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A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.
To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?
In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 06 2017, @03:04PM (1 child)
GUIs are very hard to learn for literate people, like trying to learn some weird made up kanji. Its none the less a lot easier for CLI people to learn a GUI than for completely illiterate people to learn a CLI. Illiterate people can't CLI whereas literate people are merely inefficient and annoyed by GUI.
I agree with you that there is often a different set of personalities for people who prefer CLI vs. GUI.
But I think this is a false dichotomy. A well-designed GUI can be very efficient and helpful for lots of tasks. A well-designed GUI can be easy to learn and use. As with everything, different tools are appropriate to different tasks. I almost always have both CLI and GUI open on my desktop, which I use for different things.
Once you learn one CLI they're all the same or at least trivially learnable
Huh. I guess you weren't around the folks I knew who grew up using DOS and complained continuously when they showed up to university or whatever and were suddenly forced to deal with a UNIX-derived system.
What I think you might be getting at here isn't so much about GUI vs. CLI as it is about documentation and discoverability. Modern poorly-constructed GUIs are often incredibly poorly documented and have all sorts of features that are only discoverable by trial-and-error, by having a friend show you, or by surfing the web for "15 top things you didn't know you could do with your iPhone!"
On the other hand, a traditional CLI (and even most traditional GUIs) has built-in documentation available with a clear command (like man or --help or whatever). And complete documentation has traditionally been available in an easily indexed form in books and now through websites. But admittedly it is a bit harder to make a CLI discoverable in the same way as a well-designed GUI, with its ability to nest, group, and organize commands. (Sure, you can list all commands available to you in a particular shell. But unless you're in a limited environment, that may not be so useful.)
To me, the difference you're talking about isn't between those who like CLI vs. GUI, but between those who are willing to RTFM vs. those who aren't. Literate people are willing to deal with documentation and actually prefer learning things that way. People who can't stand reading a book are more likely to click random buttons or swipe erratically until something happens that does what they want.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday March 06 2017, @03:39PM
I guess you weren't around the folks I knew who grew up using DOS and complained continuously when they showed up to university or whatever and were suddenly forced to deal with a UNIX-derived system.
On Acorn systems and anything CP/M derived, there was a command 'cat', short for 'catalogue' for listing the contents of a disk (later, of a directory). I still occasionally type 'cat' into a UNIX terminal and wonder why it's taking so long to list the contents of the directory...
sudo mod me up