Gamers Explained?

OK I'm a gamer. I admit... guilty. And if I am to add it all up I think I've spent several thousands of hours of my life playing games since I was about 14 or so.

I still remember the summer I was supposed to learn for my university admission exam; really serious business if I ever wanted to get a bachelor degree/education; I remember all I did that summer, from morning to dawn, was to play hot seat games with my friend trying to postpone the inevitable (having to prepare for the exam).

Was it wrong? Not a chance it was probably the best thing to do, I would have gone crazy had I spent all that time learning instead. It actually helped me study much faster, because it was in the way, I needed to get it done so I could play. :)

Now at some point in a gamer's life comes the question: "was I really wasting all of that time doing totally unimportant things when I could've been saving the world instead?". Or substitute "world" with whatever feels important for the person. This question, while important I admit, won't last long as soon the next gaming session starts in a try to forget about it and evade any answer :)

Jane McGonigal doesn't answer that question either, but she changed it from "Are gamers wasting time?" to "How can we make RL more like a game?" or "How can we design games that have an impact on RL?". Nice twist:



Who knows maybe our jobs would be so much more cooler if it were like an RPG. "Awesome, I've submitted another CL and got 200xp so I got to level 10 software engineer!" :D

And I share her believe, if you make a gamer believe it's a game... they can accomplish almost anything! As soon as we think the outcome doesn't really matter as "it's just a game"... we're doing so much better.

Farming

Farm·ing
a.

Pertaining to agriculture; devoted to, adapted to, or engaged in, farming; as, farming tools; farming land; a farming community.

Farm·ing
n.

The business of cultivating land.

Or so Webster's Dictionary says. I think I have a vague memory of that. But I am not sure. Think I might have met a farmer once, and he was doing exactly that, but it was early in my childhood and my memory wasn't well formed.

Farming is the killing of monsters for the purpose of gathering items, experience, gold, Faction, or promotion points and is considered to be one of the quickest and easiest ways to amass wealth.

Ah, now that sounds more familiar. You learn more about it here.

So yes, I do like playing video games and I happen to play Guild Wars, why that and not something else is besides the point (they're all the same). Now let's go back to the dictionary again:

game
n.

An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.

So... who exactly was the sick mind behind the idea of "farming" in video games? I can imagine the following discussion in a team developing games:

"- Oh shit! We worked 5 years on this game and the test users finished it in 10 hours! What do we do? What do we do?"
" - Oh well... we can't provide new content, that would actually mean working to make the game interesting and exciting. And even if we did that for a month or two, we definitively don't want to do that for the next two years! I mean that would mean us really working on the thing!"
" - Yeah, but what to keep our players busy with while we monthly take money out of their accounts for doing nothing?"
" - Well... I know! We can make them like work!"
" - Work?"
" - Yeah, you know like when you have a daily job and you have to go mine for ore or something."
" - Hmmm... mine for ore. So we just put some ore mines here and there... oh I have an even greater idea make the mining succeed or fail randomly! I mean it's not like a real miner in a mine, though some of them were dying weren't they?"
" - Yeah, that's a great idea! If we make mining to give in return random items and the cool ones will be rare I bet players will just mine forever hoping to get the rare items. I mean you know hope dies last!"
" - Excellent! That should keep many busy, but how about those that don't like mining?"
" - Oh well... make them farm!"

Brilliant, just brilliant. From game "an activity providing entertainment or amusement" to "mining and farming". Brilliant I tell you. No one would ever want to farm or mine in RL (that is Real Life) but they would all do it online! As if the modern man has so much free time and his job is not "job" enough, so we need to give modern man another "job" for the spare time.

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WTF? Really! WTF are you people doing? WTF are you gamers doing? Farming? And WTF are you game developers doing? Throwing work at people and *charging* them for working??? And making millions while at it?

I want a *game* I am *not* looking for a job! And I find mining and farming to be crappy jobs even if i was looking for one.

Fear of changes (the DST)

Remember Y2K?

Of course you do. You filled your storage spaces with food, drinking water, and so on because the end of the world was near. Oh, you didn't? So you're not from the USA?

There's a new bug in town. It's not Y2K, Y2K is now far behind us, the new name is DST. From what I understand, the DST is now updated in the US, reason for wide-spread panic and new business opportunity.

I have nothing against making good money over other people's lack of knowledge. What I have is a tooth against the panic spread from minor changes. I never thought that changing my clocks from time to time (twice each year) would become a reason of panic for some...

I am a programmer. I know how hard is to handle all the localization problems that may occur. And speaking of software, I'll let the more knowledgeable to talk about these issues. I especially appreciated this article of Mr. Ulrich Drepper (one of the brains that keep one of the most sensitive parts of some UNIX-based OSs (glibc) working). Perhaps the most valuable in my eyes is the 'offtopic' part:

Having lived here in the US now for quite a few years I think the root of the problem is the same that keeps the US from making progress on other fronts: fear of change and trying to prevent change through denial. Another example? Take the measurement system. When knowing the metric and the imperial system equally well, who would argue the latter is better? And it's not that people don't know the metric system at all. There are large numbers of people who serves/d in the military and all these people had to use it in their job. Every food container also shows grams.

I think that the problem is that the more civilized we become, the less human we become. We don't adapt anymore. We adapt the environment. And that is the most important problem of them all. We forgot to look out for the changes, we lost the ability to be, after all, natural.

Is that going to give us anything good? Maybe on the short term, as we don't see the impact we have on the world we live in. Definitely nothing good on the long term. It's funny that we define intelligence as the capacity to adapt to new situations and new environments. We're then definitely heading towards a numbed down and stupid society.