Dec 06 2012

How To Stop Online Gaming From Being a Hellish Pit of Vicious Verbiage

This article about a video game called League of Legends (which I’ve never played or even heard of) intrigued me because the game maker, Riot Games, is attempting to address what is apparently a serious problem within the Legends community.

Apparently many of the players are dickheads.

Ork

And as lead game producer Travis George puts it in his interview with Gamasutra, “Nobody wants to play a game with somebody who’s mean.”

Amen to that.

Of course, mean people playing games online is not limited to League of Legends. Which is a problem once your kids want to get involved.

As a parent who grew up playing video games, I’m highly conflicted about the current “social” state of gaming. What used to be a niche element of the gaming world — online play with strangers — has become as ubiquitous as broadband Internet connections. Read more »


Sep 08 2011

My Parents Want To Control Me [iPad]

Funny comment on Apple.com’s discussion boards: “I just bought the iPad today and my parents want to control me.”

(Emphasis added). Read more »


Jul 22 2008

Dad wakes up at 3am to get Jonas Brothers tickets

I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I guess its a nice thing for dad to do — get up at an ungodly hour so that his kid could get good seats to a Jonas Brothers concert.  Specifically, he first got up at 3am to drive to ANOTHER STATE to get the tickets, then didn’t get them, then managed to score some online. He also was “willing” to sit in the nosebleed seats so his spawn and her friend could scream like maniacs fans in the third row.

When I was in high school, I went to a couple of concerts. If I recall correctly, my first concert was a Grateful Dead show at Giants Stadium.  The kid described here is 15, I think I was 16. My mother definitely did NOT drive me someplace to get tickets. There was no internet ticketing (this was, you know, the pleistocene era) and I didn’t have a credit card, so I guess we got the tickets at a record store or something. (Kids, record stores were these places where people went to buy music. Records? Those were… oh, never mind.)

I do remember getting tickets for the first reunion tour of The Who. We got up early, went to a local record store, waited on line (that’s “on line” not “online”) and bought the tickets using cash. (Kids, cash is this filthy currency thing that people still use today. Really.) At this point I was 17 or 18, and someone had a car, but if that wasn’t the case, we would have found a way to get there.

As for getting to the shows, for the Dead show we took the bus. Got home late. And you know what? It was fine. (I did put the apple juice in the cabinet with the plates and other dishes, but that’s a verrry different story.) Once someone was old enough to drive, we drove. But it was our job to figure it out.

So it’s nice of dad to do that, but really, why can’t kids do this stuff on their own?

Source: The Poop