Dallas school district starts video game teams on 64 campuses

I'm a Lisp guy, so you can probably guess my opinions on whether it's "worth it" or not to aim for The Right Thing. And one thing I've found in my career is that the teams and individuals that make the best use of Lisp are fairly disciplined about it---they care a lot about functional purity, documentation, interopability, etc.

In other words, they're still operating under restrictions, but they're self-imposed rather than incidental. This foundation of order lets them do crazier things on top of it.

Reducing variance in one's play is the equivalent of writing code without side-effects---it's the fundamental principle of playing nicely with others in its respective domain.

Just as this is best achieved by developer education and discipline in the programming sphere, there needs to be a player ethic of reducing variance (which is why I'm glad to hear about Dallas). And without that, the problem will persist, showing its face in one form or another.

MMR accuracy is probably true, but sheesh, only in a Goodheart's Law kind of way. If it was inaccurate before, that suggests a problem with the statistic, not the game! In a complex game like OW, MMR was always going to be most accurate when applied to teams rather than individuals.

To apply your reasoning above, removing that ability was a "short term" (rules based) solution to a "long term" problem (balancing the hero roster to make duplicate heroes work in a competitive environment)

I don't think this really has anything to do with the west. Non western cultures have been producing violent art before the west even existed, and if you look at modern non-western movies and games, they aren't less likely to involve violence.

As for Go, people in countries that play Go also play plenty of games that are violent, and plenty of people in the west play Checkers.

Chess is another great game but it uses medieval battlefield as an analogy to explain the pieces and their different capabilities.

When you look at ancient myths and legends, violence is often part of the story. This is not a modern creation. This is cross-cultural and deeply woven in our psyche.

What you described with Jacob's Ladder sounds like internal conflict. It's not violent conflict, but the conflict is always there in any interesting story. Even romance novels are often about conflicted feelings or the decision between one romantic partner or another.

If you think of your top 10 favorite movies I think its likely violent conflict is a key plot device in most of them.

It's gripping. There's more on the line. When survival is at stake, you're more invested in the characters.

Not quite, but it is an interesting one. Folks are very comfortable with games depicting repeated fatal violence. Would they feel the same way about a game involving repeated rape? Surely not, at least in the US, surely?! But then again, Pick Up Artist games that evaluate your ability to emotionally manipulate people into sex are popular enough that they've broken into the world of big youtubers and

The reason these are different is because of the way our culture normalizes conflict and normalizes different kinds of dominance.

We've seen games that challenge this (even when they're by people who clearly aren't). Night in the Woods, Slenderman, Minecraft & Roblox, every racing game, Kerbal Space Program and Untitled Goose Game? All of these games are famous and made a major impact on the gaming social structure and they don't focus on pulling triggers or capturing points.

> Particularly as we try to grow the tent and move games from being just video games to more, sort of, cultural artifacts.

I don't want to be a dick, but, like, do you not read books or watch TV or movies or anything? Because those areas are all chock full of violence. Particularly if you look at movies, what are the biggest hits? Action-adventure flicks, like the Marvel movies, right? And yet nobody says "well if movies want to be cultural artifacts, they really have to move on past this sort of thing..." with a straight face.

As I was working on my computer tonight my wife was watching Good Omens on TV, nice little miniseries, and while I wouldn't normally categorize it as a particularly violent show, there's still kids stabbing dudes with a flaming sword, demons murdering other demons, etc.

Like, I just don't know how someone can be aware of the fact that violence is pervasive in all sorts of media, and then seriously suggest that video games have to somehow move past that to match those forms of media. Because they already have non-violent games as well, so you can't actually be asking for that, that would make even less sense.

It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots."

I am not sure what you want to convey. Simulated violence is base of any game really.

Heck, chess is literally a battlefield where soldiers are scarified to acheive victory.

Playing chess doesn't make you violent or toxic.

You could easily make the same sort of criticism about Contra. You're moving down endless waves of mooks with your badass weapons without a thought or care about the morality of it. Mario sure does kill a lot of animals, etc.

If you're talking driving or flying games with appropriate controllers, then they might provide some useful instruction. But first person shooters played with a controller or a keyboard and mouse are so disconnected from the reality of combat, that I can't imagine any kind of instruction that is applicable to the real world could possibly apply (actual training sims do exist and they work nothing like popular video games).

Militaries around the world learned decades ago that the only way to desensitize troops to shooting to actually kill another human (as opposed to just firing in the general direction) was by developing the muscle memory through repeated exercises of actually firing a rifle at a man shaped target.

I've seen no evidence of increased propensity to violence, or increased skill at violence over the last 30 years. If anything violent crime rates have dropped drastically, and recruits are worse performing because they are more likely to be out of shape, and less likely to have actually fired a gun.

If you're talking about increased aggression, then I'd argue it's naive to believe the opposite. Scientific studies have shown no long-term impact on aggressive behavior from violent games.

Now, that they might teach you a thing or two about guns, and even basic military tactics in some cases, sure. But by itself, that's not really a bad thing.

Violence and dystopian themes are prevalent in video games for a reason. Living as we are in a time of Global Peace never seen before in history, human minds are instinctively attracted to the opposite experience of a total war, desolation and misery. Which is why these themes retain their allure and continue to attract the strong following that they do.

That's just false. One of the most popular games in human history, Minecraft, completely destroys this notion. Every resource is infinitely renewable and available in great supply.

> This can be OK if there is other sources of conflict like in Kerbal Space Program sandbox mode where you have an unlimited amount of parts and Kerbals to build with but you have to overcome environmental challenges inherent in flying a ship to another planet and back.

This sentence seems contradictory. The challenge is in the doing of a thing. That's not conflict OR scarcity, it's simply your experience. And it's a fun and famous game with a huge following.

> If there is no conflict of any kind there is nothing preventing you from achieving your goal immediately without having to do much of anything, which isn't exactly very fun.

This is that "cultural lens" thing I've referred to in other posts. You're defining this as conflict, but it's not really conflict. It's overcoming hardship. The way you define this matters for how you think about it.

> Very few people want to play "games" that are solely experiencing the environment with no real goals.

So I submit the majority of gaming time on the most popular gaming platforms (mobile) are in fact exactly like this. There is no forced conflict in Neko Atsume or Candy Crush Saga. Roguelike games do model violence conflict, but largely do away with specific goals and simply let you revel in an environment that is new and surprising each time.

> Because (most) people need to have goals to work towards both in real life and in games.

Why does this require repeated and somewhat authentic modeling of fatal violence?

> If you don't give a player goals

I'm trying to work out how you're immediately equating "slaughter each other in PUBG while rolling around in a jeep for now reason" is "goals" but "build a pyramid with your friends in minecraft" is not. In terms of hours and copies sold, the later absolutely annihilates the former, and yet here you are arguing that the former is the only fun option.

View this more like schools spending lots of money on football teams, not as an educational experiment.

And since public schools are mostly locally funded, some districts aren't cash strapped.

>my point stands: no school should be spending a half million in tax money on corporate video games.

This decision is made at the district level, if the people don't like it, they can very easily vote in a different school board. The local voters are the ones who get to decide what they "should" spend their tax money on.

> if indeed there is any educational merit whatsoever to this initiative (which I highly doubt).

Participation in after school activities has been shown to positively impact educational performance.