I think this may be a factor of the huge increase of computer / phone users in general, followed by all the unappreciated power high level api's give them now a days, it is easy to be visible and vocal about tech without knowing anything about it.

I mean I mostly agree, but if you think about it we're already ranked on an arbitrary stat, charasima. I mean, I hate the thought of weird stats getting put into a machine and ranking you based on that, and having your teacher and parent's perceptions of you altered by a 'bad' stat. But, in some cases, it might be nice to have another avenue to excel at rather than base genetics, clothing, fitness, voice tone, body language and number of 'smiles per minute' you can put out, that we use now.

I never got used to using my thumb for simultaneous presses. On the NES i'd flip my right hand over and use my index and middle finger to play, it always felt much more precise. I appreciate them trying some buttons on the underside of it, but it does leave you with 1 less button on the right than an analog.

Though the fact that the 5th button is the analog pad, it can be much more than a one press. First is the obvious turn it into 4 buttons depending on the quadrant pressed, which would work for action games perhaps.

But even more you could do gesture then press moves to make it even more functional. There is a lot of potential for new here. It might suck, it might not, but I have a feeling we'll see some new ways to control things if the controller takes off.

He has upper management written all over him.

EA games have made a push (haven't played one in a few years so not sure if still doing this) for having more controls on the right stick. In the sports games you could flick in a direction for 'skill moves' that worked sort of well. The best use of it was in fight night for throwing punches, still probably the best boxing implementation I've ever played. They also had the Skate game that I never played, but made use of the right stick in the same way.

It might open up some new stuff, I could see some cool say arrow shooting or throwing game where you do an angry birds like motion to chuck things at people maybe.

Hey, is that a nash equilibrium problem? We are all getting along ok with the current system which reinforces itself, we still get games, companies still get money, but if we all just swapped to linux pretty much everyone would benefit more with the platform openness, but we are held in check since everyone has to move together.

I honestly thought wizards and glass , something like that, the 3rd book... was the best one. This one really set the tone for the gunslinger, and took place when he was younger and you basically had knights with guns mixed in with a western, I liked it a lot. The others were kinda sorta ok, page turners and some few good select scenes but felt a bit on the wondering side. Book 3 was the one that really stood out to me.

Googled Xtend for more info... what an unfortunate name they have for the language.

Wait, I'm confused. I played mw4 but not mwo. After reading the article it seems to me there is that cool shot item ( how long to grind that out?) that makes alpha striking better than ever. 3rd person jump sniping further supports that. I stopped playing mw4 due to disliking the hill humpping and jump sniping alpha strike gameplay. I see that as a bad thing IMHO, but others might enjoy it I guess...but why was mw4 jump sniping bad vs mwo jump sniping being good?

In my ideal world cars can talk to streets and other cars for congestion reports, routing, and local avoidance. Having a manual driver in that process would fuck everything up since there is one X factor in the swarm that isn't responding.

Still that is a long way off, I imagine self drive will begin like ski lifts, drive into a zone, control is taken, moved along a highway, then as you exit a slow ramp with some warning bells as you resume control of the car.

Either way seems to be an infrastructure nightmare but damn would be nice when it is in place. Hopefully i can see something like this when I'm just getting old enough to not drive myself.

The tech has to be there of coarse...but machines can do things much faster and more constantly than the human machine, and they don't have moods to deal with. You are distracted, pissed off, bored, lethargic, whatever, all of those will impact your ability to do anything in life, good machines dont have it.

In an ideal condition you say turn left, or tap the roadway on a map to tell the car you want to travel down it, vehicles around you respond in milliseconds to your change in direction and route around you or apply brakes behind you, and even the oncoming traffic will react to your move, no matter how abrupt.

But yeah, this dream is a long ways off, but I have no doubt the human race would be better for it if it took us out of the drivers seat and put us in command of vehicles instead.

If people want to drive for fun race tracks and 'specialized manual race cars' are where it should go down.

I agree with what you are saying, and there is a large degree of talent in finding appropriate application of technology, but sometimes those first strides to create the tech is often where the true genius lies, and often those people are under appreciated and/or compensated for it.

I don't think people praise notch for being a great game designer, do they? He kinda just kept doing stuff and hit it at the right time with the right game. We hadn't been subjected to the alpha funding model before, and that sale of 'promise' was still new and squeaky, and indie games hadn't quite exploded yet, right time, right place.

All games are copies and iterations on existing ones, EQ -> DAOC -> WOW for example, each added their own twist to the previous and improved upon it. I played infiniminer before getting minecraft and it just lacked something that minecraft has, that flavor and personality of the world.

Anyway I agree strongly with your sentiment but the fact is that the world doesn't reward hard work and knowledge and creativity. I have a friend working on a game with this pretty bad ass hand built 2d engine, he made it back before Unity/UDK existed and all that in c++ / dirextx. It is really kickass honestly, and the game play of several of his games is pretty damn good, a one man creation of a functioning RTS.

Though the art was off, he lost money/time to add the polish layer once the engine and gameplay was good, and the game sold basically nothing. That polish push is where the $'s are at, and always has been. The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.

I knew I was fucked when I started bobbing my head in time to shit playing in the grocery store.

You are basically talking out of my mouth about gmail... I wonder if this is something that is making me 'old' because the tiny ass compose window and bullshit down the left side doesn't concern me.

As for the icons I think it is a stupid ass UI design fad that I hope passes soon. As a designer though I can see how I can think my icon is super obvious as to what it does, and I don't have to translate it and worry that the "Fwd" takes up more or less space in another language.

Still, I always have to hover for tooltips now a days, I just can't remember which stupid button means what. But yeah google is taking a falling dive for a while now, they sold the gold company for riches and more generalization as they opened up the door. I probably would have done the same thing honestly.