ATTN: Gawthmaw (and others...) UPDATED w/ Paper

[Kastil]

My only feedback would be that I am Fat Tire Ale, and in to doing ladies.    I like rollerskating like in Xanadu.

Fixed

P.S. Chow, no MOOs or MUSHes, true gamers stick only to MuDs!

[thrun]

My only feedback would be that I am Fat Tire Ale, and in to doing ladies.    I like rollerskating like in Xanadu.

Fixed

P.S. Chow, no MOOs or MUSHes, true gamers stick only to MuDs!

[yt=425,350]7m1UWSD-FaA[/yt]

I dare any of you to watch the whole thing.

[Hiptotorus]

   Sounds Like your plate is full.  Interesting paper.  Good luck.  Cya when your back on.

As for having Gawth reviewing your paper... That is really letting the Loonatics run the asylum.  Outside of WoW that guy is Forest Gump!   Don't tell him I said it though 

[Amule]

From MS-DOS to 1080p HD

             The first video game was created in 1958 and was played on an oscilloscope. Today, we have high definition consoles and motion attentive systems that allow us to bowl in the comfort of our living rooms. Needless to say, we have come a long way. The first true generation of gamers is all grown up, while middle school students are wirelessly playing Tetris on their touch screen Nintendos hundreds of miles away from each other. Although many of the 30-something's games have survived the test of time, they have been reinvented and marketed in entirely different ways. The dilemma is no longer picking between the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis but between the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Whereas gaming used to be a solitary pastime, the advances that developers have made over the past 10 years have had an enormous socializing impact on the modern gamer by creating interactive online networks and revamping what we once knew to be 8-bit happiness.

            In 1994 Blizzard Entertainment introduced the world to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a real time strategy game for the Mac and PC. Like most early video games, the objectives were clear and the interface was relatively simple. The award winning game was innovative with a high replay value. Warcraft consisted of 12 levels for both the Orcs and Humans where the objective was to destroy your opponent entirely. Reminiscent of a simulation, the player was required to build various structures, like farms and mills, to help advance their army and its capabilities. In a nutshell, this was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Build a farm or three, raise the dead, set a plague on the Humans, kill a couple of Peons, and call it a day.

Warcraft allowed users to play with another gamer via modem, serial link, or IPX network, but the majority of people didn’t have a pal right down the street who had a computer or coincidentally was into the same genre of game as they. Therefore, the number of people actually playing online was slim, as opposed to Blizzard’s current 10 million monthly subscribers for World of Warcraft, the totally remade and reinvented version of the original concept. In September of 2001, Blizzard announced World of Warcraft, finally pacifying fans in late November of 2004. In ten years time, Blizzard had gone from a simple strategy game to a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. The game stayed half-heartedly true to the original, several of the races prevailing throughout the Warcraft series and many more showing up later in the game. Mounted units carried over into World of Warcraft, as well as some locations like the Swamp of Sorrows, which is the setting for the first level of the original game. Same place, same story, totally different game play.

Why the sudden change? Warcraft had survived almost a decade as a simple strategy game. Warcraft admittedly got more and more complex with each new version, introducing online play, experience points, and quests while slowly morphing itself into what we know today as World of Warcraft. Yet even with these weighty changes to the game the overall objectives and interface were the same. World of Warcraft was an entirely different genre of game. Instead of controlling multiple units, the player controls only one. The change is so enormous that a gamer wouldn’t even think to call the avatar a unit but a character. And it’s not just a character; it’s your only character. When you have a budding army of 60 or so, it’s too easy to plug in a cheat and desensitize yourself to your pawns. If a few of them don’t make it, have a necromancer on hand to reanimate their skeletons or, in the worst case scenario, make them invincible in response to your lack of talent or patience. In World of Warcraft, it’s not so simple. It’s terribly depressing to admit, but that’s you in there in a way, and you don’t want to let that character die. It takes ten full days of life, or 240 hours, minimum, for a user to grind their character up to level 70. The game experience changes entirely.

In World of Warcraft you simply can’t play alone. The game doesn’t allow for you to just run around the world attacking non-playable characters (NPCs). If you want to play, you are forced to do so online, in turn thrusting yourself into an enormous online community of gamers just like you. After a certain point, players are obligated to find other people to play with in order to further advance their level in the game. Guilds are available for the people that want to utilize them, and it’s not uncommon for a person to have multiple characters on various servers. Guilds help to further bring people together and some even have minimum requirements for membership. Some require for characters to be a minimum level or certain class and the people operating them to be confirmed adults. In this respect, people are brought together based on more than just their interest, but also based on their individual preferences in the game, their skill, and their reliability. The average gamer wants a team member that is easy to work with and fits the needs of their group. Some take it too seriously, while others play on weekends with a few close friends. You never know if you’re haggling with a thirteen year-old boy or if you’re getting ready to ambush your next-door neighbor’s Mom. Gaming has taken on a life of its own. Developers have birthed an alternate world where nerds of all ages can congregate no matter their geographical location and become total bad-asses that wield fire and flame, and own equally epic mounts.

Blizzard was clearly trying to explore unchartered ground, at least within their organization, and bring people together in a whole new way. Marriages have been destroyed, jobs have been lost, grades have dropped, and weight has been gained, many forgetting the warmth of the sun. Blizzard succeeded. Was it worth doing? With ten million subscribers paying 15 dollars a month, the Blizzard Corporation would think so although your girlfriend or routinely neglected pet might not agree. It hasn’t changed the world, but it’s changed the way people interact and spend their Saturday nights. We might be fat and pale, but at least we aren’t playing Faxanadu and doing Quaaludes.

[Nightstalker]

Nice,

And I would have to agree that the uncharted ground was only on Blizzards part. MMORPG had been established well before WoW, and we can see this in Ultima Online for example.

You can also maybe tie this in to the negative bi-product that Blizzard as produced, in it's global campaign to turn everyone into cows.
http://www.wowdetox.com/

[Amule]

And I would have to agree that the uncharted ground was only on Blizzards part. MMORPG had been established well before WoW, and we can see this in Ultima Online for example.

I was tempted to further expand the paper and talk about Xbox Live, Diablo, etc... but I seeing as how
I wrote that paper in one night, I decided not to to any more work than I had too. Hopefully I will have some cool profs. in the future and I can keep writing about something that I genuinly enjoy.

[Nightstalker]

Yes it definitely helps to be involved in something you feel passionate about, be it a job, a relationship, a paper. And if we dont seek to do these things that we feel passionate about in life, then we're really just zombies.

[Kastil]

My only feedback would be that I am Fat Tire Ale, and in to doing ladies.    I like rollerskating like in Xanadu.

Fixed

P.S. Chow, no MOOs or MUSHes, true gamers stick only to MuDs!

I dare any of you to watch the whole thing.

Are you kidding Thrun, the last part was the best! All the girls just take off into the sky in their unappealing garb.
Amule, this is the first paper in a long time that I didn't feel like the author should cut out half of it just because it didn't fit. Good paper!

[Ellanorah]

I did write a whole bunch of stuff...but my computer had a fit and didn't let it go....

I liked it.

It kind of reminds me of a paper I had to write for a class last year.
Only, it seems you didn't have to referrence stuff...all our stuff here has to be refferenced to oblivion.  Even if we have our own ideas we have to then find something that backs up our ideas.
I should post my paper here....warning, it is about 2000 words long.  The class was Science, Technology and Power.  Which it turned out was not really sciencey but about the impact of science on society.


The 1999 film The Matrix, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, deals with a future world where human beings are used as no more than fuel cells for machines.  These machines came from an Artificial Intelligence program that the humans believe was developed sometime in the early twenty-first century.  The machines have developed a kind of ‘virtual reality’ in which the human minds live while the humans themselves are being grown and then harvested to create energy for the Machines.  There are some humans who have managed to ‘un-plug’ from the Matrix and these are the ones who try to fight the Machines.  This essay will look at the ways in which the ideas behind the movie relate to science and technology at the time of its creation, while also looking at the ethical judgements of the use of this science and technology.
   The main scientific idea behind The Matrix seems to be that of Artificial Intelligence, however some argue that at the time of release AI was not a major issue.  Even the idea of machines taking over was not an original one by the filmmakers and dates back over half a century.  This then asks the question of what were some major scientific theories and discoveries of 1999? According to the World Book Encyclopaedia Science Year 2000, which is a review of the year 1999 there were discoveries made about the Universe and the fact that a few scientist believe that it is expanding in size rather than contracting. There were also developments in regards to cloning of humans with claims that scientists had already cloned more than 50 adult mice.  Human stem cells were also researched which has since sparked major debates about the use of them and how they are ‘harvested’.  The Millennium Bug, or the Y2K bug, was another issue that was around due to the high use of computers in the day-to-day lives of people.  This, probably more than anything at the time, relates to some of the ideas displayed in the film.  Computers and AI seem to go hand in hand, and if we take AI to be the ‘science’ in the film, we first need to understand something of what it is.
   “Artificial Intelligence is a subject that, due to the massive, often quite unintelligible, publicity that it gets, is nearly completely misunderstood by people outside the field.  Even AI’s practitioners are somewhat confused with respect to what AI is really about” (Schank 2003).  With such confusion it is hard to pinpoint exactly what AI is, however we can begin by looking at the name to give us some idea.  Artificial Intelligence is just that, it is a man-made form of intelligence that can be programmed into computers or other ‘robots’ in order to make them more intelligent.  This is where the problem lies, what kind of intelligence do we create? Do we make it creative?  Do we make it mathematical? Scientific? Engineering?  How about making an intelligence that knows everything about language? Perhaps this is why we believe that making computers faster or smarter may give them more ‘human’ attributes.  If we cannot even define our own intelligence, that is what it is to be a thinking and feeling being, then how do we make AI?  This seems to be one of the goals in trying to create AI, that of trying to define what it is to be ‘intelligent’ and also trying to build a machine with that kind of intelligence.  I pose this question, why should we be trying to do this?  Any development of this kind would impact our lives and can we really foresee what impact it could have?
   Whenever there is some important scientific development, our society is impacted by it. We can see this clearly in the movie when Morpheus tells Neo how the matrix was formed. For humankind in the years leading up to the destruction of their world, where world means their social and physical environment, AI developments would have been exciting but also viewed with some trepidation.  They must have feared the possibility that what did end up happening, might. As mentioned before, in the year 1999, when the film was made, our society was concerned with what was colloquially termed the “Y2K Bug”.  The fear was that all computer systems would collapse due to the numbers in the date reading ‘00’. It would affect most navigational systems, banks, security and defence systems and this would cause disaster. However, much ‘science’ was done to research and counteract any possible catastrophes but there was still the fear and possibility that something could go wrong.  Many watched the countdown to the year 2000 with baited breath.  Indeed there were many computer programmers and the like standing by in case failure occurred.  The clocked ticked over and nothing happened.  Crisis averted.  It appears however, that those ‘pre-matrix humans’ were not so lucky.  Their worst fears were realised when the machines controlled by an artificial intelligence started taking over and controlling society.  The humans tried fighting back, they even tried scorching the sky because the machines were dependant on solar power and that by doing so the machines would not survive without the sun.  The machines however, were able to convert human beings into an energy source.  It may have been just before this that the humans realised that creating and developing AI was not such a good idea.  In this sense the matrix become an end-point for the humans: “the standard account of scientific progress implies an end-point beyond which no further major discoveries can be made” (Erikson 2005).  They were unable to continue to conduct real research because they were all ‘plugged into’ the matrix.
What is the matrix but a form of control?  Morpheus states that it is a dream world to keep human beings under control so that they can be used as no more than batteries for the machines.  In much the same way Susan Leigh Star uses her essay to discuss how those with power use it to control those that don’t. She specifically uses her allergy to onions to do so.  She is limited by what she can eat and where she can eat due to this, she feels that she is being controlled by some ‘higher power’.  Also in her essay she discusses how people are able to access technology.  In relation to the matrix, those humans with no real idea that their lives are a construct created for them to ‘live’ in cannot see what is truly happening in the ‘real’ world.  Those that have managed to ‘unplug’ and then willingly ‘jack’ into the matrix can manipulate it to benefit themselves, they can dodge bullets and fly in order to defeat the ‘Agents’.  This is much the same way as those that are outside of the science culture may not know exactly what is happening unless they deliberately plug into it.  But this is not to say that if we plug into the scientific community that we will have a voice within it. 
     We can only have this voice if we actually become scientist ourselves.  Even then the likelihood that our work may be cause for further research is minimal.  Scientists may spend entire lifetimes working on subjects that they deem appropriate, even beneficial to the entire human race, but cannot get backing from other scientists.  According to Karl Popper, as referenced in the chapter “Scientific Knowledge” in Erikson’s Book “no scientific theory can ever be proved true, but all scientific theories can be proved false” (Erikson 2005).  As referred to previously, the theory that the universe is expanding is only extended work on theories already devised.  Earlier to 1999 there was some debate, and probably still is today, that the universe is either going to collapse in on itself as a reverse process to the ‘Big Bang’ theory called the ‘Big Crunch’ theory, or it would continue to expand outward.  How can either of these be proved true?  It is not as if we would be alive to witness it, as it is something that takes enormous spans of time. We have conjecture and it is from this that the scientists conduct their research.  This doesn’t mean that the work of these scientists is futile.  Part of the reason for looking at such vast things like the universe is to better understand our own world.  Perhaps this is the reason for the study of AI.  It is only by seeking to define what intelligence is that we can define what we are.  It could be suggested that The Matrix is a way of seeing ourselves as apart from those things that we have come to rely upon so heavily, like computers and machines.
   Several sociologists have referred to this idea that we now need to use these machines in our everyday lives as humans becoming a sort of ‘cyborg’.  Clearly the humans in the matrix are reliant on what the machines tell them is real, while those who have managed to free themselves still need the matrix in order to fight it.  They need to become a kind of computer.  Programs are uploaded into their brains.  These programs cover things like Jujitsu and even flight manuals.  While we cannot download information straight into our brains, which I have had heard several people say that they wish they could, we are becoming increasingly dependant on the ‘information highway’ that is the Internet to research topics.  Any topic can be found, with several thousand listings of possible information sites.  While not all of us own a mobile phone, those that do rely on it for ease of use and communication with others.  Phones have now also become more than just a simple telephone.  Many have cameras, internet accessibility, music storage and GPS systems.  In some cases the humble telephone is not so humble, they now have capabilities that rival some computer systems.  So perhaps AI is not such far-fetched idea and may move out of the realms of cinema and into the ‘real’ world.
   Finally, Harraway discusses the idea of a ‘modest witness’ to scientific processes and information.  It implies that those who witness what is happening in science are not the ones actually involved in the process of scientific discovery.  While it is possible for us to see the research and reap the benefits, we still rely on the scientists providing us with the correct information.  If they gave only biased studies or conclusions we could only make biased decisions, as we don’t have all the facts.  With AI it is no wonder that so few really know what it is all about, those presenting us with ideas of what it is are really only giving their own thoughts on what AI should be.  In much the same way the humans who live in Zion and were never part of the matrix can learn to view and read the coding that constructs the program, thus witnessing what is happening within it but they can never directly influence the program itself.  The ways in which we use science and they use the matrix are similar in the sense that we can only do what is in our power to do so.  Should we have the right to demand explanations from scientists if we believe they are giving us false and misleading information?  Surely someone must question the ethicality of discoveries, and surely there are those who can influence what things can be done and what things cannot.
   By seriously viewing The Matrix we can see some of what we could be capable of.  By considering all possibilities we could prevent such events from occurring.  But any knowledge requires information and it is up to those with this information to supply it.  We need to be able to make informed decisions on subjects that may impact the entire globe.  Ethically these decisions should not be made for us, however we can hope that there are those who can consider what is in the best interests for the world and us.  If AI were in the process of being constructed, would we have a say as to what its limitations could and should be?  Not all scientific developments are bad; it is just that some of them may turn out to be not so good either. It brings to mind the statement that “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should”.  In this way The Matrix shows what science and technology are capable of producing and wether or not we have a right to produce it.

[Dracneir]

Yeah Ell, citations are for the lose.

Every paper here is in either MLA or APA. Almost takes more time to do in-text citations than write the damn paper.

[Amule]

Almost takes more time to do in-text citations than write the damn paper.

That is SO true. My paper was actually supposed to be a research paper but my prof. is a pretty cool dude, so hopefully he can let me slide. When you think about it, putting all those citations in your paper eventually takes up about half a page alone, so maybe he will be impressed that I did over the minimum (4 pages) without filling it will useless (xxxxxx)s.

[Ellanorah]

so do you have page limits and not word limits?

and also, our quotes aren't counted in the word length

and honestly...i think most professors KNOW that you aren't pulling it out of thin air

but then again...that paper I wrote got a 35/40 (I screwed up the "annotated bibliography")
I also got a 7 (betwwen 85-100%) (or an A?)(high distinction) For english last year.  So in my "expert" opinion : "That paper Rocks, Amule. Two thumbs up."

[Hiptotorus]

  Being all science and math and English retarded I lack the credentials of Ell but, I loved the paper nice work.  A few comments though

1) World of Warcraft is a title and I'm pretty sure it should be underlined... anyone?

2) "Same place, same story, totally different game play."  This seems a bit informal for a collegiate paper IMHO but you know your audience better than I do.  I can almost hear this statement being made at a high school dance, totally

3) "to grind their character up"

Be carefull using "Gamer Speak" the person reading this may not understand what we take for granted.  Though this is a bad example because it portrays an action adequately just be carefull the use.

I give it (high distinction) whatever that is but it sounds impressive.

[Amule]

Hip - Yeah, the paper does have quite a few errors, but thankfully I'll get the opportunity to revamp the whole thing. Thanks for reading....

[Stugots]

Nice paper, about the only things I would add would maybe be some small blurbs explaining things like:  Leve 70 is the max.  Grinding = doing quests or killing npc's or creatures for experience.  Maybe a bit about experience points (which let you customize your character) from the info you said about warcraft.

And...you kind of jumped on the 10 mil subscribers a bit quick.  Maybe get some numbers on how many they had playing warcraft online and then compare it to the 10m they have today, and possibly later in the article to really show how they have dominated the market.

Here's a link to an article called "is world of warcraft a corporation?"  (I hope its the one that argues that it is the worlds largest corp.)

http://www.wow-power-leveling.com/news/new20080417090717.html

Just for some more info.

Anyway, good paper, hope it gets you a good grade.