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Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

arstechnica.com

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Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#51

Post by mynameishere »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #5

I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…

We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter

Yep. Because any idiot can do that. Your point?

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#52

Post by alanctgardner2 »

icambron wrote: post #44
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people insist on foisting "software literacy" on the general populace? In terms of skills, financial planning, cooking, interpersonal skills are all more essential than reading and writing code. The writing analogy is off anyways: not everyone can write very well. People would upvote -and buy- a children's story by, say, neil gaiman. This is not the equivalent of a throwaway story made up on the spot.

The upvote question is easy to answer -- this is Hacker News . Of course we upvote programming. And I agree with the point about writing. And I think we shouldn't read "everyone needs programming literacy" from hacking a ROM any more than we should read "everyone needs to know woodworking" from "here's a cool piece of furniture I built for my daughter." But I will try to answer the question about foisting software li…

Personally I have no horse in the coding-skills race; I really enjoy problem solving and architecting systems more than writing the code itself. If there were lots of commodity coders, I could direct and manage them and enjoy myself plenty ;)

From the 'software is eating the world' perspective, I see increased use of software, but not increased production in unconventional areas. If you look at the progression of home computers, we've gone from booting directly into BASIC, to an iPad, where you really can't do any development. The slow march to 'appification', and the trend of taking away customization and development tools from consumer-grade products makes me think that while software is becoming more important, average people need (and want) to code less and less.

It's definitely a programmer's perspective to say that any knowledge industry (like finance) is just software + domain knowledge. Someone in that industry would approach it from the other end, and say that they can write a req and get some commodity software to solve their problem from some developer half-way around the world. This is where I think the industry is going: not universal programming literacy, but a more stratified culture where 'commodity' development is it's own discipline.

Consider the ease with which any consultant can knock together a CRUD Rails app with some business logic the client specifies. We've removed a ton of overhead and boilerplate, and lowered the barrier to entry tremendously. As time goes on, and development technology advances, I see software development/engineering and computer science diverging more and more. At some point, development might be an apprenticeship or more 'hands-on' education, to learn the existing patterns and practices.

In short, development will become a commodity, but via an emerging class of commodity developers who can handle 95% of client requests. There will still be people who do hard things, and hack in their spare time, and they'll make things better for everyone. But they'll stay in the minority, and development will stay out of reach for people who aren't explicitly 'developers'.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#53

Post by newnewnew »

arrrg wrote: post #32
Karunamon wrote: post #12

Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy: -- > This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality? You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differenc…

I think it’s pretty normal if you are tired of the constant portrayal of women as weak, helpless and passive in certain media. What’s so wrong with calling out lazy storytelling based on dumb stereotypes? How can you even have a problem with that? I also like how you just declare something harmless. Why, exactly? It’s a part of video game history that lives on and is anything but harmless. Calling out crap is wrong –…

Down with the sexists who believe that humans exhibit sexual dimorphism!

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#54

Post by arrrg »

Karunamon wrote: post #45
arrrg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly am. What has that to do with the comment I made?! Also, I am not aware of any serious attempts inside the Mario franchise to seriously subvert or invert the trope. I see an endless history of portraying women as weak, helpless and passive. Sad, really.

Let's see.. Pretty sure Peach has her own game on which the entire concept is getting the Mario Bros. out of trouble (the name is eluding me right now, it's on the DS). She's personally helped save the world more than once (Paper Mario 2 comes to mind). There are other female characters too.. Timpani from Super Paper Mario has a huge dynamic with the primary antagonist of the game. And if you look outside of that par…

Yes, the Princess Peach game where she has to cry to save Mario. Vomit.

You know, subverting the trope a little bit (sometimes) is maybe nice, certainly, however, not enough when you use it all the fucking time, to this day.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#55

Post by Retric »

alanctgardner2 wrote: post #24
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #5

I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…

Why do people insist on foisting "software literacy" on the general populace? In terms of skills, financial planning, cooking, interpersonal skills are all more essential than reading and writing code. The writing analogy is off anyways: not everyone can write very well. People would upvote -and buy- a children's story by, say, neil gaiman. This is not the equivalent of a throwaway story made up on the spot.

I get along fine with without cooking skills. Now, cooking skills plus time could in theory save me up to 7k per year if you ignore prep time, but programming skills are worth a lot more than that.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#56

Post by ceol »

Karunamon wrote: post #36
arrrg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, you do know that the trope lives on in Mario games? You are aware of that? Also, looking at history can be interesting and illustrative.

You are aware that the particular character hasn't appeared in a game since? You are aware that the trope you're referring to has been subverted, inverted, and toyed with just about every way possible by the very same company?

Are you talking about Pauline? Because she was just in a game two years ago.[0]

The trope, however, has been employed in every core Mario game, most recently in New Super Mario Bros. U.[1]

[0]: http://www.mariowiki.com/Mario_vs._Donkey_Kong:_Mini-Land_Ma...!

[1]: http://www.mariowiki.com/New_Super_Mario_Bros._U

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#57

Post by xk_id »

derleth wrote: post #22
xk_id wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hah :) so software is like interactive literature.

It can be, with some games (Zork, GTA4, Bioshock) a lot more than others (Pong, Tetris, Tic-tac-toe, Chess). At the extreme end of games-as-literature is the Interactive Fiction world, which has been dealing with how the 'literature' and the 'game' aspects interact for decades now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction Read this essay for an introduction to the concepts: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive…

I actually mean "interactive literature" in a broader sense :P which includes all software, not only games. you have textbooks too, not just novels, right? :)

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#58

Post by egypturnash »

Karunamon wrote: post #45
arrrg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly am. What has that to do with the comment I made?! Also, I am not aware of any serious attempts inside the Mario franchise to seriously subvert or invert the trope. I see an endless history of portraying women as weak, helpless and passive. Sad, really.

Let's see.. Pretty sure Peach has her own game on which the entire concept is getting the Mario Bros. out of trouble (the name is eluding me right now, it's on the DS). She's personally helped save the world more than once (Paper Mario 2 comes to mind). There are other female characters too.. Timpani from Super Paper Mario has a huge dynamic with the primary antagonist of the game. And if you look outside of that par…

Finding a tiny handful of female protagonists really doesn't change the fact that video games are pretty much a sausage festival, where women are typically presented as helpless prizes to be won or rescued.

Despite what the high-budget video game developers think, video games are not played exclusively by guys. Girls play them too. And maybe we'd like to have some fantasies where someone like us gets to kick ass and save the world, or at least the day, too.

Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

#60

Post by egypturnash »

Camillo wrote: post #43

Cool hack, great dad, etc. However, I can't help but point out that one of the most popular video games of the moment, Tomb Raider, has a female protagonist, and hordes (brutish, sexist hordes!) of male gamers are playing it without issue. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to learn to play as a character that is not exactly like you.

Guys have to play as a lady about, what? Maybe 2% of the time.

Girls have to play as a guy about, oooh, 90% of the time.

For woman, playing as a character like themselves is a really refreshing change.

(Numbers are pulled out of my ass based on years of playing games; the missing 8% are games with multiple character options that include a woman. If you're lucky there may even be two or three female characters to choose from out of a cast of about a dozen!)

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