There's clearly a lot more to the cost of a product than the raw materials. Look at, oh, any video game or application software.

Atmosphere, art direction, and writing were all spot on. But none of them made any sense in what amounted to a generic shooter.

As much as I like action games, I got very annoyed with how the gameplay got in the way of the overall experience. It should have been an adventure game or something else with a slower pace, not hyper action shooter part 50.

I think the research is worth looking into, but this is exactly the wrong kind of post for Slashdot. It's the "everything you know is wrong" epiphany that geeks just love to latch onto (unless it's something about Linux being overrated or religion being good, in which case no one will buy it). Now we've got people with no clue at all, who have never run in their lives, vehemently putting down people who disagree with the article. Come on folks, no need to get all high on a quick snort of anti-establishmen views.

To some extent, the author is spinning the article in a certain direction. Of course people who are dedicated runners and buy expensive running shoes are going to have more injuries. They'd have more injuries if they ran barefoot, too.

Except a lot of people LIKE big games like Gears of War and Halo 3 and BioShock and Mass Effect and Dawn of War II, just as people like movies that cost, you know, lots of money to make.

I think you're severely underestimating what it takes to build a game. It's not like EA could just start making bubble-popping games and everyone would be happy. Anything with good art and good music and so on is not going to be cheap.

Rock Band 2. Awesome, lots of fun...comes with custom hardware.

Fallout 3...for the Xbox 360. I don't even have a network connection for my 360.

This article seems to be more about PC games than console games (and at the moment, the console market is 5-10x the size of the PC gaming market).

I'm longtime software engineer, I've used UNIX and Linux professionally...and I still run Windws as an admin, all the time.

Why? For starters, vim--yes, vim, the open source editor with roots in secure operating systems--writes to its own folder in Program Files, which is a huge no-no. I can get around this by installing vim to it's own special folder, like c:\vim, but it's a symptom of the overall problem. While most new commercial applications do things right, older apps don't, and there's a real issue with free software not handling things correctly. The proper way to handle this is to figure out what software works correctly and what doesn't (which isn't always easy, because some programs only do bad things in particular cases, and it may take months to realize this), and keeping the bad ones out of Program Files.

And all of those "layers" were completely out of place in Bioshock. The setting was good, the game mechanics were polished, but it all pretty much comes down to shooting anything that moves, clicking on corpses and crates and desks, playing some circa-1989 hacking minigame, and extremely frustrating battles with high-end enemies. "Layers" of story here makes about as much sense as adding deep, critical views of Ayn Rand's objectivist theories to professional wrestling.

Considering how few high-end PC games actually come out, getting a flashy PC just to play them isn't worth it.

Hardware issues aside, serious gameplayers need to be where the developers are, which at the moment means the Xbox 360. A Nintendo Wii or DS is optional, for those people who want to see some of the more innovative designs. (PC gaming diehards can now interject the usual comments about FPS controls and real-time strategy games and mods.)

And, yes, I'll point out that a 360 + Wii + DS + several years of Xbox Live is still cheaper than the PC mentioned in the article.

Ten years ago the video card wars were in full swing. Each generation brought amazing new advance and impressive technology.

But nVidia and ATI haven't realized that we passed the point of diminishing returns years ago. Mobility and battery life are what matter. And I know there are hardcore PC gamers out there, but there are only a handful of companies even bothering to push the high-end graphics, so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it. Wait a year or so, and you may find that one or two of the few high-end PC game makers decide to throw you a bone and add support. And as a bonus, you get SIGNIFICANTLY increased power consumption, and the video card addicts are just wasting resources so they can all whack-off to Shader 30.0 soft shadows on eyelashes.

It's a weird, captive, completely pointless market unless you're doing 3D rendering for a living (for movies, for commercials, for product design, etc.).

It's not that game developers don't want good writers...but they need writers who are willing to bend to all the quirks and problems of game development. Writing is easy compared to the work of creating art assets or programming. You'll find yourself having to revise and go off in different directions based on schedule restrictions and technical limitations. Your incredible plot point gets negated because it's deemed technically risky, and then you have to work around it without scrapping all the work that has been done so far.

In general, developers prefer to have decent writers who understand how games are made than to have amazing writers who have no clue.

Yeah , just like you can buy all the physics books you need and become a particle physicist.

Because there are so many jobs out there for particle physicists?

Anyway I always hear this argument trotted out by so called coders who've never had any formal training and by and large they're generally useless.

Programming takes practice. Computer science is not about programming. I would argue that 8 out of 10 computer science graduates suck just as much at programming as the spaghetti VB coders you rag on.

I didn't get into computer science to be a SCIENTIST, I got into it so I could write applications and games and make useful things for people.

You don't need a computer science degree for that. You can buy all the books you want from Amazon, you can find the answers to all your questions online, and you can write any app you want in Python or Ruby or Objective C or the language of your choice. There's no need to deal with dry courses about operating systems and so on.

And if you really want some insight into NP completeness or whatever, there are plenty of free articles to read...or buy another book.

Women want to program and do useful things with computers, but maybe they're not as interested in what amounts to computer science for its own sake?