I really don't know, but I wonder whether gaming is more like hot rodding was in the old days and the muscle cars were of the 70's. In some ways like SUVs are today. Overbuilding capacity for certain machines, for certain uses or just to have the capacity as a status symbol, like the HumVee.
Hot rodding and drag racing certainly occupied a lot of time, money and energy of those around me when I was young. Parents seem to tolerate it or frown upon it, depending. I remember one father/son team building a car from the ground up using a novel tubular frame. Was this a waste of time. Was this feeding the adrenaline rush that comes from drag racing? Were these toys for maturation delay? I really don't know. arthur -----Original Message----- From: Karen Watters Cole [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 12:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: pete Subject: RE: [Futurework] Re: Chess 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
