Pete, gaming has become another sports and/or couch potato activity threatening marriages and relationships, not just fueling commercial success. They are clever and entertaining. But most of these games are bought by adults with jobs and relationships. I am watching this golf, wrestling, nascar and other mind cocaine deplete the conversational skills, parenting attention and sex lives of young adults, to say nothing of their cash flow, in my personal social network. These are toys for maturation delay. And what of the older fans avoiding reading the newspaper so they won't know what else is wrong with the country, while they play golf with Tiger? If only half the talent and resources were poured into researching new medical breakthroughs, building devices for the sick and disabled, we might actually find that cure for cancer and produce that breakthrough sustainable energy source. I see the gaming mania as a menace to society, a outbreak of cultural cannibalism, more revenue for commercial pirates and wasted talent. Karen Watters Cole
At any time, day or night, this server is hosting about 120,000 games with about 400,000 users. And this is just one of at least thirty different game servers in the US, each with its own massive fanbase. (And I suppose I may be massively underestimating the number of gameservers.) There are gameservers for space wars, WWII simulations, combat flight simulators (anyone catch the microsoft ads on TV around christmas, though the game was so lame it was universally panned and microsoft had to announce a radical change in policy and undertake to write a patch to try to fix it), sword and sorcery "role playing" games, "Indiana Jones" style adventure games (cf Lara Croft), and many more I'm sure that I haven't heard of. All of them require computer performance far beyond what any practical productivity directed machine needs to be able to do. And, I'm just near enough to the edge of that world to know that the folk in silicon valley who are generating the hardware, are heavily represented among the gamers. These guys are online gaming in their spare time, and then off to work to make new hardware to enable the next level of realism in the simulations. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
