The rewards are no good
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
As long as most people don't really care much either way, there's no incentive for game writing to rise above the level of a bad fantasy or sci-fi novel. You can sell a game on great gameplay or great graphics, but it's pretty tough to sell it on great writing alone.
It doesn't help that the people who do seem to care about game writing tend to have rather indiscriminate taste. Every time someone says "the plot of Metal Gear Solid is better than any action movie" (or, worse, "Xenogears has a great story"), I die a little inside.
It all comes down to two things: weather and easy access to outdoor recreation.
Cities full of skinny people tend to be those where there's always something to do and it's rarely too hot or too cold, whereas cities in flat places where there's nothing to do outside and it's hot all summer or frigid all winter tend to be full of fatties.
Suburban sprawl is pretty much the same no matter what part of the country you're in, but it's no coincidence that the fittest cities are places like Seattle or San Francisco and the fattest cities are places like Omaha and Houston. Hell, in Houston it's taxing enough to walk across a parking lot in the summer, let alone run five miles every morning.
I signed up for Wells Fargo's BillPay to pay for my car loan. It didn't actually work, so I tried to cancel. There's absolutely no way to cancel the service online (despite it being very, very easy to sign up for it). I sent them an E-mail asking how I could cancel it online and the response was "sorry you didn't like the service, we've canceled your account". Awesome, I think.
OpenOffice looks enough like [an uglier version of] Word that people will expect everything to work the same way...and then get frustrated when it doesn't.
Glacier ice keeps your drink colder and cold longer than regular ol' ice machine ice does. Disappointingly, even here in Alaska nobody has tapped into this vast potential market yet.
I think the design philosophy for remote controls is "every remote a universal remote". Despite this, the only time I ever see anyone using one remote to control everything is when they have specifically gone out to buy another remote to do so. Go figure.
I had pretty good luck with Cingular here in Alaska. The coverage is pretty good (all things considered) and I was paying about $15 less per month than any of the local offerings.
Unfortunately, Cingular doesn't actually offer local service up here so I had to claim I lived at my father's house in California to get them to send me a phone (never mind that I gave them Alaska billing and shipping addresses). Eventually they figured out that 100% of my calls were roaming and they politely ordered me to quit using their service. On the other hand, they didn't charge me a cancellation fee or ask for the phone back.
Now I'm on Cellular One (the real owner of the network) paying $15 more a month for fewer features and fewer minutes. Blast!
The comments on this post provide a great example of how this sort of crap happens in the first place. The developers keep shouting "more choice is always better!" without regard as to whether it is needed or useful.
We should really be looking at this from the perspective of diminishing returns. Distinguishing between, say, "log off" and "shut down" is great, but eventually you reach a point where it simply isn't meaningful to add any more complexity to the software. How many people even know what Hibernate does, after all?
That said, although most of the shutdown options are indeed nearly useless on a desktop, they are very useful on a laptop. Perhaps Windows just needs to figure out what type of computer it's running on and act accordingly.
Heh heh heh, not only did my school district (in a well-to-do part of Northern California) gerrymander the boundaries such that there'd be more nonwhite students at my high school, that was the specific stated goal of the redistricting.
The lack of new refineries has nothing to do with peak oil or a bunch of oil companies conspiring to rip you off. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that, thanks to environmentalists (specifically, their lawyers) and government regulation, it's been nearly impossible to get this sort of thing approved in the last few decades. Oh well.
Indeed. The sorts of stories and activities that men like tend to translate very easily into video games. The sorts of stories and activities that women like usually don't work as video games. In other words, there's a fundamental difference in the interests of men and women, and adding cute baby animals to Grand Theft Auto or toning down the violence in Halo isn't going to change that one bit.
If anything, feminizing video games is just going to make them less fun for men. Let's not screw up our hobby because we foolishly think doing so is going to get us laid.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as most people don't really care much either way, there's no incentive for game writing to rise above the level of a bad fantasy or sci-fi novel. You can sell a game on great gameplay or great graphics, but it's pretty tough to sell it on great writing alone.
It doesn't help that the people who do seem to care about game writing tend to have rather indiscriminate taste. Every time someone says "the plot of Metal Gear Solid is better than any action movie" (or, worse, "Xenogears has a great story"), I die a little inside.
It all comes down to two things: weather and easy access to outdoor recreation.
Cities full of skinny people tend to be those where there's always something to do and it's rarely too hot or too cold, whereas cities in flat places where there's nothing to do outside and it's hot all summer or frigid all winter tend to be full of fatties.
Suburban sprawl is pretty much the same no matter what part of the country you're in, but it's no coincidence that the fittest cities are places like Seattle or San Francisco and the fattest cities are places like Omaha and Houston. Hell, in Houston it's taxing enough to walk across a parking lot in the summer, let alone run five miles every morning.
I signed up for Wells Fargo's BillPay to pay for my car loan. It didn't actually work, so I tried to cancel. There's absolutely no way to cancel the service online (despite it being very, very easy to sign up for it). I sent them an E-mail asking how I could cancel it online and the response was "sorry you didn't like the service, we've canceled your account". Awesome, I think.
OpenOffice looks enough like [an uglier version of] Word that people will expect everything to work the same way...and then get frustrated when it doesn't.
Somehow every other coffee place I've been to charges 50-75% less than Starbucks
Strange - in every city where I've ever bought coffee, Starbucks is no more expensive than any other coffee shop.
Glacier ice keeps your drink colder and cold longer than regular ol' ice machine ice does. Disappointingly, even here in Alaska nobody has tapped into this vast potential market yet.
I think the design philosophy for remote controls is "every remote a universal remote". Despite this, the only time I ever see anyone using one remote to control everything is when they have specifically gone out to buy another remote to do so. Go figure.
I had pretty good luck with Cingular here in Alaska. The coverage is pretty good (all things considered) and I was paying about $15 less per month than any of the local offerings. Unfortunately, Cingular doesn't actually offer local service up here so I had to claim I lived at my father's house in California to get them to send me a phone (never mind that I gave them Alaska billing and shipping addresses). Eventually they figured out that 100% of my calls were roaming and they politely ordered me to quit using their service. On the other hand, they didn't charge me a cancellation fee or ask for the phone back. Now I'm on Cellular One (the real owner of the network) paying $15 more a month for fewer features and fewer minutes. Blast!
The comments on this post provide a great example of how this sort of crap happens in the first place. The developers keep shouting "more choice is always better!" without regard as to whether it is needed or useful.
We should really be looking at this from the perspective of diminishing returns. Distinguishing between, say, "log off" and "shut down" is great, but eventually you reach a point where it simply isn't meaningful to add any more complexity to the software. How many people even know what Hibernate does, after all?
That said, although most of the shutdown options are indeed nearly useless on a desktop, they are very useful on a laptop. Perhaps Windows just needs to figure out what type of computer it's running on and act accordingly.
Heh heh heh, not only did my school district (in a well-to-do part of Northern California) gerrymander the boundaries such that there'd be more nonwhite students at my high school, that was the specific stated goal of the redistricting.
The lack of new refineries has nothing to do with peak oil or a bunch of oil companies conspiring to rip you off. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that, thanks to environmentalists (specifically, their lawyers) and government regulation, it's been nearly impossible to get this sort of thing approved in the last few decades. Oh well.
Indeed. The sorts of stories and activities that men like tend to translate very easily into video games. The sorts of stories and activities that women like usually don't work as video games. In other words, there's a fundamental difference in the interests of men and women, and adding cute baby animals to Grand Theft Auto or toning down the violence in Halo isn't going to change that one bit.
If anything, feminizing video games is just going to make them less fun for men. Let's not screw up our hobby because we foolishly think doing so is going to get us laid.