I'd like to say that more recent developments might have been mildly detrimental to our evolution. Civilization in general has kinda made "survival of the fittest" less of a factor in our genetics. Most other mammals as highly social as humans don't really form groups larger than maybe 120 individuals (I'm guessing at this number for the purpose of ratios, but I think it might be rather accurate for at least most primates). With a smaller group, the loss of one individual causes a noticeable gap in the work force, and therefore groups producing more weak members is more likely to fail, while groups producing fewer weak members is more likely to prosper.

When humans began forming large groups, in the hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions, one death doesn't affect the workforce as much, meaning more weak individuals can survive because there are enough strong enough links among enough people to support most of the population. 

I really, really hate to word this the way I'm going to, and I wish it weren't such a relevant point. Our ability as a society to provide for those who are unable to provide for themselves, for whatever reason, is probably evolutionarily disadvantageous.

Let's look at a couple things here:

Consider a lower-class family. Nothing really wrong there in essences, although there may be a factor of lower capacity for learning, but it's absolutely not a given. It might just be that the providers in the family fill the economically necessary roll of low-skill workers. Stay with me here. Now, consider this family has a large number of children, enough that their income cannot nearly support them. In an isolated situation, the family either trains to perform a more highly-skill job and make enough money to support them, or they proceed to "implode" under the weight of biting off more than they can chew and perish. However, modern civilization has welfare, and thanks to government funding, the family can provide for their children. Thus the family survives, and passes on a propensity to over-reproduce beyond their means to support unassisted.

Consider a situation less psychological and more physical. In the frame of my recent wisdom teeth removal, dentistry is self-perpetuating. Having teeth form in problematic way would normally be a poor trait to pass on. If one's teeth come in crooked and are so difficult to keep clean, they'll eventually rot and fall out or cause a serious infection, both of which would usually result in death, either by starvation or disease. But now we have dentistry and orthodontics. Every 6 months (which is what they say to do, and to be honest, is probably a good idea) we go to get our teeth cleaned real good and get cavities filled and what not, and thus our teeth remain mostly healthy and in our mouth, kept straight with braces if need, and thus aren't a problem. Ergo, we pass on a propensity for poor dental health.

Looking to the future, technology is hopefully going to progress to a point where evolution is completely irrelevant. Again, we've created medical fields to cure or treat nearly any malady (Cancer, heart disease, psychological disorders), and we've developed antidotes to most poisons, and immunizations to many debilitating diseases. We're extending the lives of human beings, and some sources predict we'll cure aging in the coming decades, meaning we'll never die of natural causes, on top of the fact that we have several millenia of breeding a propensity for longer life-spans.

And then we hit "technological singularity", the point at which we create computers that can learn faster than humans, use the knowledge to make itself more efficient, then learn yet faster and repeat into eternity and technological advancement accelerates to an unimaginable pace. One of the things I look forward to is the complete mapping of the human brain. Once we can map the human brain, we can reproduce it in the form of a computer. We should then have the knowledge to transfer the contents of a human brain to said computer, making us digital beings.

This is where human evolution, for lack of a less ironic word, becomes extinct. When we become digital, we don't need a body, we don't need air, we don't need food, we don't need anything but a power source, and something to protect the computer in which we reside (and a back-up probably wouldn't be a bad idea either). When we become digital, we don't even need to be humans necessarily! Think of it like The Matrix, but hopefully with more beneficent sentient machines as our "overseers", allowing us to form our own world around us.

I think that's enough pointless ranting at this point.

To all our new readers this week, welcome. I hope you've enjoyed this first insight into my scattered, overimaginative mind and are willing to read some more weekly. To all of our continuing readers, thank you for keeping with us and giving your comments and feedback. You've set the foundation for our growing readership, and we hope you keep reading and pass on the word.

-Reynard

Ok, so our official contests are getting little attention that I'm aware of, and I happen to have a bit of time to spare, so I'm gonna start a little side-blog project where I review video games, or movies, or books, or what have you. It might not be regular, and it will probably be quite informal, but it's something fun for me to write besides just contest posts (thereby ceasing to be a lame curmudgeon).

And we'll kick off the series with a relatively new game called Rocksmith (for PC, PS3, and 360).

Now, Guitar Hero and Rock Star are absurdly popular games which popularized the music video game genre. Playing guitar on one of these games involved picking up a plastic, guitar-shaped controller with 5 "fret" buttons, a bar to "strum" with, and a whammy bar for sounding cool and getting more points (or being annoying when playing online by simply holding it down, playing the song out of tune).

These two franchises have been praised for inspiring kids to learn to play real guitar, but they don't really help the learning process. The skills just don't transfer from video-game to picking strings.

This is where Rocksmith comes in. Rocksmith is similar to Guitar Hero and Rock Band in that you play along with the music as it appears on the screen, but it uses an entirely different control scheme. Instead of a plastic guitar with some buttons, you plug an electric guitar (a real electric guitar) into your system.

Interface

I'm sure most everyone is familiar with the Guitar Hero interface: 5 colour-coded columns with little blips (circles or rectangles or whatever) that scroll down from the top indicating which button to press when it hits the bottom, kinda similar to Dance Dance Revolution.

Rocksmith does generally the same thing, but instead of 5 columns, there are about 24, one for each fret on a guitar, and it has 6 of these columns stacked vertically, one for each string on a guitar.

Confusing? Yes, very much so. I've played the game for a week now and I still get tripped up. But I really can't think of a better visual interface than this, besides maybe scrolling tableture, but that might be more confusing due to fewer visual signals.

Gameplay

This game is really angled toward players who've got limited to no experience playing guitar. That doesn't mean it's exclusively for them, but knowing how to play guitar then 1) tackling the interface and 2) being patient while the game treats you like a child (because you can't just say "hey, I've played guitar before, let me go") is a bit of a challenge unrelated to the music or instrument themselves.

The game starts off setting up your guitar. You strum really hard for a while to check that the volume is high enough, you go through tuning the strings, then you play a few quick notes to get the feel of it, tells you how to fret strings, so on.

After this, you enter the meat of the game: a sort of story mode. Unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band, you have access to nearly all of the songs from the beginning, but for the purposes of the story mode they are presented to you in order generally from easier to harder. The story mode consists of being given 2-5 songs (there may be more past where I am not, not sure) to practice, which you must perform to a certain score, and then you play them all in an event. Playing an event particularly will give you an encore song to play (and then periodically there will be a double encore).

Experienced guitarists might get a bit frustrated with the pace of the game. At the very beginning, the game gives you only a couple notes to play each measure. Rocksmith does have the interesting feature of dynamic difficulty, however, where the game will make certain parts of the song harder the better you play them until you're pretty much playing the actual song. It takes a couple play-throughs with the easier songs to max them out (I've played "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction 4 or 5 times and I'm nearly maxed), and several more with more difficult songs, but the great thing is that it does this actively, while you're playing the song (which is also a pain when it really bumps up the power during an event and it throws you a bit. Suddenly I'm supposed to be shredding, which I can't do. Yet). It's not uncommon to miss a couple notes and watch some upcoming notes disappear.

Content

Pretty good selection of songs, although a lot of them are a bit obscure. There's a broad range of styles represented. Pop-ish songs (like "Well OK Honey" by Jenny O.), grunge songs ("In Bloom" by Nirvana), classic rock (3 Rolling Stones songs, "Boys Don't Cry" by The Cure), and some southern rock ("Use Somebody" by Kings of Leon). There's also a good spread of difficulty, from simple alt rock songs ("Song 2" by Blur) to prolific guitar pieces ("Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream).

I've read from some sites that Ubisoft intends to have an "aggressive DLC [Downloadable Content] schedule". Since the game's release in October, there have been 15 downloadable songs released in 5 3-song "packs": 3 "Rock Hits" packs, a Megadeth song pack (for those metal fans out there), and a free holiday song pack. I don't consider 15 songs in 3 months to be “aggressive”, but I'm sure it will pick up as the game gets more attention and can get more licensing deals for songs.

What I'd Like to See