Yeah, 20 million probably is better spent on charity or invested into some life saving research. However, it is a tad hypocritical for most people to make such a statement. I know I bought myself a new computer that I didn't need. The only difference between my selfish act and these space tourists is magnitude. If a rich guy wants to blow 20 million on a life's dream, more power to him. I would do the same thing in his position.
If it is any consolation, it very could lead to some greater benefit for mankind. These first few spending money on something so expensive and risky very well could encourage someone somewhere to develop better spaceflight for the purpose of tourism. Even if you don't consider cheaper space tourism as a benefit for humankind, things learned the development of the industry could benefit humankind.
One of the brighter sides of capitalism is that even selfish acts can lead to improving the greater good, even if it is just an accidental consequence of someone's selfish desires.
I imagine normal life insurance would probably cover dying in such an accident. I find it doubtful that your life insurance has a clause in it that says you don't get any money if you die in a space. It probably is not something insurance companies ever thought of including and so, unlike say sky diving, probably still results in coverage.
Not to invoke the wrath of the anti-humanity moderators out there, but good! To hell with Darwinism. If humanity can do it better then nature, why shouldn't it? Ok, so we can no longer effectively evolve stronger and better humans through evolution. We can still evolve stronger and better humans through genetic manipulation. Granted, we are not able to effectively do this today, but some day within the near future we will be able to. Once that happens we will likely evolve much faster then any species on the face of this planet ever has. Hell, we might not even do it biologically, it might be that a few hundred years from now we have stripped away the organics and 'being human' has nothing to do with the parts you were built out of.
Now, the obvious response is that we are playing god or screwing with mother nature, but consider for a moment that perhaps this is natures grand design?
Biological evolution is just the latest of nature's trends towards greater complexity. Why can't intelligence be the next perfectly natural way to head towards greater complexity? We don't look down upon sexual reproduction because it is more complicated then single sex reproduction. No cries that it is unnatural when sexual reproduction, the next step in evolution, is given its shot. Why look down on intelligence when it contributes to the grand scheme of things? Why would intelligent human evolution brought about in a lab be worse?
Honestly, I think humans are just the next rung on the ladder on the way up. What happens when you get to the top? Who the hell knows. Are we the last step? Probably not. It doesn't bother me though that there is a new order in town. If anything, it is uplifting. Biological evolution likely is not the most reliable way for life to survive when sun dies.
Not to run too far off topic with everyone else, but the 'why this nation and not that nation' questions are all fairly easy to answer. Why pick on Cuba and not China? Because China has a billion people in it and picking on them is more painful then not. It is the same reason why invading Iraq was considered, but not North Korea. The US can take over Iraq with a minimal amount of casualties, and we did. Even the losses we are taking right now are not that bad compared to all other past wars. Invading North Korea would have been horrific.
The US military went into Iraq not sure if Iraq had WMDs and not sure if they would use them. North Korea has many WMDs which are mostly chemical, though they are adding nukes the pile, and they would without a doubt use them. Not only would they use them, they would use them on civilians in South Korea. There is absolutely no doubt in this. A war in Korea would be horrific on the scale that would likely make all other wars before it since the World Wars look tame.
Now, the morality and cost of the Iraqi war are certainly fair questions, but the why is pretty obvious in my opinion. Why Iraq? Because it was the right place, at the right time, with the right excuse. WMDs were an excuse to try and build a democracy in the Middle East through military force. I imagine their hope is that Iraq will one day be like Japan, practically pacifist with a love of trade. So, in that regards it was the right place, the Middle East. It was the right time as the US is trying to crush Islamic fundamentalism, and while Iraq barely touched Islamic fundamentalism, it is near a horde of nations that do. Having a beacon of Western style democracy in Iraq at this time would probably influence the nations around Iraq pretty strongly. Finally, it was the right excuse. WMDs was the excuse. WMDs were not the reason, just the way to make the war 'legitimate'. You can't push a resolution through the UN saying "We need to invade because they are not a democracy." The UN has never done such a thing and it never will. They were however able to get it close enough to a legitimate invasion on the WMDs issue. It is like locking up a mobster for tax evasion. You are not really locking them up for tax evasion, it is just the only thing you can nail them on.
Like I said, the morality and (even bigger in my opinion) the cost of the war are up for question. The reason why Iraq of all nations is pretty clear. They just happened to the poor bastards who fit all the criteria.
I don't think they are pretending it is charity. It is just a low cost option. Insteaad of paying with money you get to pay with time. While this would suck for me and I would never do it, it might very well work out great for some people. My mom who just toots around the Internet and checks her e-mail would probably be a prime canidate for this. To her, watching a few comercials while she does her thing would be no big deal.
I simply fail to see how this is sick, to me it is just another payment option. For people who are not going to do much with their computer it might be a worthwhile option.
Yes, your ideas were very new and (+1)informative. I have never once have heard anyone call the Iraqi war wasteful. I thank you for the enlightenment you have added to this discussion.
Despite your excellent points that the US is spending money on a war, I will have to go back to my original point. Spain is spending money on a very massive tunnel to a third world nation.
It is silly to compare how a super power is spending on a war over seas to how a nation with only a fraction the GDP is building a very expensive tunnel to Morocco. Just because the US is spending lots of money on a war doesn't mean everyone else should spend lots of money on other things. Further, comparing how much a super power spends to how Spain spends is also going to only yield the most obvious of conclusions - the US spends more, don't try and copy it. The fact that the US spends lots of money does not add or subtract to the viability of such a massive government projects for Spain and Morocco. It is a cute commentary on US foreign policy, but plays no effect on whether these two nations should try and dig a tunnel under the sea.
Back to the topic at hand, the point was, regardless of what the US is doing, building such a tunnel is expensive. It is only justified if there is going to be some net gain for the two countries involved. As I said before, I would wonder how much of an economic study they have done on this or if it is just some bureaucrat who was swooned in by an engineer whose real motive is to build something big. Combining a guy with money who knows nothing of economics with a guy who doesn't have to spend the money is a very bad combination for the general good of the people. Why bother building what will certainly be an extremely expensive tunnel when one can simply build an airport or fairy dock?
As I said before, it would be one thing if we were talking about two nations with strong economies to support such an endeavor and there was some chance of a return on the investment. England and France are a good example. Those were two countries with strong economic interests in each other and were relatively confident that they could make a return on the investment. Spain is talking about what I assume is a much larger project with a partner that has a very weak economy. If this is supposed to be an act of charity to Morocco, then the money being spent could be used in a fair more direct and efficient way to help bolster the Moroccan economy. Encouraging Spanish investments in Morocco through various government programs would do far more then building a tunnel that will only carry a handful of people across at a time.
And yes, I advocate spending money in Europe in an efficient and worthwhile way DESPITE the fact that the US as at war in Iraq. I also argue this despite the fact that China has imprisoned political prisoners, the fact that the Artic is cold, the Japanese banking system is in a real mess, and South Korea is having some serious campaign contribution issues that will likely lead to the fall of their current PM. Yes, despite of this all, I think building a tunnel to a third world nation would be a bad idea for Spain.
Pardon my French, but how the FUCK did you relate my post to US military spending? Do you go out and look for places to troll? Did I mention US military spending once in my post? Did I even mention the US, or compare anything the US does to what Spain is doing? Did you fucking read the post before you responded?
Morons like you are what make TRUE activists with worth while opinions look like idiots. They have to deal with the perception that people who believe in their cause are all a bunch of mindless morons that spout off their propaganda at anything that moves, including fucking posts about a tunnel from Morocco to Spain. Do whatever causes you believe in a favor and shut the hell up so that non-idiots can articulate their ideas and solutions without having morons like you drag their name through mud. You have enough brains to be the spokesmen for shit, and that is it.
-1 Flamebait -1 Excessive cursing +1 Yelling at god damn idiots.
I can't help but wonder how badly there is a need to build something like this. England to France makes sense, as you are talking about two rich nations that see a lot of bussiness with each other. This on the other hand just doesn't seem to hold as much promise for profit. Granted, I know little about the area and there might be more to it then I know, but I just can't see it being worth the horrific costs. Is there any reason why such a feat of engineering is needed when an air plane or boat are both practical solutions?
I wonder how well they have looked at this from an economics side. It seems like it would be a horrific waste of money if it is just being done for national prestige. The worry in such projects is that very few people are willing to say 'no' to such things. The companies involved in the building are of course more then happy to let the government foot the bill, and the companies on either side of coast are happy to have it put in at not cost to themselves. Of course, the people who are going to have to pick up the tab are the tax payers of the respective nations. Who is speaking for them in this project? I hope this is not just a government waste program between the two nations, as it could potentially be a very expensive one.
The rest of what you said is just rehashed. The US can nuke China into oblivion. I see little point in arguing that point. As for this:
"Under normal situations you would be right. You forget something. We have troops in Iraq, Afganastan, Korea, Liberia, Colombia. We are just too spread thin right now to beat China in a war. They'd win simply because we'd run out of troops. China could send an endless supply of troops to shoot down out planes, and basically turn it into another Vietnam like situation where half of the US will want us to pull out and the other half want to stay and fight. In the end after enough troops die the US will pull out and because China simply has more troops they can afford to fight for 10 years. If we Nuke they Nuke. If we go to war in Taiwan because of the location and the amount of troops they have they'll have the advantage.
The only way we could beat China is to pull out of all of the other countries we are in and focus fully on China."
This is dead wrong. If we were talking about a land war, then you might be correct in that the US would be hard pressed to stop China. However, warring with Taiwan would be a purely sea and air war. Troops are not a factor if you can't get them across to Taiwan, which is of course an island. No theater of operation we are currently in demands excessive sea or air assets. In fact, the current places where we are fighting require no sea assets and most of our air assets are being used to keep up supply. All of our air to air assets are not being used at all.
Any Chinese invasion would never even make it across the ocean. US would completely dominate the air. Hell, the Taiwanese air force along with their surface to air assets (almost all US made) could likely hold off the Chinese air force on their own. Add in a US carrier battle group or two and it would not even be a contest. The US and Taiwan would own the skies. In the ocean, China is even more fucked. The Chinese surface fleet is weak and old. It would never survive an encounter with an American battle group. Hell, they would be lucky to even get within sight of an American battle group as all American surface fleets attack over the horizon. If the few thousand cruise missiles an American battle fleet was not enough to sink anything and everything afloat, then the vastly superior air assets of both Taiwan and China combined would make it a done deal.
Further, if China decided to enter a protracted war, they would loose even more soundly. The Chinese economy can not sustain a war with the US. They would crumple under their own weight just like the USSR did when they tried to sustain our level of military spending. The USSR learned the hard way that trying to match American production is a quick way to go bankrupt. If the Russians built a carrier, we build three. The poor bastards tried to keep up.
China is a fearsome foe in a land war simply because they can throw so much at once at the enemy, but in the sea and in the air they are helpless. China would never even make to the land before everything was destroyed. This would leave China with only a single option to win such a war, and that would be through nuclear arms. Of course, that rather defeats the entire point of going to war against Taiwan in the first place, as China would struggle to maintain a cohesive government after a nuclear onslaught, much less hold aspirations of retaking Taiwan.
Your talk of China being 'one people' shows how very little you know of China. China looks like one people to the average American. To an American, if they all look roughly the same they are one people. This is not so in China. China has many different ethnic cultures that are held from going at each others throats by the force of the government. I imagine you believe that all Chinese speak 'chinese'. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Mandarin (what people think of when they think Chinese) is just one language of many in China. China has many different languages with
I don't feel like going point by point, so I'll just address your main argument:
"You see China has nothing to lose, most of them already are living in the stone ages, so why not take us a step back with a nuclear war which they'd win simply because in the end when we both are in the stone age there will be more Chinese people."
First, you vastly overestimate China's nuclear capabilities. As I said, China has a very hard time reaching the US with their nukes. The US has been in a cold war with Russia for 50 years and have absolutely no problem blanketing China. The US has vastly more nuclear destructive force then China. Only Russia is a contender when it comes to raw nuclear power. Also recall that our arsenal was meant to take down Russia, which just as spread out as China is.
Second, your point is valid in that there exist parts of China that wouldn't notice anything is wrong except for sudden drastically high cancer rates and 'snow' in the middle of the summer. However, you miss the point that these peasants that would be less effected are not the people ruling China. China is ruled from the cities. The leaders live in cities. The leaders are very much creatures of the modern world, and China at the moment is run through its technology. The Chinese government is as helpless as the US government is without its technology.
Finally, China is ruled by rational city dwelling people. The US has stated very clearly how far it will go to preserve the few nations that it has aligned itself with. The USSR never assaulted Western Germany because they realized that our willingness to fight back with all of our conventional might and retaliate to nuclear strikes with all of our nuclear might was very much hardened and set in stone. The US has in the past and will in the future risk total annihilation for these principles. The US might be raging hypocrites on many issues, but not on this one.
The invasion of Taiwan would work out simply. China would invade and the US fleet and air force would get in the way. China would loose any conventional engagement with the US. China then has the option to press the button and set both nations back to the stone age or give up their aspirations of owning Taiwan. Either way, Taiwan will never fall into China's hands. If they press the button, lording of Taiwan will the last thing they have to worry about. It is a no win situation for China to invade. Either they suffer a terrible military defeat at the hands of US conventional forces and never take Taiwan, or all three nations go up in a cloud of nuclear smoke... and China never takes Taiwan. Both scenarios offer nothing for China.
Your logic is very flawed. If the US is not willing to carry out their threat, why would China not simply invade? How long would it take for China to build an invasion fleet big enough to get the job done? A couple of years at the most. The reason why they don't bother is because the US stands firmly in their way.
China will not "NUKE THE HELL OUT OF THE US" because the US would NUKE THE HELL OUT OF CHINA. Everyone realizes that the consequence of firing a nuke is getting a nuke shoved back in your direction. In this case, that would be a much worse thing for China then the US. Most of China's nukes can't even reach the US. Don't get me wrong, the damage would be horrific, but nothing compared to what the US would do in response. The US would be devastated. They would be utterly and totally destroyed. The US would some day recover as perhaps a shadow of our former nation, they would not. Getting into a game of nuclear holocaust with the US is a very stupid idea because in the end you loose. Period. Every US city could be flatted, but that just means everything higher then a few meters if flattened in China. The US just recently reaffirmed that the consequence of using a WMD on the US is getting a WMD thrown back in your face and then some.
Taiwan is considered US protected property. The US have made it clear in both words and in law that Taiwan is under US protection. The rhetoric Bush is using against Taiwan right now is just that, rhetoric. Bush doesn't want to fight China, but like ANY American president, Republican or Democrat, he will fight China if he has to protect Taiwan. Being a mildly rational person (or at least having some rational advisors) he is going to go out of his way to avoid fighting China. That isn't to say he wouldn't if he had to, but if the cost of keeping China from going after Taiwan are a few harsh words to Taiwan, he will certainly do it. That doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day there will always be a couple of US carrier battle groups sitting between main land China and Taiwan.
The US, for all of its flaws, are extremely principled to the point of near insanity when it comes to this point. The US has threatened in the past and would to this day destroy the world before it let a free first world democracy fall to a communist nation. It is one thing to fight over a third world nation like Vietnam or even Korea (Korea was third world at the time). It is another to let a nation like German, France (as much as the US picks on them now), Japan, South Korea (today), or Taiwan fall. The US might let one of those nations fall in an internal civil war, but never to an outside threat. The US considers Taiwan sovereign enough where fighting China wouldn't be a civil war in the US's eyes.
Saw what you will on the US, on this one issue they are principled to the point of insane fanaticism that makes Islamic terrorist look like sane and rational people. The US would defend Taiwan in an instant from China, and the US wouldn't think twice about respond to any nuclear attack from China with their own. In other words, the US would risk absolute destruction of all parties involved (themselves included) then let a nation like Taiwan fall to a nation like China. The US was more then willing to do it during the cold war and I have no doubt they would do it again.
"Maybe they're wanted back because the civilians weren't randomly imprisoned"
That was a joke, right?
Say what you want of the US invasion, those people were -bad-. They killed millions of their own people. I don't care if you support the war or not. There are plenty of reasons for the US to not worry itself with other nations, but defending those people as offering stability is a joke, especially suggesting that those were someone 'just' rules.
First, let's ignore the fact that the US would do SOMETHING if China invaded. If we had a very very weak president that wouldn't mind the US going into riot, we might be able to avoid a war. Don't count on it though. There would at least be a harsh economic response, yes, even at the cost of the US (and as a result) the world economy. Don't underestimate the will of the US to preserve other Democratic nations. We might let a third world nation with a quasi democracy sink, but we don't let first world democracies sink without a fight. I think we would respond the same way we would have responded if the USSR had invaded Germany - send everything that isn't a nuke, and keep the nukes on standby. The US is absolutely ferocious when it comes to defending such interests and China would be foolish to think we would let an invasion fleet cross channel.
Second, even if the US did absolutely nothing, the economic effect would be chilling. All of Asia would be seen as unstable. Sure, our economy would become more insular, but it sure as shit wouldn't mean getting more jobs for everyone. The US economy went belly up in 1929 because of a series of tariffs were passed into law. This turned what might have just been a recession into the worst economic disaster in US history. Becoming insular is the death of the US economy. This day an age, we are a thousand times more dependent upon foreign trade then we were in 1929. We could make 1929 look like an up year with the sort of economic devastation that would result if we tried to create an insular economy.
Simply put, China will not invade Taiwan any time in the near future. The US would stop it, and the US stopping it would give China two options. China can choose military and economic destruction or it can choose total annihilation. China, for all of its faults, is ruled by rational leaders. They understand the consequences of invading Taiwan in the same way the Soviets understood the consequences of invading West Germany. US policy has always stated very clearly the lengths we are willing to go to protect nations such as Taiwan, and any president, Democrat or Republican would be more then willing to follow through with their obligation, even at the cost of both nations. It isn't a pretty prospect, which is exactly why it won't happen.
It isn't so much that the US is the UN. Clearly the Iraq war shows otherwise. What is true is that the UN is very dependent upon the US to get anything done. If the US throws a cog in the wheels of the UN, nothing is going to get it to budge. The US provides a great deal of the UN's funding and IS the UN's military arm. The UN can pull off humanitarian aid missions without the US's help, but if it wants to pull off any sort of real military action, they simply need the US. Further, the UN is pretty much unable to enforce any major decisions without US approval, though the same can be said about all the permanent members of the security counsel.
This attempt to hand over control of the Internet to the UN is going to be met with the US crushing it. To be perfectly honest, I don't think that is a bad thing. I don't really want Syria or China to have any say in how the Internet is being run. These are not exactly model nations when it comes to the free flow of information. While the US is certainly in no way perfect, I think they do a far better job with allowing the free flow of information then many other countries. If the UN was made up of only free democratic nations, I could understand the desire to go in this direction, but while brutal totalitarian nations have their say, I don't want them anywhere near the Internet. The US isn't perfect, but the UN is certainly a worse choice.
The UN is a wonderful place to have peaceful debate and to work out diplomatic issues. However, the UN is not and should not be a world government, nor should it be where I want my Internet is controlled from. It is composed of too many nations that are violently opposed to my interests.
If you don't want a game that you have an emotional response to then clearly you are not the target audience. So what?
The point was not that the games played like a novel. They didn't. They played like games. The difference was then when you get to the end of it and all was said and done, instead of shrugging your shoulders and idly wondering when the sequal was going to come out, you could have an emotional response. That is a good thing. If you can make something that has all the perks of a game put the emotional response of a novel, you have something special on your hands. BIS did that at least twice for me.
If a developer gets done making a great game with wonderful game play, and at the end people are touched by it in some way, then that developer wold have to be an idiot to try and pull that content. No sane developer is going to go, "Wowa... hold on a second boys, that plot has people having an emotional reaction. Can we dumb this down a little?" Having great game play and a powerful story is a good thing, not something to be avoided as you seem to suggest.
I think the reason why you see such a large reaction is because all of the games you listed while great, are empty. BIS made games that affected people like novels. The ending of Fallout blew me over. The story and character development (and I am not talking about levels) for Planescape: Torment was just awesome.
Doom, Halo, GTA, Warcraft, and all of those games have an entirely different sort of appeal to me. I don't look at those games like good books. To me they are like action movies. The are without a doubt fun, but I play them in a very detached manner. The ending to the original Fallout left me choking and getting watery eyed. The ending to Warcraft or Half-Life just made me shrug and wonder when the sequel was coming out. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, but for entirely different reasons.
The point certainly is valid that such companies need to make money. BIS made some great games, but they also made some real bombs. The fact that they did a poor job on the financial end doesn't invalidate the quality games they did put out. Hopefully someone will come along pick up the pieces and package it into something more financially sound. I am still going to miss BIS though, despite thier suckage when it comes to making money.
God fucking damn it!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Ok, it is out of my system.
BIS was by far my favorite studio. Fallout, Fallout II and Planescape: Torment were my three favorite games of all times. Does anyone remember the end of the original Fallout? That ending was one of the few endings that left an emotional impact upon me. The ending as simply amazing. As he is walking away to that song I felt my gut twist in a knot and left me choking. Ahh hell, I admit it, I was getting watery eyed as he was walking away from the vault with his head down to that old bluesy song. No game had ever done that to me before. To this day hearing that song twists my gut into a knot.
Don't get me wrong, I love games today, but I have had none that made really knocked my socks off. War Craft III has great game play an all, but I have never felt any emotion while playing that game other then annoyance at the bastard over battle net you managed to raise an army and level his hero to 10 in five minutes. Fallout and Torment had an emotional effect like a good book. Nothing in these past couple of years has effected me like that.
I know I sat drooling over the prospect of Fallout III. I simply loved that entire setting. If anything, I was always supremely disappointed that BIS never ran with the title. I would loved to have seen a Fallout FPS or MMORPG.
On that note, does anyone know who the rights to the Fallout title goes to? The studio might be dead, but I would be surprised if someone picked up the rights and a few of the original creators and intend to run with it.
One of my favorite books of all times was Forgotten Soldier. It is about a guy in the German army during WWII. Yeah, he is the 'bad guy', but the truth is, he isn't. He was some stupid young kid who went off to war and any sort of political ideology he might have had was crushed under first wave of Russian soldiers.
I would absolutely kill to play a German soldier on the eastern front in a video game. Hell, I would love to play a Japanese soldier. It is a game, and if the game does well, in the end you will feel sympathy for the 'villains'. No game is going to make anyone regret that Germany and Japan lost during World War II, but they can instill that it wasn't the hordes of Nazis and brutal suicidal Japanese verse the virtuous allies.
If someone wanted to make a powerful video game, they would make a game from the axis perspective. They would start out with a bunch of your buddies all under the age of 19. You would go through some training together, get the usual propaganda stuffed into your head, then hit a real battle field and forget it all. You would huddle with your buddies in a fox hole and fight your way forward, then back in retreat, with long time companions who have saved your life countless times dying one by one. That is the reality of war. Celebrate the ideological victory and that horrific atrocities were ended, but don't forget that the enemy was human and that those humans felt the entire range of emotions that we do. The overall war was a just victory, but there were a million small tragedies on both sides to get there.
The government. Read the title. That was for 2002. It is now almost 2004. The economy has picked up since 2002. It is still arguable if the trend is going to stay good, but right now it is pulling up.
"If it doesn't have stats and random encounters, it's not a real RPG."
You are, in my opinion, absolutely and completely wrong. Stats and random encounters are NOT what defines an RPG. By your definition, Diablo II would be a better RPG then and Fallout II. Fallout II has very few random encounters, and if they were to be entirely removed they would not be missed. In fact, it is possible to eventually avoid all encounters. If Fallout II had no random encounters at all this would NOT mean it is not an RPG. Stats and random encounters are a crutch that RPG makers have fallen on to prop up game play.
RPGs are, at their heart, games that have a story. A 'good' RPG is a game that centers around its story and the development of the characters within that story, AND does this in a manner which is fun (game play). Diablo II is a good game because the game play is appreciated, but it is a shitty RPG in that its story elements are nearly non-existent and more an excuse to up stats and kill more creatures. You can have a game that is a bad RPG but a good game, and there is nothing wrong with that, however, such a game is by no means the pinnacle of RPGs.
RPGs are about their story and character development (which really is just another piece of story). The point of an RPG is to immerse yourself in an alternate reality more then in any other genera. The limits of current technology make it very hard to build entire worlds with interesting stories, and so this takes a backseat to game play. This is not an entirely bad thing simply because as it is we struggle so much with the game play aspect of RPGs. It is very difficult to make a game based around a story 'fun', and so the game play is the element that sees some of the greatest work. The real golden age of RPGs will be when technology opens the door to great game play quickly and easily for developers so that they can truly work on the story. When groups of real writers use RPGs as a medium to tell stories and flesh out beautiful and elaborate worlds, then you will know that you have hit the golden age.
Until that time we will continue to struggle simply creating the most basic of worlds with the crudest of game play. The golden titles of RPGs will be few and far in-between, like the Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, and other such games that built great worlds for great stories. The greatness of these games had nothing to do with the fact that they had 'stats and random encounters'.
I personally think that this guy simply disproved his point. He points out three elements of an RPG and says that RPGs suck at all three elements. First off, I don't think all three of those are elements. Story is the only one I think that deserves to be there. Those other two are simply methods of making the telling of the story interesting. Diablo I and II in my mind are examples of horrific and terrible RPGs. They might be great games, but they are absolutely horrible RPGs. They had no story element at all.
Planescape: Torment is an example of an RPG that is at its best. The story is masterful and easily as good as any movie, and the gameplay medium they choose to use to tell the story is fun. That is what defines a 'good' RPG. A strong story told through a fun game play medium. If you lack the story, like Diablo did, then it is no longer a good RPG. It is just a good game.
There has been absolutely no RPG renaissance. RPGs are, in my mind still yet to experience any sort of golden days. You might look back at some time period with nostalgia, but I think there has been no period that consistently told a good story through good game play. There have only been the occasional gem, like Planescape:Torment, the Fallout games, and a few others. I think the RPG golden days are somewhere in the future when we master story telling elements better. Currently we are spending so much time struggling with game play that story telling has been neglected. This is not an entirely bad thing, just a fact of things as they are now. When the medium becomes truly powerful and larger more cohesive worlds are possible, then I think you will find the story once again becoming a focus and there will be a true golden age of RPGs.
In our concern over global warming I think real costs Vs benefit analysis has been missing. Any global shift in the temperature is going to have both its good points and bad. In some places a global rise in temperature will without a doubt be damning. In other places though I imagine it would be welcomed.
Natural or not, before we get too worked up over the idea of global warming I think a better overall look at what the befits might be should be weighed. It very well could be that if we put enough effort into it, we could reverse the global trend, regardless if it is man made or not. Humans are pretty resourceful and if pushed could probably come up with ways to shift the climate in any direction the want. The issue is that any shift costs money.
How should it be decided if the overall benefits and problems are worth the cost to either stop or not stop global warming? How should it be decided if one region should be denied something that would benefit them to help a region that would be hurt? Do you just figure out which direction is the most costly? Do you declare that the current world climate is the most fair climate?
Right now we are simply acting on reflex. Things are changing and we are simply jumping to stop it. There has not been a real coherent discussion to my knowledge over whether or not perhaps a warmer earth is a good thing in the long run, it has just been an argument between industry and environmentalist, with industry automatically the side that controlling the climate is expensive, and environmentalist fighting to keep the climate from ever changing. No one is really considering the overall costs and benefits.
I suppose the answer is that right now we can't possibly begin to decide the real costs and real benefits. We are talking about a globe wide event, and with any globe wide event the variables are simply beyond our ability to even begin to tabulate. We can't even agree on what the cause is, much less develop an agreeable model over what the climate is doing so that costs and benefits can even begin to be considered. Right now it seems like everyone is just banking of 'faith'. You either have faith that things can go on as they are and in the end we will either have the power to deal with the consequences, or you have faith that the way things are now are the better then what they are moving towards and that the change will turn out to be bad and beyond our control.
In my opinion, both sides are just piss shots in the dark. Enough of my random musing.
I am completely and utterly without any excitement over World of Warcraft. I expect Blizzard to do what they always do, take the basic elements of something that has been established and streamline the mechanics. If you hate the game play style already, it isn't going to do anything for you. I expect WoW to be the best leveling up, hack and slash, MMORPG ever... exactly what I have no desire to play. Leveling treadmills, no matter how fast or slow bore me to no end. I can not even begin to explain how little desire I have to sit there and slaughter NPCs for hours on end for the goal of getting more powerful to kill more NPCs. Diablo was as fun for me as pulling barbed wire through my hands. All of that said, I think WoW is going to make it big. I my find that style of game play utterly boring and only suitable for a proper addict, but the addict market is very big as all the current MMORPGs have proven.
At this point, I have a little hope for only a two of the MMORPGs. First, Matrix Online has some potential in concept. Of course, they have not bothered to mention exactly what that concept is. Everquest could be described as a game where warriors and magic users clash against terrible fire breathing dragons. Of course, that is the PR spin. The truth is that you sit there while some stupid NPC repeats some boring animation over and over again while your weapons either go through the model of the dragon or don't even bother to hit it. Yawn. For this reason I have little excitement over the PR spin of Matrix Online. Personally, I think that if they do anything but real time combat where player skill matters, it is going to flat out suck. The only reason why I have any hope (and I know this hope is totally unfounded) is that maybe when they hit the auto attack button and the two Matrix guys stand their stupidly firing their guns unmoving, they will realize how stupid it looks and realize they need some real fast paced combat. Maybe when two people unload clip after clip at each other to go through the thousand hit points of a level 50 agent, they will realize how stupid levels and HP are. It is probably a pipe dream, but I can hope. The Matrix Online will be a success in my opinion if two people of equal skill can kill each other with a single bullet. Here is to a fools hopes.
The other game that looks potentially interesting is Priest. It has an original setting and 'first person like combat'. That scores a lot of points with me. It gives me hope the game has nothing to do with leveling up. It again is probably a fools hope, but I am allowed to dream.
This next generation of MMORPGs does not excite me in the slightest. They are still all first generation games as far game play goes as I am concerned in terms. The graphics are nicer, but it is the same shitty game with balance and graphics tweaks. They are all still the same formulaic whack the mole, get a prize, level up, whack another mole, rinse and repeat until burn out. Some get fancy and throw in some half assed poorly throughout out PvP in there for kicks, but no one dares to change the same basic boring as hell formula.
It looks like for at least a couple more years I will just have to stick to my MUD. My MUD, ArmageddonMUD http://www.armageddon.org/ , does things MMORPGs are still far too gutless to do. Namely, it has permanent death and is NOT based around leveling up. No fucking dungeon crawls, no killing literally thousands of creatures to gain a few extra skill points. Battles are fast and furious, and the consequences for loosing is death. There are no god characters and few characters that last for more then a year. The RP is quality and enforced, and there are grand scale events that actually mean something.
Do you know what the best part of the game is though? You can actually honestly to godly loose. It is entirely possibly to be rich and powerful, and the next day be dead or broke. That is the biggest problem with MMORPGs. They are too damned afraid to give players anything but
Complex Only for Addicts, Simple For Casual Gamers
on
Are MMORPGs Too Complex?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
MMORPGs are simple. They are for the most part very simple. The thing is that people are so desperate to get an edge that they take mind numbingly simple game mechanics and try and combine them in a way that is complex to get a small advantage. The game is still simple though, and for people not looking to min/max, most MMORPGs are less stimulating then minesweeper. This is, in my opinion, why many people don't like MMORPGS (myself included). The mechanics are deathly simple and boring, and I simply don't care enough to try and manipulate the game in absurd ways to get some small advantage.
MMORPGs need MORE complexity. With more complexity they could be interesting to play. Instead of string together simple and boring game mechanics together to try and create something complicated, people could find complexity and intrigue that they are looking for without having to go hunt it down. Complexity in most MMORPGs is deeply hidden and will require levels of tedium that the average sane player is simply not willing to put up with to find. If the complexities are clear and out in the open, then the masses will find these games as interesting as the guy who sets all his skills just so with tedious precision to get a certain effect.
MMORPGs are complex if you are willing to endure untold amounts of tedium to find that complexity. If you are not willing to put up with that level of tedium to find the complexity then the game is simple and boring. MMORPGs need to bring their complexity to the forefront of the game and make it accessible to everyone, not just the one addict who is willing to divine the games damage formulas to do the most possible amount of damage. Bring complexity to a place where you don't have to be an addict to find it, and people will start to play these games casually. Until this happens no sane person is going to shell out money for a boring and simple game that any monkey could play.
I would prefer if you didn't. It isn't like.games is overcrowded with stories. If one doesn't like MMORPG stories, why not just not read them instead of complain about there being too many? When.games has half as many posts as slashdot main, then I can understand wanting to cut down. However, until that time I think that it wouldn't hurt if there were MORE MMORPG stories.
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Yeah, 20 million probably is better spent on charity or invested into some life saving research. However, it is a tad hypocritical for most people to make such a statement. I know I bought myself a new computer that I didn't need. The only difference between my selfish act and these space tourists is magnitude. If a rich guy wants to blow 20 million on a life's dream, more power to him. I would do the same thing in his position.
If it is any consolation, it very could lead to some greater benefit for mankind. These first few spending money on something so expensive and risky very well could encourage someone somewhere to develop better spaceflight for the purpose of tourism. Even if you don't consider cheaper space tourism as a benefit for humankind, things learned the development of the industry could benefit humankind.
One of the brighter sides of capitalism is that even selfish acts can lead to improving the greater good, even if it is just an accidental consequence of someone's selfish desires.
I imagine normal life insurance would probably cover dying in such an accident. I find it doubtful that your life insurance has a clause in it that says you don't get any money if you die in a space. It probably is not something insurance companies ever thought of including and so, unlike say sky diving, probably still results in coverage.
Not to invoke the wrath of the anti-humanity moderators out there, but good! To hell with Darwinism. If humanity can do it better then nature, why shouldn't it? Ok, so we can no longer effectively evolve stronger and better humans through evolution. We can still evolve stronger and better humans through genetic manipulation. Granted, we are not able to effectively do this today, but some day within the near future we will be able to. Once that happens we will likely evolve much faster then any species on the face of this planet ever has. Hell, we might not even do it biologically, it might be that a few hundred years from now we have stripped away the organics and 'being human' has nothing to do with the parts you were built out of.
Now, the obvious response is that we are playing god or screwing with mother nature, but consider for a moment that perhaps this is natures grand design?
Biological evolution is just the latest of nature's trends towards greater complexity. Why can't intelligence be the next perfectly natural way to head towards greater complexity? We don't look down upon sexual reproduction because it is more complicated then single sex reproduction. No cries that it is unnatural when sexual reproduction, the next step in evolution, is given its shot. Why look down on intelligence when it contributes to the grand scheme of things? Why would intelligent human evolution brought about in a lab be worse?
Honestly, I think humans are just the next rung on the ladder on the way up. What happens when you get to the top? Who the hell knows. Are we the last step? Probably not. It doesn't bother me though that there is a new order in town. If anything, it is uplifting. Biological evolution likely is not the most reliable way for life to survive when sun dies.
Not to run too far off topic with everyone else, but the 'why this nation and not that nation' questions are all fairly easy to answer. Why pick on Cuba and not China? Because China has a billion people in it and picking on them is more painful then not. It is the same reason why invading Iraq was considered, but not North Korea. The US can take over Iraq with a minimal amount of casualties, and we did. Even the losses we are taking right now are not that bad compared to all other past wars. Invading North Korea would have been horrific.
The US military went into Iraq not sure if Iraq had WMDs and not sure if they would use them. North Korea has many WMDs which are mostly chemical, though they are adding nukes the pile, and they would without a doubt use them. Not only would they use them, they would use them on civilians in South Korea. There is absolutely no doubt in this. A war in Korea would be horrific on the scale that would likely make all other wars before it since the World Wars look tame.
Now, the morality and cost of the Iraqi war are certainly fair questions, but the why is pretty obvious in my opinion. Why Iraq? Because it was the right place, at the right time, with the right excuse. WMDs were an excuse to try and build a democracy in the Middle East through military force. I imagine their hope is that Iraq will one day be like Japan, practically pacifist with a love of trade. So, in that regards it was the right place, the Middle East. It was the right time as the US is trying to crush Islamic fundamentalism, and while Iraq barely touched Islamic fundamentalism, it is near a horde of nations that do. Having a beacon of Western style democracy in Iraq at this time would probably influence the nations around Iraq pretty strongly. Finally, it was the right excuse. WMDs was the excuse. WMDs were not the reason, just the way to make the war 'legitimate'. You can't push a resolution through the UN saying "We need to invade because they are not a democracy." The UN has never done such a thing and it never will. They were however able to get it close enough to a legitimate invasion on the WMDs issue. It is like locking up a mobster for tax evasion. You are not really locking them up for tax evasion, it is just the only thing you can nail them on.
Like I said, the morality and (even bigger in my opinion) the cost of the war are up for question. The reason why Iraq of all nations is pretty clear. They just happened to the poor bastards who fit all the criteria.
I don't think they are pretending it is charity. It is just a low cost option. Insteaad of paying with money you get to pay with time. While this would suck for me and I would never do it, it might very well work out great for some people. My mom who just toots around the Internet and checks her e-mail would probably be a prime canidate for this. To her, watching a few comercials while she does her thing would be no big deal.
I simply fail to see how this is sick, to me it is just another payment option. For people who are not going to do much with their computer it might be a worthwhile option.
Yes, your ideas were very new and (+1)informative. I have never once have heard anyone call the Iraqi war wasteful. I thank you for the enlightenment you have added to this discussion.
Despite your excellent points that the US is spending money on a war, I will have to go back to my original point. Spain is spending money on a very massive tunnel to a third world nation.
It is silly to compare how a super power is spending on a war over seas to how a nation with only a fraction the GDP is building a very expensive tunnel to Morocco. Just because the US is spending lots of money on a war doesn't mean everyone else should spend lots of money on other things. Further, comparing how much a super power spends to how Spain spends is also going to only yield the most obvious of conclusions - the US spends more, don't try and copy it. The fact that the US spends lots of money does not add or subtract to the viability of such a massive government projects for Spain and Morocco. It is a cute commentary on US foreign policy, but plays no effect on whether these two nations should try and dig a tunnel under the sea.
Back to the topic at hand, the point was, regardless of what the US is doing, building such a tunnel is expensive. It is only justified if there is going to be some net gain for the two countries involved. As I said before, I would wonder how much of an economic study they have done on this or if it is just some bureaucrat who was swooned in by an engineer whose real motive is to build something big. Combining a guy with money who knows nothing of economics with a guy who doesn't have to spend the money is a very bad combination for the general good of the people. Why bother building what will certainly be an extremely expensive tunnel when one can simply build an airport or fairy dock?
As I said before, it would be one thing if we were talking about two nations with strong economies to support such an endeavor and there was some chance of a return on the investment. England and France are a good example. Those were two countries with strong economic interests in each other and were relatively confident that they could make a return on the investment. Spain is talking about what I assume is a much larger project with a partner that has a very weak economy. If this is supposed to be an act of charity to Morocco, then the money being spent could be used in a fair more direct and efficient way to help bolster the Moroccan economy. Encouraging Spanish investments in Morocco through various government programs would do far more then building a tunnel that will only carry a handful of people across at a time.
And yes, I advocate spending money in Europe in an efficient and worthwhile way DESPITE the fact that the US as at war in Iraq. I also argue this despite the fact that China has imprisoned political prisoners, the fact that the Artic is cold, the Japanese banking system is in a real mess, and South Korea is having some serious campaign contribution issues that will likely lead to the fall of their current PM. Yes, despite of this all, I think building a tunnel to a third world nation would be a bad idea for Spain.
Pardon my French, but how the FUCK did you relate my post to US military spending? Do you go out and look for places to troll? Did I mention US military spending once in my post? Did I even mention the US, or compare anything the US does to what Spain is doing? Did you fucking read the post before you responded?
Morons like you are what make TRUE activists with worth while opinions look like idiots. They have to deal with the perception that people who believe in their cause are all a bunch of mindless morons that spout off their propaganda at anything that moves, including fucking posts about a tunnel from Morocco to Spain. Do whatever causes you believe in a favor and shut the hell up so that non-idiots can articulate their ideas and solutions without having morons like you drag their name through mud. You have enough brains to be the spokesmen for shit, and that is it.
-1 Flamebait
-1 Excessive cursing
+1 Yelling at god damn idiots.
I can't help but wonder how badly there is a need to build something like this. England to France makes sense, as you are talking about two rich nations that see a lot of bussiness with each other. This on the other hand just doesn't seem to hold as much promise for profit. Granted, I know little about the area and there might be more to it then I know, but I just can't see it being worth the horrific costs. Is there any reason why such a feat of engineering is needed when an air plane or boat are both practical solutions?
I wonder how well they have looked at this from an economics side. It seems like it would be a horrific waste of money if it is just being done for national prestige. The worry in such projects is that very few people are willing to say 'no' to such things. The companies involved in the building are of course more then happy to let the government foot the bill, and the companies on either side of coast are happy to have it put in at not cost to themselves. Of course, the people who are going to have to pick up the tab are the tax payers of the respective nations. Who is speaking for them in this project? I hope this is not just a government waste program between the two nations, as it could potentially be a very expensive one.
The rest of what you said is just rehashed. The US can nuke China into oblivion. I see little point in arguing that point. As for this:
"Under normal situations you would be right. You forget something. We have troops in Iraq, Afganastan, Korea, Liberia, Colombia. We are just too spread thin right now to beat China in a war. They'd win simply because we'd run out of troops. China could send an endless supply of troops to shoot down out planes, and basically turn it into another Vietnam like situation where half of the US will want us to pull out and the other half want to stay and fight. In the end after enough troops die the US will pull out and because China simply has more troops they can afford to fight for 10 years. If we Nuke they Nuke. If we go to war in Taiwan because of the location and the amount of troops they have they'll have the advantage.
The only way we could beat China is to pull out of all of the other countries we are in and focus fully on China."
This is dead wrong. If we were talking about a land war, then you might be correct in that the US would be hard pressed to stop China. However, warring with Taiwan would be a purely sea and air war. Troops are not a factor if you can't get them across to Taiwan, which is of course an island. No theater of operation we are currently in demands excessive sea or air assets. In fact, the current places where we are fighting require no sea assets and most of our air assets are being used to keep up supply. All of our air to air assets are not being used at all.
Any Chinese invasion would never even make it across the ocean. US would completely dominate the air. Hell, the Taiwanese air force along with their surface to air assets (almost all US made) could likely hold off the Chinese air force on their own. Add in a US carrier battle group or two and it would not even be a contest. The US and Taiwan would own the skies. In the ocean, China is even more fucked. The Chinese surface fleet is weak and old. It would never survive an encounter with an American battle group. Hell, they would be lucky to even get within sight of an American battle group as all American surface fleets attack over the horizon. If the few thousand cruise missiles an American battle fleet was not enough to sink anything and everything afloat, then the vastly superior air assets of both Taiwan and China combined would make it a done deal.
Further, if China decided to enter a protracted war, they would loose even more soundly. The Chinese economy can not sustain a war with the US. They would crumple under their own weight just like the USSR did when they tried to sustain our level of military spending. The USSR learned the hard way that trying to match American production is a quick way to go bankrupt. If the Russians built a carrier, we build three. The poor bastards tried to keep up.
China is a fearsome foe in a land war simply because they can throw so much at once at the enemy, but in the sea and in the air they are helpless. China would never even make to the land before everything was destroyed. This would leave China with only a single option to win such a war, and that would be through nuclear arms. Of course, that rather defeats the entire point of going to war against Taiwan in the first place, as China would struggle to maintain a cohesive government after a nuclear onslaught, much less hold aspirations of retaking Taiwan.
Your talk of China being 'one people' shows how very little you know of China. China looks like one people to the average American. To an American, if they all look roughly the same they are one people. This is not so in China. China has many different ethnic cultures that are held from going at each others throats by the force of the government. I imagine you believe that all Chinese speak 'chinese'. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Mandarin (what people think of when they think Chinese) is just one language of many in China. China has many different languages with
I don't feel like going point by point, so I'll just address your main argument:
"You see China has nothing to lose, most of them already are living in the stone ages, so why not take us a step back with a nuclear war which they'd win simply because in the end when we both are in the stone age there will be more Chinese people."
First, you vastly overestimate China's nuclear capabilities. As I said, China has a very hard time reaching the US with their nukes. The US has been in a cold war with Russia for 50 years and have absolutely no problem blanketing China. The US has vastly more nuclear destructive force then China. Only Russia is a contender when it comes to raw nuclear power. Also recall that our arsenal was meant to take down Russia, which just as spread out as China is.
Second, your point is valid in that there exist parts of China that wouldn't notice anything is wrong except for sudden drastically high cancer rates and 'snow' in the middle of the summer. However, you miss the point that these peasants that would be less effected are not the people ruling China. China is ruled from the cities. The leaders live in cities. The leaders are very much creatures of the modern world, and China at the moment is run through its technology. The Chinese government is as helpless as the US government is without its technology.
Finally, China is ruled by rational city dwelling people. The US has stated very clearly how far it will go to preserve the few nations that it has aligned itself with. The USSR never assaulted Western Germany because they realized that our willingness to fight back with all of our conventional might and retaliate to nuclear strikes with all of our nuclear might was very much hardened and set in stone. The US has in the past and will in the future risk total annihilation for these principles. The US might be raging hypocrites on many issues, but not on this one.
The invasion of Taiwan would work out simply. China would invade and the US fleet and air force would get in the way. China would loose any conventional engagement with the US. China then has the option to press the button and set both nations back to the stone age or give up their aspirations of owning Taiwan. Either way, Taiwan will never fall into China's hands. If they press the button, lording of Taiwan will the last thing they have to worry about. It is a no win situation for China to invade. Either they suffer a terrible military defeat at the hands of US conventional forces and never take Taiwan, or all three nations go up in a cloud of nuclear smoke... and China never takes Taiwan. Both scenarios offer nothing for China.
Your logic is very flawed. If the US is not willing to carry out their threat, why would China not simply invade? How long would it take for China to build an invasion fleet big enough to get the job done? A couple of years at the most. The reason why they don't bother is because the US stands firmly in their way.
China will not "NUKE THE HELL OUT OF THE US" because the US would NUKE THE HELL OUT OF CHINA. Everyone realizes that the consequence of firing a nuke is getting a nuke shoved back in your direction. In this case, that would be a much worse thing for China then the US. Most of China's nukes can't even reach the US. Don't get me wrong, the damage would be horrific, but nothing compared to what the US would do in response. The US would be devastated. They would be utterly and totally destroyed. The US would some day recover as perhaps a shadow of our former nation, they would not. Getting into a game of nuclear holocaust with the US is a very stupid idea because in the end you loose. Period. Every US city could be flatted, but that just means everything higher then a few meters if flattened in China. The US just recently reaffirmed that the consequence of using a WMD on the US is getting a WMD thrown back in your face and then some.
Taiwan is considered US protected property. The US have made it clear in both words and in law that Taiwan is under US protection. The rhetoric Bush is using against Taiwan right now is just that, rhetoric. Bush doesn't want to fight China, but like ANY American president, Republican or Democrat, he will fight China if he has to protect Taiwan. Being a mildly rational person (or at least having some rational advisors) he is going to go out of his way to avoid fighting China. That isn't to say he wouldn't if he had to, but if the cost of keeping China from going after Taiwan are a few harsh words to Taiwan, he will certainly do it. That doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day there will always be a couple of US carrier battle groups sitting between main land China and Taiwan.
The US, for all of its flaws, are extremely principled to the point of near insanity when it comes to this point. The US has threatened in the past and would to this day destroy the world before it let a free first world democracy fall to a communist nation. It is one thing to fight over a third world nation like Vietnam or even Korea (Korea was third world at the time). It is another to let a nation like German, France (as much as the US picks on them now), Japan, South Korea (today), or Taiwan fall. The US might let one of those nations fall in an internal civil war, but never to an outside threat. The US considers Taiwan sovereign enough where fighting China wouldn't be a civil war in the US's eyes.
Saw what you will on the US, on this one issue they are principled to the point of insane fanaticism that makes Islamic terrorist look like sane and rational people. The US would defend Taiwan in an instant from China, and the US wouldn't think twice about respond to any nuclear attack from China with their own. In other words, the US would risk absolute destruction of all parties involved (themselves included) then let a nation like Taiwan fall to a nation like China. The US was more then willing to do it during the cold war and I have no doubt they would do it again.
"Maybe they're wanted back because the civilians weren't randomly imprisoned"
That was a joke, right?
Say what you want of the US invasion, those people were -bad-. They killed millions of their own people. I don't care if you support the war or not. There are plenty of reasons for the US to not worry itself with other nations, but defending those people as offering stability is a joke, especially suggesting that those were someone 'just' rules.
First, let's ignore the fact that the US would do SOMETHING if China invaded. If we had a very very weak president that wouldn't mind the US going into riot, we might be able to avoid a war. Don't count on it though. There would at least be a harsh economic response, yes, even at the cost of the US (and as a result) the world economy. Don't underestimate the will of the US to preserve other Democratic nations. We might let a third world nation with a quasi democracy sink, but we don't let first world democracies sink without a fight. I think we would respond the same way we would have responded if the USSR had invaded Germany - send everything that isn't a nuke, and keep the nukes on standby. The US is absolutely ferocious when it comes to defending such interests and China would be foolish to think we would let an invasion fleet cross channel.
Second, even if the US did absolutely nothing, the economic effect would be chilling. All of Asia would be seen as unstable. Sure, our economy would become more insular, but it sure as shit wouldn't mean getting more jobs for everyone. The US economy went belly up in 1929 because of a series of tariffs were passed into law. This turned what might have just been a recession into the worst economic disaster in US history. Becoming insular is the death of the US economy. This day an age, we are a thousand times more dependent upon foreign trade then we were in 1929. We could make 1929 look like an up year with the sort of economic devastation that would result if we tried to create an insular economy.
Simply put, China will not invade Taiwan any time in the near future. The US would stop it, and the US stopping it would give China two options. China can choose military and economic destruction or it can choose total annihilation. China, for all of its faults, is ruled by rational leaders. They understand the consequences of invading Taiwan in the same way the Soviets understood the consequences of invading West Germany. US policy has always stated very clearly the lengths we are willing to go to protect nations such as Taiwan, and any president, Democrat or Republican would be more then willing to follow through with their obligation, even at the cost of both nations. It isn't a pretty prospect, which is exactly why it won't happen.
It isn't so much that the US is the UN. Clearly the Iraq war shows otherwise. What is true is that the UN is very dependent upon the US to get anything done. If the US throws a cog in the wheels of the UN, nothing is going to get it to budge. The US provides a great deal of the UN's funding and IS the UN's military arm. The UN can pull off humanitarian aid missions without the US's help, but if it wants to pull off any sort of real military action, they simply need the US. Further, the UN is pretty much unable to enforce any major decisions without US approval, though the same can be said about all the permanent members of the security counsel.
This attempt to hand over control of the Internet to the UN is going to be met with the US crushing it. To be perfectly honest, I don't think that is a bad thing. I don't really want Syria or China to have any say in how the Internet is being run. These are not exactly model nations when it comes to the free flow of information. While the US is certainly in no way perfect, I think they do a far better job with allowing the free flow of information then many other countries. If the UN was made up of only free democratic nations, I could understand the desire to go in this direction, but while brutal totalitarian nations have their say, I don't want them anywhere near the Internet. The US isn't perfect, but the UN is certainly a worse choice.
The UN is a wonderful place to have peaceful debate and to work out diplomatic issues. However, the UN is not and should not be a world government, nor should it be where I want my Internet is controlled from. It is composed of too many nations that are violently opposed to my interests.
If you don't want a game that you have an emotional response to then clearly you are not the target audience. So what?
The point was not that the games played like a novel. They didn't. They played like games. The difference was then when you get to the end of it and all was said and done, instead of shrugging your shoulders and idly wondering when the sequal was going to come out, you could have an emotional response. That is a good thing. If you can make something that has all the perks of a game put the emotional response of a novel, you have something special on your hands. BIS did that at least twice for me.
If a developer gets done making a great game with wonderful game play, and at the end people are touched by it in some way, then that developer wold have to be an idiot to try and pull that content. No sane developer is going to go, "Wowa... hold on a second boys, that plot has people having an emotional reaction. Can we dumb this down a little?" Having great game play and a powerful story is a good thing, not something to be avoided as you seem to suggest.
I think the reason why you see such a large reaction is because all of the games you listed while great, are empty. BIS made games that affected people like novels. The ending of Fallout blew me over. The story and character development (and I am not talking about levels) for Planescape: Torment was just awesome.
Doom, Halo, GTA, Warcraft, and all of those games have an entirely different sort of appeal to me. I don't look at those games like good books. To me they are like action movies. The are without a doubt fun, but I play them in a very detached manner. The ending to the original Fallout left me choking and getting watery eyed. The ending to Warcraft or Half-Life just made me shrug and wonder when the sequel was coming out. Don't get me wrong, I love those games, but for entirely different reasons.
The point certainly is valid that such companies need to make money. BIS made some great games, but they also made some real bombs. The fact that they did a poor job on the financial end doesn't invalidate the quality games they did put out. Hopefully someone will come along pick up the pieces and package it into something more financially sound. I am still going to miss BIS though, despite thier suckage when it comes to making money.
God fucking damn it!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Ok, it is out of my system.
BIS was by far my favorite studio. Fallout, Fallout II and Planescape: Torment were my three favorite games of all times. Does anyone remember the end of the original Fallout? That ending was one of the few endings that left an emotional impact upon me. The ending as simply amazing. As he is walking away to that song I felt my gut twist in a knot and left me choking. Ahh hell, I admit it, I was getting watery eyed as he was walking away from the vault with his head down to that old bluesy song. No game had ever done that to me before. To this day hearing that song twists my gut into a knot.
Don't get me wrong, I love games today, but I have had none that made really knocked my socks off. War Craft III has great game play an all, but I have never felt any emotion while playing that game other then annoyance at the bastard over battle net you managed to raise an army and level his hero to 10 in five minutes. Fallout and Torment had an emotional effect like a good book. Nothing in these past couple of years has effected me like that.
I know I sat drooling over the prospect of Fallout III. I simply loved that entire setting. If anything, I was always supremely disappointed that BIS never ran with the title. I would loved to have seen a Fallout FPS or MMORPG.
On that note, does anyone know who the rights to the Fallout title goes to? The studio might be dead, but I would be surprised if someone picked up the rights and a few of the original creators and intend to run with it.
One of my favorite books of all times was Forgotten Soldier. It is about a guy in the German army during WWII. Yeah, he is the 'bad guy', but the truth is, he isn't. He was some stupid young kid who went off to war and any sort of political ideology he might have had was crushed under first wave of Russian soldiers.
I would absolutely kill to play a German soldier on the eastern front in a video game. Hell, I would love to play a Japanese soldier. It is a game, and if the game does well, in the end you will feel sympathy for the 'villains'. No game is going to make anyone regret that Germany and Japan lost during World War II, but they can instill that it wasn't the hordes of Nazis and brutal suicidal Japanese verse the virtuous allies.
If someone wanted to make a powerful video game, they would make a game from the axis perspective. They would start out with a bunch of your buddies all under the age of 19. You would go through some training together, get the usual propaganda stuffed into your head, then hit a real battle field and forget it all. You would huddle with your buddies in a fox hole and fight your way forward, then back in retreat, with long time companions who have saved your life countless times dying one by one. That is the reality of war. Celebrate the ideological victory and that horrific atrocities were ended, but don't forget that the enemy was human and that those humans felt the entire range of emotions that we do. The overall war was a just victory, but there were a million small tragedies on both sides to get there.
The government. Read the title. That was for 2002. It is now almost 2004. The economy has picked up since 2002. It is still arguable if the trend is going to stay good, but right now it is pulling up.
"If it doesn't have stats and random encounters, it's not a real RPG."
You are, in my opinion, absolutely and completely wrong. Stats and random encounters are NOT what defines an RPG. By your definition, Diablo II would be a better RPG then and Fallout II. Fallout II has very few random encounters, and if they were to be entirely removed they would not be missed. In fact, it is possible to eventually avoid all encounters. If Fallout II had no random encounters at all this would NOT mean it is not an RPG. Stats and random encounters are a crutch that RPG makers have fallen on to prop up game play.
RPGs are, at their heart, games that have a story. A 'good' RPG is a game that centers around its story and the development of the characters within that story, AND does this in a manner which is fun (game play). Diablo II is a good game because the game play is appreciated, but it is a shitty RPG in that its story elements are nearly non-existent and more an excuse to up stats and kill more creatures. You can have a game that is a bad RPG but a good game, and there is nothing wrong with that, however, such a game is by no means the pinnacle of RPGs.
RPGs are about their story and character development (which really is just another piece of story). The point of an RPG is to immerse yourself in an alternate reality more then in any other genera. The limits of current technology make it very hard to build entire worlds with interesting stories, and so this takes a backseat to game play. This is not an entirely bad thing simply because as it is we struggle so much with the game play aspect of RPGs. It is very difficult to make a game based around a story 'fun', and so the game play is the element that sees some of the greatest work. The real golden age of RPGs will be when technology opens the door to great game play quickly and easily for developers so that they can truly work on the story. When groups of real writers use RPGs as a medium to tell stories and flesh out beautiful and elaborate worlds, then you will know that you have hit the golden age.
Until that time we will continue to struggle simply creating the most basic of worlds with the crudest of game play. The golden titles of RPGs will be few and far in-between, like the Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, and other such games that built great worlds for great stories. The greatness of these games had nothing to do with the fact that they had 'stats and random encounters'.
I personally think that this guy simply disproved his point. He points out three elements of an RPG and says that RPGs suck at all three elements. First off, I don't think all three of those are elements. Story is the only one I think that deserves to be there. Those other two are simply methods of making the telling of the story interesting. Diablo I and II in my mind are examples of horrific and terrible RPGs. They might be great games, but they are absolutely horrible RPGs. They had no story element at all.
Planescape: Torment is an example of an RPG that is at its best. The story is masterful and easily as good as any movie, and the gameplay medium they choose to use to tell the story is fun. That is what defines a 'good' RPG. A strong story told through a fun game play medium. If you lack the story, like Diablo did, then it is no longer a good RPG. It is just a good game.
There has been absolutely no RPG renaissance. RPGs are, in my mind still yet to experience any sort of golden days. You might look back at some time period with nostalgia, but I think there has been no period that consistently told a good story through good game play. There have only been the occasional gem, like Planescape:Torment, the Fallout games, and a few others. I think the RPG golden days are somewhere in the future when we master story telling elements better. Currently we are spending so much time struggling with game play that story telling has been neglected. This is not an entirely bad thing, just a fact of things as they are now. When the medium becomes truly powerful and larger more cohesive worlds are possible, then I think you will find the story once again becoming a focus and there will be a true golden age of RPGs.
In our concern over global warming I think real costs Vs benefit analysis has been missing. Any global shift in the temperature is going to have both its good points and bad. In some places a global rise in temperature will without a doubt be damning. In other places though I imagine it would be welcomed.
Natural or not, before we get too worked up over the idea of global warming I think a better overall look at what the befits might be should be weighed. It very well could be that if we put enough effort into it, we could reverse the global trend, regardless if it is man made or not. Humans are pretty resourceful and if pushed could probably come up with ways to shift the climate in any direction the want. The issue is that any shift costs money.
How should it be decided if the overall benefits and problems are worth the cost to either stop or not stop global warming? How should it be decided if one region should be denied something that would benefit them to help a region that would be hurt? Do you just figure out which direction is the most costly? Do you declare that the current world climate is the most fair climate?
Right now we are simply acting on reflex. Things are changing and we are simply jumping to stop it. There has not been a real coherent discussion to my knowledge over whether or not perhaps a warmer earth is a good thing in the long run, it has just been an argument between industry and environmentalist, with industry automatically the side that controlling the climate is expensive, and environmentalist fighting to keep the climate from ever changing. No one is really considering the overall costs and benefits.
I suppose the answer is that right now we can't possibly begin to decide the real costs and real benefits. We are talking about a globe wide event, and with any globe wide event the variables are simply beyond our ability to even begin to tabulate. We can't even agree on what the cause is, much less develop an agreeable model over what the climate is doing so that costs and benefits can even begin to be considered. Right now it seems like everyone is just banking of 'faith'. You either have faith that things can go on as they are and in the end we will either have the power to deal with the consequences, or you have faith that the way things are now are the better then what they are moving towards and that the change will turn out to be bad and beyond our control.
In my opinion, both sides are just piss shots in the dark. Enough of my random musing.
I am completely and utterly without any excitement over World of Warcraft. I expect Blizzard to do what they always do, take the basic elements of something that has been established and streamline the mechanics. If you hate the game play style already, it isn't going to do anything for you. I expect WoW to be the best leveling up, hack and slash, MMORPG ever... exactly what I have no desire to play. Leveling treadmills, no matter how fast or slow bore me to no end. I can not even begin to explain how little desire I have to sit there and slaughter NPCs for hours on end for the goal of getting more powerful to kill more NPCs. Diablo was as fun for me as pulling barbed wire through my hands. All of that said, I think WoW is going to make it big. I my find that style of game play utterly boring and only suitable for a proper addict, but the addict market is very big as all the current MMORPGs have proven.
At this point, I have a little hope for only a two of the MMORPGs. First, Matrix Online has some potential in concept. Of course, they have not bothered to mention exactly what that concept is. Everquest could be described as a game where warriors and magic users clash against terrible fire breathing dragons. Of course, that is the PR spin. The truth is that you sit there while some stupid NPC repeats some boring animation over and over again while your weapons either go through the model of the dragon or don't even bother to hit it. Yawn. For this reason I have little excitement over the PR spin of Matrix Online. Personally, I think that if they do anything but real time combat where player skill matters, it is going to flat out suck. The only reason why I have any hope (and I know this hope is totally unfounded) is that maybe when they hit the auto attack button and the two Matrix guys stand their stupidly firing their guns unmoving, they will realize how stupid it looks and realize they need some real fast paced combat. Maybe when two people unload clip after clip at each other to go through the thousand hit points of a level 50 agent, they will realize how stupid levels and HP are. It is probably a pipe dream, but I can hope. The Matrix Online will be a success in my opinion if two people of equal skill can kill each other with a single bullet. Here is to a fools hopes.
The other game that looks potentially interesting is Priest. It has an original setting and 'first person like combat'. That scores a lot of points with me. It gives me hope the game has nothing to do with leveling up. It again is probably a fools hope, but I am allowed to dream.
This next generation of MMORPGs does not excite me in the slightest. They are still all first generation games as far game play goes as I am concerned in terms. The graphics are nicer, but it is the same shitty game with balance and graphics tweaks. They are all still the same formulaic whack the mole, get a prize, level up, whack another mole, rinse and repeat until burn out. Some get fancy and throw in some half assed poorly throughout out PvP in there for kicks, but no one dares to change the same basic boring as hell formula.
It looks like for at least a couple more years I will just have to stick to my MUD. My MUD, ArmageddonMUD http://www.armageddon.org/ , does things MMORPGs are still far too gutless to do. Namely, it has permanent death and is NOT based around leveling up. No fucking dungeon crawls, no killing literally thousands of creatures to gain a few extra skill points. Battles are fast and furious, and the consequences for loosing is death. There are no god characters and few characters that last for more then a year. The RP is quality and enforced, and there are grand scale events that actually mean something.
Do you know what the best part of the game is though? You can actually honestly to godly loose. It is entirely possibly to be rich and powerful, and the next day be dead or broke. That is the biggest problem with MMORPGs. They are too damned afraid to give players anything but
MMORPGs are simple. They are for the most part very simple. The thing is that people are so desperate to get an edge that they take mind numbingly simple game mechanics and try and combine them in a way that is complex to get a small advantage. The game is still simple though, and for people not looking to min/max, most MMORPGs are less stimulating then minesweeper. This is, in my opinion, why many people don't like MMORPGS (myself included). The mechanics are deathly simple and boring, and I simply don't care enough to try and manipulate the game in absurd ways to get some small advantage.
MMORPGs need MORE complexity. With more complexity they could be interesting to play. Instead of string together simple and boring game mechanics together to try and create something complicated, people could find complexity and intrigue that they are looking for without having to go hunt it down. Complexity in most MMORPGs is deeply hidden and will require levels of tedium that the average sane player is simply not willing to put up with to find. If the complexities are clear and out in the open, then the masses will find these games as interesting as the guy who sets all his skills just so with tedious precision to get a certain effect.
MMORPGs are complex if you are willing to endure untold amounts of tedium to find that complexity. If you are not willing to put up with that level of tedium to find the complexity then the game is simple and boring. MMORPGs need to bring their complexity to the forefront of the game and make it accessible to everyone, not just the one addict who is willing to divine the games damage formulas to do the most possible amount of damage. Bring complexity to a place where you don't have to be an addict to find it, and people will start to play these games casually. Until this happens no sane person is going to shell out money for a boring and simple game that any monkey could play.
I would prefer if you didn't. It isn't like .games is overcrowded with stories. If one doesn't like MMORPG stories, why not just not read them instead of complain about there being too many? When .games has half as many posts as slashdot main, then I can understand wanting to cut down. However, until that time I think that it wouldn't hurt if there were MORE MMORPG stories.