I really don't understand the backlash against 3D. I can see the "wow-ness" wearing off and people getting jaded on "meh" content that uses 3D as its primary selling point, but isn't glasses-free 3D still something most people would like to see work? I have a 3DS and love it. I play it in 3D almost exclusively, only turning it off for certain tracks in Ridge Racer, or for playing Resident Evil: Revelations for extended amounts of time. I don't want to go back. If rumors that the 3DSXL has easier to view, more effective, 3D are true, I'll be getting one of those also. I may even get a 3D android phone eventually. It seems silly to me that the WiiU pad's display isn't 3D. That would be a selling point for me. I can't get excited by Vita's superior graphics because it doesn't have the 3DS' immersion. Am I really the only one who sees the 3DS as a move forward?

"For some reason they never have demo parties like this in North America. Why is that?" I will speculate based on my memory of the Amiga era. We'd meet occasionally in person and someone would show up with a bunch of cracked games and other stuff pulled from a BBS... The intros and cracktros had to fit on the floppy with the game itself, which was likely already using most of the available diskspace. It seemed that most of Europe had pretty low-end machines, mostly stock Amiga 500s, and that was what the crackers wrote to. In the US, many more Amiga users were into video and/or 3D. Versus Europe, US users tended to have expanded desktop systems with upgraded CPUs, FPUs, and extra memory. It was well known that demos and cracked software often wouldn't run on our upgraded systems, or there would be NTSC/PAL related timing problems. (Xenophobe for the A500 wouldn't work if you had the 512k expansion as it changed the memory addresses) For this reason above all others, US Amiga users valued OS compliant, multitasking applications with style-guide complaint interfaces over metal-banging demos/games that often required trial-and-error with disabling CPU caches, burst modes etc. just to run. Our contribution was artists like Eric Schwartz creating playable system-friendly animations in programs like MovieSetter.

I think dumb stuff can actually improve your cognitive skills if you approach it properly. I hadn't thought about gravity like I should've until I saw how wrong everything was in the Star Trek reboot. I gained an understanding about something without taking in any new information simply by seeing how it was depicted so clearly wrong that I had to reconcile (almost) every notion I held about about gravity. Similarly, American politics never made sense to me until I understood how professional wrestling is booked, scripted, canonized, and repeated or redacted right in front of the audience.

Good that we value the second more than the first, or we'd have been a short lived species.

I thought it was just the nature of people who have an aptitude for tech that we tend to make informed purchases, based on a thorough examination of our needs. Many of us don't value marketing because we've convinced ourselves that we don't respond to/fall for it. When I see ads for "Windows 7 computers" I smirk knowing Windows 8 will totally obsolete it; that Microsoft have already moved on to the next product and anyone trying to sell me Windows 7 is being disingenuous. At the same time, I am a Windows 7 user who needed a 64-bit OS's ability to use larger amounts of memory during 3D rendering, so marketing played little role in my purchase. (If I worked at the company whether I held a low opinion of marketing or hailed this as heroes would always depend on my feeling about the product.) I just assumed most geeks were meritocratic and so would often see marketing as a consumer of a disproportionately large amount of company funds. I wasn't going to bring up Asperger or autism, but I can see how some people could completely miss the point of an ad that was all flash or pathos while responding well to those speaking in percent improvements in performance, specific improvements in design, or advantages over competing products.

A truly advanced civilization would have discovered free energy, eliminated scarcity and would need no money. Have you ever seen Star Trek?

Imagine the outcry if they had decided to replace the Green Goblin with a character who is a half-black, half-Latino teen, and whose creators haven't ruled out that he might be gay. Whenever the hero is changed it's lauded as a reflection of our diversity, if it were the villain being changed it would be called a throwback to old negative attitudes.

The reasoning, even if flawed, is pretty simple. Most people go through life without ever committing a murder. Most people also eventually have sex at some point. Violence in games and films can be cathartic, and it's not been proven to cause a person to become a violent. Even when violent acts are linked to games, it has not been proven that the players did not already have violent tendencies. On the other hand, we expect our children will have sex. We just don't want them to be doing it at irresponsibly or illegally young ages. The more obscene the violence depicted, the more of a disconnect there is between it and reality for most people. I have killed countless people in Mortal Kombat, but have never wanted to kill an actual person. Seeing an attractive naked woman, in any media, is almost always going to remind me that I would indeed like to be having sex.

Yet it is no less true that someone reading that statement may indeed hold that opinion. I've always found it very interesting... How else might we ever develop human/animal translators?

Interactive movies are actually what I want. I don't play games for the challenge, I play them for the escape. I don't enjoy open ended multi-player games because I am simply not that competitive. Resident Evil 4, for me, was a high point in game design because I could not wait to see what kind of strange place I might end up in or what abomination I would face next. I liked my character, and I thought the NPCs were well done also (and I feel similarly about Just Cause 2 which I am still playing). I just want to explore while advancing a story to completion at my own pace.

Why is resolution still the measure of realism? I remember the FUD during the transition from 16 to 32 bit consoles that would have had people believe graphic quality was limited by the NTSC television standard. Isn't it apparent that any old live action television show still looks far more realistic than any modern game? Compare "L.A. Noire" in HD to an episode of, say, the "Rockford Files" running in 320x240 and tell me the latter isn't far more realistic. Clarity does not equal quality.

The terms graphics race seems to be used around here to refer to little more than number of pixels pushed and the complexity of the lighting model used. There are countless ways that graphics could be improved that have nothing to do with either. I think physics, when it's not part of the game mechanic, is largely graphical. I am looking forward to a generation of consoles that can render hair that doesn't clip into a figure's body, clothing that actually covers a figure rather than being modeled onto it, body masses that jiggle subtly and believably, object damage that isn't canned, buildings with visible interiors... None of those things require more pixels or a radically different shading pipeline.

Oh, I know! The worst is when they scream "get it out!" when you snag one with the grappling hook. I have to tell myself that they are the same bastards holding citizens at gunpoint at traffic stops...

Maybe more realism would snap us out of feeling the need to engage in such violent activities in depressing locales. I still play Just Cause 2 frequently, because I think they did an excellent job of making Panau a beautiful place to escape to. I would like to see rain that formed reflecting puddles, snow that accumulates, just generally more realism in all of the parts of the game I find pleasant. I would not particularly care to see more gruesome deaths or depictions of the dead.

Because, as a Catholic, he would be under papal authority and would likely consider the Pope infallible. Having a president that took directions from Rome was a legitimate concern yet was a non-issue with previous Protestant presidents who merely had preachers advising or counseling them.