Sorrow said:
I mean, they must read Illiad, Oedipus the King, Antigone, etc. (these are mandatory for 13 year old teens in Poland.) and all that drastic/graphic/perverse/serious/tragic ancient stuff but can't play games like Fallout? That's absurd.
Unfortunately, that's Poland.
In terms of the humanities and topics such as literature you are far and away better educated in Europe than even the better educated Americans. America unfortunately has been catering the the lowest common denominator in it's education for decades now with everything coached towards the stupidest kid in the classroom so no one can get offended. Combined with multiple choice tests being the norm for grading where half the answers can typically be discarded as idiotic and you can flip a coin if you don't feel like thinking about the other half you can largely coast through most schools in America without paying any attention at all to the subject matter.
I actually went to fairly good private schools myself and the Iliad was never on a reading list, hell, they even glanced over Shakespeare as 'too deep' for the curriculum.
As opposed to when I was seeing a few girls in Eastern Europe and they went to a University Exam where rather then a craptacular multiple choice test they actually had to stand up and spontaneously answer direct questions from their proffessor to demonstrate a good grasp of what he'd been teaching. A system which requires you to actually be familiar with what you're being taught and odds are will lead to retention, while in the US you can typically slide by with even a few coherent braincells rubbing together and with little reason to truly retain anything you're taught. Probably why one of my friends fathers who grew up in the Soviet Union could still break down chemical formulas and do geometry he'd been taught before I was born and I just lamely remembered the Pythagoras theorum I'd been taught scarcely half a decade before. Something I had to explain away as unrelated to intelligence or apptitude at the time and simply a matter of being able to pass geometry and chemistry in high school without really having to know any of it in my Country's amazingly lackluster school system.
The appealing to teens comments for FOOL actually kinda concerns me given the 'dumming down' of most things these days. I actually used to watch morning and afternoon cartoons geared towards kids into my twenties and the general level of quality went to hell in a handbasket. I never found myself particularly alone in that respect either, and used to know plenty of adults who once watched a lot of cartoon, but can't say I know anyone who does now without refering to Adult Swim type cartoons such as Venture Brothers which is largely caterd to adults who remember the old quality cartoons they used to watch. Last decent cartoons I could watch were Batman Beyond and Pirates of Darkwater and everything I remember since has been watered down crap, and I fail to understand the reasoning behind it. Admittedly there seems to be veyr few morning cartoons anymore at all, but that's probably because of the general lack of quality anymore. I don't think anything being produced these days would actually have held my attention back even when I was five and cartoons really were geared towards me. Most of the cartoons I actually did watch when I was five though, like the old GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, He Man, Johnny Quest, or even Scooby Doo I could probably watch today and still find amusing and worth a watch. Ironically all those cartoons have been re-made a few times, which confuses me as it seems more sensible to simply re-aire the old ones again rather than taking an idea that worked well in the past and remaking it for people who probably weren't born when the show was popular so are unlikely to have seen the originals. Makes less sense to me when the remakes tend to cater to idiots or are under the belief kids are too dumb to pay attention to anything but colors moving on a screen and flashy lights, or maybe some poor attempts and japanese anime which never seems to work when done by westerners.
It seems to me we have a lot of idiotic kids and teens in America these days because the shows we make for them are largely idiotic and flavorless crap. Wheras the same such shows produced for me at that age may have been cartoons and may have featured plots with ideas so silly as paramilitary organizations trying to blackmail the world with weather dominating devices, but they didn't treat me like an idiot while doing so. So I can amuse myself even as an adult watching old kid shows, maybe just because the producers figured adults might watch the shows
with their kids and didn't want them to have to be drunk or otherwise medicated to sit through it, or maybe cause they didn't think all kids were idiots.
I'm not sure exactly when it started but it seems the whole notion of catering to younger audiences got mixed up with catering to the stupid, so Fallout catering to teens kinda concerns me.
I didn't end up playing Fallout as a teen, cause I missed it first time around, but I woulda loved it as one. At the time though teen didn't necessarily translate as stupid while it now seems to. I'm really hoping that the make the game in a mature intelligent fashion and expect teens to enjoy it and appreciate complexities and thought, rather than dumbing everything down for a younger crowd because you think they'll only understand simple concepts, drives, and humor.
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