When I say they're not a creative force, the emphasis is on force. Yes they have great music and sound and they're quite clever, but they're not defining new genres or breathing new life into them.

Their art and character design tends to be one of two things (or a little of both):
1. Family-friendly Games Workshop
2. Americanized anime

Now, I'm not trying to shit on Blizzard; I was a huge fan for a while (mostly in Starcraft's heyday); but I recognize why I barely give a shit about what they're doing anymore and that's what I'm enumerating here.

@shagen454:
Blizzard has never been a creative force; their strength was in polish. They were great at taking existing concepts and designs and showing everyone how it should be done (see: Warcraft/Starcraft, WOW).

Unfortunately, game design is incredibly stagnant right now and Blizzard has nothing new to emulate. 1996 was the last time they launched a unique property (Diablo). They've been mostly remaking their own games since then:
* Warcraft sequels/spinoffs
* Diablo sequels/expansions
* Starcraft (Warcraft meets Warhammer 40k)
* Starcraft sequels/expansions/spinoffs
* WOW (a spinoff but a major one)
* WOW spinoffs/expansions

Then they lost a lot of the talent that made them good at the one thing they were good at (see: ArenaNet), so they're stuck milking the addicts at this point.

There's room for both. I do plenty of sports/activities, but I still enjoy watching people who are really good at them perform them at a high level.

And yeah, there are some sports I enjoy watching more than playing. My time is limited and for me, joining a rugby team or learning to be good at Starcraft would mean sacrificing another aspect of my life.

But a few hours to watch a game? That I can totally do.

oh and @poolcleaner? Protoss FTW!

for a second there I thought you meant Husky - The Starcraft II commentator...

Wasn't it a Korean crew that crashed a 737 at San Francisco? Maybe they need less StarCraft, more Flight Simulator.

That's genuinely funny. I was also thinking that a Korean StarCraft player might be able to complete the entire sequence, in, oh, I dunno, 12 seconds at thousands of APM? (assuming you didn't actually wait for the generators and engines to start etc etc etc)

Probably up late playing StarCraft

Not to state the obvious... but...
he's playing StarCraft

Idk if they still do this in SC2, but in BW it would be fairly common to drop a pylon or two in your opponents mineral line to disrupt mining. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Manner_Pylon

I never did see anybody build a wall of pylons around a base though

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Starcraft, animated, cute, surprise, egg, run' to 'Starcraft, animated, cute, surprise, egg, run, starcrafts' - edited by gwiz665

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Starcraft 2, Diablo III, Anno 2070, and other games that require an online connection.

The ones on Steam that require you to always be online are either multiplayer-only games (because you need to be online to actually play against people), and games that have their own online-only requirements (Ubisoft's UPlay, for instance).

Steam itself doesn't have any you-must-be-online reqs.

Isn't Steam an always online DRM too? I mean, I can only play most games on Steam if I'm online, even though there's an offline mode, I'm not sure it lets you be offline forever though, I think it requires checking with Steam servers once in a while (I'm guessing, haven't tried playing offline).

Steam has had many terrible problems in the first few years, but nowadays, the online requirement doesn't bother me at all.

What about Starcraft 2, you're required to be online, even to play the single player campaign. Does that qualify as always online DRM too? Seriously, I want to know.

I think ppl are complaining about the online DRM, but maybe they're just mad about SimCity's EA servers being short on capacity. Which is a huge problem if they're enforcing always online DRM, but it's not the DRM's fault. Does that make sense?

It's unfortunate that his learning will be limited by the extents of knowledge determined by his lower potential predecessors.
What will he do when he runs out of books?
His ultimate 'knowledge' will come down to his own creativity, and less his ability to absorb previous discoveries.

Someone once made a comparison of us to hypothetical aliens.
How the alien children might do our most complex physics problems in their kindergarten equivalent.
How those aliens could encounter us, and think "oh, look how cute, the human can derive a series approximation".

People like Tanishq are a step/stage between us regular people, and those theoretical aliens. He can do more as a child - but he has the potential to do more as a maximum. A personal maximum that likely humanity can't supply him with today.

People in general are a mix of creatives, memorizers, knuckleheads, middle-grounders, etc.
So the question that comes to my mind is, which kind of person is Tanishq?

We know that he absorbs information better than a regular person.
But there's a difference between memorization, understanding, and intuition.

We've all met people that memorize like crazy. They get amazing grades, but you can tell that their understanding is weak when they ask painfully stupid questions. The kind that would never be asked had they even the slightest understanding of the 'mechanics' of the subject at hand. (This always made my jaw drop. Seeing a person with perfect grades just 'not get it' to badly)

We've all met people that have a strong sense of understanding. They see one example, and they can run with it, adapting it to all kinds of changes. They 'get it'.
(Not always the best grades though. Why study when you can figure it out as you go? Because you won't figure everything out on the spot come test time...)

Then there are those with real intuition. The kind of person that looks at a problem, and thinks "the solution is something like this, I can't say why, but I can feel it. Let me work on it and figure it out." Then some time later they return with a real solution and a proof of why... and it was right along the lines that they had suspected to begin with.
No one had to give them an example, and no one had to pump them full of set-up material. They could feel it, and knew enough to recognize what it was they were on to.
These are the people that make the big leaps for human understanding.

The saddest case for Tanishq would be that he turns out to be a very enthusiastic expert memorizer.

But I hope he, and humanity, can be lucky enough for him to be both a prodigy, and a true intuitive.

-scheherazade


P.S.
Something amazing about those parent's genes. Definitely should save a [consentual] copy... Too good to lose.
IMO there should be focus on creating a gene therapy program to improve learning/intellect.
That will in itself lead to greater progress in other fields, as there would be many more super-intelligent people available to work on those problems, and many more opportunities for big breakthroughs.
It's something that could raise the potential [and actual] achievement cap of all humanity. 'It's kind of a big deal'.
It's like figuring out 'how to become those hypothetical aliens'.

Crappy starcraft example : Don't rush... macro instead. You'll be farther along later than you would be otherwise.

This is how they play starcraft as well.