Doesn't second life involve semi-programming to make those sex scenes? (Asking honestly, I've never been tempted to try second life). Does that sound like something a sony game will do? (Okay, that WAS a rhetorical question. No. I'll be suprised if you can do more than sit, stand, walk, and laugh.)
You're definitely right that the emo game did not invent making a statement with videogames, but videogames as a whole is an art form in it's infancy. 7 years, or even the 20 years or so that gaming has been around is just not enough time to develop sophisticated techniques, especially with a media form as diverse and challenging as games. No other art form really has the interactivity component to work with.
How many songs do you listen to from the first thousand years after music was invented? I guess that's unfair, since recording was not developed in that time.
Better example: how many movies from the early 1900s do you listen to? By that time, according to the wiki page on film, motion picture projectors had been around 20 years.
Of course you don't watch any of those really really old movies because film has evolved to a point now where those have only historical relevance. The technical quality of the film has undergone revolutions (getting sound so the action isn't interrupted with text was a big one, color too) and they've invented better techniques to tell the story. Those early films wouldn't have won any oscars if they had been made today. They're crap by our standards.
The same thing is likely going to happen with games is my point. Games can definitely make statements, but to really see what the form is capable of, you're going to have to wait for videogame making to evolve.
I would argue that "Geo" is a much older term than "computer," and has had much more time to be co-opted than computer has, so it's much more reasonable to assume that computer science refers to computers than geometry refers to earth measuring. But I do get the point. Also if I were to go back to undergrad, I would definitely measure in earth measuring.
That IS strange. The health insurance industry seems to justify paying for viagra but not birth control based on the technicality that viagra treats a disease but BCP prevents a normal bodily function. A terrible excuse, since any rational person would realize that unwanted pregnancy is a much bigger deal than impotence (and yes I am a guy so I'm not lacking perspective here.)
What possible reason do employers have? Surely it's not so that ultra-right wingers won't protest.
It never fails to suprise me that emo fans actually get upset and defensive when you insult emo. Or, if you don't claim to be an emo fan, it never fails to suprise me when people object to mocking of emo. This time I was expecting more whining over the republican bashing.
It's a worthy goal to make fun of emo music because 1. its funny 2. Emo, like many other things worthy of parody, is a little ridiculous when you get down to it 3. Emo fans need to grow a thicker skin. I'm praising the game because making fun of emo is not an asshole thing to do, in other words. And if you had read the author's website, you'll note that he is actually a fan of emo music.
Anyway, chill out. Why get your undies in a knot over it?
It's unfortunate that the examples were all statements of "Lookit me! I'm an insensitive asshole!" But the answer is yes, they can express that.
The real question is if games can make statements that aren't
-I want money -I want attention -I hate (insert group of people here) -I'm a jerk
The answer is yes, but we haven't been able to do it very sophisticated like yet.
One GOOD exmaple I'm thinking of is the guy who made "the emo game" You can find his works here http://www.emogame.com/
Emo game 1 basically is making fun of emo music. A worthy goal. One of the sequels is an extremely not-subtle condemnation of conservatives, republicans, Bush, Paris hilton, the anti-stem cell movement, and shooting various other fishes in barrels. They're free and sometimes funny. Again, not subtle. Try them. A lot of the message relies on you playing through not very good gaming portions and then coming to a word document with the message inserted. It doesn't flow seamlessly with the game.
There are also games that are clearly environmental, and they range from bludgeoning you over the head with it to so subtle that you could miss it.
Bioshock I'm told has some moral questions for you to ponder. As I haven't played it yet I can't comment on that. I suspect though it's largely using movie techniques between game sequences.
Videogames as statements are clearly in their infancy, so it's to be expected that the examples we have are fairly crude. Props to the emogame guy for being a pioneer of sorts though, and of course for making a statement with his soapbox. But it definitely is possible and with time they'll develop mechanisms to make it actually part of the game as opposed to gaming between statements.
Well, society at large is clueless when it comes to any expertise by definition. I'm neither an economics expert nor a CS expert, but I'm not sure being able to write a compiler is AS basic to CS as knowing supply and demand is to economics. That might be the equivalent of long division for computer science, which everyone does know.
There are other fields that are also as poorly understood to the general public as computer science, if not more so. Cell biology for one. Quantum physics for another.
So I don't think it's the reaction people get from their colleagues. Or rather, that's not the whole reason. It could easily be that CS types tend to take it as proof that everyone else is an idiot because they don't understand. Physical scientists tend to take that ignorance as a cue to try to explain until the victim's eyes glaze over. Maybe we're just more optimistic. Maybe computer science types take that as a cue that everyone else is scum?
To test this, I'm going to find the nearest computer guy and see if I can make him feel stupid for not knowing the basics of molecular biology.
On second thought, that wouldn't test anything. Okay, well then just for fun.
I think there are problems with the analogy of computers are to math and logic as a bunsen burner is to chemistry skills (don't let your pharmacist hear that, for one thing) but I get what you're saying.
Still, it's hard for me to belive that CS has little do do with computers. Does CS not stand for COMPUTER science?
Soon to get modded down as offtopic or troll, but why exactly is it that CS students think they're the smartest? What is it about knowing how to use a computer that makes for elitism? It's not like many CS students go on to cancer research with their computer skills. A few yes, but most of those were double majors in biology or were biology students taking a few computer classes.
I don't understand this at all. Tupac said "Let's show these fools how we do it on the west side, cause you and I know it's the best side." All this talk about west coast is the best coast, now you're trying to tell me east side is better? That doesn't even rhyme! How do you expect me to believe you?
I feel like that was only a jewish joke because of the names and because you said it was a jewish joke. If you were like "This is a japanese joke" and it were Yusuke and Shinji, that would work as well.
Well, for one thing he wasn't paying the guys who made the games a dime. And this is stoneage software now, you could run NES games on graphing calculators, so the hardware is pretty cheap. They were selling these from kiosks in malls as well, so no stores to buy. Very cheap. And it sounds like some other guy had already developed it, been thrown in jail, and this guy decided to start selling them.
I can't find it online, but I think I remember they sold these things for a suprising amount, I want to say in the 40-60$ range.
So very low to non-existent investment, highway robbery for the final product, that will get you a lot of money quickly.
I also wouldn't be suprised if those kiosks selling the stuff in malls were gullible individuals who had bought the kiosks, idea, and the units from him to sell themselves.
I think it's safe to say he had a nice racket going there.
Well, to be a perfect metaphor, the gerbils could still kill you. A real gerbil will at worst bite you on the finger. Exposing yourself to high levels of a not-so-potent carcinogen and getting cancer still results in... well... cancer. Which could kill you. And no one is born knowing which chemicals are carcinogens and which ones aren't. In fact, that's largely the problem, even scientists are unsure about a lot of them.
So maybe not gerbil so much as, uh... amputee old wolf that you'd have to lie down and wait to kill you. Only some aren't wolves so much as dogs which might just growl at you. But you'd still want them to be labeled so you know not to try to pet even one of the old slow wolves.
Maybe we should drop the metaphors altogether. Let's just agree that being overzealous about warning people about carcinogens at worst gets you people ignoring the warnings, but is at least better than people not having the opportunity to be informed of what is a carcinogen or not.
So the honest answer is yes. Then my question is "compared to who?" Plants? A subpopulation of people handpicked for having more common sense than the general population? An alien race I'm not familiar with? What your ideals for people are?
I'm willing to submit that people have more common sense than most animals. My cats don't have enough common sense to stay off the counters even though they seem to expect the squirt gun.
Just saying, if people don't have "common sense," then it's completely ficticious and we should redefine the term to reflect reality.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that natural selection never really works on the individual organismal level for much good either way, it really only works on the species level or above. Evolution isn't driven by individual idiots dying, it is driven by idiot species going extinct.
In other words, more people dying as a result of warning labels being removed isn't going to strengthen the gene pool, it's just going to kill some of the less-lucky people. Think about it, you've likely done some things that in retrospect were stupid that a warning label told you not to do. Whether it's a seatbelt you didn't wear because you forgot or an electrical outlet you overloaded because you were thinking of something else, or something you ingested as a kid because you didn't know any better and your parents can't be everywhere. That comes down to luck, not genetic superiority.
In other words, not all warnings are redundant with brain power, and by the way you're not so much smarter than the rest of humanity that you play by different evolutionary rules.
Like all americans, I want a magic bullet to the problem of carcinogens and cancer! I hear a lot of chatter about incandescent light bulbs and waste, fluorescent light bulbs and mercury, and LEDs and cancer. I don't understand any of it, but I'm certain it's those bureacratic fat cats in Sacramento that are making me so very confused! If they didn't put those warnings on stuff, it probably woudn't be a problem!
Why won't someone just make it simple? Wave an american flag in the direction of the perfect light bulb that has no real-world problems that I can pick up at walmart on my way to Ikea while driving in my hummer and forget all about cancer, global warming, and mercury forever.
Is that really too much to ask?!? I'm beggin you, lie to me and tell me there are perfect solutions! Just give me one saying that will solve the problem completely without consequences that fits on a bumper sticker and I'm there instantly!
Then, there's the boy that cried wolf. If every square inch of everything is plastered with cancer warnings, people might miss the ones that warn of a near certain cancer mortality within 5 years because of all the ones for the 1 in one billion risk of mortality within 90 years.
Well, the boy crying wolf is biologists. Problem is, he's not lying, there are a lot of wolves.
Well, in the biology community, the fact that everything DOES seem to cause cancer is a running gag. It's kind of black comedy really. The one way to be sure that you're not going to slowly and painfully to cancer is to get killed by something else first. Ha ha...
I blame our early RNA-based ancestors for choosing an imperfect nucleotide-based system of keeping notes that has not been significantly improved (aside from the DNA version at some point.) Is it too much to ask that the genetic material be completely error-free?
Physicists would say yes, but I say they're cowards, traitors, and anti-life.
2. If you examine history, conspiracies are actually the norm and not an aberration.
I think there are some flaws in this line of thinking. If you look back on history for conspiracies, you're going to find plenty of conspiracies and hardly any cases of where there were theories that there was a conspiracy but no conspiracy. Wrong conspriacy theories, once disproven, are generally forgotten.
The watergate scandal. If you're looking at just the nixon administration, I'm sure there were scores of conspiracy allegations. I have very little knowledge of how many theories there were or if there were more conspiracies that were proven, and of course it's not known how many conspiracies nixon actually engaged in.
Even if that were the only conspiracy in the history of the american presidency, that one would be enough to disprove the statement "The american presidency has never been involved in a serious conspiracy." However you want to phrase that null hypothesis is fine, you get my drift.
That's led many to be cynical about the presidency and government in general, but it's a fallacy to assume that because of that, every presidency has been mired in conspiracies and every conspiracy you can think of is worth the internet it's printed on.
That there have been conspiracies only proves there have been conspiracies, not that they are abberations or norms.
I would think cashiers, makeup artists, and puppeteers would at least be more rational about the debate than, say, the oil and coal lobby and the PhDs they employ, or greenpeace. Accepting for the moment the premise that people with lower paying jobs are ignorant about climate change, at least they don't have entrenched dogmatic belief in one side or the other. They'll be open to facts rather than insisting it is or isn't happening.
Now onto the premise: I have never encountered makeup artists or puppeteers, but I have met cashiers that are better citizens of earth than some scientists I know.
Lastly, you're on the freaking internet. Go to a climate change meeting if you don't want to hear from non-professionals.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the AC you were responding to was also. His favorite movie is that cup with slots in it that you spin and watch the horse run endlessly.
Doesn't second life involve semi-programming to make those sex scenes? (Asking honestly, I've never been tempted to try second life). Does that sound like something a sony game will do? (Okay, that WAS a rhetorical question. No. I'll be suprised if you can do more than sit, stand, walk, and laugh.)
True, second life has them beat by years.
You're definitely right that the emo game did not invent making a statement with videogames, but videogames as a whole is an art form in it's infancy. 7 years, or even the 20 years or so that gaming has been around is just not enough time to develop sophisticated techniques, especially with a media form as diverse and challenging as games. No other art form really has the interactivity component to work with.
How many songs do you listen to from the first thousand years after music was invented? I guess that's unfair, since recording was not developed in that time.
Better example: how many movies from the early 1900s do you listen to? By that time, according to the wiki page on film, motion picture projectors had been around 20 years.
Of course you don't watch any of those really really old movies because film has evolved to a point now where those have only historical relevance. The technical quality of the film has undergone revolutions (getting sound so the action isn't interrupted with text was a big one, color too) and they've invented better techniques to tell the story. Those early films wouldn't have won any oscars if they had been made today. They're crap by our standards.
The same thing is likely going to happen with games is my point. Games can definitely make statements, but to really see what the form is capable of, you're going to have to wait for videogame making to evolve.
I would argue that "Geo" is a much older term than "computer," and has had much more time to be co-opted than computer has, so it's much more reasonable to assume that computer science refers to computers than geometry refers to earth measuring. But I do get the point. Also if I were to go back to undergrad, I would definitely measure in earth measuring.
That IS strange. The health insurance industry seems to justify paying for viagra but not birth control based on the technicality that viagra treats a disease but BCP prevents a normal bodily function. A terrible excuse, since any rational person would realize that unwanted pregnancy is a much bigger deal than impotence (and yes I am a guy so I'm not lacking perspective here.)
What possible reason do employers have? Surely it's not so that ultra-right wingers won't protest.
It never fails to suprise me that emo fans actually get upset and defensive when you insult emo. Or, if you don't claim to be an emo fan, it never fails to suprise me when people object to mocking of emo. This time I was expecting more whining over the republican bashing.
It's a worthy goal to make fun of emo music because 1. its funny 2. Emo, like many other things worthy of parody, is a little ridiculous when you get down to it 3. Emo fans need to grow a thicker skin. I'm praising the game because making fun of emo is not an asshole thing to do, in other words. And if you had read the author's website, you'll note that he is actually a fan of emo music.
Anyway, chill out. Why get your undies in a knot over it?
It's unfortunate that the examples were all statements of "Lookit me! I'm an insensitive asshole!" But the answer is yes, they can express that.
The real question is if games can make statements that aren't
-I want money
-I want attention
-I hate (insert group of people here)
-I'm a jerk
The answer is yes, but we haven't been able to do it very sophisticated like yet.
One GOOD exmaple I'm thinking of is the guy who made "the emo game" You can find his works here
http://www.emogame.com/
Emo game 1 basically is making fun of emo music. A worthy goal. One of the sequels is an extremely not-subtle condemnation of conservatives, republicans, Bush, Paris hilton, the anti-stem cell movement, and shooting various other fishes in barrels. They're free and sometimes funny. Again, not subtle. Try them. A lot of the message relies on you playing through not very good gaming portions and then coming to a word document with the message inserted. It doesn't flow seamlessly with the game.
There are also games that are clearly environmental, and they range from bludgeoning you over the head with it to so subtle that you could miss it.
Bioshock I'm told has some moral questions for you to ponder. As I haven't played it yet I can't comment on that. I suspect though it's largely using movie techniques between game sequences.
Videogames as statements are clearly in their infancy, so it's to be expected that the examples we have are fairly crude. Props to the emogame guy for being a pioneer of sorts though, and of course for making a statement with his soapbox. But it definitely is possible and with time they'll develop mechanisms to make it actually part of the game as opposed to gaming between statements.
Well, society at large is clueless when it comes to any expertise by definition. I'm neither an economics expert nor a CS expert, but I'm not sure being able to write a compiler is AS basic to CS as knowing supply and demand is to economics. That might be the equivalent of long division for computer science, which everyone does know.
There are other fields that are also as poorly understood to the general public as computer science, if not more so. Cell biology for one. Quantum physics for another.
So I don't think it's the reaction people get from their colleagues. Or rather, that's not the whole reason. It could easily be that CS types tend to take it as proof that everyone else is an idiot because they don't understand. Physical scientists tend to take that ignorance as a cue to try to explain until the victim's eyes glaze over. Maybe we're just more optimistic. Maybe computer science types take that as a cue that everyone else is scum?
To test this, I'm going to find the nearest computer guy and see if I can make him feel stupid for not knowing the basics of molecular biology.
On second thought, that wouldn't test anything. Okay, well then just for fun.
One of the "benefits" for working at google is they'll give you up to $5000 to adopt a kid.
Clearly google is paving their own way to cheap underage chinese laborers in a few years.
I think there are problems with the analogy of computers are to math and logic as a bunsen burner is to chemistry skills (don't let your pharmacist hear that, for one thing) but I get what you're saying.
Still, it's hard for me to belive that CS has little do do with computers. Does CS not stand for COMPUTER science?
Soon to get modded down as offtopic or troll, but why exactly is it that CS students think they're the smartest? What is it about knowing how to use a computer that makes for elitism? It's not like many CS students go on to cancer research with their computer skills. A few yes, but most of those were double majors in biology or were biology students taking a few computer classes.
I come to read about interesting stuff, not technology. Yes, that's right, we have taken over your nerd board. Slashdot will now be about bad books!
I don't understand this at all. Tupac said "Let's show these fools how we do it on the west side, cause you and I know it's the best side." All this talk about west coast is the best coast, now you're trying to tell me east side is better? That doesn't even rhyme! How do you expect me to believe you?
I feel like that was only a jewish joke because of the names and because you said it was a jewish joke. If you were like "This is a japanese joke" and it were Yusuke and Shinji, that would work as well.
Well, for one thing he wasn't paying the guys who made the games a dime. And this is stoneage software now, you could run NES games on graphing calculators, so the hardware is pretty cheap. They were selling these from kiosks in malls as well, so no stores to buy. Very cheap. And it sounds like some other guy had already developed it, been thrown in jail, and this guy decided to start selling them.
I can't find it online, but I think I remember they sold these things for a suprising amount, I want to say in the 40-60$ range.
So very low to non-existent investment, highway robbery for the final product, that will get you a lot of money quickly.
I also wouldn't be suprised if those kiosks selling the stuff in malls were gullible individuals who had bought the kiosks, idea, and the units from him to sell themselves.
I think it's safe to say he had a nice racket going there.
Well, to be a perfect metaphor, the gerbils could still kill you. A real gerbil will at worst bite you on the finger. Exposing yourself to high levels of a not-so-potent carcinogen and getting cancer still results in... well... cancer. Which could kill you. And no one is born knowing which chemicals are carcinogens and which ones aren't. In fact, that's largely the problem, even scientists are unsure about a lot of them.
So maybe not gerbil so much as, uh... amputee old wolf that you'd have to lie down and wait to kill you. Only some aren't wolves so much as dogs which might just growl at you. But you'd still want them to be labeled so you know not to try to pet even one of the old slow wolves.
Maybe we should drop the metaphors altogether. Let's just agree that being overzealous about warning people about carcinogens at worst gets you people ignoring the warnings, but is at least better than people not having the opportunity to be informed of what is a carcinogen or not.
So the honest answer is yes. Then my question is "compared to who?" Plants? A subpopulation of people handpicked for having more common sense than the general population? An alien race I'm not familiar with? What your ideals for people are?
I'm willing to submit that people have more common sense than most animals. My cats don't have enough common sense to stay off the counters even though they seem to expect the squirt gun.
Just saying, if people don't have "common sense," then it's completely ficticious and we should redefine the term to reflect reality.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that natural selection never really works on the individual organismal level for much good either way, it really only works on the species level or above. Evolution isn't driven by individual idiots dying, it is driven by idiot species going extinct.
In other words, more people dying as a result of warning labels being removed isn't going to strengthen the gene pool, it's just going to kill some of the less-lucky people. Think about it, you've likely done some things that in retrospect were stupid that a warning label told you not to do. Whether it's a seatbelt you didn't wear because you forgot or an electrical outlet you overloaded because you were thinking of something else, or something you ingested as a kid because you didn't know any better and your parents can't be everywhere. That comes down to luck, not genetic superiority.
In other words, not all warnings are redundant with brain power, and by the way you're not so much smarter than the rest of humanity that you play by different evolutionary rules.
Like all americans, I want a magic bullet to the problem of carcinogens and cancer! I hear a lot of chatter about incandescent light bulbs and waste, fluorescent light bulbs and mercury, and LEDs and cancer. I don't understand any of it, but I'm certain it's those bureacratic fat cats in Sacramento that are making me so very confused! If they didn't put those warnings on stuff, it probably woudn't be a problem!
Why won't someone just make it simple? Wave an american flag in the direction of the perfect light bulb that has no real-world problems that I can pick up at walmart on my way to Ikea while driving in my hummer and forget all about cancer, global warming, and mercury forever.
Is that really too much to ask?!? I'm beggin you, lie to me and tell me there are perfect solutions! Just give me one saying that will solve the problem completely without consequences that fits on a bumper sticker and I'm there instantly!
Well, the boy crying wolf is biologists. Problem is, he's not lying, there are a lot of wolves.
Well, in the biology community, the fact that everything DOES seem to cause cancer is a running gag. It's kind of black comedy really. The one way to be sure that you're not going to slowly and painfully to cancer is to get killed by something else first. Ha ha...
I blame our early RNA-based ancestors for choosing an imperfect nucleotide-based system of keeping notes that has not been significantly improved (aside from the DNA version at some point.) Is it too much to ask that the genetic material be completely error-free?
Physicists would say yes, but I say they're cowards, traitors, and anti-life.
I think there are some flaws in this line of thinking. If you look back on history for conspiracies, you're going to find plenty of conspiracies and hardly any cases of where there were theories that there was a conspiracy but no conspiracy. Wrong conspriacy theories, once disproven, are generally forgotten.
The watergate scandal. If you're looking at just the nixon administration, I'm sure there were scores of conspiracy allegations. I have very little knowledge of how many theories there were or if there were more conspiracies that were proven, and of course it's not known how many conspiracies nixon actually engaged in.
Even if that were the only conspiracy in the history of the american presidency, that one would be enough to disprove the statement "The american presidency has never been involved in a serious conspiracy." However you want to phrase that null hypothesis is fine, you get my drift.
That's led many to be cynical about the presidency and government in general, but it's a fallacy to assume that because of that, every presidency has been mired in conspiracies and every conspiracy you can think of is worth the internet it's printed on.
That there have been conspiracies only proves there have been conspiracies, not that they are abberations or norms.
A witty saying proves nothing.
-voltaire
Personal pet peeve: unfounded elitist cynicism which passes itself off as wisdom.
What do you mean "common sense" is an oxymoron? Are you saying people in general don't have any sense? If so, compared to what? Your common sheep?
I would think cashiers, makeup artists, and puppeteers would at least be more rational about the debate than, say, the oil and coal lobby and the PhDs they employ, or greenpeace. Accepting for the moment the premise that people with lower paying jobs are ignorant about climate change, at least they don't have entrenched dogmatic belief in one side or the other. They'll be open to facts rather than insisting it is or isn't happening.
Now onto the premise: I have never encountered makeup artists or puppeteers, but I have met cashiers that are better citizens of earth than some scientists I know.
Lastly, you're on the freaking internet. Go to a climate change meeting if you don't want to hear from non-professionals.