Yes. It CAN still be a bastion of free speech, and still not let you use terms like Islamofacist. It also probably frowns on you sitting outside the student union, and demanding that all people of color go work in your cotton fields, and calling them niggers. It also probably restricts you from yelling "fire" in crowded rooms, or calling people up and telling them that you're going to rape them.
Funny how that works. It is, however, still free speech. Just think of it as having to take responsibility for what you're saying. If you're saying "I planted a bomb in the student union, muahahaha", I guess you're free to say it, but you're also responsible for saying it, and so can't really complain when people take you at face value and react accordingly.
I don't think any questions can really ever be wrong. It's not really wrong to try to find an answer. Your question may be founded on incorrect assumptions ("so, have you stopped beating your wife?") but it's not the question itself (or the act of asking it) that is wrong.
Also, philosophy isn't really a way of trying to find things out. It's almost more of a way of exploring different ways of looking at what you already know. So while saying "Philosophy is a flawed way to find things out" is technically true, it is about as useful a statement as "Hammers are a flawed way of applying screws". It's true I guess, but that's not really what it's for...
Maybe the part they want to get right is the localization? Poor localization can ruin a game just as much as a bug, really. It's a funny thing. (Like server maintenance!) When it's done well, you don't notice it at all. When it's done poorly, it's really obvious, and really annoying, and EVERYONE gets in your face about it.
Hey kids! Having trouble figuring out if using your TV-B-Gone is ok? Not sure if you're doing a public service, or just being a jerk? Here's a simple test you can try at home or "in the field":
Any time you would use your TV-B-Gone, ask yourself "Would I be comfortable just walking up to wherever the TV is and turning it off, without offering any explanation to anyone else here?" Then ask yourself "Would I be comfortable announcing in a loud voice 'I'm going to turn off the TV now.' before clicking your TV-B-Gone?"
If you answered "no" to either of these questions, then yes! You're being a jerk! You're merely using technology to hide from responsibility for your actions, and justifying it to yourself!
If you answered "yes", then you're [probably] fine! But consider putting this to the test by actually announcing your intent to everyone before just quietly clicking "off" and not telling anyone!
Have fun! And remember kids, ask your parents before you try this at home!
But what you're talking about only covers half of it:
Yes, it's important to look at a game and say "why does this game suck and how can I make games that don't suck in the ways that this game sucks?". But it's equally important to say "What about this game rocks so much? Why is this so compelling/fun/engrossing? What can I learn about how to be awesome from this game?"
This is true in any medium, not just game design. It's important to be paying attention to advances people are making, even if they're tiny gems buried in otherwise boring works.
You just said all opinions are equally valid. Lots of people are of the opinion that it is both true, and science. Who are you to claim different?
That's easy: The same thing that gives them the right to have that opinion in the first place, also gives anyone the right to disagree with that opinion. It doesn't become somehow magical or sacred or immune to dissent just because a lot of people happen to already think it.
Turn it around. Why restrict it to some anonymous coworker who can't answer back? If someone said these things to YOU, what would your reaction be? And why?
Also, remember that Congress has to approve going to war because it has to be funded. As far as abusing his position is concerned, he isn't the first and won't be the last so don't act like he is alone. The democrats *cough*Clinton*cough* do it too.
Yeah, Clinton sure lead us into an awful lot of pointless wars of aggression based on fabricated evidence too.
Or... wait, no, I think you're thinking of someone else.
P. S. It doesn't dishonor our troops to admit that the person who ultimately commands them might be... a few boats short of a flotilla. Heck, you could make a pretty good argument that refusing to admit such a thing is more of a "letting them down". But either way, they're people and not political props, so can we just leave the "who's actions let them down more??!?" conversation out of it?
Going to nitpick your nitpick a bit, I think: Story != presentation. Story is how you would summarize the game to your friends. Presentation is how the game tells the story to you.
$50,000 cutscenes are one way of presenting story.
So are in-game events.
So are random notes you find in the game environment that hint at what happened.
So are NPC dialogues.
Games that have $50,000 budgets for CG doesn't mean that they have $50,000 stories. It just means that they thought the best way to present their story was with massive FMV. (hint: They're usually wrong.)
I know the moderators will punish me for this one, but people always say Half-life had an excellent story.
In my opinion, these people are on crack. Half-life's story sucked. Seriously. Think about it. Story: "We accidentally made a portal, and it kinda goes to the world of evil aliens, so they invaded. Hooray! This guy in powered armor killed an implausible number of them, and ended the invasion! We're saved!"
Where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah. Doom. Which people seldom accuse of being the height of literature.
What Half-life DID have (and had in spades) was PRESENTATION. It presented the story extremely well by never breaking first-person view, and "showing, not telling". So even though the story was utter crap, it was fun to have told to you, because they were telling it in a way that was completely novel at the time, and that you could explore and trigger at your own pace. The story didn't feel like it was being TOLD to you, it felt like it was HAPPENING to you.
So yeah, games can be art because of the interaction, but they can also be art because of the story they are presenting, through the interaction. I think I basically agree with your point - if you take a game, and just throw some unchanging story in between levels, then you have Final Fantasy, or, as I like to call it, "graphic novels punctuated by minigames". But there are also games that have been art specifically BECAUSE of their story, and the way the game made you feel like you were in charge of it and calling the shots, and that it felt awesome.
Planescape:Torment is a good example of a game that was like this.
Games can also be art when they present a story that is mostly static, but that is presented in a way that lets the player explore it and all the ramifications. Mind Forever Voyaging is a good example of this.
Heck, games can even be art based purely on their visual presentation. I think you could make an excellent case for Okami, purely on the grounds of its graphical style alone.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit far afield here. Back to the point: Games can be art because of the story. Or just about anything else. The interaction isn't the art in itself; the interaction is the "special sauce" that lets you explore the aspect of it that IS art, and makes it more than it was originally, due to the personal connection. Whether that aspect is story, graphics, or who knows what. Just because some studio dropped $50k on trying to make some flashy FMVs as a misguided attempt to cover up the fact that their story wasn't good, doesn't mean that games can't be art because of story.
Re:Welcome to four weeks ago...
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Lair Review
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So wait, I'm confused. Is Heavenly Sword your example of an awesome game they should review as a counter-example, or a "why not review sucktastic heavenly sword, while you're piling on the hate"?
While I agree with your point, and don't really want to nitpick, I feel I should at least point out that mouse-over is NOT a reliable way of verifying a link location. There's at least one way of making the link put whatever you want in the status bar, and spoofing an address.
Yeah, of course people are saying that it's bad business, but what he did was with good intent and in a perfect world, could have had a good impact.
It may have had good intent, but that doesn't make it a good action, or one that necessarily benefits society. There is in fact a proverb that applies here I believe, dealing with the road-building materials used in construction of the thoroughfare leading to the underworld...
Because you must, there ain't no such thing as a good game with technology from 5 years ago.
Erm.
Do I need to point out everything that is utterly wrong with this comment, or can I just leave it at that? You could possibly make the argument that "...there is tremendous pressure to use bleeding edge technology as a way to appear competitive...", or some such, but as it stands, I think your claim is pretty indefensible.
What the article is saying is that the PLOT should revolve around the main character. (The player.) Not necessarily the world. The two are quite different.
A good example of this is the classic game Star Control II, (now available as opensource awesome) which was a marvelous space epic. But what it did really WELL was convey the feeling that the galaxy was proceeding along, whether or not you did anything or not. Now, if you didn't do anything, it would proceed right along to a lot of planets being blown up, ending with earth. But there was a very definite feeling that, while the player was a force in intergalactic relations, they weren't the ONLY force, and that if the player sat back and spent too much time lazing around and mining, that events would continue either way.
The player should feel like the PLOT revolves around them, meaning that they are constantly put into interesting situations that reveal things about them, the world, or whatever the designer is aiming towards. But if the world revolves around them, and events only happen when they show up and it's obvious the game is "waiting for them to get somewhere" before things happen, then it starts to feel forced. (A classic example are people such as in halflife, that you can see from a long way away that need rescuing, and who fall to their deaths or otherwise die, JUST as you get close to them. Stand away from a distance, and they'll linger indefinitely. Get close, and down they go.)
>This pretty much says it all; your manager wants you to do HIS job.
I disagree. Maybe I'm being naive, but as a software engineer who has been in the same situation, when I was asked at least, it was actually because my manager was doing a GOOD job. They recognized that this was a hard thing to quantify, and so rather than just make some random crap up that may or may not have had any bearing on reality, they came to me and said "Hey, I'm supposed to quantify how useful you are. Can you help me think of good metrics that give an accurate picture, and are fair to you?"
I take that as the sign of a good manager, actually - that they are willing to say "hey, I don't know how to describe this, and it directly affects you, any suggestions?"
Now granted, it could also be what you described, and just passing off work, but I just want to point out that asking for suggestions on something like that does not automatically mean that the manager is lazy.
Ok, I admit that networking isn't my strongest suit. But... am I missing something? What do you mean "the fact that the internet cannot cope with anything other than ascii"? The internet is just a protocol for routing information from point A to point B. That information is stored in bytes. By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything language-specific about those bytes.
Are you confusing "the internet" with "the web"? Web pages do assume (by default at least) an ascii encoding, I believe. But that's not something that needs to be solved by changing the internet, that's something you could fix just by modifying browsers. Which, surprise surprise, is something people have already done. Heck, for that matter, what's up with your original premise, that they want to "have things in a language that they can understand, using characters that appear on their keyboards"? Most Japanese web sites ARE in japanese... Most web browsers DO support unicode encoding...
Are you possibly just talking about the URLs themselves? They don't have unicode support I guess, although that's something that could [I think?] be handled just by supplying a unicode-enabled custom DNS?
Don't get me wrong, research is generally a good thing overall, and as you point out, who knows what useful things they'll come up with along the way. But most of your reasons for why reinventing the internet might be a good idea, ring hollow to me. That, and the tone of your post feels like you have a specific bone to pick with either one of the previous posters, or possibly just with america in general?
Personally, my main concern with a "new" internet is the climate in which it would be born. The current internet had the benefit of being created for non-comercial use in mind, and was deliberately designed with open access in mind. It's structure is deliberately set up in a fairly idealistic way. It has a crazy-low barrier for entry if you want to put something on it. I find it fairly unlikely that a "new" internet would be as open. Corporations in Japan (or America, for that matter) are unlikely to make that mistake again, and given the current environment (again, in both japan AND america) I find it exceedingly unlikely that any new creation on that scale wouldn't be at least partially beholden to corporate interests.
(And yes, I know, our current internet's high-ideal design is steadily eroding before the face of a never-ending series of attempted power grabs by various groups. But at least it's.... taking them longer? At least such attempts are bandaids on an unfriendly design, as opposed to having the whole thing designed to be friendly to corporate control from the get-go?)
As someone who has been in that exact same situation, let me share my findings:
I went through college wanting to get into computer game programming. Unfortunately, writing computer games is like most entertainment media: Everyone thinks "I like playing games - therefore, writing them must be fun!" And so the field is crowded and difficult to get into. Nearly every job posting asked for a minimum of 2 years of experience, or 1-2 shipped titles under your belt. I know EXACTLY what you're going through.
Also, much like you, I ended up settling for a crappy job that didn't fully tap my abilities. (QA, in my case, which, in spite of what you've heard, is NOT a good way to get your foot in the door as a programmer.) (Although as a side observation, it is a good way if you want to be a producer...)
During my boring lunch breaks, I eventually started writing a game of my own. Later, after my contract ran out, and I was sitting around thinking "huh, now what", I decided, hey! Since I have this free time, I might as well keep working on my game. I keep saying I want to be a game programmer... what's stopping me? It wasn't always easy convincing myself to sit and program instead of going out and having some fun while unemployed, but I put in a lot of time and got it polished up. I "finished" it, and got it to a point where I was happy with it. Sure, I cringe at parts of it, when I look back at it today. But if nothing else, it's a fairly complicated piece of code, that is fairly fun to play in places.
BEST DECISION I EVER MADE.
That code got me my first break. I was able to go into interviews, and say "Oh, and check out this sample game I made." That little game I put together over the course of a few months did more to sell me in interviews than hours of keyword matching. The main questions they asked when I got the job, in fact, were "are you sure you wrote ALL of this? You didn't copy large portions of it from a book, or a website, or maybe work on it as part of a team?"
I've had some time to think about it, and I've realized the reason it worked so well: When you just have a resume and cover letter, the HR people can deal with it without even blinking. They're trained to wade through paperwork like that. But when you have some code, some example of "here is what I am capable of", then it is no longer something that HR can evaluate as easily. So they are more likely to send it on to the people who CAN evaluate it - the engineers that you're trying to join. And they're much more likely to be interested in what you can do than what's on your resume.
So - Advice: If you're feeling stuck in the "I can't get experience without a job, and I can't get a job without experience" trap... Try writing something on your own. Spend some real time on making it nice, and make sure it's something significant enough to be noteworthy (i. e. more than just something you hacked together in a weekend) and start submitting it as a work sample with your applications. If you get called in to an interview, make sure you bring a copy along, preferably on a laptop, so you don't have to go through the trouble of setting it up on someone else's machine. Also, bring some source code along (that you've gone over to make sure is presentable) that you can show off, if they want to see how readable your code is. Make it relevant to your field, and run with it.
You might be surprised at what happens next. Because anyone can claim "yes, I'm an awesome programmer, and you should hire me even though I have no experience to prove it." But it's a lot harder to write you off when you have some evidence of your competence sitting right there in front of them.
Actually, the reasons Ebert describes are pretty lousy, really. Basically, it seems to boil down to "Most games aren't art, and focus on overly-simplistic mechanics. Therefore, all games XXX"
That is a deeply flawed argument, from a logical point of view. (a is in set A. a is in set B. Therefore all members of A are in set B)
And your argument "Emotion and Depth [brought forward through cutscenes] isn't possible using only interactive elements" is seriously lacking in backing. About the BEST you can say here is "I haven't seen it done, so therefore I don't believe it can ever exist." There is no evidence that you can't bring forth the same emotional range with interactive elements. Just that no one has done it well yet. Which should NOT be confused with proof.
Well, unless they just kept shooting it so that it was under control, so that Tassadar could just wander up and say "huh. Yup, that's the overmind. Yup, it'll keep regrowing.... huh. Lemme get that for ya... > Ok. All better. Let's go home!"
Trying to shoehorn a dramatic ending to the battle just felt jarring, because for many people, the end wasn't that dramatic.
Oh, exactly. Violence/Maximum violence aren't useless, but they are quite easy to overuse.
The question is, what is the "right" level of violence to use? Knocking a guy's teeth out will probably make him think twice about messing with you, but may also make him harbor a grudge, and/or may make other people watching nervous of the level of violence you're willing to go to, to the point that they begin to feel unsafe. And if the guy has a buddy, or a friend, or a younger brother, who feels he needs to avenge his brother's "honor", then you'll have to repeat the same performance possibly many times.
The problem of course is that most peoples' response to violence is violence in return, so if you respond with a lot of violence, you either need to have it be so overwhelming that no one ever thinks about (or is able to) come after you again, [which is historically hard] or be prepared for a bunch of violence coming back at you at some point.
It seems like a better way to deal with the guy punching you is to figure out "why is he punching me in the first place? What makes punching me the most attractive option for him at the moment?" If you can change the circumstances that make his reasons valid, then as long as you can avoid the first punch, maybe you won't have so many problems later.
Now obviously this can break down. (It's no more a panacea than violence is.) For example, an extreme case might be that his reason to want to punch you is "there is something wrong with his head, and he wants you unconscious so he can kill your children without you stopping him". You may find yourself in a situation where you don't have much choice. I'm just saying, to quote the cliche, (which is a cliche for a reason) that violence tends to breed more violence. So even if you ignore the morality side of things, and just go with pragmatism, most people have friends/allies/etc, so even if you violence them into submission, it's often preferable to find a solution that doesn't require you to watch your back for their buddies afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit. I had never even heard of freezepop until they became popularized by harmonix. Same goes for Bang Camero.
Now I find myself actually interested in their music, thanks to the magic of Harmonix's rhythm games.
Yes. It CAN still be a bastion of free speech, and still not let you use terms like Islamofacist. It also probably frowns on you sitting outside the student union, and demanding that all people of color go work in your cotton fields, and calling them niggers. It also probably restricts you from yelling "fire" in crowded rooms, or calling people up and telling them that you're going to rape them.
Funny how that works. It is, however, still free speech. Just think of it as having to take responsibility for what you're saying. If you're saying "I planted a bomb in the student union, muahahaha", I guess you're free to say it, but you're also responsible for saying it, and so can't really complain when people take you at face value and react accordingly.
A minor nitpick:
I don't think any questions can really ever be wrong. It's not really wrong to try to find an answer. Your question may be founded on incorrect assumptions ("so, have you stopped beating your wife?") but it's not the question itself (or the act of asking it) that is wrong.
Also, philosophy isn't really a way of trying to find things out. It's almost more of a way of exploring different ways of looking at what you already know. So while saying "Philosophy is a flawed way to find things out" is technically true, it is about as useful a statement as "Hammers are a flawed way of applying screws". It's true I guess, but that's not really what it's for...
Maybe the part they want to get right is the localization? Poor localization can ruin a game just as much as a bug, really. It's a funny thing. (Like server maintenance!) When it's done well, you don't notice it at all. When it's done poorly, it's really obvious, and really annoying, and EVERYONE gets in your face about it.
Hey kids! Having trouble figuring out if using your TV-B-Gone is ok? Not sure if you're doing a public service, or just being a jerk? Here's a simple test you can try at home or "in the field":
Any time you would use your TV-B-Gone, ask yourself "Would I be comfortable just walking up to wherever the TV is and turning it off, without offering any explanation to anyone else here?" Then ask yourself "Would I be comfortable announcing in a loud voice 'I'm going to turn off the TV now.' before clicking your TV-B-Gone?"
If you answered "no" to either of these questions, then yes! You're being a jerk! You're merely using technology to hide from responsibility for your actions, and justifying it to yourself!
If you answered "yes", then you're [probably] fine! But consider putting this to the test by actually announcing your intent to everyone before just quietly clicking "off" and not telling anyone!
Have fun! And remember kids, ask your parents before you try this at home!
But what you're talking about only covers half of it:
Yes, it's important to look at a game and say "why does this game suck and how can I make games that don't suck in the ways that this game sucks?". But it's equally important to say "What about this game rocks so much? Why is this so compelling/fun/engrossing? What can I learn about how to be awesome from this game?"
This is true in any medium, not just game design. It's important to be paying attention to advances people are making, even if they're tiny gems buried in otherwise boring works.
That's easy: The same thing that gives them the right to have that opinion in the first place, also gives anyone the right to disagree with that opinion. It doesn't become somehow magical or sacred or immune to dissent just because a lot of people happen to already think it.
Turn it around. Why restrict it to some anonymous coworker who can't answer back? If someone said these things to YOU, what would your reaction be? And why?
Also, remember that Congress has to approve going to war because it has to be funded. As far as abusing his position is concerned, he isn't the first and won't be the last so don't act like he is alone. The democrats *cough*Clinton*cough* do it too.
Yeah, Clinton sure lead us into an awful lot of pointless wars of aggression based on fabricated evidence too.
Or... wait, no, I think you're thinking of someone else.
P. S. It doesn't dishonor our troops to admit that the person who ultimately commands them might be... a few boats short of a flotilla. Heck, you could make a pretty good argument that refusing to admit such a thing is more of a "letting them down". But either way, they're people and not political props, so can we just leave the "who's actions let them down more??!?" conversation out of it?
That's none of your business.
Going to nitpick your nitpick a bit, I think: Story != presentation. Story is how you would summarize the game to your friends. Presentation is how the game tells the story to you.
$50,000 cutscenes are one way of presenting story.
So are in-game events.
So are random notes you find in the game environment that hint at what happened.
So are NPC dialogues.
Games that have $50,000 budgets for CG doesn't mean that they have $50,000 stories. It just means that they thought the best way to present their story was with massive FMV. (hint: They're usually wrong.)
I know the moderators will punish me for this one, but people always say Half-life had an excellent story.
In my opinion, these people are on crack. Half-life's story sucked. Seriously. Think about it. Story: "We accidentally made a portal, and it kinda goes to the world of evil aliens, so they invaded. Hooray! This guy in powered armor killed an implausible number of them, and ended the invasion! We're saved!"
Where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah. Doom. Which people seldom accuse of being the height of literature.
What Half-life DID have (and had in spades) was PRESENTATION. It presented the story extremely well by never breaking first-person view, and "showing, not telling". So even though the story was utter crap, it was fun to have told to you, because they were telling it in a way that was completely novel at the time, and that you could explore and trigger at your own pace. The story didn't feel like it was being TOLD to you, it felt like it was HAPPENING to you.
So yeah, games can be art because of the interaction, but they can also be art because of the story they are presenting, through the interaction. I think I basically agree with your point - if you take a game, and just throw some unchanging story in between levels, then you have Final Fantasy, or, as I like to call it, "graphic novels punctuated by minigames". But there are also games that have been art specifically BECAUSE of their story, and the way the game made you feel like you were in charge of it and calling the shots, and that it felt awesome.
Planescape:Torment is a good example of a game that was like this.
Games can also be art when they present a story that is mostly static, but that is presented in a way that lets the player explore it and all the ramifications. Mind Forever Voyaging is a good example of this.
Heck, games can even be art based purely on their visual presentation. I think you could make an excellent case for Okami, purely on the grounds of its graphical style alone.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit far afield here. Back to the point: Games can be art because of the story. Or just about anything else. The interaction isn't the art in itself; the interaction is the "special sauce" that lets you explore the aspect of it that IS art, and makes it more than it was originally, due to the personal connection. Whether that aspect is story, graphics, or who knows what. Just because some studio dropped $50k on trying to make some flashy FMVs as a misguided attempt to cover up the fact that their story wasn't good, doesn't mean that games can't be art because of story.
So what?
So wait, I'm confused. Is Heavenly Sword your example of an awesome game they should review as a counter-example, or a "why not review sucktastic heavenly sword, while you're piling on the hate"?
I honestly don't know...
While I agree with your point, and don't really want to nitpick, I feel I should at least point out that mouse-over is NOT a reliable way of verifying a link location. There's at least one way of making the link put whatever you want in the status bar, and spoofing an address.
Yeah, of course people are saying that it's bad business, but what he did was with good intent and in a perfect world, could have had a good impact.
It may have had good intent, but that doesn't make it a good action, or one that necessarily benefits society. There is in fact a proverb that applies here I believe, dealing with the road-building materials used in construction of the thoroughfare leading to the underworld...
Because you must, there ain't no such thing as a good game with technology from 5 years ago.
Erm.
Do I need to point out everything that is utterly wrong with this comment, or can I just leave it at that? You could possibly make the argument that "...there is tremendous pressure to use bleeding edge technology as a way to appear competitive...", or some such, but as it stands, I think your claim is pretty indefensible.
What the article is saying is that the PLOT should revolve around the main character. (The player.) Not necessarily the world. The two are quite different.
A good example of this is the classic game Star Control II, (now available as opensource awesome) which was a marvelous space epic. But what it did really WELL was convey the feeling that the galaxy was proceeding along, whether or not you did anything or not. Now, if you didn't do anything, it would proceed right along to a lot of planets being blown up, ending with earth. But there was a very definite feeling that, while the player was a force in intergalactic relations, they weren't the ONLY force, and that if the player sat back and spent too much time lazing around and mining, that events would continue either way.
The player should feel like the PLOT revolves around them, meaning that they are constantly put into interesting situations that reveal things about them, the world, or whatever the designer is aiming towards. But if the world revolves around them, and events only happen when they show up and it's obvious the game is "waiting for them to get somewhere" before things happen, then it starts to feel forced. (A classic example are people such as in halflife, that you can see from a long way away that need rescuing, and who fall to their deaths or otherwise die, JUST as you get close to them. Stand away from a distance, and they'll linger indefinitely. Get close, and down they go.)
>This pretty much says it all; your manager wants you to do HIS job.
I disagree. Maybe I'm being naive, but as a software engineer who has been in the same situation, when I was asked at least, it was actually because my manager was doing a GOOD job. They recognized that this was a hard thing to quantify, and so rather than just make some random crap up that may or may not have had any bearing on reality, they came to me and said "Hey, I'm supposed to quantify how useful you are. Can you help me think of good metrics that give an accurate picture, and are fair to you?"
I take that as the sign of a good manager, actually - that they are willing to say "hey, I don't know how to describe this, and it directly affects you, any suggestions?"
Now granted, it could also be what you described, and just passing off work, but I just want to point out that asking for suggestions on something like that does not automatically mean that the manager is lazy.
erm?
Ok, I admit that networking isn't my strongest suit. But... am I missing something? What do you mean "the fact that the internet cannot cope with anything other than ascii"? The internet is just a protocol for routing information from point A to point B. That information is stored in bytes. By all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything language-specific about those bytes.
Are you confusing "the internet" with "the web"? Web pages do assume (by default at least) an ascii encoding, I believe. But that's not something that needs to be solved by changing the internet, that's something you could fix just by modifying browsers. Which, surprise surprise, is something people have already done. Heck, for that matter, what's up with your original premise, that they want to "have things in a language that they can understand, using characters that appear on their keyboards"? Most Japanese web sites ARE in japanese... Most web browsers DO support unicode encoding...
Are you possibly just talking about the URLs themselves? They don't have unicode support I guess, although that's something that could [I think?] be handled just by supplying a unicode-enabled custom DNS?
Don't get me wrong, research is generally a good thing overall, and as you point out, who knows what useful things they'll come up with along the way. But most of your reasons for why reinventing the internet might be a good idea, ring hollow to me. That, and the tone of your post feels like you have a specific bone to pick with either one of the previous posters, or possibly just with america in general?
Personally, my main concern with a "new" internet is the climate in which it would be born. The current internet had the benefit of being created for non-comercial use in mind, and was deliberately designed with open access in mind. It's structure is deliberately set up in a fairly idealistic way. It has a crazy-low barrier for entry if you want to put something on it. I find it fairly unlikely that a "new" internet would be as open. Corporations in Japan (or America, for that matter) are unlikely to make that mistake again, and given the current environment (again, in both japan AND america) I find it exceedingly unlikely that any new creation on that scale wouldn't be at least partially beholden to corporate interests.
(And yes, I know, our current internet's high-ideal design is steadily eroding before the face of a never-ending series of attempted power grabs by various groups. But at least it's.... taking them longer? At least such attempts are bandaids on an unfriendly design, as opposed to having the whole thing designed to be friendly to corporate control from the get-go?)
As someone who has been in that exact same situation, let me share my findings:
I went through college wanting to get into computer game programming. Unfortunately, writing computer games is like most entertainment media: Everyone thinks "I like playing games - therefore, writing them must be fun!" And so the field is crowded and difficult to get into. Nearly every job posting asked for a minimum of 2 years of experience, or 1-2 shipped titles under your belt. I know EXACTLY what you're going through.
Also, much like you, I ended up settling for a crappy job that didn't fully tap my abilities. (QA, in my case, which, in spite of what you've heard, is NOT a good way to get your foot in the door as a programmer.) (Although as a side observation, it is a good way if you want to be a producer...)
During my boring lunch breaks, I eventually started writing a game of my own. Later, after my contract ran out, and I was sitting around thinking "huh, now what", I decided, hey! Since I have this free time, I might as well keep working on my game. I keep saying I want to be a game programmer... what's stopping me? It wasn't always easy convincing myself to sit and program instead of going out and having some fun while unemployed, but I put in a lot of time and got it polished up. I "finished" it, and got it to a point where I was happy with it. Sure, I cringe at parts of it, when I look back at it today. But if nothing else, it's a fairly complicated piece of code, that is fairly fun to play in places.
BEST DECISION I EVER MADE.
That code got me my first break. I was able to go into interviews, and say "Oh, and check out this sample game I made." That little game I put together over the course of a few months did more to sell me in interviews than hours of keyword matching. The main questions they asked when I got the job, in fact, were "are you sure you wrote ALL of this? You didn't copy large portions of it from a book, or a website, or maybe work on it as part of a team?"
I've had some time to think about it, and I've realized the reason it worked so well: When you just have a resume and cover letter, the HR people can deal with it without even blinking. They're trained to wade through paperwork like that. But when you have some code, some example of "here is what I am capable of", then it is no longer something that HR can evaluate as easily. So they are more likely to send it on to the people who CAN evaluate it - the engineers that you're trying to join. And they're much more likely to be interested in what you can do than what's on your resume.
So - Advice: If you're feeling stuck in the "I can't get experience without a job, and I can't get a job without experience" trap... Try writing something on your own. Spend some real time on making it nice, and make sure it's something significant enough to be noteworthy (i. e. more than just something you hacked together in a weekend) and start submitting it as a work sample with your applications. If you get called in to an interview, make sure you bring a copy along, preferably on a laptop, so you don't have to go through the trouble of setting it up on someone else's machine. Also, bring some source code along (that you've gone over to make sure is presentable) that you can show off, if they want to see how readable your code is. Make it relevant to your field, and run with it.
You might be surprised at what happens next. Because anyone can claim "yes, I'm an awesome programmer, and you should hire me even though I have no experience to prove it." But it's a lot harder to write you off when you have some evidence of your competence sitting right there in front of them.
Good luck!
Actually, the reasons Ebert describes are pretty lousy, really. Basically, it seems to boil down to "Most games aren't art, and focus on overly-simplistic mechanics. Therefore, all games XXX"
That is a deeply flawed argument, from a logical point of view. (a is in set A. a is in set B. Therefore all members of A are in set B)
And your argument "Emotion and Depth [brought forward through cutscenes] isn't possible using only interactive elements" is seriously lacking in backing. About the BEST you can say here is "I haven't seen it done, so therefore I don't believe it can ever exist." There is no evidence that you can't bring forth the same emotional range with interactive elements. Just that no one has done it well yet. Which should NOT be confused with proof.
Well, unless they just kept shooting it so that it was under control, so that Tassadar could just wander up and say "huh. Yup, that's the overmind. Yup, it'll keep regrowing.... huh. Lemme get that for ya... > Ok. All better. Let's go home!"
Trying to shoehorn a dramatic ending to the battle just felt jarring, because for many people, the end wasn't that dramatic.
Oh yes. We were(?) far too nerdy to get our catchphrases anywhere else.
Oh, exactly. Violence/Maximum violence aren't useless, but they are quite easy to overuse.
The question is, what is the "right" level of violence to use? Knocking a guy's teeth out will probably make him think twice about messing with you, but may also make him harbor a grudge, and/or may make other people watching nervous of the level of violence you're willing to go to, to the point that they begin to feel unsafe. And if the guy has a buddy, or a friend, or a younger brother, who feels he needs to avenge his brother's "honor", then you'll have to repeat the same performance possibly many times.
The problem of course is that most peoples' response to violence is violence in return, so if you respond with a lot of violence, you either need to have it be so overwhelming that no one ever thinks about (or is able to) come after you again, [which is historically hard] or be prepared for a bunch of violence coming back at you at some point.
It seems like a better way to deal with the guy punching you is to figure out "why is he punching me in the first place? What makes punching me the most attractive option for him at the moment?" If you can change the circumstances that make his reasons valid, then as long as you can avoid the first punch, maybe you won't have so many problems later.
Now obviously this can break down. (It's no more a panacea than violence is.) For example, an extreme case might be that his reason to want to punch you is "there is something wrong with his head, and he wants you unconscious so he can kill your children without you stopping him". You may find yourself in a situation where you don't have much choice. I'm just saying, to quote the cliche, (which is a cliche for a reason) that violence tends to breed more violence. So even if you ignore the morality side of things, and just go with pragmatism, most people have friends/allies/etc, so even if you violence them into submission, it's often preferable to find a solution that doesn't require you to watch your back for their buddies afterwards.
Wow.
So, uh. Trolling doesn't work so well when it's that obvious. Just a heads-up.