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Monday, January 3. 2011

Video games

How Videogames Are Changing the Economy - From Silicon Valley to China to media, they are leading the next productivity revolution. So hug a geek today.


I have never played a video game, and have no idea how anybody finds the time in life to do so. I am either blessed or cursed with more things I like to do, and more people I like to spend time with, than I have time for. However, the article says that there is much of real use emerging from the technology.

Posted by The News Junkie at 18:32 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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Enormous numbers of kid-hours are wasted playing these games. A relatively tiny fraction of "gamers" actually write code for them and an even smaller number of hardware techies make prototypes and develop products. Take a guess where our american kids spend their time - this country needs a rude awakening.
#1 Claritas on 2011-01-03 19:21 (Reply)
Ha... I'd like a nickle for every game of 5 cent pinball (the real kind) I played as a kid. I'd be rich, likely (well, for a couple of days anyway). Was it obsessive, sure. Did I hone skills later found to be useful in life, I think so. We all get our necks in a twit about how things should be, serve a lot better if we focused on how things are.
#2 xray on 2011-01-03 21:23 (Reply)
" Take a guess where our american kids spend their time - this country needs a rude awakening."

Always been that way. A generation ago it was the EVIL television rotting kids' brains and giving them square eyes (yes, my mother used to think that).

Generation before that it was radio said to do much the same thing.

And of course there are the eternal evils of alcohol, gambling (games, anyone?), comic books, etc. etc.

Essentially, anything that allows people to have fun will always be villified by those wanting to control peoples' lives, make them work themselves to death so the controllers don't have to lift a finger, iow the socialist's dream.
#3 J.T. Wenting on 2011-01-04 05:32 (Reply)
whoooeee --that wuz both barrels
#3.1 buddy larsen on 2011-01-04 05:47 (Reply)
H-m-m-m. I'm definitely not a gamer, but when I decided to build a new computer (for the same price as a much less capable unti from one of the Big Names), I started looking at what the gamers considered high-performance. Note that the market has responded well to this niche with a wide selection of speedy and reliable parts. So, I was introduced to Solid-State Drives for my boot drive, mechanical keyboards (with Cherry Blue switches), a P55 chipset, huge ATI video processor and i7-870 processor. No, not the latest and greatest, but I made decisions about how much more performance I would get for the incremental increase in spending. Result? Win 7 boots in under 15 seconds (without anti-virus, 20 with). That was my goal, because my old mainstream unit might be ready for "something" in about 8 minutes!

Thanks, Gamers.
#4 steve in CT on 2011-01-04 06:56 (Reply)
Having been around the computer scene for a while, I can say with some surety that gaming for home PCs drove a lot of the early acceptance of computers. Believe it or not, "Flight Simulator" was a huge driver for the early Commodore and Atari machine sales. I think back to my very first commercially built purchase - Apple II and besides Wordstar for writing and editing, I purchased "Zork" - which was a knock off of "Adventure" (aka "Colossal Cave").

Now that I think about it, in the early days of 2K, paper tape input computers with teletype Baudot printers, there were a ton of games - [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game)]"Lunar Lander"[/url], "Kingdom" and of course the grand daddy of them all, "Adventure" which was the progenitor for most first person role playing games and was responsible for bringing the term XYZZY into the popular lexicon.

Then there were the first person shooters - the main one being "Castle Wolfenstein" and/or "Duke Nukem" for driving PC sales.

No offense NJ, but I can't see how you could avoid having played a video game at some point in your life. :>)
#5 Tom Francis on 2011-01-04 07:57 (Reply)
i spent a lot of hours with Intellevision's "Tank Battle" and "B17 Bomber" --they seem unbelievably crude now --but not then!
#6 buddy larsen on 2011-01-04 10:10 (Reply)
There was a news story a few years ago about how surgeons who play video games are better at laparoscopic surgery than surgeons who don't. Makes total sense to me.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/ns/technology_and_science-games/
#7 beenel on 2011-01-04 10:22 (Reply)
I love computer games. In the 'casual' game market, there's a genre called 'time management' games, and it's intriguing to me that most of them are of the (simplest) capitalist sort. Run a restaurant to earn rewards to hire people and/or upgrade your place, etc. In other markets, war games are hugely popular.

Hmmm.... Now why do people respond to these concepts...
#8 Pam on 2011-01-06 19:35 (Reply)

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