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Fragna Cum Laude: A B.A. in Quake
TraCer00t writes, "Ever not gotten a job because you weren't Quake-educated enough? According to
this MSNBC article,
the University of California at Irvine will start giving out B.A.'s in Quake. Imagine what studying for the exams must be like!"
As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them.
Oh, my, no. Just a mild-mannered software developer.
You scare me very hardcore in your *rabid* desire to advance your ability to control and manipuate the thoughts of others through violent (abstractly, anyway) coercive technique.
If I thought I were doing that, I'd be as scared as you . . . or rather more scared, since I don't think you're scared. . . . I don't think I'm doing that. I'm not doing that, am I? If I could manipulate the thoughts of others, they'd agree with me, and the Republic would have fallen long since.
Incidentally, maybe you should try the comedy circuit, if youve got the cajones.
It's not the cojones, it's the enunciation.
Pikachu is the one and only prophet of the true religion. And his god is a jealous god,
Aren't they all, though?
--80md
suck it fundie bigot! and fuck your god! he dosen't exist!
no, emmett and timothy suck. Jamie? who the hell is jamie. Too bad the people who run slashdot now find the most idiotic things interesting. The only good story posters are (or have historically been) CmdrTaco & Hemos, Cliff (Slashdot's heyday), and Roblimo (who I think invented the interviews). yro is cool but I think that's about it. I am actively looking for another site to get my news from now.
I think the word troll is incorrect. According to the Jargon file it's derived from a fishing term, trolling. This is where I think it is fucked up: the fishing term is not trolling, but trawling.
So you are not "trolling," you are "trawling." And there is no noun "trawl," so you are not "a trawl." So you have to come up with a new common identity. I just thought you all should know this.
Have you ever read a novel called A Clockwork Orange?
Yes. Kubric rules. Nuff said.
No. Nowhere near enough said. The novel was written by Anthony Burgess. Some years later, Mr. Kubrick made a disappointing movie of the same title, loosely based on the novel. Read the novel. It's worth it. It's a shame you've seen the movie first, because that always spoils novels, but you can't have everything.
Furthermore, most of Kubrick's movies were unspectacular. Dr. Strangelove is a landmark and Full Metal Jacket is very, very good, but the man as fallible as anyone. Nabokov spoke well of Kubrick's Lolita but I haven't seen it, nor do I plan to. It would spoil the book, you know?
Incidentally Clockwork Orange was a rant against everyone
Nothing of the kind, absolutely nothing of the kind. Read it before you shoot your mouth off. It is primarily a meditation on the question of moral choice, with some satirical social commentary thrown in for variety, illustration, and some rare comic relief.
would imagine that you'd recognize certain parts of it from your own experience.
Sure who wouldn't we live on earth don't we?
Look, it hurts when a nice trope like that goes unnoticed, so I'll have to spell it out: In Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, the narrator, a young thug, is subjected to a treatment which leaves him with a conditioned reflex of vomiting in the presence of certain stimuli. The overt subject matter of novel is Pavlovian conditioning for the purpose of social control. The post to which I responded mentioned vomiting in the presence of Christians. I took the ball and ran with it. I was hoping somebody had read the book, or at least seen the movie. So much for hopes.
It's a repulsive book,
Basic instinctual reaction to the truth.
In my case, and in the case of the Christian wacko I was impersonating, it's a basic instinctual reaction to rape, murder, and the extremely horrifying scenes in which Alex, the narrator, is subjected to his conditioning. Okay?
The same way the the three way power structure keeps things in check in the US, the reversal is destroying education, democracy and free speech in world affairs.
You're out of your mind.
congratulations. now i have to browse at 0 to avoid your stupid ass. let me ask you this dumbfuck: are you trying to abolish moderation or ensure that it stays forever?
this would be funny if you didn't try to make it sound like Slashdot users were somehow immune to porn. I am sure Slashdotters make up the vast majority of the online porn customers.
And just in case you don't know, cum is latin for "with."
I hope you enjoy those drunken rants about MTV... there's some hot nerd news. Jesus, if you're going to leave, at least go somewhere worthwhile.
A college degree in Quake is beyond mindless and idiotic! A university education means more than getting vocational training in creating games! Jez... this is too stupid.
Moderators: please give this guy 1 point of "funny" karma, to reward a post well posted.
Thank you :-)
Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Jones the Third! Seriously, I wonder when we'll see them offer a B.A. in trolling at BJU? It only seems fitting (and a little more on-topic to the article)
:-)
so you believe visualisation of data is unimportant in buisness and science? I hope you like looking at the endless reams of raw data generated in these fields, trying to find useful information, instead of visualising it in one of those silly cartoons we like to call a "graph".
Not a real serious ass, mind you, but you should check your OED (or KJV, for that matter) before writing off archaic usage as unlettered.
KJV is more to the point, in a religious rant. Get it? Here are some examples. A quick grep turns up a total of fifty-one instances in the Project Gutenberg KJV, counting both Testaments.
Genesis 026:025 (note parallel usage with "digged")
Exodus 004:017
Exodus 024:004
In other words, your bigoted little tantrum would seem to describe the quality of your education and intellect far more than mine.
The sarcasm tags are hidden in the source, right?
go jump off a cliff.
Didn't the Devil try to persuade our Savior to do just that? He did, it's right there in the Bible. So when I ask myself "what would Jesus do?", the answer in this case is trivial: He would, and did, refuse.
I'm the one who originally moderated your post. I took it as a Columbine reference, which just reeks of Troll, so perhaps your post should be moderated down to -1 if possible.
The sarcasm tags are hidden in the source, right?
No, the sarcasm is right out in the open. Read the Christian's posts again. He's pushing it about as far as it can be pushed without quite putting "troll" in the subject lines.
Hahahahahahaha!!!
Finally, a B.A. that comes close to complete B.S.
It boggles the mind. They're not even pretending to educate any more. It's right out in the open.
I'm sure we all recognize the kind of student this will attract: Those unbathed, ill-groomed term-room troglodytes we knew in college, who gave out the terminal room phone number as their own and slowly, lumpishly flunked out.
Some of them stayed on anyway, parasitizing an institution that was no longer willing to tolerate their presence.
Now I guess we won't be flunking them out any more, we'll be giving them A's in "Self-Justification of Incompetence", "Advanced Parasitism", and "Stinking Like a Corpse". I can see it now -- UC Irvine will attract every drug-addled adolescent imbecile in the United States to this "program". Academic standards, already lowerd beyond all human tolerance, will sink beyond all nadirs previously imagined.
They're trying to produce a generation of young Americans so dismally uneducated that they'll fall for any idiotic junk-science and pseudo-philosophy that comes down the pike. A nation of perfect suckers to do as their told, a nation of drones incapable of thinking critically. The "recycling" industry will take off like a rocket (I'll be investing tomorrow, believe me) because these sad excuses for "college graduates" will be incapable of finding out where the "recycling" trucks actually go with the trash that the suckers have carefully sorted through (like bag ladies in their own homes, or slaves assigned as punishment to the garbage heap). Where do those trucks go, you ask? The dump, same as the other trucks. It's just obedience-training. The liberals always do what they're told, because they haven't the imagination or strength of will to create their own freedom.
I'm sorry if I'm ranting here, but I'm watching my nation get flushed down the toilet at the taxpayer's expense, and it's a bit hard to take.
Really, what's between your dirty ears should should remain there.
the homepage for quake is http://www.quake3arena.com, not q3arena.com. Even *I* know that, and I have played quake four times.
The Holy Crusades. Remember that?
you're claiming women are incapable of anything other than homemaking?
I haven't "claimed" this, my Creator has decreed it, and that's a very different thing.
All of you secular humanists are so accustomed to appointing yourselves as your own God that you simply can't grasp the fact that I do not consider myself to be God. God is another being entirely, and a far greater One than either of us. I repeat His Word, but I do not judge it, nor interpret it, nor presume to add to it.
Somehow, I find it hard to believe that God would limit half the population of the world to a single occupation.
Be that as it may, He did, and there's nothing we can do about it. Do you also disapprove of gravity? Would you prefer water that isn't wet? Well, it's beyond your control. You can't change these things.
The idea isn't to force them to have jobs, but to allow them to
Brainwashing them to believe that they want to have jobs consitutes "force" in my book (and in my Book as well). The social conditioning enforce by the feminists is robbing these girls of their free will, and that's force.
After clicking on home at 7 pm I expect new news, only to see 12:30 PM's "breaking news" report of the dissolution of the western roman empire, as well as the 18th reposting of o'reilly's correspondance.
Hey, I haven't seen you around here in donkey's years. Good to see you back. This place has been degnerating into a swamp of right-wingers.
Oh, yeah, now that I mention it . . . back to work!
Gee, I've met many women who do construction work.
That's because they're glandular monstrosities hell-bent (and I do mean that literally) on defying the Will of God. They're no different from Lesbians or Vegetarians: Rebellious abominations in the sight of their Creator.
The Catholic Church is a quasi-Satanic "mother-goddess" cult, descended from the old religion of Pagan times in Europe, before the Roman Empire. That false "church" is another good example of the barbarism that comes of neglecting to stress the Ten Commandments in the moral character-building phase of education.
POLYESTER DOT NET
LOL, it's pretty funny seeing one troll knock down another.
Click here now. God and his drunken son Jesus Chrust loves you :)
:: Nabokov spoke well of Kubrick's Lolita ...
: See it just to thank Showtime for having the
: balls.
The retelling of *Lolita* that recently aired on Showtime was not Kubrick's, which was released many, many years before.
ooo i've downloaded this porno quake patch the other day
and i've been shooting mah manhood gun and been cumming like crazy
my opponent must have been cowboy neal...
he must have picked up my cum...
oh wait that was sexy jenny mccarthy who posted this story!! (i've been shooting it well that other nite)
i should have stopped doing this thing now that it has becum such a bad habit of mine... (cumming while playing quake)
the whole world knows that how good i am now..
aww man!!
jenny! enuf is enuf~! no more hot grits for you!!
(here's a picture of me doing it for those who are interested)
-- "no hot grits for you, cum back one year"
Seinfeld (Grits-Nazi)
How about programming? Game programmers have to be good to extract the last bit of performance from the hardware.
The "last bit of performance" programmers are nose-to-the-bare-metal goto-heads. That's to their credit, in context; traditionally, one has had to be that kind of programmer to get the necessary performance out of crap the hardware that was available to the gaming public. (Of course, nowadays hardware is rapidly catching up, and Tim Sweeney is talking about backing up and getting all OOPy about it; of course I don't know if he's right, since as I don't mind admitting, he's out of my league). From what I've read, even Carmack isn't the most maintainable programmer on earth.
Of course, these necessities change with Voodoo cards and Athlons, but then your point about required skill becomes obsolete to the same degree (whatever that degree may be; not 100% I'm sure, since games are getting bigger and groovier as the hardware improves -- but Quake III is not a bare-metal dos program, while Doom was because it had to be).
The problem is that most software development has very different priorities. The very best game programmers (e.g. those mentioned above) would probably do my job a hell of a lot better than I do, but a kid who's spent four years optimizing renderers in ASM isn't my first choice for a new hire to work on a large OO project in C++. Carmack is good at what he does because he's who he is, not because he wrote a lot of low-level code for Quake I or whatever. It's the other way around.
(Erp, sorry, fell out of character there . . . one moment . .
Furthermore, game programmers are all Satanists anyay. Look at Doom! Devils everywhere, killing and blood and you name it. There is no excuse for allowing this filth into our schools. You're talking about training our children to "play" at summoning up demons as if it were a game. Well, it's not a game. It's serious. Good and evil are serious matters and no good will come of teaching children to regard them as a "game". You need only read the news from last spring to get an idea of where this is headed, but on a much larger scale. A bloodbath the like of which we've never seen before. If my child were at UC Irvine, I'd (a) bring him home to safety immediately, and (b) bring suit against the grossly irresponsible administration that perpetrated this anti-academic, anti-Christian, anti-family abomination.
"the masculine, graceless, sexless pseudo-women who throng our colleges"
my god man, what school did you go to??
Why do you ask?
Heh Heh He said cum
Well, I'm not the one who posted it, but from what I see it looks like this:
YBT. YHL. HAND.
Simple, eh?
moron
I lead my life by two rules:
That's great, and I applaud you for throwing off your early humanistic training and trying to lead a decent life in spite of it all, but this is purely voluntary. For an atheist, there is no incentive to live that way, no rewards at all -- and no punishments either, for those less able to control themselves. It's all just a howling existential void. You want to end up like Sartre, miserable and useless? And with a proverbially goofy wife, too. Howling existential voids are a bummer! Choose life instead. Choose Jesus. Choose now, before it's too late and the Grove Press gets ahold of you. When that happens it's all over, baby, believe me. Look what became of Allen Ginsberg.
It helps.
Nope, sex is an evolutionary device used by gametes to produce more gametes.
Masturbation is the normal intellectual response to the biological impulses involved when the situation makes reproduction an undesirable choice.
Statistically, the only "abberations" and "neuroses" involved are those that parisitical religious institutions have brainwashed into their followers, usually at ages too young to allow critical thinking and logic to interfere, with the goal of promoting the production of yet more unwitting victims.
I have written a lot of code and most of it has been in the area of implementing algorithms! Desiging ADT's and small programs to work as servers/clients for boring things. The closest i have gotten to a nice front end is a perl script putting out some HTML! BUT coding Quake.... and testing it... cant skip that stage now can you:) Testing is more important and i bet you have to push yourself.. err the code a lot :)
Statistically, the only "abberations" and "neuroses" involved are those that parisitical religious institutions have brainwashed into their followers, usually at ages too young to allow critical thinking and logic to interfere, with the goal of promoting the production of yet more unwitting victims.
In other words (and ignoring your inexplicable hostility), religion propagates by roughly the same means as gametes do.
What you describe is what God has commanded us to do. Therefore, we do it. If God shows up tomorrow and tells us to raise orchids instead, we'll do that. Get a grip.
You're saying they have Rebellious Abomination Glands?
It's called the Digipen Institute of Technology. http://www.digipen.com. Located adjacent to the Nintendo of America Corporate HQ in Redmond, Washington - it is accordingly almost Nintendo's own university. The courses range from 3D modelling to game programming theory and plot design. In addition, they offer degrees - perhaps a master's in multiplayer game theory and implementation?
Yes. Precisely. Lesbians, Vegetarians, Unitarians, and Breatharians all have Rebellious Abomination Glands in their lower medulla oblongata, retrofitted by Satan himself and bound to cause nothing but sorrow.
You have stated the case most eloquent-like. I thank you.
Sorry,
No harm done. In fact, if any apologies are in order, they would be my own; read on . . .
I've read too many posts by an ac that prattles on about the evils of everything. That last paragraph sounded too much like him/her/it
If those posts were in this sub-thread that started with the "Sociology and folkdancing" troll, I'm afraid that AC would be me; hence that last paragraph. We've reached the point in the troll where I thank everybody for being so patient and playing along, and/or I apologize if I've gone over the line and it stopped being fun.
--80md
At this point, Slashdot might be better off becoming a site for Press Releases.
/. since they rejected this story when I submitted it Friday afternoon.
But that would risk reporting stories when they are still new. Obviously this is not the intent of
Also, when I submitted it I chose not to use the wire stories headline referring to a BA in Quake, but used a headline more inline with the actual facts in the article.
Ha! My former CS professor at the college I formerly attended also believed Windows was written in VB. I almost choked when he asked the class what language Windows was written in, someone answered C++, and he said, "No Visual Basic!" He was serious.
You misspelt corpse.
I did? Where? I was writing so much, trying to respond to everybody who attacked my right-wing persona, that I wasn't proofreading or revising very well.
people who act altruistically have aligned themselves with the species as a whole. Such creatures recognize each other instintively, work together, do better than individuals. This isn't religion, it's common sense. The rewards and punishment are obvious with the merest reflection.
True, but there's always some asshead who comes along and takes without giving. The rewards for that are a bit more diffuse than the heaven/hell thing: If a society generally acts like a bunch of Ayn Randites, it's not going to last, but a generally healthy society can support a certain number of scattered, individual Ayn Rands without breaking down. Religion is just the most common of the organs that societies have evolved to keep the Ayn Rands to a minimum. It's a case where the short-range interest of the individual often conflict with the long-range interests of that same individual, and with the short and long-range interests of the community as a whole. Religion is just a means of getting people to do the right thing even when nobody is watching -- and it does this by telling people that Somebody always is watching
You're also forgetting that most people are not at all reflective, although it remains true that most people with an IQ above 75 have a far firmer grasp of ethics and personal responsibility than Ayn Rand ever did
My personal belief is that it should be possible to create a synthetic "religion" which would encourage behavior which genuinely is good, while not getting tangled up in irrational, destructive nonsense like homophobia and whatnot. I'm not at all certain that people would ever really get behind a religion that doesn't ever give them license to behave like pigs, but it's worth a try.
--80md
Despite protestations of the posters above, if I were to design a major in game programming, Quake would be the center of it. I mean, how many other games have its popularity after all these years? Also, being the first true polygon based angine, and looking DAMN good at it in comparison to the competition of its time while running smoothly at 8x6 on a P166-32, it must be among the most tightly coded first person shooters I can think of. If some company, id or another, could match it on all of those, that company would do quite well, and its prgrammers could easily graduate from studying Quake, not its successors nor really most other contemporary games.
too many hot Sociology majors turn you down, make you bitter?
Unfortunately, I all too able imagine the reason why anybody could be attracted to the masculine, graceless, sexless pseudo-women who throng our colleges: Alcohol. This is the only rational explanation for the astonishing amount of drinking which goes on in our colleges.
That, and the fact that drinking beer will no doubt find its way into the curriculum soon enough now that they're handing out "degrees" for playing video games.
In any case, I am certainly not interested in the brutish "Soviet tractor women" you seem to desire. I prefer women who are strong and secure enough to take their assigned role in life, just as strong and secure men have always taken their assigned role. Fair's fair: Do you see me demanding to be allowed to lay around the house all day, dusting a little bit here and there and devoting a few spare minutes to the children? No, of course not. I leave the house and work, as I am required to. And I do not complain about the "burden".
Slashdot is going to hell, and its not because of trolls or other bad comments. The stories are the culprit. I think that a moderating system for stories posted would be a nice feature to be added to Slash. Moderation of Stories posted would be done by the readers (It, apparently, can't be done by Rob, Hemos, etc. Their recent posts have failed us miserably.) while posting comments or in a similar fashion as Meta-Moderation. If you would like this feature, mention this comment and mail Rob.
"plain american" just doesn't fit with that url, you know?
heh heh.
anyhow, i (the troll) was making noises which were essentially in favor of the institution of slavery in the US. it seemed perfectly reasonable to me for him to mention his coloration in that context. what are you upset about?
by your logic I am no longer an american.
uhhh . . . what? he's an american of african extraction. you're an american of european (predominantly german) extraction, i'm an american of mostly irish extraction. the fact that most of my grandparents were born in a different country does not preclude my being an american. e.g.: my cat is a long-haired cat. does that mean he's not a cat anymore? no, it means he as long hair. he's still a cat, but he has qualities other than "catness". i mean, like, chill, okay?
I shall now be know as a European American.
okay. i'm irish-american. whatever. it's only a problem to mention these things if somebody wants to get violent or weird about it. otherwise hey, what the hell, we're not all cookie-cutter clones here, y'know?
Why do you feel the need to be singled out as being special?
why do you think he feels that need?
btw, i've seen yr posts before, and i'm wondering: are you a troll, or ironic, or making a point (if so, what?), or are you serious about the stormfront thing?
There is a sight for sore eyes (from hours of Fraggin on UT and Q3)
You must have an impressive grade point average if you spend that much time on your "studies". Tell me, do you get extra credit for refusing to bathe? Will you do a senior thesis in substituting the number '5' for the letter 's'? I would assume so.
Intro level Soac/Humanities/Psych class and what do we see... HOT female students!!!
I am trying to imagine this spectacle, and I'm sorry, but I'm laughing so hard my chest hurts. A drugged, stinking, ill-groomed fragment of semi-human wreckage slithers into a room full of rawboned, humorless imitation women with mustaches and hairy legs. He looks into their dead, sterile, hermaphroditic eyes and sees . . . beauty!
Dear God, is this what we've come to? Is this how low we've fallen?
Err, sorry, better than the movie.
I was gonna say, uhh . . .
Don't worry about feeding the troll, I'm satiated
Anyhow, I did point out the Burgess v. Kubrick thing in another post, uhhh . . . somewhere around here. I think the subject line was "Now j-just a d-darn minute there . .
Thanks for contributing!
--80md
University is not about job training. If that is what you are after, one might be better off seeking vocational training at someplace like DeVry or GamePen.
Gaming in its broadest sense is multi-disciplenary. Philosophy, statistics, art, history, and science can all claim a piece. In it's narrowest sense, it is a specific subset of computer science.
If you want to add business to the mix, you should also include accounting.
All-in-all, combining a liberal arts education (learn to reason and research) with a compsci education (learn to take apart and rebuild) is a good start.
Howdy, this is the troll who started the whole mess here.
I'm all trolled out on this subject. I wish you'd posted this last night, your points are all valid (IMHO) and better yet they're concrete, which is important. It's hard to riff off abstracts, but concrete statements are great troll-food. I'd have done a brazen-denial-of-reality thing on most of it. The Victorian Era thing was cool, I could have used that to jump off on a tangent with British Empire conspiracy theories. Those are always fun.
Anyhow, I wanted to thank you for participating and apologize for not writing a properly irrational response. I feel very strongly that if somebody takes the time to respond thoughtfully to one of my trolls, I owe them a hand-crafted burst of personalized zaniness in return.
--80md
Overated?
That's funny, cause i think he gets to post at 2. So no one moderated him up. Under that premis, it was not rated up.
And all you brainwashed "free-speech mantra" wonder why we're cleaning up the Internet: Free speech does not necessitate shoving your personal degradation and perversions in the face of everyone you meet. You may believe that it does, but you are wrong. If I broke into your house and held a church meeting in your living room, you'd be outraged and you'd call the police. The difference, of course, is that we'd be jailed, beaten, and quite likely "shot while trying to escape" -- because anybody with a sense of right and wrong is, in law, a "bigot". You, on the other hand, if you broke into my home and practiced your perversions in my living room, you would get a pat on the back from the Supreme Court and a meda from the ACLU.
The present "slave-state" condition of our nation not only allows but encourages your behavior, by "not judging" it. Children like you are taught that anything they "feel like doing" is perfectly okay. This is of course an absurdity, and it will not last. We are gathering more and more power every day, and with every public office we own, we work to restore our authority over our own nation, the nation we were given and which will remain ours in Law in perpetuity. Momentarily our land is in the hands of interlopers, but they are weak and confused. Their power is waning. We will treat them humanely when our rights are restored, but we will never permit them to restore their criminal regime.
It's me again, the troll, 80md.
The corpse comment was an (apparently failed) attempt at irony.
I'm notoriously insusceptible to irony in others, so the blame is probably all mine
Whatever you call it, it's an incredibly valuable meme that wraps itself up in different guises . . . etc.
Hmmm . . . What you're saying all makes sense to me, but I'm afraid I draw different conclusions from it: I'm inclined to identify the meme as "herd instinct" or "pack instinct" and be a lot less positive about it. Just because we all want it doesn't mean it's always good for us. Some religious people can be very, very good people, though, and I think the religion part helps them do it. That much is undeniable. Still, it can amplify badness in the same way . . .
You may be able to get rid of lots of baggage by building a new institution, I don't really know.
I doubt it very much.
--80md
His comment is completely lame. Since he used his +1 on it, and it didn't deserve it, I marked it as "overrated". Was it Flamebait, Offtopic, Troll? No. He just rated his post at a 2 while it's nothing special. So the orignal rating of it was done by the author himself. I'm sick of people using their +1 to get any comment in. I have +1 privledges, and I use them when I have somthing insightful to add to a discussion that has 100's of comments already. It usually gets me on the first page. Of course, if I don't have anything interesting, then I post at 1. Perhaps the option should be "Add +1 to this comment" while writing it up, rather than having to click to make it post normal.
yea why dont we just go back to the 'good old days' when women were expected to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen without any hope of ever achieving something in life
That is their assigned role. I did not establish the Law, I merely seek to obey it as best I can. I expect the same from others. I can only assume that you are a homosexual, in which case women would hardly matter to you, would they? Nevertheless, it may seem "unfortunate" to you that women were not made to be men, but it is a simple, obvious fact and there is nothing you can do about it. There is no "inequality" here, either. Do you rave about inequality when a dwarf is not permitted to play professional football? Why not? Because that role is not within his capabilities, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Indeed, you'd be doing him no favors by forcing him to take on a role which he is utterly unequipped to fulfill. So it is with women: I support their freedom and their right to a decent, satisfying life by fighting against those who would force them to take on roles in which they could never succeed.
because simpletons like yourself had their oh so precious masculinity threatened by women who can think for themselves.
My masculinity is hardly threatened by the Law of my Creator. Is yours? Had you any masculinity to begin with, I would take that to be the case.
Dammit! I thought posting under AC doesn't affect the moderation. I should've wiped my cookie then posted it. Anyways, if anyone has moderation points, mark down the top of this thread for the reason cited in my last comment.
yay! another /. bible thumper-fundie! praise the lawwwad!
excuse me while i puke
Either that's a lot of software or its very expensive.
Stuff like Alias/Wavefront is very expensive. A EDA software company donated 4 licenses to our school... it was worth 1.2 million.
excuse me while i puke
I'm intrigued, not to say amused, by the fact that you've been so thoroughly conditioned by your secular humanist "priests". Have you ever read a novel called A Clockwork Orange? I would imagine that you'd recognize certain parts of it from your own experience. It's a repulsive book, but an instructive one in that it outlines out a large part of the leftist social-control agenda. It was written back in the early 1960's, before any of these things has been implemented. They were still learning important lessons from the North Koreans back then, and also from the Chinese. Fifty thousand young Americans died in Vietnam, merely as a cover for providing political prisoner "guinea pigs" to the mind-control masters employed by Ho Chi Minh. They did their work, our observers learned their techniques, and the human "failures" of those "experiments" beg for change on every sidewalk in the nation. The successes are another matter; several virtually robotic "moles" have found their way high into the government, and one is even running for president. You can recognize them by their lifeless eyes and stiff movements. One of the "observers", who spent five months in Vietnam learning techniques, was assigned the role of "maintaining" the conditioning of our so-called "president". The "observer" himself appears to have been subjected to the treatment also, judging from his wooden and mechanical behavior. That's only natural; the powers running the show want some "insurance". They'd never give a free man that kind of responsibility.
And you are telling me that you've been an "experiment" yourself, programmed with degenerate peristaltic reflexes in response to the Christian religion. I haven't seen such a clear case before, but I suppose I always knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. As their power wanes, they paradoxically grow less cautious and more overt. It seems to be a progressive degenerative weakness in their leadership, and it bodes well for the future success of the resistance against their plans.
What happend to the "create your own freedom" line you had a couple of posts ago?
Don't mistake "freedom" for "license". They are two very different things. "License" is what allows rapists to rape, and murderers to kill. "Freedom" refers to our right and obligation to live a decent, upright life according the tenets of Judeo-Christian morality on which the very existence of civilization is necessarily predicated. Can you imagine a civilized society without the Ten Commandments? If you think you can, you're fooling yourself or else writing science fiction, because no such civilization has ever existed. You have had the great good fortune to be raised in the only democratic, civilized, and free nation in a barbaric and violent world. Therefore you imagine that this is the natural state of affairs for the human race. Don't kid yourself. It isn't. This nation was built and maintained by people who knew the Ten Commandments and kept them. They builded so well that almost seventy years of left-wing usurpation of the government has failed to destroy what they made. Everything good that you have, and everything good that you are (if anything) may be traced directly to the Biblical foundation of your homeland. You can bite the hand that feeds you if you like, but don't be surprised if the feeding ultimately stops.
Assigned by whom? Required to by whom?
By our Creator. As I've said before, I don't make the rules, I just follow them and urge others to do the same. No doubt you think I'm somhow infringing on your "rights" by informing you of your responsibilities, but that really doesn't interest me. You can even call the police, and I have no doubt that I'll be incarcerated and subjected to unspeakable abuse for my "bigotry". This does not concern me in the least. I receive strength and support from One far greater than your squalid, irrational court system could ever be, however hard the courts may try to usurp His role.
China (pre-Mao), India, Japan, the Mayans
The coerced abortions of modern China are only a continuation of their ages-old practice of infanticide, necessitated by their practice of concubinage and related barbaric customs. That is not civilization. The same brutal "customs" have been practiced in India and Japan from time out of mind.
The Mayans practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale.
Your "civilizations" are whorehouses drenched in blood. You may keep them for yourself, I don't want any part of them.
If you want an engrossing game that makes fairly good use of advanced computing resources, and is very challanging on more than a reaction-time level, check out Microsoft's "Pandora's Box" game. It's pretty awesome, and authored by the guy who invented Tetris.
And it's cheap. $20 at full retail.
one of the human failures out of the experiment cited above is running for President now (McCain).
"several virtually robotic "moles" have found their way high into the government, and one is even running for president. "
It's gratifying to see that even if my explicit statement to that effect went unnoticed, you understood the import of my information to the extent that you were able to duplicate my conclusions independently.
Confidentially, I don't believe that McCain is the only "mole" in this race. The one called "Bill Bradley" was a Rhodes Scholar, which as you know is the training program which produced our current "president". As you can see, the English branch of the "program" was at that time far behind their Vietnamese masters in skill. One of their "products" ("Clinton") is almost uncontrollable, and the other ("Bradley") is dull-eyed and sluggish. No doubt the quality and reliability of their "product" has improved since the days of the early pilot program which conditioned those two.
Game design covers every aspect of the system.
Children play with tinkertoys. This does not make them architects. Similar principles may be involved on a trivial scale and in a meaninglessly approximate way, but it's just an instructive game, suitable for small children who man one day study architecture or engineering as adults -- or who may squander their lives studying basketweaving and related fripperies at an American "college".
What you are suggesting is not merely that playing with tinkertoys will turn a child into an experienced architect, but that another child merely manipulating the product (playing the game) will be transformed into an architect as well. This is patent lunacy, and you know it as well as I do.
You are clearly an intelligent person, judging from your writing. Please don't debase yourself by parroting the orthodoxies of your inferiors. You deserve better. Don't sell yourself short. God knows you, and he wants you to come home: All is forgiven. Life is too short to let such a chance get away from you.
game design teaches you a great deal about computing from database design to 3-D imaging
3D imaging is a flashy child's toy of no practical use. As for the rest, it may be true that video game "designers" incorporate degenerate imitations of the sound engineering work done by their betters, but studying a degenerate imitation is hardly a good way to learn. Start at the source, and you will learn what you need. The wellsprings of innovation and sound design in software engineering lie in the world of business, as one would expect them to do: When a video game crashes or loses data, who cares? Nobody. The child holding the joystick may throw a brief tantrum, but that's all. When, however, trouble strikes a large database system in a major financial institution, real people suffer in real ways and the institution will operate at a terrible competitive handicap. This is sufficient incentive to guarantee that the code written in such business envioronments is bulletproof, innovative, and architecturally sound. The real visionaries in software development don't waste their time on graphics. They have more important things to deal with. They will settle for nothing less than large-scale database design and implementation because that is what is important, and great minds are always attracted to the center of things.
Wow, I've never had so much fun reading such idiotic ravings
I beg your pardon. The plain, obvious truth is hardly "idiotic", even if it does contradict the orthodoxies your masters programmed you to hold.
If you really believe this stuff then I think you should be shot.
I am amused to no end by the vicious, violent hate poured upon the heads of honest Christians by the supposedly "peaceful" and "tolerant" secular Left.
religion powers will have no effect on me, for I am an athiest!
Not to be rude, but that's "atheist" (with the 'e' first), meaning "one without God", a "theist" (from the Greek "theos" == "God" or some such thing) being one with God. It's not at all ironic that the word "atheist" should have come from the ancient Greeks, as they were notorious pagans.
In any case, you may believe or not believe whatever you like, but your Creator believes in you, as you will eventually discover to your lasting dismay if you don't get your act together before your natural span expires and you are gathered to your just reward (or punishment, as seems more likely).
If you are a troll, then I salute you.
Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Sounds like you have your head on straight. Good luck with the girls. I hope they put out.
About time that someone thought of the excellent idea of using computer generated playgrounds for the kids to play with, insted of the previous horrifying events when students bring firearms to school, the situation may be the latest Quake Script, or Z-bot?.
My god, this article is 3 days old. All the gaming sites (shugashack, blues, PQ, oxygen tank, etc.) reported about this a long time ago. Come on Rob, get with it. Yeesh. Slashdot sure does suck when it comes to gaming news.
That is unproportionally disturbing. Not like Stileproject.com wasn't disturbing enough, but some buddies on IRC mentioned his webcam this morning, but never that time lapsed movie. I'll have to show them that. That is very disturbing though. Oh well, R.I.P. Stile.
Interesting.....I don't suppose this could be a veiled reference to what geeks love to do best, i.e. spend their time CODING? If you don't understand the hacker ethic, I suggest you spend some quality time reading the Jargon file available here, especially that section on the profile of the typical hacker.
Note, I am not commenting on the content of the article, but on your blithe ignorance of certain established patterns. I especially love that line about "Stinking like a corpse". While I'm all for personal hygene, if a person has just finished a hacking run, I wouldn't complain terribly if they were a little wiff. And if your ultra-conservative olefactory organs can't deal with that....that's your problem.
As far as your point about this country getting "flushed down the toilet"...That actually is well taken. Many of the majors produced now days do, in fact, reflect the intellectual malaise that "only the genius possess and the insane lament". And underwater basketweaving may soon be an actual major, given the trends. That's all well and good. But unless I am misunderstanding the article, this program would basically train people how to make games - a combination of grafics design (that's where Alias/Wavefront comes in) and programming. It's perhaps not as academically rigorous as pure programming, but I can see it's legitimacy. Why did this particular major set you off? It seems, as far as weird majors go, it's fairly tame compared to some of the other stuff out there.
I am all for ranting...but it should be done under the appropriate topic. If you feel like decrying the state of modern decay, post under the latest article about MPAA, Echelon, or Microsoft patenting the bicycle.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
-LL
who needs 3-D MRI visualization or 3-D Ultrasound for medical diagnoses, or 3-D molecule design software to produce more efficient pharmaceuticals and materials for engineering?
Silly cartoons are of no use in these fields.
Furthermore, you may well be proud of your cartoon caricatures of life, but remember that your Creator created life itself, which you in all your foolish arrogance can never hope to duplicate.
if (troll) {
cout "Grow up.\n";
}
else {
throw std::Shit_Eating_Bigot;
}
butt kissing ape
It is you, not I, who believe yourself to be the offspring of the lower primates. In your case, there would appear to be corroborating evidence, but this does not concern me.
I assume you are aware that the "evolutionist" view is fondly held by the Nazi Party and the ill-named "Christian Identity" creatures. They have seen in the evolutionist view its true implications, and they find it very valuable in their propaganda: Briefly, they hold that "lesser races" are descended more recently from the apes than they themselves are, due to crossbreeding between humans and apes in antiquity. This view is utterly rejected by Christianity, of course, but your own materialist/humanist theology accepts it without qualm.
Now, tell me, who is the fascist?
I'm waiting.
I suppose that's why the local swordfighting #2 player is a woman.
This phrase conveys no meaning to me. Perhaps you would be kind enough to elucidate?
Look, I want to speak to you as man to man here, because you are clearly an intelligent sort (albeit misguided). Do you really want your job to be given to a woman who can't even begin to approach your competence? I can only assume that you take pride in your work and wish to make a contribution in the world. Wouldn't it be a genuinely tragic thing if you were "obsoleted" by a woman, who was congenitally unable to make a contribution? Don't tell me this wouldn't tear you apart, because I know it would. And the truth is, it would tear her apart too, because no human soul can be utterly severed from God, and the will to honesty and self-worth resides somewhere within us all. She would bitterly regret having been tricked into giving up her birthright in the home in exchange for a "prize" she did not value.
The feminist exploitation of women must be stopped, you can see it as well as I can. Don't be part of the problem. Be part of the solution.
you know you like rimming men's assholes, and licking every last tasty drop of tasty shit of your dripping, brown-coated fingers.
so who's this long-haired anti-establishment hippy you call your "lord"? I'm sure you two will be very happy together.
Hallelujah!
by divide decree
Try Dristan.
HAHAHAHAHAAA! Sorry.
Read _The_Brothers_Karamazov_ . . . Unless, of course, it proves too much of a threat to your antiquated ideas and shoddy reasoning
Oh, good heavens, my antiquated ideas and shoddy reasoning haven't ever stopped me from reading Dostoevski; no, it's my poor abused attention span that balks. I much prefer Borges. The only Russian I can take is Nabokov, and he's really not a real Russian anyway.
My school (San Diego State Universtiy) does not currently offer a game design degree, so I did what any good coder should know how to do, I improvised! I added an English minor, and made up my own courses, the trickiest part of which is getting a professor to sponsor you. The two classes I 'invented' were: Rhetoric and Writing 499: "Narrative Theory and Game Design" and English 499: "Science Fiction and Game Design" very cool! Then finally, my last semester here, the CS department offered an OpenGL course, which I am currently enrolled in.... was all the trouble worth it? Well, I start work as a full-time software engineer at Electronic Arts (you may have heard of them) this summer... ;)
Universities and colleges were actually created to serve as centralized repositories of knowledge.
European colleges were first created in the Middle Ages as theological seminaries, for the greater glory of God. As the Catholic "churth" gradually sank further into Abomination, Protestants gladly took up the torch and came to America, where they established a new system of God-centered learning institutions, which are now daily derided in the liberal media as "bigoted" institutions for their adherence to God's Law.
The rest of your post is reasonably accurate. Slashdot is surely nothing but a profit-taking scam, intent on making a fast buck off the promotion of pornography and the undermining of the just profits of Judeo-Christian free enterprise.
Nor do I.
I'm not trying to produce any "lasting effects", and least of all to convince anybody; the "faith that moveth mountains" isn't itself going to be moved by an AC with a free Sunday afternoon on his hands. I just find this fun . . . and so, I suspect, do most of the other posters; why else get involved? I do the right-wing maniac persona only because it offers so much material to work with. The fun is in trying to defend bizarre arguments against intelligent, well-informed people who know damn well I'm full of shit
--80md
"the masculine, graceless, sexless pseudo-women who throng our colleges"
my god man, what school did you go to??
www.kuro5hin.org : story moderation is here.
You are probably as sick of seeing this link in Slashdot as I am, but click it, it's worth it. Plus they use verdana font; much easier on the eyes. Not completely finished (no comment moderation yet) but maybe they should just ditch slash and use kuro5hin (which is GPL also).
You answered your own fucking question, you retard. GAMING SITES had this a long time ago. SLASHDOT IS NOT A GAMING SITE. Personally, I think this should not even have been posted, especially being so old. If you want up-to-the-minute gaming news, you know where to go, bitch. This is a fucking lame article anyway.
Sample test questions: that will be in exams: What is: a Quad Whore? Write a paragraph explaining why swearing is either good or bad during game play... Explain in one sentence what mouse and keyboard procedures you use to 'rocket jump'? Where is quake's offical homepage? What is a LPB? How much shield points does a red and yellow armor give respectively? Mark with an 'x' the spawning locations for the map location below (shown is map DM2) NB...Cheating will result in 50 health point being taken away from your practical segment of this test) PRACTICAL COMPONENT Practical component of this quake exam will be to DM everyone...The minimum frag score you need to pass is 30 (time - 20mins). Examiners will be in spectator mode to monitor any unfair activities such as camping and zapping in water :P FYUSY
... after all highschools have been preparing a lot of kids for the quake experience lately, a nice program for those kids in college would be an added bonus (oh powerup)...
--
Unless you were born in africa and only moved here a few months ago, you are a *PLAIN AMERICAN*. My ancestors are from europe, mostly german in fact. So by your logic I am no longer an american. I shall now be know as a European American. Why do you feel the need to be singled out as being special? I thought you wanted to be treated equally?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
well my purpose is all of those. trolls post something inflamatory to create a bunch of replies from people who can't ignore the obvious troll. I created a real account to get the automatic score +1 and get noticed. The archiebunker nickname seemed appropriate with the stormfront.org website. I'm not really serious about it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So why don't you follow his example?
Me, of course.
I hope that they also address running a business as some of most successful of 90's programmers/creative teams had business failures.
My other thought is:
This could be just another way for the University to hit an industry up for donations.
TRUST me Alias is oneof the leading forces in 3d/animation software. i have seen MAYA in a production enviroment and i was really impressed. Also their alias/wavefront Studio was pretty impressive. And not to mention EXTREMELY expensive stuff. One license can be up to the 10 000's of dollars range. Of course i am not an artist or have anything in common with 3d/animation stuff. But from the work i have seen a few guys do in a local studio i was impressed.
IIRC the purpose of a college education is to provide a person with the skills required to succeed in the real world (i.e. workplace in one's future career).
Sadly, you are correct; Colleges of today have mostly been reduced to fancified versions of Vo-Tech schools. Universities and colleges were actually created to serve as centralized repositories of knowledge. The quest for knowledge and the desire to better the world fueled the enrollment books hundreds of years ago. Securing a job was not a concern.
Today, everything is about the buck. Take a look at this website. Malda started it out as a way to broaden his understanding of the internet technologies and tools. It is now nothing more than his very own cash-cow. The quality of stories has dropped precipitously. Failed moderation has led to inane work arounds like the 70 second delay in replying to posts. Malda has no desire to further his knowledge with regard to making this website better (NNTP version anyone ?). Rather, Malda is more concerned about waiting for his stock options to vest.
I think we can learn from our friends at the X Files on this one. Create a gaming universe with AI bots. Then code all the females you need. With some luck, they will jump computers, learn new tricks on their own, and you could have a whole lab of a mix of The Sims, Quake, and The Matrix. Well, it'll be fun until someone shuts the computer off. Perhaps a minor in Backupology would go well with this.
Oh, and Nintendo already did this back 10 years ago up there in Canada with courses in SNESology including storytelling.
Well, we can but hope that some students in this course put some effort into developing a top-quality open source 3d game engine.
I'm surprised that no one in the industry has done this yet. Rather than cross-licensing and paying huge royalties back and forth, all the companies could combine their efforts and just play "feature race", along with spending more of their time on storyboard. Games would get better and cheaper (to make, at least).
Politas
The Linux kernel uses a lot of complicated data structures. (maybe not complicated DS, but used in complicated ways, with many functions which access them). This makes the kernel not very good for teaching about e.g. virtual memory, because the VM code probably does some filesystem and/or scheduling stuff too. To completely understand (like that ever happens :) a piece of code in the kernel, you have to know about a lot of extraneous stuff. (That's been my experience looking at kernel code. I haven't looked at enough to be confident hacking it, though.)
:). Linux is great as background knowledge when thinking about operating system concepts, but it is too complicated to make case studies from, or try to actually teach directly. Our prof tried to give some examples of real code near the end of the term, but he had to stop and explain a bunch of things, so we didn't get into much code. He did leave top(1) running in the ssh window on the PC connected to the overhead projector, so the class got to watch the system being seriously overloaded (load av. 40--70 on a 4way SMP UltraSPARC, 1GB RAM :). Some guy with a laptop ran a process which showed up as "hey_cs3120" or something like that for a few seconds :)
OTOH, I found it extremely helpful for my third year operating systems course to have read lots of docs about things in the kernel work, and to have written programs which make system calls like open(2), read(2), and mmap(2). (especially mmap. It's cool
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
... is it possible to get a Masters in Game Design? That would be schweet, and just might convince me to stay in school for another few years.
->www.chuma.org, ranting and Newtons, what more could you want?
..why not game schools? What seems to be missed by many posters here is that this isn't some sort of fluffy basket-weaving course about how to appreciate games or something, but how to go about creating a good game. You might say "well, nobody needs to take a course to do that -- and you can't teach creativity anyway", but if this is true, why then do most succesful movie directors have a degree in film?
At a guess: Outcast.
This used a voxel engine rather than polygons, so 3D accelerator cards had no effect. The only thing that mattered was raw CPU power. Having said that, the graphics were very impressive and the forest area truly amazing. It is difficult to realistic draw even a static tree and outcast could be showing dozens, all blowing in the wind.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
JeffK is of course, the best man for the job.
www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
The title of this slash story is extremely misleading. The course is not about playing games, it's about designing and programming them. I repeat...it is NOT a course about quake.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
This may be the beginning of specialized degrees. ERP work is where a lot of big money also is and graduate schools are beginning to tailor theor courses so you may specialize in ERP work.
An analogy to use would be getting a physics degree then getting hired to be mechanical engineer. You would be unqualified even though you know all most of the theory behind mechanical engineering. There may be a potential out there to offer different tracks of the CS degree, similarly as there are different engineering degrees available.
Alias|Wavefront are the makers of Alias PowerAnimator also nowadays known as Maya
They make a few other high-end products such as Maya Fusion. Maya is high-end 3D modeling/animation software for TV, Film, Games etc. Things like the characters in Phantom Menace are modeled in Maya (stress the characters and not the other stuff) and animated in SoftImage. The cheapest version (Maya Complete) is over $7500 USD. I'm currently using both Maya and SoftImage and they are very very very nice packages BUT..there are other very very nice 3D packages at a fraction of the cost.
As far as the money...you can lease Maya...or SoftImage heh
What the hell is WRONG with you people??
/. summary (which nobody in their right mind would pay attention to) was inadequate, is just slightly more than i can handle. Especially when some of these posts are at score:3.
SLASHDOT ISN'T JOURNALISM!! OK, so it is sometimes when they post original articles, but this ISN'T one of those times. This is a link, a summary, and a discussion forum. PERIOD. it isn't MEANT to be journalism. it isn't supposed to be "reporting" shit. it isn't a "story". it isn't intended to be accurate or anything. it is intended to give you a LINK, and a vague description as to the link's content. that's IT. the entire point here is, they show you where to read information on the subject and ask you to respond. they are not "reporting facts" in any way, shape or form. they are telling you where to get facts. I'm amazed i have to EXPLAIN this.
the article/headline was phrased in such a way that anyone with half a brain cell could figure out what it meant. esp. the part about "As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them." apparently half a braincell is not too common a thing to have, judging from the huge number of people bitching "this is a misleading headline blah blah blah".
Hey, guess what: Actually reading the article IS NOT THAT IMPRESSIVE. Lots of people do it. You haven't really "discovered" anything by finding out, hey, if you read the first couple sentances of the article linked, the headline which is obviously a flippant joke turns out to be somewhat misleading when taken out of context!
so given that none of this was intended to be or attempting to be journalism, why are you people so unable to handle it not being journalism..?
go away and stop cluttering my screen!! if they posted a blatantly misleading summary of something important that's bound to start a flamewar that would be one thing; but no. This is slight irritating goofiness in an article that doesn't matter much.. why do you feel compelled to act offended by it??
I dunno. excuse me if i am overreacting, but more than six semiidentical comments bitching about how the
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This almost makes me want to get off my lazy ass and go back to school, but then again, maybe not
JEFF
I mean, if you don't have a quick trigger finger, there's no way you'll graduate buam luade au quade.
--
+&x
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Alright, I'm just going to assume that you're for real and this isn't just some big joke to see if anyone will buy your bullshit...
- -----------------
Allow me to try to structure what little reason you have offered into an actual argument:
1)God exists.
2)God has decreed that women can not be anything but housewives.
3)Whatever God says is right.
-----------------------------------------------
Conclusion: Women can not be anything but housewives.
Any religious argument undoubtably starts off with premise #1, which is unprovable. This fact dooms every religious argument to failure, but let's continue...
I don't know where you got premise #2 from-I'm assuming the Bible. If so, where does it specifically state that God made that statement? I have not read the Bible, so I honestly have no idea whether or not this is true.
I'm assuming your support for premise #3 is that God is perfect, and therefore infallible.
My only question is this: if your argument were correct, that women are "incapable of anything other than homemaking", then EVERY WOMAN WOULD BE A HOMEMAKER!!! Only a fool makes such an absolute statement for which there is such an abundance of evidence in contradiction. Then again, you have already demonstrated that you clearly are a fool. You might as well make the statment that "every human is five feet tall" or "every tree is pink".
Neither the Bible nor God ever said that women are incapable of anything other than housekeeping. If you meant that God said women should be housewives, then that is slightly different. But, allow me to ask you this: Even if God exists and he did say that women should be housewives, why should we follow along? In other words, why should we do whatever God says without question? (Please, make a better argument than "because he created us", that is not good enough. Your parents "created" you, but if they told you to kill someone, you shouldn't do it regardless)
-
-
It is possible for your mind to be so open that your brain falls out.
It seems like people who are interested in the 'design' factors of a game would be better off served with a different major. This degree seems to be one that would leave you the jack of all trades but master of none. Sure you know how to code a decent engine, but do you understand lighting? Or level design? Or simple plot/character design(not artistically but in terms of actual character.) It seems majors like english, theatre or CS would be something more appropriate then some multi-displinary major that leaves you with limited capacity in all fields.
one would think that time is better spent actually learning something new...oh wait..thats not what universities are for.
Programming games makes sense to me. Sony is making more money on PlayStation than they are on movies. If universities have Film programs, why not learn to make games too?
;)
Hopefully they will branch out a bit from the purely technical and into the social motivations, impact, and theory behind games, gaming and interactive entertainment. Why are they so addictive? Is gaming bad? Is this just repackaged crack?
Also write and study the history of gaming. There is a rich and vibrant history of creative people that has barely been written down yet. Who thought of the original standards? Who wrote the first first person shooter? (was it battlezone?) What were the authors' lives like, the things that lead up to the creation of Donkey Kong and Ultima?
There is a lot of opportunity for crossover with other majors here too. The AI in games could learn from and give back to the research in Cog-sci. There is a huge amount of psych crossover as well as the sociology of new communities built around a common activity. Network gaming can be a lot like a bowling league or AA meeting. Do better players also posess charisma in chat?
The other amazing thing about network gaming is the way certain people excel even in a leveled playing field. Systems and pings aside, some people are just better at others at some games, just like regular mainstream athletics. Like Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky, some people are born naturals. I bet Tony Hawk's mother never imagined he'd one day make a living at skateboarding.
Maybe it's time for intramural FPS (first person shooter) leagues? Companies are already staging team deathmatches against other companies, just like softball or basketball. I'm sure frats are doing it too. There is money to be won at convention tournaments. Maybe it's time to step up and organize? There would probably be a team skin, but would there be uniforms? (can you picture the "team" parading into the arena in matching sweatsuits? UPN would eat that up
What about sponsorship? Will Coke buy a 32 pixel block on the back of a good player? Don't laugh, it's coming.
Joe Maller
maybe they should take note of the quote on ./ for today:
"People disagree with me. I just ignore them. -- Linus Torvalds, regarding the use of C++ for the Linux kernel"
and use that to teach c/c++ , if you're going to take the stance you have regarding quake code. Then again, I wouldn't know how complex (or simple, perhaps) code for the linux kernel is, so I wouldn't know how feasible that is. The thing to remember is that it's all in the name of good ol' learning, but, now that I think of it, they could start some kind of cool linux/OSS-based class(es) using linux kernel code, etc (i.e. code from other OSS projects) and analyze it, etc. Yet, as we all know, the vast majority of learning comes from experience/having to do something yourself.
Insert mind here.
I suggest you try the two Fallout games -- they are 'unofficial' sequels to wasteland. Much of the same team worked on them and there are NUMEROUS subtle jokes referring to parts of Wasteland. They are, of course, quite good games in and of themselves. Lots of text and non-lineary story, very little cgi, and a great sense of humour.
When Fallout 2 was finished some of the same team worked on planetscape: torment, which sounds like another great one.
They're are actually MORE creative, complex games out there than ever -- they just often get lost in the crowd since the crowd is so much bigger. Much like the film industry -- plenty of good movies, just maybe not at the local megaplex.
But how much did it cost to produce in the first place? How much would it cost you to create this product from scratch?
Of course I'd expect someone studying at Unreal Tournament to put Quake down. Listen pal, diversity in curriculum is essential to a well-rounded education. I'm sure there's plenty of room for a Quake class, even at UT. Think outside the box.
I wonder how this corresponds to the program that was listed in Slashdot before, which was the game university located in Britain. Similar curriculum?
I also find it interesting that in order to give a degree in a new field, new "standards" have to be set, standards which those creating the degree may or may not have met. Case in point, with my degree track, Digital Media, an art degree, my instructors have told me that they've never taken an art history class in their life. But because they created the degree, they can deem it necessary to have everyone after them take the classes they see fit. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the extra classes, which I see as an opportunity to learn, but I find it extremely interesting to see what kind of precedent will be set to ensure the qualified creation of a game designer.
"'Have you ever read a novel called A Clockwork Orange? '
Yes. Kubric rules. "
Nitpick, sorry.
Anthony Burgess wrote a book called A Clockwork Orange. It's, of course, better than the book, and there are, of course, added scenes and such. It's really quite interesting, and, unfortunately for Burgess, probbly the only book anyone will remember by him when he's dead.
Trying not to feed the troll:
Dan
"A Clockwork Orange. It's, of course, better than the book"
Err, sorry, better than the movie.
Doh. Is that freud talking to me?
Dan
"What people need to teach the next generation of game makers is dramatic construct and basic fictional writing abilities, "
I don't know if that's possible. A lot of people don't want that, and a lot of people who think they can, well, can't. I've seen this a lot. People (in general) take 200 or 300 level Creative Writing workshop type courses and think they can write. It's more than simple grammar and punctuation (though the basics of writing are important). It's passion.
I don't have a passion for programming. I do it when I need something, otherwise I avoid it. I write because I love it. I make video-game levels because I love that, too.
Maybe it's just me, as a writer, but programmers might want to stick to programming and writers stick to their field.
Half-life and it's add on was a great game, but I think it's because of the process they used to create it (a lot of brainstorming in groups and so on, there was an article on a gaming page somewhere that had all that information.) If one person is sufficiantly talented, then he or she could guide a team to make a game as good as half life (doing what it does). This is part of why id software works so well, because it's centered around Carmack.
Even if the others give boatloads of support to the game as well, the big thing about id is their engines and pure adrenaline gaming. Unreal has something similar (though, IMO is very tedious because there isn't really a goal, just "Survive").
That is why Duke3d (okay, the plot was lacking, but it had plenty of "other" stuff) or Half-life were good games, there was so much more. Quake(s) and Doom(s) were good for the same reasons as a Stallone or Swarzenegger flick.
Should id hire a writer? I'm biased, but I say "yes," if they ever make a single player game again.
If not, they should avoid bothering with a story at all, I think what they did with Q3A was cheesy.
Of course, Half-Life looks rather dated now. I love the game, don't get me wrong, but I think you're wrong when you say that we don't need better engine's. I want to see every petal of a flower, and then I want to look off the balcony at a town-square.
And I've seen engines that do that. And something like thhat is what I want to design for.
insommnia, please release me:
Dan
Think again. Ever watched a human being walk? It's a very distinctive sort of motion. Now watch characters in Quake-style games, or amateur animation. Doesn't look like a real human's motion, does it? That's what human kinetics deals with.
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They have to watch "Full Metal Jacket"
"Guy 1: Ever shoot women and children?
Guy 2: Sometimes.. I try not to.
Guy 1: How could you?
Guy 2: It's not hard. You just don't lead them so much."
Just replace "women and children" with "newbies"
>:-)
---
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Yep. DigiPen. Sponsored by Nintendo.
--
The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
This is just hit me. There are higher levels than B.A., so why not adjust the scrolls accordingly?
There should be an:
'Excellent!' on your diploma if you move on after getting your B.A. and receive your Masters.
Then, if you take it further and get your Ph.D. in game design, the scroll should further read: 'Impressive!'.
However, if you fail out of college, you'd simply receive a 'Humiliation!'. How embarrassing that would be, eh?
Hacksworth
That was a cocky, off-the-cuff reaction, for which I (again :) apologize. I'm not at all familiar with the theories you were discussing, and I should have kept my mouth shut.
It's what the Constitution has setup to protect itself. The Legislative branch, Executive branch, and Judicial branches have no Right cannot destroy or overpower the Rights of the others.
It's the classic demon frozen in a crystal story that is the theme to a heck of a lot of MUDs and RPGs.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Game design covers every aspect of the system. It is the same as studying the evolution of Greek systems of philosophy and Roman innovations in organization networking efficiency and planning. Where studying that teaches you great deal about their culture, game design teaches you a great deal about computing from database design to 3-D imaging which as most of the golry days fucks so far don't recognize leads to better surgical equipment for dealing with transplant for say someonme who has muscular dystrophy.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
See my other post. Nuff said.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
That is their assigned role. I did not establish the Law, I merely seek to obey it as best I can. I expect the same from others.
:)
Establishment butt kissing ape
I can only assume that you are a homosexual, in which case women would hardly matter to you, would they? Nevertheless, it may seem "unfortunate" to you that women were not made to be men, but it is a simple, obvious fact and there is nothing you
can do about it.
I'll be damned... he veered off the topic into his own overbloown ego void. If this guy had a smidgeon of an ego of self-respect, hell would freeze over.
There is no "inequality" here, either. Do you rave about inequality when a dwarf is not permitted to play professional football? Why not? Because that role is not within his capabilities, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Indeed, you'd be doing him no favors by forcing him to take on a role which he is utterly unequipped to fulfill.
I suppose that's why the local swordfighting #2 player is a woman. God you need to be returned to your cave.
So it is with women: I support their freedom and their right to a decent, satisfying life by fighting against those who would force them to take on roles in which they could never succeed.
Buddy you need to get off those drugs they give out at the retreats.
My masculinity is hardly threatened by the Law of my Creator. Is yours? Had you any masculinity to begin with, I would take that to be the case.
The fuhrer has spoken everyone laugh now. What a dildo...
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
excuse me while i puke
:)
Please do in honor of multicelled organisms. We all are grateful for your gesture.
Okay... time to fry this bitch.
I'm intrigued, not to say amused, by the fact that you've been so thoroughly conditioned by your secular humanist "priests".
You must have a 2 bit brain. Everything is a promotion to you people. No wonder you fall for it.
Have you ever read a novel called A Clockwork Orange?
Yes. Kubric rules. Nuff said. Incidentally Clockwork Orange was a rant against everyone, not a bible thumping pamphlet to the salvation that doesn't await your arrival. Promotion again. Boy this is easy.
I would imagine that you'd recognize certain parts of it from your own experience.
Sure who wouldn't we live on earth don't we? Reminds me of a psychic ad where some fraud tells her listener that she is creative. Who isn't? Everyone has a soul. (Duh! Your soul is you.) Everyone likes to build something even ppl who'd rather please an audience than create. You can't get away from it.
It's a repulsive book,
Basic instinctual reaction to the truth. And you were talking about the truth a few posts ago.
But an instructive one in that it outlines out a large part of the leftist social-control agenda.
I get it. It's the advertisement stupid. Got it. Mkay... @#@$#@$#!!!
Now about those leftists in robes at the prisons giving Bilblical Guidance and leading the experiment. Boy you really need your head descrambled. Read the book again.
It was written back in the early 1960's, before any of these things has been implemented. They were still learning important lessons from the North Koreans back then, and also from the Chinese. Fifty thousand young Americans died in Vietnam, merely as a cover for providing political prisoner "guinea pigs" to the mind-control masters employed by Ho Chi Minh. They did their work, our observers learned their techniques, and the human "failures" of those "experiments" beg for change on every sidewalk in the nation. The successes are another matter; several virtually robotic "moles" have found their way high into the government, and one is even running for president. You can recognize them by their lifeless eyes and stiff movements. One of the "observers", who spent five months in Vietnam learning techniques, was assigned the role of "maintaining" the conditioning of our so-called "president". The "observer" himself appears to have been subjected to the treatment also, judging from his wooden and mechanical behavior. That's only natural; the powers running the show want some "insurance". They'd never give a free man that kind of responsibility.
Sure sure and right-wing free conservatives are going to save the world from left-wing liberals. Go home Nazi.
And you are telling me that you've been an "experiment" yourself, programmed with degenerate peristaltic reflexes in response to the Christian religion. I haven't seen such a clear case before, but I suppose I always knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. As their power wanes, they paradoxically grow less cautious and more overt. It seems to be a progressive degenerative weakness in their leadership, and it bodes well for the future success of the resistance against their plans.
Uhh you suck. The simple truth versus a long winded inversion of an otherwise true conspiracy.
If you want to see what's really sucking the blood out of this country, read Trilateralism. It's a book about the reversal of the trilateral deadlock in the separation of powers in world affairs.
The same way the the three way power structure keeps things in check in the US, the reversal is destroying education, democracy and free speech in world affairs.
Excuse me while I puke.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Move along netizens. Some fool is masturbating. Nothing to see here.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Look at the variety of gaming that is done for PCs beyond what you said. You mentioned FPS and sports games -- but those are sold for the console markets too. Instead, look at the intense diversity of games we have: Sim-Games like SimCity, multi-player strategy games like C&C and Starcraft, massively multiplayer MUDs (graphical and text-based), simple but beautiful games like Deer Hunter, text-based games like NetHack (and its cousins), problem-solving games like Myst, and much more.
My point is: don't think there is no innovation in gaming because the top sellers are all FPS and sports games. People come out with new PC games every fricking day -- I am glad the platform is still around! (btw, I am looking forward to Daikatana when it comes out... very soon, check out the demo!)
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
I hope the genre doesnt die. It would be like having a degree in PacMan..
Doesnt being a tad too specialized frighten them? The industry changes too fast to learn toolsets, but arent what they are learning be better applied on the job?
good luck to them all
--jay
I lead my life by two rules:
Beyond that it's a matter of personal judgement.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
Sorry, I've read too many posts by an ac that prattles on about the evils of everything. That last paragraph sounded too much like him/her/it
--Have a Johsonville brat.
Incidentally, maybe you should try the comedy circuit, if youve got the cajones. If you do care about the Fate Of The Glorious Union Builded By Our Forefathers Who Were Direct Descendants of the Archangel Gabriel, it could be interesting.
PS--Pikachu is the one and only prophet of the true religion. And his god is a jealous god, who is also vengeful and in control of anime-dubbing. So I'd watch out if I were you...
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
point made!!! There arent enough people here who agree with the ideas being ridiculed to actually produce a lasting effect!! Choose another media or forum!! (Ill be plenty happy to suggest a few...they should be easy pickings for you)
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
Well the title said "How about a BA in Quake?" or something similar, so I guess we cant blame /. for the headline.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Oi! I think that's a little TOO far. I mean really, with a program like that, our future games will be totally addicting, and appeal to every sense we have (except that common one). -and be so bloated with bad code, it will make M$ complain. Forget it. Teach me algorithms! Teach me Assembly optimizations! teach me how to run the machine with my bare hands (we don't need no steenkin OS). Then I will posess the knowledge to pick up game programming, and make it blindingly fast. Besides that, what else will these kids be able to do? "I'd like to work for your company as a DB manager, and I think my Quake skills give me just the edge you need to blow your competition into huge blood soaked chunks of dead flesh..." uh, no.
Fish
I had a friend I knew way back when dos was a huge thing (dos1.0 -2.0) and there was a game on it called load runner my friend got into this game and learned how to change the parmeters of the game and do lots of neat things with it. I never got in to it as heavily probably should have he's a venture capitlist in Cailf and all of this because he wanted to change the way a game worked. The course may seem ridiculos to some but if you look at it it is a way to help them learn in a fun way. Maybe the ideas they use for assignments in the class don't seem like much it's the technique of using those ideas that will help them in a career oriented enviroment.
now we have more of a reason to be teachers pets!
Teacher: OK now, go home and play some Quake 2, mmmk? As for you, Anonymous Coward, you get to play Doom, you troll! And you, Rhydant, Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament?
Rhydant: UT is for me.
just imagine the possiblities!
Yeah. What Six said. He's more correct. The article looked like it was giving people the idea that there was whole course already. (Judging from some of the posts.) So I decided to set everyone straighter.
Didn't know Rob was going to do all that stuff with the consoles...sweet...probably going to take a couple years, though, right Six? Lunch for tomorrow still good?
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I am going to have to disagree with some of this. At this school, about half of the CS majors have NO idea what to do when faced with a programming/design problem. They became CS majors because they liked playing quake - not because they had any skill in the field. Although I develop games as a hobby, I wouldnt consider this major because I am not really interested in being stuck into game design my entire life.
I think many people on Slashdot would argue about Gates/Allen being some of the best programmers. You may be right that *in the past* many good programmers did not finish college. But also, mind you that back then (~25 years ago) most universities did not have a computer science major. Gates was a math major. Also, back then computer graphics was practically non-existant. I don't think that Gates/Wozniak would know any of the amazing hacks that are done in computer games to make them run fast (like not having specular light reflections in Quake). And I don't think that you can learn those by just coding from age 13. Things have become much more complicated in the last 20 years and not going to college will probably not help you. I know, Einstein flunked math even though he was Einstein but not everyone is Einstein.
A college friend got a job this way from Geology - for his masters he wrote a program to create 3d fractal landscapes from data, and got hired to do background scenes on Mars for Total Recall. I have no idea where it went from there - hope he stayed in the fun stuff.
It is called Digipen Institute, and it has campuses in Redmond and Vancouver. I have never been there, but when I worked at [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE], I interviewed a ton of graduates, and they had better skills, more diverse skills, and better communications skills (big thing, yeah) then a lot of the industry people I was talking too. They had to build working games, from the ground up, in teams, from their freshmen years, and they used all the top APIs and tools, stuff as good as we had. [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE] used to be the "college" of the computer game industry, especially outside of CA, but Digipen may have that beat.
Digipen is pretty expensive, (300/hr), but the classes seemed to be pretty hard, and the graduates knew their stuff! If I was a rich kid who wanted to do games, I could think of worse ways (like being a playtester!) to enter the industry.
The URL is HERE
Donut, mere lead programmer
Somehow, I find it hard to believe that God would limit half the population of the world to a single occupation. That people like you want to impose such limits using His name is one of the reasons so many people have developed a knee-jerk reaction against religion.
Ok. Know that we have the course outlined, what supplies are we going to need for class?
How much will the academic versions of games cost at the bookstore?
How much of the course will include artistic classes so we have decent content (characters, textures, etc.) after we have coded everything? Great AI will not be that impressive if the game looks like it was drawn by a 4th grader.
Are any of the game manufactures going to supply some game code? I know we have Quake I,Descent code, etc. but I mean they could turn over some abandon projects over to the schools. Sierra just killed a project that was almost finished here recently. They could give it to the school with the provision that they would get the final product back to distrubute. Of course it would probably be on the school's FTP tool but whatever money they make would be gravy and offset costs they incured up to the point they abandoned the project.
How much can I write off on my taxes to educational expenses? I have a pretty good amount racked up on games and hardware and research into multiple platforms. I could have a really nice return next year.
Alias | Wavefront makes very nice software... or so I hear. The stuff's like 20k for a fully functional commercial seat - um, I'll stick with LightWave. At 2k for a commercial seat (and how am I 'commercial'? I'm sure as hell not making any money from it yet) it's still expensive, but at least we're not still waiting for 'Sumatra' (COUGH LW6!).
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
What? No rocket jumping? The American education system really is going down hill.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
As for other places that teach game design, I'm currently enrolled in a two-year program at a college in Miramichi City, New Brunswick, Canada. It allows students the choice of studying either coding or graphics, and also has as part of it's core classes in game design, mechanics, and artificial intelligence. The final requirement for graduation from the course is, naturally, a completed game.
I game, therefore I am...
okay, thats just wrong. yeah, the article's title is "How about a B.A. in Quake?" but it quickly goes on to clarify that the program is in 'gaming studies,' not quake. big surprise that MSNBC would twist the truth a bit to get you interested, but come on /., transcend.
as far as the program goes, it sounds like a great idea to me. we seem to support people who devote their whole lives to games in the physical world.. whats the big difference? what makes video games more/less important?
its just human creativity/imagination at work, nothing wrong with that.
This actually isn't the only degree program in game programming. Digipen University in Vancouver
(there's a Redmond campus too, though I don't know how suspicious we should be about that) has offered one for a few years, and it is reportedly quite rigorous. I'm not sure how broad the program is in terms of the non-technical disciplines. It was sponsored by Nintendo in an attempt to address a perceived industry shortage
in game programmers...
I've tried them, and thought while they were better than most of the stuff that's being thrown at us, the user interface was a little too slow. Combat seemed to take too long, and there was too much of it. But maybe I've just gotten too old and impatient.
So the wheel should be reinvented on a regular basis then? This is what happens when you don't have at least one Compsci graduate on the team. Compsci teaches lots of basic algorithms (most of the course is what _not_ to do) and also how to estimate how fast new algoithms will run. If the game in your example is CPU bound then a Athlon 850 + DDR Geforce would probably bring it up to a playable 30-40 frames a second. However if it I/O bound then you'll have to wait for a change in memory architecture for a speed up. I do not rate Gates as a programmer _all_ of his code was scrapped in the MSDOS 3.3 rewrite.
Hate to pick nits, but: cout must have a operator. And, you don't need braces for one line of code. Have a nice day!
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
"I prefer women who are strong and secure enough to take their assigned role in life, just as strong and secure men have always taken their assigned role. Fair's fair: Do you see me demanding to be allowed to lay around the house all day, dusting a little bit here and there and devoting a few spare minutes to the children?" yea why dont we just go back to the 'good old days' when women were expected to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen without any hope of ever achieving something in life; because simpletons like yourself had their oh so precious masculinity threatened by women who can think for themselves. yeah that sounds great. guess what, the good old days never existed. If you aren't a troll you are sad little man.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It's a Bachelor's Degree in Game Programming. I don't know about you, but I don't know of anyone that got a B.A. in one semester. As for curriculum and what could be tought: there is alot that goes into developing the game. High-end mathematics and physics especially. If you're in a smaller group you might need to know the 3D art stuff. If you want an idea of the complexity, get a copy of Andre LaMothe's book "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Guru's" or his earlier book by the same title minus Windows. There's also a plethora of other books that explain the complete process of developing a computer game. Also, language is irrelevant. For example, if I wanted to use Quake source code to teach how to render a bitmap to the screen, I would start by requiring that students had already taken a C class and convert to a flowchart. I would probably give examples of the same thing in other languages.
oh and what HORRIBLE barbarism it is...they teach you to love God, Jesus, AND Mary (perish the thought!!)
-Evergreen
"Your "civilizations" are whorehouses drenched in blood. You may keep them for yourself, I don't want any part of them. "
and what is america,...? every day, people are murdered, raped, abused, neglected, maligned, mistreated, aborted, cheated on, and so forth...and these things arent new nor are they instigated solely by pagans, luciferians, or other "evil" people...
plenty of people who were taught the ten commandments still do very bad things, sometimes they even believe they are doing it FOR "God", (getting rid of those horrible sinners, those blasphemers, etc.)
If a kid refuses to say the pledge of allegience they got rocks thrown through the window and hateful messages by mail and phone from all the "good christians"
the countries listed, and many others, qualify to be called "civilizations" just as much or more as america and the other so-called "christian" nations.
-Evergreen
A "conservative," by definition, wants to "conserve" the status quo.
Not quite. All the conservatives on the late 1990's want everything but the status quo. President Reagan hard wanted to keep the nation at it's status quo deadlock with Communism or economic hardship. Read about his speech at the Brandenburg gate, the famous, "Mr. Gorbachev open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" line. That was a battle between Reagan and his speech writers and the NSA begging him to leave things at the status quo, don't piss off the Soviets.
The status quo changes throughout history, oddly enough. No one group is purely for the status quo. We just happen to live in a time when things need changing. Conservitism is more about restoring the idea, dating back to the late 1700's, that the government should do only as little as needed, and leave the states to do the rest.
Take Roe vs Wade, conservatives don't just say, "Make all abortions illegal," but instead revert it to the states to decide. Or what sort of flags are flown over a state capitol, Bush, McCain, et al are lambasted for "not making up their mind" on the issue, when the one correct answer when you keep the Constitution in mind, is "it's up to the state to decide." If, as Mr. Gore stated a few weeks ago, "over 80% of the people" in South Carolina are against it, I don't understand how they elect state assemblymen that haven't torn it down by now. Or education, get the federal governemetn (and NEA) out of it and give it back to the state and local levels. The federal governement can oversee it, make sure kids are taught, but not to the point of, "You must teach X, Y, Z or else no money for you!"
I guess Conservatism is most about conserving those ideals that got this country started in the first place, a very simple federal governement, all men are created equal, all that nonsense. There has been bumps in the road along the way, we learn from our mistakes, but one day we'll get it right.
Yeah that one piqued my curiosity, too. Typically any computer science degree is abstracted to the point where it will actually be useful for years and years after you graduate - the whole "We don't teach you C, we teach you how to program" philosophy. Yet by delving into disciplines like human kinetics they are moving away from this. Certainly knowledge in this field is useful for some sort of first-person sim, but who's to say that FPSs aren't a passing fad? Ten years ago they would have been teaching things like writing a software texture renderer or sprite animation. Those are practically dinosaurs now, and if you'd been trained in them you'd be back in school by now. I'm curious if they will be able to tailor this degree so that it's dynamic enough to still be useful a couple years of of college, considering that games are pretty much the only field of software that actually innovates and pushes the technological limits anymore.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This is a true troll in the grand Kiboesque tradition! Keep it up, this is much better quality than the idiots we see on here at other times.
So, how do I get an honorary degree in Quake or modification design and implementation? :)
/// Zoid.
This can only get worse in a degree program that focuses on gaming. So what's a geek to do? Transfer to Geography. Well not quite Geography. I'm now in the second year of a 4 year degree in Media, Information, Technoculture and Geography, and I'm happy to say that the ratio if guys to girls is much better. What is a geek doing in Media and Geography?
Its all about the information. Media and Information science is about who controls the information and where its at. Its a new program at the University of Western Ontario.
Why Geography? I like flight sims. ;-)
GIS (Geographical Information Systems) is one of the most data intensive applications there is. Its all about crunching big numbers and making sense of them.
The 4 years you spend at University will be the one time in your life when you will be surrounded by people your own age of the opposite gender. Why waste by taking courses with other male geeks, where there is so much geekyness in so many other fields? Open your mind... Explore the possibilities... (Try a Marijuana Cookie... ) =)
Link to Media, Information, Technoculture
Reality has a liberal bias
wavefront is very expensive. we used to have to license that stuff while I was a sys admin at a multimedia development department at a university. i can't imagine what the costs are for a commercial license.
Seriously, you couldn't cover the entire depth of a complex system like Quake in one semester. Could you do it in two? You'd still be pressed. And the individual aspects of the game (skin modelling) would be better taught with applications and systems that were built for doing just that, not ones that do it out of incidence for appearance like quake.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
$1 million dollars of something that can be duplicated for 0.05% (1/2000) of its selling price makes for a pretty nice tax deduction. It's like printing money.
Alias/Wavefront is very high-end 3D-graphics modelling/rendering software. It's used for stuff like special effects for films. The article is incorrect when it says Alias is a 'game maker'. Licences for their software are extremely expensive, it's not something you'd run on your PC at home, it's more the kind of software that's people buy SGI workstations for.
Wish I'd had it when I was studying computer graphics at university.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
The article mentions gaming-type courses also now being offered by MIT and NYU, but are there many (any?) instituitons that have been set up solely for gaming education. If memory serves me correctly there is a school recently opened in Brisbane, Australia for gaming education (requiring some sort of portfolio of previous work). So what about the US and elsewhere?
Gaming is a very significant field in the next step of human communication. Human communication started with simple gestures, growing in complexity to be more expressive, systematically "cleaned up" to provide more consistent meaning to the messages.
We then got speech, words and writing. All significant advances in human communication. These were great, but bandwidth was low. The bandwidth limitation was due to geographic restrictions. You couldn't speak to millions of people around the world, because there were no means to do so.
Then came the technology for telecommunication. We got phones, we got radios, we got television. Phones were relatively low bandwidth, while radio and television were relatively high bandwidth. Of course, we all know that the architecture of that was hierarchical in nature, as broadcast media are wont to be.
We communicate to share ideas. But more importantly, we inherently want others to see our ideas, be influenced by our ideas, and become one of 'us'. This is the concept of memes, of course. Religion has very deep roots in the idea of memes. So do movies, tv shows, books, and more blatantly capitalistically, advertisement. They all want to sell you an idea, pass on the idea, and let you pass it on to yet more people. We are a people whose personality is defined by the memes that have infected us throughout the years with the (now) 'traditional' media.
Gaming is one step further (much like the Internet is, but they are on different conceptual levels, so there's no comparing them). Gaming also spreads memes (good vs. evil, what is mean by good and what is meant by evil, etc.) Gaming takes it one step further than broadcast media like movies, etc., in that it is actually allowing you to train in a 'practical' application of the memes in question.
To give you an idea of what I'm talking about: In many games, we are constantly trying to defeat an evil archvillan and his (usually of male gender) henchmen, who are bent on taking over the world, dominating the population, destroying the spirit of goodness, etc. Where there is actually a slight hint of plot and morality, this is the archetypical theme.
It is no surprise, then, that these ideas often reflect historical governments and events. Now that we are living in a democracy, and (mostly) everyone sees it's good, then the games will depict anti-democratic ideas as evil.
Games, then, are neat little workbooks that now only teach us how to think and act, but gives us the opportunity to practice. Of course, there are many more lessons being taught in these games, many of them involve something along the lines of 'practice makes perfect' or 'journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step' kind of morals. These morals were taught in fables and stories. Now that we have computers and interactivity, games have increasingly taken on these roles.
I think that in the future, games will become like storybooks of the past. In fact, it won't be that different than the book as depicted by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. So active academic pursuit of gaming will be crucial in the fields of humanities and communication. So this is a great first step. Don't fall into the trap of shallow assumption that this is not a serious thing. It's more serious than studying computer science (in that it is more interdisciplinary, and consequently cares about the sociological impacts).
~svoboda
~svoboda
Practice kind randomness and beautiful acts of nonsense.
Just like in a lot of other industries, the money drove out the creativity. There's more drama, creativity, and dignity in Nethack than in the ostentatious, 3-D accelerated pieces of fluff that come out now. The problem seems to be the same thing that hit the movie industry; design by focus group. Paradoxically the games have gotten less complex from a player's perspective as they get more so from a designer's viewpoint. Look how much they fit into Wasteland or Ultima V; instead of filling the CDs with 500 meg cut scenes I'd love to see a version of those old games with more modest graphics and a much bigger world to explore.
This may not apply in all situations, but I think in the past, the better programmers have not usually had the better education. Many of the best programmers in the past were either dropouts or didn't go to college at all (Gates/Allen, Wozniak). It happens more often than not where a software company brings in people with PhD's or whatever to design something really new and cool, and it ends up sucking because its either too slow (because the programmer does not know any of the speed hacks that somebody who's been programing since they were 13 might know), or the UI sucks (you can't create a good UI if you haven't used computers for long enough to know what a good UI is). This applies to all areas of programming, but there is one game that illustrates my point, unfortunately I cannot remember its name. Anyway, it used a pixel-volume engine, and was really cool and looked amazing, but unfortunately even my 500Mhz PIII and Voodoo 3 3k (both brand new when the game came out) could not get over 23 fps. I'm willing to bet that somebody focused on speed from the onset, and not doing a cool new engine could have accomplished the same thing, and had it run faster. But college learned people often are more interested in research, therefore they wind up with the 'new and cool' factor above the speed factor in their products.
This is not much different then when I was in college and they had course study and degrees in such things as "basket weaving" and "frisbee throwing" (I kid you not).   The frisbee throwing was related to physics...
;-)
The point was to design an entire course of study (which included the "required" courses like humanities, social/behavioral sciences, writing, foreign languages, and physical/biological sciences + math) around that "theme".
It might sound hokey on the surface but if gaming is a market, how else to do it?   I can see it including stuff like psychology, etc., whereby you need to understand human behavior quite a bit in order to design a game, or history, where you might want to focus on "epic" games with historical themes.   Of course the programming is a must as well...
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Nice misleading story. Of course to report on things accurately, you'd have to investigate and read up first huh? At this point, Slashdot might be better off becoming a site for Press Releases.
"As a gesture of support for the UC program, game-maker Alias/Wavefront has donated $1 million in software."
Either that's a lot of software or its very expensive. What kind of software? Are they wisely getting these students hooked and locked on their software? Its good when its free, but I hope they know the costs when there comes a time when they have to start paying for further use and productivity.
Not to nitpick, but a programmer who learned how to program from an Algorithm viewpoint and had some sort of liberal arts education should be able to program anything. I think getting the quote from the 3DO (giggle) guy just confirms that this program is lame.
Teaching to an area where there's a lot of interest is a good idea -- it makes the students want to learn. I don't know what level they're planning on starting at, but as someone who's played with Quake source, I can say that the C source is of reasonable complexity, enough so that a CS course could take advantage of it as a teaching tool fairly well. Add that to the opportunities working with modelling and skin design, and you could build a curriculum that offered a broad range of CS experiences. Kudos to UC Irvine! Matthew
The issue here is that coding is not the shortcomings of most current games. Q3 looks incredible. It has great bots. It has no plot. It is the last of these statements which is its the greatest criticism.
Carmack is a coding god but his games reflect what he enjoys. Simple shoot-em ups. He is the Swartzeneggar of gaming, looks pretty but poor content. This is what is running gaming into a rut.
Half-Life was not a great game because the engine was incredible. It was great because it was immersive. It felt real, you could believe you were Gordon Freeman. It explained away some of the conventions of gaming, like health recharges, in a believable way. This and its AI is what made HL a great game.
Games need better writing not better engines. Graphics and multimedia are part of this, a well made environment adds a lot to a game just as a poor one subtracts from it. Think of how crappy level design hinders a good engine, like in Twisted Metal 3 on PS. What people need to teach the next generation of game makers is dramatic construct and basic fictional writing abilities, not necessarily just coding which is actually a relatively small part of the total game design.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
From the article:
The program incorporates courses in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, graphic design and human kinetics. The goal is to create students who are not only able to code and design games but also have an understanding of the societal impact and significance of this $7 billion industry.
IIRC the purpose of a college education is to provide a person with the skills required to succeed in the real world (i.e. workplace in one's future career). Currently gaming is pulling in almost as much money as Hollywood (the movie industry) yet most college computer science curriculums(sp?) act like it doesn't exist. On the other hand we see nothing wrong with film schools or colleges with curriculum emphasizing parts of of the cinematographic process including acting. People like you with their heads in the sand disgust me. Have you ever looked at the source code for Quake I or ever wondered how difficult a management process is involved in game development? After all isn't game development still software development?
Why is a course exploring various aspects of the game development process and its ramifications to society as a whole suddenly a bad idea? Does the fact that the software being developed is primarily going to be used for entertainment purposes somehow make game development trivial...I guess with that reasoning all the work done from 1960s on ARPANET till today building the infrastructure, protocols and software that is the Internet is pretty trivial since most people who use the internet today do so to use chat rooms, view porn, browse the web etc.
PS: The article makes no mention of Quake, this addition seems to have been made by the original poster for sensationalistic effect which has been achieved given your rant.
So, it isn't a major in quake but possibly in gaming...
The Dean of the School is Thresh, and he will of course name the rest of Death Row his Associate Deans.
The recommended course structure of this program is outlined below.
Semester One
Semester Two
Semester Three
Semester Four
Due to the newness of this program, other semesters have not been scheduled as of yet. However, courses to be offered include Advanced CTF, InstaGib: The Only Way to Frag, and more.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
for that department...
Well, I always knew I was preparing myself for some important post in life.
QK104: Quake Linguistics. Topics will include study and morphology of native Quake player dialects, including such colloquialisms as "BFG, Owned, Frag" and others. Prerequisites: Q103, "Bindings" and Q102, "The Zen of 1337"
Gaming is stagnating, and that's a fact. Innovation? Try EA SPORTS XXXXXXXX SEPTEMBER EDITION. Another Dune 2 clone. Another 3d shooter. I think that the game industry took a wrong turn at a certain point and for the right reasons but we're still having to deal with the fallout. Namely, when CD drives allowed massive (relatively) storage with muldimedia there was all this talk about synergy between the movie industry and gaming. The result was crap games with shit interactivity and horrid FMV. What should have been reaped from Hollywood was storytelling that is rigourously tested, strong characterization, and an attempt to be something more. 99% of movies are crap, yes, but the ones that get away and are something extraordinary are so special because of what an epiphany they represent. I feel gaming has come close but nowhere near having the emotional effect of the greatest movies. The games that are widely loved by the hardcore gamers are the ones that come closest to sports, (and that's what deatmatches are really) which cannot do this. There is, in my mind, an arena for games which want to do more. This is why Metal Gear Solid, say, impressed me from a design perspective so much. It was an action adventure game with a unique interface and play style, highly recognizable and differentiated characters, and an actual attempt to say something about the world - all within the confines of a game. I think a glance at Quake 3 will confirm that there is a marked difference between design and coding. I'm not slamming Q3, I'm a huge admirer, and am in awe of John Carmack and his talents, but I do not think Quake 3 is a brilliant work of immersive design. Granted, it aims for a different experience.
One of the hardest things about the game industry is that cracking into designing, which I believe should be a specialized position, happens through moving up the ladder either as a coder or a play tester... And I'm sorry, but I just do not feel that coders (with the exception of Neal Stephenson) make great storytellers, nor the greatest human computer interaction gurus. It's about time designing was made a discipline of its own, and there was a way for people to get an overview of gaming and come to companies with some form of acceptable accreditation. The game designers I respect the most did not come from a traditional coding background, people like Warren Spector (who wrote novels and worked for TSR) or Rod Fung (who comes from a cinematography background)
PC gaming is in for a big shock soon, undoubtedly, with the new generation of consoles and the simple fact is that the games that sell well are no longer real PC games but bargain Deer Hunting titles. That's a fact. There's amazing, ridiculous amounts of money floating around, with nothing to show for (COUGH COUGH ION STORM) and designer's reputations based on tenuous connections to a track record (COUGH COUGH JOHN ROMERO). Hopefully the establishment of such a course will make the gaming industry listen and change their ways, and we'll be better off for it. Oh, and BTW, Alias/Wavefront is amazingly expensive stuff. One of the best things about this course is that I can see students getting a chance to use the really high end industry strength apps without having to warez them. I do CG in my free time as a film student trying to learn tools, and recently pricing Maya - there's even a yearly license fee for student use. If as a student I was able to get my hands on motion capture utilities, a terrific sound recording studio, people interested in the same thing (unlike film school where there's like 2 people who want to make something that people would actually want to see and everyone else wants to make "art"), and access to some high end apps sounds blissful and serious to me.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
The real problem will be getting teachers competent to teach this stuff.
...calling home and telling your folks that you're majoring in a computer game._ _
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I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.