Computer games & drugs? Seriously?
Hardly important.
Some of us actually grow up after we are teenagers.
The computer games industry has thrown up some pretty surreal situations, from mushroom-gobbling plumbers to inexplicably grumpy avians launching kamikaze attacks against smirking pigs. So you would be forgiven for thinking video games developed by the once “most dangerous man in America”, psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary, …
Once again, your mindless knee-jerk reaction leads me to ask the obvious question, to which I would like a genuine and thought-through answer from you:
OK, then - tell us what you view as important? What do you do that is more important than what Leary did? Or do you just like jeering from the sidelines, with nothing constructive to add?
GJC
"What do you do that is more important than what Leary did?"
Leary was one of dumbest smart persons on the planet. Anyone who seriously thinks anything constructive came out of the drug culture obviously didn't do enough of them. Drugs and computer software don't go together as you can't do both at the same time.
Well now...
You will notice that I did not claim that anything Leary did had any intrinsic worth or value. I asked what Jake was doing that had more worth or value, which is an entirely different question.
As to whether or not Leary did anything of value, who knows? He asked a lot of questions, and made a lot of other people think, which is good enough for me.
Drugs and computers went together just fine in the 1980s, I can tell you from personal experience. "Drugs" is a very broad church, and covers a whole bunch of substances that each have different and diverse effects on the mind and body. I found a combination of alcohol, coffee, and amphetamines just right for business programming as it was done back then. Probably wouldn't work in today's much more structured and big-corporate world, I grant you.
GJC
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis
It is my strong opinion that "growing up" is carried entirely on the X-chromosome. There is an extremely weakened tendency to anyone with only one X-chromosome, but pressure from two-X people can make one-X people act as if they have some characteristics of having grown up. That is why most techie people are men - they perpetually inhabit a world of not-grown-up, and so can see further.
Unfortunately it reprogrammed it to kill Stroggs which so far hasn't proved to be a terribly useful life skill.
Non flippant version: "reprogramming the brain" is otherwise called learning - if you claim it means something else you're talking nonsense. (Susan Greenfield, I'm looking at you.)
I will post AC for obvious reasons. Having a lot of first hand knowledge of the aforementioned drug, I can assure you that no-one designs computer games whilst tripping. The Ideas and Images that enter your mind are so powerfull that you are literally elevated to another plane. Once you are in the plane it becomes the only source of existance.
Most people have no idea what it means to actually hallicunate, it is far beyond anything that a normal mind can imagine. It's a bit like dreaming whilst your are awake, where everything is tangible but constantly evolving into other forms and lifes. None of what you see though has any relation to the world you currently know, you delve into a world of fantasy and emotion that, for me at least, cannot be achieved without taking the drug.
It literally does open your mind. The drug itself merely opens up a small gate within your brain and allows the imagination to flow unrestricted. It has it's good side but it also has its bad side, but that's another story, anyone that suffers from Flashbacks knows what I mean..
The closest images that I have ever seen to someone hallicinating are in the film fear and loathing in las vegas . Within the short extract there are scenes where your see the carpet and the womans face morphing. Try to imagine those same scenes but not as smalll isolated unique events but more as 100% of what you are currently experience. Where the whole room, building, forest or skies are constantly in an evoluative state.
With LSD you can smell sound, feel colour, touch a smell, your senses are heightened and interchanged. Time no longer has any value, life and death themselves role into one. The energy that vibrates throughout the universe becomes your very soul.......
Coming back to down to earth.......
I would neither advocate nor oppose it's usage.
On the other hand though, when you come down you are still capable of remembering some of what you experienced. This I believe is the only thing that could be used in order to create a game, the memories that remain.
Nice, AC - nice.
I was always curious about LSD back when I used to do That Sort Of Thing, but problems with anxiety ruled it out.
I'm a bit calmer now, but alas, also a bit older and wiser and less interested in That Sort Of Thing. Probably still to much risk of having a panic attack mid trip, so I'll leave it be methinks.
Sounds interesting though.
Anon, for obvious reasons.
"I will post AC for obvious reasons. Having a lot of first hand knowledge of the aforementioned drug, I can assure you that no-one designs computer games whilst tripping. The Ideas and Images that enter your mind are so powerfull that you are literally elevated to another plane. Once you are in the plane it becomes the only source of existance."
Whatever made you think I was talking solely about LSD?
"Most people have no idea what it means to actually hallicunate, it is far beyond anything that a normal mind can imagine. "
I've only seen the aftermath of a bad trip a friend took.
The bodies still walking around but I mourned their death a long time ago.
"Most people have no idea what it means to actually hallicunate, it is far beyond anything that a normal mind can imagine. "
I've heard A Scanner Darkly conjures up some of the behaviour of some drugs quite well.
For any non-participants curiously standing on the sidelines and wondering what all this is about, puzzling to see what might be so good about LSD, Dr Susan Blackmore writes eloquently from a conventional standpoint.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/22/lsd-acid-trip-self-knowledge
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/telegraphdrugs.htm
Who knew Leary could also see into the future. By designing a game that could be translated to Facebook use, he has cunningly designed a one-step personality assessment tool. If you've taken the test, you have logged into Facebook - Personality type: Narcissistic Knob End.
I know it's popular to trash on Facebook, but sometimes I wonder if it's occurred to people that there are those who use FB specifically to keep loosely in touch with relatives / friends and to maintain business contacts informally, rather than for ego massage.
OK, I get it, it's a joke - but still, I get the feeling that people are mixing up their set theory: The vast majority of Narcissistic Knob Ends may well be on Facebook - and are presumably the loudest - but that doesn't necessarily mean that *all people who are on Facebook are Narcissistic Knob Ends*. Or even most of them. The ones who aren't are, by definition, unobtrusive, and therefore don't end up with idiotic posts spread around via imgur. I get the feeling that the hatred for Facebook has a bit of shoot-the-messenger about it - since every asshole out there uses fb, and since all of their assholish posts are screenshots of their fb posts, the assumption is that everyone on fb is an asshole. But it's hardly Facebook's fault that it's the communication medium of choice for assholes; it's ubiquitous, so blaming it is a bit like blaming the telephone company when the people you talk to on the phone are morons!
If distorting reality was bad, FOX News* would have vanished in a cloud of sulphurous smoke decades ago. :^)
* Note: And most news organizations, newspapers, governments, marketing departments, religions and ElReg journos and commentards. ^_^