Why are you assuming that all these scientists think they've got it all figured out. Right there in the article summary one of the quoted scientists says that they like when things don't fit their theories, because they'll learn more by figuring it out.
You're not being insightful, you're faking it by creating an issue that doesn't exist. Astrophysicists know as well as anybody how little they've actually figured out. All the new observational and simulation techniques that have been developed recently have raised way more questions than they've answered. I doubt you'd find a real scientist anywhere out there who'd say that we've figured out how the universe works.
I think the reality of the situation is that the internet and these social networks are out there, kids are interested in them, and they will be using them. Trying to lock them out of the schools, or pretending that they don't exist will just drive them "underground". It won't stop people from using them.
Instead you bring it out in the open, talk about it, and help people use it more responsibly.
It's not about healthy vs. sick, it's about risk. Insurance, in its most basic form, is about spreading risk. People who have habits that make their body less healthy are introducing more risk into the system, which raises the overall cost of the system. People with genetic predispositions towards things like excessive weight or high-cholesterol are certainly a concern, and I would hope that any system such as the one suggested in the article would find a good way to take that into account.
But someone who goes skydiving every weekend is adding extra risk, and is fully aware of that fact. That's probably why when I signed up for life insurance a few months ago, I was asked if I skydive. A smoker is adding extra risk, and should be fully aware of that fact.
In summation, it's not that people are sick that's upsetting. People generally don't choose to be sick. It's a problem when people make informed choices that leads them to greatly increase their risks, and as a result raise the risks of the whole system. In effect, they're raising the risks(and costs) for everyone. I don't mind sharing some of the risk with those people, but I'm not that excited about them adding extra cost into the system unnecessarily. They should chip in a bit more to make it more fair for everyone else.
You haven't been paying attention if until today you thought that Apple's legal team was any different from anywhere else, even if the rest of Apple really does have a unique culture. They have, for years, consistently been making moves and saying things that seem to go against the general outlook on life that Apple tries to express with their PR and advertising. Slashdot itself has seen lots of stories of Apple suing people who don't really deserve it, trying to suppress information that's already out on the internet, and saying dumb stuff that your average fanboy would never imagine Apple saying.
It's probably the result of a few things. One, lawyers live in their own little corner of the world, and no matter how you set up your company, you're going to have to deal with all that legalese, so you need some lawyers who live in that corner as well. Two, Apple isn't all sunshine and happiness, they're a business that needs to make money, and sometimes that need doesn't direct you towards the friendliest path. Third, despite what happens to some of their hardcore fans, Apple does not brainwash their employees into mindless drones, it's a company made up of thousands of individuals, many of which have differing opinions and views on things.
Apple has been around for decades, and has invested a lot of time and resources into building a business that works well within the existing patent system. Put quite simply, they have a lot to potentially lose if the patent system changes. They've got a big pile of patents protected by it, and they know how to get new patents. Google, on the other hand, is much newer, hasn't built up as large a patent portfolio, and as such has plenty to gain from a reformed system. You could argue that Apple could potentially benefit from good patent reform, but apparently they believe otherwise.
You're right about the AI stuff, that would probably be quite a challenge, maybe as part of the game state that is saved for the replay is enough contextual information that the AI can use to understand why it was doing whatever it was doing at a given point in time?
Devorak is confusing buzzwords with a bizarre economic fluke. Every time there's a new, potentially disruptive technology on the horizon, we get a bunch of the big players talking about how it's going to be a revolution, and a bunch of smaller companies come out of nowhere looking like they might be able to take advantage of this new thing to outmaneuver the entrenched giants.
A lot of press releases are issued, pundits wonder if this hot new buzzword is the next big thing, and a bunch of investors throw money at it, hoping they'll get lucky. At the end of the day, the buzzword usually ends up not being feasible for mass production, or not really gaining consumer acceptance, or for whatever reason it doesn't become the next big thing in terms of flying off of store shelves.
The dot-com bubble was unusual in that not only were there about a zillion buzzwords, there was also some real disruptive technology going on, and this whole internet thing is a technology that's disruptive at so many levels. The evolution of the internet effected not just the tech world, not just the corporate world, not just education, not just individuals sitting at their desk at home, it was something that changed how all of those things functioned. When it crashed, lots of people looking to get rich quick found out that it wasn't all that easy, but don't pretend like we ended up back where we started. A lot of people made a lot of money, and there are plenty of companies created in that madness that not only survived, but which continue to do well. A whole industry was born in the dot-com era.
Web 2.0 has plenty of hype, no doubt, and it will likely leave the internet a more interesting place than it was before. We're not moving into some sort of post-information age now, it's pretty much just business as usual. If there's anymore hype than normal, it's only because the internet makes distributing hype much easier and cheaper than it used to be.
Maybe this has been talked about before, but I haven't seen it anywhere. Supposedly the replays are stored not as a rendered movie file, but rather as the actual movements and events in the sequence that they happened. The being the case shouldn't it be possible to not only watch your replay from whatever angles and such, but also to jump back into the game from any arbitrary point in that replay and then play out the game differently?
That could allow for players to sort of create their own "scenarios" which they could start from, and try out different strategies and such to "solve" those scenarios. Maybe one team spends some time setting up some cool defenses at a base, and the other team can repeatedly try to take it over, without having to spend all that time setting the defenses up at the beginning of each round?
You're never going to be able to stop everything bad from happening. If some bad guy really wants to hurt someone, they'll find a way. I could do a lot of damage to the guy sitting next to me even if I brought nothing on the plane. I could get those headphones from the stewardess, and strangle the guy while he's sleeping. Or I could just sucker punch him in the face with my fists.
The hope is that methods can be developed that limit the amount of damage that a person can do. Bombs on planes are pretty scary because in one instant, a person can feasibly bring down the whole plane and everyone on board dies. That same guy can stab someone in the neck with a pen, and it certainly sucks for that person, but it'd only be a matter of minutes before other passengers have subdued the attacker, and he's no longer a threat.
The terrorists on 9/11 apparently hijacked the plane with box cutters. That only worked because the passengers figured that the hijackers were going to follow the standard hijacking script of landing the plane somewhere and making demands to release the hostages. If the passengers had in any way thought it probable that the hijackers were going to purposely crash the planes into buildings, they would've resisted. They'd have had nothing to lose, seeing as the other alternative was certain death. And five guys with box cutters aren't likely to survive too long against 150 passengers fighting for their lives. There's not likely to be another attack like 9/11 where a plane gets hijacked and flown into a building. The standard response from the passengers would be different now. It'd still suck if someone jabbed a pencil into your stomach on a plane, but that sort of thing isn't really any more likely to happen on a plane than anywhere else. The attacker wouldn't gain anything by being on an airplane, they'd just make their escape much less likely.
That's kind of the point of my post. A crappy story is a crappy story no matter how you tell it, so sure a text based game isn't guaranteed to work well. But on the flip side, a bad presentation can ruin even a great story. Now, writing good stories isn't a trivial matter, but it's the kind of thing that one or two skilled people can do. Turning that story into a photo-realistic looking video game is likely to take dozens of skilled people, and with the current limits of our computer technology, it's still not likely to achieve the same level of realism and detail that, at least my mind creates, when I read an engaging story.
All other things being considered, from just the standpoint of ease of production, it's much easier to expand a text-based game than a game with the fancy graphics that we've got today. The graphic power of modern computers also offers us many many advantages over text based games, which is why you so rarely see text-based games these days, but that's not what I was talking about.
It's a neat game. But it's very overwhelming at first. They're not always easy to find, but if you can discover a corp that is actually interesting in helping newbies, you'll have a much better time of it.
Agreed. Plenty of games have gone with a different art direction, and been better games for it. WoW even did this. It's a stylized, semi-cartoony look. It fits in well with the history of WC, as well as helps them avoid the issue of how difficult photo-realism really is.
But still, once you put images on the screen, it shuts off the images in the player's mind. Reading a book is a way different experience than watching a movie, even if they're telling the exact same story.
Yeah, I guess I was a little harsh towards Mr. Garriot, when the real criticism should go towards whoever wrote the linked article. The talk was likely far more informative.
Then what you're looking for is MMO's with a bigger focus on the multiplayer aspect. One game that I'll mention that does this pretty well is eve-online. It's intensely player driven, and its in-game universe has many player created and run alliances. Alliances can take territory and improve it, but they also have to defend it and can certainly lose it. There is communication, diplomacy, spying, backstabbing, love for allies, hatred of enemies...all beyond a level that you can probably believe unless you've seen it. It's certainly not a game for everyone, the gameplay is quite slow at times, it requires extensive teamwork and trust to accomplish much of what the game has to offer.
The game is very open-ended in not only how you achieve your goals, but also in letting you decide what your goals are. You can sit around by yourself shooting NPCs all day to make money, but unless you've made friends with the people who control the high-end space, you're not going to get access to the good NPCs. You can try to create your own corporation, ally with other corporations, hire yourselves out as mercenaries, try to set up a trade empire, etc.
A large corporation/alliance needs a whole host of roles filled in order to live and compete in alliance space. Logisitics are huge, finances need to be tracked, diplomacy is always on-going, intel-collecting is key. Some people are constantly testing new battle strategies, some are trying to make more game-money, others are trying to scam your corporation out of as much as they can run off with.
It's a cool game, but you'll only experience a small percentage of what it has to offer if you try to play it all by yourself.
The truth of the matter is that it's a lot easier to add complexity into a text based game, because the player's imagination will fill in so many of the details for you. Adding graphics, particularly ones that are trying to look photo-realistic, allows the player to shut off that part of their imagination, and so then you've got to fill it all in, which is a hell of a lot of work.
When I read "You throw the rock through the nearby window, which shatters into hundreds of razor sharp pieces. The shards fly into the store, catching the many shoppers by surprise. Panic breaks out amongst them.", In my mind I can picture all of that happening without very little effort. But for a game developer to create a scene like that in a game, they'd have to do an incredible amount of work if they wanted it to look good. Things like physics to have the glass shatter realistically. Some sort of AI(or at least scripting) to have the people react appropriately. Not to mention wrapping it all up in some pretty graphics with high-rez textures on detailed and well animated models.
All the computing power in the world isn't going to make designing photo-realistic gameplay anywhere near as easy as it is to do it text based (that's not to say that good text based games are a piece of cake though).
Hey awesome, if you've got some great ideas that gamers will love, then go ahead and make a new game.
I realize that this was an article that someone wrote based on this other guy talking, but there didn't seem to be much in the way of actual suggestions, just the observation that many MMO's have a lot of very similar qualities. Which, by the way, is true of just about every game genre that's ever existed.
I love that old school nintendo hockey game. I played the crap out of it. Also there was a code(it may have been with the game genie?) that made the ice frictionless, so you could just take a huge slapshot and the puck would bounce all over the place until it went into a goal. Awesome.
I think part of it is that Nintendo has been selling many Wii's to the more "casual" gamer, and golf is certainly a more casual and relaxed game to play than football. Even if the motion controls have simplified Madden, the series of options that the game of football presents to someone who's functioning as both a coach and a player is quite complex and the timing and execution required to make it work takes a lot of practice to get comfortable with.
It may take a significant amount of time to get really good at Golf, but any ol' idiot can take an occasional swing and hit the ball in the general direction that they're aiming.
Basically, the initial learning curve for any halfway realistic football game is going to be a good bit steeper than for a realistic golf game. It's just the nature of the two sports. If Nintendo's really making this big push into new gamer territory, it's certainly easy to see how golf would appeal more to many of those players (especially since they already got a taste of it with WiiSports golf).
I love subscription pricing. And I'll tell you why. Most games don't hold my attention more than a month or so. A few MMO's have been the exception, but I still feel like I'm getting a great deal with them. I've been playing EVE online for about a year and a half. At $15 per month, that's $270 that I've given them. That sounds like a lot, but if being distracted by EVE causes me to buy one less retail game at $50 every two months, then that's $450 worth of games I haven't paid for. Bump that up to a game every month, and you're approaching a grand.
The flip side is, what if I found a $50 game that could keep me entertained for 18 months. Well, that'd be pretty awesome, but hasn't happened for me yet. At $60 for a game, I need to get 4 months of solid entertainment (10hr+ per week) to match the return on investment I get from an MMO(@$15/mo).
I did, however, refuse to pay $50 up front for WoW, knowing that I'd have to pay monthly fees beyond that. That seemed ridiculous to me.
From what I've read it seems that a majority of games, even the big budget ones, have a relatively short productive shelf life. Meaning that the large majority of a game's sales come within its first few months of release. That being the case, a company like Valve or Id could easily release their a few months game before licensees get around to releasing, and then there's no real competition between them, because the original game is already past its prime.
Also, for a company that puts a lot of time and resources into an engine, if they just had their own game to make that money back, they could be in real trouble if that game tanks for whatever reason. But if they've got the engine set up for licensing, that's some extra insurance that they'll recoup their investment.
I'm wondering why you'd want to do all of the algae production in one giant lake? One of the reasons that oil is as contentious as it is is that can only be found in certain places. Prices went way up in the summer of 2005 because a couple of hurricanes hit a part of the country that was responsible for a large portion of our refinery capacity. We'd be far better off in general if we could distribute our energy supplies around the country and around the globe. Then the infrastructure as a whole would be far less susceptible to disruptive events, as well as requiring less energy to distribute our energy sources throughout the population.
Why would Florida want to buy algae-based fuel from California when Florida could just create their own algae farms?
I think your conclusion is a little too simple as well. Malware is not the only thing that motivates people to write better software
Quality is important to some people, even for things that can get fixed. (dreaded car analogy ahead!) I've had my car for about 6 years, and there has been a handful of recalls on it, where the manufacturer was notified of a problem, they notified me, and I took it in and got it fixed for free. And while it was nice that it was fixed for free, that doesn't mean that I won't take the existence of those design mistakes by that manufacturer into consideration when I'm looking to buy a new vehicle.
All the same, even if a software vendor eventually does patch all their stuff, the inconvenience and time required to do so surely is going to affect some people, and in turn affect the reputation of that company. While it's certainly a more complex situation than just "we'll release it when it's perfect", and there have undoubtedly been projects where just getting it to market was all that mattered, there are plenty of reasons beyond malware why a company might want strive to write better software. Believe it or not, but there are still people out there who take pride in their work and their reputation.
I'm glad that you like your PS3, I'm sure many people who own one have enjoyed it. But even if resistance is a great game, it's only one game, and if Sony wants $500-600 just for the console, then they're going to have to woo me with a large number of great games, or at least a handful of absolutely incredible ones.
It's also awesome that you're happy with Blu-ray, but there's plenty of evidence both in what people saying and what people are buying that shows that most people aren't particularly compelled by it(nor by HD-DVD). I don't know if it's fair to say I'm angry with Sony for pushing it so hard, but as an individual who has no-use for a Blu-ray player right now, I do think it's kind of disappointing that I'd be required to pay for one in order to play PS3 games.
Sony is getting a rough ride from all sorts of people, because they created a product that doesn't fit the market as well as they thought, they priced it well beyond what most of the market considered reasonable for a game console, and in all honesty, their executives were kind of dicks about the whole thing whenever they said anything. They fell into the same complacent trap that Nintendo did back in the day, so sure of their dominance that they could push whatever they wanted onto the consumer.
It took Nintendo a little while to get back on track, but they have, and as a result, we've got some pretty different and interesting gaming systems available. I think that not only has Sony earned some of the ire they've seen, but in the long run it will be good for the gaming industry. Even if the PS3 ends up a failure, I don't think Sony will abandon the industry, they'll hopefully take a fresh look at it, and rebuild their glory days.
Have you tried a Wii yet? Dismissing the remote as just something to "waggle" while you play does not begin to cover the capabilities that it's already demonstrated. I'll agree that much of what has been done with the Wii has been less about adding to traditional gaming, and more about creating new types of gaming, I still think we've gotten some hints at ways that the wiimote can improve even "traditional" game types. Redsteel certainly wasn't a perfect game, but the ability to point and aim like that in a FPS is ridiculously awesome. I'm extremely excited for the new metroid game. Madden football on the Wii is a significantly different experience than it is on other consoles.
Whether you were a gamer five years ago or never picked up a controller in your life until the Wii came out shouldn't really have a bearing on whether or not you enjoy something like WiiSports. It's not a new experience for non-gamers, it's a new experience for everyone, because games didn't work like that before.
Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid, SSB, Zelda...Nintendo is working on as many "deep" games as they always have, they're just also making a bunch of more casual games as well. Not to be too accusatory or anything, but you sort of sound like another "real" gamer who just feels like whining because "normal" people getting more into your hobby devalues it in your mind.
First off, comparing somebody destroying a mass-produced electronics device to somebody getting seriously injured is kind of silly. Nobody was hurt by blending an iPhone. The world was not deprived of a rare/priceless item. I don't understand what there is here to get upset about?
I guess you just don't believe that people should have fun for fun's sake. You could make an argument that what they did to an iPhone wasn't particularly funny or original, but the willitblend website has been around for a while and had tons of traffic, so obviously a whole lot of people find it amusing.
Anyways, your little rant about somebody breaking their ankle has absolutely nothing to do with iPhones in blenders, but I will say that trying to dunk a basketball off of a trampoline is not any safer or smarter than trying a rail slide on a skateboard. Both are obviously dangerous tricks to attempt, and I have a hard time feeling too sorry for anyone who gets injured doing either of them.
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Why are you assuming that all these scientists think they've got it all figured out. Right there in the article summary one of the quoted scientists says that they like when things don't fit their theories, because they'll learn more by figuring it out.
You're not being insightful, you're faking it by creating an issue that doesn't exist. Astrophysicists know as well as anybody how little they've actually figured out. All the new observational and simulation techniques that have been developed recently have raised way more questions than they've answered. I doubt you'd find a real scientist anywhere out there who'd say that we've figured out how the universe works.
I think the reality of the situation is that the internet and these social networks are out there, kids are interested in them, and they will be using them. Trying to lock them out of the schools, or pretending that they don't exist will just drive them "underground". It won't stop people from using them.
Instead you bring it out in the open, talk about it, and help people use it more responsibly.
It's not about healthy vs. sick, it's about risk. Insurance, in its most basic form, is about spreading risk. People who have habits that make their body less healthy are introducing more risk into the system, which raises the overall cost of the system. People with genetic predispositions towards things like excessive weight or high-cholesterol are certainly a concern, and I would hope that any system such as the one suggested in the article would find a good way to take that into account.
But someone who goes skydiving every weekend is adding extra risk, and is fully aware of that fact. That's probably why when I signed up for life insurance a few months ago, I was asked if I skydive. A smoker is adding extra risk, and should be fully aware of that fact.
In summation, it's not that people are sick that's upsetting. People generally don't choose to be sick. It's a problem when people make informed choices that leads them to greatly increase their risks, and as a result raise the risks of the whole system. In effect, they're raising the risks(and costs) for everyone. I don't mind sharing some of the risk with those people, but I'm not that excited about them adding extra cost into the system unnecessarily. They should chip in a bit more to make it more fair for everyone else.
You haven't been paying attention if until today you thought that Apple's legal team was any different from anywhere else, even if the rest of Apple really does have a unique culture. They have, for years, consistently been making moves and saying things that seem to go against the general outlook on life that Apple tries to express with their PR and advertising. Slashdot itself has seen lots of stories of Apple suing people who don't really deserve it, trying to suppress information that's already out on the internet, and saying dumb stuff that your average fanboy would never imagine Apple saying.
It's probably the result of a few things. One, lawyers live in their own little corner of the world, and no matter how you set up your company, you're going to have to deal with all that legalese, so you need some lawyers who live in that corner as well. Two, Apple isn't all sunshine and happiness, they're a business that needs to make money, and sometimes that need doesn't direct you towards the friendliest path. Third, despite what happens to some of their hardcore fans, Apple does not brainwash their employees into mindless drones, it's a company made up of thousands of individuals, many of which have differing opinions and views on things.
Apple has been around for decades, and has invested a lot of time and resources into building a business that works well within the existing patent system. Put quite simply, they have a lot to potentially lose if the patent system changes. They've got a big pile of patents protected by it, and they know how to get new patents. Google, on the other hand, is much newer, hasn't built up as large a patent portfolio, and as such has plenty to gain from a reformed system. You could argue that Apple could potentially benefit from good patent reform, but apparently they believe otherwise.
You're right about the AI stuff, that would probably be quite a challenge, maybe as part of the game state that is saved for the replay is enough contextual information that the AI can use to understand why it was doing whatever it was doing at a given point in time?
Devorak is confusing buzzwords with a bizarre economic fluke. Every time there's a new, potentially disruptive technology on the horizon, we get a bunch of the big players talking about how it's going to be a revolution, and a bunch of smaller companies come out of nowhere looking like they might be able to take advantage of this new thing to outmaneuver the entrenched giants.
A lot of press releases are issued, pundits wonder if this hot new buzzword is the next big thing, and a bunch of investors throw money at it, hoping they'll get lucky. At the end of the day, the buzzword usually ends up not being feasible for mass production, or not really gaining consumer acceptance, or for whatever reason it doesn't become the next big thing in terms of flying off of store shelves.
The dot-com bubble was unusual in that not only were there about a zillion buzzwords, there was also some real disruptive technology going on, and this whole internet thing is a technology that's disruptive at so many levels. The evolution of the internet effected not just the tech world, not just the corporate world, not just education, not just individuals sitting at their desk at home, it was something that changed how all of those things functioned. When it crashed, lots of people looking to get rich quick found out that it wasn't all that easy, but don't pretend like we ended up back where we started. A lot of people made a lot of money, and there are plenty of companies created in that madness that not only survived, but which continue to do well. A whole industry was born in the dot-com era.
Web 2.0 has plenty of hype, no doubt, and it will likely leave the internet a more interesting place than it was before. We're not moving into some sort of post-information age now, it's pretty much just business as usual. If there's anymore hype than normal, it's only because the internet makes distributing hype much easier and cheaper than it used to be.
Maybe this has been talked about before, but I haven't seen it anywhere. Supposedly the replays are stored not as a rendered movie file, but rather as the actual movements and events in the sequence that they happened. The being the case shouldn't it be possible to not only watch your replay from whatever angles and such, but also to jump back into the game from any arbitrary point in that replay and then play out the game differently?
That could allow for players to sort of create their own "scenarios" which they could start from, and try out different strategies and such to "solve" those scenarios. Maybe one team spends some time setting up some cool defenses at a base, and the other team can repeatedly try to take it over, without having to spend all that time setting the defenses up at the beginning of each round?
I don't know, just thinking out loud here.
You're never going to be able to stop everything bad from happening. If some bad guy really wants to hurt someone, they'll find a way. I could do a lot of damage to the guy sitting next to me even if I brought nothing on the plane. I could get those headphones from the stewardess, and strangle the guy while he's sleeping. Or I could just sucker punch him in the face with my fists.
The hope is that methods can be developed that limit the amount of damage that a person can do. Bombs on planes are pretty scary because in one instant, a person can feasibly bring down the whole plane and everyone on board dies. That same guy can stab someone in the neck with a pen, and it certainly sucks for that person, but it'd only be a matter of minutes before other passengers have subdued the attacker, and he's no longer a threat.
The terrorists on 9/11 apparently hijacked the plane with box cutters. That only worked because the passengers figured that the hijackers were going to follow the standard hijacking script of landing the plane somewhere and making demands to release the hostages. If the passengers had in any way thought it probable that the hijackers were going to purposely crash the planes into buildings, they would've resisted. They'd have had nothing to lose, seeing as the other alternative was certain death. And five guys with box cutters aren't likely to survive too long against 150 passengers fighting for their lives. There's not likely to be another attack like 9/11 where a plane gets hijacked and flown into a building. The standard response from the passengers would be different now. It'd still suck if someone jabbed a pencil into your stomach on a plane, but that sort of thing isn't really any more likely to happen on a plane than anywhere else. The attacker wouldn't gain anything by being on an airplane, they'd just make their escape much less likely.
That's kind of the point of my post. A crappy story is a crappy story no matter how you tell it, so sure a text based game isn't guaranteed to work well. But on the flip side, a bad presentation can ruin even a great story. Now, writing good stories isn't a trivial matter, but it's the kind of thing that one or two skilled people can do. Turning that story into a photo-realistic looking video game is likely to take dozens of skilled people, and with the current limits of our computer technology, it's still not likely to achieve the same level of realism and detail that, at least my mind creates, when I read an engaging story.
All other things being considered, from just the standpoint of ease of production, it's much easier to expand a text-based game than a game with the fancy graphics that we've got today. The graphic power of modern computers also offers us many many advantages over text based games, which is why you so rarely see text-based games these days, but that's not what I was talking about.
It's a neat game. But it's very overwhelming at first. They're not always easy to find, but if you can discover a corp that is actually interesting in helping newbies, you'll have a much better time of it.
Agreed. Plenty of games have gone with a different art direction, and been better games for it. WoW even did this. It's a stylized, semi-cartoony look. It fits in well with the history of WC, as well as helps them avoid the issue of how difficult photo-realism really is.
But still, once you put images on the screen, it shuts off the images in the player's mind. Reading a book is a way different experience than watching a movie, even if they're telling the exact same story.
Yeah, I guess I was a little harsh towards Mr. Garriot, when the real criticism should go towards whoever wrote the linked article. The talk was likely far more informative.
Then what you're looking for is MMO's with a bigger focus on the multiplayer aspect. One game that I'll mention that does this pretty well is eve-online. It's intensely player driven, and its in-game universe has many player created and run alliances. Alliances can take territory and improve it, but they also have to defend it and can certainly lose it. There is communication, diplomacy, spying, backstabbing, love for allies, hatred of enemies...all beyond a level that you can probably believe unless you've seen it. It's certainly not a game for everyone, the gameplay is quite slow at times, it requires extensive teamwork and trust to accomplish much of what the game has to offer.
The game is very open-ended in not only how you achieve your goals, but also in letting you decide what your goals are. You can sit around by yourself shooting NPCs all day to make money, but unless you've made friends with the people who control the high-end space, you're not going to get access to the good NPCs. You can try to create your own corporation, ally with other corporations, hire yourselves out as mercenaries, try to set up a trade empire, etc.
A large corporation/alliance needs a whole host of roles filled in order to live and compete in alliance space. Logisitics are huge, finances need to be tracked, diplomacy is always on-going, intel-collecting is key. Some people are constantly testing new battle strategies, some are trying to make more game-money, others are trying to scam your corporation out of as much as they can run off with.
It's a cool game, but you'll only experience a small percentage of what it has to offer if you try to play it all by yourself.
The truth of the matter is that it's a lot easier to add complexity into a text based game, because the player's imagination will fill in so many of the details for you. Adding graphics, particularly ones that are trying to look photo-realistic, allows the player to shut off that part of their imagination, and so then you've got to fill it all in, which is a hell of a lot of work.
When I read "You throw the rock through the nearby window, which shatters into hundreds of razor sharp pieces. The shards fly into the store, catching the many shoppers by surprise. Panic breaks out amongst them.", In my mind I can picture all of that happening without very little effort. But for a game developer to create a scene like that in a game, they'd have to do an incredible amount of work if they wanted it to look good. Things like physics to have the glass shatter realistically. Some sort of AI(or at least scripting) to have the people react appropriately. Not to mention wrapping it all up in some pretty graphics with high-rez textures on detailed and well animated models.
All the computing power in the world isn't going to make designing photo-realistic gameplay anywhere near as easy as it is to do it text based (that's not to say that good text based games are a piece of cake though).
Hey awesome, if you've got some great ideas that gamers will love, then go ahead and make a new game.
I realize that this was an article that someone wrote based on this other guy talking, but there didn't seem to be much in the way of actual suggestions, just the observation that many MMO's have a lot of very similar qualities. Which, by the way, is true of just about every game genre that's ever existed.
I love that old school nintendo hockey game. I played the crap out of it. Also there was a code(it may have been with the game genie?) that made the ice frictionless, so you could just take a huge slapshot and the puck would bounce all over the place until it went into a goal. Awesome.
I think part of it is that Nintendo has been selling many Wii's to the more "casual" gamer, and golf is certainly a more casual and relaxed game to play than football. Even if the motion controls have simplified Madden, the series of options that the game of football presents to someone who's functioning as both a coach and a player is quite complex and the timing and execution required to make it work takes a lot of practice to get comfortable with.
It may take a significant amount of time to get really good at Golf, but any ol' idiot can take an occasional swing and hit the ball in the general direction that they're aiming.
Basically, the initial learning curve for any halfway realistic football game is going to be a good bit steeper than for a realistic golf game. It's just the nature of the two sports. If Nintendo's really making this big push into new gamer territory, it's certainly easy to see how golf would appeal more to many of those players (especially since they already got a taste of it with WiiSports golf).
I love subscription pricing. And I'll tell you why. Most games don't hold my attention more than a month or so. A few MMO's have been the exception, but I still feel like I'm getting a great deal with them. I've been playing EVE online for about a year and a half. At $15 per month, that's $270 that I've given them. That sounds like a lot, but if being distracted by EVE causes me to buy one less retail game at $50 every two months, then that's $450 worth of games I haven't paid for. Bump that up to a game every month, and you're approaching a grand.
The flip side is, what if I found a $50 game that could keep me entertained for 18 months. Well, that'd be pretty awesome, but hasn't happened for me yet. At $60 for a game, I need to get 4 months of solid entertainment (10hr+ per week) to match the return on investment I get from an MMO(@$15/mo).
I did, however, refuse to pay $50 up front for WoW, knowing that I'd have to pay monthly fees beyond that. That seemed ridiculous to me.
From what I've read it seems that a majority of games, even the big budget ones, have a relatively short productive shelf life. Meaning that the large majority of a game's sales come within its first few months of release. That being the case, a company like Valve or Id could easily release their a few months game before licensees get around to releasing, and then there's no real competition between them, because the original game is already past its prime.
Also, for a company that puts a lot of time and resources into an engine, if they just had their own game to make that money back, they could be in real trouble if that game tanks for whatever reason. But if they've got the engine set up for licensing, that's some extra insurance that they'll recoup their investment.
I'm wondering why you'd want to do all of the algae production in one giant lake? One of the reasons that oil is as contentious as it is is that can only be found in certain places. Prices went way up in the summer of 2005 because a couple of hurricanes hit a part of the country that was responsible for a large portion of our refinery capacity. We'd be far better off in general if we could distribute our energy supplies around the country and around the globe. Then the infrastructure as a whole would be far less susceptible to disruptive events, as well as requiring less energy to distribute our energy sources throughout the population.
Why would Florida want to buy algae-based fuel from California when Florida could just create their own algae farms?
Yeah, except that you'd very quickly find yourself without a security team.
I think your conclusion is a little too simple as well. Malware is not the only thing that motivates people to write better software
Quality is important to some people, even for things that can get fixed. (dreaded car analogy ahead!) I've had my car for about 6 years, and there has been a handful of recalls on it, where the manufacturer was notified of a problem, they notified me, and I took it in and got it fixed for free. And while it was nice that it was fixed for free, that doesn't mean that I won't take the existence of those design mistakes by that manufacturer into consideration when I'm looking to buy a new vehicle.
All the same, even if a software vendor eventually does patch all their stuff, the inconvenience and time required to do so surely is going to affect some people, and in turn affect the reputation of that company. While it's certainly a more complex situation than just "we'll release it when it's perfect", and there have undoubtedly been projects where just getting it to market was all that mattered, there are plenty of reasons beyond malware why a company might want strive to write better software. Believe it or not, but there are still people out there who take pride in their work and their reputation.
I'm glad that you like your PS3, I'm sure many people who own one have enjoyed it. But even if resistance is a great game, it's only one game, and if Sony wants $500-600 just for the console, then they're going to have to woo me with a large number of great games, or at least a handful of absolutely incredible ones.
It's also awesome that you're happy with Blu-ray, but there's plenty of evidence both in what people saying and what people are buying that shows that most people aren't particularly compelled by it(nor by HD-DVD). I don't know if it's fair to say I'm angry with Sony for pushing it so hard, but as an individual who has no-use for a Blu-ray player right now, I do think it's kind of disappointing that I'd be required to pay for one in order to play PS3 games.
Sony is getting a rough ride from all sorts of people, because they created a product that doesn't fit the market as well as they thought, they priced it well beyond what most of the market considered reasonable for a game console, and in all honesty, their executives were kind of dicks about the whole thing whenever they said anything. They fell into the same complacent trap that Nintendo did back in the day, so sure of their dominance that they could push whatever they wanted onto the consumer.
It took Nintendo a little while to get back on track, but they have, and as a result, we've got some pretty different and interesting gaming systems available. I think that not only has Sony earned some of the ire they've seen, but in the long run it will be good for the gaming industry. Even if the PS3 ends up a failure, I don't think Sony will abandon the industry, they'll hopefully take a fresh look at it, and rebuild their glory days.
Have you tried a Wii yet? Dismissing the remote as just something to "waggle" while you play does not begin to cover the capabilities that it's already demonstrated. I'll agree that much of what has been done with the Wii has been less about adding to traditional gaming, and more about creating new types of gaming, I still think we've gotten some hints at ways that the wiimote can improve even "traditional" game types. Redsteel certainly wasn't a perfect game, but the ability to point and aim like that in a FPS is ridiculously awesome. I'm extremely excited for the new metroid game. Madden football on the Wii is a significantly different experience than it is on other consoles.
Whether you were a gamer five years ago or never picked up a controller in your life until the Wii came out shouldn't really have a bearing on whether or not you enjoy something like WiiSports. It's not a new experience for non-gamers, it's a new experience for everyone, because games didn't work like that before.
Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid, SSB, Zelda...Nintendo is working on as many "deep" games as they always have, they're just also making a bunch of more casual games as well. Not to be too accusatory or anything, but you sort of sound like another "real" gamer who just feels like whining because "normal" people getting more into your hobby devalues it in your mind.
First off, comparing somebody destroying a mass-produced electronics device to somebody getting seriously injured is kind of silly. Nobody was hurt by blending an iPhone. The world was not deprived of a rare/priceless item. I don't understand what there is here to get upset about?
I guess you just don't believe that people should have fun for fun's sake. You could make an argument that what they did to an iPhone wasn't particularly funny or original, but the willitblend website has been around for a while and had tons of traffic, so obviously a whole lot of people find it amusing.
Anyways, your little rant about somebody breaking their ankle has absolutely nothing to do with iPhones in blenders, but I will say that trying to dunk a basketball off of a trampoline is not any safer or smarter than trying a rail slide on a skateboard. Both are obviously dangerous tricks to attempt, and I have a hard time feeling too sorry for anyone who gets injured doing either of them.