betajames

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes worry that I spend too much time looking at screens: computer screens, smartphone screens, TV screens, movie theater screens, and (of course) screens on which slides are projected. Am I cutting myself off from the real world? Am I insufficiently mindful and overly mediated? Am I, in short, watching “shadows of artefacts” all day long, just like the prisoners in Plato’s cave? There are plenty of people who would say Yes, yes you are, you and all those other SXSW attendees. Get out of the dark cave of your parents’ basement, nerd, and get some sunshine. Stop with the fantasy already.

Your visible use of social platforms will send strong messages to your staff and your community. You will tell the staff that learning new tools is important. You will expose your own vulnerability in learning publicly and will help your staff accept risk more readily. You will connect with people in your community who may not consider your news products relevant to their lives.

Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased. In America, copyright holders get 95 years’ protection as a result of an extension granted in 1998, derided by critics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.

These have real world effects on how we see ourselves and each other. Even in systems that have very open identity creation options, like Second Life, there are still different valuations for skins, social groups and categories being formed, people playing out different personae...one realizes that identity is social matter, because even if one can create the perfect avatar, it does not mean that others will respond to it in the desired way that the person sees himself or herself. This means that even in social networking software, we create profiles that ostensibly represent our real selves, but they are limited by many of the same constraints as characters in games.

Games that create interesting, properly interactive worlds are special. Games don’t even have to be incredibly “interactive” to convince gamers that this world is exactly the kind of world that the player’s avatar would move through, in this kind of story and this kind of game.

Many is the game that that forgets this rule and takes one kind of story and world and plugs the worst possibly matched gameplay and interface into that world.

In assessing the degree to which there may be a gap between the cost of a college degree and its value, a lot depends on what you assume about the people doing the evaluation. If we were all strictly rational long-term-income-maximizing automata, a college degree would still look like a good deal on average. After all, you make substantially more by the end of your life. Let’s call this the efficient market theory of college pricing. But as we have recently discovered much to our pain, markets aren’t always efficient. A more reasonable theory might be that most college students and their parents simply don’t do this calculation. They take it on faith, with perhaps a sprinkling of anecdote and experience of generations past, that having a college degree is worth the investment prima facie. This evaluation would be helped, of course, by the fact that there can be very good reasons to go to college other than pure economic pay-back. But at the very least, I suspect that the number of people who would be willing to get a degree knowing that it may not pay off for quite some time would be significantly smaller than the number of people who are getting their degrees right now.

There is a reason why you are a film critic, Mr. Ebert. You know film. You know film and appreciate it deeply. You understand what makes a good film. You have written countless articles and books on film. You have even written a great film. But one thing must be kept in mind at all times: You are not a video game critic.

I believe if one is going to present choices or issues in games as ethical, those choices have to matter in the game world. But I get antsy when games present me with choices that clearly open one door while closing another, as I want to see all of the game’s content, since I’m unlikely to go through it multiple times.

“The Internet is a great place to spread a message, no matter how silly it is,” Mr. Gates said, adding that although his goal was to get 1,000 comments, the response was “way more than I figured would actually review milk.” Marguerite Copel, a spokeswoman for Dean Foods, which owns the Tuscan milk brand, said it was impossible to be offended by the lampoon. “Milk is an important part of Americana,” she said, “and if people can have fun with it, why not?”