I work in the "Games Industry", so I'll throw in my two cents.
Part of our problem is that the high profile titles are still stuck in what I'll call the Sitcom and Movie Of The Week phase. We have lots of heavily promoted titles that, to an outside observer, are only midly different (my mother would not be able to tell the difference between L4D and Fallout 3, just as I can't tell the difference between Fraiser and The King of Queens), and the production and release of these titles is largely driven by profitibility.
There are smatterings of "art" games, and it is my belief that these games are the ones that will bring legitimacy to the industry, although it's going to be an uphill battle. Let me take this sentence apart, because I want to clarify what I mean and why I'm making this argument.
A game like Emily Short's "Galatea", which is a text based game (ostensibly "Interactive Fiction"), is art, if solely for the beauty of the prose and the exploratory nature of the interaction. There are a vast array of possible conversations that the player can have with the title character, and these are mature, adult conversations, with depth and emotion fitting of any high quality published novel. But barely anyone knows about this game outside of the IF and Academic community.
Another game is Johnathan Blow's "Braid", which I began playing for the third (fourth?) time again last night. Not only is it beautiful, fun, polished, and unique, but the time-manipulation gameplay ties in with the plot in an almost magical fashion. Who, or what, is The Princess, and how exactly does she fit into the timespace continuum? Even after I put down the controller, I find myself thinking about the story far more than the button mashing or the puzzles.
But these two games also reveal part of the challenge, in that a game in the purest sense, as James Earnest (of Cheapass Games) used to attempt to impress upon me often, doesn't care about plot or story or pretty graphics. A game is about rules and play and fun, and that's it. So intertwining the game play aspect with the story aspect is the real challenge for legitimacy, because it's through story and narrative that people develop an emotional connection to the content, but it's via interaction that they experience this narrative.
I think there are a handful of approaches that are starting to tie interaction and dynamic narrative together. Fallout 3 (which I haven't played, admittedly) and Fable 2 are probably good examples, although they're perhaps the modern day "Die Hard" equivalents: yes, romance drives the plot, but it's really about guns and explosions. Cultural legitimacy, when playing a certain video games becomes the mass-populace in-thing to do because there is a positive (or at least thoughtful and broadly appealing) common experience to be had, this is probably at least another decade off. I think we need to see more Braids and Galateas, and better Fables that are less about sword slashing and more about our inner conflicts as human beings, before we get there. I think we need development teams who are more artists and storytellers than algorithmic optomizers, and I think we need to make games that take more risks and fail not simply because the framerate was poor or the textures were blocky, but because they tried to teach us something about what it means to be human and just wound up being weird.
Those are the mistakes we need to make in the industry, so that we can learn from them. Only when we understand how to merge interaction with introspection will video games be legitimate forms of art and entertainment.
When you're looking at things really really far away, the frequencies shift towards the red end of the spectrum due to the doppler effect of the Hubble Expansion. If we only looked in the visible spectrum, we wouldn't see anything, because the light had already shifted out of the proper range. Thus, but looking towards the infrared and longer wavelengths, we can actually detect things that originally light emitted in the visible spectrum but are reaching us in a heavily stretched state.
Yes, and publishers should make books and magazines without margins. Think of the wasted paper!
Those areas are there because we have fingers and hands, and we need to hold these items. Zero bezel monitors sit on a desk or attach to a wall. They're not designed to have an area that can be touched and not obscured by our grubby digits.
And, yes, I'm certain I'm an insensitive clod for ignoring people who don't have hands.
This leads to the series of time machines that provide their own frames of reference, where an object can only travel within the duration for which the machine is "turned on". See the movie "Primer" for an example.
Of course, this makes me wonder, if a person gets into such a machine at 2PM to travel back to 10AM, what would another person see inside if they entered at 1PM to leave at 11AM? Is the device empty? Do they meet the other traveler? What if the other traveler is themselves?
I love the fact that at any time of any day I can find hundreds or thousands of people to play games with. What I strongly dislike, and what keeps me from playing games online that often, is that enough gamers are jerks to ruin the experience for the rest of us. Maybe it's Penny Arcade's GIF Theory, or maybe it's the fact that there are no real-world reprocussions to namecalling, swearing, ragequitting, or otherwise rude and unsportsmanlike behavior. It is, however, those who in real life would receive a smack upside the head followed by a discussion with their mommy and daddy about how they are failures as parents, it is these people who ruin the online gaming experience for me.
On occasion, I get matched with people who are polite, good team players, and who are just there to have fun, learn from each other, or genuinely cooperate to make the whole team better. In the Texas Hold'Em game I wrote, it's tournament style, so the obnoxious guy will often bet out early. But more than half the time, I have people screaming that I and everyone else on the team suck, or clogging up the chatlogs with obscenities, or otherwise behaving in ways that no person would act if they were in physical proximity to the people they were insulting. And in lieu of a good, consistant way to select out those people (Gamer Zones on XBox Live is a good start), I play far less online gaming than I would otherwise.
The great personal irony is that I got into the game development industry as a network programmer.
Back in college, when I was still super driven to be the best at everything, I used to down several cups of coffee and tea at night in order to remain awake and focused while doing my homework. It got to the point where after drinking the tea, I would suck on the teabag (keep your wiseass comments to yourself, thanks) because I'd read that saliva could extract even more caffiene.
This all ended one night when I woke up at about 3AM (after staying up until 1 doing some Physics III homework) with what sounded like a couple of dozen people having a rally in my head. I couldn't make out individual voices, words, or sentences, but the sound was distinct: lots of people were talking over one another, LOUDLY, and there was no way to get away from it or make it quieter. It was, frankly, extremely frightening, even though it only took a minute to realize what was going on and why. I wound up lying on a couch in the common area with a pillow over my head for about an hour, wishing the noise would stop so I could actually get some sleep. Eventually, it quieted enough that I could crawl back into bed and catch another four or so hours before needing to get up for class.
Anyway, caffiene: it's a drug, and now I limit myself to one cup in the AM and occasionally another in the afternoon, or a very small cup with dessert. Auditory hallucinations are no fun, and I found that I value the quality of a healthy life much more than the rewards of intense focused work these days.
See, the problem with responses like this is that they ignore the request of the original poster, and, while being valid instructions for a home-built, it is only a good solution if the time of the OP has zero value. Your instructions involve eight steps: Order (multiple) parts, wait for delivery, assemble, learn how and then install OS, learn now and install three other packages. The OP is looking for three steps: Order one thing, wait for delivery, plug in and use.
Your post has value to the DIY crowd, certainly. But for someone looking for a product recommendation, it totally missed the boat.
Go grab Inform (v6 or v7, depending on your proficiency with C-type programming languages) or TADS, and write away. The community is small, but highly focused on excellent story, grammar, spelling, and originality. It's the easiest and least expensive way to display not only top notch writing skills, but also an understanding of the vast array of possibilities for user interaction with the world in modern games, and that you can write your way into and out of any situation that could occur.
Modern Warfare is not about acquiring land for future utilization directly by the citizens of the victor. It is about acquiring access to resources and denying access to everyone else.
Don't point your child at a language or a system or a technology. You'll just bore them.
Instead, ask them what they want to accomplish, or what problem they want to solve. Don't even frame this in a technological sense. It's not "Do you want to build a robot that sorts DVDs?", it's "Do you want to have your DVDs automatically organized?"
Then, once they have something they're really interested in accomplishing, let them ask questions, and point them in the right direction to figure out the answers. Don't answer the questions yourself, even if you know the answers. "Oh, you think you need to control a robot, huh? How do other people control robots? Have you looked that up?" Check in on their progress every day and reward their effort, not their accomplishments.
Yes, it will be more painful, but they'll learn far more valuable skills and become much more independant and focused. Then it won't matter if they picked C++ or Python or SNOBOL, they'll have picked the best solution for them to accomplish their goals, and they'll have learned a wide variety of valuable skills, not simply "programming".
Not necesarily. This is FOX we're talking about. They could simply paint him as the victim of some "Activist Judges," and as a martyred hero for the god-fearing, hard-working moral people of America.
"However, under the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which have been adopted in most states, disbarment in one state or court is grounds for disbarment in a jurisdiction which has adopted the Model Rules."
I'm not sure if you're aware, but hippie chicks are a pain in the ass. They don't shave their body hair, they're overly concerned with what direction they're facing when making out so they can "harness the natural energy of Gaia", and they think all technology pollutes their auras.
What you want is to score with a hot female electrical engineer, because there's usually a hellion lurking beneath the rose-rimmed glasses and the tight labcoat.
Massively Offtopic: In a very roundabout way, if the FBI hadn't acted exactly when they did and how they did, I would never have been born.
My grandfather was an Electrician in the US Navy, and an American of German heritage. He was scheduled to ship out from NY to Africa to lay cabling for airstrips during WWII, but as he was about to board his ship, the "G-Men" grabbed him for interrogation to see if, as a German, he knew anything about his U-Boat off the coast of Long Island. He didn't, of course, and wasn't involved, but by the time the Feds were done with him, his ship had already left port, and he had to be reassigned.
It turns out that his ship was sunk in the Atlantic by a Wolf Pack, and all hands onboard were lost. My Grandfather, of course, survived and went on to meet and marry my Grandmother, who gave birth to my Mother. Thus, I (and my Mother) owe my very existance to the odd actions and timing of the FBI at this point in history.
These guys always wind up the same. I predict that like Kent Hovind, Thompson will soon be tried for some crime that will land him behind bars for quite a few years. The ones who are loud and filled with self-righteous conviction are also the types of people who believe the law doesn't apply to them, and they inevitably wind up on the wrong side of that very same law.
I don't really use BitTorrent much at all. Sure, I downloaded some HiDef video to test out content delivery over my home LAN from a server to my HDTV, but I don't scour the net for movies and music like I used to. I just don't have the time and interest.
However, I did just grab the new Nine Inch Nails album, and as a former musician myself, I still dabble in remixing on occasion. Thus, when I went to go grab the freely available multitracks for remixing, I was somewhat surprised that they were only available via Torrent. That's smart on the part of Trent Reznor and his tech team (why bog down only his own servers with information that he's freely sharing with everyone?), it's bad for other artists and remixers if their access to this media is going to be limited because of the "taint" associated with BitTorrent.
I'm not sure there's a solution here. Any distributed network will inevitably be used for some amount of "gray market" trafficking, but it would be nice if we preferred and promoted technologies for their Common Good usage rather than limiting them by their potential negative effects. And by "we" I mean the corporations who gouge us for $100 each month just to shuttle electrons around.
Re:Inform
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Inform 7 looks very very impressive, and while I've downloaded the IDE and looked at a smattering of source, I'm just not ready to make the leap from Inform 6. As a developer, I prefer the "Code Style" of Inform 6, and find it much easier to parse when I'm looking for something or trying to sort out a bug.
Still, Inform 7 is damned impressive if only inasmuch as it is highly readable and writable to nonprogrammers.
"Pathological monsters!" cried the terrified mathematician "Every one of them is a splinter in my eye. I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry!"
But that Mandelbrot Set is one badass fucking fractal!
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the "Games Industry", so I'll throw in my two cents.
Part of our problem is that the high profile titles are still stuck in what I'll call the Sitcom and Movie Of The Week phase. We have lots of heavily promoted titles that, to an outside observer, are only midly different (my mother would not be able to tell the difference between L4D and Fallout 3, just as I can't tell the difference between Fraiser and The King of Queens), and the production and release of these titles is largely driven by profitibility.
There are smatterings of "art" games, and it is my belief that these games are the ones that will bring legitimacy to the industry, although it's going to be an uphill battle. Let me take this sentence apart, because I want to clarify what I mean and why I'm making this argument.
A game like Emily Short's "Galatea", which is a text based game (ostensibly "Interactive Fiction"), is art, if solely for the beauty of the prose and the exploratory nature of the interaction. There are a vast array of possible conversations that the player can have with the title character, and these are mature, adult conversations, with depth and emotion fitting of any high quality published novel. But barely anyone knows about this game outside of the IF and Academic community.
Another game is Johnathan Blow's "Braid", which I began playing for the third (fourth?) time again last night. Not only is it beautiful, fun, polished, and unique, but the time-manipulation gameplay ties in with the plot in an almost magical fashion. Who, or what, is The Princess, and how exactly does she fit into the timespace continuum? Even after I put down the controller, I find myself thinking about the story far more than the button mashing or the puzzles.
But these two games also reveal part of the challenge, in that a game in the purest sense, as James Earnest (of Cheapass Games) used to attempt to impress upon me often, doesn't care about plot or story or pretty graphics. A game is about rules and play and fun, and that's it. So intertwining the game play aspect with the story aspect is the real challenge for legitimacy, because it's through story and narrative that people develop an emotional connection to the content, but it's via interaction that they experience this narrative.
I think there are a handful of approaches that are starting to tie interaction and dynamic narrative together. Fallout 3 (which I haven't played, admittedly) and Fable 2 are probably good examples, although they're perhaps the modern day "Die Hard" equivalents: yes, romance drives the plot, but it's really about guns and explosions. Cultural legitimacy, when playing a certain video games becomes the mass-populace in-thing to do because there is a positive (or at least thoughtful and broadly appealing) common experience to be had, this is probably at least another decade off. I think we need to see more Braids and Galateas, and better Fables that are less about sword slashing and more about our inner conflicts as human beings, before we get there. I think we need development teams who are more artists and storytellers than algorithmic optomizers, and I think we need to make games that take more risks and fail not simply because the framerate was poor or the textures were blocky, but because they tried to teach us something about what it means to be human and just wound up being weird.
Those are the mistakes we need to make in the industry, so that we can learn from them. Only when we understand how to merge interaction with introspection will video games be legitimate forms of art and entertainment.
Redshift, probably.
When you're looking at things really really far away, the frequencies shift towards the red end of the spectrum due to the doppler effect of the Hubble Expansion. If we only looked in the visible spectrum, we wouldn't see anything, because the light had already shifted out of the proper range. Thus, but looking towards the infrared and longer wavelengths, we can actually detect things that originally light emitted in the visible spectrum but are reaching us in a heavily stretched state.
Yes, and publishers should make books and magazines without margins. Think of the wasted paper!
Those areas are there because we have fingers and hands, and we need to hold these items. Zero bezel monitors sit on a desk or attach to a wall. They're not designed to have an area that can be touched and not obscured by our grubby digits.
And, yes, I'm certain I'm an insensitive clod for ignoring people who don't have hands.
This leads to the series of time machines that provide their own frames of reference, where an object can only travel within the duration for which the machine is "turned on". See the movie "Primer" for an example.
Of course, this makes me wonder, if a person gets into such a machine at 2PM to travel back to 10AM, what would another person see inside if they entered at 1PM to leave at 11AM? Is the device empty? Do they meet the other traveler? What if the other traveler is themselves?
I love the fact that at any time of any day I can find hundreds or thousands of people to play games with. What I strongly dislike, and what keeps me from playing games online that often, is that enough gamers are jerks to ruin the experience for the rest of us. Maybe it's Penny Arcade's GIF Theory, or maybe it's the fact that there are no real-world reprocussions to namecalling, swearing, ragequitting, or otherwise rude and unsportsmanlike behavior. It is, however, those who in real life would receive a smack upside the head followed by a discussion with their mommy and daddy about how they are failures as parents, it is these people who ruin the online gaming experience for me.
On occasion, I get matched with people who are polite, good team players, and who are just there to have fun, learn from each other, or genuinely cooperate to make the whole team better. In the Texas Hold'Em game I wrote, it's tournament style, so the obnoxious guy will often bet out early. But more than half the time, I have people screaming that I and everyone else on the team suck, or clogging up the chatlogs with obscenities, or otherwise behaving in ways that no person would act if they were in physical proximity to the people they were insulting. And in lieu of a good, consistant way to select out those people (Gamer Zones on XBox Live is a good start), I play far less online gaming than I would otherwise.
The great personal irony is that I got into the game development industry as a network programmer.
At least now he won't be... buried alive!
Wait, Congress causes abortions?
Back in college, when I was still super driven to be the best at everything, I used to down several cups of coffee and tea at night in order to remain awake and focused while doing my homework. It got to the point where after drinking the tea, I would suck on the teabag (keep your wiseass comments to yourself, thanks) because I'd read that saliva could extract even more caffiene.
This all ended one night when I woke up at about 3AM (after staying up until 1 doing some Physics III homework) with what sounded like a couple of dozen people having a rally in my head. I couldn't make out individual voices, words, or sentences, but the sound was distinct: lots of people were talking over one another, LOUDLY, and there was no way to get away from it or make it quieter. It was, frankly, extremely frightening, even though it only took a minute to realize what was going on and why. I wound up lying on a couch in the common area with a pillow over my head for about an hour, wishing the noise would stop so I could actually get some sleep. Eventually, it quieted enough that I could crawl back into bed and catch another four or so hours before needing to get up for class.
Anyway, caffiene: it's a drug, and now I limit myself to one cup in the AM and occasionally another in the afternoon, or a very small cup with dessert. Auditory hallucinations are no fun, and I found that I value the quality of a healthy life much more than the rewards of intense focused work these days.
Because their Tesla boards post nearly a TFLOP of performance for single precision computing, but only 78 MFLOPS for double precision.
although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys
The real secret of the NSA is that they've got a zombie Alan Turing kept functioning on a combination of nutrient bath and Jeff Stryker porn.
See, the problem with responses like this is that they ignore the request of the original poster, and, while being valid instructions for a home-built, it is only a good solution if the time of the OP has zero value. Your instructions involve eight steps: Order (multiple) parts, wait for delivery, assemble, learn how and then install OS, learn now and install three other packages. The OP is looking for three steps: Order one thing, wait for delivery, plug in and use.
Your post has value to the DIY crowd, certainly. But for someone looking for a product recommendation, it totally missed the boat.
Go grab Inform (v6 or v7, depending on your proficiency with C-type programming languages) or TADS, and write away. The community is small, but highly focused on excellent story, grammar, spelling, and originality. It's the easiest and least expensive way to display not only top notch writing skills, but also an understanding of the vast array of possibilities for user interaction with the world in modern games, and that you can write your way into and out of any situation that could occur.
Modern Warfare is not about acquiring land for future utilization directly by the citizens of the victor. It is about acquiring access to resources and denying access to everyone else.
Don't point your child at a language or a system or a technology. You'll just bore them.
Instead, ask them what they want to accomplish, or what problem they want to solve. Don't even frame this in a technological sense. It's not "Do you want to build a robot that sorts DVDs?", it's "Do you want to have your DVDs automatically organized?"
Then, once they have something they're really interested in accomplishing, let them ask questions, and point them in the right direction to figure out the answers. Don't answer the questions yourself, even if you know the answers. "Oh, you think you need to control a robot, huh? How do other people control robots? Have you looked that up?" Check in on their progress every day and reward their effort, not their accomplishments.
Yes, it will be more painful, but they'll learn far more valuable skills and become much more independant and focused. Then it won't matter if they picked C++ or Python or SNOBOL, they'll have picked the best solution for them to accomplish their goals, and they'll have learned a wide variety of valuable skills, not simply "programming".
Not necesarily. This is FOX we're talking about. They could simply paint him as the victim of some "Activist Judges," and as a martyred hero for the god-fearing, hard-working moral people of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disbarment
"However, under the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which have been adopted in most states, disbarment in one state or court is grounds for disbarment in a jurisdiction which has adopted the Model Rules."
If they want to correctly display the advanced AI "poker face": :|
I'm not sure if you're aware, but hippie chicks are a pain in the ass. They don't shave their body hair, they're overly concerned with what direction they're facing when making out so they can "harness the natural energy of Gaia", and they think all technology pollutes their auras.
What you want is to score with a hot female electrical engineer, because there's usually a hellion lurking beneath the rose-rimmed glasses and the tight labcoat.
Massively Offtopic: In a very roundabout way, if the FBI hadn't acted exactly when they did and how they did, I would never have been born.
My grandfather was an Electrician in the US Navy, and an American of German heritage. He was scheduled to ship out from NY to Africa to lay cabling for airstrips during WWII, but as he was about to board his ship, the "G-Men" grabbed him for interrogation to see if, as a German, he knew anything about his U-Boat off the coast of Long Island. He didn't, of course, and wasn't involved, but by the time the Feds were done with him, his ship had already left port, and he had to be reassigned.
It turns out that his ship was sunk in the Atlantic by a Wolf Pack, and all hands onboard were lost. My Grandfather, of course, survived and went on to meet and marry my Grandmother, who gave birth to my Mother. Thus, I (and my Mother) owe my very existance to the odd actions and timing of the FBI at this point in history.
These guys always wind up the same. I predict that like Kent Hovind, Thompson will soon be tried for some crime that will land him behind bars for quite a few years. The ones who are loud and filled with self-righteous conviction are also the types of people who believe the law doesn't apply to them, and they inevitably wind up on the wrong side of that very same law.
Salty. Red. Once covered in liquid.
It's clear to me that Mars was once a giant Bloody Mary for the gods. It's the only explanation that fits.
I love science!
I concur. Any article based on a false dichotomy isn't worth the paper it's printed on, nor the electrons it uses on the WWW.
I don't really use BitTorrent much at all. Sure, I downloaded some HiDef video to test out content delivery over my home LAN from a server to my HDTV, but I don't scour the net for movies and music like I used to. I just don't have the time and interest.
However, I did just grab the new Nine Inch Nails album, and as a former musician myself, I still dabble in remixing on occasion. Thus, when I went to go grab the freely available multitracks for remixing, I was somewhat surprised that they were only available via Torrent. That's smart on the part of Trent Reznor and his tech team (why bog down only his own servers with information that he's freely sharing with everyone?), it's bad for other artists and remixers if their access to this media is going to be limited because of the "taint" associated with BitTorrent.
I'm not sure there's a solution here. Any distributed network will inevitably be used for some amount of "gray market" trafficking, but it would be nice if we preferred and promoted technologies for their Common Good usage rather than limiting them by their potential negative effects. And by "we" I mean the corporations who gouge us for $100 each month just to shuttle electrons around.
Inform 7 looks very very impressive, and while I've downloaded the IDE and looked at a smattering of source, I'm just not ready to make the leap from Inform 6. As a developer, I prefer the "Code Style" of Inform 6, and find it much easier to parse when I'm looking for something or trying to sort out a bug.
Still, Inform 7 is damned impressive if only inasmuch as it is highly readable and writable to nonprogrammers.
"Pathological monsters!" cried the terrified mathematician
"Every one of them is a splinter in my eye.
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry!"
But that Mandelbrot Set is one badass fucking fractal!