Comment Re:Almost competing (Score 1) 706
I won't address your other points, because they're valid, and this is
I think he means worship of the almighty dollar.
I would like to add to your excellent and highly accurate post, Good Citizen dangitman, as opposed to bothering with some of the idiotic and moronic criticizing posts which follow it: If Wall Street could ever come up with anything remotely as successful as Social Security (an insurance program for the majority), we would all be mightily impressed.
Instead, they keep coming up with an infinite amount of securitized financial scams (or as they call them, "instruments") to continue The Great Financialization.
The absolute best gaming experience I've had when it comes to immersion is definitely Metroid Prime. The game completely blew me away the first time I played it. It's just you, nobody else, on a planet fighting against ETs and Space Pirates while trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Retro Studios never made the game too unlike the previous games in the series as well; this isn't an FPS, it's a First Person Adventure. The puzzles were innovative, expansions were well hidden and fun to find, and the controls, while awkward, worked surprisingly well. The graphics were absolutely beautiful to look at; your HUD would show things like raindrops hitting it or condensation appearing from steam/heat!
The reason why I think the game was so immersive was this: Retro never made players care about the story! The game went on without any real "story" happening. You had to figure out for yourself where to go next, how to beat certain enemies, and everything! You had to "scan" items and enemies to figure out parts of the story and how to defeat enemies. The game gave you this feeling like the world in the game was going on without you animal-crossing style; go to an area one time and something happens, go there another time and different enemies/sequences are present. I was only a pre-teen when I played the game first, so you can imagine how thrilling it was to watch a metroid breaking out of its casing to attack me, and after wondering where to go next for a split second a space-pirate jumps through the window and attacks me.
If more shooters want to be successful, make the design choices that Metroid Prime made.
It's not just a dedicated place of learning, it's a place of research.
Many of the top schools aren't called "top schools" because they teach well. They're top schools because they have to researchers and experts a wide range of subjects who make themselves available to students. If you have a large number of the top people in the world, and they all expect to have the highest salaries of anyone in their line of work, then you have to find a way to increase income to meet their demands. When you see a faculty to student ratio, it can be interpreted as the number of students it takes to pay one person's salary (on average).
This is all on top of providing infrastructure and a vast number of services to enough people to fill a small city (in many cases).
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse