I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing.
I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playing was so I would have a way to play with some longtime RL friends while they were living at U of I in champaign and urbana.
Intangibly I feel like I have learned a lot about how to communicate with people, particularly from a leadership position. Since communication over text or in ventrilo doesn't have all the physical queues of face to face interaction, you learn to speak with more clarity and precision as time goes on. I feel like it would be pretty easy to be a successful manager of some non-technical sector of work like retail based solely on what I've learned from being an officer in WoW now as well as being an officer in Runescape back when I was like 13-14.
Edit: PS. I forgot a big intangible: I've had a lot of fun playing over the past couple years.
>I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday.
It seems like it would be a good thing if guilds could be set up based on the geographic location of the players. If you had a reasonable chance of making "real life" friends, a lot of the objections to MMOs that aren't made to, say, a ski club or a bowling league, would go away.
I disagree. I think a lot of people that play with others geographically close to each other already know each other in some way and the reverse would not necessarily be the same. I mostly play with two "real life" friends, and most of the groupings of people I know in my guilds are couples, friends from college/home, coworkers, and similar. It's usually not "oh we know each other after we found out in-game that we're geographically close".
For every interesting person I have met in WoW, I've come across someone I can't even begin to describe...social misfit, awkward, creepy, misogynist, immature, stalker doesn't even begin to cover it. Whenever I find a random group of people to raid with, I am afraid to talk in vent/mumble because I don't want to give away the fact that my voice gives me away as being a very, very valley girl/California English spoken woman. The few times I slip and talk, some players didn't care but others split off into various assumptions, usually along the lines of my being incompetent by being female or "no way, she's a girl! (I'm going to harass her in whispers now!)". The few that didn't care and judged me based on my actual performance were the ones I ended up really appreciating being grouped with and that in turn were the ones that outright told me that they were sad to see me go before I changed servers a couple months ago. The ones that assumed I was dumb, well, I had an ignore list longer than my arm by the time I moved away. Moved away to a guild where I vetted the GM and his guild for his female-friendliness and zero tolerance to harassment first above all other concerns, including raiding. (And for what it's worth, I left my very first WoW guild because I couldn't stand even the smallest playful insults anymore. Starting with "you sure do get around" for getting an achievement for exploring a zone.)
So in an environment like that, I really hope that such a thing is never, ever, ever possible in-game and is something people do waaaaay far out of game on their own accord. Blizzard really scared a lot of people with their initial implementation of RealID and still kinda do despite all the privacy settings, and I would cancel my WoW account the day Blizzard ever considers putting in some kind of interface for geographical guild finding no matter how opt-out it is. I want to choose which basis I use to find friends in this game and I never want Blizzard to help me with that. I especially never ever want some dumbass 15 year old punk that hits on me to find out I live in Los Angeles, let alone what my real name is.
(And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone. Some people just don't learn to manage their in-game time very well and that is the fodder for all those horror stories, not the vast majority of people that do know how to stop playing a game.)
>I mostly play with two "real life" friends, and most of the groupings of people I know in my guilds are couples, friends from college/home, coworkers, and similar. It's usually not "oh we know each other after we found out in-game that we're geographically close".
Yeah, but that's partly because when you meet a random person online, odds are that they don't live near you because any two random internet denizens aren't likely to live near each other. The point of geolocation would be that you could feasibly meet if you wanted to.
I don't see what the problem would be with opt-outable geolocation. You could set your location to private, or don't enter it at all, and join a guild/clan/whatever that isn't local to a specific area.
A game or a guild that geolocated should also be harder on creeps, banning people who were creepy and not letting in 15 year olds in the first place if that's not who they wanted. It would be more like a real life social group. If you don't want to hang around with someone in real life, you don't, and if you're not in high school yourself, you probably don't socialize with 15 year old boys who aren't related to you. I understand your concerns but I think there are solutions to them, and there will always be alternatives for those who want to keep it strictly anonymous and online.
>And really, I'm sick of the people that think that WoW can't be real life. I have come across some of my best friends online, and WoW is no different from IRC or AIM or email or any means of online communications. It is as real life as it gets without being face-to-face with someone.
But there are still some things you're missing without face to face. And having a social life centered around electronic communication with people you don't know in real life is almost as stigmatized as WoW addiction anyway.
Sure, playing WoW lead to me getting a job at a startup (Rupture, which was later sold to EA) and moving to San Francisco. Considering I'm radically happier in my life now than I was previous to living here, I'd say it was quite helpful.
I heard and read about multiple marriages resulting from WoW. There are also a lot of people who have learned to program or make a decent side income with addons. One can also learn a lot about leadership and determination, since a lot of times you will fail horribly but you still continue (and have to keep everyone motivated). Another thing is communication. For example if you are with 24 other people inside a dungeon and you make a mistake, everyone will have lost 10 minutes or more. So you have to handle that and be honest that this was your fault.
Me personally? I actually got a free holiday in the Netherlands, since someone I know from the game invited me.
And of course don't underestimate the fun that can be had in the game. Oh and nearly forgot: I learned English. It's still far from perfect, but before I could barely read English...
I'm not what you'd probably call a WoW 'addict' (never managed to get into the 4+ hours a day for longer than a couple weeks at a time before getting sick of it and quitting,) but I would consider the time that I've played WoW to be a net benefit to me..
I've played with a fair number of people who are in the same field as me, as well as with my own coworkers and managers, which has allowed me to get to know them pretty well and get pretty good job offers and consulting gigs.
But sure, if I had been spending every free moment on WoW, it likely wouldn't have been a worthwhile endeavor.. And for all I know, I would have done something better with the time put into it had I taken up a different hobby.
Yes, I know a ton of people that learned to program writing and hacking add-ons. WoW has a very powerful add-on system based on LUA. A number of folks that write those add-ons that make a great living doing so.
I get the same sinking feeling every time I check for an OS update on my Samsung Fascinate and it's not there.
No update means:
- ZERO GPS functionality (Verizon reps acknowledge this)
- crippled performance on what's supposed to be top-of-the-line hardware (because the Samsung version of Android 2.1 uses a badly written swap filesystem)
My iPhone 3G has a better UI, multitouch, and even now feels like a more solidly built device. On the other hand, I've never had a dropped call on Verizon in San Francisco. I'd rather have a mostly-functioning, always-connected device than a beautiful idiot that connects to a network incapable of delivering even SMS.
The author needs to get past the fantasy that the US government is the big bad guy in a room full of innocent school children. Russia, while weakened over the past few years, is a global military power. China (and India) are starting to flex their muscles. North Korea is still ruled by a cantankerous despot. The technology advantage the US has held since WWII is waning, and with it goes the luxury of military complacency. I'd rather the skirmishes happen behind the scenes than with more large-scale conventional warfare.
I had a reply filled with disbelief about the ability to successfully cheat through law school, but after reading that article I'm truly blown away.
It's beyond pitiful - in the literal, not pejorative sense - how many people manage to get through our so-called higher education without so much as the ability to communicate on a sixth-grade level. I guess all I can do is teach my kids the value of what it means to love learning, and how to communicate their thoughts and ideas well. The system obviously hasn't figured out how to make that happen yet.
But if they couldn't do the work in school (needing to turn to someone else to do their assignments), then why would they be flabbergasted that they couldn't do the work on their own outside of school?
Who says its source code that was stolen? "Intellectual Property" covers a very wide range.
It's easy for Oracle to stand up, roll out the long list of their patents, call "They're infringing!", and then the burden is on SAP to show they were not.
I'm sure that some of SAP's products have similar (or near identical) UIs and APIs to Oracle's copyrighted works. Whether the similarity is intended, who knows...
Considering that 37signals products are web-based, they also work natively on a pretty large percentage of available hardware and software platforms (at least the ones you're likely to be using).
I agree that web-based solutions could reach enough people for them to be a feasible replacement for email in terms of availability. The point I was trying to make by talking about access is that everyone has an email address I can send mail to, but generally access to project-specific tools are limited to folks on the project. So if I hash out an interesting technical approach with someone outside the project or outside the company, it will likely be done in email or via the phone.
Once I have resorted to using email, eventually I will forget to move a conversation over or I don't think it will be important and our "repository" has gotten out of sync, which leaves me with a merging issue (do I trust what my email says or the website), and eventually a duplication of effort (I know we talked about this, but my email says x, and the website says y)
As an aside, as I was writing this, I also realized that I tend to use email as my "archive of knowledge". When I move on to a new project I can search back through my email to find relevant discussions and apply them to my new work. I have not seen a tool with a similar ability to archive and take with me my lessons learned (whether because of company policy or lack of feature in the tool). I know lots of managers who religiously archive their email to avoid losing some obscure piece of information or process from years ago.
True, but people are already using email. Everyone knows how email works and how to attach files. Not everyone knows what a "writeboard" is and how it's different from a "message"
I agree fully that everyone knows how email works, and I'm not debating the point that email-capable devices outnumber javascript-web-capable devices. I'm questioning the point that because there are more email-capable devices, email is a superior medium for project communications -- because there are enough devices with modern web browsers to let people use more advanced tools.
I hardly think it's worse than antennagate. The iPhone's antenna issues caused so much of a stir because they impact the basic usage of the device. Is iPhoto such a core piece of MacOS functionality that this bug will make people stop buying Macs?
Then again, the timing along with the iPhone screen lock bug could have been better...
How is taking pictures and saving them on a computer not a core piece of how a lot of mac users use their computers? Not to mention losing precious data like personal photos that cannot be replaced is far worse than a dropped call.
