Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.

It wasn't a software house - it was a laser engraving business, doing custom work for businesses and individuals, and then also catering to the roleplaying gamer market. He frequently said (well, says, I imagine) that owning your own business is the second most over-rated thing in the world. The number one most over-rated thing being natural childbirth.

Opening text: Together, they will learn there can be no good without evil... No love without hate.... No heaven without hell... No light without darkness.

And my first thought was: I'm a geek who happens to be female, please don't lump me with a demo by gender! But really, I suppose that's true of most geeks. I suspect, for example, that the interest in sports of the average Slashdot reader is somewhat lower than "normal". Etc.

Not so much. Outside, today it will be 95 degrees F. Inside my place of employment, I sometimes wear a scarf this time of year. *sigh*

It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.

I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.

It seems to be there must be a very narrow band in amount of plot for a conversion of game to movie to be successful. First person shooters (ala Doom) very seldom have enough plot, so it's really an action (or action-horror) movie with a thin veneer of the game laid on top of it, because they had to make too much up.

Conversely, some games have too much plot to be made into movies. With the announcement of a (direct to DVD, anime style) Dragon Age movie, the fan community I belong to when crazy. In a negative fashion. Why? We knew they would never make the choices we made. Heck, it's a mainly female community and we started with the cynical observation that they would surely pick a male hero.

So: you need a game that has a recognizable plot line to it, but not one that allows much impactful choices by the player.

I was going to contradict you, but I was a good girl and checked things. Vernor Vinge's True Names didn't use the term cyberspace, just the concept.

Thought I'd share just because it is still interesting.

I read Neuromancer in the mid-90's, and still found it an interesting read, though I did have the urge to through a bucket of soapy water over everything, with the dark and gritty descriptions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill I'm only willing to point that out because I'm not from Indiana, I just live here.