James MacAulay

I've always found the Mario games to be fun, but it's never been my favourite franchise. That said, this game looks like pure joy.

otakucode:

In the article, the quotes from the researchers never actually mention addiction. That's just implied by the spin that Forbes put on it.

But, regarding what you were saying re: artificial need as a definitive property of addiction...

An addiction needs a foothold. Most addictions let the brain slack off in production of certain chemicals while the source of the addiction provides a surplus of those chemicals in one way or another; when the source goes away the brain suddenly has a deficit of said chemicals, so now you're really screwed without that cigarette.

But any addiction must provide things which we already crave in order to thrive in the first place. The artificiality lies in the fact that we become dependent on some *source* of that which we crave; a particular source which we did not use before, such as nicotine or cocaine. But the drug itself must provide something that all of us need already; for example cocaine, nicotine, and a tonne of other sources of addiction reward dopamine pathways in various ways (maybe *all* sources of addiction do this, I don't know).

Likewise, the artificiality of an addiction to video games is in the fact that before a 16-hour-a-day WoW aficionado knew about the game, they of course suffered no adverse effects from its absence. But of course all of us have always desired the pleasant things that WoW provides, or else it would never be appealing to someone in the first place. It's just that we (some more than others) can get used to WoW being the *primary* source of those pleasant things, which is where the problems can come from.

pito189: I know it isn't quite the same, but you can just click in the song list and start typing, and like most scroll lists in OS X it will jump to the row that matches what you type (with respect to whichever column is currently defining the order).

Wow, I didn't realize that iTunes had an Aqua interface even in OS 9. I thought that Aqua was only ever an OS X thing.

Attention contest robots: this is the winning entry.

Sincerely,
James

I've been using RubyOSA for a couple months now, and I really love it. The most important thing to me isn't that I get to write AppleEvent applications in a language I already know; it's that I can easily integrate it with any other ruby app.

Also see: http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/doc/ which has been around for a while (but which I have yet to experiment with).

One of the big reasons why all these folk-devils (video games, D&D, rock and roll, marijuana, etc.) survive so long in the public consciousness is that people always forget that correlation is not the same as causation.

It's very easy to find a significant correlation between people with a yearly income over $100K, and people who use opera glasses on a regular basis. This does not mean that using opera glasses on a regular basis will have any effect on your income.

It makes sense that if you have someone who is confused in such a way that killing people seems like a good idea, then this person would also enjoy forms of art which portray that kind of violence. I mean, wouldn't it seem kind of odd if this killer from Montreal had an *aversion* to violent video games?

The many and varied effects of (video) games on human beings is valid and worthwhile area of inquiry, which is precisely why it's such a shame when the discourse is muddied by this kind of idiocy.

It may seem unimportant to some, but Cider is not an emulator. It's more like WINE (or Transgaming's own WINE-based Linux software, Cedega) in that it is a port of the Win32 API. As far as I remember, some applications have been shown to run *faster* on Linux with WINE than they do natively in Windows.

I expect we will mostly see Cider implementations being bundled with the Windows versions of games, since the whole point is that you don't need to re-write your app. For companies that are porting other companies' games to the Mac, however, I expect them to shy away from Cider for the time being since it only works on Intel Macs.

Kiba: you need administrator privileges in order to install boot camp, in which case the kid wouldn't be subject to any restrictions in the first place. And the parents might notice ten gigs missing from the hard drive.

A piece of software is a "bucket of bits and bytes" in a similar way that a cat is a "bucket of atoms and molecules." (Similar in kind, but of course very dissimilar in scale.)

I suppose GW-Basic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC) changed my life, since it got me into programming.

Google changed my life, because it essentially grafted the internet to my brain.

OS X changed my life, because I now own a computer that I am not offended by whenever I use it.