Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Aug 15, 2006
The World Bank slows down a lot during the late summer, until it ramps up for the annual meetings again. I've actually been fairly busy, but only because about half the department is out on vacation. So there hasn't been much in the way of new B-SPAN material, and the most recent podcast pulls from the archives.
But it's a great pull: Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and Director of the UN Millennium Project, spoke in 2004 on his approach to poverty. Sachs is kind of a brute-force development expert: he believes that while corruption can be a factor, the real problem in development is donor stinginess and lack of will. Whether or not you agree (William Easterly, author of the excellent The Elusive Quest for Growth and no fawning Bank panderer, considers it foolish), Sachs is a gifted speaker whose passion is inspiring to hear.
P.S. If you want to see something really disgusting, check out the comments on this Daniel Drezner post about Sachs' plan. Perhaps my "favorite" is here:
Don't kid yourself. Poor Africans are mentally deficient, and giving them $50 a year will no more raise them from poverty than giving each American their SS money will provide for their retirement.
$150B in the hands of 3 billion retarded people will cause every huckster, con man, fast talker, religious nut, and hoodlum to devour the entire continent.
Wow.
You know, I've commented on this before (back when I had my own conservative troll), so I probably shouldn't be so shocked, but it still takes me by surprise. Even if you think Sachs is an idiot, $150 billion for his initiatives isn't really that much money on the scale of the US budget. The fact that some are so disproportionately opposed to aid really worries me.
Okay, the lights are back on, and everything seems to be where I left it. Guess Neureal fixed their DNS issues. Now, who's got an opinion?
Oh, yes. I do.
I'm typing from a Konsole window on my first Linux installation. I'm impressed by how slick the GUI is, and a little bit amazed at how unhelpful Linux still manages to be. Would it kill you guys to write just a paragraph on (for example) the four different partition formats I'm given? Sure, I can google it, but I probably shouldn't have to.
Also, the live CD (try out the whole OS from a bootable CD before you install) is really slick. But you can't tell me that most people really want to go around downloading a 700Mb ISO before they install. It's such a weird mix of technical savvy and personal cluelessness.
George Allen, Virginia's elected senator and a well-known Confederate sympathizer, is an idiot. At a campaign event, he picked out an American of Indian descent (apparently the only person of color present), and mocked him with a word that is either A) nonsensical, B) a racist term for North Africans, or C) a species of monkey. Even with the benefit of a doubt, what could he have been thinking?
The topic of the Round Table this month is casual gaming. And that's a surprisingly hard term to pin down, because as other panelists have noted people can get pretty deep into other "casual" entertainments, like crossword puzzles or office softball or thermonuclear engineering.
But this is not ultimately different from other hobbies. I watch very little television. We could say that I am a "casual watcher." It's an entertainment of last resort, usually. But I have a few shows (Battlestar Galactica, Project Runway) that I follow fanatically. Are those just not "casual shows?" (Perhaps not. Don't think about this example too hard.)
I think (and half-remembered comm texts seem to back me up on this) that we seek out media that fills a specific need, much the same way that we look for "confirmation bias" in political sources. If our needs are filled by a game more strongly, then we might play it more seriously, even if it is technically a casual game. If we don't feel that craving often, or if other options are competing for time (explaining my fluctuating habits), we might play harder games in a lightweight, fleeting fashion.
It's not that games have become more casual, or that they will do so in the future. It's that they've gotten better at accomodating both types of playing habits. The Pokemon design trend means there's more to do (although arguably it's just more tedium) with any given title, for the hardcore players. For the less obsessive, save points have become more accommodating, levels aren't necessarily as long, and difficulty curves have flattened.
The first step in the trend was the tutorial level, which nowadays both introduces the game and its controls/mechanics. You didn't have to read a manual anymore. Then there's context sensitivity (hopefully displayed with onscreen prompts) so that I don't have to remember what button does what, if I pick up a game months after the last time I played it. Alternately, there's a buttonmashing approach, where the controls are easy and forgiving enough that a new player could just mash their way through--see: Tekken. I can't stand Tekken personally, I think it's the easy reader of fighters. But for a friend of mine, it's perfect, because he doesn't need to learn any combos or special moves. He starts a game every couple of months, maybe, has fun just reacting to the events onscreen, and then shelves it again. My friend is dismayed to learn that there are high levels of Tekken play, where people do learn combos and strategies, but at least he never has to learn them.
The point is that it's not an either-or proposition. There's the potential to play many games in casual spurts, or in long, dedicated sessions. The real development has been the fulfillment of that potential.
Who else wants to talk?
