[Edu-sig] Just ran into Kevin Altis...

[kirby urner]

On 5/14/06, francois schnell <francois.schnell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally I prefer to see kids practicing their old "hunting skills" in
> virtual worlds than becoming real hunters killing real animals just for fun.
>

I'm for that if the hunting is purely for sport and not survival.

Let 'em rent 'Deer Hunter' for the X-box or something.  Maybe put a
real shoulder kick in the rifle somehow?  Holodeck stuff.  Oh, and let
players opt to be the deer instead of the hunter.

And that point (when switching animals), many players would ask for a
stronger predator avatars (gentle deer were never that hard to kill,
were for rank beginners even in the Stone Age).

How 'bout give us something to really scare those humans silly.  ETs?

> All that said FPS is not my cup of tea except a part for the game "Unreal
> Tournament 2004"  that I bought because there were Linux logo on the box :).
> With the Linux NVDIA drivers I could at least impress my friend about 3D
> games on Linux.

'Half Life 2' for me.  It's just so good at pushing to a fascist
extreme in the opening minutes -- reminds everyone of why we fight
(except some among us secretly yearn to play quisling for the ETs --
as revealed by on target personality tests).

> Concerning TPB I think they are really interesting since you can learn about
> history, economics, strategy while playing. A shame that it doesn't fit well
> the console market with their limited pad and TV-screen.
>
> francois

Good point.  But then, I worry about such limited APIs in general, for
humans I mean.  Sure, a car is X-Box simple to operate and driving is
fun, sometimes x-tremely so.

But if that's *all* you know, you haven't really exploited some of the
deeper powers of your nervous system.  Like hey, you're human this
time, so why not milk that for what it's worth?

Like try a real keyboard sometime, combined with reading some
challenging writing, like William Shakespeare or Calvino or someone,
or maybe learn Chinese.

Kirby