Well, an initiative from Microsoft isn't necessarily a wolf in sheeps clothing. It might be an alligator in sheeps clothing or a giant mutated spider in sheeps clothing. The main thing we know about it is that it will be some sort of predator that eats sheep.
Seriously, though, I think this is actually simpler than domination of consoles, where Microsoft has been behind for two generations now. I think Microsoft is refiguring out how important games are to keep Linux and OS X from encroaching on the PC market.
Microsoft had a standard PC joypad in the past, the Sidewinder, so I expect they are simply repurposing the XBox controller to this task. From their About Games for Windows Page, "Games for Windows titles that support controllers are also compatible with the Microsoft XBOX 360 controller for Windows, including the XBOX 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows." So Dawn of War is safe for now, it's only games that use joypads that have to use the XBox joypad.
Yes, it's true, Microsoft would love to be able to sucker people into paying for each car in a PC racing game, but the PC is still an open platform compared to consoles. It will be up to the individual publishers to go along. (Mind you, I do know how screwed up Vista is, and how closed it is compared to previous PC OSs... it's still better than the locked down consoles from the big three...
Seung-Hui Cho was 23 years old. Now, as far as I know, but I guess I'm old fashioned, 23 years old is an adult. Adults are allowed to drink, joing the army, by M rated video games, drive and by lots of guns. You know, because they are adults. They aren't impressionable children anymore.
I consider the whole, impressionable children thing to be dubious when we are dealing with older teenagers, anyway, but I consider it ridiculous when talking about adult men.
So, what then are Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson trying to say, that video games will turn anyone into a killer, even adults? I think it's interesting that this guy didn't commit any serious crimes until he was well into adult hood.
To me, this represents a shift in the debate. At Jonesboro, you had children commiting mass murder, so trying to figure out what made innocent little boys into monsters makes sense in a way. This is not what we have at Virginia Tech.
Are people going to do this with David Berkowitz now? Jeffrey Dahmer? etc? If some 40 year old murderer gets caught, are they going to check him for Counter Strike experience.
The purpose of AI isn't to make the game more difficult, though, it's to make the game more fun. I'll admit, it doesn't make sense to adapt AI techniques that will not make a game more fun.
Put it this way, have you ever had a conversation with a character in a PC RPG? Well, they don't have conversations do they? They just spit out a set of canned responses. Currently, part of AI research is the Turing Test which is to create a machine that can fool a person having a conversation with it into believing that there is a real person there.
This isn't a win/lose scenario. The machine you are talking to may be an ally or a neutral character in a game. But it would make the game more interesting if the conversation you were having seemed realistic.
There are other applications of AI as well. For example, they could add unpredictability to an enemy behaviour in a game. The enemy AI still wouldn't be the unbeatable uber player the machine would be, but you'd have to vary your tactics during a game to beat it. Yes, you are still "creating a loser," but a less predictable loser.
What's the point? Well, the point of playing the computer is to learn the nuances of the game. Obviously, there's no great sense of accomplishment in beating a computer. If computers follow a predictable pattern, you eventually plateau on the useful knowledge you can learn from them.
You know that sitting right next to those Dragon magazines is going to be every Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novel ever written.
Well, no... I only have a few of the novels, but they are sort of meh... I once knew a girl who thought D&D the game was stupid but loved the novels... shudder...
I do have the Demons boxed set and one of the related supplements that were published by Mayfair Games during TSRs dark age. (OH, and bunches of other D&D modules. Most of the bound books... A lot of Tunnels and Trolls solitare modules... a frightening amount of Paranoia... Call of Cthulhu (at one time I owned just about every supplement they published)... Um.. Toon... Timemaster... Chill... Torg... Ghostbusters...... I'm sure there is more.... Wargames West loved me...)
On foot, American soldiers are loaded down with everything except the kitchen sink, and they will probably be required to carry that too as soon as it is digitized. To use tactics of encirclement, you need to be at least as mobile as your enemy and preferably more so. The kind of light infantry fighters we find ourselves up against in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are just that, light. They can move much faster on their feet than can our overburdened infantry. The result is that they ambush us, then escape to do it again, over and over. Flip-flops in the alley beat boots on the ground.
-- A Tactics Primer, by William S. Lind
Basically, the kind of gear a soldier carries affects the kind of small unit tactics that can be used, and in this situation mobility is the most important thing. Unfortunately, the army is currently stuck on Second Generation tactics rather than Third Generation tactics.
The problem here is that we have two competing world views, one or the other is true. They can't both be true.
The view which you endorse, which I believe to be false, dangerous, and naive is that humans are basically peaceful creatures that only kill in extreme situation.
The alternative, which I believe, is that humans are born killers, like most animals. It is our human natures and our access to reason that allows us to rise above such animal cruelty and create codes of conduct for ourselves.
I'm not expecting to convince you of the truth, but I'm sad that Doom gets the blame whenever a mentally ill lunatic, usually who has been telegraphing what he's going to do for months in advance, goes on a killing spree.
Even in cases where it turns out later that the lunatic had never played any video games.
It's just that the previous miltary activities they've been involved in haven't been the big disasters that Iraq has (well, since Indo-China).
Not that they haven't been disasters, they just haven't been quite as bad as Iraq. Clinton's war on Serbia was pretty bad (and things are still simmering over there, could explode one of these days), but not so bad that people are worried about the huge sums of money that have gone into Camp Bondsteel. (I will say this, cool name. It must be fun to work for Halliburton, sort of like playing Starcraft with real people.)
Still, George W. Bush has shown a peculiar genius for incompetence, he's the master of disaster. Because the Iraq war went so badly, so fast, and so obviously contrary to what he thought was going to happen, the oily folks who make up what Ike called "the military-industrial complex" are having to face the light of day, which isn't healthy for vampires.
The big question is whether they are going to be able to disappear into the shadows again when the current lame duck administration is no longer with us, which I suppose depends on the competence of the person who replaces him. Surveying the field, competence doesn't seem to be the watchword for the leaders of either party, but it's hard to believe that whatever Republican or Democrat replaces Bush won't be able to do a little better... but I've been wrong before.
Of course, there's more on the Exile, which is definitely not work safe, unless you work at the Bada Bing or something. However, this article is a good primer.
Back when H.P. Lovecraft was flat broke and wasn't making money selling his stories (of course, he never really made money from writing while he was alive, If he were alive now he'd have a Gillion dollars), he tried for a job as a salesman. The man who did the hiring told him he was too much of a gentleman for it.
You either had to be a charmer, someone with a really magnetic personality, or a very rude and disagreeable person who ignored civility in dealing with strangers.
The second, according to the article, is very important in getting promotions at work, and in my opinion the first would work just as well.
In other words, mastery of office politics and not mastery of whatever it is you were originally hired to do is the key to getting ahead at the office. Sad but true.
Why, this company was split into factions by country. The two factions didn't get along, and didn't consult with each other on major, company affecting projects. Eventually, the company died. The whole sordid story is here:
Not only is this comment dumb because it is basically saying, "Linux is better than Windows because of something it can't do," but it isn't true at all. There are tons of "productivity killing" games for Linux, you just don't get the same variety of games that you do with Windows.
You don't need Wine to play games on Linux!
So not only is the comment demented or stupid, it also isn't true.
Muslim? Who's a Muslim? The Thai government, and everyone in it, belong to the national religion of Thailand, which is Buddhism. (Represented in the flag of Thailand by the color white.)
There is a tiny Muslim minority in Thailand, which has basically been commiting acts of terrorism against the military junta now in power:
PATTANI, Thailand -- A Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand has grown more violent in the six months since Thai military officers seized power in a coup and promised to end the conflict.
Muslim separatists' attacks on Buddhists in the south have increased in recent months, testing the new government's decision to try a less forceful approach there.
Thai security forces on Wednesday detained seven Muslims suspected of beheading an elderly Buddhist and killing three police officers. Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the army chief who led the Sept. 19 coup that overthrew Thailand's elected civilian government, said last week that the insurgency had intensified. "Insurgent groups have turned their focus on killing randomly, ending the lives of innocent people," he said.
Then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's failure to pacify the south was among the justifications Sonthi and other coup leaders cited for their decision to take power.
Buddhists make up roughly 95% of the 64 million Thais. In three southern provinces, however, there are 1.7 million Muslims and 300,000 Buddhists. The isolated rural area is populated largely by ethnic-Malays and is a rural backwater.
Well, as I wrote elsehwere in response to this article, the closest analogy in the U. S. would be the Pope. Matt Taibbi was forced to resign from New York Press for his "50 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope."
Look, here's the thing. Monopoly is and always has been a tedious, pointless waste of time. It isn't fun, so why play it? People don't follow the "official" rules, and the "house" rules most people use suck even more than the official rules.
In the 50's they had other games besides Monopoly. In fact when I was a kid, in the 70's, I had Disney's Haunted Mansion game, which I loved. You know what? Today it would probably be Haunted Mansion Monopoly. They'd put the names of rooms in the mansion on the spaces, have some tokens that looked like those little carts you ride in the ride. Jail would be the graveyard, and you'd have "ghostly" money... Hey look, I'm a famous game designer! Sign me up, Parkey Brothers.
Because some brilliant person came up with the idea, "We don't have to make new games, lets just remake Monopoly over and over and over again with different branding...." doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the kids. Monopoly is just boring.
You know what is a good game? M.U.L.E. Oh, and it is impossible to have house rules in M.U.L.E. thank God.
Look, I hate Monopoly like poison, mainly because it's existence means that I never get to play any of the other games in my vast collection of board games. However, you are missing certain points about why people like to play Monopoly.
People play Monopoly because of:
1. The play money. Replace Monopoly's play money with something else and people will be like "hey, where's the play money."
2. The cute little tokens that look like various things. (Including the player tokens and the little houses and hotels.)
3. The concept of owning deeds to property.
In other words, with Monopoly the presentation is the point. The thing about Monopoly is, as you point out, it is a bad game. The presentation, however, is great and the actual game is "good enough" for the people who buy it. Yeah, it's all sizzle and no steak, but believe me, Parker Brothers knows what they are doing.
Interesting, since the game has huge-eyed stereo-typical anime women in cut scenes throughout, and combines H.P. Lovecraft and the Magical Girl genre (in a non-ecchi way, mind). It's not like anyone who was offended by anime was going to like the game based purely on the cover.
My theory? The cover was changed so that parents, buying it for their kids, wouldn't pass it by if it was too Japanese looking. (Parents who had the "they bombed Pearl Harbor!" mentality of my own father. I swear "they'll be no Star Blazers in this house!" yeah, but Scooby Doo was ok, right Dad? Grrr...)
Ah, the Dreamcast had so many 2D fighters. I have both Capcom vs. SNKs, one Capcom vs. Marvel, the Vampire (Darkstalkers) import, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, JoJo's Bizarre Advenuture (unless I gave it to some kid... because it wouldn't work in VGA. Dreamcast games must work in VGA.)
Ah, for an unbiased view (I kid, of course), let's check the mainstream media:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A feisty shareholder revolt at Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. this week offed nearly as many executives as virtual characters in the video game company's violent titles.
Financial analysts and child advocates said only a thorough purging at the top would reverse the accounting and ethical lapses at the publisher of the popular, murder-your-way-to-victory video game "Grand Theft Auto." With a new CEO and several new board members now leading the company, that's what they got.
"If you look at the content of what these guys have distributed, it's so offensive and inappropriate. It's not surprising to learn they had committed massive acts of fraud at the board and CEO level," said James Steyer, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based multimedia ratings group Common Sense Media Inc., a nonprofit that rates video games and other content for violence and other factors. "The chickens have come home to roost for this company _ and I say good riddance to these guys."
...snip...
Financial analysts have criticized Take-Two for relying too heavily on relatively uncreative sequels, sports games and bloodthirsty "first-person shooters." While so-called hardcore games remain popular with teens and young men, new online genres _ trivia quizzes, word games and multiplayer role-playing games _ are catching on with women, older players and millions of mobile phone users.
Child advocacy groups and legislators are Take-Two's biggest foes, complaining that the company produces the industry's most violent, mean-spirited games.
In "Grand Theft Auto," players shoot pedestrians and police with reckless abandon. Another hit is "Bully," about a slingshot-wielding 15-year-old at Bullworth Academy boarding school, whose motto is "Canis Canem Edit," Latin for "dog eat dog."
Take-Two is best known for a version of "Grand Theft Auto" that included a hidden, lewd scene that sparked a 2005 congressional uproar.
-- Investors Laud Video Game Co.'s Upheaval
Let's see, this AP article could have been written by Jack Thompson. It is extremely poor journalism. Has Rockstar ever even published an FPS? These are the people (AP) who many people rely on for information on world affairs, and in helping to determine who to elect into office, and their "facts" resemble the ones that used to be put forth by Cotton Mather at the average Salem witch-trial.
Prediction, when Grand Theft Auto 4 comes out, expect these same "child advocacy" censorship groups to be saying, "Looks like Take Two didn't learn their lesson."
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, I think this is actually simpler than domination of consoles, where Microsoft has been behind for two generations now. I think Microsoft is refiguring out how important games are to keep Linux and OS X from encroaching on the PC market.
Microsoft had a standard PC joypad in the past, the Sidewinder, so I expect they are simply repurposing the XBox controller to this task. From their About Games for Windows Page, "Games for Windows titles that support controllers are also compatible with the Microsoft XBOX 360 controller for Windows, including the XBOX 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows." So Dawn of War is safe for now, it's only games that use joypads that have to use the XBox joypad.
Yes, it's true, Microsoft would love to be able to sucker people into paying for each car in a PC racing game, but the PC is still an open platform compared to consoles. It will be up to the individual publishers to go along. (Mind you, I do know how screwed up Vista is, and how closed it is compared to previous PC OSs... it's still better than the locked down consoles from the big three...
You have made my day!
Hooked on phonics worked for me!
I consider the whole, impressionable children thing to be dubious when we are dealing with older teenagers, anyway, but I consider it ridiculous when talking about adult men.
So, what then are Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson trying to say, that video games will turn anyone into a killer, even adults? I think it's interesting that this guy didn't commit any serious crimes until he was well into adult hood.
To me, this represents a shift in the debate. At Jonesboro, you had children commiting mass murder, so trying to figure out what made innocent little boys into monsters makes sense in a way. This is not what we have at Virginia Tech.
Are people going to do this with David Berkowitz now? Jeffrey Dahmer? etc? If some 40 year old murderer gets caught, are they going to check him for Counter Strike experience.
Put it this way, have you ever had a conversation with a character in a PC RPG? Well, they don't have conversations do they? They just spit out a set of canned responses. Currently, part of AI research is the Turing Test which is to create a machine that can fool a person having a conversation with it into believing that there is a real person there.
This isn't a win/lose scenario. The machine you are talking to may be an ally or a neutral character in a game. But it would make the game more interesting if the conversation you were having seemed realistic.
There are other applications of AI as well. For example, they could add unpredictability to an enemy behaviour in a game. The enemy AI still wouldn't be the unbeatable uber player the machine would be, but you'd have to vary your tactics during a game to beat it. Yes, you are still "creating a loser," but a less predictable loser.
What's the point? Well, the point of playing the computer is to learn the nuances of the game. Obviously, there's no great sense of accomplishment in beating a computer. If computers follow a predictable pattern, you eventually plateau on the useful knowledge you can learn from them.
I do have the Demons boxed set and one of the related supplements that were published by Mayfair Games during TSRs dark age. (OH, and bunches of other D&D modules. Most of the bound books... A lot of Tunnels and Trolls solitare modules... a frightening amount of Paranoia... Call of Cthulhu (at one time I owned just about every supplement they published)... Um.. Toon... Timemaster... Chill... Torg... Ghostbusters...... I'm sure there is more.... Wargames West loved me...)
First, read the following link. I'll wait. It's about the debunking of Men Against Fire:
http://pages.slc.edu/~fsmoler/grossman.html
This goes beyond video games.
The problem here is that we have two competing world views, one or the other is true. They can't both be true.
The view which you endorse, which I believe to be false, dangerous, and naive is that humans are basically peaceful creatures that only kill in extreme situation.
The alternative, which I believe, is that humans are born killers, like most animals. It is our human natures and our access to reason that allows us to rise above such animal cruelty and create codes of conduct for ourselves.
I'm not expecting to convince you of the truth, but I'm sad that Doom gets the blame whenever a mentally ill lunatic, usually who has been telegraphing what he's going to do for months in advance, goes on a killing spree.
Even in cases where it turns out later that the lunatic had never played any video games.
It's just that the previous miltary activities they've been involved in haven't been the big disasters that Iraq has (well, since Indo-China).
Not that they haven't been disasters, they just haven't been quite as bad as Iraq. Clinton's war on Serbia was pretty bad (and things are still simmering over there, could explode one of these days), but not so bad that people are worried about the huge sums of money that have gone into Camp Bondsteel. (I will say this, cool name. It must be fun to work for Halliburton, sort of like playing Starcraft with real people.)
Still, George W. Bush has shown a peculiar genius for incompetence, he's the master of disaster. Because the Iraq war went so badly, so fast, and so obviously contrary to what he thought was going to happen, the oily folks who make up what Ike called "the military-industrial complex" are having to face the light of day, which isn't healthy for vampires.
The big question is whether they are going to be able to disappear into the shadows again when the current lame duck administration is no longer with us, which I suppose depends on the competence of the person who replaces him. Surveying the field, competence doesn't seem to be the watchword for the leaders of either party, but it's hard to believe that whatever Republican or Democrat replaces Bush won't be able to do a little better... but I've been wrong before.
A Brief History of Rage, Murder and Rebellion
Sri Lanka: The Big Hate Mo'
Of course, there's more on the Exile, which is definitely not work safe, unless you work at the Bada Bing or something. However, this article is a good primer.
Back when H.P. Lovecraft was flat broke and wasn't making money selling his stories (of course, he never really made money from writing while he was alive, If he were alive now he'd have a Gillion dollars), he tried for a job as a salesman. The man who did the hiring told him he was too much of a gentleman for it.
You either had to be a charmer, someone with a really magnetic personality, or a very rude and disagreeable person who ignored civility in dealing with strangers.
The second, according to the article, is very important in getting promotions at work, and in my opinion the first would work just as well.
In other words, mastery of office politics and not mastery of whatever it is you were originally hired to do is the key to getting ahead at the office. Sad but true.
Why, this company was split into factions by country. The two factions didn't get along, and didn't consult with each other on major, company affecting projects. Eventually, the company died. The whole sordid story is here:
Project Mars: Anatomy of a Failure
You don't need Wine to play games on Linux!
So not only is the comment demented or stupid, it also isn't true.
How did this get modded up to 5?
There is a tiny Muslim minority in Thailand, which has basically been commiting acts of terrorism against the military junta now in power:
Is this supposed to be a troll, or did you really think Thailand was Muslim?Well, as I wrote elsehwere in response to this article, the closest analogy in the U. S. would be the Pope. Matt Taibbi was forced to resign from New York Press for his "50 Funniest Things about the Upcoming Death of the Pope."
The King is a spiritual leader with a lot of indirect political power, much like the Pope.
In the 50's they had other games besides Monopoly. In fact when I was a kid, in the 70's, I had Disney's Haunted Mansion game, which I loved. You know what? Today it would probably be Haunted Mansion Monopoly. They'd put the names of rooms in the mansion on the spaces, have some tokens that looked like those little carts you ride in the ride. Jail would be the graveyard, and you'd have "ghostly" money... Hey look, I'm a famous game designer! Sign me up, Parkey Brothers.
Because some brilliant person came up with the idea, "We don't have to make new games, lets just remake Monopoly over and over and over again with different branding...." doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the kids. Monopoly is just boring.
You know what is a good game? M.U.L.E. Oh, and it is impossible to have house rules in M.U.L.E. thank God.
People play Monopoly because of:
1. The play money. Replace Monopoly's play money with something else and people will be like "hey, where's the play money."
2. The cute little tokens that look like various things. (Including the player tokens and the little houses and hotels.)
3. The concept of owning deeds to property.
In other words, with Monopoly the presentation is the point. The thing about Monopoly is, as you point out, it is a bad game. The presentation, however, is great and the actual game is "good enough" for the people who buy it. Yeah, it's all sizzle and no steak, but believe me, Parker Brothers knows what they are doing.
I like you guy, you're all right. Hope your wife is doing better.
Exibit B: El Viento American cover
Interesting, since the game has huge-eyed stereo-typical anime women in cut scenes throughout, and combines H.P. Lovecraft and the Magical Girl genre (in a non-ecchi way, mind). It's not like anyone who was offended by anime was going to like the game based purely on the cover.
My theory? The cover was changed so that parents, buying it for their kids, wouldn't pass it by if it was too Japanese looking. (Parents who had the "they bombed Pearl Harbor!" mentality of my own father. I swear "they'll be no Star Blazers in this house!" yeah, but Scooby Doo was ok, right Dad? Grrr...)
Ah, the Dreamcast had so many 2D fighters. I have both Capcom vs. SNKs, one Capcom vs. Marvel, the Vampire (Darkstalkers) import, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, JoJo's Bizarre Advenuture (unless I gave it to some kid... because it wouldn't work in VGA. Dreamcast games must work in VGA.)
Sega CD Releases
Of course, this means CD based games and not GD-ROM based games, but so be it. Looking forward to Age of the Beast
SEGA was defeated but the soul still burns....
Prediction, when Grand Theft Auto 4 comes out, expect these same "child advocacy" censorship groups to be saying, "Looks like Take Two didn't learn their lesson."
I forget, what video games did Enron make?