In the game you're an "animate" inspector, you judge robots disguised as humans to see if they pass the turing test.
The whole game consists of you questioning and interacting with a character called Galatea, who may or may not be an animate.
Rather than look at big names, the important thing to consider in this is the indie record labels and indie bands under the EMI umbrella.
You take away Sgt. Pepper... yeah it's a great album, and yeah they'll miss it in the indie stores, but it's more important to have the hip new bands in stock in an indie record store.
So surfing wikipedia, the indie record labels I see as members of EMI that I recognize are Virgin, Astelwerks, DFA records (wow), and Mute records (wow).
That's a really big deal, and trust me, I don't think that the next Liars or LCD Soundsystem CD (two popular indie rock bands) are going to fly off the shelves at Wal-Mart.
Specialist records stores will have to survive solely on the quality of information and advice their staff can provide -- it's their only market advantage.
Also independent record stores are more fun to go to (and have more indie "cred") than the Wal-Mart CD section.
This doesn't make sense to me, how does the advent of digital distribution change create monopolies and take power out of the hands of the publishers?
Already any publisher has to ask the platform creator for the code or whatnot that allows their game to work on the platform, therein lies the power the platform creator has.
How does digital distribution add more power to the platform creator?
The same number of competitors exist in the marketplace so I don't see the monopoly.
The publisher still has the games, and the platform creator still has the rights to let the publisher make the game for their platform, what has changed?
I agree whole-heartedly on the quality of the translations of the Shin Megami Tensei series.
Playing Persona 3: FES, the thing that struck me the most about the character interactions was that they were so natural. Considering that the game setting is modern times in an urban area, the dialogue was teenager slang. In most games, attempts at slang are heavy-handed and laughable.
The dialogue in Persona 3 was incredibly natural sounding though, which is a feat I thought impossible!
What about viruses that are designed to replicate as much as possible?
If a virus was the recepiant of human-level AI, it's motivation would be to replicate as much as possible.
When a virus is on your computer, it's difficult to remove. Viruses are programmed to be difficult to "kill." Wouldn't this be a sign of self-presevation if displayed by an AI?
But US courts have already concluded that photographic reproductions of a public domain painting do not count - so tough, it's legal, and not up for debate.
[Wikimedia Commons] regard all images of out of copyright material as public domain, and dispute there is any copyright in a copy of an original work,' [Simon Cliffe, NPG executive director] says. 'This is contrary to UK law.... The 1988 CDPA recognises this.'
So according to this guy, US and UK law are in disagreement over this, making this case all the more interesting.
There's nothing stopping major game publishers from creating their own chain of used game stores, and contracting (or just buy a majority share in) gamestop to manage them for the publishers.
Yeah... except that it's like... really expensive.
I mean by that logic there's nothing stopping ME from doing that either.
you're careful to point out how the study could have overestimated the percent of pirates, but you convienantly miss that the study could have underestimated too, resulting from:
more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
In that blog post 2D Boy makes a more rigouous investigation of the subject, and comes out with a result of 82% piracy taking into account many factors.
From this they deduced that the level of piracy is probably less than 90%, but probably not much less.
It is interesting to note that the 2D Boy developer's stance on DRM is such:
i'm hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.
I bought the game and loved it, so I recommended it to my friends. Two of them downloaded it illegally online, both loved it, neither bought a real copy.
If someone wanted to test it out, they could just try the demo like you did. Piracy is inexcusable in this case.
nobody will care for its name, its story or anything else RPG or WC-story related it might bring along.
I see this as a huge problem in WoW.
It's a shame that people don't care about the lore in WoW or why they are running the instance that they are running.
One can sympathsize with them, they play the game for their own reasons, which is to play a game, devoid of any meaning to the game besides that it engages them.
But I feel that if the game was designed differently, people would pay more attention to the lore.
People are conditioned by the games they play. They see rewards, and they work towards those rewards.
In Oblivion, people don't just work towards the main quest line, because they recieve side quests from NPCs, and those offer alternative rewards. They get to define their own fun.
But in a social arena like WoW, your rewards are pre-determined for you before you play the game, because the community already exists, and the community more than the game decides what you see as a reward (and the game decides the community, but that's not my point).
So, what I'm saying is, when little Timmy plays WoW, he's prolly not going to play it to explore and have fun, he's going to play it to keep up with his friends in level and engage with his guild, which is not a bad thing, I'm just pointing out where his rewards lie. Notice Timmy has no reward for knowing lore.
So long story short, my idea is that the game developers could create rewards for knowing lore. That way it would become integral to the game to understand the game.
How to do this? I dunno, I'm not a developer. Quizzes for bonus lootz? To know where to go for a quest you have to know the lore associated? Just ideas, but my point is that if lore is to be relevent to a game, it has to become integral to the game.
As a member of the younger generation, I enjoy using facebook, all of my friends are online and active so it's a good community. To speak truthfully, it's a social necessity to have a facebook on a college campus, but I digress...
I've started work on a facebook game of my own, a simple artillery firing game. Facebook is a great place for games for me, because I know that if I deploy my game on facebook, I have a built in user base of... everyone I know.
Also, the social aspect of the game is interesting, I like the idea of a game being enriched by the experience of playing against anyone you know and ranking against them.
Immersion is the most important thing. So then why can't we just get immersed in a good ole game of half-life?
Because while half-life was awesome and immersive when it first came out, one plays it now and in the back of one's head is the thought: "This is old." The rough graphics, the lack of anti-aliasing, 'you can never go back home.'
Certainly during an intense level you're going to forget graphics completely while you blow up an alien, but you're always going to return to that suspension of immersion when something doesn't go right.
For example, I've been playing Battlefield heroes. As a multiplayer game, the point isn't to get immersed in the game, but it's a good example of what I'm trying to show. In new games, after you shoot an enemy, they go rag doll. That is now what I expect. When an enemy doesn't rag doll, the immersion is ruined. So in Battlefield Heroes, when I see a character do a death animation-lie flat on the ground-number, the immersion is ruined (if I was immersed in the first place but in a multiplayer shooter like that immersion isn't the point).
So it may be a hard fact for the gameplay stalworts to accept, but people like me need graphics! It's not cause I'm a bad person who hates gameplay and suckles at EA's teat, it's because immersion in a game is important.
And, immersion in a not-state-of-the-art game is certainly possible, i've been immersed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collosal_Cave_Adventure, but the truth of the market is that the average gamer will judge a game on its graphics, so that marketability factor is there.
Slashdot Mirror
On the subject of interactive characters in games, a great experiment in NPC interaction is Galatea.
You can play it online at http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://parchment.toolness.com/if-archive/games/zcode/Galatea.zblorb.js
In the game you're an "animate" inspector, you judge robots disguised as humans to see if they pass the turing test.
The whole game consists of you questioning and interacting with a character called Galatea, who may or may not be an animate.
Rather than look at big names, the important thing to consider in this is the indie record labels and indie bands under the EMI umbrella.
You take away Sgt. Pepper... yeah it's a great album, and yeah they'll miss it in the indie stores, but it's more important to have the hip new bands in stock in an indie record store.
So surfing wikipedia, the indie record labels I see as members of EMI that I recognize are Virgin, Astelwerks, DFA records (wow), and Mute records (wow).
That's a really big deal, and trust me, I don't think that the next Liars or LCD Soundsystem CD (two popular indie rock bands) are going to fly off the shelves at Wal-Mart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EMI_labels
Specialist records stores will have to survive solely on the quality of information and advice their staff can provide -- it's their only market advantage.
Also independent record stores are more fun to go to (and have more indie "cred") than the Wal-Mart CD section.
Thanks for that substancial yet uncited or defended claim.
This doesn't make sense to me, how does the advent of digital distribution change create monopolies and take power out of the hands of the publishers?
Already any publisher has to ask the platform creator for the code or whatnot that allows their game to work on the platform, therein lies the power the platform creator has.
How does digital distribution add more power to the platform creator?
The same number of competitors exist in the marketplace so I don't see the monopoly.
The publisher still has the games, and the platform creator still has the rights to let the publisher make the game for their platform, what has changed?
WTF? The Zelda cartoon was aweseome.
Well Excuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me Princess!
/IANADOWUH - I Am Not A Director Or Warcraft Universe Historian
Take note slashdot commenters, this is an essential acroynm!
I agree whole-heartedly on the quality of the translations of the Shin Megami Tensei series.
Playing Persona 3: FES, the thing that struck me the most about the character interactions was that they were so natural. Considering that the game setting is modern times in an urban area, the dialogue was teenager slang. In most games, attempts at slang are heavy-handed and laughable.
The dialogue in Persona 3 was incredibly natural sounding though, which is a feat I thought impossible!
What about viruses that are designed to replicate as much as possible?
If a virus was the recepiant of human-level AI, it's motivation would be to replicate as much as possible.
When a virus is on your computer, it's difficult to remove. Viruses are programmed to be difficult to "kill." Wouldn't this be a sign of self-presevation if displayed by an AI?
And nobody wants to play with a DM who can be bribed.
You're assuming that the microtransitions give players a tactical advantage.
In Battlefield Heroes, there are microtransactions, but they give you no tactical advantage, besides that you can level and gain points faster.
You can't buy important things, like weapons and abilities, with real world money. That way you can't "bribe" the game.
I don't know what the case is in Free Realms. Hopefully someone can tell me what the situation is there.
989 made some good games.
Anyone remember Jetmoto 2?
But US courts have already concluded that photographic reproductions of a public domain painting do not count - so tough, it's legal, and not up for debate.
From TFA: http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=865802
[Wikimedia Commons] regard all images of out of copyright material as public domain, and dispute there is any copyright in a copy of an original work,' [Simon Cliffe, NPG executive director] says. 'This is contrary to UK law. ... The 1988 CDPA recognises this.'
So according to this guy, US and UK law are in disagreement over this, making this case all the more interesting.
There's nothing stopping major game publishers from creating their own chain of used game stores, and contracting (or just buy a majority share in) gamestop to manage them for the publishers.
Yeah... except that it's like... really expensive.
I mean by that logic there's nothing stopping ME from doing that either.
more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
not everyone opts to have their scores submitted
Taken from the 2D Boy website: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
In that blog post 2D Boy makes a more rigouous investigation of the subject, and comes out with a result of 82% piracy taking into account many factors.
From this they deduced that the level of piracy is probably less than 90%, but probably not much less.
It is interesting to note that the 2D Boy developer's stance on DRM is such:
i'm hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.
I would like to know how you know that World of Goo had a 90% rate of piracy.
Dude I put the reference at the end of my comment!
I'll repeat it here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars
I bought the game and loved it, so I recommended it to my friends. Two of them downloaded it illegally online, both loved it, neither bought a real copy.
If someone wanted to test it out, they could just try the demo like you did. Piracy is inexcusable in this case.
I think college LANs are falling by the wayside,
for example, in my dorm there was no LAN in the building, my friends and I only played online. I think this is a common trend.
I believe that if you have a 90% piracy rate, it is because your software sucks and no one who has tried it thinks it is worth any money.
World of Goo had a 90% rate of piracy... because it sucked?
We must have different definitions of the word "suck", please, enlighten me to yours.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars
What Microsoft could pull is to warn of a "critical exploit" in all versions of Windows prior to Windows 7 and make money.
Out of sincere curiousity, has Microsoft ever done this?
"Guide your red dot into the mysterious green squaaaaare!
And every Saturday, a strange sweaty man comes to empty the quarters out of your machine!"
nobody will care for its name, its story or anything else RPG or WC-story related it might bring along.
I see this as a huge problem in WoW.
It's a shame that people don't care about the lore in WoW or why they are running the instance that they are running.
One can sympathsize with them, they play the game for their own reasons, which is to play a game, devoid of any meaning to the game besides that it engages them.
But I feel that if the game was designed differently, people would pay more attention to the lore.
People are conditioned by the games they play. They see rewards, and they work towards those rewards.
In Oblivion, people don't just work towards the main quest line, because they recieve side quests from NPCs, and those offer alternative rewards. They get to define their own fun.
But in a social arena like WoW, your rewards are pre-determined for you before you play the game, because the community already exists, and the community more than the game decides what you see as a reward (and the game decides the community, but that's not my point).
So, what I'm saying is, when little Timmy plays WoW, he's prolly not going to play it to explore and have fun, he's going to play it to keep up with his friends in level and engage with his guild, which is not a bad thing, I'm just pointing out where his rewards lie. Notice Timmy has no reward for knowing lore.
So long story short, my idea is that the game developers could create rewards for knowing lore. That way it would become integral to the game to understand the game.
How to do this? I dunno, I'm not a developer. Quizzes for bonus lootz? To know where to go for a quest you have to know the lore associated? Just ideas, but my point is that if lore is to be relevent to a game, it has to become integral to the game.
As a member of the younger generation, I enjoy using facebook, all of my friends are online and active so it's a good community. To speak truthfully, it's a social necessity to have a facebook on a college campus, but I digress...
I've started work on a facebook game of my own, a simple artillery firing game. Facebook is a great place for games for me, because I know that if I deploy my game on facebook, I have a built in user base of... everyone I know.
Also, the social aspect of the game is interesting, I like the idea of a game being enriched by the experience of playing against anyone you know and ranking against them.
I think it's bullshit that Goblins will be a playable race.
Even if they were, why would they end up on the Horde side? That would ruin the idea of all the Goblin towns being neutral.
OT: Climbing mountains while there is a storm is really dangerous.
Maybe you need to get a thrill out of life, but that's no reason to risk your life.
Your post makes me sad.
You should look on the sunny side of life.
Maybe get a new hobby? Bike riding? Fishing?
You hit the nail on the head dude.
Immersion is the most important thing. So then why can't we just get immersed in a good ole game of half-life?
Because while half-life was awesome and immersive when it first came out, one plays it now and in the back of one's head is the thought: "This is old." The rough graphics, the lack of anti-aliasing, 'you can never go back home.'
Certainly during an intense level you're going to forget graphics completely while you blow up an alien, but you're always going to return to that suspension of immersion when something doesn't go right.
For example, I've been playing Battlefield heroes. As a multiplayer game, the point isn't to get immersed in the game, but it's a good example of what I'm trying to show. In new games, after you shoot an enemy, they go rag doll. That is now what I expect. When an enemy doesn't rag doll, the immersion is ruined. So in Battlefield Heroes, when I see a character do a death animation-lie flat on the ground-number, the immersion is ruined (if I was immersed in the first place but in a multiplayer shooter like that immersion isn't the point).
So it may be a hard fact for the gameplay stalworts to accept, but people like me need graphics! It's not cause I'm a bad person who hates gameplay and suckles at EA's teat, it's because immersion in a game is important.
And, immersion in a not-state-of-the-art game is certainly possible, i've been immersed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collosal_Cave_Adventure, but the truth of the market is that the average gamer will judge a game on its graphics, so that marketability factor is there.