Well, besides the murder part :p

I would hope that's the case here, but in some circles it really isn't possible. Which is a shame.

Well, *you* are talking about religion as whole. What I'm doing in challenging your premise that "gamer culture," as you put it, is analogous to religion as a whole, i.e. "the culture which surround serious gamers" <=> "all of religion." I don't think that premise is useful, that it is an apt comparison, and I don't…

Actually, "popularity," as you put it, has a huge bearing here. We could talk about Korean Shamanistic religion, the divisions between the main belief systems, and how deals primarily with addressing specific needs by appeasing the appropriate spirits. Given the place it has in Korean society we might even have a few…

Well, yes. I defined it differently because I DO believe that it bears a different definition. As you say, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of exceptions to an Abrahamic view of religion, but within the context of this talk and this community, I don't know that we need to give weight to every single one of them.…

Good catch on Ebert's quote. I was wondering if Robertson knew about *that* one.

As theJakeman pointed out, that's not necessarily the case, even among Abrahamic religions—there are plenty of believers who accept the religious teachings as metaphorical and not literal.

Well, they are different, fundamentally. While religion, like most things, lies on a spectrum and does not mean the same thing to everyone, I think an easy definition for this discussion would be a set of teachings, morals, beliefs, and practices perpetuated with the intent of achieving spiritual awareness and…

I'm seeing two different readings here, one with a boy who will do anything, including hurt people, to get to a girl he's obsessed with, and a manipulative girl who demands more and more of a boy, who goes along with it.

Feedback, absolutely. Voting with your dollars, yes. Sometimes a big community backlash can do some good.

They're different, and I don't really mind either way. I will say, though, that I don't really like the direction that Blizzard's art took after Brood War. I don't mind stylized art at all, and with Warcraft it worked very well, but it seems like Blizzard has made *all* of their titles brighter, softer, and more…

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this issue. While I certainly want more interesting, varied, nuanced, and compelling characters/stories period (particularly female ones), and the old cliques we see over and over get, well, old, I'm not really comfortable saying that the media has a moral imperative to portray…

Now *that's* what we're really running into here, isn't it? I personally don't think there is anything wrong with a sexual depiction of a person, regardless of gender, and I don't think that we as a society should be afraid of sex, but women do get the brunt of the sexualized stick. Objectification, which is broader,…

Oh gosh, that's funny.

So AoM you had three factions (four with an expansion) which all collected resources and used them differently. Very clever, though I personally didn't care for the game very much.

Some of them, sure, but some just did not age well. At all.

Masters of Orion 2, Magic Carpet 2, X-COM, Planetfall, some of the King's Quest series, Heroes of Might and Magic III; I can play these to this day and quite enjoy them. But bring out Quake, or Dune II, or Diablo 1, not so much.

I think it depends on what you play the game for. With titles which, in their time, were known for shiny new graphics or some quirky new mechanic (quick time events, for example), they tend to die pretty quickly. That's why there are SO many abandoned FPS titles; they were the latest flash in the pan with a new…

I saw a video of a SC2 player jungling with Meepo. Micro'd all four of his clones in different places, farmed through the jungle and then engaged on multiple lanes.

It was pretty cool.

I don't think so. Given the choice between this and the ugly sweaters my parents dressed me up in for special occasions, I'll take the cosplay any day.

I would probably go more toward Age of Mythology than Age of Empires, where the different factions have incomparable units and game mechanics instead of the same basic setup. The Starks need to maintain the support of their allies in the North, since that is where the majority of their armies come from, so they aren't…