Perhaps you should read Stallman's comments in more depth. He actually reads the licenses carefully and notes what are potentially serious problems with them, not just areas where they fail to constitute Free Software or are GPL incompatible. For the APSL he notes:
The termination clause says that Apple can revoke this license, and forbid you to keep using all or some part of the software, any time someone makes an accusation of patent or copyright infringement. In this way, if Apple declines to fight a questionable patent (or one whose applicability to the code at hand is questionable), you will not be able to have your own day in court to fight it, because you would have to fight Apple's copyright as well. Such a termination clause is especially bad for users outside the US, since it makes them indirectly vulnerable to the insane US patent system and the incompetent US patent office, which ordinarily could not touch them in their own countries.
...
At a fundamental level, the APSL makes a claim that, if it became accepted, would stretch copyright powers in a dangerous way: it claims to be able to set conditions for simply *running* the software. As I understand it, copyright law in the US does not permit this, except when encryption or a license manager is used to enforce the conditions.
I think that he has pointed out a potentially very serious problem here. If somebody accuses Apple of copyright or patent violations, they can yank your right to use you own computer because they can revoke your operating system license. Doesn't that sound a bit scary to you?
(And I wonder: Is the mechanism that edits them out the preprocessor? Can it expand macros?)
Sorry, but the genetic code is much more like bare assembly than a high level language. Each assembly instruction (base triplet) is translated directly into one machine code instruction (amino acid). There's not even a set of assembly macros, so programming is very primitive. OTOH, there are some interesting aspects to the whole intron-exon structure. Depending on which promoter activates the gene, the spliceosome, which chops out the introns, can splice the gene differently. Some genes actually carry more exons than will be coded into a particular protein and will cut different ones of them out under different circumstances. The result is that a single gene can code for a small family of closely related proteins, or if you want to put it that way that a single protein can have several sequence variants.
Some genes, like the ones that code for antibodies, take this to an extreme. The gene for immunoglobulin (antibodies) can be spliced about a zillion different ways, so that all of the possible antibodies can be produced by splicing a single gene. When antibody producing cells (T-cells) differentiate, they actually undergo permanent splicing of their DNA, not their mRNA, so that they can then produce only one kind of antibody. It's really, really cool.
Of course we don't actually need a complete genome to tell that evolution has happened. People have been doing cross-species genetic comparisons for years as a way of looking at evolution. There are some genes that have been sequenced in hundreds or even thousands of different organisms, and they show exactly the same kinds of differences that you'd expect based on neo-Darwinism. Similarities are greatest between organisms that were generally believed to be similar already- human myoglobin is identical to that from chimpanzees but is slightly different from that of mice, for instance. Genes that have critical roles in sustaining life undergo evolution more slowly than ones that are less important, so basic structural proteins like actin are very highly conserved and less critical ones like hemoglobin are less conserved. Within a given gene family, changes that have no effect on function, like those that don't actually change which amino acid is coded for, are more common than ones that do change function. Conservative changes, which result in changing an amino acid to a similar one, are more common than radical one that change an amino acid into a totally different one. Changes in unimportant regions are more common than ones in critical regions. The behavior is so well understood that it's been used as the basis for "molecular clocks" that can tell how long ago species diverged by differences in critical genes.
This is so obvious to anyone who's looking at information like this that it's pretty much impossible to deny. It's staring you right in the face every time you look at the data. The genome is nice because it shows things working at an organism level, but crushingly clear molecular evidence of evolution has been available for quite some time.
OTOH, most court cases aren't going to involve extremely contentious issues that are hot ongoing research topics. Instead they're going to pit one side that actually has the weight of generally accepted scientific though behind it and one side that's dug up the one scientist in a thousand who has a wacked out alternate theory. The problem is that the average judge or juror isn't going to be able to tell the two apart based only on the testimony of the two sides' witnesses. Each of them is going to present himself as the more reliable party and without an unbiased third party to help decide the issue it's likely to be a tossup. Heck, in many cases it's worse than that because the guy supporting the wacko view is a professional witness who has lots of experience convincing juries while the guy supporting the real science is a practicing scientist who's only used to talking to other scientists.
Actually, in some cases it's worse than that. My boss was an expert witness in the OJ civil trial, testifying about the mass spectrometry evidence of EDTA contamination in the blood samples. I can't see how any practicing scientist could possibly have concluded that the samples were contaminated based on the evidence they had (the alleged EDTA was a background peak, while it should have stood out like a sore thumb) but the defense dug up somebody who was willing to testify that they were. I'm sure that money changing hands had a lot to do with it. A third scientist who reached his conclusion based on the evidence instead of how much money was going into his research budget (my boss at least took his fee as a donation to his research, not for his personal use) would have been much more reliable.
Federal judges have had the right to appoint experts to advise both judge and jury
since 1975
As long as they have that right, it makes sense to give them an opportunity to take good advantage of it by finding competent scientific advisors- which is all that the system does. Nobody is forcing the justice system to bring them in, either, so the judge will only call one in when he thinks that it's warranted. Besides, it's not as though the judges and juries have to take the scientists' words as gospel just because they're not being hired by one side or the other. They'll still be required to judge the scientists' opinions and credibility the same way that they would any other witness. If the scientist has an obvious bias, his testimony can be discounted the same way that any other biased witness's testimony would be discounted.
If it was possible to measure value to the Open Source community as contributed by country, I'm sure
Australia and Finland would be at or very near the top.
I'm pretty sure that the number one country by contribution would be the People's Republic of Berkeley. Remember BSD Unix, BIND, etc. It's a pretty huge contribution from one little city.
If the government is going to be paying people to produce software, the software should be open for all taxpayers to use.
Including closed-source software companies.
But GPLed software is available for anyone to use. Right of unrestricted use is part of the license. Closed-source software companies can even distribute GPLed software. Microsoft could release its own distribution of Linux if it particularly felt like it. They just aren't allowed to slap on a different license. In fact, IIRC, Microsoft already does distribute some Open Source software (under its original license) as parts of some of its multi-part software packages.
Actually, I agree that government originated projects shouldn't be licensed under the GPL. I think that it's probably better for them to be released under something like the BSD license or public domain that allows the broadest possible use. But that shouldn't stop the government from contributing to GPLed projects already in progress (i.e. NSA high security Linux) if doing so is a good way of achieving government aims.
Blech. The GPL is neither particularly restrictive nor nearly as complicated as most people seem to think. For practical purposes, the GPL means three things to most users:
You are perfectly free to run the software any way you damn well choose
If you redistribute the software you may not change the terms of the license and must let other people know their rights by including a copy of the license
If you redistribute the software as binaries you must make source available to everyone to whom you made the binaries available.
That neither restrictive nor difficult, particularly if you tend to distribute the software as source. The GPL just looks big and intimidating because it's written in legalese to make it harder to dodge in court.
Some people (and companies) that are honest enough to follow the GPL and release modifications to the public would be more than happy to keep their modifications private if the code were licensed under the BSD or released into the public domain. Thus the GPL still encourages sharing.
The GPL still gives a powerful legal lever if a violation is eventually discovered. If somebody who has access to proprietary code finds a chunk of GPLed code in it and lets others know, there's a legal basis for bashing the company that cheated. Even though this seems like a remote possibility, some people may think that it's worthwhile.
Reason 1 is probably more persuasive, but you can't really neglect reason 2. You really never know when a violation might be discovered.
Yes. It was in "Blast Pit", where you have to turn on the giant fan and then jump out into space and let the wind blow you up to the ceiling. The concept was too silly for me to believe, mostly because I couldn't imagine an AC fan that was that powerful. It also seemed to me that
Every other fan in the game would do you horrible damage if you tried something similar and
If it were actually that strong it would blow you up the ladder, which it didn't seem to do.
I'll admit that I didn't consider throwing grenades to see if the wind blew them, or to just try it anyway (hell it would only be one death) but I considered and rejected it and tried everything else I could think of without success. I remember very distinctly reading the walkthrough and thinking, "Gee, they really did want you to do something that stupid."
The camera is a part of what defines the art, and DOGME 95 represented an effort to remove the importance of the camera, in favor of the performance and the story.
But Dogme95 is a deliberate overreaction against a perceived (and IMO actual) shift too far in the direction of pretty camerawork. Too many movies today are all about the camera and nothing about the story. The goal of Dogme95 is to revive the idea of using film to tell stories by eliminating all elements that can cause directors to abandon story in favor of doing neat tricks with the camera. After doing so, it should be possible to return to a happy medium, in which the story and the camera are given appropriate weight. The idea is that only by such a deliberate overreaction can we guarantee the revival of storytelling skills. Similarly, Dogma2001 is built around the idea that by deliberately giving up technological and genre crutches game designers will have a chance to focus on originality. When that is fused with the technological power of the latest, greatest toys the result will be vastly superior to games which ignore originality in favor of impressive looks.
The prohibition on standard subjects (Rule 4) is especially absurd. There have been VERY VERY few games that did not include one of those. Some of the most innovative games of all time have! (Ultima had them, DOOM had them, Diablo had them)
I think that you miss the point of several of the dogmas. Those particular characters are forbidden because the games that you mentioned made them into hackneyed old warhorses, so those games are basically exempt. Similarly, Wolfenstein3D (AFAIK the first true FPS) didn't violate the ban on FPS games because they wouldn't have been on the list until they were done to death. The goal is to prevent designers from returning to hackneyed genres and characters, and the ones listed are basically a provisional list of ones that are already clearly meet that criterion. If Vikings become excessively popular, or business strategy games, or any other character or genre that isn't currently exceptionally popular, they may well wind up on the list of hackneyed characters/genres.
You could plausibly argue that the introductory movie is against Dogma 6 (All cinematics, cut-scenes, and other non-interactive movies are forbidden.), though it could be cut without any problem. IIRC it also doesn't have a 640x480 mode, so it may violate Dogma 2 (The use of hardware 3D acceleration of any sort is forbidden. Software 3D engines are not forbidden, but the game must run at 20 frames per second or better in 640 x 480 16-bit SVGA mode or the nearest available equivalent). It's unclear to me whether the 640x480 mode restriction only applies to games with a software 3D engine or to all games, so this might or might not be a violation. IIRC some of the player careers may also violate the genre restrictions.
Still, these are trivial violations and could be removed without great difficulty or impact on the game. That proves that it is very possible to create a game that meets Dogma2001 restrictions but is still a great game to play.
I think that this is the critical point of the article. The goal is not to suggest that Dogma 2001 is the only valid way of making good games, or even that Dogma2001 games will be particularly great. But they will focus on innovation, and when they do come up with a great idea the vast horde of me-too game designers will be able to make a copycat version with all of the cool bells and whistles that technophiles drool over.
One of my favorites, and IMO deserving of a place higher on the list was this one:
9. If a game is representational rather than abstract, it may contain no conceptual non sequiturs, e.g. medical kits may not be hidden inside oil tanks.
Games would be far, far better if they just adhered to this simple rule. I've seen far too many games that are difficult or impossible without a cheat guide simply because the require an illogical action on the player's part to go on to the next stage. I remember particularly clearly one step of Half Life that I couldn't get through without the cheat guide simply because I considered the action required and then rejected it as so ridiculous that the author couldn't possibly require you to do something that stupid. Any game designer who does something like that deserves to be flogged.
the true miracle of a great game is not the "balancing" of these issues, but rather the capacity to use theatrical devices, smoke and mirrors, to cloud the player into feeling or having the sense that a storytelling game is interactive, or that a simulation is storytelling. One of the devices used in this regard is precisely the notion mentioned above, giving the user more control of sequencing to make up for the lack of timing -- which is the real tradeoff that is typically made. The best, and most creative games, are not just those which provide non-linearity, but which combine nonlinearity with other, often subtle, devices that "fake out" the user into thinking she is playing one type of game when she is actually playing the others.
There are a lot of fairly standard devices that can lend a nice air of pacing and/or non-linearity to an otherwise blandly linear plot. A classic is what I think of as a "node" approach; the player moves from one chunk of the linear game to another but the actions necessary to move on are fairly free-form within each chunk. That is to say that you can get the key first or you can kill the monster guarding the door first, but you must kill the monster and have the key before you can move on. This lets the player feel that he's not completely on a rail without breaking the scripting advantage of a linear plot.
Another old chestnut to provide a semblance of pacing is to vary the difficulty and frequency of opponents vs. puzzles vs. open space. Sections without oppnents can release the built up excitement of a flurry of combat, but after a while they start to build up tension and wondering when the next attack is going to come. Areas without any puzzles or enemies can be particularly good for this, since the player is inevitably scrutinizing everything very carefully to find the next ambush. Similarly, an increased frequency and intensity of combats convinces players that they're closing in on something important, while an occasional wimpy attacker suggests that nothing big is going on. These kinds of things let a careful designer play with the gamer's emotions in much the same way that a good novelist can, and can be made to work even without a rigidly linear plotline.
Yeah, the plot pretty much goes away once you get to Xen, but it retains some interest because you get to explore completely different and bizzare landscapes. The thing that really, really sucked was the part of "Interloper" where you have to jump down about fifty floating platforms while the damn floating head things are blasting at you with fireballs. You're completely exposed, and the jumps are tricky enough without needing to avoid being killed by the fireballs. That section just plain sucks, and it takes forever to get through for no real reason. If you could just skip that part it would be OK.
This is the way forward, and it's not something to be afraid of. What people always forget, is that TCO is the only thing that matters. By having a regular upgrade/subscription cycle, we have the following:
1. improved productivity, thanks to the improvements in software effected between upgrades
If you really think that constant upgrades are the route to increased productivity, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. Every time your software changes, users will have to be trained in how to use the new functions, which is expensive, and even with training they'll lose productivity while they're adapting to the new way of doing things. If you figure an hour of training plus an hour of total lost productivity every month, you're talking about effectively three days of lost time per year per user to deal with constant upgrades. Counting salary, benefits, training costs, etc. that's several hundred dollars in costs per year on top of the software costs. And that's assuming that there's no downtime because slight changes in the way that the system software works prevent your admins from being able to fix problems.
I can tell you that real businesses don't change their software lightly. My employer, for instance, is sticking with NT4 and Office97 with the computers it's buying today rather than upgrading to the 2000 versions of both despite their potential advantages. Why? Because they know that they'd have to retrain the whole damn company to use the new versions if they switched and it's just not worth it. For most users good enough is good enough, and the endless upgrade cycle is a pure, 100% waste of time.
There are a lot of software types for which this type of payment would not work.
Think about the programs that you only use once a month or once a week or once only: financial software, inventory software, OS update/optimization
software. You wouldn't pay monthly for something you only use monthly.
Actually, there's an excellent example of a software package that people are pretty much guaranteed to use only once a year- tax preparation software. It's already built on essentially a subscription basis; every year they update their software to deal with changes in tax law and people pay the fee to get the latest version. It seems that people are willing to pay a periodic fee for software that they use only occasionally, so long as the value of the updates is high enough.
In an ideal subscription-based world (an oxymoron is some people's mind, I know), this means that the reason for the new release it to make their product better (compete better, so you get more subscriptions, so you make more money), rather to get people to upgrade (give people who have your product a reason to buy more, so you make more money).
Sadly, this is not an ideal world. You can bet your ass that the first "upgrade" is going to be to a new version with an incompatible file format (and probably crippled backward compatibility), so that all of your friends will have to upgrade to the subscription version of the software to read the files you send them. It's not as though we've never heard of any company doing that before.
The problem is that social phenomena apply to people, not to large corporate entities like companies and governments. Ordinary people are willing to let others have privacy because they don't want their own privacy violated, but when you start dealing with a corporate entity that reciprocity is not applicable. Companies and governments generally assume that other people are trying to steal their secrets, so they rely on active measures to protect them rather than the politeness of others. That also means that they are less likely to respect the unprotected secrets of others.
More importantly, even social conventions about privacy can be violated with reason. You might not read somebody's diary if you found it, but a suspicious person might very well try to lay their hands on the diary of the person they were suspicious of to find out if their beliefs were well founded. Those investigation companys exist because people are willing to violate others' privacy on occasion. Companies and governments are much more purposeful than individuals (they basically exist for a specific purpose, after all), so if they decide that invading people's privacy serves their goals you can bet they'll do it. They're less socially constrained and have stronger motivation, which is a very dangerous combination.
So is that why the NSA released an Open Source version of Linux designed for high security? Or why they're working on using VMWare + Linux to allow multi-level security on a single box? Yeah, those bastards at NSA hate Open Source so much, they're trying to kill it by releasing powerful, innovative, Open Source security programs. I guess they're hoping that all of the paranoid looneys like you will die of a heart attack when you find out, leaving the non-paranoid population succetible to their schemes.
It would be better if the programmer in the picture appeared to be working on a PC clone (you know, the kind of computer MS is interested in), rather than an iMac. Of course I also think it would be funnier if the devil in the Red Army uniform looked more like the BSDaemon, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment.
Just a nit, but it was actually Hitler who made the comment about the importance of "The Big Lie"; Musolini wasn't that smart.
Actually, the comments surrounding the basic one about the importance of the big lie really scream out in this case. The key point that Hitler made was not so much that shouting long enough and loud enough would drum the lie into the mind (though he did believe that about propaganda in general- keep it to a few often repeated points) but that a sufficiently big lie takes on a life of its own. I think that Microsoft's has done pretty well in that department; they've been so successful in framing the argument in terms of stifling innovation that most people have forgotten to look at how derivative all of Microsoft's products are. They've also done a decent job of shifting the focus from legality (has Microsoft broken the law) to practicality (would punishing Microsoft have negative consequences).
I just don't see how you can refute this argument.
And I don't see how you can maintain it. Just look at, to pick three obvious examples off the top of my head, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Larry Wall. None of them was getting paid for their work when they started doing it, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Each one was brilliant and managed to find a way to underwrite his software writing that didn't compromise its status as Free Software. None of them has stopped writing great and often innovative software, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should read Stallman's comments in more depth. He actually reads the licenses carefully and notes what are potentially serious problems with them, not just areas where they fail to constitute Free Software or are GPL incompatible. For the APSL he notes:
I think that he has pointed out a potentially very serious problem here. If somebody accuses Apple of copyright or patent violations, they can yank your right to use you own computer because they can revoke your operating system license. Doesn't that sound a bit scary to you?
Sorry, but the genetic code is much more like bare assembly than a high level language. Each assembly instruction (base triplet) is translated directly into one machine code instruction (amino acid). There's not even a set of assembly macros, so programming is very primitive. OTOH, there are some interesting aspects to the whole intron-exon structure. Depending on which promoter activates the gene, the spliceosome, which chops out the introns, can splice the gene differently. Some genes actually carry more exons than will be coded into a particular protein and will cut different ones of them out under different circumstances. The result is that a single gene can code for a small family of closely related proteins, or if you want to put it that way that a single protein can have several sequence variants.
Some genes, like the ones that code for antibodies, take this to an extreme. The gene for immunoglobulin (antibodies) can be spliced about a zillion different ways, so that all of the possible antibodies can be produced by splicing a single gene. When antibody producing cells (T-cells) differentiate, they actually undergo permanent splicing of their DNA, not their mRNA, so that they can then produce only one kind of antibody. It's really, really cool.
Of course we don't actually need a complete genome to tell that evolution has happened. People have been doing cross-species genetic comparisons for years as a way of looking at evolution. There are some genes that have been sequenced in hundreds or even thousands of different organisms, and they show exactly the same kinds of differences that you'd expect based on neo-Darwinism. Similarities are greatest between organisms that were generally believed to be similar already- human myoglobin is identical to that from chimpanzees but is slightly different from that of mice, for instance. Genes that have critical roles in sustaining life undergo evolution more slowly than ones that are less important, so basic structural proteins like actin are very highly conserved and less critical ones like hemoglobin are less conserved. Within a given gene family, changes that have no effect on function, like those that don't actually change which amino acid is coded for, are more common than ones that do change function. Conservative changes, which result in changing an amino acid to a similar one, are more common than radical one that change an amino acid into a totally different one. Changes in unimportant regions are more common than ones in critical regions. The behavior is so well understood that it's been used as the basis for "molecular clocks" that can tell how long ago species diverged by differences in critical genes.
This is so obvious to anyone who's looking at information like this that it's pretty much impossible to deny. It's staring you right in the face every time you look at the data. The genome is nice because it shows things working at an organism level, but crushingly clear molecular evidence of evolution has been available for quite some time.
OTOH, most court cases aren't going to involve extremely contentious issues that are hot ongoing research topics. Instead they're going to pit one side that actually has the weight of generally accepted scientific though behind it and one side that's dug up the one scientist in a thousand who has a wacked out alternate theory. The problem is that the average judge or juror isn't going to be able to tell the two apart based only on the testimony of the two sides' witnesses. Each of them is going to present himself as the more reliable party and without an unbiased third party to help decide the issue it's likely to be a tossup. Heck, in many cases it's worse than that because the guy supporting the wacko view is a professional witness who has lots of experience convincing juries while the guy supporting the real science is a practicing scientist who's only used to talking to other scientists.
Actually, in some cases it's worse than that. My boss was an expert witness in the OJ civil trial, testifying about the mass spectrometry evidence of EDTA contamination in the blood samples. I can't see how any practicing scientist could possibly have concluded that the samples were contaminated based on the evidence they had (the alleged EDTA was a background peak, while it should have stood out like a sore thumb) but the defense dug up somebody who was willing to testify that they were. I'm sure that money changing hands had a lot to do with it. A third scientist who reached his conclusion based on the evidence instead of how much money was going into his research budget (my boss at least took his fee as a donation to his research, not for his personal use) would have been much more reliable.
But, as the article clearly states:
As long as they have that right, it makes sense to give them an opportunity to take good advantage of it by finding competent scientific advisors- which is all that the system does. Nobody is forcing the justice system to bring them in, either, so the judge will only call one in when he thinks that it's warranted. Besides, it's not as though the judges and juries have to take the scientists' words as gospel just because they're not being hired by one side or the other. They'll still be required to judge the scientists' opinions and credibility the same way that they would any other witness. If the scientist has an obvious bias, his testimony can be discounted the same way that any other biased witness's testimony would be discounted.
I'm pretty sure that the number one country by contribution would be the People's Republic of Berkeley. Remember BSD Unix, BIND, etc. It's a pretty huge contribution from one little city.
But GPLed software is available for anyone to use. Right of unrestricted use is part of the license. Closed-source software companies can even distribute GPLed software. Microsoft could release its own distribution of Linux if it particularly felt like it. They just aren't allowed to slap on a different license. In fact, IIRC, Microsoft already does distribute some Open Source software (under its original license) as parts of some of its multi-part software packages.
Actually, I agree that government originated projects shouldn't be licensed under the GPL. I think that it's probably better for them to be released under something like the BSD license or public domain that allows the broadest possible use. But that shouldn't stop the government from contributing to GPLed projects already in progress (i.e. NSA high security Linux) if doing so is a good way of achieving government aims.
Blech. The GPL is neither particularly restrictive nor nearly as complicated as most people seem to think. For practical purposes, the GPL means three things to most users:
That neither restrictive nor difficult, particularly if you tend to distribute the software as source. The GPL just looks big and intimidating because it's written in legalese to make it harder to dodge in court.
For two reasons:
Reason 1 is probably more persuasive, but you can't really neglect reason 2. You really never know when a violation might be discovered.
Yes. It was in "Blast Pit", where you have to turn on the giant fan and then jump out into space and let the wind blow you up to the ceiling. The concept was too silly for me to believe, mostly because I couldn't imagine an AC fan that was that powerful. It also seemed to me that
I'll admit that I didn't consider throwing grenades to see if the wind blew them, or to just try it anyway (hell it would only be one death) but I considered and rejected it and tried everything else I could think of without success. I remember very distinctly reading the walkthrough and thinking, "Gee, they really did want you to do something that stupid."
But Dogme95 is a deliberate overreaction against a perceived (and IMO actual) shift too far in the direction of pretty camerawork. Too many movies today are all about the camera and nothing about the story. The goal of Dogme95 is to revive the idea of using film to tell stories by eliminating all elements that can cause directors to abandon story in favor of doing neat tricks with the camera. After doing so, it should be possible to return to a happy medium, in which the story and the camera are given appropriate weight. The idea is that only by such a deliberate overreaction can we guarantee the revival of storytelling skills. Similarly, Dogma2001 is built around the idea that by deliberately giving up technological and genre crutches game designers will have a chance to focus on originality. When that is fused with the technological power of the latest, greatest toys the result will be vastly superior to games which ignore originality in favor of impressive looks.
I think that you miss the point of several of the dogmas. Those particular characters are forbidden because the games that you mentioned made them into hackneyed old warhorses, so those games are basically exempt. Similarly, Wolfenstein3D (AFAIK the first true FPS) didn't violate the ban on FPS games because they wouldn't have been on the list until they were done to death. The goal is to prevent designers from returning to hackneyed genres and characters, and the ones listed are basically a provisional list of ones that are already clearly meet that criterion. If Vikings become excessively popular, or business strategy games, or any other character or genre that isn't currently exceptionally popular, they may well wind up on the list of hackneyed characters/genres.
You could plausibly argue that the introductory movie is against Dogma 6 (All cinematics, cut-scenes, and other non-interactive movies are forbidden.), though it could be cut without any problem. IIRC it also doesn't have a 640x480 mode, so it may violate Dogma 2 (The use of hardware 3D acceleration of any sort is forbidden. Software 3D engines are not forbidden, but the game must run at 20 frames per second or better in 640 x 480 16-bit SVGA mode or the nearest available equivalent). It's unclear to me whether the 640x480 mode restriction only applies to games with a software 3D engine or to all games, so this might or might not be a violation. IIRC some of the player careers may also violate the genre restrictions.
Still, these are trivial violations and could be removed without great difficulty or impact on the game. That proves that it is very possible to create a game that meets Dogma2001 restrictions but is still a great game to play.
I think that this is the critical point of the article. The goal is not to suggest that Dogma 2001 is the only valid way of making good games, or even that Dogma2001 games will be particularly great. But they will focus on innovation, and when they do come up with a great idea the vast horde of me-too game designers will be able to make a copycat version with all of the cool bells and whistles that technophiles drool over.
One of my favorites, and IMO deserving of a place higher on the list was this one:
Games would be far, far better if they just adhered to this simple rule. I've seen far too many games that are difficult or impossible without a cheat guide simply because the require an illogical action on the player's part to go on to the next stage. I remember particularly clearly one step of Half Life that I couldn't get through without the cheat guide simply because I considered the action required and then rejected it as so ridiculous that the author couldn't possibly require you to do something that stupid. Any game designer who does something like that deserves to be flogged.
There are a lot of fairly standard devices that can lend a nice air of pacing and/or non-linearity to an otherwise blandly linear plot. A classic is what I think of as a "node" approach; the player moves from one chunk of the linear game to another but the actions necessary to move on are fairly free-form within each chunk. That is to say that you can get the key first or you can kill the monster guarding the door first, but you must kill the monster and have the key before you can move on. This lets the player feel that he's not completely on a rail without breaking the scripting advantage of a linear plot.
Another old chestnut to provide a semblance of pacing is to vary the difficulty and frequency of opponents vs. puzzles vs. open space. Sections without oppnents can release the built up excitement of a flurry of combat, but after a while they start to build up tension and wondering when the next attack is going to come. Areas without any puzzles or enemies can be particularly good for this, since the player is inevitably scrutinizing everything very carefully to find the next ambush. Similarly, an increased frequency and intensity of combats convinces players that they're closing in on something important, while an occasional wimpy attacker suggests that nothing big is going on. These kinds of things let a careful designer play with the gamer's emotions in much the same way that a good novelist can, and can be made to work even without a rigidly linear plotline.
Yeah, the plot pretty much goes away once you get to Xen, but it retains some interest because you get to explore completely different and bizzare landscapes. The thing that really, really sucked was the part of "Interloper" where you have to jump down about fifty floating platforms while the damn floating head things are blasting at you with fireballs. You're completely exposed, and the jumps are tricky enough without needing to avoid being killed by the fireballs. That section just plain sucks, and it takes forever to get through for no real reason. If you could just skip that part it would be OK.
If you really think that constant upgrades are the route to increased productivity, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. Every time your software changes, users will have to be trained in how to use the new functions, which is expensive, and even with training they'll lose productivity while they're adapting to the new way of doing things. If you figure an hour of training plus an hour of total lost productivity every month, you're talking about effectively three days of lost time per year per user to deal with constant upgrades. Counting salary, benefits, training costs, etc. that's several hundred dollars in costs per year on top of the software costs. And that's assuming that there's no downtime because slight changes in the way that the system software works prevent your admins from being able to fix problems.
I can tell you that real businesses don't change their software lightly. My employer, for instance, is sticking with NT4 and Office97 with the computers it's buying today rather than upgrading to the 2000 versions of both despite their potential advantages. Why? Because they know that they'd have to retrain the whole damn company to use the new versions if they switched and it's just not worth it. For most users good enough is good enough, and the endless upgrade cycle is a pure, 100% waste of time.
Actually, there's an excellent example of a software package that people are pretty much guaranteed to use only once a year- tax preparation software. It's already built on essentially a subscription basis; every year they update their software to deal with changes in tax law and people pay the fee to get the latest version. It seems that people are willing to pay a periodic fee for software that they use only occasionally, so long as the value of the updates is high enough.
Sadly, this is not an ideal world. You can bet your ass that the first "upgrade" is going to be to a new version with an incompatible file format (and probably crippled backward compatibility), so that all of your friends will have to upgrade to the subscription version of the software to read the files you send them. It's not as though we've never heard of any company doing that before.
The problem is that social phenomena apply to people, not to large corporate entities like companies and governments. Ordinary people are willing to let others have privacy because they don't want their own privacy violated, but when you start dealing with a corporate entity that reciprocity is not applicable. Companies and governments generally assume that other people are trying to steal their secrets, so they rely on active measures to protect them rather than the politeness of others. That also means that they are less likely to respect the unprotected secrets of others.
More importantly, even social conventions about privacy can be violated with reason. You might not read somebody's diary if you found it, but a suspicious person might very well try to lay their hands on the diary of the person they were suspicious of to find out if their beliefs were well founded. Those investigation companys exist because people are willing to violate others' privacy on occasion. Companies and governments are much more purposeful than individuals (they basically exist for a specific purpose, after all), so if they decide that invading people's privacy serves their goals you can bet they'll do it. They're less socially constrained and have stronger motivation, which is a very dangerous combination.
So is that why the NSA released an Open Source version of Linux designed for high security? Or why they're working on using VMWare + Linux to allow multi-level security on a single box? Yeah, those bastards at NSA hate Open Source so much, they're trying to kill it by releasing powerful, innovative, Open Source security programs. I guess they're hoping that all of the paranoid looneys like you will die of a heart attack when you find out, leaving the non-paranoid population succetible to their schemes.
It would be better if the programmer in the picture appeared to be working on a PC clone (you know, the kind of computer MS is interested in), rather than an iMac. Of course I also think it would be funnier if the devil in the Red Army uniform looked more like the BSDaemon, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment.
Just a nit, but it was actually Hitler who made the comment about the importance of "The Big Lie"; Musolini wasn't that smart.
Actually, the comments surrounding the basic one about the importance of the big lie really scream out in this case. The key point that Hitler made was not so much that shouting long enough and loud enough would drum the lie into the mind (though he did believe that about propaganda in general- keep it to a few often repeated points) but that a sufficiently big lie takes on a life of its own. I think that Microsoft's has done pretty well in that department; they've been so successful in framing the argument in terms of stifling innovation that most people have forgotten to look at how derivative all of Microsoft's products are. They've also done a decent job of shifting the focus from legality (has Microsoft broken the law) to practicality (would punishing Microsoft have negative consequences).
And I don't see how you can maintain it. Just look at, to pick three obvious examples off the top of my head, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Larry Wall. None of them was getting paid for their work when they started doing it, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Each one was brilliant and managed to find a way to underwrite his software writing that didn't compromise its status as Free Software. None of them has stopped writing great and often innovative software, either.