Re:I really want my FRIENDS to buy this
on
The Wii Takes NYC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I anticipate that many of the future Wii games, particularlly the more complex ones that appeal to more serious gamers, will require about as much effort to control as does any game that uses a computer mouse. Meaning some minor arm and wrist movements.
Imagine sitting on your couch and pointing at things on your TV with a laser pointer. When you're 10 feet away, you only need to turn the pointer a few degrees to get it to move much further across the screen. While Nintendo's promo videos show people playing with their arms held up in front of them and then moving around, I'm willing to bet that many of the control schemes will work just as well if you're slouched in a chair and holding the controller down in your lap.
Not that there won't be games where you just go nuts. Those will likely tend to be multiplayer games, because the only thing better than looking like a tard is looking like a tard with other people watching.
The general mindset of owning a game console is that you'll end up buying more games for it in the future. Nobody who's buying a Wii for games is going to somehow forget that there are more games than the one that shipped in the Wii box. If they enjoy Wii and Wii Sports for a few weeks, doesn't that create a greater chance that they'll go buy some extra games than if they had never bought a Wii to begin with?
I don't understand what the problem is. If someone goes to buy one and doesn't purchase another game because of the pack-in, what has been lost? A single game sale? I don't think anyone is going to show up at the store looking to buy a console and 5 games and then decide to skip the games because the system comes with one disc.
And at least for Nintendo, even if you buy the Wii and never even look at another game for it, they won't have lost money on that inital console sale.
While I'm sure Zelda will be a great game, it's not really a flagship member of their new "games for everyone" push. Seeing as it developed first as a Gamecube game, plus is inheriting a lot of complexity from the zelda legacy, it's not really a beginner's game.
Wii sports, on the other hand, looks pretty damn straight forward. The remote is acting like a bunch of objects that everyone, even if they haven't used one before, has seen one used and is familiar with. I haven't even played Wii Sports yet, but from the few videos I've seen, I'm fairly confident I could explain over the phone to my mom how to play it. And she could hardly avoid turning around and going backwards in Mario Kart on the Gamecube.
If we weren't all dumbass hillbillies, we'd go get jobs as video game journalists. Then we could get a tax write-off for our PS3's and HDTV's as business expenses.
Just because someone can find a way to make paper ballots not work well doesn't mean that they're a worse solution than a computerized system. I think that if I gave it an hour or two of thought, I could come up with a pretty damn unambiguous ballot design, and I've got no experience doing such things. Any way you slice it, it's a much easier task than designing a foolproof and reliable electronic voting machine.
An electronic system that also record on paper is better than purely electronic, for sure. But it still doesn't solve the problem that I original brought up, which is that complexity just adds more potential points of failure.
Ok, so even if there wasn't any intentional wrong doing here, I think this is a pretty straight-forward example of where technology is not the best solution to a problem.
Electronic voting machines just add another big layer of complexity to a process that really doesn't need to be so hard. A paper ballot has just two parts, the ballot sheet and a pen. If the ballot sheet breaks, the voter can just grab a new one, and the whole process gets held up for a minute, instead of hours or more. If someone forgets the pens, you can run to corner store and grab a box, or chances are enough of the first batch of voters will happen to have pens with them that they don't mind leaving behind.
Instead we have computerized machines that require specialized knowledge to set up and service, and which can break in a huge number of ways.
Even a secure, tamperproof, open-sourced electronic voting machine is a waste of money. The only problem it solves is speeding up the tallying of votes. And all that is really good for is letting the media report on partial results before half the people out there have even had a chance to vote. That benefit hardly seems worth the extra complexity or cost.
And even if they don't ship the system with two controllers, you don't have to go buy another for multiplayer. You can just hit each other! Everybody wins!
I think the potential benefits of Bluray in the PS3 are way bigger for Sony than they are for gamers, and that the Sony management has either convinced themselves otherwise, or they think consumers are too stupid to notice.
As other comments have noted, some analysts are saying around half the cost of a PS3 is going to go towards the bluray drive. If you're going to add $300 to the cost of a console when the average cost for a console has only been around $300 historically, you've got quite a task ahead of you to convince buyers that they're getting value for their money. In this case, Sony needs to convince me that Bluray is going to make my PS3 at least twice as useful/fun for me.
The best argument that I've heard so far for spending an extra $300 for the PS3's bluray drive is that all the other bluray players are $1000+. I guess that's a deal, but it's still not very compelling. A $10,000 diamond encrusted toilet seat selling for only $8,000 is a pretty good deal, but I don't want a diamond encrusted toilet seat. $300 for $1000 worth of bluray player is pretty good percentage-wise, but unfortunately for Sony, I haven't seen any good reason why I should consider any blu-ray player worth even $50. Especially when I know that if the format is succesful, I'll be able to buy a player for that price in a couple years.
Basically Sony is trying to pull the same thing that Microsoft did by bundling IE with Windows. They're trying to use a monopoly to force a new product onto the market. The problem for Sony is that video game console lock-in isn't very strong, most consumers are aware of the alternatives, and Sony doesn't really have a monopoly anyways.
Yeah, I've decided that I'm not buying an iPod until apple wises up and adds the ability to recieve FM radio, and simulate the aging of my large nuclear weapon stockpiles.
Well yeah, obviously it won't work for every type of game.
I do agree with your point about the AI libraries. Just like how graphics cards have been engineered around software libraries (DirectX and OpenGL), and vice-versa. Having a stable toolkit for both game developers and the AI card guys to work towards would definitely be key for this to work.
Although many games use the same DirectX and OpenGL libraries, developers have still managed to make a bunch of different games, and do it would be with AI libraries. If you need something that the library doesn't explicitly provide for, then you have to write somethign to do it yourself. A well written library would allow plenty of flexibility for developers while at the same time making some of the more common stuff quicker and hardware accelerated.
So what we're left with is a sort of a chicken or the egg problem. Can an AI card gain any acceptance without a solid library for it? Does having a card available speed up the adoption of that library? How do they relate when it's all just starting up? I don't have any answers for that. I guess I suck:(
I'd imagine that for a lot of things, there are more similarites than you think. Stuff that has already been mentioned, like line of sight or path finding. One thing that most games nowadays have in common is that they're basically simulating three-dimensional spaces. What happens within those spaces changes, but there are certain qualities of those spaces that are pretty much always the same. Some objects are in front of others. Some objects are too far away to be seen. Most objects in the world cannot be passed through. And so on. Whether they're shooting aliens, or driving a car trying to chase down a criminal, most NPC's in today's games are inhabiting a simulated reality with rules pretty similar to real life.
This issue quickly runs into the same sorts of problems that copy protection on software does. People who are dedicated to breaking the system will still be able to, but normal people trying to work with the system are just getting annoyed.
It's a mild pain in the ass to match a swirled up picture of letters (I've known the alphabet for about 25 years, and I still get them wrong sometimes), but I'll usually go through it. Make it much more difficult than that, however, and I'm pretty likely to decide it's not worth it, and go waste my time on another website.
The solution to this problem is not to make the visitor do more work, because you can easily drive your visitors away by making your website a hassle. The spam needs to be filtered on the server side, or just deleted as it appears.
I've encountered this problem on my own neglected website, and I haven't found a good solution that I have the skills to implement. I generally just delete the spam as it appears, and I turn off commenting on older posts. This works for my personal site, because it's low traffic, but I'd imagine someone who gets more readers and spam could find the motivation to set up some sort of filtering, similar to email spam filters.
It was for a couple reasons. Apple had a few previous attempts at a next-gen OS fall through, so they really needed to ship something to show consumers and developers that OSX was really going to happen. Developers mostly. It gave both the big software vendors as well as the shareware/freeware crowd some confidence in Apple's future, which helped them move their applications from OS9 to OSX.
All that being said, the public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 were really dog slow, and it wasn't until 10.2 that you stopped noticing the slow downs.
You're not being imaginative enough. I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who are kept up a night, wondering how they can take more money from the american taxpayers. It seems to be a very motivating problem. And although it's a field where much progress has been made, there surely is still much more work to be done.
Goldeneye was fun because I could play it with a couple of friends sitting right next to me. Internet multiplayer is all well and good, but it's way less satisfying to say "take that n00b!" over text than it is to get right in your friend's face and yell "I JUST SHOT YOU IN THE EYE I OWN YOU BITCH!" and have him punch you in the neck.
Goldeneye was an awesome multiplayer experience if you were playing with a couple of friends. The fact that it's on a console really matters in that sense, because there's a social aspect to that that really took the game to another level. I have not seen another FPS that has done that as well since.
I'm willing to bet that the majority of slashdotters do not hate football. I imagine that if you did a survey of the IT industry, the percentage of people who watch football on TV would be pretty similar to the percentage in most other job types.
I think the fact that the DS has already existed for a while will be a big benefit for the Wii. Many people scoffed at the touch screen as just a gimmick, just as some have labeled the Wii controller. But the market successes and the player enthusiasm that the DS has managed to develop really is a hard to argue vote of confidence for Nintendo's "different direction" for gaming.
With even churn-mills like EA putting some effort forth to really integrate the Wiimote into the Nintendo version of their franchises, it's really looking like developers are on board. You can draw a lot of similarities between the DS vs. the PSP and the Wii vs. the PS3. Having the DS hold its own against some powerful hardware and truckloads of hype has helped keep developers and publishers from assuming that Nintendo has completely lost its mind.
Yeah, it's easy to suspect somebody, but a little harder to find the proof. At first, nobody knew who was responsible for it, and so people started questioning their congress people to find out where they stood. Sen. Stevens did not answer until pretty much everyone else had denied being responsible. Then, when it was about to get pinned on him anyways, he admitted it.
I don't think too many people were surprised by who it ended up being, but it's still better to have it as fact than to have it as a probably right guess.
I think what the previous commenter was getting at is more of a realization that humans were not some inevitable grand finale of evolution. Much of what makes us what we are evolved as a result of chance events, and random occurances. While our minds have allowed us to thrive and deal with challenges, our physical form is by no means the last word in biological efficiency or toughness.
Were things to get really bad, (Eg: A bigass comet smashing into the earth), there are plenty of "lesser" species whos chances of survival are much better than ours. Evolution has not made humans perfect, nor made humanity invincible.
If a ton of options is what you want, you're missing out if you haven't given EVE-online a shot. There are hundreds of skills to train, and endless possibilities to specialize or diversify as you see fit. There's third party software that's been created to help people plan out their future skill training, and people share and discuss their training plans just as much as they discuss weapons/ship fittings and such. There's also a huge player run economy that is extremely deep and nuanced as well. Not to mention that it's all crammed into one big in-game universe, not a bunch of little server shards.
There are other aspects to EVE that may or may not appeal to you, but as far as choice and complexity are concerned, you would not be disappointed. And the devs realize that their subscriber base stays with EVE for that complexity, so they are not likely to try and dumb it down for mass appeal.
You could say that, but I wouldn't. Making games is different, because well, you're making something. I love games, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them. Entertainment is a legit human need, and I don't think entertainers or artists or game designers/programmers/whatever are necessarily wasting time.
I also think that journalism, in general, is an important and admirable profession. It's just that there are some topics that really, in the grand scheme of things, don't matter enough to be fulfilling. I know that not everyone is going to change the world in some big way, but I like to think that all those hours I put into work are going to leave the world with something substantial and beneficial.
Even though the speed at which software development happens nowadays means that games are pretty quickly obsolete, everything builds on what came before it, so you're at least involved in a creative and continuing process. But I don't think video game journalism adds much to the equation. I'm sure some people who are involved in it would beg to differ, but I just don't see them having much impact on the industry which they owe their existance to. They're just sort of there.
I think being involved in video game design could be totally awesome. Sadly I don't have the patience or skill to be an artist, and looking at code for more then 15 minutes makes my eyes glaze over. And sadly, no one's going to hire me off the street to be a game designer, no matter how cool I think my ideas are.
Well, I've never worked at a software company, but I have heard plenty of horror stories about the corporate world sucking the life out of people. So maybe those jobs suck too. I guess if you assume that for some people, work is just going to completely suck regardless, doing something like writing about video games is a relatively bearable version of suck.
Also, I guess I didn't properly explain what I was trying to say about the hobby thing. The point I was trying to get across is along the lines of, just because something makes a good and fun hobby doesn't necessarily mean that it would make a fulfilling career. And while I accept that different people have different requirements for feeling "fulfilled", writing about video games seems like one of those things where I wouldn't be surprised if someone doing it for a while felt like something was lacking in their life.
Not all hobbies are created equal. One of my hobbies when I was younger was drawing buildings. And now I'm an architect, and for the most part, I'm quite happy. Like you, there are plenty of days in which I'm tempted to just stay home, but when I'm working on an interesting building, the thought of it one day existing as steel and concrete and being inhabited by dozens/hundreds/thousands of people is pretty damn motivating to me. At the end of the week, I can look back, and see something coming into existance that I feel has a lot of value. Not only to myself, but to humanity as a whole. That's a bit idealistic and vague, but it's basically how I feel.
Writing about video games can be fun and interesting. I do it reasonably often on slashdot infact. But I just don't think it would be very fulfilling to do for a living. It just seems like the sort of job where, if everyone paid to do it stopped doing it tomorrow, the world would go on just fine without them. If IGN, Gamespy, and all the rest disappeared this instant, I'd still be able to find plenty of unpaid people writing about video games just for the heck of it, and I'm more inclined to find their opinions believable because the "real" video game media is so heavily influenced by publishers and developers.
My original comment wasn't meant to be taken as broad statements on career choices. Just an explanation as to why I think it's perfectly reasonable for a "video game journalist" to be so jaded after only a few years.
Re:Half a decade?
on
PAX 2006 Recap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know. I really don't mean to crap on video game journalists, but as much as I enjoy video games, I don't think that I'd find spending five years writing about them particularly satisfying.
Turning a hobby into a job is a pretty good way to turn it into something you don't enjoy very much. And while playing video games can be fun, it's not the most productive thing in the world. I guess my point is, in the grand scheme of things, how much does this guy's job really matter? Maybe he feels that it's more important than that, or maybe he just does it for the money. I don't know. It reminds me of people who report on what celebrities wear to the academy awards or whatever. Sure, they sell magazines, and they're probably getting a decent paycheck. But at the end of the day, how can they really be satisfied with how trivial the result is of what they do with the bulk of their time. I would find that work soul crushing, no matter how much I got paid.
I don't think it's accurate to say they're the same thing. I'd say they're different solutions to the same problem. The problem being how to provide the player with new abilities in a structured way as they progress through the game.
I also think at least one of those bullet points is inaccurate. How can classes be easier to balance, when a strictly skills based game can basically ignore a whole part of game balancing completely? In a skills based game, if one skill gives an unreasonable advantage to people trained in it, then everyone will just train it, and it'll become a non-issue.
The downside to skills is that a player needs to show some real self-discipline to really focus in one one particular aspect of the game and not get distracted by other skills if he/she really wants to become "powerful". A class based system makes that path more direct and easier to follow. But I think for those people who care about that sort of thing, the required focus will be there either way, and as a gamer, I'd rather have that choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I anticipate that many of the future Wii games, particularlly the more complex ones that appeal to more serious gamers, will require about as much effort to control as does any game that uses a computer mouse. Meaning some minor arm and wrist movements.
Imagine sitting on your couch and pointing at things on your TV with a laser pointer. When you're 10 feet away, you only need to turn the pointer a few degrees to get it to move much further across the screen. While Nintendo's promo videos show people playing with their arms held up in front of them and then moving around, I'm willing to bet that many of the control schemes will work just as well if you're slouched in a chair and holding the controller down in your lap.
Not that there won't be games where you just go nuts. Those will likely tend to be multiplayer games, because the only thing better than looking like a tard is looking like a tard with other people watching.
The general mindset of owning a game console is that you'll end up buying more games for it in the future. Nobody who's buying a Wii for games is going to somehow forget that there are more games than the one that shipped in the Wii box. If they enjoy Wii and Wii Sports for a few weeks, doesn't that create a greater chance that they'll go buy some extra games than if they had never bought a Wii to begin with?
I don't understand what the problem is. If someone goes to buy one and doesn't purchase another game because of the pack-in, what has been lost? A single game sale? I don't think anyone is going to show up at the store looking to buy a console and 5 games and then decide to skip the games because the system comes with one disc.
And at least for Nintendo, even if you buy the Wii and never even look at another game for it, they won't have lost money on that inital console sale.
While I'm sure Zelda will be a great game, it's not really a flagship member of their new "games for everyone" push. Seeing as it developed first as a Gamecube game, plus is inheriting a lot of complexity from the zelda legacy, it's not really a beginner's game.
Wii sports, on the other hand, looks pretty damn straight forward. The remote is acting like a bunch of objects that everyone, even if they haven't used one before, has seen one used and is familiar with. I haven't even played Wii Sports yet, but from the few videos I've seen, I'm fairly confident I could explain over the phone to my mom how to play it. And she could hardly avoid turning around and going backwards in Mario Kart on the Gamecube.
If we weren't all dumbass hillbillies, we'd go get jobs as video game journalists. Then we could get a tax write-off for our PS3's and HDTV's as business expenses.
Just because someone can find a way to make paper ballots not work well doesn't mean that they're a worse solution than a computerized system. I think that if I gave it an hour or two of thought, I could come up with a pretty damn unambiguous ballot design, and I've got no experience doing such things. Any way you slice it, it's a much easier task than designing a foolproof and reliable electronic voting machine.
An electronic system that also record on paper is better than purely electronic, for sure. But it still doesn't solve the problem that I original brought up, which is that complexity just adds more potential points of failure.
Ok, so even if there wasn't any intentional wrong doing here, I think this is a pretty straight-forward example of where technology is not the best solution to a problem.
Electronic voting machines just add another big layer of complexity to a process that really doesn't need to be so hard. A paper ballot has just two parts, the ballot sheet and a pen. If the ballot sheet breaks, the voter can just grab a new one, and the whole process gets held up for a minute, instead of hours or more. If someone forgets the pens, you can run to corner store and grab a box, or chances are enough of the first batch of voters will happen to have pens with them that they don't mind leaving behind.
Instead we have computerized machines that require specialized knowledge to set up and service, and which can break in a huge number of ways.
Even a secure, tamperproof, open-sourced electronic voting machine is a waste of money. The only problem it solves is speeding up the tallying of votes. And all that is really good for is letting the media report on partial results before half the people out there have even had a chance to vote. That benefit hardly seems worth the extra complexity or cost.
And even if they don't ship the system with two controllers, you don't have to go buy another for multiplayer. You can just hit each other! Everybody wins!
I think the potential benefits of Bluray in the PS3 are way bigger for Sony than they are for gamers, and that the Sony management has either convinced themselves otherwise, or they think consumers are too stupid to notice.
As other comments have noted, some analysts are saying around half the cost of a PS3 is going to go towards the bluray drive. If you're going to add $300 to the cost of a console when the average cost for a console has only been around $300 historically, you've got quite a task ahead of you to convince buyers that they're getting value for their money. In this case, Sony needs to convince me that Bluray is going to make my PS3 at least twice as useful/fun for me.
The best argument that I've heard so far for spending an extra $300 for the PS3's bluray drive is that all the other bluray players are $1000+. I guess that's a deal, but it's still not very compelling. A $10,000 diamond encrusted toilet seat selling for only $8,000 is a pretty good deal, but I don't want a diamond encrusted toilet seat. $300 for $1000 worth of bluray player is pretty good percentage-wise, but unfortunately for Sony, I haven't seen any good reason why I should consider any blu-ray player worth even $50. Especially when I know that if the format is succesful, I'll be able to buy a player for that price in a couple years.
Basically Sony is trying to pull the same thing that Microsoft did by bundling IE with Windows. They're trying to use a monopoly to force a new product onto the market. The problem for Sony is that video game console lock-in isn't very strong, most consumers are aware of the alternatives, and Sony doesn't really have a monopoly anyways.
This whole thing seems like a bad risk for Sony.
Yeah, I've decided that I'm not buying an iPod until apple wises up and adds the ability to recieve FM radio, and simulate the aging of my large nuclear weapon stockpiles.
Well yeah, obviously it won't work for every type of game.
:(
I do agree with your point about the AI libraries. Just like how graphics cards have been engineered around software libraries (DirectX and OpenGL), and vice-versa. Having a stable toolkit for both game developers and the AI card guys to work towards would definitely be key for this to work.
Although many games use the same DirectX and OpenGL libraries, developers have still managed to make a bunch of different games, and do it would be with AI libraries. If you need something that the library doesn't explicitly provide for, then you have to write somethign to do it yourself. A well written library would allow plenty of flexibility for developers while at the same time making some of the more common stuff quicker and hardware accelerated.
So what we're left with is a sort of a chicken or the egg problem. Can an AI card gain any acceptance without a solid library for it? Does having a card available speed up the adoption of that library? How do they relate when it's all just starting up? I don't have any answers for that. I guess I suck
I'd imagine that for a lot of things, there are more similarites than you think. Stuff that has already been mentioned, like line of sight or path finding. One thing that most games nowadays have in common is that they're basically simulating three-dimensional spaces. What happens within those spaces changes, but there are certain qualities of those spaces that are pretty much always the same. Some objects are in front of others. Some objects are too far away to be seen. Most objects in the world cannot be passed through. And so on. Whether they're shooting aliens, or driving a car trying to chase down a criminal, most NPC's in today's games are inhabiting a simulated reality with rules pretty similar to real life.
This issue quickly runs into the same sorts of problems that copy protection on software does. People who are dedicated to breaking the system will still be able to, but normal people trying to work with the system are just getting annoyed.
It's a mild pain in the ass to match a swirled up picture of letters (I've known the alphabet for about 25 years, and I still get them wrong sometimes), but I'll usually go through it. Make it much more difficult than that, however, and I'm pretty likely to decide it's not worth it, and go waste my time on another website.
The solution to this problem is not to make the visitor do more work, because you can easily drive your visitors away by making your website a hassle. The spam needs to be filtered on the server side, or just deleted as it appears.
I've encountered this problem on my own neglected website, and I haven't found a good solution that I have the skills to implement. I generally just delete the spam as it appears, and I turn off commenting on older posts. This works for my personal site, because it's low traffic, but I'd imagine someone who gets more readers and spam could find the motivation to set up some sort of filtering, similar to email spam filters.
It was for a couple reasons. Apple had a few previous attempts at a next-gen OS fall through, so they really needed to ship something to show consumers and developers that OSX was really going to happen. Developers mostly. It gave both the big software vendors as well as the shareware/freeware crowd some confidence in Apple's future, which helped them move their applications from OS9 to OSX.
All that being said, the public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 were really dog slow, and it wasn't until 10.2 that you stopped noticing the slow downs.
You're not being imaginative enough. I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who are kept up a night, wondering how they can take more money from the american taxpayers. It seems to be a very motivating problem. And although it's a field where much progress has been made, there surely is still much more work to be done.
Goldeneye was fun because I could play it with a couple of friends sitting right next to me. Internet multiplayer is all well and good, but it's way less satisfying to say "take that n00b!" over text than it is to get right in your friend's face and yell "I JUST SHOT YOU IN THE EYE I OWN YOU BITCH!" and have him punch you in the neck.
Goldeneye was an awesome multiplayer experience if you were playing with a couple of friends. The fact that it's on a console really matters in that sense, because there's a social aspect to that that really took the game to another level. I have not seen another FPS that has done that as well since.
I'm willing to bet that the majority of slashdotters do not hate football. I imagine that if you did a survey of the IT industry, the percentage of people who watch football on TV would be pretty similar to the percentage in most other job types.
Speak for yourself nerd, but I had never even heard of Apple (are they related to the beatles?) or Google before (isn't it spelled googol?)
I think the fact that the DS has already existed for a while will be a big benefit for the Wii. Many people scoffed at the touch screen as just a gimmick, just as some have labeled the Wii controller. But the market successes and the player enthusiasm that the DS has managed to develop really is a hard to argue vote of confidence for Nintendo's "different direction" for gaming.
With even churn-mills like EA putting some effort forth to really integrate the Wiimote into the Nintendo version of their franchises, it's really looking like developers are on board. You can draw a lot of similarities between the DS vs. the PSP and the Wii vs. the PS3. Having the DS hold its own against some powerful hardware and truckloads of hype has helped keep developers and publishers from assuming that Nintendo has completely lost its mind.
Yeah, it's easy to suspect somebody, but a little harder to find the proof. At first, nobody knew who was responsible for it, and so people started questioning their congress people to find out where they stood. Sen. Stevens did not answer until pretty much everyone else had denied being responsible. Then, when it was about to get pinned on him anyways, he admitted it.
I don't think too many people were surprised by who it ended up being, but it's still better to have it as fact than to have it as a probably right guess.
I think what the previous commenter was getting at is more of a realization that humans were not some inevitable grand finale of evolution. Much of what makes us what we are evolved as a result of chance events, and random occurances. While our minds have allowed us to thrive and deal with challenges, our physical form is by no means the last word in biological efficiency or toughness.
Were things to get really bad, (Eg: A bigass comet smashing into the earth), there are plenty of "lesser" species whos chances of survival are much better than ours. Evolution has not made humans perfect, nor made humanity invincible.
If a ton of options is what you want, you're missing out if you haven't given EVE-online a shot. There are hundreds of skills to train, and endless possibilities to specialize or diversify as you see fit. There's third party software that's been created to help people plan out their future skill training, and people share and discuss their training plans just as much as they discuss weapons/ship fittings and such. There's also a huge player run economy that is extremely deep and nuanced as well. Not to mention that it's all crammed into one big in-game universe, not a bunch of little server shards.
There are other aspects to EVE that may or may not appeal to you, but as far as choice and complexity are concerned, you would not be disappointed. And the devs realize that their subscriber base stays with EVE for that complexity, so they are not likely to try and dumb it down for mass appeal.
You could say that, but I wouldn't. Making games is different, because well, you're making something. I love games, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them. Entertainment is a legit human need, and I don't think entertainers or artists or game designers/programmers/whatever are necessarily wasting time.
I also think that journalism, in general, is an important and admirable profession. It's just that there are some topics that really, in the grand scheme of things, don't matter enough to be fulfilling. I know that not everyone is going to change the world in some big way, but I like to think that all those hours I put into work are going to leave the world with something substantial and beneficial.
Even though the speed at which software development happens nowadays means that games are pretty quickly obsolete, everything builds on what came before it, so you're at least involved in a creative and continuing process. But I don't think video game journalism adds much to the equation. I'm sure some people who are involved in it would beg to differ, but I just don't see them having much impact on the industry which they owe their existance to. They're just sort of there.
I think being involved in video game design could be totally awesome. Sadly I don't have the patience or skill to be an artist, and looking at code for more then 15 minutes makes my eyes glaze over. And sadly, no one's going to hire me off the street to be a game designer, no matter how cool I think my ideas are.
Well, I've never worked at a software company, but I have heard plenty of horror stories about the corporate world sucking the life out of people. So maybe those jobs suck too. I guess if you assume that for some people, work is just going to completely suck regardless, doing something like writing about video games is a relatively bearable version of suck.
Also, I guess I didn't properly explain what I was trying to say about the hobby thing. The point I was trying to get across is along the lines of, just because something makes a good and fun hobby doesn't necessarily mean that it would make a fulfilling career. And while I accept that different people have different requirements for feeling "fulfilled", writing about video games seems like one of those things where I wouldn't be surprised if someone doing it for a while felt like something was lacking in their life.
Not all hobbies are created equal. One of my hobbies when I was younger was drawing buildings. And now I'm an architect, and for the most part, I'm quite happy. Like you, there are plenty of days in which I'm tempted to just stay home, but when I'm working on an interesting building, the thought of it one day existing as steel and concrete and being inhabited by dozens/hundreds/thousands of people is pretty damn motivating to me. At the end of the week, I can look back, and see something coming into existance that I feel has a lot of value. Not only to myself, but to humanity as a whole. That's a bit idealistic and vague, but it's basically how I feel.
Writing about video games can be fun and interesting. I do it reasonably often on slashdot infact. But I just don't think it would be very fulfilling to do for a living. It just seems like the sort of job where, if everyone paid to do it stopped doing it tomorrow, the world would go on just fine without them. If IGN, Gamespy, and all the rest disappeared this instant, I'd still be able to find plenty of unpaid people writing about video games just for the heck of it, and I'm more inclined to find their opinions believable because the "real" video game media is so heavily influenced by publishers and developers.
My original comment wasn't meant to be taken as broad statements on career choices. Just an explanation as to why I think it's perfectly reasonable for a "video game journalist" to be so jaded after only a few years.
I don't know. I really don't mean to crap on video game journalists, but as much as I enjoy video games, I don't think that I'd find spending five years writing about them particularly satisfying.
Turning a hobby into a job is a pretty good way to turn it into something you don't enjoy very much. And while playing video games can be fun, it's not the most productive thing in the world. I guess my point is, in the grand scheme of things, how much does this guy's job really matter? Maybe he feels that it's more important than that, or maybe he just does it for the money. I don't know. It reminds me of people who report on what celebrities wear to the academy awards or whatever. Sure, they sell magazines, and they're probably getting a decent paycheck. But at the end of the day, how can they really be satisfied with how trivial the result is of what they do with the bulk of their time. I would find that work soul crushing, no matter how much I got paid.
I don't think it's accurate to say they're the same thing. I'd say they're different solutions to the same problem. The problem being how to provide the player with new abilities in a structured way as they progress through the game.
I also think at least one of those bullet points is inaccurate. How can classes be easier to balance, when a strictly skills based game can basically ignore a whole part of game balancing completely? In a skills based game, if one skill gives an unreasonable advantage to people trained in it, then everyone will just train it, and it'll become a non-issue.
The downside to skills is that a player needs to show some real self-discipline to really focus in one one particular aspect of the game and not get distracted by other skills if he/she really wants to become "powerful". A class based system makes that path more direct and easier to follow. But I think for those people who care about that sort of thing, the required focus will be there either way, and as a gamer, I'd rather have that choice.