Time to hunker down for a couple of weeks:
"‘Fortnite’ may be a virtual game, but it’s having real-life, dangerous effects" by Beth Teitell Globe Staff, March 31, 2019
An obsession so intense that kids are seeing doctors and therapists to break the game’s grip, in some cases losing so much weight — because they refuse to stop playing to eat — that doctors initially think they’re wasting away from a physical disease.
The stress on families has become so severe that parents are going to couples’ counselors, fighting over who’s to blame for allowing “Fortnite” into the house in the first place and how to rein in a situation that’s grown out of control.
“One of the parents will get to the point of almost considering a divorce,” said Rich Domenico, a therapist with LiveWell Therapy Associates, in the Back Bay. “It’s similar to working with parents who have a child addicted to drugs.”
Parents worrying about kids spending too much time playing video games isn’t new, but a few significant factors have combined to make today’s games harder to stop playing. Better technology has made the games more interactive, more engaging, and more artistic, said Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State University psychology professor and coauthor of the book “Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents.” More insidious, game makers have taken a lesson from slot-machine designers and started employing a variable reward schedule, according to Ofir Turel, a professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at California State University Fullerton.
In the case of “Fortnite,” the psychological manipulation combines with the game’s flashy colors, its many potential plots, and the element of social interaction to stimulate the brain and train it to “crave” more, he e-mailed the Globe.
I'm only pointing it out, not trying to do it to you.
“Fortnite” has been likened to a cross between “Minecraft” and “The Hunger Games.” Some 200 million people have played, but if you’re not one of them, here’s how it works: One hundred competitors are dropped on an island, where they run around finding weapons and materials to build walls, ramps, and floors that can protect them from other players.
As the game progresses, the game field gets smaller, putting opponents in ever closer range. The last player — or players, if friends are playing as a team — wins.
“Fortnite” is free, but more than 68 percent of players make in-game purchases — like pickaxes, dance moves, and outfits to personalize their characters — and the average player who makes purchases has spent $84.67, according to a 2018 study by the financial services firm Lendedu.
Epic Games Inc., creator of “Fortnite,” did not respond to Globe e-mails.
As “Fortnite” scare stories proliferate — a British behavioral specialist likened it to heroin — many parents wonder if any child can get sucked in.
Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, said his clinic has yet to see a patient struggling with “Fortnite” who does not also have an underlying issue. “In fact, we are currently characterizing PIMU” — Problematic Interactive Media Use — “not as a diagnosis, but as a syndrome, a group of symptoms of diagnoses ranging from ADHD to anxiety, depression, or mood disorders that manifest themselves in the interactive media environment.”
One of the BCH clinic’s patients is a Brookline boy who secretly used his father’s credit cards to make thousands of dollars of in-game purchases.
“My sweet mama’s boy became angry and disrespectful,” said the boy’s mother, who spoke to the Globe on condition of anonymity to protect her family’s privacy.
The personality transformation came after the boy switched from a Brookline public school to a private school in sixth grade. A lonely new kid, he eventually managed to make friends through his growing prowess in “Fortnite.”
As the game’s pull escalated, he refused to do anything but play. He wouldn’t go outside. Wouldn’t go to sleepaway camp. Didn’t even want to go out for his own birthday dinner.
Gaming can lead to weight gain, as kids spend hours sitting on the couch, but Tara McCarthy, a clinical nutritionist with Boston Children’s Hospital, is seeing boys who won’t take a moment away from “Fortnite” to eat.
Lynne Karlson, a general pediatrician at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center, who has heard about kids denied “Fortnite” kicking down doors, suggests parents limit playtime “before it becomes so all-encompassing,” but that can be harder than it sounds.
Samuel Roth, a clinical psychologist in Newton, described a scenario that will sound familiar to many parents.
“The parents make a deal with the kids,” he said. “ ‘You can play for this long,’ and the kids are agreeable — they’re eager to start playing.
“Everyone nods their heads, and everyone feels good, until it come to the end of the playing time, and the child cannot abide by the agreement, and the parents feel immensely violated. It tears at the fabric of trust in the family.”
As for the Brookline boy who stole his dad’s credit cards to fund his gaming, he hit rock bottom on a family trip to New Hampshire, in the summer of 2018, when he refused to go boating. While the rest of the group was enjoying the lake, he tried to break into the family car with a hammer to get his electronic device.
So have I with the Globe and this blog.
The incident lead to an 11-day inpatient hospital stay, where he got therapy and quit “Fortnite” cold turkey.
Looking back, even he is baffled by the power the game held.
Now, at 13, on the other side of “Fortnite,” he’s disturbed by what he sees around him. “The little kids on the school bus have gone from Pokeman cards to ‘Fortnite,’ ” he said. “They’re in third and fourth grades and that’s all they talk about.”
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The sole survivor was David Price.
"Boston used to dominate the video game industry. Can it rebound?" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, March 22, 2019
In November, the Smithsonian Institution hosted an evening event to celebrate the birth of the video game industry, which happened — where else? — at MIT in the early 1960s, when students programmed a game called “Spacewar!”
This week, the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center will host one of the country’s largest expos for video game players, PAX East.
Yet Boston isn’t exactly home to a booming industry, though you can find a job working on games like “Red Dead Redemption,” “Star Trek Timelines,” or “Game of Thrones: Conquest.”
What gives?
One person to start with is Mike Dornbrook, who began his career in the games industry just after graduating from MIT in the early 1980s. If you played “Zork” or “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on your Apple computer in that century, or jammed with “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band” in this one, Dornbrook was involved.
“Thirty-five years ago, the Boston area was second only to the [San Francisco] Bay Area in concentration of computer game companies,” Dornbrook says. Companies like Infocom, Spinnaker Software, and Parker Bros. were all among the top 10 game publishers.
“Now, this area is pretty far down the list,” he says, trailing not only the Bay Area, but Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto.
One issue, Dornbrook says, is our chilly climate, but another one is Canadian government subsidies that support the industry there, offering tax incentives that effectively cut by half the cost of employing video game developers, and these days, it is “very difficult for game companies to raise money here,” Dornbrook says. “Lots of investors were burned” by putting money into companies that may have had one hit but couldn’t follow it up.
Also, watching seven years of lawsuits that erupted after the bankruptcy of Rhode Island-based 38 Studios — the games company founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling — didn’t make investors more eager to funnel money into the sector.
“The challenge with the game industry,” venture capitalist Bob Davis says, “is that it’s such a hits-driven business. It’s hard to deliver consistently.”
But let's shell out some tax $ub$idies and base an economy on it!
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Need a Lyft?
"Uber-Lyft fee to help taxi drivers has so far funded only consultants" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, March 29, 2019
Did you know that every time you hop into an Uber or a Lyft in Massachusetts, you’re doing your part to support the taxi industry?
Sounds bizarre, but since Governor Charlie Baker in 2016 signed into law a bill to regulate “transportation network companies” like Uber,, you’ve been paying a nickel per ride into a fund that is supposed to aid the very companies you’re disrupting by using an app, rather than your hailing hand, to summon a vehicle.
I wrote about the law just after it was passed, suggesting some ways the money could be well spent — even if it feels odd to ask one business to subsidize one that it is supplanting. Did we require the telegraph companies to help prop up the Pony Express?
So I thought I’d check in on how much money that 2016 legislation has funneled into the taxi business to help it — what, manage to hang on? Rebound?
The first thing I learned is that MassDevelopment, the state’s economic development and finance agency, has so far collected $3.2 million from the nickel-per-ride law. That money was generated by nearly 65 million rides through Uber, Lyft, and some other smaller players.
As those millions of customers were flocking to Uber and Lyft, they were fleeing taxis.
Good thing we’re using that $3.2 million to stanch some of the bleeding, right?
I'm indifferent to it.
Well, last March, MassDevelopment put out a 27-page call for consultants who might have ideas about how to spend the money constructively. In October, it contracted with one, a regional planning agency called the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
The MAPC will be paid $49,750 to interview drivers and taxi owners and “identify industry trends and challenges,” according to language in the call for consultants. So that’s almost 1 million of your Uber and Lyft rides, at a nickel a pop, funding a study about what kind of pain your Uber and Lyft rides are causing the taxi and livery industries.
Once the study is complete, the MAPC will issue recommendations to MassDevelopment about how the rest of the nickels ought to be spent. MassDevelopment expects to get those recommendations this summer. MAPC researchers are conducting the study of how to spend the nickels.
“It’s too little, too late.”
“The industry is frustrated that the money is being held, for sure,” says Cheryl Horan, vice president of Green and Yellow Cab in Somerville. “Our strength will be in the number of vehicles we can get together in a mutual fleet,” Horan says. Then, there would be a need to promote that new kind of regional transportation network. Horan says the MassDevelopment millions could be helpful on those fronts.
Or $tolen! Looks to me like it is being doled out to "consultants" and "contractors" who must be well-connected!
She notes that Green and Yellow Cab hasn’t been a technology laggard; the company launched its first mobile app in 2013 — the same year Lyft started operating in Boston.
MassDevelopment will keep collecting nickels until January 2027. It could ultimately add up to more than $30 million before the mandatory fee is phased out.
It’s probably not a realistic goal to deploy that money to keep every taxi owner in Massachusetts afloat, but what if we could ensure that those that survive the shakeout actually provide a service you’d be happy to use? That means comfortable cars, courteous drivers who know the city, and maybe even a phone charger — like you often see when you ride in an Uber or Lyft.....
“They wiped me out, and a lot of other people.”
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That advice was available for the price of a copy of the Sunday Globe.
So how was the road test?
Why don't you give it the old college try, and no buzz needed:
"For gamers, the clouds are rolling in" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, April 7, 2019
I haven’t bought a video game in quite awhile, and if Google and Microsoft get their way, hardly anyone else will be buying them, either.
Instead, the tech titans want us to embrace “cloud gaming,” which means they own and host the game, streaming it over the Internet to customers who pay by the month. It works for movies — bet you’ve got a subscription to Netflix or some other video streaming service. The music industry has learned to love Apple Music and Spotify, with unlimited online listening for a monthly fee. So why not play video games the same way?
You just click an icon in your browser, and the game would start, on your desktop computer, or any other connected device— laptop, tablet, phone or even the living room TV. You could put down one device, pick up another, and keep right on playing where you left off.
Already, millions of people play online combat games like the immensely popular “Fortnite,” but the software runs on our own computers.
With cloud gaming, the game software runs on powerful cloud servers in some remote data center. You won’t need a new PC or smartphone to run the latest games. They’ll perform well on cheap, obsolete machines, as long as you’ve got a fast broadband connection, and the services will likely offer dozens or hundreds of games.
A company called OnLive tried cloud gaming a decade ago, only to go bust. Sony Corp. has done better. In 2014 it created PlayStation Now, which let PlayStation 4 owners play earlier-generation games that would not run on the new console.
Today, PlayStation Now is the biggest cloud gaming service, with over 750 titles on offer. The market research firm SuperData estimates it generated $143 million in revenue for Sony in 2018. That’s barely a rounding error for Sony, which took in $21 billion last year. Sony declines to provide a subscriber head count, but it’s safe to say PS Now hasn’t had much of an impact, but if companies like Google and Microsoft are willing to gamble on game streaming, I expect quite a few consumers to play along, at least for awhile.
The newcomers must get the technology right.....
F***ing this just froze!
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