I'm not sure what it will take. I get the feeling that for the casual gamer, upgrading and buying new games isn't a big attraction. My dad still happily plays Civ2 every night. He knows Civ3 is out but simply has no interest in buying the new one. So to buy into something like a MMOG it has to be instantly obvious why it is better than what they already have.
I'm a pretty hardcore gamer and I still haven't even tried one of these MMOG's. WHile I'm sure that the experience is rewarding, there just isn't enough emphasis there to make it seem like something I want to buy. So if you can't interest a hardcore gamer like me to buy your product, how can you expect to interest the casual gamer?
The selling point of the Sims Online seemed to be "Its the Sims, but online!" which just doesn't seem to be enough of a difference to me. The idea of interacting with real people doesn't seem that big of a draw in that game.It is going to take something with a big "wow" factor to make MMOG's seem worthwhile.
Another thing that I would think is scaring people away is the fact that you have to pay every month. It seems like it would take a lot of playing time to get your money's worth in one of these games. Also I feel that the casual gamer thinks, "There are lots of games I only have to pay for once, why should I buy this one and pay every month?" SO this is an issue of public perception. Again, it is going to take a "wow" factor to win people over.
What is that wow factor? I have no idea. A lot of people have been thinking about this a lot more than I. But I look forward to what they come up with.
Most of them were, but I still ran into older blues albums that were not. Of course with some of those the original quality of the recording is so bad, it doesn't really matter.
The reason I quit is that this new service is not the service I signed up for. I signed up for something else and so when they changed I decided to show my disaproval the only way that really matters, by not giving them any more of my money.
I haven't RTFA because its/.ed. but the videogame industry really needs to get a bit more proactive. They need to run some commercials during prime time shows that kids don't watch and explain that not all games are for kids. These comercials need to tell parents about the rating system. It might not do any good. Parents might not listen, but at least the industry could say, "Look! we're trying to educate the public!"
Also I think it might be time for Microsoft to implement some parental controls in its OS. An OS that calls itself "home edition" should have some features that are usefull for families. A simple to use parental control system would be a nice feature for them to hype. One that can be configured to block IM's and chat, limit access to programs and an equivelent of a v-chip for games so that the actual software of games could notify the OS of its rating and parents could determine what rating they want their kids to be able to play.
Of course all of this could easilly be bypassed by a smart kid, but once again, that isn't the point. It's PR. Microsoft could promote the fact that they give parents control giving the appearance that they care about what children do so that they too can say, "look we are trying to protect children!"
So with a game it was 149.99 now without a game it is 99.99 and a game costs 49.99. Wow, I saved a penny! Honestly it just shows that people look at the price and do not look at what you get for the price. I will admit, when I first heard about it, I was tempted to go out an buy one untill I realized that it wasn't as good of a deal as it sounds.
I didn't know that. All I saw was what the show portrayed of the situation. I was so in love with Brittany at the time I was just crushed that she got kicked off. The fact that I can remember the name of a reality show contestant 3 years later kind of proves how addicted to that show I was. I tried the second season but the changes kept me away from it ever since.
This would be really smart thing for particularly high schools and grade schools who every few years have to buy textbooks. With the school budgets so tight, it would seem obvious, hey let's write our own books. Or even all the schools in a state decide to write an open source Algebra One book. I think the real reason that schools don't do this is that unfortunately too many school teachers aren't aware that the technology exists to do this cost effectively. So ironically the reason that the people who teach and inform people don't do this is ignorance.
The first season of the US show was like the UK version. It was really very interesting. It was totally non-competitive and the people on the show really bonded. It was pretty interesting because the wife of one of the contestants arranged for the local phone company to pay for everyone in their home town to call and evict her husband's biggest rival, and of course the people in the house had no idea that was going on. People would rent planes with flying banners and stuff to try and tell the people in the house what was going on. It was really very interesting. So of course they totally changed it. They have made it more and more competitive every year. I guess it is working simce this years ratings are the highest yet.
I think that it would be easy to say that play time varies by genre, at least in single player games. Then perhaps you could argue that certain genres are are more popular in certain countries.
However, even this is flawed. How long is the single player portion of Tetris or Bejeweled or the Sims? has anyone "beat" those? Do they have an end?
Of course there are many that do not really think about games like Tetris or Bejeweled when they think of videogames (not to even mention microsoft solitare but since that could be argued as a simulation of a physical game that complicates the issue). However, those games played by non-hardcore gamers, are videogames regardless if the person playing is l33t or not.
Then there is the question of multiplayer games. There are still people playing Doom online, so how do you messure length of that?
Thus we come down to the real fault of the question. Length of videogames cannot be measured the same way the length of a book or a film is. For a book, there are numbers of pages and for a film there are minutes of running time. These are objective measurements (disregarding issues like physical dimentions of the paper and how long you want to make the credits and whatnot). While it may take me longer to read a 300 page book than it does you, we have both read the same number of pages, and a 92 minute film is always 92 minutes. But how do we objectively independantly measure a game? Even games with definable beginning middle and end, and a definable way of saying, that, yes you did beat the game, are still not the exact same for 2 people. It might take me X number of hours to beat Doom, but it will almost certainly not take you that exact same ammount of time. Similarly, a game of Pac-Man can be over in minutes (if I get killed as quickly as possible) or a very long time (if I am good and know the patterns).
A possible question might be, Does a certain genre of games from a certain region that has a definable beginning middle and end have more and/or bigger levels than the same genre from a different region?" However, as stated, the question is flawed since there is no way of accurately determining length among all genres of videogames. It is like asking "Do sporting event lengths vary by territory?" It seems obvious that such a question about sproting events cannot really be answered and encompase every kind of sporting event. Similarlly, there cannot be an all emcompasing answer to the question, "Does videogame length vary by territory?" It is simply too broad and too vague.
It would seem that a solution even easier would be to just put a big red bar through the middle of the picture. These are supposed to be screener copies, not for public showing, so why not deface them so that they are so ugly that no one who is not supposed to have them would even want them?
the 'shoot-it-if-it-moves' mechanic of games like Quake [is] a fundamentally empty experience
So instead of promoting his own style of game on its own merits, he does so by turning up his nose at another style of game. I love it when people who are in a field like gaming that is looked down upon by elitists become elitists themselves by denegrating the work of others in the field.
When I read the Hardocp article, I kept thinking that this is like something out of some heist movie. The guy's life is just too fictional in quality to beleive. Going from one failure to the next but still staying one step ahead of people catching onto the fact that all he is is a con man. wild stuff.
the headline is that 70% of teenagers play violent games. However, the actual article says that 70% HAVE played GTA3. There is a difference between saying that they play it and that they have played it. Saying that they have played means that they have tried it. They may or may not have played it more than once. I HAVE played GTA3. I don't play it (I don't own a PS2 and haven't gotten around to buying it for the pc. one of these days...) This is like saying that X% of people are drug users when in reality X% of people had only tried drugs. However, as the headline states, it is a lot more sensationalistic and more scry to think that 70% ARE playing these evil murder simulators.
No the mouse does NOT have rechargable batteries according to the sight the mouse "Uses 2 AA Lithium Non-Rechargeable Batteries" You could put in rechargable NMi batteries (and you would probably want to) but it doesn't come with them, thus it doesn't come with a dock. Which pretty much stinks if you ask me.
I'm not sure if it was this game or another karaoke game, but I happened to see G4TV's awards show and before one of the commercial breaks they showed one of the guys from Barenaked Ladies sing along to his own song and it said he was awfull! Not sure what that says about the game, but it was the funniest moment of the entire show.
This isn't that new of a technology. I remember a couple of years ago on Techtv they were playing around with one of these for the PC. IT doens't look that different of an implementation. This will be fun for a couple of days,then people will get bored with it. It is super gimmicky. I think it will be about as successfull as those fishing games that look like a fishing rod or the golf games where you have to swing the club. They are fun for a little while, then you get tired of them and they sit and gather dust.
Wertham isn't quite as bad as he is made out to be. However, he made the same mistake (or perhaps ligical fallacy) that Jack Thompson is making.
Wertham saw that juvenile delinquents read comics and assumed there was a connection. However, his logic was faulty in that at the time a very large percentage of the entire population read comics. Therefore, if a great number (I've heard as high as 90% of literate Americans, although I can't verify that statistic) read comics, of course a great number of juvenile delinquents read them as well.
This is exactly what is happening with videogames. As the articel correctly points out, a large percentage of males between 15 and 30 play videogames. Thus is should not be surprizing that a large percentage of violent offenders in that age range play vidoegames. However, Thompson is doing what Weartham did by pointing his finger and saying "See, there's the problem!"
I think that there is a very distinct market for e-books. And realisticly in the short term the market isn't for e-books as books, but e-texts. Technical manuals, how too books, resource books, reference books. the beauty of the e-book is, or at least should be, the ability to jump to any part instantly and to be able to search for a section and find it quickly. The immediate market for ebooks in not books where we would typiclaly read the entire thing, but non-fiction, non-narrative works where we wouldn't normally need to read the whole thing to make use of it.
There are very few reasons to have a paper dictionary for example, and I can't tell you how many times I flipped through a text book looking for that one section where they cite author X who is talking about subject Y. A keyword search where you could search a book for X and Y (in a much more sophisticated manner than a simple index) would have saved me a lot of time writing my thesis when I was looking through a dozen book looking for that exact quote that I remembered but couldn't remember who said it.
So I've been avoiding reading for class by checking out Slashdot. I finally get around to reading this Victor Turner article "The Anthropology of Performance" and who is mentioned in the first paragraph? Arnold Toynbee. weird.
According to Turner, Toynbee is the person who coined the term "postmodern." Very weird.
I hope that those on here who are so absolutly certain that graffiti isn't art will remmber their narrow elitist notions of what is and isn't art the next time someone says that vidoegames aren't art either...
Read this and then let me know if all graffiti is still vandalism.
It is so obvious that Jack Thompson jumped all over this. As I mentioned when this happened, whenever there is any juvenile violence that is remotely associtated with vidoegames, Jack Thomson is there to blame videogames and remove any possibility of personal responsibility.
This is the guy who said that the DC snipers were gamers and got nearly every mainstream media outlet to beleive it. This is also the guy who sent a 13 year old (possibly his son, I don't remember exactly) into Best Buy to guy M rated games. He has very good PR and is very good at getting media coverage beacuse he gives the media the kind of hysteria laden sound bites they love. This guy has an agenda and he needs to be watched out for.
I have to admit that I bought it. I was able to justify it to myself by saying that it was "collectable" because they only shipped a number proportional to the number of hardback books that were ordered. Of course I will probably never sell it, but it was a good argument at the time!
You mention movies, and I'm curious, why are violent movies so much less dangerous than violent videogames? I have seen films that involve killing that seem much much more callous and cold toward the loss of human life than many videogames.
I remember seeing Con Air for the first time a couple of years ago, long after it had been out and probably long after it had been on network tellevision. In that film there are more than a couple of scenes where a person's death (remember a person played by a real life human, not a bunch of polygons) is played for laughs. I was much more shocked by that than any game I've ever played.
What about those Faces of Death videos which claim to depict the actual deaths of people on tape. Now most if not all of those are fake, but they are still very disturbing and when they were all the rage 15 years ago or so, I was 16 when I saw one and I knew several kids younger than me who had already seen them. What about all those Lifetime movies that depict rape? Why are actual people pretending to do things not as bad as polygons doing things.
Now don't read into my words. I'm not saying that violence in any form is always 100% safe for 100% of the people to experience 100% of the time. But there are lots of other violent activities that go on that people don't get nearly as excited about that, at least to me, seem a lot more disturbing than videogames.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what it will take. I get the feeling that for the casual gamer, upgrading and buying new games isn't a big attraction. My dad still happily plays Civ2 every night. He knows Civ3 is out but simply has no interest in buying the new one. So to buy into something like a MMOG it has to be instantly obvious why it is better than what they already have.
I'm a pretty hardcore gamer and I still haven't even tried one of these MMOG's. WHile I'm sure that the experience is rewarding, there just isn't enough emphasis there to make it seem like something I want to buy. So if you can't interest a hardcore gamer like me to buy your product, how can you expect to interest the casual gamer?
The selling point of the Sims Online seemed to be "Its the Sims, but online!" which just doesn't seem to be enough of a difference to me. The idea of interacting with real people doesn't seem that big of a draw in that game.It is going to take something with a big "wow" factor to make MMOG's seem worthwhile.
Another thing that I would think is scaring people away is the fact that you have to pay every month. It seems like it would take a lot of playing time to get your money's worth in one of these games. Also I feel that the casual gamer thinks, "There are lots of games I only have to pay for once, why should I buy this one and pay every month?" SO this is an issue of public perception. Again, it is going to take a "wow" factor to win people over.
What is that wow factor? I have no idea. A lot of people have been thinking about this a lot more than I. But I look forward to what they come up with.
Oh you mean like the painstation or the Xshock controller? Nice to see that even artists aren't above using someone else's idea.
Most of them were, but I still ran into older blues albums that were not. Of course with some of those the original quality of the recording is so bad, it doesn't really matter.
The reason I quit is that this new service is not the service I signed up for. I signed up for something else and so when they changed I decided to show my disaproval the only way that really matters, by not giving them any more of my money.
I got their email. Ten minutes later I cancled my account.
I haven't RTFA because its /.ed. but the videogame industry really needs to get a bit more proactive. They need to run some commercials during prime time shows that kids don't watch and explain that not all games are for kids. These comercials need to tell parents about the rating system. It might not do any good. Parents might not listen, but at least the industry could say, "Look! we're trying to educate the public!"
Also I think it might be time for Microsoft to implement some parental controls in its OS. An OS that calls itself "home edition" should have some features that are usefull for families. A simple to use parental control system would be a nice feature for them to hype. One that can be configured to block IM's and chat, limit access to programs and an equivelent of a v-chip for games so that the actual software of games could notify the OS of its rating and parents could determine what rating they want their kids to be able to play.
Of course all of this could easilly be bypassed by a smart kid, but once again, that isn't the point. It's PR. Microsoft could promote the fact that they give parents control giving the appearance that they care about what children do so that they too can say, "look we are trying to protect children!"
So with a game it was 149.99 now without a game it is 99.99 and a game costs 49.99. Wow, I saved a penny! Honestly it just shows that people look at the price and do not look at what you get for the price. I will admit, when I first heard about it, I was tempted to go out an buy one untill I realized that it wasn't as good of a deal as it sounds.
I didn't know that. All I saw was what the show portrayed of the situation. I was so in love with Brittany at the time I was just crushed that she got kicked off. The fact that I can remember the name of a reality show contestant 3 years later kind of proves how addicted to that show I was. I tried the second season but the changes kept me away from it ever since.
This would be really smart thing for particularly high schools and grade schools who every few years have to buy textbooks. With the school budgets so tight, it would seem obvious, hey let's write our own books. Or even all the schools in a state decide to write an open source Algebra One book.
I think the real reason that schools don't do this is that unfortunately too many school teachers aren't aware that the technology exists to do this cost effectively. So ironically the reason that the people who teach and inform people don't do this is ignorance.
The first season of the US show was like the UK version. It was really very interesting. It was totally non-competitive and the people on the show really bonded. It was pretty interesting because the wife of one of the contestants arranged for the local phone company to pay for everyone in their home town to call and evict her husband's biggest rival, and of course the people in the house had no idea that was going on. People would rent planes with flying banners and stuff to try and tell the people in the house what was going on.
It was really very interesting. So of course they totally changed it. They have made it more and more competitive every year. I guess it is working simce this years ratings are the highest yet.
Yes, I too have heard exactly the opposite as well. I have heard repeatedly that japanease gamers like harder games. weird.
I think that it would be easy to say that play time varies by genre, at least in single player games. Then perhaps you could argue that certain genres are are more popular in certain countries.
However, even this is flawed. How long is the single player portion of Tetris or Bejeweled or the Sims? has anyone "beat" those? Do they have an end?
Of course there are many that do not really think about games like Tetris or Bejeweled when they think of videogames (not to even mention microsoft solitare but since that could be argued as a simulation of a physical game that complicates the issue). However, those games played by non-hardcore gamers, are videogames regardless if the person playing is l33t or not.
Then there is the question of multiplayer games. There are still people playing Doom online, so how do you messure length of that?
Thus we come down to the real fault of the question. Length of videogames cannot be measured the same way the length of a book or a film is. For a book, there are numbers of pages and for a film there are minutes of running time. These are objective measurements (disregarding issues like physical dimentions of the paper and how long you want to make the credits and whatnot). While it may take me longer to read a 300 page book than it does you, we have both read the same number of pages, and a 92 minute film is always 92 minutes. But how do we objectively independantly measure a game? Even games with definable beginning middle and end, and a definable way of saying, that, yes you did beat the game, are still not the exact same for 2 people. It might take me X number of hours to beat Doom, but it will almost certainly not take you that exact same ammount of time. Similarly, a game of Pac-Man can be over in minutes (if I get killed as quickly as possible) or a very long time (if I am good and know the patterns).
A possible question might be, Does a certain genre of games from a certain region that has a definable beginning middle and end have more and/or bigger levels than the same genre from a different region?" However, as stated, the question is flawed since there is no way of accurately determining length among all genres of videogames. It is like asking "Do sporting event lengths vary by territory?" It seems obvious that such a question about sproting events cannot really be answered and encompase every kind of sporting event. Similarlly, there cannot be an all emcompasing answer to the question, "Does videogame length vary by territory?" It is simply too broad and too vague.
It would seem that a solution even easier would be to just put a big red bar through the middle of the picture. These are supposed to be screener copies, not for public showing, so why not deface them so that they are so ugly that no one who is not supposed to have them would even want them?
the 'shoot-it-if-it-moves' mechanic of games like Quake [is] a fundamentally empty experience
So instead of promoting his own style of game on its own merits, he does so by turning up his nose at another style of game. I love it when people who are in a field like gaming that is looked down upon by elitists become elitists themselves by denegrating the work of others in the field.
When I read the Hardocp article, I kept thinking that this is like something out of some heist movie. The guy's life is just too fictional in quality to beleive. Going from one failure to the next but still staying one step ahead of people catching onto the fact that all he is is a con man. wild stuff.
the headline is that 70% of teenagers play violent games. However, the actual article says that 70% HAVE played GTA3. There is a difference between saying that they play it and that they have played it. Saying that they have played means that they have tried it. They may or may not have played it more than once. I HAVE played GTA3. I don't play it (I don't own a PS2 and haven't gotten around to buying it for the pc. one of these days...)
This is like saying that X% of people are drug users when in reality X% of people had only tried drugs.
However, as the headline states, it is a lot more sensationalistic and more scry to think that 70% ARE playing these evil murder simulators.
No the mouse does NOT have rechargable batteries according to the sight the mouse "Uses 2 AA Lithium Non-Rechargeable Batteries" You could put in rechargable NMi batteries (and you would probably want to) but it doesn't come with them, thus it doesn't come with a dock. Which pretty much stinks if you ask me.
I'm not sure if it was this game or another karaoke game, but I happened to see G4TV's awards show and before one of the commercial breaks they showed one of the guys from Barenaked Ladies sing along to his own song and it said he was awfull! Not sure what that says about the game, but it was the funniest moment of the entire show.
This isn't that new of a technology. I remember a couple of years ago on Techtv they were playing around with one of these for the PC. IT doens't look that different of an implementation. This will be fun for a couple of days,then people will get bored with it. It is super gimmicky. I think it will be about as successfull as those fishing games that look like a fishing rod or the golf games where you have to swing the club. They are fun for a little while, then you get tired of them and they sit and gather dust.
Wertham isn't quite as bad as he is made out to be. However, he made the same mistake (or perhaps ligical fallacy) that Jack Thompson is making.
Wertham saw that juvenile delinquents read comics and assumed there was a connection. However, his logic was faulty in that at the time a very large percentage of the entire population read comics. Therefore, if a great number (I've heard as high as 90% of literate Americans, although I can't verify that statistic) read comics, of course a great number of juvenile delinquents read them as well.
This is exactly what is happening with videogames. As the articel correctly points out, a large percentage of males between 15 and 30 play videogames. Thus is should not be surprizing that a large percentage of violent offenders in that age range play vidoegames. However, Thompson is doing what Weartham did by pointing his finger and saying "See, there's the problem!"
I think that there is a very distinct market for e-books. And realisticly in the short term the market isn't for e-books as books, but e-texts. Technical manuals, how too books, resource books, reference books. the beauty of the e-book is, or at least should be, the ability to jump to any part instantly and to be able to search for a section and find it quickly. The immediate market for ebooks in not books where we would typiclaly read the entire thing, but non-fiction, non-narrative works where we wouldn't normally need to read the whole thing to make use of it.
There are very few reasons to have a paper dictionary for example, and I can't tell you how many times I flipped through a text book looking for that one section where they cite author X who is talking about subject Y. A keyword search where you could search a book for X and Y (in a much more sophisticated manner than a simple index) would have saved me a lot of time writing my thesis when I was looking through a dozen book looking for that exact quote that I remembered but couldn't remember who said it.
So I've been avoiding reading for class by checking out Slashdot. I finally get around to reading this Victor Turner article "The Anthropology of Performance" and who is mentioned in the first paragraph? Arnold Toynbee. weird.
According to Turner, Toynbee is the person who coined the term "postmodern." Very weird.
I hope that those on here who are so absolutly certain that graffiti isn't art will remmber their narrow elitist notions of what is and isn't art the next time someone says that vidoegames aren't art either...
Read this and then let me know if all graffiti is still vandalism.
It is so obvious that Jack Thompson jumped all over this. As I mentioned when this happened, whenever there is any juvenile violence that is remotely associtated with vidoegames, Jack Thomson is there to blame videogames and remove any possibility of personal responsibility.
This is the guy who said that the DC snipers were gamers and got nearly every mainstream media outlet to beleive it. This is also the guy who sent a 13 year old (possibly his son, I don't remember exactly) into Best Buy to guy M rated games. He has very good PR and is very good at getting media coverage beacuse he gives the media the kind of hysteria laden sound bites they love. This guy has an agenda and he needs to be watched out for.
I have to admit that I bought it. I was able to justify it to myself by saying that it was "collectable" because they only shipped a number proportional to the number of hardback books that were ordered. Of course I will probably never sell it, but it was a good argument at the time!
You mention movies, and I'm curious, why are violent movies so much less dangerous than violent videogames? I have seen films that involve killing that seem much much more callous and cold toward the loss of human life than many videogames.
I remember seeing Con Air for the first time a couple of years ago, long after it had been out and probably long after it had been on network tellevision. In that film there are more than a couple of scenes where a person's death (remember a person played by a real life human, not a bunch of polygons) is played for laughs. I was much more shocked by that than any game I've ever played.
What about those Faces of Death videos which claim to depict the actual deaths of people on tape. Now most if not all of those are fake, but they are still very disturbing and when they were all the rage 15 years ago or so, I was 16 when I saw one and I knew several kids younger than me who had already seen them. What about all those Lifetime movies that depict rape? Why are actual people pretending to do things not as bad as polygons doing things.
Now don't read into my words. I'm not saying that violence in any form is always 100% safe for 100% of the people to experience 100% of the time. But there are lots of other violent activities that go on that people don't get nearly as excited about that, at least to me, seem a lot more disturbing than videogames.