The Death of PC Gaming

A perennial theme in the computer game industry media has been that PC gaming is dying. Never mind that World of Warcraft is a PC-only title that has a strangle-hold on people's minds, or the hits that came before, or the fact that the declining retail sales numbers have been more than offset by growth in online subscription income not captured by the analysts.

So what offerings does the PC industry have for gamers this year? Here is a list of recently released or soon to be released titles:

Age of Empires III
Anarchy Online: Lost Eden
Auto Assault
Battlefield 2: Special Forces
Black & White 2
Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood
Call of Duty 2
City of Villains
Civilization IV
Commandos Strike Force
Earth 2160
F.E.A.R.
King Kong
Myst V: End of Ages
Neverwinter Nights: Diamond
Quake 4
Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion
Serious Sam 2
Star Wars: Battlefront 2
Star Wars: Empire at War
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Movies
The Sims 2: Nightlife
The Suffering: Ties That Bind
Ultima Online: The Eighth Age
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Winter Assault
X3: Reunion
Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species

As usual, the rumors of the PC's death as a gaming platform are exaggerated. Usually these rumors are from people who stand to gain prestige and/or a lot of easy development cash for whoring themselves to the console divisions of Sony, Microsoft, and/or Nintendo.

Of course, there are a lot of barriers for PC gamers created either by the platform itself or common bad practices in the development community. It's just nice to remember that despite the fact that the retailers make shelf space for PC games nearly impossible to find that games still get out there.

(no subject)

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Archimedes

Watching a Nova episode on Archimedes, one of the interviewed mathematicians referred to the "Dark Ages" as the "Age of Faith".

That really struck me.

Throughout human history, there has been tension between knowing how the world works, and believing how the world works. One man's (or woman's) "Dark Ages" is another's "Age of Faith". One's "Age of Reason" is another's "Dark Age of Immorality". The two have never coexisted peacefully. We can see it in the history of the world. We can see it in modern American politics. As someone who values the intellectual pursuits, it's disturbing to realize that a human love for knowledge (that has become modern science) cannot be taken for granted in the face of our human desire for certainty and self-assured unshakable truth.

As a child I had a sense that the 21st Century would be an "Age of Reason". My early experience with the Southern Baptist church, my parent's relationship (or lack thereof) to religion, and even the scare tactics of crazy-ass Pat Robertson's 700 Club all turned me away from 'faith' as a central tenet of life. I loved science as young boy in school, and formed my world-view around the concept of reason. I try to temper it with a sense of value for the life of emotions, love, and the transcendental experience of bliss however one achieves it.

Even still, those to put faith before reason make me uncomfortable, even outraged when they claim a moral person must be a religious person. Somehow the "21st Century" turned out to be less a renaissance of technology and reason, and more a 'renaissance' of religiously motivated violence and political manipulation. Instead of moon bases and a sure-fire cure for the common cold, we have the conflict in the Middle East and an increasingly ostrich-like American public turning to faith to hide from the realities of a more complex, connected, and dangerous world.

Neither reason nor faith should have absolute control, but the pendulum seems to have swung back into well-known and dangerous territory once again.

Natalia Zukerman

"walking away from the sky
i gotta hole in my pocket
and one in my life where you used to stand
there's a hole in my pocket
and one in the sky where you used to stand

i haven't lost anything important yet
just scraps of paper like petals in a flowerbed
they litter my path on my way back to you

and now i know that
all the dust in this ghost town
is all that's left of you
and i am the saloon door
i'm swinging open and back again
i'm just hoping you'll come back again

there's a hole in the ground
and when it fills up with rain
i see my reflection stumbling around
looking for a heart built like one of those
buildings with a fortune teller in the window
she holds up a card and points right at me

and then i know that
all the dust in this ghost town
is all the words you ever said to me
and i have been the saloon door
i'm swinging open and back again
i'm just hoping you'll come back again
i'm just hoping you'll come back again

to block out the light you held up your hand
and when you were gone
it looked like a hole where you had been standing
there's a hole in the sky where you used to stand
a hole in the sky where you used to stand"
-- Hole, Natalia Zukerman