While there's definitely some truth to what you're saying, I don't think that completely explains it. I think the truth of the matter is that A.I. is just plain harder than fancy graphics. In the world of academia, there have been plenty of people devoted specifically to work on AI. They aren't distracted by graphics, because that's a non-issue in their research. They've been working on this stuff for decades, and progress is still moving pretty slowly.
Compare that to graphics technology, which has advanced at a pretty relentless pace. Regardless of the economic incentives one way or another, I refuse to believe that there aren't some very smart people out there dedicated to AI research.
Whenever a gamer talks about HL, as you said the comparatively good AI is quite often mentioned. If it wasn't a marketable feature, then nobody would care enough to talk about it. I think if your AI was amazing and blew away editors at gaming mags/websites, they would rant about it plenty, and you would get a lot of great publicity which would help you move lots of extra units. It seems plausible enough that I can't believe that at least a few developers wouldn't have already gone that route if it were already possible.
I don't know if the hardware isn't powerful enough yet, or if the underlying research isn't far along enough, or if we need a whole different computer language paradigm before AI can make serious steps forward. But I think that it would've already happened if it was just a matter of someone throwing some significant resources at it. If you could figure out how to write some really competent general AI, the return on investment would be huge, extending well beyond gaming.
I don't want to say that there's no future for businesses in a "virtual world" that might share some qualities with SL, but as for SL itself, as I have experienced it over the past few years, no thanks.
Various people have been getting excited about the idea of "virtual reality" over and over again at least through the past couple decades, and while the reality has consistently fallen short of the hype, there's certainly a potential that's very compelling.
Second Life makes some of those potentials even more apparent, but that potential that it causes me to imagine makes its flawed current state even more obvious. Just a few of those flaws inherent in SL; crippling lag once you get any reasonable number of people into the same area of the grid, the ability of random people to perform unwelcome acts against your character or your land (and the meager amount of safeguards that you can protect yourself with), the random interpretations of acceptable conduct by the devs/GMs/moderators, the fact that most of these problems have existed for years and still haven't been fixed (meaning that the underlying structure or Linden Labs is unable/unwilling to change in ways necessary to solve these issues).
But the biggest difference between the web and SL is that a company could pretty much entirely control their website. They could own the server, write all of the webpages/scripts, etc. In SL, you're always reliant on Linden labs, which is in one sense, the unaccountable government that lords over the grid. This could change now that they're open sourcing the server. But at that point, I would argue that it's not SL anymore. Until now, SL has really been a service, and not a software package.
So it's not to say that no companies can find a use for a 3D based, open-ended, "virtual world" software platform. Just that the service that Linden Labs offered and called SL has not been well suited to the business related projects of the sort of scale that would justify the resources needed to develop it.
SL offers a few things that I find occasionally interesting. First off, it's a fancy chat service. I can talk with a bunch of people, and the 3D world it takes place in allows for a lot of creative ways for you to express yourself beyond just text.
Second, it's a big sandbox, and it gives you a fairly pervasive ability to create stuff. Although there are definite (and often times very annoying) limits to the modeling system and scripting system, you can still use them to make just about anything that you can imagine. If you enjoy that sort of free creativity, then SL offers it in a reasonably straight-forward package. If you spend a little bit of time being social, then you can easily find people to help you create, or just to share your creations with.
A third thing that I enjoy about SL is its potential for just ridiculousness. Parts of the SL world are a lot like those stupid, random, and often very amusing photoshopped pictures that people email to each other, except it happens in real time. I wouldn't say that spending time there makes me any smarter or a better person, but it's at least as amusing as watching most of the crap on TV these days.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
Well, sure, if you are going to define evolution as "change", then yes, the world, societies, and humanity will continue to evolve in that sense. But in terms of natural biological evolution shaping our DNA as it has over billions of years, that doesn't play much of a part in most of what you mentioned.
Human society is actually changing at an increasingly quick rate, well beyond anything that biological evolution might have in store for us. The way I spend my average day would probably be entirely unimaginable to my great-grandparents. In that sense, people are constantly adapting, trying to stay ahead of the curve and be successful. But the way that humans primarily do that, through technology, is entirely different from how all the other life forms on this planet adapt. The world as it exists today is drastically different from the world of 2000 years ago, yet there appears to have been very little change overall in the biological/physical attributes of humans. (Although I have read that we're generally getting a bit taller. This may have as much to do with improved nutrition as genetics though).
I would say that the ability to create technology does make us profoundly different from every other creature on earth. I wouldn't argue that other animals are entirely devoid of thought, or even some cognitive ability, or even some level of language. I guess you could argue for a while where exactly the threshold is, and how much it's a mix of not only brain capabilities but also physical attributes (things like an opposible thumb). But wherever you put that divide, the potential and capabilities of an average human to manipulate his/her environment for his/her benefit goes well beyond anything I've ever seen or heard about for any other animal. (A flip side is that we're also quite capable of destroying our environment to our own detriment, but I guess that just keeps things exciting)
I don't want to argue whether or not human consciousness/intelligence is some sort of magic, or gift from a God, or anything. Even if we can all agree that it's just a process of natural biological evolution, we've certainly reached a point where through our creativity and hard work, we can advance our capabilities far quicker than evolution would advance them for us. While we're not entirely free seperate from the biological world around us, and while our genetic strengths and flaws can still have significant bearing on our individual lives, humans have a level of control over their own future well beyond anything any other animal could hope for.
If you really think about it, if you want to view evolution as a procession towards "perfection", the really interesting thing is that whatever the process was that created DNA based life, it looks like it only happened once. And since then, as things have continued towards that "perfection", species have continued to diversify and become more and more dissimilar. The "perfect" life form, from a biological standpoint, is completely adapted to it and as such is also highly reliant on it.
I'm not entirely sure where intelligence fits into that. Like you said, it really moves us out of that system. In a lot of ways, the ability to create technology allows humans to "cheat the system". We can thrive in a lot of climates that our bodies are not really suited to by significantly manipulating the environment, or more commonly, creating little pockets of more comfortable climates in which we spend most of our time. Then you figure we've created lots of ways to easily kill each other, methods so destructive and pervasive that evolution couldn't possibly hope to keep up.
All that being said, in our world at large, evolution still needs to be a consideration for humanity, not because of our own DNA, but because of things like the emergence of drug resistant bacteria and such.
Those are both good points, but as someone involved in the design and construction of buildings, I can assure you that even if a client/architect/contractor are willing to deal with necessary design/construction effort to make a non-orthagonal building work, the costs tend to quickly go up, and that'll kill most projects faster than anything else.
Well, that's an ok argument for why you may or may not like a game, but isn't really a valid way to say definitively whether or not a game has any value.
Most of my "screwing around" time in GTA3 was task oriented, just random tasks that I came up with on my own. How quickly could I get to 4 wanted stars, and how long could I survive afterwards. Can I figure out a way to pile up cars or something to get my character up onto a ledge where I really shouldn't be walking. One time I find my way over a wall somewhere and there was a texture on the other side that said something to the effect of "You're not supposed to be here".
I don't know if that's really "self-improvement", but it was entertaining and I felt accomplished when I managed to do something that was difficult. Whether or not it was a task that the game designers had in mind isn't really relevant to me.
Something like pacman could maybe allow that sort of experimentation on much simpler scale (maybe something like beat this level while only making left turns), but I wouldn't say that that limited ability for a player to expand the scope of the game was a strength. It was more a limitation of the technology and the game world that a designer/artist/programmer could reasonably create within that hardware and with the tools available.
But I will say that having a "sandbox" game is not a valid excuse to avoid creating meaningful content/gameplay. An example would be the Spiderman 2 game. I played it for maybe an hour and had a great time just slinging around the city and exploring not only the landscape but the capabilities of my character. But beyond that, the story line missions were pretty weak, the initial feel of the city was impressive but it pretty quickly revealed itself to be shallow. Basically, despite having a giant area in which you could move your character, it was difficult to come up with interesting and "meaningful" self-challenges, and the challenges included in the game were not compelling to me.
I know it's not really the point of your story, but in case it comes up again, the main reason that most of our buildings are generally rectangular is because it's much easier(read: cheaper) to build them that way.
For ever classic arcade game that you mention you could spend hours on, how many were created around the same time that nobody even remembers. There were great games and crappy games then, just as there are great games and crappy games now. Even by your own criteria.
I could spend way more time screwing around in GTA3 than I could in galaga. I wasted hours and hours just cruising around the city in that game, exploring places, doing random stuff. And that doesn't even include playing the storyline that was in that game.
There will always be developers who just throw out a shiny piece of crap to make a quick buck. There will always be game designers who try really hard to make something great, their idea fails, but their publisher makes them ship it anyways. And there will always be a few, who through either skill or luck, create some great games that we'll all remember. There are a lot more people working on making games today than there were a couple decades ago, so there's probably more good stuff out there than ever before. It's just harder to see sometimes, because there's more of the crap games floating around as well.
One person can still make a game today. If it's a good game, that person can sell that game and make decent money. One individual cannot make a huge game like GTA3, but that's not the only type of game that exists.
The guy who made Snood made a good chunk of change off of that game. It's simple, that graphics have stayed consistently crappy over the years, the sound is weak, and the gameplay is very simple. That gameplay is, however, extremely addictive. And the simple nature of the game made it appeal to a lot of people. Keeping in mind the simplicity of the game, the price tag was low compared to most games. And while he didn't sell 20 million copies at $50 per shot, he apparently sold enough that he made over $100k, and he didn't have to share that money with anybody else (except the government via taxes I guess). Those successes also led to Snood getting picked up by some other publishers who ported it to various consoles.
There are many other examples of individuals or small teams who are making money producing video games. If all you read is big gaming sites like IGN or 1up, you might miss out on some of that, because the small time developers can't compete in the media circus. But they can still sell games, and make a living. Just because other people have moved on to the gaming "industry" doesn't mean that the indie scene has disappeared.
I'm not trying to dump on those older games, but it's not always that simple. I think that nostalgia not only tints things in a positive light, but the experience that you may have had the first time you played a really great game might wane as time goes on, and you've "been around the block" so to speak. The first time I saw the northern lights, it was so incredibly amazing and awesome. The second time I saw them, it was still very cool, but the shock and amazement and surprise had already died down a bit.
Civ IV might be a significantly better game than the original Civ, but it'll always be a sequel, and never perceived as the same sort of innovative new experience that the early Civ games were. But I think that were it to have come out when it did, but none of the other Civ games had existed, it would have been heralded as one of the greatest things ever.
I guess we just have much higher expectations for games these days.
Online multiplayer can be a great thing, and not only really fits some gametypes, it also makes a lot of new gametypes possible. But it takes much of the experience out of the hands of the designer, which can be dangerous to the quality of the game. I do find it mildly frustrating that online gaming has sorta become the new "fad" , to the point where it gets applied even to games that don't really need it, and especially when it's substituted for something else. It blows my mind that Motorstorm for the PS3 has online multiplayer, but two people cannot race against each other sitting on the same couch and watching the same TV. Is the ability to play online with random people so compelling that it's worth trading away the ability to play against your friends, or your brother, or your kid?
There's more choices today, tons of games coming out, and a huge backlog of old games to entertain yourself with if you feel so inclined. Big budget publishers allow for the creation of games way bigger and more complex than ever before, and we also get lots of neat things like shiny graphics, more realistic physics, and hopefully some better AI in the future.
Meanwhile, if you and your buddy want to lock yourselves in a basement for a week and hammer out a crazy game idea that you have, you can certainly do that. And there's this neat little invention called "The Internet", which you can use to distribute and even sell your game, without even needing to get a publisher involved. There are many people who have done very well this way.
The rise of big gaming companies has not killed the small group or individual game developers. It's just that now they're only a part of a much bigger ocean of games. If anything, new things like the Xbox Live marketplace could make that method of game development even more lucrative, by opening it up to the huge world of living room consoles.
I guess that maybe back in the atari days, small developer teams were making games for the home consoles, but that was such a small industry back then, the opportunities now are much more interesting.
I agree. You can't compare this to the iTMS or any other online music store and then complain about the price. They're not just distributing someone else's music, they're putting a good amount of work into it, and offering a final product of which the music is just a single part.
Think about it in terms of how much enjoyment you'll get from a new GH song. An hour's worth? Is that worth $2 to you?
It would be nice if they'd let you buy just one song at a time though. The bundling is unnecessary, and just makes the perceived price look a little higher.
If rich people want to hide their money in video game currencies, I say let them. That'll last until somebody loses a few million dollars worth of real money when their account gets banned, or a database server crashes and the data is lost, or a company suddenly folds and takes their game offline.
Every MMO out there has a user agreement that lets them shut down your account for any reason, and no company is dumb enough to take legal responsibility for safeguarding your in-game currency. Second Life is doing some weird stuff with the ownership of in-game assets, but if they ban your account, they're not going to cut you a check for the real world equivalent of your game money.
Even if you're not worried about your money flat out disappearing, don't forget that MMO economies have all sorts of built-in ways for the game developers to influence them, in drastic ways that the fed only wishes it could affect the US/global economy. Inflation, deflation, and in-game taxation can be very unpredictable, and truly could change at the whim of a single individual. No one intelligent would put serious money into a situation like that. If I ran a game and suspected of people using it to harbor money from taxes, I'd be awfully tempted to mess with them, just for being so dumb.
It's not an unconscious realization, it's common freakin' curtesy. But out of the thousands of people who fly each day, there's still going to be hundreds of ignorant assholes who are either too self-absorbed to realize, or to selfish to care. Flying is already an intense and intimidating experience for many people, long flights are generally uncomfortable and borderline miserable. Ever ride on a plane with a baby in a nearby seat? That can be annoying as all hell, but babies cry, they can't know any better, and so I deal with it. But if someone was talking loudly on their cell phone for a half hour, subjecting everyone around them to half of their conversation, I just don't know if I could take it.
As for billions in lost productivity (that number sounds rather high to me) because of people flying, big freakin' deal. Businesses have existed for thousands of years without cell phones, a few hours disconnected here and there won't put our economy into a recession.
Anyone who's saying that the desktop is totally going away is a little nuts. But it's becoming possible for network based applications to function basically the same as desktop applications, so that makes the details of everything below the app (the OS and the hardware) that much less important. As long as the hardware and the OS can provide you with the "network", then it doesn't really matter what kind of computer you've got.
I'll probably still prefer running programs off of my local hard drive, but all other things being equal, I'm likely to pick a piece of software that has the capabilities for me to work under the same environment at any computer in the world over the web/net/whatever, should the need arise. Like adobe moving photoshop to the web. I don't see that replacing the boxed copy you buy and install, just becoming another feature of it.
I don't understand the general hostility that many people have towards companies re-releasing content. It's their property, they get to set the price, and if you don't think it's worth the money then don't buy it. If other people value it differently and spend the money, that's their decision. It's not like an older game is a destructive influence. It's not the consumer getting taken advantage of. It's just people trying to make money, which is one of the main reasons why companies exist.
Is Nintendo the biggest culprit? A culprit is someone accused of a crime. Nintendo is a bunch of creative people that make games that a bunch of other people enjoy enough that they're willing to spend money on. It's not bad, it's not sneaky, it's not even ironic. It's business.
The ability to easily customize and personalize items is really exciting. It's already invading certain industries, you can go to reebok or nike's website and design your own shoes by picking from lots of colors and mixing and matching many different ways. It's awesome that Nike or whoever has got their manufacturing efficient enough that they can produce a single unique pair of shoes for you at a price close to a mass produced model.
In that sense, something like 3d printing is sort of the opposite of mass production. It just brings custom manufacturing closer in price to mass production. Basically because instead of all the highly specialized equipment that is required for normal mass production, you've got a single tool that can do it all.
Mentally disabled people are a more difficult situation. They're obviously still a person, but I don't think we can ever be sure what level of thought they're capable of. They're certainly owed some basic rights just out of respect for the fact that they are a person. I'm not capable of making any sort of definitive statements about which particular rights they should or shouldn't have, beyond some of the really simple stuff like a right to live, to not be physically harmed, etc. But I don't have a problem with them being restricted from other rights that carry with them responsibilities that they aren't capable of handling. (Right to vote, right to bear arms, stuff like that.)
While it's true that we can't really be sure of what level of thought an ape is capable of either, there is plenty of observational evidence that even the smartest apes are well below the mental abilities of even a mediocre human being. The fact that occasionally you come across a human who is for whatever reason disabled does not make the apes any smarter.
I'm not sure whether or not animals "deserve" basic rights. Nature is often very brutal towards life. But I think that for a number of reasons it is in the best interests of people for us to generally treat animals with respect, and if granting them "rights" is helpful in doing that, it can be a good idea.
Maybe they like OSX better than Windows? Maybe the cost difference wasn't such a big deal? Maybe a lack of windows maintence saves them more money in the long run. Let's just say for the sake of argument that you could get a comparable Dell for $500 less a piece. And say they have 20 machines. That's $10,000, which is a sizeable chunk of change, but in the grand scheme of things is not a huge deal for even a moderately sized business.
At my job, we have about a dozen windows workstations, an off-site computer tech service, and me doing some of the basic tech support since I'm fairly computer savvy. I spend a lot of time fixing computers, and the computer tech guys generally get called in to fix stuff/install stuff/whatever when it's something that I don't have the time/knowledge to do. Knowing the hourly rate that we pay for those techs, and the hourly rate that my boss bills my time out to clients, if $10,000 extra up front could cut the amount of time/money that we spend fixing the damn machines by half, we would make that money up in a year easy.
Sadly, we're stuck with a pile of windows only software for various reasons, and my significant portion of my job will continue to involve fighting with windows.
When I was in school, we had a class where the exams were basically the professor giving us all a copy of the test, then telling us to drop them off to him in his office (in a different building) in an hour or so. He then left the building and went to his office to read the newspaper or whatever and wait. As you can probably imagine, there was much cheating, apparently a large portion of the class left the building, went to the park, and all sat under a tree and figured out the test together. This apparently was a tradition within the school.
A number of us took the test honestly, it wasn't even particularly difficult. Anyways, a few of the more honest people did mention the fact that this cheating was taking place to the school administration, who did investigate. The majority of the class was found to have cheated. The end result was something to the effect that the test was declared invalid for everyone in the class, instead your grade for that class that semester was to be determined only by your score on the final exam. People who were caught cheating were to be docked a letter grade. Oh, and a different professor taught the class the next year. Pretty weak punishment.
My school was a fairly high ranked institution, well respected, and they certainly made a big deal about honor code and no cheating and whatnot when I got there. But for the most part they did not seem very vigilant about looking for cheating, and when the situation forced them to look for it, they found it so widespread that the proper response would've been extremely destructive to the school in a number of ways. Basically, it's so widespread and common that if they purged out all the guilty parties, they wouldn't have much of a school left. And so they generally ignore it, and when forced to take action, they do the bare minimum that they can.
Children do not understand their rights, but they certainly have the potential to, and we should assume that they will understand and take advantage of those rights in the future. There's not a meaningful comparison between human children and apes in regards to this topic.
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While there's definitely some truth to what you're saying, I don't think that completely explains it. I think the truth of the matter is that A.I. is just plain harder than fancy graphics. In the world of academia, there have been plenty of people devoted specifically to work on AI. They aren't distracted by graphics, because that's a non-issue in their research. They've been working on this stuff for decades, and progress is still moving pretty slowly.
Compare that to graphics technology, which has advanced at a pretty relentless pace. Regardless of the economic incentives one way or another, I refuse to believe that there aren't some very smart people out there dedicated to AI research.
Whenever a gamer talks about HL, as you said the comparatively good AI is quite often mentioned. If it wasn't a marketable feature, then nobody would care enough to talk about it. I think if your AI was amazing and blew away editors at gaming mags/websites, they would rant about it plenty, and you would get a lot of great publicity which would help you move lots of extra units. It seems plausible enough that I can't believe that at least a few developers wouldn't have already gone that route if it were already possible.
I don't know if the hardware isn't powerful enough yet, or if the underlying research isn't far along enough, or if we need a whole different computer language paradigm before AI can make serious steps forward. But I think that it would've already happened if it was just a matter of someone throwing some significant resources at it. If you could figure out how to write some really competent general AI, the return on investment would be huge, extending well beyond gaming.
I don't want to say that there's no future for businesses in a "virtual world" that might share some qualities with SL, but as for SL itself, as I have experienced it over the past few years, no thanks.
Various people have been getting excited about the idea of "virtual reality" over and over again at least through the past couple decades, and while the reality has consistently fallen short of the hype, there's certainly a potential that's very compelling.
Second Life makes some of those potentials even more apparent, but that potential that it causes me to imagine makes its flawed current state even more obvious. Just a few of those flaws inherent in SL; crippling lag once you get any reasonable number of people into the same area of the grid, the ability of random people to perform unwelcome acts against your character or your land (and the meager amount of safeguards that you can protect yourself with), the random interpretations of acceptable conduct by the devs/GMs/moderators, the fact that most of these problems have existed for years and still haven't been fixed (meaning that the underlying structure or Linden Labs is unable/unwilling to change in ways necessary to solve these issues).
But the biggest difference between the web and SL is that a company could pretty much entirely control their website. They could own the server, write all of the webpages/scripts, etc. In SL, you're always reliant on Linden labs, which is in one sense, the unaccountable government that lords over the grid. This could change now that they're open sourcing the server. But at that point, I would argue that it's not SL anymore. Until now, SL has really been a service, and not a software package.
So it's not to say that no companies can find a use for a 3D based, open-ended, "virtual world" software platform. Just that the service that Linden Labs offered and called SL has not been well suited to the business related projects of the sort of scale that would justify the resources needed to develop it.
SL offers a few things that I find occasionally interesting. First off, it's a fancy chat service. I can talk with a bunch of people, and the 3D world it takes place in allows for a lot of creative ways for you to express yourself beyond just text.
Second, it's a big sandbox, and it gives you a fairly pervasive ability to create stuff. Although there are definite (and often times very annoying) limits to the modeling system and scripting system, you can still use them to make just about anything that you can imagine. If you enjoy that sort of free creativity, then SL offers it in a reasonably straight-forward package. If you spend a little bit of time being social, then you can easily find people to help you create, or just to share your creations with.
A third thing that I enjoy about SL is its potential for just ridiculousness. Parts of the SL world are a lot like those stupid, random, and often very amusing photoshopped pictures that people email to each other, except it happens in real time. I wouldn't say that spending time there makes me any smarter or a better person, but it's at least as amusing as watching most of the crap on TV these days.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
Well, sure, if you are going to define evolution as "change", then yes, the world, societies, and humanity will continue to evolve in that sense. But in terms of natural biological evolution shaping our DNA as it has over billions of years, that doesn't play much of a part in most of what you mentioned.
Human society is actually changing at an increasingly quick rate, well beyond anything that biological evolution might have in store for us. The way I spend my average day would probably be entirely unimaginable to my great-grandparents. In that sense, people are constantly adapting, trying to stay ahead of the curve and be successful. But the way that humans primarily do that, through technology, is entirely different from how all the other life forms on this planet adapt. The world as it exists today is drastically different from the world of 2000 years ago, yet there appears to have been very little change overall in the biological/physical attributes of humans. (Although I have read that we're generally getting a bit taller. This may have as much to do with improved nutrition as genetics though).
I would say that the ability to create technology does make us profoundly different from every other creature on earth. I wouldn't argue that other animals are entirely devoid of thought, or even some cognitive ability, or even some level of language. I guess you could argue for a while where exactly the threshold is, and how much it's a mix of not only brain capabilities but also physical attributes (things like an opposible thumb). But wherever you put that divide, the potential and capabilities of an average human to manipulate his/her environment for his/her benefit goes well beyond anything I've ever seen or heard about for any other animal. (A flip side is that we're also quite capable of destroying our environment to our own detriment, but I guess that just keeps things exciting)
I don't want to argue whether or not human consciousness/intelligence is some sort of magic, or gift from a God, or anything. Even if we can all agree that it's just a process of natural biological evolution, we've certainly reached a point where through our creativity and hard work, we can advance our capabilities far quicker than evolution would advance them for us. While we're not entirely free seperate from the biological world around us, and while our genetic strengths and flaws can still have significant bearing on our individual lives, humans have a level of control over their own future well beyond anything any other animal could hope for.
If you really think about it, if you want to view evolution as a procession towards "perfection", the really interesting thing is that whatever the process was that created DNA based life, it looks like it only happened once. And since then, as things have continued towards that "perfection", species have continued to diversify and become more and more dissimilar. The "perfect" life form, from a biological standpoint, is completely adapted to it and as such is also highly reliant on it.
I'm not entirely sure where intelligence fits into that. Like you said, it really moves us out of that system. In a lot of ways, the ability to create technology allows humans to "cheat the system". We can thrive in a lot of climates that our bodies are not really suited to by significantly manipulating the environment, or more commonly, creating little pockets of more comfortable climates in which we spend most of our time. Then you figure we've created lots of ways to easily kill each other, methods so destructive and pervasive that evolution couldn't possibly hope to keep up.
All that being said, in our world at large, evolution still needs to be a consideration for humanity, not because of our own DNA, but because of things like the emergence of drug resistant bacteria and such.
Those are both good points, but as someone involved in the design and construction of buildings, I can assure you that even if a client/architect/contractor are willing to deal with necessary design/construction effort to make a non-orthagonal building work, the costs tend to quickly go up, and that'll kill most projects faster than anything else.
Well, that's an ok argument for why you may or may not like a game, but isn't really a valid way to say definitively whether or not a game has any value.
Most of my "screwing around" time in GTA3 was task oriented, just random tasks that I came up with on my own. How quickly could I get to 4 wanted stars, and how long could I survive afterwards. Can I figure out a way to pile up cars or something to get my character up onto a ledge where I really shouldn't be walking. One time I find my way over a wall somewhere and there was a texture on the other side that said something to the effect of "You're not supposed to be here".
I don't know if that's really "self-improvement", but it was entertaining and I felt accomplished when I managed to do something that was difficult. Whether or not it was a task that the game designers had in mind isn't really relevant to me.
Something like pacman could maybe allow that sort of experimentation on much simpler scale (maybe something like beat this level while only making left turns), but I wouldn't say that that limited ability for a player to expand the scope of the game was a strength. It was more a limitation of the technology and the game world that a designer/artist/programmer could reasonably create within that hardware and with the tools available.
But I will say that having a "sandbox" game is not a valid excuse to avoid creating meaningful content/gameplay. An example would be the Spiderman 2 game. I played it for maybe an hour and had a great time just slinging around the city and exploring not only the landscape but the capabilities of my character. But beyond that, the story line missions were pretty weak, the initial feel of the city was impressive but it pretty quickly revealed itself to be shallow. Basically, despite having a giant area in which you could move your character, it was difficult to come up with interesting and "meaningful" self-challenges, and the challenges included in the game were not compelling to me.
I know it's not really the point of your story, but in case it comes up again, the main reason that most of our buildings are generally rectangular is because it's much easier(read: cheaper) to build them that way.
For ever classic arcade game that you mention you could spend hours on, how many were created around the same time that nobody even remembers. There were great games and crappy games then, just as there are great games and crappy games now. Even by your own criteria.
I could spend way more time screwing around in GTA3 than I could in galaga. I wasted hours and hours just cruising around the city in that game, exploring places, doing random stuff. And that doesn't even include playing the storyline that was in that game.
There will always be developers who just throw out a shiny piece of crap to make a quick buck. There will always be game designers who try really hard to make something great, their idea fails, but their publisher makes them ship it anyways. And there will always be a few, who through either skill or luck, create some great games that we'll all remember. There are a lot more people working on making games today than there were a couple decades ago, so there's probably more good stuff out there than ever before. It's just harder to see sometimes, because there's more of the crap games floating around as well.
One person can still make a game today. If it's a good game, that person can sell that game and make decent money. One individual cannot make a huge game like GTA3, but that's not the only type of game that exists.
The guy who made Snood made a good chunk of change off of that game. It's simple, that graphics have stayed consistently crappy over the years, the sound is weak, and the gameplay is very simple. That gameplay is, however, extremely addictive. And the simple nature of the game made it appeal to a lot of people. Keeping in mind the simplicity of the game, the price tag was low compared to most games. And while he didn't sell 20 million copies at $50 per shot, he apparently sold enough that he made over $100k, and he didn't have to share that money with anybody else (except the government via taxes I guess). Those successes also led to Snood getting picked up by some other publishers who ported it to various consoles.
There are many other examples of individuals or small teams who are making money producing video games. If all you read is big gaming sites like IGN or 1up, you might miss out on some of that, because the small time developers can't compete in the media circus. But they can still sell games, and make a living. Just because other people have moved on to the gaming "industry" doesn't mean that the indie scene has disappeared.
I'm not trying to dump on those older games, but it's not always that simple. I think that nostalgia not only tints things in a positive light, but the experience that you may have had the first time you played a really great game might wane as time goes on, and you've "been around the block" so to speak. The first time I saw the northern lights, it was so incredibly amazing and awesome. The second time I saw them, it was still very cool, but the shock and amazement and surprise had already died down a bit.
Civ IV might be a significantly better game than the original Civ, but it'll always be a sequel, and never perceived as the same sort of innovative new experience that the early Civ games were. But I think that were it to have come out when it did, but none of the other Civ games had existed, it would have been heralded as one of the greatest things ever.
I guess we just have much higher expectations for games these days.
Online multiplayer can be a great thing, and not only really fits some gametypes, it also makes a lot of new gametypes possible. But it takes much of the experience out of the hands of the designer, which can be dangerous to the quality of the game. I do find it mildly frustrating that online gaming has sorta become the new "fad" , to the point where it gets applied even to games that don't really need it, and especially when it's substituted for something else. It blows my mind that Motorstorm for the PS3 has online multiplayer, but two people cannot race against each other sitting on the same couch and watching the same TV. Is the ability to play online with random people so compelling that it's worth trading away the ability to play against your friends, or your brother, or your kid?
There's more choices today, tons of games coming out, and a huge backlog of old games to entertain yourself with if you feel so inclined. Big budget publishers allow for the creation of games way bigger and more complex than ever before, and we also get lots of neat things like shiny graphics, more realistic physics, and hopefully some better AI in the future.
Meanwhile, if you and your buddy want to lock yourselves in a basement for a week and hammer out a crazy game idea that you have, you can certainly do that. And there's this neat little invention called "The Internet", which you can use to distribute and even sell your game, without even needing to get a publisher involved. There are many people who have done very well this way.
The rise of big gaming companies has not killed the small group or individual game developers. It's just that now they're only a part of a much bigger ocean of games. If anything, new things like the Xbox Live marketplace could make that method of game development even more lucrative, by opening it up to the huge world of living room consoles.
I guess that maybe back in the atari days, small developer teams were making games for the home consoles, but that was such a small industry back then, the opportunities now are much more interesting.
I agree. You can't compare this to the iTMS or any other online music store and then complain about the price. They're not just distributing someone else's music, they're putting a good amount of work into it, and offering a final product of which the music is just a single part.
Think about it in terms of how much enjoyment you'll get from a new GH song. An hour's worth? Is that worth $2 to you?
It would be nice if they'd let you buy just one song at a time though. The bundling is unnecessary, and just makes the perceived price look a little higher.
If rich people want to hide their money in video game currencies, I say let them. That'll last until somebody loses a few million dollars worth of real money when their account gets banned, or a database server crashes and the data is lost, or a company suddenly folds and takes their game offline.
Every MMO out there has a user agreement that lets them shut down your account for any reason, and no company is dumb enough to take legal responsibility for safeguarding your in-game currency. Second Life is doing some weird stuff with the ownership of in-game assets, but if they ban your account, they're not going to cut you a check for the real world equivalent of your game money.
Even if you're not worried about your money flat out disappearing, don't forget that MMO economies have all sorts of built-in ways for the game developers to influence them, in drastic ways that the fed only wishes it could affect the US/global economy. Inflation, deflation, and in-game taxation can be very unpredictable, and truly could change at the whim of a single individual. No one intelligent would put serious money into a situation like that. If I ran a game and suspected of people using it to harbor money from taxes, I'd be awfully tempted to mess with them, just for being so dumb.
It's not an unconscious realization, it's common freakin' curtesy. But out of the thousands of people who fly each day, there's still going to be hundreds of ignorant assholes who are either too self-absorbed to realize, or to selfish to care. Flying is already an intense and intimidating experience for many people, long flights are generally uncomfortable and borderline miserable. Ever ride on a plane with a baby in a nearby seat? That can be annoying as all hell, but babies cry, they can't know any better, and so I deal with it. But if someone was talking loudly on their cell phone for a half hour, subjecting everyone around them to half of their conversation, I just don't know if I could take it.
As for billions in lost productivity (that number sounds rather high to me) because of people flying, big freakin' deal. Businesses have existed for thousands of years without cell phones, a few hours disconnected here and there won't put our economy into a recession.
Anyone who's saying that the desktop is totally going away is a little nuts. But it's becoming possible for network based applications to function basically the same as desktop applications, so that makes the details of everything below the app (the OS and the hardware) that much less important. As long as the hardware and the OS can provide you with the "network", then it doesn't really matter what kind of computer you've got.
I'll probably still prefer running programs off of my local hard drive, but all other things being equal, I'm likely to pick a piece of software that has the capabilities for me to work under the same environment at any computer in the world over the web/net/whatever, should the need arise. Like adobe moving photoshop to the web. I don't see that replacing the boxed copy you buy and install, just becoming another feature of it.
I don't understand the general hostility that many people have towards companies re-releasing content. It's their property, they get to set the price, and if you don't think it's worth the money then don't buy it. If other people value it differently and spend the money, that's their decision. It's not like an older game is a destructive influence. It's not the consumer getting taken advantage of. It's just people trying to make money, which is one of the main reasons why companies exist.
Is Nintendo the biggest culprit? A culprit is someone accused of a crime. Nintendo is a bunch of creative people that make games that a bunch of other people enjoy enough that they're willing to spend money on. It's not bad, it's not sneaky, it's not even ironic. It's business.
The ability to easily customize and personalize items is really exciting. It's already invading certain industries, you can go to reebok or nike's website and design your own shoes by picking from lots of colors and mixing and matching many different ways. It's awesome that Nike or whoever has got their manufacturing efficient enough that they can produce a single unique pair of shoes for you at a price close to a mass produced model.
In that sense, something like 3d printing is sort of the opposite of mass production. It just brings custom manufacturing closer in price to mass production. Basically because instead of all the highly specialized equipment that is required for normal mass production, you've got a single tool that can do it all.
Mentally disabled people are a more difficult situation. They're obviously still a person, but I don't think we can ever be sure what level of thought they're capable of. They're certainly owed some basic rights just out of respect for the fact that they are a person. I'm not capable of making any sort of definitive statements about which particular rights they should or shouldn't have, beyond some of the really simple stuff like a right to live, to not be physically harmed, etc. But I don't have a problem with them being restricted from other rights that carry with them responsibilities that they aren't capable of handling. (Right to vote, right to bear arms, stuff like that.)
While it's true that we can't really be sure of what level of thought an ape is capable of either, there is plenty of observational evidence that even the smartest apes are well below the mental abilities of even a mediocre human being. The fact that occasionally you come across a human who is for whatever reason disabled does not make the apes any smarter.
I'm not sure whether or not animals "deserve" basic rights. Nature is often very brutal towards life. But I think that for a number of reasons it is in the best interests of people for us to generally treat animals with respect, and if granting them "rights" is helpful in doing that, it can be a good idea.
Maybe they like OSX better than Windows? Maybe the cost difference wasn't such a big deal? Maybe a lack of windows maintence saves them more money in the long run. Let's just say for the sake of argument that you could get a comparable Dell for $500 less a piece. And say they have 20 machines. That's $10,000, which is a sizeable chunk of change, but in the grand scheme of things is not a huge deal for even a moderately sized business.
At my job, we have about a dozen windows workstations, an off-site computer tech service, and me doing some of the basic tech support since I'm fairly computer savvy. I spend a lot of time fixing computers, and the computer tech guys generally get called in to fix stuff/install stuff/whatever when it's something that I don't have the time/knowledge to do. Knowing the hourly rate that we pay for those techs, and the hourly rate that my boss bills my time out to clients, if $10,000 extra up front could cut the amount of time/money that we spend fixing the damn machines by half, we would make that money up in a year easy.
Sadly, we're stuck with a pile of windows only software for various reasons, and my significant portion of my job will continue to involve fighting with windows.
When I was in school, we had a class where the exams were basically the professor giving us all a copy of the test, then telling us to drop them off to him in his office (in a different building) in an hour or so. He then left the building and went to his office to read the newspaper or whatever and wait. As you can probably imagine, there was much cheating, apparently a large portion of the class left the building, went to the park, and all sat under a tree and figured out the test together. This apparently was a tradition within the school.
A number of us took the test honestly, it wasn't even particularly difficult. Anyways, a few of the more honest people did mention the fact that this cheating was taking place to the school administration, who did investigate. The majority of the class was found to have cheated. The end result was something to the effect that the test was declared invalid for everyone in the class, instead your grade for that class that semester was to be determined only by your score on the final exam. People who were caught cheating were to be docked a letter grade. Oh, and a different professor taught the class the next year. Pretty weak punishment.
My school was a fairly high ranked institution, well respected, and they certainly made a big deal about honor code and no cheating and whatnot when I got there. But for the most part they did not seem very vigilant about looking for cheating, and when the situation forced them to look for it, they found it so widespread that the proper response would've been extremely destructive to the school in a number of ways. Basically, it's so widespread and common that if they purged out all the guilty parties, they wouldn't have much of a school left. And so they generally ignore it, and when forced to take action, they do the bare minimum that they can.
Children do not understand their rights, but they certainly have the potential to, and we should assume that they will understand and take advantage of those rights in the future. There's not a meaningful comparison between human children and apes in regards to this topic.