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Comment ATTN: Any Last.fm engineers reading slashdot (Score 1) 173

Please add some form of adaptive (or configurable) quality to your streaming service. I currently find it unusable (and therefore not worth paying for) due to occasional audio gaps. I would FAR prefer lower quality without interruptions to a high quality stream that cuts out once or twice per song.

Comment Re:Tunnels of Doom (Score 1) 272

Just adding my love for the Tunnels of Doom. Released in 1982, it can best be described as an upgraded version of Rogue. Random dungeon generation, first-person hallways, non-combat interaction such as fountains and vaults with secret passcodes, random magical items, listening for monsters at doors, this game had nascent versions of alot of the features that people now appreciate in rogelikes such as Nethack, but with graphical sprites and color which, in 1982, made this game freaking awesome.

Comment It has to do with expectation of outcome. (Score 1) 103

I did my thesis in exactly this area. My research assumed that task complexity had something to do with enjoyment, but I was wrong. Experimental evidence showed that people had more when the difficulty of the task made the outcome uncertain relative to their skill level. This jives with researcher Kevin Burns theories of enjoyment being derived from unexpected good news (the unexpected occurrence of positive information gain) - i.e. the punchline of a joke or winning against the perceived odds.

Comment Re:Does this mean? (Score 1) 384

I'm frequently amazed the games industry doesn't just stand up one day and go "Y'know, we talked it out between us, and we've had enough. We're going to all get jobs with fewer hours and better pay in something dull like spreadsheet programming.

Actually, many do. There is a huge attrition rate in the industry; however there are always more than enough inexperienced programmers wanting to give it a try. Of course, why fight to keep senior people around when programmers are easily replaceable cogs from the point of view of management? This explains the quality engineering that goes into many of today's games.

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