My thoughts exactly. Pretty much every BioWare game ever (especially Dragon Age or the Mass Effect games) is about story and consequences; the gameplay is not terribly difficult, even on the highest difficulty settings. Same thing can be said for Bethesda games, like Fallout 3 or Oblivion; not 'impossible' to beat by any stretch, and far more about exploring interesting new worlds. All of these examples are games that did extremely well without ANY multiplayer 'tacked on', as it were

Multiplayer has its place, certainly. Every now and then I just need to put in Left 4 Dead and massacre some zombies with a couple of friends. But it's nice to separate myself from that sometimes and dig into a truly engrossing story.

I think the main point here is that nobody has found a good way to merge the two, so we are all stuck with either: a) single-player-focused games with deep and moving storylines / settings and a forced, artificial multiplayer tacked on or b) multiplayer-focused games with forced, artificial story / characters tacked on.

My school's CS department was very similar for our first year. We started learning programming theory and whatnot through vanilla C on boxes running some flavor of Red Hat Linux. Eventually we were forced to write a few programs for Windows, and after that we were mostly allowed to program for / in whichever environment we choose. Most of the class went back to Linux, and a few stayed in the Windows world.

But several of the more advanced classes pushed us all back into the open source world. Lets face it, open source is very handy in the world of Academia. It's much easier to understand the inner mechanics of a computer's OS when you can actually poke around inside of the kernel and experience what happens when you tweak settings and 'enhance' the code in there.

Microsoft tries pretty hard to keep us out from under the hood of their software, so it's only natural that big learning institutions would turn to more open software for education purposes.

As a recent CS grad, I agree 100% that the cost to get up and running for MS is a pretty huge deal.

But another big draw in the FOSS world (for me, at least) is the freedom to write code that isn't locked down to particular technology or other setup. I see Microsoft (and Apple, and a few others) as wanting to get us locked into their way of doing things, completely ignoring the possibility of 'change' that doesn't come from them.

I would much rather give life to some core idea and then see how people with other interests and thoughts can expand and evolve what I started.