Pkeod

Most everything you do in life is chasing highs and reinforcing biological addictions or psychological habits. Going for a run? Chasing that runner's high, scratching that addiction itch. Having sex? Getting that orgasm high, scratching that addiction itch. Eating food you love? Getting that sugar high, scratching that addiction itch.

Research on slot machine players: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1705333...

Utilitarian gamblers, in essence, are looking for something to do. Many are seniors, who are looking to kill time, reduce boredom, or simply get out of the house – and they are less motivated by financial rewards or excitement. Some enjoy people-watching as much as the actual slot play.

Excitement gamblers are looking for a buzz – the thrill of winning a jackpot, relaxing and having a good time. This group doesn’t like progressive machines with bigger payouts because they don’t pay off frequently enough to provide the excitement.

Multipurpose gamblers tend to be younger, less educated, have lower household income, and are less likely to be married and own a home. Their motivation is to have fun and win money, and they are attracted to themed games and other machines they consider “lucky” or fun to play.

Relaxation gamblers were the most educated and well-to-do, and played slot machines for the socialization and fun. However, they also like to stay within their denomination – usually 25-cent machines or $1 machines, and often look at slot play as a way to relieve day-to-day stress.

There are PopCap themed slot machines already. Their characters are just as "kid friendly" in the sense that they are simple and stylized, but again PopCap's products are for adults and not kids.

>One thing we should be able to agree on, though, is that using childrens-book cartoon characters in gambling products does no-one any favours.

FarmVille was never made for kids or to appeal to kids. Children are not the only ones who like cartoon characters. None of this is marketed to kids. If they marketed on the same channels or sites kids go to then I'd agree with you but as is aesthetics alone is not enough.

Just because it does not appeal to you does not mean it doesn't appeal to other adults. It does not mean it automatically appeals to kids either.

>Should parents keep their children in a virtual home prison?

I'm not about to tell parents what to do, but if I were a parent I would want my kids to be as wordly as possible and to understand the way things work as soon as possible. Understanding that gambling is not a way to make money (unless you own the machines) is a good thing to know. It's not about being a hawk and watching every action, and banning things so there is no chance of anyone being exposed. It's about building up key knowledge, allowing them to make mistakes, and having a positive enough environment where they can safely learn from their mistakes.

Most people who do gamble with slots do it for entertainment only: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1705333...

Simplified shapes? Must be appealing to all small children! I remember being a kid and I liked cooler, detailed things. Likewise as an adult I really appreciate simplified designs. It may appeal to some kids but not all.

UK being a nanny state is not a good thing. It is the job of the parent to give and take access to things. Let's ban all graphics because they could appeal to some kid out there whose parents are irresponsible.

Do you "waste" money on entertainment? Should what you value be imposed on others?

What's wrong with it?

Should people be ineligible if they are born infertile?

We could say that we probably won't have enough younger people to take care of the older people as birth rates decrease, but I think robots and AI will be more developed by then that either more people will be available to take care of the elderly and or the robots will do it along with all other service and manual labor jobs.

No matter what happens we will adapt.

44% isn't a high divorce rate? It is higher than it has been ever in our history. 6% away from flipping a coin that your marriage will fail. No thanks.

The proportion of children born outside of marriage, and more likely to not have strong father figures, is growing every year. Most mothers get custody, and most children don't have a strong father figure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most...

The marriage rate in the US is dropping drastically as well. Marriage doesn't make sense. Guys have nothing to gain from marriage and only things to lose. No, you don't get loyalty when you get married, and you don't get any of the other things you want. Most guys say they get less of what they want from their spouse after marriage.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s...

No family units means kids lose out on the value of a strong family with strong parent figures worthy of being role models.

There are genetic qualities which are passed on silently and only expressed after certain situations occur. If this were not the case there would be only heterosexual people.

Most people who seem stupid are only stupid because they lack what equally capable, but perceived as gifted or intelligent, people have. Most people have much the same genetic wetware capabilities - brain damaged people an exception - the biggest biological differences between most people are in hormones, and changes in hormones are largely a product of environment and can be changed just as knowledge can be changed. A human's potential is able to be expressed with an abundance of knowledge and the lack of enforced ideology. Allow people reference, perspective, and freedom and they will seem like smarter people than whose without. The sooner people have the best situation the better but it is never too old for someone to get smart.

Upbringing is much less important for development than genetics? No. Single mothers who raise kids in poverty with no father figure raise more daughters who have more kids without getting married or even involving a strong father figure (repeating the cycle), and more sons who become criminals or forever doing minimum wage jobs and going nowhere. Parenting > culture > genetics. Your genetic predisposition does not make you who you are. A person who is sheltered and not able to see the world is much worse off than a person who is given perspective about the world and able to expand their library of thoughts.

Which of my opinions do you want me to show are informed by data?

What's wrong with valuing yourself? The world owes you nothing and you are the only person who is responsible for your own well being and happiness.

Be wary of friendships which are one sided. If a person doesn't value their own person and they constantly need you to help them that's not friendship it's dependency. I've never ejected people out of my life the first time they needed help, but I have given up on people when I realized I was wasting my time. Many people who need help can only change with their own effort.

Every relationship is one of opportunity. Think about that!

/r/childfree is still a useful place for people to gain some perspective - that there are actually people who never want kids and have mostly good, personal reasons for this. Not everyone cares about the fact that other countries will likely dominate in the future. Hey, good for them.

For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.

It is our biological imperative to reproduce, but with humanity we can rise above our animal imperatives and impulses. I choose to avoid many things which push the biological buttons.

How old are your kids? Even with the special bond parents can have with their children that's not a guarantee things will be good. I know awesome parents who have raised horrible people. I know awesome kids who turned into horrible people after they left the nest. Most people seem to eject their aging parents into nursing homes when they are too old, because people would rather live their lives than take care of their parents. Good friendships last forever and don't require you to change diapers in the early years while convincing yourself its all worth it for the few golden moments if you don't happen to be forced to miss them because of work or just chaos.

Convincing me to want to have kids would first require me being convinced that I should want to ever get married. :)

Out of my graduating highschool class, I only know of one woman who isn't now a parent.

Will it soon be my civic duty to have kids? I'll still say no.

In many polls when as if people would not have kids if they could do their life again they said they would not have kids.

It's the truth. Raising children without being neglectful takes a serious amount of time and money. If you don't have the money you have to go and make the money and that means paying someone else to watch your kids to take the chance of them raising them for you.

Yes, that's the reality. Statistics of divorce say so. Not only are you likely to get divorced, as there is usually more incentive to wives to ask for one, but if you live in a state which has alimony lives you could be stuck paying money.

I'm not jaded or negative. I'm an an extremely realistic (data is emotional) person who is very excited to live life well and do a lot of great things - I live in the real world, but I'm also very optimistic with what I do choose to do.

The reality in the US is a mother can move across the country while a father is forced to pay child support, if he moves he can likely lose his well paying job, and if he can't find a just as good job where he moves he could be put into jail for non-payment (debtor's jail!).

Friends are the family you choose. I would rather go out and make good friends than hope my kids would become good friends.

I do not have kids and I do not plan to. If I had kids I would want to raise them right, and I know that I really wouldn't be able to do what I want to do in life and that.

Everyone dies alone.

YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can't live your dreams and raise your kids right. It's not just a financial lens for many people it's a time lens too.

Having kids whose lives you very probably won't even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.

Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it's a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.

10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home

http://reddit.com/r/childfree

http://www.leangains.com/

Check a few articles on most popular.

Enjoy your limits.

>People are measured relative to others, if everyone were what we currently deem as attractive then many who are currently attractive would certainly seem ugly for example.

Nope. It is not that others must suffer for you to have a good life much the same as it not be required for your neighbor to be ugly for you to be beautiful. Much of what you think as really true is not.

>If 2 people dedicate their lives to running 100 metres in the fastest time then eventually one will be faster than the other due to innate genetic factors.

This is the world you live in: I have a predisposition and I'm going to stick to it and within my natural limits.

This is the world I live in: fuck the rules.

> innate ability is still important

To be the very best that no one ever was? Sure it is, but it is largely inconsequential in the reality we live in! Like I said before: probably no one here can be a NFL quarterback as they are now... but they can still achieve nearly everything within their desires still! The reality is that the majority of people will think like you do are held back by their beliefs, while less innate people blow past them. Even if you think there are limits... they really do not matter. There will always be opportunity for you to have as much success as you choose to have. If you deny this then you will remain one of the many who choose to stay as you are.

As far as the brain goes, the differences in innate ability are so very unimportant compared to choice. A person who is born one way with a healthy brain is not any better or worse in permanence than someone with an equally healthy brain. They both can be great if they through their lives choose to be.

There are people who can play chess better than I can, who have higher "IQs", and yet I make more money than they do. Intelligence is not a magic number which increases in one way which allows you to do great things automatically with no effort. An average person (based on IQ points, which do NOT measure all the the ways for people to have potential for intelligence) can do far greater, meaningful things through willpower, and willpower is something we all have only still most people do not understand how to use it effectively. It's just knowledge, not innate ability. We are all very similar genetically and we all have very similar with our potential for greatness. Sure we all cannot be great in the same ways... like many of us here couldn't be NFL quarterbackers if we wanted to, but still ultimately with the things we want and the things we want to do the only thing holding us back are our beliefs.

Any kind of creative person who is great is not born that way. It is not innate ability. Watch and listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnflBERf2zM It is the same with anyone who has "intelligence" - like I said, there is no smart people, only people who are exposed to more and work harder to learn more. Yes, people can be brain damaged with real limits, but even they can be greater than lazy people who waste their potential. Even people with extremely limiting abilities can use what brain tissue they have, expand their mind, and blow away all we thought we knew as impossible.

>Well informed is also a sticky concept, there is a lot of information out there. Much of it conflicting, it requires skill,time and a certain amount of luck to use the right information to make the right decisions.

Yes, so, be exposed to as much as possible, and think. That's what I'm saying it takes.

>Sadly not everyone can be great, if everyone were great then nobody would be great.

Yeah, no. Wow. This is like saying not everyone can be happy, because we need some unhappy people for the rest of us to have some perspective. Or that we need ugly people to feel good about how good we look. Or that we need gold stars to gloat over how others don't have gold stars. No.

You have so many self limiting beliefs.

There's no such thing as a smart person. Only people who are more well informed. What you do is what you become. When I say smart I mean a willingness to do what it takes based on informed decisions.

Creativity is only the body of material you have to draw from. Your visual or intellectual library of things you have already made a part of yourself through direct exposure. No invention or creation is made independently, it's all made with a clear path from one to another. Anyone can invent or create great things. Anyone can be great. All it takes is choice.

Success favors perseverance. Failure is necessary to reach what works. Those who are unwilling to fail never succeed.

>the choice is usually between

Or doing your own thing on your own on your own terms following the rules you make up. Hey, stop waiting for people to tell you what to do and create your own opportunity!

My alternate future where robots do everything absolutely no one wants to do (I wouldn't believe for a second that there are absolutely no people who love their job picking up trash) is more likely to become reality than your future where it's impossible to make money making games because too many people are making too many amazing games so no one wants to pay for them.

>I would discourage somebody from fixating on a programming career if they were only interested in programming because they wanted to work at facebook for example.

Yeah, same with wanting to work for a random AAA game company. Unfortunately most people don't appreciate wisdom until they have already failed (reality check when someone is doing work they hate at their "dream job" - if they hate it then they made a mistake), and some people never learn from their mistakes.

And many who lived extremely fulfilling lives outside of accepting money for work.

Everything is a choice. The people who refuse to not be smart about business refuse to take what they need - so they get what they get much like people who only work when a job is offered to them. Money is rarely made by accident. It is more likely to be made when you mix choice with opportunity.

I never had a fancy tech job, or really any fancy job. I've had jobs. I moved industrial pipe for a few years in my teens. Not my favorite thing, but it was a choice. I worked for Sears for a few years up until I was 18. Worst years of my life. Also a choice. I've been making games since I was 11 and I'm just about 25. When I was 18 I decided to take it seriously and now here I am. I choose to do this. I can do programming, but I like art more, and I work with people who are just as passionate as I am. I love programming when I do it. I have a game on Steam, games on iOS and Android. I am dead set on doing great things not just with games but with culture and the future of humanity.

>The fun part (gameplay, game balance, story-telling, level creation) all happen near the end.

Then you are doing it wrong. There are so many tools available which allow you to skip so much of the technical parts and get to the parts you like. You can choose to use them, or you can choose to build your own.

>You don't make a game, you make a series of tools

That's a choice, and a huge thing newbies to game development are cautioned against. Don't make tools - make games! The tools are already made, don't reinvent the wheel. Yet so many insist on doing just that, and I have no sympathy for them.

>In fact

Yes, absolutely, and so many people lack willpower to do greater things. That's not because they are not good enough people forever unable to summon the willpower to do it, but simply because they don't know the knowledge necessary. So many people believe so many absurd things which hold them back from what is possible.

>You can't have an economy

Sure you can. How long before the majority of all manual labor, all service jobs are done by computers and robots? Jobs which humans can do, but don't have to do. All of that uninspiring, boring drudge work which doesn't require any creativity or real problem solving. When those jobs are left we trend toward more of a gift economy where the value you have is what you do for others, what you inspire in them, what you delight them with. Some people already do things which do these things, others collect the trash. People are not forced to pick up your trash, and everyone could decide to refuse to take up that job, and yet people choose to still. Eventually it won't be a choice to put anyone's trash because it will all be automated.

You would think that, but the reality is there is a whole bunch of opportunity right now that is not being seized. Smith could change his life if he made the choice to. There is not an overflow of game developers, or people writing code worth being inspired about to the point where people who do it are not able to make money enough to live. People think what you are saying and assume it applies currently, and that they have no hope so they have to do the boring work they don't like. It does not apply right now, and it may never actually apply just because of what so many people are ingrained to believe.

>think TPS report generators or whatever

Value systems are not universal. You could take the most horrifying job you could think of and someone would take pleasure in it.

> being allocated

No one is ever forcibly allocated. Everyone has a choice to do what they want to do. If the ultimate horror reality of there being too many good games being made and not enough people to buy them all to the point where no one could make a living making games happened then people could still compromise and go down the list of things they genuinely enjoy and do those instead when they find something which can make them money. I don't know enough about Smith, but if he's not doing what he is doing as a temporary stopgap and he believes he is stuck forever doing code he hates then he is absolutely doing it wrong.

I'm an indie game developer and the way I see it is a choice for anyone to work independently. Some people are adamant about working for others and accepting whatever boring job they can get. Making games isn't the perfect thing to do, but it is possible, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Yes, working at a AAA studio can suck, but that's a choice also.

Boring crap to you doesn't mean it's boring to everyone. Who are we to impose our value system upon others. Some people just love modeling 3d crates all day and that's their mission in life to create the perfect 3d crate. Other people walk by and wonder why he's wasting his life creating crate after crate. It's not cool to me to rationalize something someone doesn't like doing just because someone has to do it. Let someone who actually likes it do it.

> you have to accept that

Only if you are not in control of your own life. There is no rule which say what you must ultimately do. If your goal is to do x and that requires ultimately doing a lot of y, you can still change what you want to do to z and immediately go for it. So many of my friends are insistently passionate about wanting to work for AAA game companies and I know their glamorous dreams are going to put them through a lot of potential slog, but that's not the only choice. It is their choice to go in that direction and accept the outcome of that direction. There are plenty of other options.

Smith is idealizing coding games and working on programming projects which inspire him. He should go do either of those instead.