My brother plays almost nothing but shooters today, but in the 90s he was playing Syndicate, X-Com, and Lucasarts adventure games. Shooters are easy to make, pitch, and market. Projected sales are taken from similar games; if the most similar game was a flop from 15 years ago (Syndicate Wars) then it won't get funded. Say it's "like Bioshock" or something and it'll get approved. Syndicate wouldn't work very well with a controller, either. Try dragging a window around a group of moving targets using an analog stick *shudder*.
I'm sick of us jumping in every time a species is about to die out. Too cute to fail? I say let them go extinct. The ones that survive who looked to the future instead of eating all the grass in the field this quarter are doing what's morally right, and will lead to a stronger society. Before you know it, the lazy lower-class animals will be living in human-provided housing, with food handouts and arranged marriages, and the predation the superior specimens take part in will be outsourced to the hunters!
I want to see RNA Translation in redstone
on
Like a Redstone Cowboy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The animations I've seen make translation look neat, I bet it'd look neater with 3d blocks in a video game. Somehow.
The 4 million Japanese who bought Dragon Quest 9 at the equivalent of $64 kindly disagree with your assertion that "very very few" people would pay $40 for a portable game.
Maybe when 6 buttons and an analog stick are standard equipment for smart phones Nintendo might have something to be afraid of; multitouch implementations of buttons and dpads/sticks are terrible and take up screen real estate. Clip-on accessories are available for some phones, but most people don't have these, there's no standardization, and thus most games won't support these things; it also contradicts the premise that people are playing these smartphone games when they're bored and just have a few minutes: they aren't going to lug around the clip-on button pad all day every day just in case they're bored for a few minutes.
Oh, and there's the fact that an unlocked smartphone costs more than a 3DS or PS Vita, and you need to pay a subscription for the ability to buy or redownload games. If you don't trust your kid to use a smartphone unsupervised, a dedicated games machine would be a better option.
If you have a dumbphone and are still under contract, then you don't have a smartphone laying around. If you're not technically apt, you don't have a smartphone laying around. If you have an Android/Blackberry and you want an iOS game, you're SOL. If you have an iPod touch, the CPU is too crappy to run the more complex games at full framerate.
Then there's different markets. If you're 40+ and never owned a games machine before, you might download Angry Birds to see what the fuss is about. If you check IGN every day, chances are you'll realize that different systems get different games and there are games that interest you on every platform -- this means you will be interested in games that are only on the 3DS, even if you hate the hardware and have an iPhone.
Analysts seem to be repeating this argument ad nauseum, because they see portable gaming systems as less convenient than mobile phones. This is true, but missing the point. I bought a DS not because I wanted to play games when I'm out that happen to be new, it's that games I'm interested in playing happened to be released on a portable system.
The real question is, why would developers make games for the 3DS instead of smartphone only? The answer has to be: because that's where the gamers are -- the gamers willing to pay $40 per game. That means high production values and budgets, and high-quality games made by large teams for 18+ months. It could also be that something they REALLY want to make requires an analog stick or buttons, but that's less likely.
Personally I appreciate these high-quality large games that aren't just ports of home console games, but are things that wouldn't be released on any other system -- they're too large for a smartphone and too small for a home console.
I recently discovered the existence of 'penny auction' websites, which are a gamified version of eBay et al. In short, each bid raises the price by 1 cent, but placing a bid costs you 60 cents, which you can't get back. The person who places the last bid wins, and the timer resets to 15 seconds or so if someone places a bid when there's less than that amount of time left. Obviously, this leads to bidding wars, where people have sunk money (in the form of bids) and are unwilling to lose the auction. The value of the 60 cent bids placed often far exceeds the value of the item.
The site I browsed had a FAQ pleading that their business model isn't (legally considered) gambling, although they eventually admit that it is gamified auctioning. I think many people intuitively feel that the distinction is morally dubious.
Furthermore, Boy Scout badges are pretty similar to Achievements.
How many large entities who regularly invest $billions in bonds or other debt actually look up the grade rating in S&P's investment index when deciding whether or not to buy debt from the U.S. Government? It's not like the U.S.A. is some obscure Elbonia country where your average economist would have to look up what that country's assets and liabilities are, it has an economy larger than the 7 next-richest countries combined and any investor worth his salt has these figures memorized for the U.S.A.
The reasoning behind the downgrade is of much larger concern to investors -- that the national debt to GDP ratio keeps increasing quickly, and the vast majority of federal government is strongly opposed to either reducing spending or increasing taxes.
I see this as the financial equivalent to moving the Doomsday Clock one minute forward.
You can shoot, stab, maim and murder the NPCs all you want... but the results will be that they'll bleed rainbows and cry in joy as they casually lay down to wait out the rest of the game. If there's anything children need, it's to be taught that extreme violence results in no negative consequences for the victim.
It'll take a while for this tech to get turned into an engine with animation/shading/lighting working, and no game developer will touch it until that happens. Euclideon had the right idea making a converter to turn polygonal models into voxel models, since noone was going to dedicate the money to create high-quality voxel assets that couldn't be used if they decided to scrap the tech and use a normal polygon engine. This tech is risky, so the first game to use it is likely going to be a cheaply-made game, possibly by the company itself a la Serious Sam.
The big problem is speed, right now it's completely CPU dependent. I'm unsure how parallelizable it is, but CPUs aren't increasing in speed as quickly as GPUs are. Perhaps some GPGPU code would help? Barring that, a board with dedicated hardware a la the PhysX board might make this feasible.
I think he's referring to 'serious games', not standard entertainment-focused video games. Imagine a simulation where you interact with an AI in different scenarios. The AI's actions and responses to the user can be standardized and tweaked to ensure that the child playing the game learns the intended lesson/skill. This could be especially useful in teaching children social interactions, where how another human responds is unpredictable, even if they've been trained beforehand.
The 800 pound gorilla is that we're going to live in a Star Trek future with strong AI and a pure robot economy before parents leave child-rearing to AI simulations, so the 'exponential increase of intelligence' isn't going to come from this; genetic engineering or self-designing AIs are much more plausible for a trigger of a singularity.
Last I looked into this, the best format in terms of reliability was magneto-optical. It heats up the disc with a laser before the magnetic bits are able to be manipulated, so it's unlikely to be corrupted by only magnetic interference or only light/heat. You can get a 9GB rewritable disc or 30GB write-once for ~$50.
There's also tape, which has massive capacities, but every anecdote about tape I've heard ends in "but the tape backup was partially/completely corrupted". Make two tape backups from the source (not copied from one tape to the other) using different technologies from different manufacturers if you absolutely must use tape. Keep one copy on-site for a few days if you'd normally ship backups to a storage center, so that you may not be required to recall the truck if the server explodes and the on-hand copy works.
The video embedded in TFA contains the engineer who created this saying that it was invented about 100 years ago, but nothing came of it and the tech was forgotten. He did rediscover it independently, however.
I can say the situation isn't too good. Promotion for most of these games is non-existent on Microsoft's part. Too few games make enough in revenue to cover the money spent (usually on art/music) to produce the game, even less cover the programmer's time.
Those that have made the highest-quality games are almost all leaving or considering leaving the platform. The biggest problem is quality: maybe 50% of games are no better than your average free Flash game; most of the rest are ok quality but highly derivative. High-quality games get no special promotion and are thrown in the New Releases list next to Breakout clones and gimmick app/games. The Indie Games area would ideally be reserved for games that are nearly Xbox Live Arcade quality but are too niche or can't fit in the extremely crowded XBLA release schedule.
Advertising these small $1 indie games isn't tenable, as the cost for ad impressions/clickthroughs is higher than the return on one extra sale of a $1 game. Getting someone browsing the Internet on their PC to download a demo on their Xbox is difficult as well, in psychology and process.
Of course Nintendo and Sony don't offer anything comparable (peer-reviewed indie games with no dev-kit cost or possibility of game concept rejection) so the most similar platform one can threaten to leave to is the mobile phone market, whose pitfalls have been repeated ad nauseum since the first few stories of iPhone-coder millionaires.
The best solution to fix XBLIG is some way to promote certain games to a special 'not-crap' section that gets dashboard promotion and is more easily accessed than the rest of the stuff. Some actual competition from Sony would go a long way.
The major game publishers already do market research which isn't published, they know and have known the age distribution of gamers. The effect that being older has on gaming has been known for years (preference for mature themes, short play sessions, greater access to credit cards, etc.). I think (some) baby boomers are the only ones surprised that video games aren't just for kids.
A malware coder is less likely than your average drone to agree to let Thuggy hand him a sack of cash in a back alley that corpses are regularly found in. He'd require payment in Bitcoins, or a wire transfer to an offshore account belonging to an off-the-shelf bank that bounces around a dozen more shell banks (which mysteriously go bankrupt the following day). Even if their employer is an FBI informant they're unlikely to get caught.
The Wii's successor is rumored to have more horsepower than the Xbox 360/PS3, so it's not like the arm's race is over. Sony and MS simply realized that hardware improvements that have been made possible in the past 6 years don't translate to drastically better graphics sufficient to get people to buy a new console yet. Also, Sony isn't looking forward to selling another $800 machine priced at $599. It's easy to forget that 2 console generations ago, consoles output at 320x240 resolution. Now, console games can run at higher resolutions than many computer monitors. The obvious quality improvements that come with increased resolution aren't going to come again in the near future.
There's little data you can create on a 3DS using built-in software and purchasable games. It's mostly just pictures and StreetPass data. StreetPass data is already broadcast promiscuously to every other 3DS you come near, so it's hardly going to be considered 'private information' by the owner (or shouldn't, if they have any sense).
Nintendo collecting this information and using it for anything public and that anyone might object to would be foolhardy, as they'd have to navigate privacy laws. Even aside from COPPA etc., minors are legally unable to sign contracts, and that includes clickwrap EULAs. Nintendo would have to obtain written consent from the (potentially minor) players in order to use their pictures or other personal information. Aggregated game statistics are something that noone is likely to object to being publicly disseminated, even if the legal basis for its collection is murky/invalid.
There is a built-in web browser but I'm skeptical that anyone would do serious web content creation from a 3DS and care that Nintendo could theoretically lay claim to it.
It gets stranger. According to their recent updates for the SOE hack, the hackers used 'sophisticated means [...] to cover their tracks'. Why go to a lot of trouble to cover your tracks, yet purposely leave a file implicating Anonymous? Either the access was done over a period of time, and the tracks were covered to keep continued access (not something I'd imagine Anonymous would care to do), or the evidence was left to divert investigators away from the real source of the hacks. Leaving behind a calling-card then letting Anonymous make 2 statements (one when the PSN outage first began) that they weren't responsible, without releasing a counter-statement claiming responsibility and acting on behalf of Anonymous, suggests that this person is either so on the fringe of association with Anonymous they have no contact with other members, or they're trying to pass suspicion/investigative efforts/blame to Anonymous. Any way you look at it, you can't blame the greater body of Anonymous.
If you desire a world that's perfectly just, then an omniscient, omnipotent ruler is required. Politicians sell the idea of a world that's perfectly just, and people who feel afraid or have been wronged desire this outcome -- authoritarianism. I don't think politicians promote this because they consciously want more power (they may, but this usually isn't why they promote easy justice). I think it's because it's an easy way to score points with voters and mollify the public if anything that makes them feel afraid (like a terrorist attack) happens. It should be obvious that America's founders intended for a system that wouldn't be perfectly just, e.g. innocent until proven guilty, but it was too easy for citizens to desire justice and fail to see that its implementation ends up being weighed against liberty.
There is a real problem of people selectively tuning in to news sources that cater to their bias, but the summary has a tone implying that established news sources are more correct or neutral than new media when this isn't always the case. The scare quotes around 'facts' clearly suggest that new media are wrong and established media is right. Using the term 'birthers' paints the believers as conspiracy theorists, which may be accurate but is unnecessary.
They see Facebook as a new technology, like cellphones, and they're treating it like a phone or SMS. So they're saying the same things they would say on a phone or send over SMS. The thing is, phone and SMS data are usually sent to limited-function devices that can't easily store and reproduce this data. While the government may intercept phonecalls or text messages, the vast majority of people are much more likely to feel negative effects from a lack of privacy in their subsequent interactions with friends, family and employers.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother plays almost nothing but shooters today, but in the 90s he was playing Syndicate, X-Com, and Lucasarts adventure games.
Shooters are easy to make, pitch, and market. Projected sales are taken from similar games; if the most similar game was a flop from 15 years ago (Syndicate Wars) then it won't get funded. Say it's "like Bioshock" or something and it'll get approved.
Syndicate wouldn't work very well with a controller, either. Try dragging a window around a group of moving targets using an analog stick *shudder*.
A recent dearth of good Linux .ISO releases. *cough*
I'm sick of us jumping in every time a species is about to die out. Too cute to fail? I say let them go extinct. The ones that survive who looked to the future instead of eating all the grass in the field this quarter are doing what's morally right, and will lead to a stronger society.
Before you know it, the lazy lower-class animals will be living in human-provided housing, with food handouts and arranged marriages, and the predation the superior specimens take part in will be outsourced to the hunters!
The animations I've seen make translation look neat, I bet it'd look neater with 3d blocks in a video game. Somehow.
My FBI Agent has been running her own honeypot for quite a while now. Keep 'em off the streets, that's what I say.
FTFY :)
The 4 million Japanese who bought Dragon Quest 9 at the equivalent of $64 kindly disagree with your assertion that "very very few" people would pay $40 for a portable game.
Maybe when 6 buttons and an analog stick are standard equipment for smart phones Nintendo might have something to be afraid of; multitouch implementations of buttons and dpads/sticks are terrible and take up screen real estate. Clip-on accessories are available for some phones, but most people don't have these, there's no standardization, and thus most games won't support these things; it also contradicts the premise that people are playing these smartphone games when they're bored and just have a few minutes: they aren't going to lug around the clip-on button pad all day every day just in case they're bored for a few minutes.
Oh, and there's the fact that an unlocked smartphone costs more than a 3DS or PS Vita, and you need to pay a subscription for the ability to buy or redownload games. If you don't trust your kid to use a smartphone unsupervised, a dedicated games machine would be a better option.
If you have a dumbphone and are still under contract, then you don't have a smartphone laying around. If you're not technically apt, you don't have a smartphone laying around. If you have an Android/Blackberry and you want an iOS game, you're SOL. If you have an iPod touch, the CPU is too crappy to run the more complex games at full framerate.
Then there's different markets. If you're 40+ and never owned a games machine before, you might download Angry Birds to see what the fuss is about. If you check IGN every day, chances are you'll realize that different systems get different games and there are games that interest you on every platform -- this means you will be interested in games that are only on the 3DS, even if you hate the hardware and have an iPhone.
Analysts seem to be repeating this argument ad nauseum, because they see portable gaming systems as less convenient than mobile phones. This is true, but missing the point. I bought a DS not because I wanted to play games when I'm out that happen to be new, it's that games I'm interested in playing happened to be released on a portable system.
The real question is, why would developers make games for the 3DS instead of smartphone only? The answer has to be: because that's where the gamers are -- the gamers willing to pay $40 per game. That means high production values and budgets, and high-quality games made by large teams for 18+ months. It could also be that something they REALLY want to make requires an analog stick or buttons, but that's less likely.
Personally I appreciate these high-quality large games that aren't just ports of home console games, but are things that wouldn't be released on any other system -- they're too large for a smartphone and too small for a home console.
I recently discovered the existence of 'penny auction' websites, which are a gamified version of eBay et al. In short, each bid raises the price by 1 cent, but placing a bid costs you 60 cents, which you can't get back. The person who places the last bid wins, and the timer resets to 15 seconds or so if someone places a bid when there's less than that amount of time left. Obviously, this leads to bidding wars, where people have sunk money (in the form of bids) and are unwilling to lose the auction. The value of the 60 cent bids placed often far exceeds the value of the item.
The site I browsed had a FAQ pleading that their business model isn't (legally considered) gambling, although they eventually admit that it is gamified auctioning. I think many people intuitively feel that the distinction is morally dubious.
Furthermore, Boy Scout badges are pretty similar to Achievements.
How many large entities who regularly invest $billions in bonds or other debt actually look up the grade rating in S&P's investment index when deciding whether or not to buy debt from the U.S. Government? It's not like the U.S.A. is some obscure Elbonia country where your average economist would have to look up what that country's assets and liabilities are, it has an economy larger than the 7 next-richest countries combined and any investor worth his salt has these figures memorized for the U.S.A.
The reasoning behind the downgrade is of much larger concern to investors -- that the national debt to GDP ratio keeps increasing quickly, and the vast majority of federal government is strongly opposed to either reducing spending or increasing taxes.
I see this as the financial equivalent to moving the Doomsday Clock one minute forward.
You can shoot, stab, maim and murder the NPCs all you want... but the results will be that they'll bleed rainbows and cry in joy as they casually lay down to wait out the rest of the game. If there's anything children need, it's to be taught that extreme violence results in no negative consequences for the victim.
It'll take a while for this tech to get turned into an engine with animation/shading/lighting working, and no game developer will touch it until that happens. Euclideon had the right idea making a converter to turn polygonal models into voxel models, since noone was going to dedicate the money to create high-quality voxel assets that couldn't be used if they decided to scrap the tech and use a normal polygon engine. This tech is risky, so the first game to use it is likely going to be a cheaply-made game, possibly by the company itself a la Serious Sam.
The big problem is speed, right now it's completely CPU dependent. I'm unsure how parallelizable it is, but CPUs aren't increasing in speed as quickly as GPUs are. Perhaps some GPGPU code would help? Barring that, a board with dedicated hardware a la the PhysX board might make this feasible.
I think he's referring to 'serious games', not standard entertainment-focused video games. Imagine a simulation where you interact with an AI in different scenarios. The AI's actions and responses to the user can be standardized and tweaked to ensure that the child playing the game learns the intended lesson/skill. This could be especially useful in teaching children social interactions, where how another human responds is unpredictable, even if they've been trained beforehand.
The 800 pound gorilla is that we're going to live in a Star Trek future with strong AI and a pure robot economy before parents leave child-rearing to AI simulations, so the 'exponential increase of intelligence' isn't going to come from this; genetic engineering or self-designing AIs are much more plausible for a trigger of a singularity.
Last I looked into this, the best format in terms of reliability was magneto-optical. It heats up the disc with a laser before the magnetic bits are able to be manipulated, so it's unlikely to be corrupted by only magnetic interference or only light/heat. You can get a 9GB rewritable disc or 30GB write-once for ~$50.
There's also tape, which has massive capacities, but every anecdote about tape I've heard ends in "but the tape backup was partially/completely corrupted". Make two tape backups from the source (not copied from one tape to the other) using different technologies from different manufacturers if you absolutely must use tape. Keep one copy on-site for a few days if you'd normally ship backups to a storage center, so that you may not be required to recall the truck if the server explodes and the on-hand copy works.
The video embedded in TFA contains the engineer who created this saying that it was invented about 100 years ago, but nothing came of it and the tech was forgotten. He did rediscover it independently, however.
I can say the situation isn't too good. Promotion for most of these games is non-existent on Microsoft's part. Too few games make enough in revenue to cover the money spent (usually on art/music) to produce the game, even less cover the programmer's time.
Those that have made the highest-quality games are almost all leaving or considering leaving the platform. The biggest problem is quality: maybe 50% of games are no better than your average free Flash game; most of the rest are ok quality but highly derivative. High-quality games get no special promotion and are thrown in the New Releases list next to Breakout clones and gimmick app/games. The Indie Games area would ideally be reserved for games that are nearly Xbox Live Arcade quality but are too niche or can't fit in the extremely crowded XBLA release schedule.
Advertising these small $1 indie games isn't tenable, as the cost for ad impressions/clickthroughs is higher than the return on one extra sale of a $1 game. Getting someone browsing the Internet on their PC to download a demo on their Xbox is difficult as well, in psychology and process.
Of course Nintendo and Sony don't offer anything comparable (peer-reviewed indie games with no dev-kit cost or possibility of game concept rejection) so the most similar platform one can threaten to leave to is the mobile phone market, whose pitfalls have been repeated ad nauseum since the first few stories of iPhone-coder millionaires.
The best solution to fix XBLIG is some way to promote certain games to a special 'not-crap' section that gets dashboard promotion and is more easily accessed than the rest of the stuff. Some actual competition from Sony would go a long way.
The major game publishers already do market research which isn't published, they know and have known the age distribution of gamers. The effect that being older has on gaming has been known for years (preference for mature themes, short play sessions, greater access to credit cards, etc.).
I think (some) baby boomers are the only ones surprised that video games aren't just for kids.
A malware coder is less likely than your average drone to agree to let Thuggy hand him a sack of cash in a back alley that corpses are regularly found in. He'd require payment in Bitcoins, or a wire transfer to an offshore account belonging to an off-the-shelf bank that bounces around a dozen more shell banks (which mysteriously go bankrupt the following day). Even if their employer is an FBI informant they're unlikely to get caught.
I read about this a year or so ago, probably on Slashdot even.
The Wii's successor is rumored to have more horsepower than the Xbox 360/PS3, so it's not like the arm's race is over. Sony and MS simply realized that hardware improvements that have been made possible in the past 6 years don't translate to drastically better graphics sufficient to get people to buy a new console yet. Also, Sony isn't looking forward to selling another $800 machine priced at $599.
It's easy to forget that 2 console generations ago, consoles output at 320x240 resolution. Now, console games can run at higher resolutions than many computer monitors. The obvious quality improvements that come with increased resolution aren't going to come again in the near future.
There's little data you can create on a 3DS using built-in software and purchasable games. It's mostly just pictures and StreetPass data. StreetPass data is already broadcast promiscuously to every other 3DS you come near, so it's hardly going to be considered 'private information' by the owner (or shouldn't, if they have any sense).
Nintendo collecting this information and using it for anything public and that anyone might object to would be foolhardy, as they'd have to navigate privacy laws. Even aside from COPPA etc., minors are legally unable to sign contracts, and that includes clickwrap EULAs. Nintendo would have to obtain written consent from the (potentially minor) players in order to use their pictures or other personal information. Aggregated game statistics are something that noone is likely to object to being publicly disseminated, even if the legal basis for its collection is murky/invalid.
There is a built-in web browser but I'm skeptical that anyone would do serious web content creation from a 3DS and care that Nintendo could theoretically lay claim to it.
Rudyard Kipling would be pissed.
It gets stranger. According to their recent updates for the SOE hack, the hackers used 'sophisticated means [...] to cover their tracks'.
Why go to a lot of trouble to cover your tracks, yet purposely leave a file implicating Anonymous? Either the access was done over a period of time, and the tracks were covered to keep continued access (not something I'd imagine Anonymous would care to do), or the evidence was left to divert investigators away from the real source of the hacks.
Leaving behind a calling-card then letting Anonymous make 2 statements (one when the PSN outage first began) that they weren't responsible, without releasing a counter-statement claiming responsibility and acting on behalf of Anonymous, suggests that this person is either so on the fringe of association with Anonymous they have no contact with other members, or they're trying to pass suspicion/investigative efforts/blame to Anonymous.
Any way you look at it, you can't blame the greater body of Anonymous.
If you desire a world that's perfectly just, then an omniscient, omnipotent ruler is required. Politicians sell the idea of a world that's perfectly just, and people who feel afraid or have been wronged desire this outcome -- authoritarianism.
I don't think politicians promote this because they consciously want more power (they may, but this usually isn't why they promote easy justice). I think it's because it's an easy way to score points with voters and mollify the public if anything that makes them feel afraid (like a terrorist attack) happens.
It should be obvious that America's founders intended for a system that wouldn't be perfectly just, e.g. innocent until proven guilty, but it was too easy for citizens to desire justice and fail to see that its implementation ends up being weighed against liberty.
There is a real problem of people selectively tuning in to news sources that cater to their bias, but the summary has a tone implying that established news sources are more correct or neutral than new media when this isn't always the case. The scare quotes around 'facts' clearly suggest that new media are wrong and established media is right. Using the term 'birthers' paints the believers as conspiracy theorists, which may be accurate but is unnecessary.
They see Facebook as a new technology, like cellphones, and they're treating it like a phone or SMS. So they're saying the same things they would say on a phone or send over SMS. The thing is, phone and SMS data are usually sent to limited-function devices that can't easily store and reproduce this data.
While the government may intercept phonecalls or text messages, the vast majority of people are much more likely to feel negative effects from a lack of privacy in their subsequent interactions with friends, family and employers.