Spun is spot-on here & Jaffe is both right and wrong. The problem with stories in games is not that there are stories, it's that the writer is trying to tell a single story in a dynamic medium, which means that the player isn't integral to the story progression. The worst case is when the player's interactivity is severely restricted to the story the designer wanted to tell.
Brenda Laurel, Chris Crawford, Andrew Stern, Joseph Bates, Michael Mateas at Georgia Tech and a handful of others are working on creating viable interactive story, which I believe will be a revolution in interactive entertainment (and will take it beyond games).
This describes what they want the Internet to be, not what it is or what it will be. The characteristics of the Internet they describe will change based on who uses it, as it molds itself to suit the people to use it as a TOOL.
And globalization helps them by giving them an opportunity to survive. They are mortgaging their futures to survive in the short term, but if the choice of starve now or deal with long-term problems is a no-brainer. Most Americans have no conception of what life is like in the "third world".
Harvard Business Review did a study of leadership styles and broke CEO leadership styles into four categories. "Box"--coming from creating a box for employees to work in, having little tolerance for going beyond those constraints--was hands-down the most common style, with 40% of CEOs using that strategy. However, there are another 60% using other primary strategies.
Simple: the Internet is more efficient than their corporations. They are fighting (and suing) to keep their inefficient distribution system in place because most of the money in the record industry pays for distribution (publishers, distributers, retailers).
It is simple to set up a licensing scheme for music content, but they don't want it because the price would go way down if music simply shot over the network to those who wanted it. If consumers had real choice over which songs they wanted to pay for. If we found out about good music by hearing DJs spin who make the same amount of money as the rest of us.
Ignore the smoke and mirrors of the current litigation and support systems like iTunes where you pay what songs are worth. Cut out the RIAA middlemen! Artists deserve to be paid for creating music. Copyright law was invented to incent artists. The RIAA has hijacked that system through its monopoly on distribution and now is the time to take it back from them!
A need is something necessary for life: air, water, food, shelter. A want is everything else...
As human beings, we have emotional needs: emotional imperitives we will walk over broken glass to fulfill. Advertisers know this and systematically tie their products to our emotional needs to incentivize us to spend our time creating luxury for them. Most of us are unaware of how powerful those emotional needs are and how strong are our built-in systems of arbitrarily attaching those needs to nonsensical sources.
It sounds like you are also ignorant of this. Life in our society involves interaction with others. Survivalism is for those with more severe emotional issues than the average consumer. Awareness and choice is a more reliable answer.
Systematically allowing private interests to trump free speech in this way would be a dire risk to our position as the world's technological leader, which is fundamental to our economy. If I cannot analyze another's algorithm, it will dramatically reduce my ability to improve upon it.
This is precisely the form of "innovation" that Microsoft generates its profits from.
Actually, the fact that computers work by making an "in-memory" copy of data does play a part in intellectual property claims. It's yet another of the convoluted bits of legal precedent that we need to support the EFF in rectifying.
I'm happy that you found a new career. Please leave building software to people who were trained how to do it. Would you go to a "self-taught" surgeon?
When I was in college, I was a consultant at the computer center. I was able to help students fix their programming homework even though I hadn't taken the classes. The classes I took in the 1980's did not teach what is important, but taught what was easily testable and presumed that was enough.
Now that I am in the industry, I find that the majority of the engineers do not seek out new learning. Even though the practices they were taught have 85% failure rate in terms of late/canceled projects, they are still widely used. I have consulted for several organizations whose practices were unveiled in the 1970's-1980's.
The engineers I most want to work with are those who understand the fundamentals of engineering and work to keep current, not those who learned chapter and verse but who are at a loss to apply their learning to anything new. I'd rather work with a neophyte with an open mind than with a rigid old-school practitioner who doesn't understand what he's doing. Some of those with degrees lack that understanding and some without have it. The pedigree is the warm-up exercise.
>>>Yeah, I'm sure the childless, single people with no responsibilities will chime in with suggestions about better managing finances...but you folks are obviously more readily able to absorb unforseeable hits on your pocketbook because you aren't paying for daycare. health insurance, etc.
We all make life choices and deal with the consequences. I assume that having children was a conscious choice on your part. Do you appreciate having them in your life?
Risk-averse, yes, but not so bad for a big company. Look at Motor City Online, American Mcgee's Alice and Majestic. Not genre-breaking by any standard, but not exactly the same old pap.
Slashdot Mirror
Spun is spot-on here & Jaffe is both right and wrong. The problem with stories in games is not that there are stories, it's that the writer is trying to tell a single story in a dynamic medium, which means that the player isn't integral to the story progression. The worst case is when the player's interactivity is severely restricted to the story the designer wanted to tell.
Brenda Laurel, Chris Crawford, Andrew Stern, Joseph Bates, Michael Mateas at Georgia Tech and a handful of others are working on creating viable interactive story, which I believe will be a revolution in interactive entertainment (and will take it beyond games).
This describes what they want the Internet to be, not what it is or what it will be. The characteristics of the Internet they describe will change based on who uses it, as it molds itself to suit the people to use it as a TOOL.
And globalization helps them by giving them an opportunity to survive. They are mortgaging their futures to survive in the short term, but if the choice of starve now or deal with long-term problems is a no-brainer. Most Americans have no conception of what life is like in the "third world".
Harvard Business Review did a study of leadership styles and broke CEO leadership styles into four categories. "Box"--coming from creating a box for employees to work in, having little tolerance for going beyond those constraints--was hands-down the most common style, with 40% of CEOs using that strategy. However, there are another 60% using other primary strategies.
The problem is that if you have mob rule, you inevitably get elite rule, as Plato pointed out in The Republic.
Simple: the Internet is more efficient than their corporations. They are fighting (and suing) to keep their inefficient distribution system in place because most of the money in the record industry pays for distribution (publishers, distributers, retailers).
It is simple to set up a licensing scheme for music content, but they don't want it because the price would go way down if music simply shot over the network to those who wanted it. If consumers had real choice over which songs they wanted to pay for. If we found out about good music by hearing DJs spin who make the same amount of money as the rest of us.
Ignore the smoke and mirrors of the current litigation and support systems like iTunes where you pay what songs are worth. Cut out the RIAA middlemen! Artists deserve to be paid for creating music. Copyright law was invented to incent artists. The RIAA has hijacked that system through its monopoly on distribution and now is the time to take it back from them!
As human beings, we have emotional needs: emotional imperitives we will walk over broken glass to fulfill. Advertisers know this and systematically tie their products to our emotional needs to incentivize us to spend our time creating luxury for them. Most of us are unaware of how powerful those emotional needs are and how strong are our built-in systems of arbitrarily attaching those needs to nonsensical sources.
It sounds like you are also ignorant of this. Life in our society involves interaction with others. Survivalism is for those with more severe emotional issues than the average consumer. Awareness and choice is a more reliable answer.
Systematically allowing private interests to trump free speech in this way would be a dire risk to our position as the world's technological leader, which is fundamental to our economy. If I cannot analyze another's algorithm, it will dramatically reduce my ability to improve upon it.
This is precisely the form of "innovation" that Microsoft generates its profits from.
Actually, the fact that computers work by making an "in-memory" copy of data does play a part in intellectual property claims. It's yet another of the convoluted bits of legal precedent that we need to support the EFF in rectifying.
A couple of reasons:
I love licensing IP! It's way better than wasting physical space and money on atoms when all I want are the bits.
Anyway, my point is simply that the demand is there, it's the supply that's missing. It's not the other way around like the author is suggesting.
And the supply is missing because the producers view the internet as a gigantic piracy haven. Hence all of the MPAA lawsuits over Digital Rights.
The same point as any of these /. posts. To entertain each other by giving us something to chatter on about.
Now that I am in the industry, I find that the majority of the engineers do not seek out new learning. Even though the practices they were taught have 85% failure rate in terms of late/canceled projects, they are still widely used. I have consulted for several organizations whose practices were unveiled in the 1970's-1980's.
The engineers I most want to work with are those who understand the fundamentals of engineering and work to keep current, not those who learned chapter and verse but who are at a loss to apply their learning to anything new. I'd rather work with a neophyte with an open mind than with a rigid old-school practitioner who doesn't understand what he's doing. Some of those with degrees lack that understanding and some without have it. The pedigree is the warm-up exercise.
>>>Yeah, I'm sure the childless, single people with no responsibilities will chime in with suggestions about better managing finances...but you folks are obviously more readily able to absorb unforseeable hits on your pocketbook because you aren't paying for daycare. health insurance, etc.
We all make life choices and deal with the consequences. I assume that having children was a conscious choice on your part. Do you appreciate having them in your life?
Lucas is notoriously restrictive about what can happen with their Intellectual Property. Proposing changes means running the bureaucracy gauntlet.
This is a big part of why the stock characters will be unkillable.
Risk-averse, yes, but not so bad for a big company. Look at Motor City Online, American Mcgee's Alice and Majestic. Not genre-breaking by any standard, but not exactly the same old pap.