I could be wrong, but it sounds like you're basing your opinion of the entire series off of just one or two of the games.
I could be wrong, but I think the GP was looking for a "funny" tag. Pretty much everything he described (cheesy characters, superficial plots, turn-based combat) are unfortunate staples of the FF series.
"An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
No it wouldn't, just because something mimics consciousness does not mean it is conscious. This is a common fallacy amongst people who take a naive form of physicalism to extremes.
If it walks like a duck...
Can you aenesthetize an artificial brain?
Why not? Maybe I am misunderstanding, but just because it cannot communicate and does not regulate a body doesn't mean it's not equivalent to a regular old brain.
One prominent sociologist at a top university explained earnestly that he was no bigot but, of course, wouldn't want his sister to marry a Republican."
Becoming a Republican is a choice, because it is a membership to an organization with a certain set of public beliefs and ideologies. It is not bigoted to say you disagree with those ideologies and hope that your close family members don't follow them (or become "tempted" by marrying one, I guess).
Becoming gay is not a choice, according to both scientists studying human sexuality and the gays themselves. Being against homosexuals is like being against those with black skin or mental retardation--it is callous and ignorant of the facts.
It's OK to criticize ideologies and those who follow ideologies. It's generally not OK to make sweeping presumptions about entire groups of people for things they are born with or cannot control.
Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].
You also need to know proper etiquette and customs [bragging about your ePeen, using annoying and repetitive emotes, and informing others that they need to "l2p"]. Don't forget about avoiding those embarassing social faux pas [corpse-camping a dude who has a level 80 character hidden behind a bush, ready to rape you].
I don't see richness and depth in online games. Most of the worlds are ridiculously large, but they take a regular game's worth of content and stretch it for hundreds of hours. For instance, you might fight a wolf at level 1, but you'll fight that same wolf at level 50, but now he's reskinned and slightly larger. You'll still be collecting wolf pelts the whole way through. Nothing has dramatically changed, except for your character's abilities, which let you kill in new and interesting ways. You're still killing in the same "right-click then press 1-2-3 until it dies" fashion, though.
At least in World of Warcraft, you definitely need a particular group composition (at high levels). In particular, you need one tank, one healer, and a bunch of other goons that try to cause damage. It's fine to try some strange combination (like 3 rogues for damage, or 2 paladins to heal, etc.), and it can actually work with a decent team, but you still need some guy to tank, and some guy to heal. If you don't, your team dies, and that's about it.
Even if you have the right composition, there's no guarantee that your team actually works well together. All it takes is one guy to do something stupid and then the whole group suffers (make a bad pull, fear a mob into another group of mobs, forget to repair, etc.). It was very difficult to compensate for your group's weaknesses, since every class had to be uber-specialized to fulfill its role properly (however, it's my understanding that Wrath of the Lich King is trying to make classes more versatile with dual talent builds, and all that).
Sitting around and waiting for a healer/tank to log on or join my group was the worst part of WoW, so I quit playing. You really needed a large group of friends who play all the time to really enjoy that game, since looking for people to join pickup groups was a lesson in frustration.
The standard display lists those key commands in the side of the window. You likely will memorize at least some of them during use, but you certainly don't have to.
Right, but for some reason, I have to press the button associated with each menu (like B for Build, D for Designate, etc.), instead of using the arrow keys or a mouse cursor to navigate my way through them. When slapping down plots of farmland, I have to use C and Z (or some keys on the left side of the keyboard) to resize those plots, while a different set of keys (PgUp and PgDown, I think) are used for resizing fences and walls. Or maybe I have them reversed. The point is that I don't remember them because they were completely unintuitive.
All that said, I continued to play the game, diligently following the tutorials lesson by lesson. Then I reached one tutorial that instructed me to download an exterior program, which could alter the game's memory in real-time to quickly change assigned roles for all my dwarfs. The reason the program existed is because the in-game interface for changing roles was terribly sloppy.
I looked on the forums to see future plans for the game, but apparently the creator had his sights set on more sub-systems, like quality of dwarven bandaging or something. No mention of mouse support, higher resolutions, streamlined interface, easier feedback system, etc.
(Though it's worth adding that if the actual Mars astronauts got into bloody fistfights and sexually harassed the hot Canadian crewmate, Americans might actually tune in and learn more astronomy sort of by accident. Hmm, maybe Rupert Murdoch should fund the mission and give FOX/Sky broadcast rights to what would surely be the most watched reality show in all of history!)
There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress.
What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap.
The beauty of one graphic tileset in relationship to another is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I don't like having to cross-reference a game's objects with an out-of game table. For instance, how is it obvious that a D refers to a dragon, while a d refers to a dwarf? (or vice-versa, or maybe D is a dwarf while d is a baby dwarf, while a red D is an evil dragon, or whatever...).
Graphics aside, nothing turns me off more than a hideous interface. In Dwarf Fortress, at least, you have to memorize an arcane system of key commands to navigate through a literal fortress of menus. Ugh.
Recently, some evolutionary scientists came before God and said to him, "We don't need you any more. We can explain everything with natural processes and do anything you could do."
And so God challenged the scientists to a contest to create life. Of course, they would have to do it the old way that God had done, and if they exceeded Him, He would go.
So, the lead scientist was gathering up some dirt when God noticed and said, "Woah, woah.. You make your own dirt."
To which the plucky scientist replied, "That makes almost as much sense as this misleading and improbable story makes."
* - For the benefit of the people who consistently reply to my analogies involving carburetors that carburetors are obsolete and not in common use, please note that that is the damn point of my using them in this analogy.
I still don't understand. Maybe you could use a car analogy to help explain your analogy about carburetors?
It's also an interesting response because it's the same knee-jerk defense of WoW PvP I've read in many other forums. If you don't like it, go away. If that's become such a quick response to anything that seems even remotely to be an attack on PvP, maybe that says something about how PvP is broken in WoW. Can you play on a PvP server without griefing or being griefed? What if all your friends are griefers and refuse to roll on anything but a PvP server? Is there any point to playing on a PvP server besides being able to one day grief others? Do people even distinguish between griefing and PvP anymore or is it basically, "You're on a PvP server. Expect PvP all day, every day. Oh and by the way PvP means that as you're out questing you'll encounter random groups of PvP equipped max level players who will kill you and camp your corpse."
I started my characters on a PVP server when the game first came out, and it was a lot of fun. Running into someone and not knowing whether they'd be friendly or hostile, the constant paranoia, the fight for control of quest resources--it made the game a little more interesting.
(Disclaimer: I played a night elf rogue, so my character usually had the jump on people, and he had good escape abilities if things went sour. Other classes didn't have such an easy time.)
Even with all those perks, as soon as people hit the max level, everything changed. Maxed-out griefers replaced world PvP between characters and groups of similar levels. Bored high-level characters (who didn't have access to Battlegrounds yet) ran around and slaughtered low-levels who didn't have a chance.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to level up characters on old PVP servers during prime-time hours. You need to bring your high-level wherever your alts go, so if you get corpse-camped, you login with a high level character and fight the griefer. If that doesn't work, you whine over the general chat until someone helps you.
It was really a lesson in frustration, so I gave up playing WoW. If I ever return, I'm going to a PvE server, where PvP is consensual and optional.
You heard it here on Slashdot first, gentlemen. Gay men aren't attracted to your operating system.
We already knew they weren't aroused by the size of your external hard drive, but the jury's still out on whether or not you should wear an anti-virus shield when having unprotected file-sharing with another anonymous gay man. Some call this controversial practice "bare-backuping," and it remains highly controversial in online gay communities.
On the one hand, this seems like a good alternative. On the other, the notion is basically incompatible. After all, wouldn't the greenest thing of all be to simply unplug and go till your garden?
That, I believe, is a false dichotomy. The "all-or-nothing" idea is popularized by a small minority of eco-nuts who think the only way into the future is by going backward (i.e., grow all your own food, get off the grid, total rejection of consumerism, etc.). Those eco-nuts are then lambasted by right-wing nuts, who believe that minority represents the entire green movement (anti-hippie hysteria ensues). Meanwhile, they take pride in gas-guzzlers, ridicule global climate change, and generally gravitate to the extreme opposites.
"Going green" does not mean giving up on technological progress or turning backward. It is simply recognizing that our technology has the power to do awesome and terrible things, and then building (and buying) technology that takes those problems into account. Green tech is usually focused on sustainability, low power use, and small ecological footprints.
Basically, throwing away our computers entirely would be going backwards. Building computers that take less energy and remain capable of running the latest OSs, apps, and games is a greener way of going about it. Does this computer satisfy those prerequisites, is it a gimmick that's latching onto the green movement, or is it a step in the right direction? I don't really know, but it's faster in every way than my current gaming computer, which I built last year for $400 (not counting monitor and peripherals). On top of that, it uses a 300-watt power supply, compared to my 500-watts. So I dunno, maybe there's something to it?
I fear that 'green' is becoming more about fashion than it is about the Earth, and the notion of a green way to do a very non-green thing seems to support that. Sort of like a hybrid SUV, an eco-friendly landfill, or a more merciful way to kill whales.
It's definitely a fashion statement. However, I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing. Instead of "creating a fashion statement," a more favorable wording would be "popularizing a meme." I think the goal of environmentalists is to push their memes up near the top of the list of things people consider when buying and building stuff. Next to cost, safety, usability, etc., they would want to see "environmental impact" as an important choice.
(Of course, there's such a thing as false advertising. Something can be overpriced, unsafe, or useless at its function, and of course something that's considered environmentally friendly actually be harmful to the environment. Yadda yadda.)
The guy just wants to use technology to turn a terrifying situation into a slightly less terrifying one for his family. He's not trying to impose his authoritarian, unbending will on a helpless populace. I don't see any dangerous "worlds" being created by one parent's desire to safeguard his child. He's not asking the government to do it, for one, and there's no evidence that this "trend" would continue into the girl's adolescence or adulthood.
Relax. Not everyone is "out to get you," and just remember that 1984 was speculative fiction ("what if?"), not prediction or prophecy.
Slashdot Mirror
I could be wrong, but it sounds like you're basing your opinion of the entire series off of just one or two of the games.
I could be wrong, but I think the GP was looking for a "funny" tag. Pretty much everything he described (cheesy characters, superficial plots, turn-based combat) are unfortunate staples of the FF series.
Look on the bright side.
In 20 years, we'll have flying brains!
"An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person."
No it wouldn't, just because something mimics consciousness does not mean it is conscious. This is a common fallacy amongst people who take a naive form of physicalism to extremes.
If it walks like a duck...
Can you aenesthetize an artificial brain?
Why not? Maybe I am misunderstanding, but just because it cannot communicate and does not regulate a body doesn't mean it's not equivalent to a regular old brain.
One prominent sociologist at a top university explained earnestly that he was no bigot but, of course, wouldn't want his sister to marry a Republican."
Becoming a Republican is a choice, because it is a membership to an organization with a certain set of public beliefs and ideologies. It is not bigoted to say you disagree with those ideologies and hope that your close family members don't follow them (or become "tempted" by marrying one, I guess).
Becoming gay is not a choice, according to both scientists studying human sexuality and the gays themselves. Being against homosexuals is like being against those with black skin or mental retardation--it is callous and ignorant of the facts.
It's OK to criticize ideologies and those who follow ideologies. It's generally not OK to make sweeping presumptions about entire groups of people for things they are born with or cannot control.
http://www.frontiernet.net/~imaging/lunar_lander_game.html
http://sebleedelisle.com/games/moonlander/
http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/lunar_lander/
Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].
You also need to know proper etiquette and customs [bragging about your ePeen, using annoying and repetitive emotes, and informing others that they need to "l2p"]. Don't forget about avoiding those embarassing social faux pas [corpse-camping a dude who has a level 80 character hidden behind a bush, ready to rape you].
I don't see richness and depth in online games. Most of the worlds are ridiculously large, but they take a regular game's worth of content and stretch it for hundreds of hours. For instance, you might fight a wolf at level 1, but you'll fight that same wolf at level 50, but now he's reskinned and slightly larger. You'll still be collecting wolf pelts the whole way through. Nothing has dramatically changed, except for your character's abilities, which let you kill in new and interesting ways. You're still killing in the same "right-click then press 1-2-3 until it dies" fashion, though.
At least in World of Warcraft, you definitely need a particular group composition (at high levels). In particular, you need one tank, one healer, and a bunch of other goons that try to cause damage. It's fine to try some strange combination (like 3 rogues for damage, or 2 paladins to heal, etc.), and it can actually work with a decent team, but you still need some guy to tank, and some guy to heal. If you don't, your team dies, and that's about it.
Even if you have the right composition, there's no guarantee that your team actually works well together. All it takes is one guy to do something stupid and then the whole group suffers (make a bad pull, fear a mob into another group of mobs, forget to repair, etc.). It was very difficult to compensate for your group's weaknesses, since every class had to be uber-specialized to fulfill its role properly (however, it's my understanding that Wrath of the Lich King is trying to make classes more versatile with dual talent builds, and all that).
Sitting around and waiting for a healer/tank to log on or join my group was the worst part of WoW, so I quit playing. You really needed a large group of friends who play all the time to really enjoy that game, since looking for people to join pickup groups was a lesson in frustration.
The standard display lists those key commands in the side of the window. You likely will memorize at least some of them during use, but you certainly don't have to.
Right, but for some reason, I have to press the button associated with each menu (like B for Build, D for Designate, etc.), instead of using the arrow keys or a mouse cursor to navigate my way through them. When slapping down plots of farmland, I have to use C and Z (or some keys on the left side of the keyboard) to resize those plots, while a different set of keys (PgUp and PgDown, I think) are used for resizing fences and walls. Or maybe I have them reversed. The point is that I don't remember them because they were completely unintuitive.
All that said, I continued to play the game, diligently following the tutorials lesson by lesson. Then I reached one tutorial that instructed me to download an exterior program, which could alter the game's memory in real-time to quickly change assigned roles for all my dwarfs. The reason the program existed is because the in-game interface for changing roles was terribly sloppy.
I looked on the forums to see future plans for the game, but apparently the creator had his sights set on more sub-systems, like quality of dwarven bandaging or something. No mention of mouse support, higher resolutions, streamlined interface, easier feedback system, etc.
I didn't play anymore after that. =\
(Though it's worth adding that if the actual Mars astronauts got into bloody fistfights and sexually harassed the hot Canadian crewmate, Americans might actually tune in and learn more astronomy sort of by accident. Hmm, maybe Rupert Murdoch should fund the mission and give FOX/Sky broadcast rights to what would surely be the most watched reality show in all of history!)
http://www.hulu.com/watch/80030/virtuality
Didn't a British reality TV show do something like that?
There are some modern games still being produced in ASCII, like Dwarf Fortress.
What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap.
The beauty of one graphic tileset in relationship to another is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I don't like having to cross-reference a game's objects with an out-of game table. For instance, how is it obvious that a D refers to a dragon, while a d refers to a dwarf? (or vice-versa, or maybe D is a dwarf while d is a baby dwarf, while a red D is an evil dragon, or whatever...).
Graphics aside, nothing turns me off more than a hideous interface. In Dwarf Fortress, at least, you have to memorize an arcane system of key commands to navigate through a literal fortress of menus. Ugh.
Recently, some evolutionary scientists came before God and said to him, "We don't need you any more. We can explain everything with natural processes and do anything you could do."
And so God challenged the scientists to a contest to create life. Of course, they would have to do it the old way that God had done, and if they exceeded Him, He would go.
So, the lead scientist was gathering up some dirt when God noticed and said, "Woah, woah.. You make your own dirt."
To which the plucky scientist replied, "That makes almost as much sense as this misleading and improbable story makes."
I'm using Build 7100 RC1, but I've seen other leaked versions pop up on TPB and Slashdot.
Anyone have a good idea of what has changed since the release candidate? Any big features or bugfixes I should be expecting for the final release?
Learn about... bubble sort...
No, don't. Seriously. If you are at all capable, then *forget* about bubble sort. Erase it from your mind, with surgery if need be.
Even Obama knows that one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nnj7r1wCD4 @ 7:10
* - For the benefit of the people who consistently reply to my analogies involving carburetors that carburetors are obsolete and not in common use, please note that that is the damn point of my using them in this analogy.
I still don't understand. Maybe you could use a car analogy to help explain your analogy about carburetors?
Now that's Michael is dead, who will rear his children?
Watch your language, young man.
Something that is dead has no potential of becoming alive again. Otherwise it is not truly dead, but only mostly dead.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
Yet with strange aeons even death may die.
It's also an interesting response because it's the same knee-jerk defense of WoW PvP I've read in many other forums. If you don't like it, go away. If that's become such a quick response to anything that seems even remotely to be an attack on PvP, maybe that says something about how PvP is broken in WoW. Can you play on a PvP server without griefing or being griefed? What if all your friends are griefers and refuse to roll on anything but a PvP server? Is there any point to playing on a PvP server besides being able to one day grief others? Do people even distinguish between griefing and PvP anymore or is it basically, "You're on a PvP server. Expect PvP all day, every day. Oh and by the way PvP means that as you're out questing you'll encounter random groups of PvP equipped max level players who will kill you and camp your corpse."
I started my characters on a PVP server when the game first came out, and it was a lot of fun. Running into someone and not knowing whether they'd be friendly or hostile, the constant paranoia, the fight for control of quest resources--it made the game a little more interesting.
(Disclaimer: I played a night elf rogue, so my character usually had the jump on people, and he had good escape abilities if things went sour. Other classes didn't have such an easy time.)
Even with all those perks, as soon as people hit the max level, everything changed. Maxed-out griefers replaced world PvP between characters and groups of similar levels. Bored high-level characters (who didn't have access to Battlegrounds yet) ran around and slaughtered low-levels who didn't have a chance.
Nowadays it's almost impossible to level up characters on old PVP servers during prime-time hours. You need to bring your high-level wherever your alts go, so if you get corpse-camped, you login with a high level character and fight the griefer. If that doesn't work, you whine over the general chat until someone helps you.
It was really a lesson in frustration, so I gave up playing WoW. If I ever return, I'm going to a PvE server, where PvP is consensual and optional.
You heard it here on Slashdot first, gentlemen. Gay men aren't attracted to your operating system.
We already knew they weren't aroused by the size of your external hard drive, but the jury's still out on whether or not you should wear an anti-virus shield when having unprotected file-sharing with another anonymous gay man. Some call this controversial practice "bare-backuping," and it remains highly controversial in online gay communities.
I'm sure it will work fine for some games, that is until someone walks behind you or moves around in the background to ruin your game.
One word: "Moooommmm!!!"
On the one hand, this seems like a good alternative. On the other, the notion is basically incompatible. After all, wouldn't the greenest thing of all be to simply unplug and go till your garden?
That, I believe, is a false dichotomy. The "all-or-nothing" idea is popularized by a small minority of eco-nuts who think the only way into the future is by going backward (i.e., grow all your own food, get off the grid, total rejection of consumerism, etc.). Those eco-nuts are then lambasted by right-wing nuts, who believe that minority represents the entire green movement (anti-hippie hysteria ensues). Meanwhile, they take pride in gas-guzzlers, ridicule global climate change, and generally gravitate to the extreme opposites.
"Going green" does not mean giving up on technological progress or turning backward. It is simply recognizing that our technology has the power to do awesome and terrible things, and then building (and buying) technology that takes those problems into account. Green tech is usually focused on sustainability, low power use, and small ecological footprints.
Basically, throwing away our computers entirely would be going backwards. Building computers that take less energy and remain capable of running the latest OSs, apps, and games is a greener way of going about it. Does this computer satisfy those prerequisites, is it a gimmick that's latching onto the green movement, or is it a step in the right direction? I don't really know, but it's faster in every way than my current gaming computer, which I built last year for $400 (not counting monitor and peripherals). On top of that, it uses a 300-watt power supply, compared to my 500-watts. So I dunno, maybe there's something to it?
I fear that 'green' is becoming more about fashion than it is about the Earth, and the notion of a green way to do a very non-green thing seems to support that. Sort of like a hybrid SUV, an eco-friendly landfill, or a more merciful way to kill whales.
It's definitely a fashion statement. However, I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing. Instead of "creating a fashion statement," a more favorable wording would be "popularizing a meme." I think the goal of environmentalists is to push their memes up near the top of the list of things people consider when buying and building stuff. Next to cost, safety, usability, etc., they would want to see "environmental impact" as an important choice.
(Of course, there's such a thing as false advertising. Something can be overpriced, unsafe, or useless at its function, and of course something that's considered environmentally friendly actually be harmful to the environment. Yadda yadda.)
For those of us who believe in the existence of God, (or at least the soul)
Well, there's your problem! Take that away, and suddenly the universe starts to make a whole lot more sense.
Not to mention your second problem, of course, being the manual insertion of carriage returns.
(Lets act like adults).
No.
Paranoid much?
The guy just wants to use technology to turn a terrifying situation into a slightly less terrifying one for his family. He's not trying to impose his authoritarian, unbending will on a helpless populace. I don't see any dangerous "worlds" being created by one parent's desire to safeguard his child. He's not asking the government to do it, for one, and there's no evidence that this "trend" would continue into the girl's adolescence or adulthood.
Relax. Not everyone is "out to get you," and just remember that 1984 was speculative fiction ("what if?"), not prediction or prophecy.