? If you business doesn't have ANY need to load webpages (ie: the book network at a stock exchange), then yes, you block standard webpages. Of course if you business relies on Tor (clearly not a publicly traded company); then you wouldn't block it either. Additionally, you may not block it on your dev, guest, or honeypot network.
Its a lot more complicated than that. ion thrust, photon thrust, em thurst, etc are nothing new. But this appears to be.
Imagine a closed plastic box that has a propeller attached on the outside. You put it in water, turn it on, and it moves in a direction. Common, simple, normal physics.
Now fill that box with water, put the propeller on the inside, and turn it on. Does it move in a direction? Of course not.
From what I understand, replace the propeller with microwave generator and for certain shapes of the closed box, the thing appears to move very very little. So this is the controversy, is it really moving or is it just a measurement issue where the micro thrust is within the measuring instrument's margin of error.
If it is really moving... WHY? That is ground breaking and it opens up a new arena in the field of physics.
Honestly, for folks that are ok at managing budgets, there just isn't a need for "quick cash" here in the US. Almost everyone accepts cards*. Many people I know hardly go through a $20 bill in 3 months! You can transfer cash to almost any bank in 24 hours and withdraw it 24 hours later for free. Thou you do need to setup and link the accounts up front (again managing budgets). Most bank networks have it instantaneous within their network. We have 3 weeks to pay almost all bills and that's more than enough time to setup and execute autopays.
Quite frankly, there just isn't enough demand in the US to justify the switch from batch overnight transactions to costly just-in-time transactions (or some appearance of). I just used my credit card for 88 cents at Walmart.com.
* = Government services & housing usually don't, but they accept personal checks.
Actually you want to have a secondary checking account that is linked to many systems. Your primary checking account and the savings account (high interest online account) should be the ones that are not linked to anything but your secondary "spending" checking account.
There is so little "content" and "depth" in today's games. Tons of pixels animating a rain drop falling off a leaf but that adds so little to the game. The per pixel market value is going down but the cost of making it keeps going up. The industry is more geared toward making choose-your-own-adventure movies than an actual game. Such a sad state of affairs that I hope devs leaving will eventually fix.
Yes, I HATE this about the phone, cable, and internet providers. I wish they would stop assuming that I am some retard. I did the assessment, I know what you offer, and I personally found it lacking.
They came up with some dollar value of their service(s) and it is asinine & disrespectful that they think we must agree to their determination. Clearly I am already pissed at the provider, the least they can do is quickly accept that we don't have a deal and make it a smooth separation and try again later. Funny, if they got rid of the legions of sales and "retention specialists", they could probably offer the service at the value I see it and not actually lose me. But then I guess our national unemployment rate would double.
Exactly! The current telecoms could have always done it, they just never had a need to. The "Avalon" community here will get Google Fiber. But the city of Alpharetta that it is in will not. Multiple 100+ house hold communities and apartment complexes within 2 miles of the community will not get Google. Thus all those have heard nothing from Comcast or AT&T's DSL about better service.
I always liked this idea. The H1B is tied to the employee, not the company's position. Have the person be similarly powered as a native. And after 2 years, the employee can take it else where. The person would need to continue renewing the H1B. Renewal can't be declined (unless user is a criminal or terrorist, etc) but can't go more than 6 months without a job, else it will expire. If the company fires the person in less than 2 years, the H1B visa expires.
This way it benefits everyone equally. The company takes a risk in getting an H1B so will only hire true vetted requirements, and that person is incentivized to do their best. The person isn't stuck with a horrible employer and can seek higher salaries but still can't lazy off. The natives will need to compete, but atleast it will be fair. The country can manage the number of H1s in the system and know that they are actively contributing to society without concentrating those H1s in a small group of companies. And the system downsizes naturally in a recession.
In this plan, I think taxes should be the same, but the benefits such as social security or 401s etc shouldn't be tallied. This will encourage the person to either seek better options or reinvest in their home country or become part of ours.
REALLY SLASHDOT? Ok, we got random annoying ACs out there along with this principal. But our moderation system reflects us on the whole... The parent post should have been modded to 0.
So what is the point of the parent? By promoting it to +4 Informative, what are we saying? That we should be mob hammering this person into submission by DDOSing them? That mailbox and phone number will become useless for the purposes that it was actually meant for.
Some stupid school read their stupid policy & guidelines book and it impacts one student. We can let the system take care of itself here and wait for more instances before going "One time at band camp" on it.
No country has ground to a halt using silver, gold or good old bartering. But that doesn't mean we should use those and slow down our economy.
Those other countries have a high fraud rate and that is why they have such systems. Having been there too and with foreign bank accounts, I can tell you that even with those measures, fraud still exists. There are many cases where one stranger officially sold another's land! Now tell me how easy it is over there to catch a criminal or to prove you didn't purchase something. It's far harder than the US; people don't even try.
The fraud rate in the US system is actually quite minimum compared to the total commerce the system enables. It isnt high enough yet to warrant the additional transaction costs. The banks would love to go to the PIN and Chip system... but they already did studies that showed the reduction in commerce wasn't worth the reduction in fraud. Visa and MC did the whole Verify by Visa and MC... Initially both made it mandatory but quickly turned it optional as they realized the commerce hit.
Thank you! There is so much less festering and feces here than the other parts of the world. Thou you seem to have more of one color vs another. Oh well, red or blue, not much different than green or dark blue or dark red.
Seriously? Credit card lending is a horrible way to obtain funds. Its just quite stupid... on both sides. The person receiving funds can get a far better rate from a bank. The agency issuing the funds has very little recourse if you choose not to pay it back, other than tanking the credit score. For someone with bad credit, they probably don't have a credit card, but if some stupid agency provides one, that's on them. Credit card rates are mostly high because the loan is not secure and the risk is pretty much on the agency. The only reason it works is because of the ignorance & goodness of the person paying the money back.
What is and how do you verify "I". What is reasonable doubt? Nice terms to make a point, but the real world isn't that black and white. Too lax and those two are the reasons why banks dished out government IOUs for housing. Too strict and we have today; banks won't lend money to a person with excellent credit.
Verification and doubt reduction have costs, which are transaction costs that if too high negate the commerce path itself. The banks and credit industry have actually gotten pretty good at balancing these two items. Now if we were talking about the issue of having your identity itself violated, I agree that something needs to be done. The current system sees that as soft money and doesn't tally it into the equation. It should have a per incident price point written in law so that the system's scale is better balanced with the consumer's pain accommodated.
The point of password complexity requirements has nothing to do with security. It's about the check box some auditor or lawyer needs to check. People assume it leads to security, but only because they see it in a vacuum.
Complexity introduces incremental passwords, common passwords, safes, post its, support costs, complacency, single point of failures, easier social engineering, and easy passwords. All of which work against security. They don't have check boxes for these because they are hard to understand and measure.
So is complexity checked? Yes, OK move along sir. I SAID MOVE ALONG. GOOD DAY!
Agreed, but what I am saying is that the word "gaming" has been so successfully hijacked not only at the financial level, but also the social/consumer level that we can't use the old definition anymore. Those of us who still define gaming the old way and basically puke at the current environment are so few and insignificant that we are the odd balls. We are that rambling random guy in the street that has "End of the World is Here" sign on our shoulders.
Gaming as currently defined is considered to be extremely successful. People paid $100 for Destiny and 2 DLCs 12-18 months before release! The game was a shell of what was advertised and there is no boycott or riot. There are few industries that can claim such success, let alone escape fraud investigations. I am surprised theaters haven't followed suit and don't sell no-refund tickets 6-12 months in advance at $12 (vs $15) for new movies.
I don't think its the dark ages. The gaming world has just been redefined and left us old timers out. From my view, the average game is now an interactive movie. The old school definition of "fun" has long ago died. Its all about graphics and "showing" a story or a cool suit or a cool weapon design. In some ways its just playing dress up with dolls, or action figures, but now they call them "video games" and the accessories are DLCs.
Gone are the complex paper,rock,scissor strategies or couch coops and personal connections. Now its very anonymous and the player is the key content in the game without which other players would stop playing. Its up to the player to create the micro stories like kids used to with dolls/action figures with their imagination. The game itself is just a catalyst to bring the faceless masses in for the movie watching and of each other.
As for us old school gamers, we are pretty much irrelevant. The current set of gamers are on mobile phones and only online. They need instant gratification and once the next one comes out or the trophies are achieved, they forget the last. No significant number of them care about replay or nostalgia. And they will pay up front and months in advance based on the cover or press release. Whether it meets their expectations or value is irrelevant, because that money is spent and the next press release just came out. Not much different than the IT stock buyers in the last 90s.
I miss the old days but.. damn-it those kids are on my lawn again!
Slashdot Mirror
HUH.... I think you just answered which of the two groups you fell into.
Work-life balance is a horrible term. It means, the company gets your time outside of business hours. You are available 24/7. In return you can have flexible work hours, work from home, or take off 1-2 office hours for the official work you did late into the night. Overall the concept isn't all that bad. Until you start crossing 60 hrs/week. At which point those 9+ hours of work every day can really cut out family, friends, and sleep time.
If you sleep & eat 8 hours of the day, you only got 16 hours left. 60 hrs/week would normally mean 14 hours work/commute, 1 hour lunch break, and 2 hours for fun. Plus you got your weekends. Imagine those 9hrs/day spread across 2 or 3 sections of the 16 hours. Exactly what are you going to do with your short free time slots and no weekends? Sacrifice your sleep to extend your free time so you can atleast enjoy your Friday night?
Work-life balance is pretty good as long as the hours stay below 45 per week... which is extremely rare in IT. Above that, the company starts winning out and it should be called "24/7 availability". If HR says they offer work-life balance, understand that they are nothing special, they are just like everyone else. You should ask what they offer that others don't. What makes their company special compared to the rest? HR rarely knows how to answer that. Understand that you probably won't get the job if you do ask that.
5000 respondents is a sufficient enough sample size to make generalizations... sometimes many non-generalizations. The size isn't the issue in as much the population it actually represents and if that population is representative of the whole IT sector. Not having read the article (who does?) but per the little in the summary, I think we are good on the sample size.
Anyway, I don't think a lot of companies are fixated on the idea that minor perks will translate to huge moral boosts. If they were, they would also understand that lack of said minor perks would result in the opposite. And I have yet to meet a client that thinks about either.
I think in IT, it is mostly the "no sense of mission" that depresses IT folks. There are "requirements documents" that aren't worth the pixels and Sharepoint storage they take up. Deadlines that assume that time machines have been invented. And "approvals" and "sign offs" that might as well be check boxes & a meeting attendee list because no one reads what they are signing off on.
All these end up with a mission path that keeps changing while not caring about the change costs. Its like taking a flight where the guys in business class keep changing where they want to land. Eventually they emergency land somewhere random or crash land somewhere or just crash and burn. Of course those business folks all have parachutes.
Whats depressing is that management is fully aware of the "reasons" why something went off rails, but continues to make the same mistake on all subsequent projects. We document lessons learned for the sake of write-only documentation and nothing more.
>> We have scrum at 11pm...
I am sorry, but that statement just is so stupid on face value. I understand that most people say "Oh company X doesn't really do scrum" or "Scrum isn't done right anywhere." etc. But if your formal process is to actually have a meeting AFTER business hours... you have a pretty serious problem; least of which is that you aren't implementing scrum. I can understand if you got an off shore team in India/Turkey/Whocaresville. If you need to sync with them during their business hours, then you formally adjust YOUR business hours. You don't come in at 8am... you come on at 3pm and work till midnight.
Forget the IT "Mythical Man month" the other poster said. How do century old disciplines like HR, Legal, and "common sense" not find the above stupid as shit? You are implementing scrum because you have stupid processes that lead to the above and as proven a billion times, decreases return & productivity. But you can't get out of the inefficiency by using the same stupid processes and just labeling it "scrum".
Lower interest rates do not make a home cheaper. Its basically offset by a rise in the house price. The monthly payment affordability of someone doesn't change with rates or house prices. All that happens is what percent of that payment goes to interest and what to the loan. Lower interest rates, higher house price. Sure you can "afford" a more expensive home, but with all prices going up, you basically end up with the same "value". So if the rates today all of a sudden jumped to 7%, you can bet the home prices get depressed.
What will more likely happen is that house prices are supposed to go up by 5% but will only go up by 1% due to the interest rate correction. Keeping it low just "inflates" the house price. There are winners and loses when interest rates change. From an investment view point: rates going down, good time to sell; going up, good time to buy). The problem is moving out of the norm. And we been out of the norm too long.
On a personal network... I don't care, your choice. But on a business network, this is a no brainer. Its clearly from IBM's "No shit Sherlock" department. Some intern needed to write a security recommendation. Few enterprises have a business need for Tor, so why not block it? What good reason is there to have it unblocked?
As for where it stops ummm... when it actually hinders your business? If you business doesn't have ANY need to load webpages (ie: the book network at a stock exchange), then yes, you block standard webpages. Of course if you business relies on Tor (clearly not a publicly traded company); then you wouldn't block it either. Additionally, you may not block it on your dev, guest, or honeypot network.
Its a lot more complicated than that. ion thrust, photon thrust, em thurst, etc are nothing new. But this appears to be.
Imagine a closed plastic box that has a propeller attached on the outside. You put it in water, turn it on, and it moves in a direction. Common, simple, normal physics.
Now fill that box with water, put the propeller on the inside, and turn it on. Does it move in a direction? Of course not.
From what I understand, replace the propeller with microwave generator and for certain shapes of the closed box, the thing appears to move very very little. So this is the controversy, is it really moving or is it just a measurement issue where the micro thrust is within the measuring instrument's margin of error.
If it is really moving... WHY? That is ground breaking and it opens up a new arena in the field of physics.
Honestly, for folks that are ok at managing budgets, there just isn't a need for "quick cash" here in the US. Almost everyone accepts cards*. Many people I know hardly go through a $20 bill in 3 months! You can transfer cash to almost any bank in 24 hours and withdraw it 24 hours later for free. Thou you do need to setup and link the accounts up front (again managing budgets). Most bank networks have it instantaneous within their network. We have 3 weeks to pay almost all bills and that's more than enough time to setup and execute autopays.
Quite frankly, there just isn't enough demand in the US to justify the switch from batch overnight transactions to costly just-in-time transactions (or some appearance of). I just used my credit card for 88 cents at Walmart.com.
* = Government services & housing usually don't, but they accept personal checks.
Actually you want to have a secondary checking account that is linked to many systems. Your primary checking account and the savings account (high interest online account) should be the ones that are not linked to anything but your secondary "spending" checking account.
So.... don't use debit cards? But credit cards are ok?
The only thing safer is an elevator :)
Mod parent up. Well said.
There is so little "content" and "depth" in today's games. Tons of pixels animating a rain drop falling off a leaf but that adds so little to the game. The per pixel market value is going down but the cost of making it keeps going up. The industry is more geared toward making choose-your-own-adventure movies than an actual game. Such a sad state of affairs that I hope devs leaving will eventually fix.
Yes, I HATE this about the phone, cable, and internet providers. I wish they would stop assuming that I am some retard. I did the assessment, I know what you offer, and I personally found it lacking.
They came up with some dollar value of their service(s) and it is asinine & disrespectful that they think we must agree to their determination. Clearly I am already pissed at the provider, the least they can do is quickly accept that we don't have a deal and make it a smooth separation and try again later. Funny, if they got rid of the legions of sales and "retention specialists", they could probably offer the service at the value I see it and not actually lose me. But then I guess our national unemployment rate would double.
Exactly! The current telecoms could have always done it, they just never had a need to. The "Avalon" community here will get Google Fiber. But the city of Alpharetta that it is in will not. Multiple 100+ house hold communities and apartment complexes within 2 miles of the community will not get Google. Thus all those have heard nothing from Comcast or AT&T's DSL about better service.
I always liked this idea. The H1B is tied to the employee, not the company's position. Have the person be similarly powered as a native. And after 2 years, the employee can take it else where. The person would need to continue renewing the H1B. Renewal can't be declined (unless user is a criminal or terrorist, etc) but can't go more than 6 months without a job, else it will expire. If the company fires the person in less than 2 years, the H1B visa expires.
This way it benefits everyone equally. The company takes a risk in getting an H1B so will only hire true vetted requirements, and that person is incentivized to do their best. The person isn't stuck with a horrible employer and can seek higher salaries but still can't lazy off. The natives will need to compete, but atleast it will be fair. The country can manage the number of H1s in the system and know that they are actively contributing to society without concentrating those H1s in a small group of companies. And the system downsizes naturally in a recession.
In this plan, I think taxes should be the same, but the benefits such as social security or 401s etc shouldn't be tallied. This will encourage the person to either seek better options or reinvest in their home country or become part of ours.
zero * infinity = ??
?? depends on how the factors are approached.
REALLY SLASHDOT? Ok, we got random annoying ACs out there along with this principal. But our moderation system reflects us on the whole... The parent post should have been modded to 0.
So what is the point of the parent? By promoting it to +4 Informative, what are we saying? That we should be mob hammering this person into submission by DDOSing them? That mailbox and phone number will become useless for the purposes that it was actually meant for.
Some stupid school read their stupid policy & guidelines book and it impacts one student. We can let the system take care of itself here and wait for more instances before going "One time at band camp" on it.
Doesn't the end if and end loop become the same crap but more verbose once you have nested ifs and loops?
No country has ground to a halt using silver, gold or good old bartering. But that doesn't mean we should use those and slow down our economy.
Those other countries have a high fraud rate and that is why they have such systems. Having been there too and with foreign bank accounts, I can tell you that even with those measures, fraud still exists. There are many cases where one stranger officially sold another's land! Now tell me how easy it is over there to catch a criminal or to prove you didn't purchase something. It's far harder than the US; people don't even try.
The fraud rate in the US system is actually quite minimum compared to the total commerce the system enables. It isnt high enough yet to warrant the additional transaction costs. The banks would love to go to the PIN and Chip system... but they already did studies that showed the reduction in commerce wasn't worth the reduction in fraud. Visa and MC did the whole Verify by Visa and MC... Initially both made it mandatory but quickly turned it optional as they realized the commerce hit.
Thank you! There is so much less festering and feces here than the other parts of the world. Thou you seem to have more of one color vs another. Oh well, red or blue, not much different than green or dark blue or dark red.
Seriously? Credit card lending is a horrible way to obtain funds. Its just quite stupid... on both sides. The person receiving funds can get a far better rate from a bank. The agency issuing the funds has very little recourse if you choose not to pay it back, other than tanking the credit score. For someone with bad credit, they probably don't have a credit card, but if some stupid agency provides one, that's on them. Credit card rates are mostly high because the loan is not secure and the risk is pretty much on the agency. The only reason it works is because of the ignorance & goodness of the person paying the money back.
What is and how do you verify "I". What is reasonable doubt? Nice terms to make a point, but the real world isn't that black and white. Too lax and those two are the reasons why banks dished out government IOUs for housing. Too strict and we have today; banks won't lend money to a person with excellent credit.
Verification and doubt reduction have costs, which are transaction costs that if too high negate the commerce path itself. The banks and credit industry have actually gotten pretty good at balancing these two items. Now if we were talking about the issue of having your identity itself violated, I agree that something needs to be done. The current system sees that as soft money and doesn't tally it into the equation. It should have a per incident price point written in law so that the system's scale is better balanced with the consumer's pain accommodated.
The point of password complexity requirements has nothing to do with security. It's about the check box some auditor or lawyer needs to check. People assume it leads to security, but only because they see it in a vacuum.
Complexity introduces incremental passwords, common passwords, safes, post its, support costs, complacency, single point of failures, easier social engineering, and easy passwords. All of which work against security. They don't have check boxes for these because they are hard to understand and measure.
So is complexity checked? Yes, OK move along sir. I SAID MOVE ALONG. GOOD DAY!
Agreed, but what I am saying is that the word "gaming" has been so successfully hijacked not only at the financial level, but also the social/consumer level that we can't use the old definition anymore. Those of us who still define gaming the old way and basically puke at the current environment are so few and insignificant that we are the odd balls. We are that rambling random guy in the street that has "End of the World is Here" sign on our shoulders.
Gaming as currently defined is considered to be extremely successful. People paid $100 for Destiny and 2 DLCs 12-18 months before release! The game was a shell of what was advertised and there is no boycott or riot. There are few industries that can claim such success, let alone escape fraud investigations. I am surprised theaters haven't followed suit and don't sell no-refund tickets 6-12 months in advance at $12 (vs $15) for new movies.
I don't think its the dark ages. The gaming world has just been redefined and left us old timers out. From my view, the average game is now an interactive movie. The old school definition of "fun" has long ago died. Its all about graphics and "showing" a story or a cool suit or a cool weapon design. In some ways its just playing dress up with dolls, or action figures, but now they call them "video games" and the accessories are DLCs.
Gone are the complex paper,rock,scissor strategies or couch coops and personal connections. Now its very anonymous and the player is the key content in the game without which other players would stop playing. Its up to the player to create the micro stories like kids used to with dolls/action figures with their imagination. The game itself is just a catalyst to bring the faceless masses in for the movie watching and of each other.
As for us old school gamers, we are pretty much irrelevant. The current set of gamers are on mobile phones and only online. They need instant gratification and once the next one comes out or the trophies are achieved, they forget the last. No significant number of them care about replay or nostalgia. And they will pay up front and months in advance based on the cover or press release. Whether it meets their expectations or value is irrelevant, because that money is spent and the next press release just came out. Not much different than the IT stock buyers in the last 90s.
I miss the old days but .. damn-it those kids are on my lawn again!