kelbear

My wife wants to move south so we can get one of those giant mansions that are twice the size of our house for a /third/ of the cost.  
 
But I don't want to live in the south. I only want to live in coastal metropolitan areas where minorities aren't a sideshow event. 

Depends on the job.  
 
Public accountants have mandatory 60-hour minimum work weeks from January to April. Again, that's the minimum requirement, i.e more can be expected of you. 
 
If you land a client with a year-end that isn't on december, you can be pulling those same work hours at other times of the year in addition to those 4 months of official busy season.  Of course, that's why the average turnover in this industry is 20% within the first 2 years for new hires.  
 
Also, you are required to pass the CPA exams while you're working those hours, or you can't get promoted. Plus, the longer you work there, the longer your hours will get until you make manager. Plus, if you can't pass the CPA exam within 2 or 3 years of working there, you'll get fired since they need people with CPA licenses.

Storytelling in games often struggle under the burden of being "games" rather staying true to a narrative vision.  
 
One of the most obvious recent examples is Uncharted 2 where an otherwise fantastic narrative is forced to overextend action sequences, and turns into a massacre of thousands of badguys dying at the feet of what was supposed to be a "john everyman" on his hero's journey.  
 
Another common problem is the gun. Once the game pitch starts with a gun, all interaction with the world tends to flow from "the gun", and only deviating in rare circumstances. I recall Patrick marvelling at Prey 2 where he was given the "choices" of paying a guy off for information, or pulling a gun and shooting his bodyguard to get him to talk. The player's only means of making things happen in that world is with his gun? There's nothing new or interesting about that. There's nothing wrong with giving players a gun, but once it gets into the game, it tends to monopolize design effort and attention, and really starts to hem in the possible ways they could have the player change the world around them. 
 
 I liked LA Noire, let's have some first-person political strategy games! Campaign your way into the white house from a first-person perspective. Coordinate political strategy with aides, decide who to trust with key positions and political pacts, and analyze the public and balance their desires against your personal moral compass in taking up positions on your platform. Want to change the country for the better? Then you'll need to learn how to compromise. How much good can you accomplish in your political career? How many good causes do you have to sacrifice to get enough support for more important good causes? Maybe you don't care about "good" and want to see how far you can abuse your growing power. Maybe you need to abuse the power a little to get the funding you need to get the political power for social reform. Truly grey moral decisions emerging from the player, with less need for the developer to present cut and dried "this or that" scenarios when the player can decide what their own "big picture" is going to look like. The "game" here flows through strategy and polling for the results of your decisions, plenty of mechanics there to fill out the necessary game length.
 
We've been seeing a lot of shooter creep in gaming, and hopefully we'll see the far slope of this climb soon. 

Heh, liiiiiiiaaaaaaarrrsssss.

I thought this topic deserved it's own thread: 
 
I don't see any way Valve could possibly break into the living room console market (and more importantly, would there even be a profit in attempting to do so? Huge sunk cost, and it torpedoes their ability to cross-sell on PSN, and possibly the other networks)  However, what if Valve tried to make moves into handheld devices? That is much more interesting.  
 
It's a relatively new market with vague borders. If you define it purely as gaming handhelds, you've only got two competitors(Sony and Nintendo) instead of 3. There's no established expectation of how a handheld should be designed, so they could manage to sell with a clever design rather than sheer hardware power. If you look at the market more broadly and define it as "mobile gaming" in general, then Valve has an even better chance of making inroads by being the premiere marketer and distributor on the Android platform. The existing Android market is flush with crapware and no way for quality apps to show themselves to distinguish themselves from all the crapware flooding through. The signal to noise ratio is horrendously low. However, Steam's advertising and sales systems would be able to establish itself as the place where all the REAL android gaming apps are, a place where shovelware will not be allowed to take the same amount of front-page attention, if they're allowed in at all. If this push is successful enough, perhaps even Apple would allow Steam on iphones (they've already allowed Steam for macs...) 
 
Mobile gaming app developers don't expect to be Angry Birds, they just want to at least make some profit off their little app. That's damned hard to do when they can't get seen. Even if their game is great, it won't make money unless people know that it's great. That's where Valve has experience. They promote games well on Steam. They can even afford to find a few good mobile apps in development (they are already the closest to the indie development out of all publishers) and then just buy those developers out entirely by promising them an upfront profit. They can then sell those blockbuster apps through Steam on Android to create an established install base on that platform that gets people aware that this is where you go when you want to only see real apps, and have all the crapware filtered out. It will take time, since Android gaming itself is a new struggling economy, but the future is wide open for Android in general. If Steam can establish itself early and rise with Android, then it will be the 800lb-gorilla distribution network on both Android and the PC, with strong ties to large development studios as well as small independent projects.
 
After making this important inroad on the mobile market in software, approximately 8-10 years down the line then they could in theory make a mobile device with gaming chops built right in. It can be designed in many different directions with fewer expectations on minimum capability. It could be as a mobile phone where the slide-out keyboard is replaced with slide-out bottom and top edges (approximately same size/shape as a Droid X). 8-direction D-pad on the slide-out bottom edge, and buttons on the slide-out top edge. Now you've got a basic controller with touch capability in the middle, but on the mobile phone you carry everywhere and use in public.  This bridge between standard touch-only smartphone gaming and the purely gaming focused sony and Nintendo handhelds has a much broader market to sell to. Also, what makes this more plausible is the large volume of suppliers in the manufacturing network that Valve could partner/contract with for mobile devices compared to attempt to manufacture their own living room consoles. This is where Valve could one day release a hardware gaming platform. Living rooms? Not a chance.