hzzn

Games are mechanisms for play. Play is not art. Play is dynamic, art is static. Play engages, art coerces.

I think Ebert is mostly right, but we shouldn't give much serious attention to someone who has had so little experience with games. That's like arguing about Hermann Hesse with someone who staunchly refuses to read anything longer than a road sign. We should be proud of the distinction between play and art. If we're going to argue at all, our position should be that play is potentially as important as art, if not more so.

---

(Emphasis on "potentially". Game developers still have a lot of ground to cover. The linked article was praising games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect as positive examples of storytelling in games. Yikes.)

    BioWare has got lost in the dense tangle of what it was trying to
    accomplish. It hasn't been able to see the wood for the trees. It
    has summoned an entire world into existence in the most meticulous
    detail, but failed to give it an identity beyond the blandest
    cliché. It has created living characters that respond like humans,
    but speak like dictionaries and move like mannequins. It has
    engineered solidly absorbing RPG gameplay and character progression
    and stranded them in a succession of hackneyed and hide-bound
    scenarios.
    
    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/dragon-age-origins-review

(The comment I am about to make is not supported by a link to a paper published by a widely respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal. You can safely assume that it contains nothing but falsehood and moderate accordintly.)

It's possible that the purpose of the comment was merely to express an opinion, and that the commenter had no intention of persuading you, or anyone else, of anything.

I agree with the fundamental philosophy behind Doctorow's argument, but good grief:

  The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what
  William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby
  hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in
  the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered
  with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and
  makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express
  its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing
  the channels on a universal remote."

Take a close look at the game industry for a glimpse into a slightly more probable future. The consoles, dominant as they are, did not kill PC gaming. A significant and very profitable chunk of gaming occurs on personal computers. The indie gaming scene is arguably stronger now than it ever has been. There has been an explosion of inexpensive or free or open source game development tools, engines and libraries over the years. As a result, it has never been easier or cheaper to make games and share them with others than it is right now. That's good!

On the other hand, the corporate gatekeeping to the console publishing world makes the App Store look like GitHub. That's bad!

It is far more useful to address actual problems that computing appliances might pose than it is to paint apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios where we are transformed into creatures made up mostly of eyes.

This story was first broke by the New York Times:

"Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html

(I realize--hope?--that everyone else has moved on from this thread.)

"what you posted is IMHO quite insulting to HN posters"

If it is insulting even with my comment just above that praising an article that itself criticizes the very kind of tribalistic behavior I was ironically exhibiting, then maybe more of those voting should have read the article itself and taken its message to heart.

I only flipped through about ten pages of thumbnails, but as far as I could tell every photo on their stream is accompanied by a link entitled United States Government Work which points to http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml

    A work that is...prepared by an officer or employee of the United
    States Government as part of that person's official duties, is
    not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no
    U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works,
    distribution, performance, or display of the work.

I'm guessing from the down-votes that folks have taken my "Perl sucks" comment at face value. (Or maybe they just don't think I'm funny, which puts them in good company; my girlfriend doesn't think I'm very funny either.)

I suppose the joke would have been more obvious if I had added something along the lines of Python FTW SUCKAS! ;) :D ;).

Also, Perl sucks.

I remember first reading this not long after it was originally written. This article made a significant impact on me, and contributed significantly to my maturation as a programmer.

I thought then (and still believe today) that the basic gist of this piece applies to a broad range of topics. People can get tribalistic and territorial about just about anything, software and sports don't even scratch the surface.

It's odd to hear all this victory hooting over a single hyperbolic prediction with so many glaciers in retreat all over the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850). Ah, but I suppose every claim on the page linked above is also attributable to equally bad science, or perhaps the citations were merely planted there by members of the Shadowy Underworld Global Climate Change Cabal.

I agree. It seems you could have written this article during Jane Austen's time. "Children growing up are going to be SOOOO much different from the previous generation because the post is delivered as often as SIX times a day and OMG will this kind of instant communication breed a new race of hive mind humans?????????//?/?"

(Perhaps not the most believable pastiche of 18th-century written English ever.)

    Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent
    knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful
    multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that
    16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free
    time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and
    checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.

    People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and
    those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

A quote from

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/GlobWarm.HTM

    The science, reduced to its simplest terms, is that carbon dioxide
    is known to be effective at trapping solar heat. So are water
    vapor (the source of 90% of earth's natural greenhouse effect),
    methane, and other gases. The natural carbon dioxide content of the
    atmosphere has doubled in the last 200 years, climate is getting
    warmer, so the logical conclusion is that there is a connection
    between the two trends. If you feel uncomfortably warm at night and
    wake up to find someone has put another blanket over you, you don't
    need to look beyond that to identify the source of the warming.

    * Nobody - nobody - argues with the carbon dioxide trend. It's
    established beyond doubt.

    * The debate over whether climate is getting warmer is mostly over.

    * The debate now is over whether the connection between warming and
    human emission of carbon dioxide is real, or whether there are other
    causes of climate change at work.

    * The real issue is whether the benefits of taking action will
    outweigh the costs and regulatory burdens.

    * There are some who argue that warming will be beneficial by
    reducing energy demands for heating, lengthening growing seasons,
    and creating larger habitable and arable territory.

    The case for human-caused global warming is simultaneously a lot
    clearer than George W. Bush believes, and a whole lot less so than
    Al Gore does. There are legitimate questions about the data, past
    climate reconstructions, and the computer modeling still to be
    answered.