I didn't say (or mean) that expecting people to contribute something is bad, especially not today. But who contributes and what counts as a real contribution are fairly arbitrary. Children in industrialized societies are usually not expected to contribute to their household income today, even though it was the norm for millennia. Likewise, opinions vary wildly over whether being a stay-at-home parent counts as a "job", and often depend on unrelated things like the race and marital status of the mother. Even normal types of wage labor have been/are thought to be unsuitable for various groups of people. (Women can't be doctors! etc.)

In a scarcity-driven society, your example makes sense:

But the direction it goes in is one where less and less work is required. It takes a lot of people to manually run an entire farm. What if it just doesn't take as many to maintain the drones? Do we shrink the population until there's ~1 person per available job? Or do we do something else, like rotate the work? Imagine only having to work for, say, five years before retirement. Or maybe some people would volunteer to maintain the drones because they find it fulfilling, or maybe drone maintenance comes with extra prestige or privileges beyond a basic standard of living. Or we could wildly expand our definition of what counts as work, so that people writing fanfiction or playing in garage bands are seen as contributing something worthwhile to society. You get the idea.

Reducing the amount of work it takes to keep the human race alive, fed, and housed should be unambiguously good. The reason it's not is because we've structured our society around the idea that all adults must be employed in full-time jobs (or be married to someone who is) to qualify for a decent life. We have this idea, particularly in America, that (employment) work is a virtue in and of itself. Unemployed people are shamed and villainized.

If we all lived on isolated family farms, it would be obvious that reducing the total workload is better for everyone -- less work = more free time. But instead, we live in a complex, interconnected industrial society. It's going to take a lot of large cultural changes before we can handle the idea that some people might not work at all, or only work a few hours a week. For perspective, we still don't have a consensus on whether something as difficult and time-consuming as being a stay-at-home mom counts as a job.

I can't help but notice that you left off the first part of the quoted sentence. You know -- the part about the *other* major subject of right-wing science denial.

Funny how the evolutionary biologists seem to have the exact same problem.

(Not everyone is practiced in publicly debating bogus talking points.)

I agree with your overall point, but...

It wasn't a crowded market. The North American video game industry had collapsed when the NES came out.

Sony entered the market at a time when Nintendo was both unpopular with developers (due to restrictive policies) and behind on hardware (due to sticking with cartridges). Sega was trying to come back from a series of hardware blunders when Sony undercut them by $100. The Neo Geo was never a serious competitor, and the TurboGrafx-16 only sold well in Japan. Sony is also a hardware company, and spent quite a lot of money ($1 billion?) to design custom hardware for the PlayStation.

3DO was from the previous decade. Not sure where you're getting Atari from. Microsoft basically threw monopoly money at the XBox, even buying Bungie so they could have a decent launch title. There were also lots of existing developers used to making games for a Microsoft platform (DirectX). Even then, the sales were pitiful next to the PS2, especially in Japan (which mattered more back then). The GameCube did about the same, and was the start of Nintendo's journey towards low-cost party game consoles. The XBox 360 was where Microsoft really got going.

Under the right circumstances, with the right company, yes. And I think Valve has a serious shot at this. But it's not trivial. Half the companies you listed were utter failures in the market.

On the other hand, the market is different today. From the NES to the PS2, there was always a clear winner in sales and third-party support in each generation. But the latest generation was closer to a tie between the PS3 and X360 (please don't start talking about the Wii). We're now in a world where cross-platform games are the norm and two consoles can co-exist on equal footing. Hopefully there's enough room for Valve to push the industry in a different direction from where Sony and Microsoft want to take us.

They shouldn't be (and probably aren't) using numbers that are very close together to teach the concept. Instead of using 1/5 and 1/6, use 1/2 and 1/3, or 1/3 and 1/8. If the perception of length vs. area/angle matters, it's a bad choice of numbers.

They're sending out controllers as part of the Steam Box beta. The participants are pulled from Steam users who volunteer and jump through a few hoops, so we'll no doubt see reviews from outside gamers very soon.

It looks like the main buttons are on the top and back. I see the usual two sets of triggers, but there are also two big buttons going down the middle. I guess you'd press them by squeezing your middle and ring fingers, which I don't think has been done before. It's a neat idea; trying to put four fingers on the triggers always makes me feel like I'm going to drop the controller.

To be fair, that is what basically all new products are.

For gamers, a new type of video game controller is a big deal. Compare a DualShock 4 gamepad (2013) to an SNES gamepad (1990). They're still remarkably similar. The basic concept of two analog sticks, a D-pad, start/select, four face buttons, and some shoulder buttons has been the standard for well over a decade. The exceptions are some niche attempts at motion control that haven't worked so well for actually gaming. Using trackpads to replace the analog sticks on a gamepad is a new idea. It sounds pretty clever, assuming they can optimize the design.

Part of the announcement is a request for beta testers. Beta hardware will be shipped in the next few months with plans for release early next year. That's not vaporware. As someone who's eligible for the beta, I appreciated the heads-up.

Well, I didn't say it was *justified* sneering. But I wouldn't call it 100% artificial either. Big-name casual games are usually not the most sophisticated of their genre. (Fans of tower defense games complain bitterly about the simplicity of Plants vs. Zombies, for example.) There are legitimate criticisms of any work of art.

Myst players weren't all part of the gaming community. Many (most?) never played other games, except for stuff like Solitaire. And Myst sold 3-6 times as many copies as the most popular hardcore games of that year (e.g. Doom, Secret of Mana, Mega Man X). It might have been niche in an absolute sense, but it didn't seem that way at the time.

Er... I am aware that the world predates my birth, thank you. But I don't see how having lots of serial dramas in the 1970s means a reemergence of the form in the mid-2000s doesn't count as a change.

Well, I was born in '82, so no. I turned 18 the year Survivor launched, so my view is probably colored somewhat. I fled to anime for a few years, and when I came back to American TV it looked very different.

I don't know; it sure seems like there are a lot more serial dramas on American TV in the post-Sopranos era. In the first few years of the millennium it was almost all sitcoms and reality shows. (Not that there's a shortage of those today, but when I was a kid, it seemed like *every* TV show as purely episodic.)

Why didn't Myst have a larger impact? The answer is in the article:

It also explains the distinction and the draw:

To that I would add that the pre-rendered graphics looked much nicer than most other games available at the time.

I was a gamer when Myst came out. I remember it being sneered at by the hardcore crowd. The people talking about it changing the face of gaming were the ones salivating over its sales figures. But casual games don't seem to create new genres so easily. For a while it was Myst, then it was The Sims, then Angry Birds, Farmville, Plants vs. Zombies, and who knows what else. And they're all different! Whatever makes a casual game popular, it doesn't seem to be easy to clone. At a guess, I'd say it's personality.

(Why did we sneer at Myst? Because every gaming executive secretly wants their company to be a casual gaming money machine. When they start talking about "the future of gaming" being being point-and-click slideshows, it sounds very threatening to us. The modern version of this is "the future of gaming is mobile", i.e. games with a terrible touchscreen interface. But since gaming happens across so many different platforms now, it's less scary. Plus, we're older, so we've seen this pattern a few times.)

(Also, I was 12, so I sneered at everything.)

I must point out that this is pretty standard risk mitigation, particularly given that reducing CO2 emissions will take many years. (The more the better, for economic reasons.) You're not supposed to wait for 100% confirmation of an impending disaster before taking steps to prevent it -- ask any insurance company. Had we started seriously trying to cut emissions 20-30 years ago, we'd be in a much better position now. Likewise, starting now is much better than waiting another ten years. And reducing fossil fuel usage is something we need to do anyway, both because of pollution and because we're running out of them. Again, starting on those problems early is a good idea.

Those are some pretty big assumptions given the state of economics as a science, and the lack of consensus therein. What makes you think the economy is that much more fragile than the climate?

They show a difference of ~30-50ms between iOS and Android. Based on previous discussion about input lag in LCD monitors, that seems to be a range that some people find very annoying and others don't notice at all.