The Prodigal Sons

My greatest fear is one of my old inventions turning into a mischievous wayward child.  If the devout Mormon Philo Farnsworth knew that the television he invented would be used for adult entertainment, he would likely try to disown it.  Unfortunately, great modern inventions sneak out of their cozy bedrooms and paint the town red: Facebook has its share of cyberbullies and adulterers, e-mails are being seized by governments with questionable intentions, and Twitter feeds are used to organize violent flash mobs.  If I was an inventor whose product was used for evil, I’d feel a great responsibility to minimize its negative effects but feel completely powerless to do so.  The best I can do is to keep the fatted calf waiting at home while I await the prodigal son’s return.

Not a True Sport?

Some would say that professional Starcraft is not a true sport because it involves sitting in front of a computer (sometimes in front of thousands of screaming Koreans).  However, other than the obvious physical benefits of traditional sports, not much of a difference exists between cyber-sports and traditional sports.  Both have professional teams, intense competition, bitter rivalries, outrageous scandals, crazed fans, and demanding training routines.  At the end of the day, the dedication, training, and mental toughness that it takes to be a world champion in Starcraft is almost no different than what it takes to win a Super Bowl ring.  Anyone that considers cyber-sports to be inherently inferior to normal sports misunderstands what it means to be a “sport.”

Should video games be banned?

In this video, I talk about whether video games should be banned or not.  Feel free to view it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euwnkhsDFwA&list=HL1385009041&feature=mh_lolz

The Death of the Single Transaction (and the Birth of the Gaming Addiction)

With such headlines popping up as "Teenager kills girl to feed video game habit" and "Teen Beats Mom to Death Over Playstation," many perplexed individuals are increasingly concerned about the highly addictive nature of the modern video game. Others wonder why they keep returning to the lousy Farmville game to check on their virtual livestock. The answer lies in the fundamental change in the video game marketers' business model: the shift from single transactions to multiple micro-transactions. 

In the humble origins of the home console, the consumer would physically drive to the nearest store and buy a video game for between 20$ to 50$.  That single purchase used to be all the revenue that the game developer could make from that consumer for that particular video game.  Moreover, the revenue generated would be the same if the person played the game for 30 minutes or played it for 200 hours.  The marketers' and developers' only task was to get the game off the shelf and nothing more.

The advent of the internet and the facilitation of micro-transactions has ultimately changed that business model.  The developer can now sell more to the consumer while the consumer is playing the game, resulting in many opportunities for micro-transactions.  In Farmville, the player can buy extra coins in the video game for real-life money.  In World of Warcraft, the player has to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue playing the game.  Even free-to-play video games gain more revenue through advertisements!

This new change in the video game business model has provided game developers with every financial incentive to make their game more addicting to the consumer.  The more a consumer plays a game, the more likely he/she will make an in-app purchase or view more advertisements.  As responsible consumers of digital entertainment, we need to be aware of the motivation behind the addictive properties of video games so we can more easily avoid crippling video game addictions.  At the very least, we can have a great excuse handy as to why we didn't accept our Facebook friends' Farmville invitations.

False Assumptions on Sexist Discrimination

All engineers worth their bits know that a program won’t ever function correctly if its logic is based on false assumptions.  Unfortunately, politicians’ careers do not depend on the airtight validity of their assumptions like those of engineers.  Senator Ron Wyden makes a false assumption that the declining participation rate of women in computer science can be mostly explained by discrimination, which “[pushes] women into traditional female roles, such as teaching.”  Who is doing the discrimination, Ron Wyden?  In my university, the only step between a woman and a seat in an introductory CS course is an online class registry sheet waiting for her consent.  If a conscious choice not to study a certain field is unequivocally the result of discrimination, shouldn’t we also be concerned about the fact that only 18.3% of middle school and high school teachers were men in 2011?  Should we also be concerned that the prospect of fatherhood pushes men into more traditional male roles, such as engineering?  Maybe we shouldn’t be concerned, since it is not politically beneficial to discuss those disparities.

Programmers Are More Social Than You

The prevailing stereotype of the hunchbacked, hygiene challenged programmer enclosed in a dark basement is inaccurate at best.  The truth is that many programmers are much more social and collaborative with other human beings than originally thought.  Imagine this scenario: you’ve moved into a new neighborhood and you’ve built a brand new house from the ground up.  Several of your neighbors stop by and decide that your house can be something much bigger and better, so they add on a basketball court, a tennis court, and a full-length swimming pool at no cost for labor.  These are some social and friendly neighbors!  As it turns out, thousands of programmers collaborate in software development in online open-source projects like Firefox, Linux, and Wordpress.  If the rest of the professional world was as social (and generous) as open-source programmers, we’d have free mechanics in our garages fixing our cars, free heart surgeons in our hospitals performing life-saving operations, and free plumbers fixing those pesky leaks underneath the sink!  Now, don’t you wish that everyone was as social as a typical programmer?

Teachers Are the Most Human of Us All

The excessive use of technology has a dehumanizing influence over any group of people near the omniscient influence of a space satellite.  However, if we look on the space satellite’s silver lining, we would discover that one group among us is becoming more human: people who teach as an occupation.  Consider that LDS missionaries switched from robotic, scripted missionary lessons to more dynamic and interactive lessons since the introduction of Preach My Gospel in 2004.  Also consider that school teachers have recently begun to make more interactive lessons for their students in order to compensate for their students’ shorter attention spans.  As a result, both teachers and missionaries are evolving from their genetic roots as human tape recorders into powerful instructors who teach lessons from their own words.  If we could only put away our smartphones and give teachers our undivided attention, we’d become a little more human too.