Why do we insist on using computers to do everything? Things that are already easy. Things that weren't even problems that needed solving until we realised how hard they were for computers to do. Maslow said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What we have is a world where every eighteen months, the hammers can hit twice as hard as they did before. So even things that didn't look like nails in the past, might yet be persuaded to yield, if only we hit them a bit harder.

Using computers to recognise human faces is like employing a human to do your arithmetic for you, instead of a calculator. It's a gross misuse of talents. The human brain is the most sophisticated facial recognition device that has ever existed.

It is possible that one day, we (and by "we", I mean someone that is neither you nor me) will build a device that exceeds our own natural talent in this regard. But at what cost? And to what end?

We aren't busy perfecting robot earthworms to digest leaf litter because we already have actual earthworms that do the job perfectly well. If Microsoft replaces the receptionists in its offices with a web cam and a digitised face, what exactly have they achieved?

They have taken a job that can be done by virtually any human to an extremely high degree of competence, including coping with visitors wearing large hats or the outbreak of unexpected building fires, and replaced it with a computer that will only order you a taxi, if you spend 10 minutes patiently navigating your way through voice menus.

Yes, I know you won't need to pay the computer - but you will need to pay for the computer and you will certainly need to pay the team of 20 sysadmins it takes to keep it running. Holidays are just replaced with essential system maintenance, sick leave with the Blue Screen of Death. In the end, all you have is an expensive way of doing the same job badly.

And if that's all they want, they could just as easily hire me.

Everyone knows that Warhammer Online is not going to beat World of Warcraft. WoW's unassailability is now axiomatic and all that is left is the fighting over the carrion scraps for second place. But in trying to carve a viable niche for itself, Mythic has failed to understand the psychology of an MMORPG.

They have looked at WoW and concluded that it does PvE very well and PvP very badly and in this they are right. They have also concluded that they should therefore attack WoW's weak spot and concentrate on PvP and in this they are wrong.

WoW does have rubbish PvP. I mean really rubbish. There is such an enormous power imbalance between level 1 and level 70 players that battlegrounds have to be divided into brackets 10 levels wide but even then a ten level difference is essentially insurmountable so when you ding from 39 to 40 and find yourself in the next bracket up, you can more or less forget PvP until you hit at least level 48.

Gear dependent

And even if you and your opponent are both the same level, WoW is a hopelessly gear-dependent game. That's actually the whole point of the game – killing stuff to collect new gear to make you better at killing stuff. If the other guy has better gear than you then you start at a huge disadvantage and balancing PvP for this is virtually impossible.

But this is an intrinsic problem with any game where your character's power is not solely dependent on your own skill as a player. The most ridiculous extreme of this can be seen on the role-playing servers where some lunatics engage in a sort of combat called power emoting.

This is where they just stand there and use the chat interface to say things like "I summon elf energies from the nether darkness to blast you", countered with "Ah but I am a 3,000-year-old immortal elf and your spell bounces harmlessly off me." Fun PvP works because your avatar is simply an extension of your own ability.

Your fireball doesn't hit harder because you say so or because you spent three days killing locusts in a cornfield until one of them dropped the ultra-rare Trinket of Awesome Fireballs, it hits harder because you aimed accurately and scored a head-shot. Planetside did this pretty well and I played it with a suicidal fervour for about six months.

Kinda boring

But in the end, pure PvP always gets boring. Ironically, the unpredictability of a human opponent gets averaged out into just another kind of predictability in the massively-multiplayer context. And you never actually achieve anything because captured flags just get uncaptured again and you can't ever gain any cool kit or powers because it would unbalance the game.

With a PvE game, you can allow players to steadily get more powerful because you give them bigger monsters to fight. Sure, like one of those weird rising scales you never actually reach the top, but that doesn't really matter because you still have the sense of constant progression and when you stand in the lowbie zones and watch the baddies die just from the light of your glowing sword, you feel like a true hero.

Progression in PvP is more like building sandcastles on the beach. However impressive your fortification is today, it will all be washed away by the tide and tomorrow you start again with exactly the same blank canvas.

I am quite sure that the realm-wide PvP in Warhammer will be great fun – for a while. I even think it will be better than Planetside. But you're not going to play it for three years. That kind of commitment comes only from the PvE game and in that regard, Warhammer doesn't have anything that WoW hasn't had for ages.

Or won't add with the next expansion. When World of Warcraft is eventually toppled from its throne, it will be because someone finds a way to make killing locusts in a field feel even more epic than WoW does. I'm thinking zapping space locusts in an asteroid field, maybe.

Why is the space character so hated by the internet? How is it that in cyberspace, the one thing you won't find is a space? At least not in domain names. But why, exactly? It's just another character. Surely if we are going to bother translating numerical IP addresses to a human-readable form at all, we might as well go that extra yard and actually make it pronounceable as well.

The whole point of punctuation is that it increases clarity and reflects the natural rhythms of speech. But with a domain name, you are forced into the ridiculous position of having to explicitly state each non-alphanumeric character. Is it pennyarcade or penny-arcade? Worldofwarcraft or world-of-warcraft? And what do we do about "Mamma Mia!"?

And while I'm on the subject, why do we still need to specify www? If I type "Luis Villazon" into my browser address bar, it works out that I meant to include the http:// but stupidly doesn't assume www. It also substitutes %20 for the space, which no domain name on Earth uses, rather than simply omitting it, and doesn't bother with a TLD suffix of any kind.

Of course, who still uses the address bar anyway? We all have Google right on the toolbar so it's much easier to just type something into that, even when you know the domain name perfectly well. Except that there are two problems with this.

1. It forces an extra step because I need to go to the results page first.

2. I can't force my domain to appear higher up the list, unless I pay for google adwords. DNS is just a lookup table that matches certain text strings to IP addresses. Why can't I just register "Luis Villazon" and have that match to my IP address, instead of www.luisvillazon.com?

Because the internet is stupid, that's why.

Sometimes you have an idea that is just so awesome, that the only possible reason it hasn't already been done must be that there are sinister forces at work actively conspiring against it. Yesterday I wondered why there isn't a Sims expansion pack containing all the characters from Springfield. It would be called – obviously – The Sims-sons.

EA already has a licensed Simpsons game so it's not exactly a radical departure but the Sims demographic doesn't really overlap much with that of other video games (which is a polite way of saying it's only played by girls) and there are already lots of unofficial Simpsons mods out there so the demand is clearly there. All EA has to do is clamp itself onto the teat and suckle.

Truth according to the internet

Now I am aware, of course, that there may be all sorts of trivial and tedious legal, logistic, market segmentation and return-on-investment reasons why no one has got around to this yet but I am dismissing these out of hand. This is the internet, after all. What we really need is a decent conspiracy theory to explain it all. So here's what I think:

There already is a Simpsons pack for the Sims. It was developed five years ago by 3D Realms when they were supposed to be working on Duke Nukem Forever. Because EA was then in talks with Fox Media for a licence to its their own Simpsons game, it turned down the 3D Realms pack. Consequently it was sold to the Taliban, who were looking for a video game that didn't involve gratuitous nudity.

During the allied bombing campaign there, it was smuggled across the border into Pakistan. Some of the sound samples used by Professor Frink in the game, inadvertently contained hints that would be useful in the development of weapons-grade plutonium and this information was acquired by Baathist agents in Iraq in early 2003.

Cartoon calamity

Concerned that Saddam Hussein might develop weapons of mass destruction based on a cartoon show, the US and British coalition forces moved swiftly to invade Iraq on the 20th March and the gold master discs for the Sims-sons were captured by US special forces during fierce house-to-house fighting in Fallujah. Since then the game has been languishing on an old Dell Centrino laptop at Guantanamo.

This is just the same old thing that prevents most of you from being able to play World of Starcraft, even though the servers have been up for nearly a year. Oh no wait, you're not supposed to know about that. Forget I said anything.

Yet again, it seems that someone has been paid to discover that email is distracting. On average you wait just 1 minute 44 seconds to respond to an email after it arrives and it takes you another 64 seconds to figure out what you were doing again after the interruption. By the magic of extrapolation, this allows us to infer that eight-and-a-half hours a week are wasted checking email.

But this ridiculous figure exists only to create a ridiculous figure for people who like ridiculous figures. It assumes, not only that I check my email every five minutes and I'm pointlessly distracted every single time, but also that this time would otherwise have been spent doing useful work. The reality is that most people get hardly anything done in a typical working day. Here's a typical itinerary:

8:40 Arrive five minutes before boss. Hang up coat. Race to boot up PC.

8:45 Boss arrives. Look like you have been hard at it for the last hour.

8:50 Make coffee to suck up to boss and waste ten minutes.

9:15 Finish coffee and reluctantly turn attention back to PC.

9:16 Check slashdot to keep up to date with important technology issues.

10:45 Finish reading flamewar on slashdot about whether a plane could take off on a conveyor belt or not.

10:50 Check email. Dave in Finance is going for a fag break. You don't smoke but you tag along to discuss "important issues".

11:00 Meeting with the project team. You aren't strictly needed here but your boss wants you along to back him up on item 14 on the agenda.

13:00 Meeting has now reached item 8 and is adjourned for lunch.

14:00 You are back from lunch but your boss has been called away to something more urgent so the meeting is rescheduled for next week.

14:05 Coffee.

14:15 "Fag" break with Suzie from Distribution.

14:30 Flirty email from Suzie.

14:40 Have another look at slashdot. There are some additional insightful comments on the whole aeroplane/conveyor thing that need your attention.

15:50 Email from boss. He needs the figures from this morning turned into impressive PowerPoint slides for tomorrow's meeting.

16:40 PowerPoint crashes. You can't be bothered to do it again, so you log a ticket with IT Services, knowing full well that they can't possibly get it sorted before lunchtime tomorrow, and cc it to your boss.

16:45 Wash up coffee mugs.

16:50 Ring home to see if you need to get anything from Tesco.

16:55 Type furiously while your boss puts his coat on and imply that you will be busy for at least another hour and a half.

16:59 Go home.