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02 Nov 2009 13:47
November 2. Game designer Eskil Steenberg is one of my favorite living philosophers, but not a very good writer in English. It took me several reads to make sense of his latest post about gaming as an abusive relationship. He's complaining that online games are mostly level grinding, where you do tedious repetitive tasks to increase your character's powers, and that many gamers love it because they're emotionally sick. The core of his argument:
Ask yourself, would you rather play an hour of grind to level up, or an hour of great gameplay whose progress you couldn't save? I think many gamers would rather take a beating if they think that they are accomplishing something, than have some pointless fun. That's a real shame because, let's be clear, you don't accomplish anything when you play games.
This issue reminds me of James Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games, and also the book of Ecclesiastes.
November 2. Great day yesterday! First, because of the time change, I got to sleep until 9 and get up at 8. Then I got an $85 donation -- thanks SD -- which I might use to get some wool pants. Then I hauled leaves up to the land, mulched my plants for winter, and put leaves on three stick piles and in one small pile for compost. I noticed that the leaves were already starting to get warm from composting, just from being packed in bags in the truck, so I decided to look for another load to make a bigger pile. Back in Spokane, I saw 18 bags on Craigslist and drove out at dusk to get them, and they were gone, but two doors up a family was out bagging leaves and they were very happy to give me enough to fill the truck. Maybe I'll haul that load up tomorrow and come back for a third. I'm on my new computer, and upgrading from 1 GHz to 1.73 GHz does make it go faster, but there's still an annoying one second lag when switching between the window where I'm composing this and another, and scrolling up and down in the online text editor is still painfully slow. I just timed it, and going from top to bottom using the mouse wheel takes 35 seconds, and using the down arrow, 57 seconds! I should try some different stripped-down Linux systems, or older versions of Puppy, and see if one of them handles online text editors better. Or maybe the problem is with my web host -- when I'm in Gmail, scrolling with the mouse wheel is instantaneous, and when I paste this into Edit Pad, the down arrow takes only 14 seconds. (If you want to test it on your system, use View Source rather what's on this page.) Anyway, after some research, I partitioned the hard drive with 20GB of NTFS, to run TinyXP Rev09, then 10GB of FAT32, to relay stuff between Windows and Linux, because Linux likes FAT32 better than NTFS, and Windows can't use Linux filesystems at all without a special utility. Then 26GB of ext3 to run Puppy, and finally a 1GB swap partition. I'm going to try to not get online with Windows at all, so I don't have to mess with antivirus and spyware programs, but it will be nice to have it for games and the few things that Linux is still struggling with.
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