{"id":132,"date":"2005-05-24T02:34:02","date_gmt":"2005-05-24T06:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/24\/gratuitous-gaming\/"},"modified":"2005-05-24T02:34:02","modified_gmt":"2005-05-24T06:34:02","slug":"gratuitous-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/05\/24\/gratuitous-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"Gratuitous Gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a898'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"4\">A good post from two months back:<\/font><\/p>\n<p>On the insistence of my cousin&#8217;s daughter, I made the mistake of<br \/>\npeeking into the seamy world of Really Bad Games Written by High School<br \/>\nKids and Played by Tens of Thousands of Users.<\/p>\n<p>As the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lordsoflords.com\/meadow2\/paper.php\">LoL newspaper<\/a><br \/>\nsuggests, a lot of people are spending a lot of time doing really,<br \/>\nreally silly things. Like giving eachother six septillion gold pieces,<br \/>\nback and forth. Which is wrong on so many levels; for instance, our<br \/>\nsilly arabic numeral system deprives players of even the redeeming<br \/>\nfeature of teaching people how to spell &#8220;septillion.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Some of<br \/>\nthe more popular games in this genre, like the one my cousin insisted I<br \/>\ncheck out, a) only let you make a few moves a day, b) require you jump<br \/>\nthrough all kinds of hoops to prove you&#8217;re a human, and c) have<br \/>\nabsolutely no plot, graphics, or gameplay. Yet *hundreds of thousands*<br \/>\nof people play them. Tends of thousands play them for hours and hours<br \/>\nevery week. Entire high school classes are apparently addicted to these<br \/>\ngames, whose concept, complexity, and execution are on a level with a<br \/>\nviral form of Pong which made the mistake of interposing lots of text<br \/>\nand windows between episodes of actual action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A good post from two months back: On the insistence of my cousin&#8217;s daughter, I made the mistake of peeking into the seamy world of Really Bad Games Written by High School Kids and Played by Tens of Thousands of Users. As the LoL newspaper suggests, a lot of people are spending a lot of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chain-gang"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}