Wings Over the Pyre - January 21st, 2004

02:47 pm - Mmmm, French Fries

I'd just like to say, I do not wear a cape. Of course, I don't play D&D, either.

Current Mood: amused

04:52 pm - The Future's So Bright

From the closing of a review of Gregg Easterbrook's book The Progress Paradox, How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse:

Mr. Easterbrook identifies problems that remain, from poverty that shouldn't exists at all in such a prosperous America to the fact that one-third of us are obese today, vs. 12% in 1960--the latter a byproduct of prosperity. Yet with all the progress we have enjoyed, why aren't we happier about it? He concludes that our genetic pessimism--an internal bad-news bias--plus the championing of victimhood by elites, intellectuals and the media, along with the material abundance that pressures us to seek more abundance, are the reasons that people don't feel better off.

But feeling worse and being worse are two different things, and calamities are no more around the corner in 2004 that they were four decades ago in Messrs. Galbraith's and Erlich's minds. But elitist global pessimism lives on--recall that in the 1992 presidential campaign Al Gore stated that America "faced the greatest calamity in the history of man."

There are calamities--terror attacks, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions--but they are not caused by global progress or democratic capitalism. Today's America can be improved--and is constantly improving--but that is no reason to insist falsely that it is calamitous, dysfunctional, or doomed. Rather than nasty, brutish and short, 21st century life is good, comfortable and long, and getting better all the time.

Current Mood: thoughtful

07:57 pm - End of a Period

There really should be some kind of sad, tinkling musical accompaniment to this post, I think.

"I saw the news today, oh boy."

I decided to cancel my Eve Online MMORPG account today.Not because I can't afford it, or anyone ran me off of it, but just because the game had stopped being fun weeks ago, and showed no promise of the company that runs it making it fun again. CCP had caved to the griefers, the pirates, and the hypercorps one too many times for me to maintain my enjoyment of the game to any maximal degree.

There wasn't going to be any hope my character could do anything new and cool for weeks, maybe months, with the way they injected the high-end requirements for the new technology bits. The only folks that could would essentially be dead-weight for the time until they trained rare, difficult, slow improving new skills. I couldn't produce new technology products, because they all required obscure bits or, worse, mineral goods that were only accessible to the hypercorps and who, logically, retained most of them for their own use to maintain primacy. No new toys were trickling down. The only thing I could do was run repetitive missions and boring trips over and over again for a slow trickle of increases in my reputation with an NPC corp, hoping maybe to occasionally get thrown a bone, some bit of kit I couldn't use anyway.

Hell, I was missing the days where I'd sit in space for hours at a time with a crew of folks moving ore. At least it was company, at least we could see a kind of material advance.

I remember the first time I flew combat patrol for my mining team -- flying a handful of light drones and keeping the skies swept clean with barely twitching a fingertip, surprising the whole corporation with efficiency even as I was mining. I pioneered an entirely new combat defense methodology.

I remember my first personally owned Thorax cruiser, ugly and lumpy as it was. It boosted my mining rate to unbelievable reaches, letting me play a pioneer role as a miner and producer for our little family.

I remember my first battleship, the Dominix, and the huge swarm of heavy drones I could fly in its bays. I broke new ground in asteroid mining, and enabled others to get into their dream ships that much sooner, that much better.

I remember the feeling of being part of a well-oiled machine that may not have been bigger or better than anyone else, but was just more effective, more efficient, more complete. There's something good about being at the top of your game.

I remember realizing, for the first time, that CCP didn't give a rat's ass about my kind of player, the kind that drives real economies, the kind that wants to work in small team groups, not hyperextended hierarchies or preying on fellow players like hyenas. They gave away the game to those other entities while paying lip service to the notion of player-driven economies and groups, to the idea that the players in the main were important at anything less than 50 at a time. They threw their attention at the squeakiest wheels and ignored the rest.

They threw me away.

I realized I hadn't played the game in about 2wk ... and I really hadn't missed it. Once, I would have, but no more. And that was enough to convince me.

Maybe, at some point, I'll pick up The Matrix Online; it looks promising, in a strange, surrealist way. Its as pretty as Eve, and maybe it'll be a bit more focused on holding onto the fun. But for now ...

Its been fun, Genesis Galaxy. But my ship sails on past your meager stars.

Current Mood: disappointed