Online gaming: Practical and useful observations.
on
Designing Virtual Worlds
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From where I stand, I see two very distinct type of "gamers" these days.... Rather than get to the point, I'll regail you with a story.
I've been playing video games of all sorts for plenty of years now, and I have no problem admitting that I am not hooked on Counter-Strike. I'm involved with a gaming center that hosts one of those servers, and it is regularly active. I don't love CS, but I don't consider myself a bad player either.... Most of the maps in rotation are simple deathmatch type maps, none of the maps from version 1.5.... Typically, I rank in the top 3 or 4 out of 20 players when I hop on once or twice a month, a stat that surprises me even now. However, being the "old school" gamer, I often switch to maps that aren't so usual... With the CS 1.5 maps or classic maps (vegas, 747, as_ maps), I completely blow everyone else out of the water. I wouldn't say that it's the "lag" of newer maps, nor the fact that most of these guys don't know the maps... Heck, I hardly know some of these maps, so much of this is just a raw skill competition.
I honestly believe that well over 80%, maybe up to 90% of "regular" online gamers are in it primarily for the social contact and environment. I'm sure there's plenty of people (like me) who would rather play for other primary reasons, such as the andrenaline rush or competitive nature, and those factors influence the social gamers greatly, but nontheless.... The vast majority of gamers seem to enjoy or are addicted to the social aspects more than anything else, and learn how to "go through the motions" and base their gameplay on mastery of these motions, and complain when things are altered in the slightest, even to the benefit of gameplay.
I would have been much more interested to hear from the author about his own firsthand experiences with the dynamics of balancing social and gameplay components.... How *DO* you improve a game that people are addicted to, when addicts tend to fight change of any sort? As for that entire article, it seemed too pseudo-intellectual, and I see no benefit of questioning where the lines are drawn between art, social matters, and gaming... After all, I could classify the results of a masterful promoter attracting masses to an art exhibition as art itself.
Why don't we have some type of Radio-On-Demand service yet, where music could be "performed" rather than downloaded, preferrably without the same legal and monetary overhead that comes with permanant downloads? This type of thing seems to work fine on much more technically-intense "On Demand" cable movies. It seems like something that BMI and ASCAP would embrace.... Instead, all we get are classic-radio-stlye streams (which the licensing agencies easily cover). Wouldn't micropayments (as currently defined) easily cover the cost of transimssion and performance, as well as provide an industry alternative for all the R&D money that's getting wasted allowing permanant copies of DRM-protected media?
This is all simply observation from where I stand, and may or may not indeed be accurate, but I've got a strong feeling that nVidia's getting slapped by the trout of irony in the short term, that Microsoft is having fun with their spot on the totem pole of cash, and ATI and nVidia may in fact switch places again with this move.....
What we saw with X-Box one looked like this: nVidia makes waves with graphics cards. nVidia scores humongous x-box deal. nVidia wisely focuses on development of their x-box product, while losing some focus on their core audience, home PC gamers. R&D mishaps, and one bad mini-product-line later, and now ATI's got a clear lead in the game.
Honestly, I bet that if Microsoft makes ATI contort and wrap themselves around all sorts of bad practices and ideas just to make the perfect X-Box 2 chip, ATI may just lose ground back to nVidia... Remember, ATI thinks they are the ones with nothing to lose now, while nVidia learned the hard way that a dustbuster makes for a sloppy cooling fan, and are resolved to quit making mistakes.... especially since they probably aren't happy with the net results of their first Microsoft outing.
I can't even pretend to be a great "network administrator" or "software engineer", but I don't see how anyone can even pretend that Snort is difficult to set up with some of the documentation on the website. The most foolproof one there goes by the name of something like "RedHat 9 + Snort + Acid + MySQL + Apache", and RH9 is only used in the "base packages" sense (except for sharutils, which doesn't seem to install by default, but comes in handy when installing Nessus with the installer script).
If you can't install Snort with that type of docum.... hold on... the late 90s called, they wanted to congratulate you on beating the odds.
I honestly know of nobody else who uses this technique, I just figured I would try it back when I was hunting down upgrades for old games like Quake 2 while places like FilePlanet were getting hammered:
At google, type "index of", followed by the precise name of the file you are looking for.
I'd say this gives me good results on a fast server 95% of the time.
I mean, especially with being a web HOSTING company, where many of your clients won't even have a decent e-mail address until the buy one from you, why on earth did you bother with support via e-mail when web interfaces, even ones that have anonymous access, are so much better.
I killed many of my personal e-mail address a long time ago, with an auto-reply that leads to http://www.rahga.com/contact.... I get roughly 2 spams a month through the form from desperate spammers.
"$874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account"....
What on earth type of number is that? I work in a small (3 person) office, a branch of the main company.... Unfortunately, this means that when someone calls us, I'll pick up the phone half the time. The time I have to waste trying to figure out is it's a telemarketer or not is insane, and it takes quite a bit of skill to represent your company with class while hanging up on these 2-bit lowlife punks.
My calculation: 3x the wasted time of spam, so telemarketers are robbing every American worker $2541 out of their paychecks, assuming that the lost time can be made up in productivity with constant market value. Makes me care far less about the "2 million" jobs that will be lost thanks to the do not call list.
Worst part? We can't sign up our phone number with the Federal do not call list. Out only hope is if my baby yak breaks out of the barn, hops on to the internet, and manages to type the phone number for our biz at donotcall.gov.... but what's the chance of that happening?
At least e-mail is fairly easy to screen out.... The random-characters these guys are inserting into the body of the message in order to avoid blacklists are very easy to spot.
I can imagine this reaching some level in intranet circles. This is not a new idea.... In fact, it's far more common in real life. You know, social engineering and all that stuff. As a quick example, the only thing memorable about "Eyes Wide Shut" was the "musican's password" goofup.
... however, I would imagine that once upon a time, the idea of racing cars for sport seemed rather ridiculous.
Racing for money and fame is another matter, though, and usually happens far before racing hits the "Nascar" level. Remember (reading in history books) when they would show the might and speed of the newest railroad trains by racing them head-to-head with horses? The art of racing to impress and encourage investment will need to be mastered way before it matures into sport.
Let's face it, you are not yet distributing music for big time bands here. People who go to you to download music will do so only because it is a means to an end. Your primary goal SHOULD BE making it as easy as possible for your customer to find and download the stuff that they want.
Banking on value-ads like CD inserts and art will come with a big problem: To be cost-effective, you will have to rely on the artists and their labels for such content. Idies have a hard enough time preparing content for their gigs, let alone liner notes and the whole nine yards.
Feel free to advertise other bands and music on your site, but do not be to pushy about it. The key to getting customers to respond to your business will be providing them with an excellent first impression, in this case, getting them straight to the music they came for.
Along the same lines, your users should be able to get straight from the band's page to a place where they can get the music. They shouldn't have to go through any front pages of your website unless they want to.
"Doesn't mean the government can't spy on them, it simply means they can't spy on them openly. Nothing has changed, TIA will continue. I'm living happily in Canada, thank God."
I agree 100%. Down here in America, individuals have to pay good, hard money to treat mental illnesses like paranoia. At least Canada has those glorious socialized medicine programs.
I remember something Ted Kennedy said a while back in committee, about "obsolete" ideas in the constitution about indivudals witholding taxes so that stuff like the Army couldn't operate without funding. Quote, "That stuff will never happen here in America". IMHO, he's not ultimately correct about this point, but the motivation in making it is pretty strong.
I really can't go any further without trolling like 95% of these other posts are. I'm kinda really sick about political stories in/., aren't you?
"It's quite depressing to see that money taken out of your paycheck knowing that you won't see any of it later."
Social security was, and still is, sold by politicans to the public as "you pay now, we pay you when you retire". The reality is and has always been "you pay us now, we pay the elderly now and spend the rest".
Does this mean most Americans have been lulled into dreaming their way through a fantasy world? Yep. That's what politican's are supposed to do, it's their job. However, is the problem much worse in, say, Canada, or the vast majority of Europe? Definitely.
"Taking care of those that are weak and cannot manage by themselves instead of taking advantage of them is really one of the key defining things of being a human."
Exactly. A government is not human. Individual people should be in the business of charity and love, not governments.
With the personal value and investment in e-mail addresses dropping thanks to spam, I suppose AOL needed something that will keep subscribers from jumping ship.
I've got to wonder, however, what the EULA on this thing is going to look like.... especially if the try to pull a geocities "all your content are belong to us" clause. And what will happen someday when an popular AOL blogger decides to complain about AOL's service?
The web of front machines hides the identity of the true server computer so "there's no individual computer to shut down," Mr. Smith said. "We're dealing with somebody here who is very clever."
Mr Smith:
For the sake of my sanity, I respectfully request that you not label these 2-bit punks as "clever", as you are giving them far more credit than they deserve. The folks who deserve the clever label work in marketing for Microsoft, because while they regularly advertise a secure operating system (that seems to get a critical "system comprimising" update at least once a week), they do not deliver on that promise yet manage to evade the wrath of people such as yourself.
You see, if marketing folk and PHBs aren't heeding your warnings about quick-and-dirty solutions, and are telling potential clients that the sun will always shine and everything your company touches turns gold, then it is their responsibilty to deliver on those promises, not yours.
See, this is where that paperwork everyone always whines about comes in handy. Get rid of the bull ("synergy","integration", and oter hot words), keep from overdocumenting the situation, and make those "little notes" availiable wherever you go. Just do the jobs you are given, know your role, and give your tormentors no choice but to live up to their roles.
As far as dirty-vs-clean.... Bah... You really don't need opinions on that now, do you? Just give yourself a bit of backbone, man.:)
I decided to condense what I was originally going to say, and in sum: I completely disagree with everything in this post.
As a programmer here in the real world, my problems rarely involve with this "keeping up with the Jonese" mentality espoused by trade magazines. No, programming is a skill, and a propreitary language like C# is not one of the tools used, because clients for critical GIS software that helps predict and manage Schistosomaisis problems (among other uses) in Africa do not have an option to run tens of hundreds of computers powered by proprietary Microsoft technologies.
Perhaps you are motivated to sing praises of certain tools rather than your skills because it is one of the few ways to catch the eyes of potential customers to a consulting business. I don't know, but I can tell you this.... There are FAR more people getting paid by the hour on C than there are C#, and it's not merely for low-level stuff. In fact, I'd assume there are more C instructors and teachers altogether than there are actual C# programmers, especially when you look worldwide.
Yeah, CS _was_ a rather addictive fad. I wish I could regret the fact that I dedicated at least an hour per day (for several months) playing it.
However, something good did come from it. Once you decide to stop playing CS, you honestly don't miss the crappy game, and it makes it so much easier to swear off video game addictions completely, and simply feel content with gaming only in moderation.
I just feel sorry for those of ya'll still addicted to Everquest. Unlike Half-Life (cs), that game really is junk.
I'll go ahead and stick my neck out: It may be newer to Netscape rather than Mozilla, but I can't tell you how much I love little things like "Find As You Type"... This is kinda second-nature stuff to those of us who commonly use vi & co..... to find a link, if the browser has focus, just type a word to find a link containing that word, or "/" followed by the word to search the text. Bad part: "/" + "Enter" won't go ahead and look for the next word, instead you have to do "Ctl+G" or "F3"... bah! No regexp support either, at least as far as I know.... maybe not useful for a ton of users, but wouldn't it rock?
I've spent a LOT of my time at a pretty good gaming center I'm associated with, so I have more than enough first-hand research at my disposal....
First, I'll state that among the patrons there, the social interaction is FAR greater than you see in the majority of other open settings, such as banks, grocery stores, parks, etc. Let's face it, if you really wanted to treat them as apples-to-apples, you could say shopping is largely an anti-social activity. I rarely talk to more than just the cashier, and I know I'm not alone in this regard. Howerver, at the gaming center, I'd say the activity often rivals that of your local raceway... The nearest rival would be local sports, but it's a bit different, as the social units usually hold more connections than usual, but sometimes are harder to become a part of because the roles are not as easily defined. Public raceways, gaming centers, etc..... Many people know who to go to when you have a technical problem here or an experience problem there, and that is often the cause for first contact among the participants. Raceways excell only in the fact that almost everyone can be identified by their car.
I define geek by the number of animal heads they eat... otherwise, it's a pointless classification.
Slashdot Mirror
From where I stand, I see two very distinct type of "gamers" these days.... Rather than get to the point, I'll regail you with a story.
I've been playing video games of all sorts for plenty of years now, and I have no problem admitting that I am not hooked on Counter-Strike. I'm involved with a gaming center that hosts one of those servers, and it is regularly active. I don't love CS, but I don't consider myself a bad player either.... Most of the maps in rotation are simple deathmatch type maps, none of the maps from version 1.5.... Typically, I rank in the top 3 or 4 out of 20 players when I hop on once or twice a month, a stat that surprises me even now. However, being the "old school" gamer, I often switch to maps that aren't so usual... With the CS 1.5 maps or classic maps (vegas, 747, as_ maps), I completely blow everyone else out of the water. I wouldn't say that it's the "lag" of newer maps, nor the fact that most of these guys don't know the maps... Heck, I hardly know some of these maps, so much of this is just a raw skill competition.
I honestly believe that well over 80%, maybe up to 90% of "regular" online gamers are in it primarily for the social contact and environment. I'm sure there's plenty of people (like me) who would rather play for other primary reasons, such as the andrenaline rush or competitive nature, and those factors influence the social gamers greatly, but nontheless.... The vast majority of gamers seem to enjoy or are addicted to the social aspects more than anything else, and learn how to "go through the motions" and base their gameplay on mastery of these motions, and complain when things are altered in the slightest, even to the benefit of gameplay.
I would have been much more interested to hear from the author about his own firsthand experiences with the dynamics of balancing social and gameplay components.... How *DO* you improve a game that people are addicted to, when addicts tend to fight change of any sort? As for that entire article, it seemed too pseudo-intellectual, and I see no benefit of questioning where the lines are drawn between art, social matters, and gaming... After all, I could classify the results of a masterful promoter attracting masses to an art exhibition as art itself.
Why don't we have some type of Radio-On-Demand service yet, where music could be "performed" rather than downloaded, preferrably without the same legal and monetary overhead that comes with permanant downloads? This type of thing seems to work fine on much more technically-intense "On Demand" cable movies. It seems like something that BMI and ASCAP would embrace.... Instead, all we get are classic-radio-stlye streams (which the licensing agencies easily cover). Wouldn't micropayments (as currently defined) easily cover the cost of transimssion and performance, as well as provide an industry alternative for all the R&D money that's getting wasted allowing permanant copies of DRM-protected media?
This is all simply observation from where I stand, and may or may not indeed be accurate, but I've got a strong feeling that nVidia's getting slapped by the trout of irony in the short term, that Microsoft is having fun with their spot on the totem pole of cash, and ATI and nVidia may in fact switch places again with this move.....
What we saw with X-Box one looked like this: nVidia makes waves with graphics cards. nVidia scores humongous x-box deal. nVidia wisely focuses on development of their x-box product, while losing some focus on their core audience, home PC gamers. R&D mishaps, and one bad mini-product-line later, and now ATI's got a clear lead in the game.
Honestly, I bet that if Microsoft makes ATI contort and wrap themselves around all sorts of bad practices and ideas just to make the perfect X-Box 2 chip, ATI may just lose ground back to nVidia... Remember, ATI thinks they are the ones with nothing to lose now, while nVidia learned the hard way that a dustbuster makes for a sloppy cooling fan, and are resolved to quit making mistakes.... especially since they probably aren't happy with the net results of their first Microsoft outing.
I can't even pretend to be a great "network administrator" or "software engineer", but I don't see how anyone can even pretend that Snort is difficult to set up with some of the documentation on the website. The most foolproof one there goes by the name of something like "RedHat 9 + Snort + Acid + MySQL + Apache", and RH9 is only used in the "base packages" sense (except for sharutils, which doesn't seem to install by default, but comes in handy when installing Nessus with the installer script).
If you can't install Snort with that type of docum.... hold on... the late 90s called, they wanted to congratulate you on beating the odds.
I honestly know of nobody else who uses this technique, I just figured I would try it back when I was hunting down upgrades for old games like Quake 2 while places like FilePlanet were getting hammered:
At google, type "index of", followed by the precise name of the file you are looking for.
I'd say this gives me good results on a fast server 95% of the time.
I mean, especially with being a web HOSTING company, where many of your clients won't even have a decent e-mail address until the buy one from you, why on earth did you bother with support via e-mail when web interfaces, even ones that have anonymous access, are so much better.
I killed many of my personal e-mail address a long time ago, with an auto-reply that leads to http://www.rahga.com/contact.... I get roughly 2 spams a month through the form from desperate spammers.
"$874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account"....
What on earth type of number is that? I work in a small (3 person) office, a branch of the main company.... Unfortunately, this means that when someone calls us, I'll pick up the phone half the time. The time I have to waste trying to figure out is it's a telemarketer or not is insane, and it takes quite a bit of skill to represent your company with class while hanging up on these 2-bit lowlife punks.
My calculation: 3x the wasted time of spam, so telemarketers are robbing every American worker $2541 out of their paychecks, assuming that the lost time can be made up in productivity with constant market value. Makes me care far less about the "2 million" jobs that will be lost thanks to the do not call list.
Worst part? We can't sign up our phone number with the Federal do not call list. Out only hope is if my baby yak breaks out of the barn, hops on to the internet, and manages to type the phone number for our biz at donotcall.gov.... but what's the chance of that happening?
At least e-mail is fairly easy to screen out.... The random-characters these guys are inserting into the body of the message in order to avoid blacklists are very easy to spot.
These moderators need to get their heads checked.... Complete overreaction to a diss about another worthless slashdot story.
I probably speak for the vast majority of slashdot readers when I say this:
Man, what a slow newsday.
I can imagine this reaching some level in intranet circles. This is not a new idea.... In fact, it's far more common in real life. You know, social engineering and all that stuff. As a quick example, the only thing memorable about "Eyes Wide Shut" was the "musican's password" goofup.
... however, I would imagine that once upon a time, the idea of racing cars for sport seemed rather ridiculous.
Racing for money and fame is another matter, though, and usually happens far before racing hits the "Nascar" level. Remember (reading in history books) when they would show the might and speed of the newest railroad trains by racing them head-to-head with horses? The art of racing to impress and encourage investment will need to be mastered way before it matures into sport.
Let's face it, you are not yet distributing music for big time bands here. People who go to you to download music will do so only because it is a means to an end. Your primary goal SHOULD BE making it as easy as possible for your customer to find and download the stuff that they want.
Banking on value-ads like CD inserts and art will come with a big problem: To be cost-effective, you will have to rely on the artists and their labels for such content. Idies have a hard enough time preparing content for their gigs, let alone liner notes and the whole nine yards.
Feel free to advertise other bands and music on your site, but do not be to pushy about it. The key to getting customers to respond to your business will be providing them with an excellent first impression, in this case, getting them straight to the music they came for.
Along the same lines, your users should be able to get straight from the band's page to a place where they can get the music. They shouldn't have to go through any front pages of your website unless they want to.
"Doesn't mean the government can't spy on them, it simply means they can't spy on them openly. Nothing has changed, TIA will continue. I'm living happily in Canada, thank God."
I agree 100%. Down here in America, individuals have to pay good, hard money to treat mental illnesses like paranoia. At least Canada has those glorious socialized medicine programs.
I remember something Ted Kennedy said a while back in committee, about "obsolete" ideas in the constitution about indivudals witholding taxes so that stuff like the Army couldn't operate without funding. Quote, "That stuff will never happen here in America". IMHO, he's not ultimately correct about this point, but the motivation in making it is pretty strong.
/., aren't you?
I really can't go any further without trolling like 95% of these other posts are. I'm kinda really sick about political stories in
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/t ypeaheadfind.html
Just hit "/", type the word you are looking for, and *BAM*, it gets highlighted and jumps to the next instance of the word.
Okay, so it may not be the same thing, but it is a superior alternative.
"It's quite depressing to see that money taken out of your paycheck knowing that you won't see any of it later."
Social security was, and still is, sold by politicans to the public as "you pay now, we pay you when you retire". The reality is and has always been "you pay us now, we pay the elderly now and spend the rest".
Does this mean most Americans have been lulled into dreaming their way through a fantasy world? Yep. That's what politican's are supposed to do, it's their job. However, is the problem much worse in, say, Canada, or the vast majority of Europe? Definitely.
"Taking care of those that are weak and cannot manage by themselves instead of taking advantage of them is really one of the key defining things of being a human."
Exactly. A government is not human. Individual people should be in the business of charity and love, not governments.
With the personal value and investment in e-mail addresses dropping thanks to spam, I suppose AOL needed something that will keep subscribers from jumping ship.
I've got to wonder, however, what the EULA on this thing is going to look like.... especially if the try to pull a geocities "all your content are belong to us" clause. And what will happen someday when an popular AOL blogger decides to complain about AOL's service?
The web of front machines hides the identity of the true server computer so "there's no individual computer to shut down," Mr. Smith said. "We're dealing with somebody here who is very clever."
Mr Smith:
For the sake of my sanity, I respectfully request that you not label these 2-bit punks as "clever", as you are giving them far more credit than they deserve. The folks who deserve the clever label work in marketing for Microsoft, because while they regularly advertise a secure operating system (that seems to get a critical "system comprimising" update at least once a week), they do not deliver on that promise yet manage to evade the wrath of people such as yourself.
... and to be honest, this isn't your concern.
:)
You see, if marketing folk and PHBs aren't heeding your warnings about quick-and-dirty solutions, and are telling potential clients that the sun will always shine and everything your company touches turns gold, then it is their responsibilty to deliver on those promises, not yours.
See, this is where that paperwork everyone always whines about comes in handy. Get rid of the bull ("synergy","integration", and oter hot words), keep from overdocumenting the situation, and make those "little notes" availiable wherever you go. Just do the jobs you are given, know your role, and give your tormentors no choice but to live up to their roles.
As far as dirty-vs-clean.... Bah... You really don't need opinions on that now, do you? Just give yourself a bit of backbone, man.
I decided to condense what I was originally going to say, and in sum: I completely disagree with everything in this post.
As a programmer here in the real world, my problems rarely involve with this "keeping up with the Jonese" mentality espoused by trade magazines. No, programming is a skill, and a propreitary language like C# is not one of the tools used, because clients for critical GIS software that helps predict and manage Schistosomaisis problems (among other uses) in Africa do not have an option to run tens of hundreds of computers powered by proprietary Microsoft technologies.
Perhaps you are motivated to sing praises of certain tools rather than your skills because it is one of the few ways to catch the eyes of potential customers to a consulting business. I don't know, but I can tell you this.... There are FAR more people getting paid by the hour on C than there are C#, and it's not merely for low-level stuff. In fact, I'd assume there are more C instructors and teachers altogether than there are actual C# programmers, especially when you look worldwide.
Yeah, CS _was_ a rather addictive fad. I wish I could regret the fact that I dedicated at least an hour per day (for several months) playing it.
However, something good did come from it. Once you decide to stop playing CS, you honestly don't miss the crappy game, and it makes it so much easier to swear off video game addictions completely, and simply feel content with gaming only in moderation.
I just feel sorry for those of ya'll still addicted to Everquest. Unlike Half-Life (cs), that game really is junk.
I'll go ahead and stick my neck out: It may be newer to Netscape rather than Mozilla, but I can't tell you how much I love little things like "Find As You Type"... This is kinda second-nature stuff to those of us who commonly use vi & co..... to find a link, if the browser has focus, just type a word to find a link containing that word, or "/" followed by the word to search the text. Bad part: "/" + "Enter" won't go ahead and look for the next word, instead you have to do "Ctl+G" or "F3"... bah! No regexp support either, at least as far as I know.... maybe not useful for a ton of users, but wouldn't it rock?
I've spent a LOT of my time at a pretty good gaming center I'm associated with, so I have more than enough first-hand research at my disposal....
First, I'll state that among the patrons there, the social interaction is FAR greater than you see in the majority of other open settings, such as banks, grocery stores, parks, etc. Let's face it, if you really wanted to treat them as apples-to-apples, you could say shopping is largely an anti-social activity. I rarely talk to more than just the cashier, and I know I'm not alone in this regard. Howerver, at the gaming center, I'd say the activity often rivals that of your local raceway... The nearest rival would be local sports, but it's a bit different, as the social units usually hold more connections than usual, but sometimes are harder to become a part of because the roles are not as easily defined. Public raceways, gaming centers, etc..... Many people know who to go to when you have a technical problem here or an experience problem there, and that is often the cause for first contact among the participants. Raceways excell only in the fact that almost everyone can be identified by their car.
I define geek by the number of animal heads they eat... otherwise, it's a pointless classification.