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It just seems to me that most of the multi local player games are for kids

And a lot of households that have to worry about "spouse acceptance factor" have kids. What's the alternative to Super Smash Bros. series on PC? The difference between Super Smash Bros. and a PC game like Street Fighter IV is that Super Smash Bros. is what's called a "platform fighting" game: the arenas are larger and include varied terrain, and fighting tactics include jockeying for control of terrain.

The trend now seems to be network gaming

I tried playing a fighting game over the Internet. The control lag inserted to make netplay causal became unbearable.

something where they can siphon even more money out of the players wallet with monthly or yearly fees.

Or even just siphon more money out of the players' wallets by requiring four copies of the game per household, and diverting even more money toward the publisher's GPU maker strategic partners by requiring four gaming PCs as opposed to one gaming PC and three office PCs whose Intel graphics are good enough for homework and Facebook.

The current generation of consoles are old and nowhere near the capability of a modern PC.

Yet a lot of console games still support two, and in some cases four, players per machine while most PC games (with a handful of exceptions) support only one despite the fact that PC-compatible TVs have been affordable for the past half decade. Part of this capability comes from a mental set among gamers against connecting a PC to an HDTV, and part comes from publishers wanting to sell multiple copies to a single household.

man its so hard to buy a gamepad

Actually, it is hard. First, most game controllers sold for use with PCs are either Microsoft, Logitech, or Gravis, and those brands have had decidedly subpar directional pads over the years compared to, say, Nintendo or Sony.

and hook your tv to the computer these days

Actually, it is hard. Most major-label PC games are not made with modes designed for PCs connected to televisions because apart from a tiny market of HTPC geeks, nobody wants to connect a PC connected to a television. (See previous comments: 1 2 3 4 5) A lot of gamers have trouble even connecting a DVD player to a TV, let alone a PC. (6 7) Furthermore, the major PC game publishers think they can make more money by selling a separate copy of the game per player vs. per household, as Cracked columnist David Wong has pointed out.

If companies thought they could sell as many copies of a game released only on the PC as they could console games you bet they would release more for the PC even if it requires spending a little bit more on doing QA.

I think it's more that the companies know that they can't sell ridiculous reskins for $2 a pop to the PC market.

This is why the major developers love the console market. Also why they're starting to move to the Facebook and mobile game markets. They want to cash in on the millions of people that say "Eh, $2 isn't that much." Next thing you know they've sunk $100 into new buildings for their farm.

After that, maybe we'll get better clarity on why companies seem to be walking away from the PC more and more these days.

The fact that they can milk the fuck out of console players with DLC probably doesn't hurt, either.

This is why developers love the shit out of consoles.

You may be thinking of the Cracked.com article: "5 ways we ruined the occupy wall street generation." Good article, and definitely worth a read.

Exactly. Much of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, is devoted to explaining this principle. I put an article about it on my blog a while ago, but far more importantly, it's been on Cracked.com.

Governments who are unpopular with other governments may have their leaders called lunatics, but can you name one significant leader who truly was?

These guys seem pretty crazy.

You don't consider Kim Jong Il to be crazy? Just because he hasn't started a war yet (and it's not like he hasn't come close), doesn't make him sane. Perhaps I could agree it does mean he has some grasp of reality, but sanity isn't a totally boolean choice.

... Damn I wish I had some mod points to give you. This comment is AMAZING. Well stated - I've often been at odds with some of my friends who insist that one "brand" of something is better than another - especially when you look at some of the food products, where 4 different "brands" literally come right from the same factory.

Similar link over here for those who don't want to listen to a recorded audio feed.

Oh and don't forget this one - it may be a Cracked.com article, but it's actually a great read.

Yeah, that describes it nicely, although I think the one I was originally thinking of was "confirmation bias" as I had recently read an article on cracked.com titled '5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think."

link for those interested.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-you-think_p2.html

An article saying exactly this.

Now we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us, and we're berated and jeered at because we refuse to flip burgers and mow lawns.

I will refer you to this , which I saw on reddit the other day. It is interesting.

Also, I attribute the economic pain we are feeling now on the effects of the world slowly approaches an "average" standard of living. So as the very large third world get a slightly bit richer, the very small first world must get a LOT poorer.

So the "I did everything I was told, I have a college degree, and I demand to stay at my childhood standard of living" argument is valid, but simply not going to happen. In a world of limited resources, "fair" counts for absolutely nothing.

I have a Windows XP machine hooked up to our Living Room TV for Windows-only Games

How many of those Windows-only games support gamepads for players 2, 3, and 4? There's a mindset endemic in the PC video game business that each player should have his own computer and his own copy of the game.

It's discussed in the Kama Sutra, see Point #5.

Read an interesting article that suggests that arguing is essentially an effort to raise your tribe status at the expense of someone else. The impetus is emotional, not logical, and there's no advantage to conceding defeat. In other words, there's really no point in arguing or debating. Some set of the people already agree with you, some set disagree with you, and some set will just side with whomever they think is "stronger" as demonstrated by chest-thumping, I suppose. Nothing of intellectual value transpires.

Dude, you really need to read this Cracked article, in particular #1.

Except in number of players per machine. Very few PC games support split- or otherwise shared-screen co-op using one TV and two to four USB gamepads. One reason is that apart from a few geeks, almost nobody is willing to hook a PC up to a TV or a TV-sized monitor.

Because a PC (clue is in the title) is designed to have only one person interacting with it, if you want multiple people interacting you get multiple PCs. In the lounge you all sit around the TV so it makes sense that a device designed for that environment be able to cater for multiple local players. It's all very logical if you actually think about it. There's no reason you couldn't have more local multiplayer on PCs but virtually no-one is interested in that.

But perhaps Cracked columnist David Wong is on to the real reason, calling the requirement of a separate PC and copy of the game per player a cheap revenue-enhancing scheme for game publishers in his article.

More likely not, given that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that same restrictions could not be imposed on consoles per-player or per-console.

How many people can play Brawl on one Wii console at once? Four. How many people can play a game on one PC at once? Typically one, due to publishers wanting families to buy two to four copies of a game for multiplayer.

So get a Wii and a PC, your complaint is that PC game manufacturers aren't targeting a particular market and it couldn't be more obvious that it is because the market is virtually non-existent.

But perhaps Cracked columnist David Wong is on to the real reason, calling the requirement of a separate PC and copy of the game per player a cheap revenue-enhancing scheme for game publishers in his article.

Maybe that's why PC gaming always lags in sales, because they don't offer us the split-screen option like they do with most console games.

How many people can play Brawl on one Wii console at once? Four. How many people can play a game on one PC at once? Typically one, due to publishers wanting families to buy two to four copies of a game for multiplayer.

What does that have to do with running your own os on a console?

How many people can play Brawl on one Wii console at once? Four. How many people can play a game on one PC at once? Typically one, due to publishers wanting families to buy two to four copies of a game for multiplayer.

We're miles ahead in every category.

Except in number of players per machine. Very few PC games support split- or otherwise shared-screen co-op using one TV and two to four USB gamepads. One reason is that apart from a few geeks, almost nobody is willing to hook a PC up to a TV or a TV-sized monitor. But perhaps Cracked columnist David Wong is on to the real reason, calling the requirement of a separate PC and copy of the game per player a cheap revenue-enhancing scheme for game publishers in his article.

Oh, also I think you should see this:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19461_6-b.s.-myths-you-probably-believe-about-americas-enemies.html

Hmmm, so .50 caliber BMG rifles and everything on this list is legal (sort of), yet 60 year-old Korean-war era rifles aren't? Has anyone in the Obama administration studied logic? Or for that matter, have any kind of common sense at all? These things are far less dangerous that dozens of weapons I can legally buy in nearly any gun store. "They clearly were used as military guns..." oh FFS, so were muskets, you wanna make those illegal too?

Sadly, they probably would.

Loyalty and image are Apple's Bread n' Butter. Even back in the '80s they advertised their products with celebrity endorsements rather than on technical merit. Today it's "if you don't have an iPhone...well, you don't have an iPhone! *smugface*" (cleverly satirized here)

You know, it's funny, I was just reading this:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19419_6-parodies-that-succeeded-because-nobody-got-joke_p2.html

Now if Apple hired me in the early 2000s to ruin their company, you know what I would have done? Release a phone with good, expensive hardware and locked down software. Make developers pay to release software on the device.

And you know what I would have done after that? Make a version of the phone that can't make calls or fit in your pocket and charge even more for it.

I would have made Apple one of the world's most successful megacorporations, failing horribly at my job.

Donald Trump even manages to stay rich despite his own best efforts to go broke.

(I've probably shown you this already mcgrew, but everyone else take a look)

http://www.cracked.com/blog/10-stories-about-donald-trump-you-wont-believe-are-true/

Donald Trump has the financial history of a crackhead.

Seismologists (and alarmists) had been saying since long time ago that in some moment a big quake will hit San Francisco area, and the city hasnt even tried to be evaquated. Had been predicted that in some moment could be a big tsunami generated by a volcano in the Canary Islands that could kill a lot of people in the caribbean and eastern north america, yet nothing had been done about it. And somewhere in a (probably long, but last year raised concerns) future the yellowstone caldera could blow, and still North America is populated, wasnt evaquated because that incoming predicted disaster. In fact, this cities are predicted to be somehow destroyed in a not very far future, and still people live there.

Even predicting that something will happen don't mean that it really will, or when, or with a strenght enough to worry about, or that authorities will do something, or that people, even warned, will do anything. If some of those predictions become true, lots of people will die, should the people predicting those things be treated as mass murderers if their predictions ever become true?

As much as I appreciate the thought of drunk female screeners handling my package, I believe this gentleman's proposal has more going for it, namely bears.

Marx described the mechanical forces driving human social evolution. Production relations are the infrastructure, they create a social superstructure. Each society evolves through a thesis-antithesis-synthesis process very similar to the ying-yang concept of Asia. So, capitalist society creates its own replacement: the industrial revolution that created capitalism has created the information revolution. Old ways of creating wealth are gradually being obsoleted. New ways are taking over. What the future society will look like? No one knows, but it will grow from the current advanced capitalist countries. A surprisingly insightful analysis can be found at Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

But what would they know compared to our few hundred years of research in Western medicine?

Not enough to know that there's no such thing as chi/ki/prana apparently. As for this mind-gut connection, enlighten me, does it say anything specific or relevant to anything related to gut flora? Or is it just that eating good food makes you feel better (which falls firmly into the no shit category), mixed with a heaping helping of nonsense about 'yin foods' and 'yang foods'? I'm not making that up; TCM practitioners actually believe that some foods have magical heating (yang) or cooling (yin) abilities, and that eating too much of the one or the other will screw you up. And before you say 'well yeah, cucumber is cool and pepper is hot' take note that the lychee (one of the best foods most westerners have never heard of, tastes kinda like a grape, but grows on a tree and has a hard red skin) is one of the yangiest foods (cherries and pineapples are also yang). Could there be a scientific basis behind it? Dunno, maybe a thousand years of anecdotes amounts to something. But given the complete lack of actual science to back those points, and the plethora of just plain stupid things TCM guys also believe in (ever seen the dried lizard/worm/wood/who-knows-what-else infusions they make?), I sure as hell don't buy it until someone gives me more than the Chinese equivalent of the four humors (which, I have no doubt, if some magical foreigners had invented, these morons would be buying that too, but since it's European then it is just dumb).

http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_the-7-commandments-all-video-games-should-obey_p2.html
That was my bigesst issue with Twilight Pincess, it just took too long to get somewhere and there where quite a few quests that required you too crawl everywhere...

I quit about 4 months ago after about 4 years of playing the same class/role (warrior tank). The driving factor for me was that the game had massively shifted from being huge and exciting, with a real sense of achievement, to inevitable victories and reinforcement pellets.

I used to love playing with my girlfriend, levelling and exploring the new content. We felt skillful completing raids with a group of people. We were never the best, but we worked hard and achieved our goals. Even when Wrath of the Lich King came out, it still felt epic and there was a lot of new content to explore and play.

However, now it's just a Skinner box. See here and here for great articles on this.

So, no new content, a lazy achievements system and uninspired story telling made me quit. This time, I don't think I'll ever go back.

So now I know not to try to play head-to-head games at home anymore, sticking to games where we both finish the session happy.

Thank you for the insight that local multiplayer can allow for stronger group cohesion in a cooperative game.

My PS3 is brilliant. I can play games on it AND plug in a USB Stick/Drive and watch my downloaded TV/Movies.

But can you play anything homemade? I'd look up Sony's qualifications for licensed development of indie games for PS3, but the web site in question has been down for nearly four months. (I found this link in a Sony press release and have been checking occasionally since April 10.) Or if not for the PS3, then for which platform should indie co-op split-screen games be developed?

I tried for a while to get my Fiancee to [play some PC MMORPG] with me, but the other PC is in another room

Consensus is that gaming PCs can be easily moved from room to room. Perhaps some people are used to having laptops or small-form-factor desktop PCs designed for easy transport to and from a LAN party.

This is where consoles with capability for more than one controller come in.

And, ideally, where PCs with capability for more than one controller come in. PCs since about 1999 have had USB ports that allow for four gamepads and more. And TVs made since about 2006 have had inputs to show PC video: VGA ports for VGA video and HDMI ports for DVI-D video. So why don't people make use of that?

They are one machine, plugged into one TV with 2-4 input devices.

As are home theater PCs. But consensus is that home theater PCs don't exist. Consensus is that PCs can't be moved from room to room. Yes, this means the consensus is self-contradictory: people are willing to move a PC for a LAN party but not move it next to a TV.

Why make a game that 2 people will share, when you can try to make one that each has to buy individually?

David Wong, columnist for Cracked, agrees with you. But Slashdot consensus is that PC games are so much cheaper than PS3 games that it's just as cheap for a player to buy two copies of a $30 PC game that doesn't support split-screen as it is to buy one copy of a $60 PS3 game that does support split-screen.

2) Must be complicated enough to interest a pro-gamer, but simple enough for a casual.

Sounds like Super Mario Galaxy for Wii: player 1 controls Mario and player 2 shoots candy at the enemies to get them to stop.

There's a hundred people pointing out problems with your interpretation of what The Prince INTENDED to be. I thought I would add the funny one from cracked.com

------------------------

If you've ever heard a politician or other powerful person referred to as "Machiavellian," you can guess it's not a compliment. That's thanks to a shifty-looking Italian diplomat named Machiavelli. He was bad enough that we turned his name into a pejorative adjective that means "cruel, amoral tyrant." Napoleon, Stalin and Mussolini were three of his biggest fans, and the Mafia considers Machiavelli the father of the organization.

In his defense, he cleans up well.

The reason for this is Machiavelli's The Prince, one of the most notorious political treatises ever written, designed as an instruction manual for the Florentine dictator Lorenzo de' Medici to help him be more of a bastard. Completely disregarding moral concerns in politics, the book serves as a levelheaded discourse on the best way to assert and maintain power, noting that it's better to be feared than loved, and that dishonesty pays off in the long run as long as you lie about how dishonest you are.

Machiavelli's masterpiece is equal parts brilliant and irresponsible, showing tyrants how best to run a country like a video game.
[Civ3 shot .. playing as Ruskies]

What it's really about:

Actually, Machiavelli was totally just trolling. Far from being the spiritual patriarch of the Gambino crime family, he was a renowned proponent of free republics, as noted in a few obscure texts called everything else he ever wrote. The reason The Prince endured the ages while the rest of his philosophy gathered dust in the back of an old library warehouse is chiefly 1) it's really short, and 2) it angries up the blood. By far the best way to get a book on the best-seller list is to write something that pisses everyone off, but the drawback is that it steamrolls the message of any work that's only meant to be understood in context.

The context in this case is that the Medici family to whom he dedicated his love letter is the same group who personally broke Machiavelli's arms for being such a staunch advocate for free government. He worked for the Florentine Republic before the Medicis marched in, mowed down the government and mercilessly tortured him, and then he sat down and wrote The Prince from his shack in exile, assumedly with some really bendy handwriting (on account of the arms). When you learn about that, it kind of adds a new layer of meaning to the text -- it suddenly sounds like it's dripping with sarcasm.

Not everyone was in on the joke.

For centuries, the consensus on Machiavelli's best-known work has been that he was just trying to brown-nose his way back into the government. But a deeper study of his full body of work reveals that this is a pretty absurd ambition, considering not only did Machiavelli repeatedly say that "popular rule is always better than the rule of princes," but after he wrote The Prince, he went right on back to writing treatises about the awesomeness of republics. Considering also that he was no stranger to the literary art of satire, scholars these days are turning to a more likely scenario -- Machiavelli was the Stephen Colbert of the Renaissance.

Part of the blame might also be leveled at the shitty job that people have done in trying to translate his work into English. It's from Machiavelli that we get the notorious phrase "the end justifies the means." A much more accurate translation from the original Italian is something more like "one must consider the end," which kind of means something totally different.

I can buy a game and install it on my desktop and my laptop, and play it on either machine so long as I don't try to play both at once. Makes sense to me.

I agree with respect to single-player. But many console games let two to four players play on one console. PC games, on the other hand, tend to require a separate PC per player, and Cracked columnist David Wong cynically claims that this is to sell multiple copies of the game per household.

Nintendo used many wonderful techniques to combat shovelware during the NES and SNES days. They worked wonderfully.

For one thing, Nintendo lost an antitrust lawsuit over this. For another, it didn't stop all shovelware: all but one of the games on this list of the bottom 20 carried the Official Nintendo Seal.

That was the most stupid slideshow ever. Any random "Top Ten" in http://cracked.com/ is better than this drivel. Lame!

The problem is not the advancement of technology, the problem is the social structure, the production relationships. Our current capitalistic system is not fit for the information revolution. It was fit for the industrial revolution. Capitalism will start blocking real productivity, as best explained here: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s._p2.html/ As the classics speculated, the new socialist society will emerge from the advanced capitalistic societies.

As opposed to DC's high and evolutionary Snowflame.

thanks to the consoles being from the stone age a $200 PC with a $60 GPU plays most games at 1600x900 or higher at decent framerates

But how many players can play at once? Cracked made another list of seven commandments, and the first was not providing a shared-screen mode for owners of home theater PCs. Not all households have the money for a separate gaming PC and separate copy of each game for each resident, or they have laptops that don't take GPU upgrades.

Cracked.com also compiled a list. Ever year or so someone goes on a rant like this, and brands it "commandments". TFA focuses heavily on UI and corporate meddling on gamers' affairs; Cracked concentrated on gameplay and plot. Interestingly, both had rants about multiplayer, though with different things in mind.

Cracked made a few of these lists: http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_the-7-commandments-all-video-games-should-obey.html, http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html and http://www.cracked.com/article_17442_5-things-gaming-industry-will-never-fix-and-why.html. There's more, but most of them aren't as good...

Cracked made a few of these lists: http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_the-7-commandments-all-video-games-should-obey.html, http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html and http://www.cracked.com/article_17442_5-things-gaming-industry-will-never-fix-and-why.html. There's more, but most of them aren't as good...

Cracked made a few of these lists: http://www.cracked.com/article_16196_the-7-commandments-all-video-games-should-obey.html, http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html and http://www.cracked.com/article_17442_5-things-gaming-industry-will-never-fix-and-why.html. There's more, but most of them aren't as good...

The closest thing they have to iHell is where they shun you for not owning an iPhone:

http://www.cracked.com/video_18269_the-new-iphone-ads-are-getting-out-hand.html

its not human nature to be selfish or greedy. if so, you wouldnt have families.

Then perhaps it's human nature to be selfish or greedy with those outside one's top 150 friends, or as this Cracked article calls it, one's "monkeysphere". Immediate families are well within that group.

Promoting artificial scarcity in lieu of the scarcity inherent in manufacturing physical goods.

Unfortunately this is only going to get worse: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

People are getting disgusted with MMOs, it is inherently amoral business.

Eventually, player realizes what excatly is being done to him:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

Once you realize that, everything about MMO stops being fun, every reward is spolied because you know it is conditioning to keep you playing to get further rewards. Then you get slightly pissed at authors for abusing skinery-boxy mechanics of human psychology. And you quit for good.

Changing MMO does not help: it is just differently colored lever you have to press to get pelets. Nothing devs can do can help past this point except abandoning notion of chaining player to game.

There is no cake.....

People are getting disgusted with MMOs, it is inherently amoral business.

Eventually, player realizes what excatly is being done to him:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

Once you realize that, everything about MMO stops being fun, every reward is spolied because you know it is conditioning to keep you playing to get further rewards. Then you get slightly pissed at authors for abusing skinery-boxy mechanics of human psychology. And you quit for good.

Changing MMO does not help: it is just differently colored lever you have to press to get pelets. Nothing devs can do can help past this point except abandoning notion of chaining player to game.