"No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again."
The game works through cutting edge procedural generation, where solar systems and planets are created on the fly as you explore them. I happen to think reality is created this way too, and I'm excited enough about No Man's Sky that I might buy a gaming computer so I don't have to wait five years to play it. If you're skeptical, here's a reddit thread, How might the game be pathetically underwhelming? But all of these imagined problems could be fixed by later versions of the game, or new games on the same kind of foundation, or existing games using fractal math to add limitless size and complexity. Imagine Legend of Zelda with 18 quintillion dungeons and towns.
Computer graphics are well into diminishing returns: every doubling of computing power makes the pictures prettier by a smaller margin. But procedural generation is a new frontier, and it could improve as much in the next ten years as graphics improved in the 1990's. I'm wondering how long it will take for AI creativity to match good human creativity, or if that's even possible for AI as we know it.
There is no "main quest" in life. Life is all side quests. Grind is what you do when the side quests you really want to complete are too difficult to pull off, so you resign yourself to doing some mind-numbingly monotonous shit that isn't rewarding in and of itself, but levels/gears you to get where you want to go and do what you want to do. But the gear, the skills and the henchmen are only important if having them on their own satisfies you.
If you treat life like a levelling treadmill, it's going to end up as unrewarding as grinding one in a game. It feels great to accomplish something and gain an extra level, and other players might ooh and ahh at your equipment, but in the end you just might find yourself envying the ones that played the game passing up all the leet gear and instead spent every minute laughing their asses off beating the game with the broom.
(For more about this in the context of games, here's a good reddit thread on MMO grinding.)
]]>If you think of the transition to "adulthood" as a collection of markers -- getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids -- for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.
How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off. The author starts with the observation that child prodigies tend to fizzle as adults because they were learning success on their parents' terms, instead of learning creativity. Then he drops this bomb:
Why Quantity Should be Your Priority. I've seen the anecdote about the ceramics class before, where students who were graded on quantity cranked out hundreds of pieces and eventually did much better work than students who were graded on quality and did only a few pieces. I doubt that it actually happened, but it would happen, and I would explain it like this: When you do work in the physical world, you learn things you could never learn by doing the work in your head.One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.