"As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry."
I haven't committed a crime. Why should I be subject to public inquiry? Police officers only check licence plate numbers if they have a reason to suspect something is wrong (now certainly if they always have a VALID reason or not is another question). A computerized system checkes EVERY licence plate number. That is a big difference. That is the difference that makes people uncomfortable. Why is this necessary? Why does EVERY person have to be checked? Is crime that horrible in that town?
Call me crazy, but your example of a system that keeps track traffic violations and cross checks when someone is pulled over is a LOT different than checkinge very single car.
"The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something." Why should we have to worry about it in the first place? We should be worried that we are being victimized by criminals, not law enforcement.
Is there a huge crime epidemic? Are criminals suddenly getting smarter? If the answer to these is no, then the question we need to as is, why do we need these? who is pushing for them? why are they pushing for them? and who is directly benifiting from them?
If the only people that have anything to hide are the guilty, then why aren't these questions being answered?
why should art matter?
on
Videogames as Art
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wrote about this over on my blog a while back. Basically, whenever this question coes up I have to ask, "Why should we care?" Why does it matter if it is art or not? What do we get out of that? The people who say it isn't, will never say it is. The people who say it is, already say it is.
What does calling it art do for the form?
I don't think this will be as cost effective as one might think. Basically the videogame industry is still in the pre-industrial artisanal (sp?) era. Everything is still made by hand. If you want to make a chair, you still need to build the chair peice by peice. There is no equivelent to a factory-made chair. So rather than the unskilled labor we now have in most factories, we have skilled craftsmen and artists.
Untill technology exists for the equivelent of unskilled labor to design the chairs, wheels, and furniture of a gaming world, the costs of developing games will still be high.
I forsee a day soon when a start up will open that specializes in creating the props of vidoegame worlds so that game designers will have a situation similar to that of the players of the Sims where they have a wide variety of chairs (or whatever) to pick from and they just plop it into the game pre-fab without having to employ someone to exclusively make such props.
Now certainly there is something to say for props that are build explicitly for the game. They provide a sence of stylistic unity. But I really do see a day when pre-fab props will come to be used.
I remember reading about this in either Popular Science of Discover magazine. I seem to remember that the head researcher took the chips to another building or room to show them off and they didn't work. Then took them back to the room they came from and they worked again. They finally determined that the rooms had slightly different temperature and the chips were so specific to that environment thta changing the temperature even a tiny bit stopped them from working. Crazy stuff.
Does anyone know if the shuffle on the ipod is indeed 100% random (or as close to 100% random as one can get)? Because I swear that there are songs that my ipod plays more than others. I know it may just be becasue of my brain damaged short attention span, but I often wonder what is going on with teh shuffle.
I've had that happen too. Just last week I posted a story about the xbox price being lowered. Rejected. then three hours later they post someone else's version of it. i don't understand the criteria either.
Instead of all these lame April Fool's jokes every year, it might be nice one day (not necessarilly April Fool's) to have all articles that are ordinarilly rejected. I'm sure there are lots of incredibly lame, and stupid stories suggested every day. I would think that at least some of them would be (unintentionally) more humorous than many of these April Fool's jokes.
The story blurb states that "No U.S. cable or satellite currently offers such a plan."
This is not technically true since big dish C-Band programming providers offer al a carte service, or at least the one my dad uses did as recently as two years ago.
Sure, the number of c-band users is miniscule, but it is a satellite dish.
Regarding the odds: That's not always true is it? Doesn't it depend on what card the dealer has to hit on and what card the dealer has to stay on? I know that varies from casino to casino and I would think that would change the odds.
I'm not sure about snakes or bats, but remember the Merovingian (sp?) and that line that vampires, ghosts and werewolves are rogue programs. So I would imagine that would be a major part of who you would fight.
Could you give me an example? Seriously, I really can't see that happening. I'm just speaking from personal experience, but I do not remember ever looking at the rating of a game before I bought it. If adults do look at the ratings when buying games for themselves, I would be interested in knowing why and reading some examples.
I think it is safe to say that for the most part, the only people that buy anything based on the rating is people the rating is allegedly designed to prevent from buying it in the first place.
That is to say that the only time i really cared about ratings on anything was when I was a kid. Now certainly not all kids actively seek out the forbidden fruit, but I can't really see an adult saying "I'll buy this one because it's for mature people!"
It seems that he is talking about two different things. It seems that letting in a celebrity is a case where they are trying to make gaming look cool. "Look hollywood celebrity X thinks games are cool! That means that liking games makes you cool too!"
The issue of not giving designers enough credit is something else. Even in Hollywood, for every Lucas there are a million other people who make competent work and go unknown. Let's face it, even one of the biggest directors is probably much less reccognizable than the biggest actor simply because the directors are not on camera. The same holds true of game designers. By the nature of their work they can't really get as much screen time as an actor, so they will be less well known.
I don't think the case of EA taking the glory for a film is that unusual. How many films does someone like Mirimax or Lion's Gate just buy and put their name on it and get the credit for putting out quality films?
Certainly designers do deserve more credit, but to compare designers level of celebrity to an actress is to compare apples and oranges.
I didn't know that. So that seems to add some credibility to those occasional articles that claim that the content of a game is not accurately reflected in the ratings. Inderesting.
As I said, I have NO issues with rating the game. My problem is that they did not play the game. If they had played the game and given it that rating then it would be fine.
They do not rate movies based on trailers or the script. They watch the entire thing. I think that videogames are worthy of at least being experienced in the way that they are intended to be experiences -- that is played -- before they are judged.
That they seem to have judged it based on watching it is the problem, not that they judged it.
I don't really care what the game is rated. However, from reading the article the WAY the rating was decided seems really problematic.
"If you've seen this video you realize, quite frankly, it's really disturbing," said Ontario Consumer Minister Jim Watson.
"Some of the graphics that I was shown should alert parents that this kind of a video is for older children," he said.
This seems to indicate that, once again, people made a judgement on a game without actually playing it. While maybe someone else played the game, the article doesn't seem to indicate that. Judging a game based on watching film clips of it is like judging a film based on the script. This rating is theoretically supposed to keep chiildren from PLAYING the game not WATCHING it. Therefore, the very least they could do would be to actually play it themselves before giving it a rating.
The reviewer, unfortunatley, missed his chance to really grill Spector. Spector admitted that not having a drag and drop interface for the PC was a mistake. I really would have liked to have seen the reviewer go in and ask about other mistakes. And to see if those are going to be worked on for Thief.
Oh well. I suppose the interviewer was afraid that if he really grilled Spector, then Sector wouldn't do any more interviews with gamespy.
I guess we can only hope that Thief benifits from the lessons learned in makeing Deus Ex 2
Re:What about water conservation??
on
DIY HVAC
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· Score: 1
I saw a thing a few years ago on a fix it show that had a fancy lid for a toilet that when you flushed it, first the water flowed through a fountain at the top before it went into the commode so that you could wash your hands without turning on the sink faucet.
Of course I've never seen one in person, so it obviously didn't catch on.
I study videogames, and I couldn't see myself in a sociology department and certianly not a psychology department. I found this article to be very distorted view, or at least a very narrow view of what at least I consider to be videogame studies.
Most of the stuff they talked about in this article I find very depressing and quite frankly pretty lame. While some of the people mentioned are doing good stuff, the projects they described jsut seem to be reproducing traditional dichodomies and seem fairly pointless.
I see myself much more at home in a Cultural Studies department. I study the people who play games, not so much the games themselves. The reason I feel that videogames are their own field are pretty complex and I probably can't explain fully in a slashdot post. To be as brief as possible, I find the relationship of videogame players to be just as unique as readers are from film watchers and if both literature and film get their own department, then so can videogames.
As someone who not only graduated from BGSU but did so with a Master's thesis written about videogames, I can tell you that there have been lan parties on BGSU before, so this seems like a case of someone who is ignorant of what is going on. I see two solutions.
One is to go and try to talk some sence into them tell them that this is not a public showing, everyone coming will have bought their own copies of the game, everyone has paid for the games, and that the games are designed for this exact purpose. Which office did you talk to? I have reserved rooms at BGSU for various reasons several times for some odd purposes and never had them question me. I would suggest trying to talk to someone else.
Secondly, baffle them with bullshit. I know that nothing is going to happen, You know that nothing is going to happen. Print out the user agreements to like 10-20 different games and I would imagine that they would just stick it in a file somewhere without even reading it. As long as they have some official sounding paperwork then in most cases they would be happy, unless you run into some power happy person -- again I think the best route is to try to talk to someone else. Don't say, "Can I talk to soemone else" just go over there at various times untill that person is gone and pretend this is the first time you've been there.
Exactly, or how about those "race car drivers?" All they do is sit there and hit pedals and turn a little wheel. Oh good, you can turn a wheel better than someone else.
Why don't they get a life? Who would ever watch people go in circles in cars when we can go out and get in our own car and do it ourselves?
No one would take something as silly as that seriously.
As you suspect, the reason that videogames do not use G, PG and the like is because the MPAA won't let them. Marvel comics started using G PG and whatnot a couple years ago and has stopped becasue the MPAA threatened to sue.
Slashdot Mirror
"As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry."
I haven't committed a crime. Why should I be subject to public inquiry? Police officers only check licence plate numbers if they have a reason to suspect something is wrong (now certainly if they always have a VALID reason or not is another question). A computerized system checkes EVERY licence plate number. That is a big difference. That is the difference that makes people uncomfortable. Why is this necessary? Why does EVERY person have to be checked? Is crime that horrible in that town?
Call me crazy, but your example of a system that keeps track traffic violations and cross checks when someone is pulled over is a LOT different than checkinge very single car.
"The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something."
Why should we have to worry about it in the first place? We should be worried that we are being victimized by criminals, not law enforcement.
Is there a huge crime epidemic? Are criminals suddenly getting smarter? If the answer to these is no, then the question we need to as is, why do we need these? who is pushing for them? why are they pushing for them? and who is directly benifiting from them?
If the only people that have anything to hide are the guilty, then why aren't these questions being answered?
I wrote about this over on my blog a while back. Basically, whenever this question coes up I have to ask, "Why should we care?" Why does it matter if it is art or not? What do we get out of that? The people who say it isn't, will never say it is. The people who say it is, already say it is. What does calling it art do for the form?
I don't think this will be as cost effective as one might think. Basically the videogame industry is still in the pre-industrial artisanal (sp?) era. Everything is still made by hand. If you want to make a chair, you still need to build the chair peice by peice. There is no equivelent to a factory-made chair. So rather than the unskilled labor we now have in most factories, we have skilled craftsmen and artists.
Untill technology exists for the equivelent of unskilled labor to design the chairs, wheels, and furniture of a gaming world, the costs of developing games will still be high.
I forsee a day soon when a start up will open that specializes in creating the props of vidoegame worlds so that game designers will have a situation similar to that of the players of the Sims where they have a wide variety of chairs (or whatever) to pick from and they just plop it into the game pre-fab without having to employ someone to exclusively make such props.
Now certainly there is something to say for props that are build explicitly for the game. They provide a sence of stylistic unity. But I really do see a day when pre-fab props will come to be used.
I remember reading about this in either Popular Science of Discover magazine. I seem to remember that the head researcher took the chips to another building or room to show them off and they didn't work. Then took them back to the room they came from and they worked again. They finally determined that the rooms had slightly different temperature and the chips were so specific to that environment thta changing the temperature even a tiny bit stopped them from working.
Crazy stuff.
Does anyone know if the shuffle on the ipod is indeed 100% random (or as close to 100% random as one can get)? Because I swear that there are songs that my ipod plays more than others. I know it may just be becasue of my brain damaged short attention span, but I often wonder what is going on with teh shuffle.
I've had that happen too. Just last week I posted a story about the xbox price being lowered. Rejected. then three hours later they post someone else's version of it.
i don't understand the criteria either.
Instead of all these lame April Fool's jokes every year, it might be nice one day (not necessarilly April Fool's) to have all articles that are ordinarilly rejected. I'm sure there are lots of incredibly lame, and stupid stories suggested every day. I would think that at least some of them would be (unintentionally) more humorous than many of these April Fool's jokes.
The story blurb states that "No U.S. cable or satellite currently offers such a plan."
This is not technically true since big dish C-Band programming providers offer al a carte service, or at least the one my dad uses did as recently as two years ago.
Sure, the number of c-band users is miniscule, but it is a satellite dish.
Regarding the odds: That's not always true is it? Doesn't it depend on what card the dealer has to hit on and what card the dealer has to stay on? I know that varies from casino to casino and I would think that would change the odds.
I'm not sure about snakes or bats, but remember the Merovingian (sp?) and that line that vampires, ghosts and werewolves are rogue programs. So I would imagine that would be a major part of who you would fight.
Could you give me an example? Seriously, I really can't see that happening. I'm just speaking from personal experience, but I do not remember ever looking at the rating of a game before I bought it. If adults do look at the ratings when buying games for themselves, I would be interested in knowing why and reading some examples.
I think it is safe to say that for the most part, the only people that buy anything based on the rating is people the rating is allegedly designed to prevent from buying it in the first place.
That is to say that the only time i really cared about ratings on anything was when I was a kid. Now certainly not all kids actively seek out the forbidden fruit, but I can't really see an adult saying "I'll buy this one because it's for mature people!"
It seems that he is talking about two different things. It seems that letting in a celebrity is a case where they are trying to make gaming look cool. "Look hollywood celebrity X thinks games are cool! That means that liking games makes you cool too!"
The issue of not giving designers enough credit is something else. Even in Hollywood, for every Lucas there are a million other people who make competent work and go unknown. Let's face it, even one of the biggest directors is probably much less reccognizable than the biggest actor simply because the directors are not on camera. The same holds true of game designers. By the nature of their work they can't really get as much screen time as an actor, so they will be less well known.
I don't think the case of EA taking the glory for a film is that unusual. How many films does someone like Mirimax or Lion's Gate just buy and put their name on it and get the credit for putting out quality films?
Certainly designers do deserve more credit, but to compare designers level of celebrity to an actress is to compare apples and oranges.
I didn't know that. So that seems to add some credibility to those occasional articles that claim that the content of a game is not accurately reflected in the ratings. Inderesting.
As I said, I have NO issues with rating the game. My problem is that they did not play the game. If they had played the game and given it that rating then it would be fine.
They do not rate movies based on trailers or the script. They watch the entire thing. I think that videogames are worthy of at least being experienced in the way that they are intended to be experiences -- that is played -- before they are judged.
That they seem to have judged it based on watching it is the problem, not that they judged it.
I don't really care what the game is rated. However, from reading the article the WAY the rating was decided seems really problematic.
"If you've seen this video you realize, quite frankly, it's really disturbing," said Ontario Consumer Minister Jim Watson.
"Some of the graphics that I was shown should alert parents that this kind of a video is for older children," he said.
This seems to indicate that, once again, people made a judgement on a game without actually playing it. While maybe someone else played the game, the article doesn't seem to indicate that. Judging a game based on watching film clips of it is like judging a film based on the script. This rating is theoretically supposed to keep chiildren from PLAYING the game not WATCHING it. Therefore, the very least they could do would be to actually play it themselves before giving it a rating.
The reviewer, unfortunatley, missed his chance to really grill Spector. Spector admitted that not having a drag and drop interface for the PC was a mistake. I really would have liked to have seen the reviewer go in and ask about other mistakes. And to see if those are going to be worked on for Thief.
Oh well. I suppose the interviewer was afraid that if he really grilled Spector, then Sector wouldn't do any more interviews with gamespy.
I guess we can only hope that Thief benifits from the lessons learned in makeing Deus Ex 2
I saw a thing a few years ago on a fix it show that had a fancy lid for a toilet that when you flushed it, first the water flowed through a fountain at the top before it went into the commode so that you could wash your hands without turning on the sink faucet.
Of course I've never seen one in person, so it obviously didn't catch on.
Yes, the Atari 7800 was sooooo successful due to its backwards compatability with the 2600.
Freedom Force on google if that helps.
I study videogames, and I couldn't see myself in a sociology department and certianly not a psychology department. I found this article to be very distorted view, or at least a very narrow view of what at least I consider to be videogame studies.
Most of the stuff they talked about in this article I find very depressing and quite frankly pretty lame. While some of the people mentioned are doing good stuff, the projects they described jsut seem to be reproducing traditional dichodomies and seem fairly pointless.
I see myself much more at home in a Cultural Studies department. I study the people who play games, not so much the games themselves. The reason I feel that videogames are their own field are pretty complex and I probably can't explain fully in a slashdot post. To be as brief as possible, I find the relationship of videogame players to be just as unique as readers are from film watchers and if both literature and film get their own department, then so can videogames.
I'm curious as to what field you work in.
As someone who not only graduated from BGSU but did so with a Master's thesis written about videogames, I can tell you that there have been lan parties on BGSU before, so this seems like a case of someone who is ignorant of what is going on. I see two solutions.
One is to go and try to talk some sence into them tell them that this is not a public showing, everyone coming will have bought their own copies of the game, everyone has paid for the games, and that the games are designed for this exact purpose. Which office did you talk to? I have reserved rooms at BGSU for various reasons several times for some odd purposes and never had them question me. I would suggest trying to talk to someone else.
Secondly, baffle them with bullshit. I know that nothing is going to happen, You know that nothing is going to happen. Print out the user agreements to like 10-20 different games and I would imagine that they would just stick it in a file somewhere without even reading it. As long as they have some official sounding paperwork then in most cases they would be happy, unless you run into some power happy person -- again I think the best route is to try to talk to someone else. Don't say, "Can I talk to soemone else" just go over there at various times untill that person is gone and pretend this is the first time you've been there.
Exactly, or how about those "race car drivers?" All they do is sit there and hit pedals and turn a little wheel. Oh good, you can turn a wheel better than someone else.
Why don't they get a life? Who would ever watch people go in circles in cars when we can go out and get in our own car and do it ourselves?
No one would take something as silly as that seriously.
I've been to 3 gas stations in the last couple days and haven't found itunes Pepsi's at any of them. Anyone not in a major city see these yet?
As you suspect, the reason that videogames do not use G, PG and the like is because the MPAA won't let them. Marvel comics started using G PG and whatnot a couple years ago and has stopped becasue the MPAA threatened to sue.