Editor’s Choice

In Response to “West Virginia’s Health Revolution” from The Escapist Forum: Let’s hope the conclusions of this study reflect Ryan’s answers, because I think Murphy has it badly wrong. DDR is more fun for these kids. It’s that simple.

Traditional team sports are often extremely badly “designed” (insofar as they’re designed at all) for promoting exercise. As a kid I saw most sports as violent and offering little worthwhile gameplay. And most team sports were structured in such a way that the weakest member of the team had little impact when they were playing well but a large impact when they screwed up. Not ideal, psychologically.

I have a kind of rather unlikely dream that progress in video game design may one day feed back into real-world team sports and people will start to design and play games that actually don’t suck. That would be nice.

– Dom Camus

In Response to “Whyville: Saving the Children” from The Escapist Forum: Unfortunately, there is no one way to improve education. The fact of the matter is that kids are different: some of them will jump headfirst into mathematics and science, and others will question why they have to be there at all. You can’t apply the same solution to both of them, because either the kids who get it will feel stifled, or the kids who don’t get it will feel lost, and eventually some of them are going to end up resentful of education as a whole. This is the price that we’ve paid for assuming that the worst thing that can happen in a kid’s education is not, in fact, not being educated, but rather being made to feel segregated or inferior.

Things like this are excellent – it reminds me that there are still people out there who believe that kids naturally want to learn, and aren’t afraid to look for answers to the question of why, if they like learning so much, they don’t like doing it in school. Most of the “edutainment” I’ve seen has been poor as an example of entertainment, or as an example of a game, or both, but these people seem to be doing it right.

– Bongo Bill

In Response to “Plaintiff’s Attorney in Player-IGE Lawsuit Speaks to The Escapist” from The Escapist Daily: I can’t see Hernandez winning this lawsuit simply by the fact that the process of farming the gold falls well within the rules of the game. The act of camping spawn points or any other method of obtaining gold is what the game’s about. If IGE isn’t farming the gold, it’s a million other players. Nothing will change with IGE out of the picture.

Richard, Hernandez’s lawyer, uses the analogy of kicking the back of a moviegoer’s seat. Um, yeah. Sure. Can I get a court injunction against all griefers and players in my way then? 😉

IGE does the same thing that any other individual player does in the game at one point of another… so it must be because they are a large organized body that makes it worse, right? Guilds, anyone? Oh, right, it’s about the money. So it’s okay to camp a spawn point and ruin someone else’s game as long as your not earning real money for it. That doesn’t sound convincing enough to me. Am I missing something here?

Yes, IGE is breaking the licensing agreement with Blizzard, but that’s with Blizzard, not Hernandez. I think Blizzard is not suing IGE for reasons that Hernandez’s lawyer doesn’t understand… or won’t admit.

I have never played WoW, but I’m familiar enough with a variety of MMOs to understand that it’s impossible to achieve an online utopia. Hernandez needs to have an intervention… there’s more to life than WoW.

– Echolocating