Why otherwise intelligent journalists should never cover subjects dealing with technology
The New Yorker has covered Will Wright’s “spore”. The most hilarious paragraph follows:
Spore isn’t a multiplayer game, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft, which runs on “massively parallel� computers (a distributed system employing many networked machines); it’s what Wright jokingly calls a massively parallel single-player game. If you enable an Internet feature, Spore servers will “pollinate� your copy of the game with content created by other players. In order to create the best content for your style of play—“the right kind of ecosystem for your creature,� as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players’ content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you. In other words, while you are playing the game, the game is playing you.
It’s interesting that he makes perfect sense everywhere else, but at about this paragraph he sounds like a five year old. It’s not just his lack of knowledge in the field, but possibly the infectious excitement of the product. He may as well have said "Will Wright said WoW is a massively parallel multiplayer single player game LoL!!! Darwinia pwns j00 noobs!!1"