Online Gaming

I was in the group that talked about online gaming so I will talk about stuff we didn't include in our presentation. One related topic to the course would be the future of console games. Consoles are game systems such as Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation 2. In the past few years, these systems have incorporated online play into their systems. My prediction is that online play in these consoles will never be as popular as online play on a personal computer for one reason: console games cannot be modified after their release. PC games of course can. After a PC game is released, a patch can be distributed by the creator of the game to fix any problems encountered by the gaming community. This is an outstanding feature that cannot be implemented on a console game. Also, players of PC games can modify the game with the help of Software Development Kits or SDK's. These modifications include changes in game-types, new maps, new weapons, new player models, or changes to old things. Many people don't know it, but Counter-Strike is actually a mod of the original Half-Life.

Anyway, I will not rule out that consoles will one day be able to have these modifications; however, when this happens they will no longer be a console because they would then fit the definition of a computer which is something that you can input information into, change it, have it process it, and then output the information. Right now one does not input information into these systems except for new consoles that save game settings. These are not modifications to the game and the console does not process this information in order to produce an output. There is a limited amount of changes that are predefined in these settings and they do not currently constitute a computer even though the Xbox had more power than most PC's when it was originally released.

Declining Social Skills

We had a discussion in class about the benefits and problems the internet creates with social skills. Some of the benefits were that they allow support groups to flourish since it is easier for people to talk about their problems when they do not have to be seen. These benefits would actually help social skills on the internet. The problems included people substituting internet activities for real life ones such as building a community, communicating, and etc. Personally, I think it all boils down to individual use of the internet. If one uses the internet as a way to replace real life, then it will replace real life. If one uses the internet to share information, then it will primarily benefit that person. The internet is just a bunch of wires and connected computers; it cannot directly affect one's social skills. The problem comes when one uses the internet to excess. Then it usually decreases real life socail skills while grooming internet skills.

This brings up the question: are real life social skills really necessary? I think so. Without the internet, it is just us. I don't think we should be so dependent on the internet that we become unable to communicate without it. It's just like a student using a calculator to do simple addition or subtraction. There's a point when it gets too far and we don't need to be that dependent on technology, because it might not always be there.

Patterns

The whole time I read this story, I was expecting it to tie into our class in some way, shape, or form. I kept looking. I thought maybe it was a futuristic story in which we can manipulate things just by touching a tv screen; maybe there was some futuristic way that this man would be captured. After I realized that this guy is just crazy, I thought that maybe scientists were probing his mind or something and then I could analyze that, but nothing! I was very dissapointed in this story and feel that it does not relate to our class in any way. The man was just crazy.

Blood Music

This story was very interesting. It always amazes me how a science fiction story can make something that seems so far away also seem so possible by using a bunch of hi-tech terms of which I have no understanding. I do believe this is very far fetched; however, since I don't believe that we're going to be able to create creatures or organisms that are that small and that intelligent. For that matter, the realism of this story is dependent on the organisms ability to evolve very quickly because a day to us is like years to them. So for this to be a reality there are a lot of unique things that have to occur. I more likely believe that aliens would come and inject us with this intelligent bacteria than we would come up with it on our own. I would imagine this would be possible; however, not anywhere in the near future (next 100 years).

Total Recall

I was amazed that one of the stories we read almost exactly played out like a movie I've seen called "Total Recall." In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a bad guy who becomes a good guy in the end. His organization actually made him go to mars and then sent him to a place called "Recall" to give him memories of being a secret agent that went to mars. However, they told him when he came out that he went to Recall as a vacation and that he was a simple worker. This is all to similar to the story. Not to mention the character's name is Douglass Quaid where in the story the character is Douglass Quail. There's got to be some relationship between the story and the movie.

I think this is very interesting. Since I have seen the movie before, I have thought of this memory injection thing before but reading this story brought up new questions. I really wonder how far ahead in the future this will be. I would say definitely in the next 100 years but that is a very huge range of time. I'm also afraid of this technology because I'm not sure that I would want someone to be able to replace my memories, because they said when it works the subject never knows it ever happened. It would be like living a fake life.

Popularity On The Internet

I was reading one of the recent chapters that discussed popularity on the internet and how it is different than that of real life, such as the example of the computer programming expert. One thing that I thought relates to this is online gaming. I play a computer game that has the capability of keeping stats on all the players. This is limited to the server that the players play on. The server that I play on the most does keep track of stats and I have been number one out of at least a thousand other people who play for a couple of weeks now. Although there is one person who is very close to beating me and probably will soon. You can see this at: http://www.smackcentral.net/codstats/. I play under the name Lemmage [NBK].

Another thing that helps the popularity is the forums that is also on the server's website. So not only can people see who is good, but then they can talk to each other about it. The address for the forums is: http://www.smackcentral.net/cgi-bin/smackforum/ultimatebb.cgi. I just thought that would be an interesting new way to look at popularity on the internet (Among Groups).

Internet Vs. Real Life

After reading chapter one in Weinberger's book, I thought to myself how different I am on the internet than I am in real life. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how the internet tends to remove inhivitions in social interaction. If I were playing someone in a game I would think nothing of giving them my age, sex, and location (or a/s/l as it is commonly reffered). Of course I would limit location to my state and would not divulge any other info, but age is a question that many people would be offended by in the real world.

I also found something that I thought was both relative to the previous group project of internet cartoons and this chapter. It is an internet cartoon from the makers of Red vs. Blue that depicts the differences between life on the internet and life in the real world. It makes some good points through humor. Here is the link to the cartoon.