posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else

Call of Duty is basically just a form of a first person shooter, first person shooters are basically just virtual paintball, paintball is basically just a war re-enactment, a war re-enactment is basically just a war, all wars are basically the same so we might as well say the battle of Thermopylae; would be the equivalent application of that type of reduction. It's this ridiculous comparison of things so vastly different that you accused Tepples of when he was talking about the creation of new genres of video game, i.e. First Person Shooter vs. RPG vs. Platformer vs. Adventure. He was not saying that video game plots are just rehashes of older themes from movies and literature.

No, the point is -- it doesn't really matter!

Defining your terms properly matters in any dialogue, otherwise you might as well just grunt at each other.

Obtuse?

Yes, as in unrelated to the matter at hand. No one was attempting to say that video games are not relavent because they make use of old plot devices, but we wouldn't be arguing if you got that point.

The Pandaria reference was a jab at furries btw.

Even the ones that are polite, but introverted and quiet become a communication energy drain eventually.

Congratulations! You just offended half the world population and 80% of /.

they don't have to conform to anyone's ideas of the social norm

Introverts have their own social norm, namely that the focus in a work environment should be on the work itself. Most other introverts I know have zero difficulty engaging in conversation when it's about a common directive or goal such as accomplishing a task at work, it's only when people try to engage them in idle small talk or go off on an unrelated tangent that they start blocking. I suspect that what you perceive as a communication energy drain is your attempt to insert unrelated topics into a business communication. Tell them clearly what they need to do and set deadlines for reports on their progress and most introverts will exceed your expectations.

Everyone has been on that business trip with the guy who just won't stop talking... you spend hours and hours with them at the airport, at meals, in the car driving to and from your destination and they never stop! It's miserable. You'd rather be there by yourself than be with the guy who won't shut up from the moment you say "hello" until the time you say "goodnight".

I retract my earlier statement and submit for your approval: Kids born before and after the 80s don't know shit about gaming.

I wouldn't call this excellent execution. Unless, y'know, you're into that sort of thing.

But, I digress. What is more important is that it seems you are misreading genre as medium. Tepples comparison of Katamari Damacy to Bubbles is really spot on if you actually bother to look up what he's referring to. On the other hand, comparing the an internet forum to courier messaging (an odd reduction since a physical forum would seem to have been more fitting) is so obtuse I'm not really sure where to begin. To illustrate, let's take what you're implying Tepples was doing and apply it. The end result would be saying Call of Duty is basically the same as the historical battle of Thermopylae whereas Tepples' assertion was more along the lines of saying 'we haven't come up with many more innovative ways of killing each other since the atom bomb' if we want to stick with a morbid theme.

In other words, he was comparing genres as in Horror, SciFi, Mystery, Fantasy or Classical, Rock, Alternative, Jazz. (Notice that they all stay within their mode of expression.) Whereas you started comparing speaking to writing to printing to broadcasting or the individual stories within a genre but across different media.

Using cover and shields are as old as the effin' hills, just look at Time Crisis. Kids born after the 80s don't know shit about gaming.

Or you could do it in your spare time while working for someone else. This is actually the more common pattern for innovaters, it's relatively rare that you get someone who just throws everything in the pot and comes up with something new. More often, it's the application of knowledge gained in your existing field or through education and then applied to a dream or a problem diligently over time that nets results. A good example is Chester Carlson, the inventor of Xerography.

What Mr. Persson pioneered was the financing for this type of work by developing the game to a usable state where it was just interesting enough to pay a couple bucks for and using that cash flow to build the supporting development structure so he didn't have to do it all by his lonesome.

As a side note, he's not that young. His wikipedia page says 32 which would make him 30 or so when he started Minecraft.

Blech, you mean all the migrants that show up in any subculture when it becomes 'cool'? It's not cynicism or sociopathy, just low IQ and hormones. 'Nerds' and 'geeks' becoming fashionable did a lot for making tech and science culture more mainstream but it's also been watered down by the masses that have signed on because it's the latest fad. Everyday it seems more and more like we face the same dilemma that Kurt Cobaine often lamented about; 'playing shows for the people that used to beat us up in highschool' may make us popular but who wants to be popular if that's the company you get to keep.

When they say intersperse I don't think they mean 'make a checkerboard of small plots'. What they are referring to is high density planting where you find ways to mix planted crops together so that they mutually benefit each other (making use of inter-cropping and companion planting). It's never used on a large scale because it is so labour intensive but many people with postage stamp yards make good use of it to grow their own food.

If a country that possesses nuclear warheads and ICBMs is pissed off enough to launch one at you, you've got a lot more to worry about than whether your tractor has a microcontroller in it or not. In other words, an atmospheric EMP pulse is only going to be set off in preparation for a full scale ground assault so your ass will be drafted in about 24 hours flat. Look on the bright side though, the military's got lots of K rations.

I sometimes wonder how long this debate has gone on.

It may seem strange now but Windows users used to celebrate and, dare I say, look forward to new releases of the OS. We still had that glimmering hope that if we had been very good little boys and girls we would maybe get the feature or fix we had been asking for. Around the release of Windows ME is when most of us threw up our hands in disgust and walked away but a few hung in still keeping the faith until they saw the Playmobile colours of XP. That tipping point comes whenever an OS sacrifices usefulness for more users. They have to turn the system into a child's toy so that burnt out soccer moms who 'just want to check Facebook/email/whatever' will shell out money for their product. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use computers for trivial things. I just believe that if you don't need the extra functionality of a full system you should stick to something more specialized like an iPad aka the smartphone for geezers. The thing that irritates me is that companies are trying to market their product to the lowest common denominator by watering it down, swathing it with bubble wrap, grinding off all the sharp corners, etc. This makes it a pain to use if you actually know what you're doing and chews up system resources even with every extraneous feature disabled. So really it's not change that bothers people but wasteful change.

Because apart from WWI and WWII the United States has never been involved in another war

Nobody reads that stuff, we all just click 'I Agree' and promptly get scheduled for experimental surgery.

At first glance, I would have imagined myself siding with the rational, thought-provoking argument and not the base attack founded on personal fetish. As it turns out, I did not judge myself incorrectly. The more I hear Coyne speak and the more of his words I read, the clearer it becomes that he has taken up the banner of the literalism that he rails against. After reading some of what Hughes has written, it's easy to recognize him as the more rational person in this debate. Here is part of an excerpt from his book God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens that seems to sum it up nicely:

I must confess that it has been disappointing for me to have witnessed the recent surge of interest in atheism. It’s not that my own livelihood, that of a theologian, is at stake—although the authors in question would fervently wish that it were so. Nor is it that the treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy over-generalizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God. Rather, the new atheism is simply unchallenging theologically. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.

Clearly the new atheists’ strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. As a result of this exclusion, the intellectual quality of their atheism is unnecessarily diminished. Their understanding of religious faith remains consistently at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize. Even though the new atheists reject the God of creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists, and “intelligent design” (ID) advocates, it is not without interest that they have decided to debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.

This choice of antagonists betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types. The new atheists are saying in effect that if God exists at all, we should allow this God’s identity to be determined once and for all by the fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religious traditions. I believe they have chosen this strategy not only to make their job of demolition easier, but also because they have a barely disguised admiration for the simplicity of their opponents’ views of reality.

In preparing treatises on a-theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what it is they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology. And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So the new atheists just know there is something sick and delusional about theology. There is no need to look at it up close. Furthermore, conversation with theologians, most of whom are not biblical literalists, would add a dimension of intricacy to the new atheist literature that would detract from the breeziness that sells books. Ignorance of theology simplifies the new atheists’ attacks on their equally uninformed religious adversaries. It allows their critique to match, point for point, the fundamentalism it is trying to eliminate.

I, personally, am not religious but I do not have a problem with someone holding a different viewpoint on the matter. Unfortunately, it seems to be becoming an ever more popular trend to attack others based on their personal belief. This is horrendously shameful and it is difficult to imagine that any reasonable person would be able to personally justify such an act. The debate has become less and less about the intersection of scientific thought versus religious thought which had been a rational debate about areas still undelved by science and open to theological debate and has become more focused on running rough shod over anything with even a remote connotation of religious faith while placing an enormous amount of faith in the absolute assumptions made by this 'New Atheism'. A post by another slashdot reader from the previous debate thread comes to mind:

mario_grgic
This kids is what a delusional person sounds like. Unintelligible mumbo jumbo and irrational logic. Hate to break it to you but we already have models of universe that starts from nothing. Read Hawkng's "Grand Design" and upcoming "Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss. Don't expect to understand the details (Hawking does not even go into details) because that requires a fairly good understanding of the quantum mechanics (which is relevant for the universe that starts from essentially an infinitesimal point). By the way, the biggest fault with religion is that it makes a virtue out of faith and faith is believing something without evidence, which is essentially ignorance. Religion makes virtue out of ignorance. Faith is not a way to enlightenment or to discovery of what is true, only evidence based reasoning is.

Note: emphasis mine.

I think it stands for itself and so I will leave it for your consideration.

That quote by Einstein in the context of this discussion is oddly appropriate given his personal beliefs about God.