Gaming Annoyances

Is it too much to ask that every computer game have a setting option to turn off the opening cinematic? Nobody watches them every time, and it's a pain having to click past the movie every time the game loads. I don't get why "No opening movie" is such a rare option...

The Wisdom of the Ancients

I think we tend to think of technological progress - particularly ancient technological progress - as being done in discreet steps. You have a barter system, then some bright individual invents coins, and you start using them instead. Historically, though, it doesn't always work that way.

In ancient Greece, for example, the pure barter system was first replaced by the 'talent', a large piece of bronze the shape and size of an ox hide, complete with simulated hair on the outside. It was a few centuries before it was realised that the talent was not much more convenient than bartering with actual oxen, and the talent was replaced with the Obolus. The Obolus was a long thin rod of metal, about three feet long, which represented an ingot of copper. Six of them were worth one Drachma - the daily wage of a skilled worker or hoplite.

Finally, in about the sixth century BCE, coins as we now know them began to replace long metal poles as the currency of the Greeks - except in Sparta, where Obolus remained in use, apparently as part of an effort to discourage the pursuit of wealth by keeping a more inconvenient form of currency.

Now it seems to me that once you've made the intuitive leap from "I will trade for things with oxen" to "I will trade for things with something that represents oxen", making the leap to "I will trade for things with something that represents oxen AND is convenient to carry around" shouldn't be that big a step. But it took the ancient Greeks centuries to make that connection - they didn't even invent coins themselves, they got the idea from the Lydians.

There is also the history of alphabetisation - a major development in the sorting of information in the classical era. But classical libraries did not sort alphabetically after the first letter - all the authors starting with 'A' would be together, but there was no organisation beyond that. It was several centuries after adopting alphabetisation that the Great Library at Alexandria made the next step and started sorting works by the whole name, not just the first letter. Again, it seems that to me once you have the basic concept organising things alphabetically, you'd fairly quickly realise the advantage of complete alphabetisation.

I wonder what innovations or refinements to existing technologies or customs we will make in the future that will seem blindingly obvious in hind sight...