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Submitted by progliberty
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Comment: Star Drek? (Score 1) 186

by pieceofstone (#33770366) Attached to: Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era
Does anyone remember Star Drek? That was a game played from the perspective of the bridge monitor in 3D space. Everything was in ASCII graphics and real-time. A photon torpedo headed your way would be redrawn as a larger and larger group of maybe it was asterisks. There was a bug where you could indicate to use a large negative number for the amount of energy to spend on phasers, which would both let you use a powerful phaser blast and you wouldn't lose energy from your ship. The game had tractor beams, a planet called Blish and a Death Star, only it wasn't out and out called a Death Star. This was either in the late '70s or early '80s. When you created an account for the game (this was on unix, I think), you'd be asked various questions as though going through an application form ("Have you ever been arrested for a felony?") and if you said no, it'd proceed normally, but if you said yes, it'd ask how many times. If you gave some low number, it would tell you to be more careful next time. If you gave a high enough number, it'd say anyone stupid enough to be arrested that many times was too stupid to run a starship, or something like that.

Comment: profanity around children (Score 1) 449

by pieceofstone (#33664962) Attached to: Today's Children Are Officially Potty Mouths
Yeah, it's a little depressing to me. I will curse occasionally (especially alone and in an aggravating traffic condition) but the "Who cares?" attitude bothers me. Like, when I used to hang out on Second Life, someone admitted to being a minor and thus wasn't supposed to be on the main grid but in a place for teenagers, and in response to this, the person she said this to typed out "Holy #^#@%@!" except without the Q*Bert filter. I sighed and the older (twenty-something) kept asking in whispers why, so I explained myself and she had an attitude of, well, they can hear it on so many places, so who cares whether I say it or not?" and in some other online place where a room had a set of guidelines about allowable behavior, someone who would promote the rules as long as they were particular rules she favored used the f-bomb (against the rules) on someone who was a registered minor, who immediately disconnected. I feel that whether it's common in schoolyards is beside the point and I wish strangers around children would care more.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Tracking the Harm Games Do 118

Posted by Soulskill
from the correlation-something-something-causation dept.
Every so often, video games are accused of causing all sorts of negative behavior in children, teens, and adults. These accusations are typically predicated on statistics that sound much more damning than they actually are. In that vein, gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun did their own tongue-in-cheek statistical analysis, complete with pretty charts and graphs. Quoting: "As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the divorce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in divorces. ... An often ignored statistic (and you have to ask why it’s being ignored by the games media, don’t you?) is the sheer volume of PC games being released. We’ve all noticed the British population is abandoning the church, turning instead toward shopping, DVDs and knife crime. But few have thought to check for a connection between PC sales and the numbers of people attending their local Church Of England church on a Sunday. When you look at the data there’s little doubt left that as the publishers continue to release more and more PC games each year, our nation’s faith is being increasingly eroded. And at what cost? If only a graph could tell us that."

Comment: sequel? (Score 1) 298

by pieceofstone (#31523990) Attached to: Filming For <em>The Hobbit</em> Begins In July
This sound wrong to me. The last I read was that the two movies would just be the Hobbit, broken into two but with some segments of the book expanded upon. I know there was talk earlier about a non-Hobbit sequel for the 2nd movie, but I don't think that's the way things stand right now unless things have changed again for some bizarre reason. Okay, here's one link: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41848 "Where as many months ago, writers Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh were contemplating the first films as essentially being the Tolkien book, and the second film being a bridge movie between THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Jackson told a select group of online journalists a couple nights ago that that clearly wasn't going to be the case. The two films will be the novel stretched out and supplemented by material from appendices, and other background source material written by Tolkien."
