Tag Archives: computers

John Dvorak needs to learn “WASD”

UPDATE: Apparently I forgot to add a link to the article in question the first time around. Added now.

So when was the last time PC Mag columnist John Dvorak wrote something that wasn’t pure idiocy? Here’s a line from his latest:

And when you try to take on one of these games as an adult you soon realize that there is too much weird crud, like “hit the A button while moving the joystick forward while pulling the trigger while moving the mouse with your right hand and left clicking.” That’s just to walk forward!

As someone on QT3 posted in reply, all I need to do on my keyboard is press “W” to walk forward. Perhaps Dvorak needs to get himself a better keyboard. And which game needs you to use both a joystick and a mouse at the same time? Even the use of the word “joystick” reveals how out of touch Dvorak is. It was emblematic of the Atari 2600 days, but now that flight simulators have been relegated to a niche enthusiast community, few people actually use joysticks now. The closest modern equivalent are the sticks that are now selling out due to the recent release of Street Fighter 4, but those are now called “fighting sticks”.

Also, look carefully at the last line of his column:

A game like Garage Band or Guitar Hero isn’t the answer. But what is?

Uh, “Garage Band”? Someone should take this guy to one side and kindly explain to him that he’s just making a laughingstock of himself at this point.

Segregation and the net generation

In a recent review of a book published in The Economist, I noted something that I had suspected all along. In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, author Don Tapscott argues that not only are the children now growing up in a world of networked computers more intelligent and well-informed than any previous generation, they are also more tolerant of diversity and more concerned with social justice.

This is an argument that makes a lot of sense to me. After all, it doesn’t matter what skin colour you are when you’re interacting with each other on all sorts of forums, using instant messaging software, in multiplayer games, on social networking sites and even using old-fashioned e-mail. What does matter are the quality and content of your posts, messages and other forms of communications and it is by those standards that participants are judged by the communities they choose to be a part of. What could be fairer than that?

In a previous post, I addressed some concerns about racial segregation in Malaysia. I argued that the existence of vernacular schools had little impact on whether or not Malaysians of different races would cooperate and coexist peacefully in society and that the divisions between the races are the result of government policies, and not prejudices learned as children. I reiterate that stand here. The largest Malaysian forum on the internet, LYN, is full of Malaysians of all races, of all religions and many different types of schools. Yet, none of that matters on the net.

Folks are segregated on that forum, but they are segregated not by race but by the choices they make: what hobbies they take up, what shows they like, what games they play, how outgoing they choose to be and so on. It’s hard to argue there isn’t a great deal of tension between the different races in Malaysia now, but again, I say that this is due to politicians playing up the issue and instituting policies that are expressly designed to create divisions. Here’s to the hope that the net generation will prove wiser and more resistant to such divide and conquer tactics.

Psionic Interface for Gamers

I tend not to write gushy posts about the latest tech toys because I don’t care for devices looking sleek or fashionable. To me, function matters a lot more than form. However, I’m writing about this latest interface device from OCZ because it’s cool enough to make for an exception. It’s called the Neural Impulse Actuator and it’s a headband that can “hear” your thoughts and allow you to use it to interface with a computer, replacing the traditional mouse and keyboard.

Devices like this aren’t exactly news at this point, but this is the first time that I’ve heard of something like this outside of an experimental setting with specially designed software. OCZ’s device has already been demoed at a computer show to play a commercial FPS game, Unreal Tournament, and apparently will soon be in normal production with an estimated retail price of US$300.00. The makers also claim that since the device bypasses the muscles, response time for gamers will be much better. Essentially, instead of your thoughts going to your fingers and from there to the computer, they’ll pretty much go directly from your brain to the computer.

We’ll have to wait a while yet to see how much of this is true and how sophisticated an input device it proves to be. It seems to me that an important factor will be the communications bandwidth that it allows between your brain and the computer. If the bandwidth is large enough, it would cause a revolution in games design since it would allow games with many more options and controls to be designed than would normally be possible given the physical control limits of traditional interfaces.