What I really think is going on is that the huge number of casual gamers are convinced into buying some 'great game' by a friend who's a hardcore gamer, and then realizing a few hours in that they prefer Bejeweled over Halo. Also, think about the traits that a modern AAA game has: fast-paced, cinematic, action-heavy, gives you a handful of ways to approach a problem (even if those ways are only superficially different). This tends to lead to two approaches: heavily scripted games with numerous weapons, and open-world games with a handful of mission types.
Heavily-scripted games tend to have you run through the environments at a quick pace and never go back, making environment modeling/texturing costs sky-high. Making one of these games last much more than 8 hours would be financially unfeasible. Once an open world is modeled and the mission types are done, an infinite number of missions can take place there, limited only by voice acting costs and disc space. However, developers realize that doing the same mission type over and over gets boring. In my opinion, they 'realize' this too many hours after the point where the player is already bored.
So, 4-5 hours of play means that the player has already seen 80% of what the game has to offer. This doesn't apply to strategy games or RPGs, which have high replayability or play time respectively. Stopping 5 hours into a 40 hours RPG is against the point, if you care about the story.
He seems to come to an "I know it when I see it" definition for art, admitting that he can't find a solid definition. Ebert also seems to take the 'game' part of 'video game' literally and as the basis for his argument. Some things we call 'video games' don't have goals or challenges and thus don't meet his definition of 'video game' which is why it seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy; it may technically qualify as No True Scotsman but gamers' overbroad definition of 'video game' is partially at fault. He referred to games like Chess and said that they're not art, and so by the same reasoning says that games played on screens aren't art either. He seems to be implying that a set of rules and goals and obstacles can't be art any more than an obstacle course can be art. None of the examples in Kellee Santiago's presentation explained the nitty-gritty of their mechanics, obstacles and goals and how they are artistic. If a few games by say Jason Rohrer were explained to Ebert he might come to a different conclusion, but few 'games' of that vein exist.
Putting DRM on a game nowadays is like shutting the barn door after the horse has left. It only stops people who aren't intimidated by PC games, don't mind infringing copyright, but don't know about the existence of cracks. Those of whom which the 1st and 3rd apply is but a small minority of PC gamers buying anything more sophisticated than The Sims.
Digital downloads (I hate that term) will be great for PC gaming, eventually. There's way too many great PC games that can't be found on Steam for it to be a one-stop shop; consolidation, expansion, or a 3rd party frontend is needed to make more games easily available, to avoid each publisher having their own platform with associated system tray icon, memory footprint and updater.
The PC is the best platform for indie game developers, since there's no devkit to buy or gatekeeper to pay in order to develop for it. Updates are as easy as FTPing a new binary to your server; open source games are especially unlikely to appear on consoles. Interesting experimental or hastily-made games which would never appear on a console due to lack of polish or content can be offered for free on PC. And finally, the standard input devices of mouse and keyboard aren't standard on any console, allowing more precision or more functions for PC games.
Cloud gaming won't be very interesting until bandwidth is high and unlimited and the lag is low. I imagine it would work better in Korea, since it's compatible with the net cafe business model, and they have very high speed internet.
Publishers start funding of downloadable console games at $300k-$500k, so anything expected to gross less than that needs a new funding source. It may be negligible to publishers which rake in Billions per year, but to a two-man team $250k can be a lot of money, the amount a niche game might make. Self-publishing for the PC is always an option.
You're not thinking from the gun-control point of view. Gun crime happens; gun crime is bad; gun crime couldn't happen if the criminals didn't have guns; therefore: ban guns. It's the exact same logic used for website filtering or other "ban bad stuff" schemes.
My hypothesis: I suspect that population density is a factor in crime rates, and Phoenix has 1/4 the population density of Chicago.
The Obama administration is trying to close this loophole, by making it so that corporations make up the difference in tax rates. E.g. if they pay 12% to Ireland, they'll pay 23% to the U.S. govt. to bring it up to 35%. Assuming no loopholes, this should end the point of tax havens for American companies, although I don't see how they would be stopped from reforming as foreign companies. Worried corporations talk about the problem of foreign multinationals being potentially more competitive than domestic multinationals, although the key premise is that tax rates affect a corporation's competitiveness.
A year ago, Ubisoft released their new Prince of Persia game with no DRM as an experiment to see how it affected sales. Now, they're trying the opposite approach with draconian (and thus far uncracked) DRM. It will likely be cracked some day but most sales occur within the first couple months so that's all they need. They were skeptical that no DRM would work which is why they only released one game that way, yet have several new games with this new DRM that requires constant internet access. We have to do our part to ensure that they conclude that sales are better with no DRM than with this new DRM.
Google leaving China does do something for Chinese citizens -- it makes them wonder why Google pulled out. The Chinese govt. will have a difficult time offering a convincing explanation that isn't embarrassing. More convincing explanations will be found elsewhere on the internet, leading more people to distrust the Chinese government and start getting their news elsewhere.
I haven't read the text of the bill, but wouldn't this apply to worms as well? They pass data from victim to victim (peer to peer) without authorization. I wouldn't want to be liable for violating this law just because my computer was infected with a worm.
Also I wonder if folding@home and similar programs would also be prohibited from being installed on computers without authorization.
Senioritis is caused by senior year grades not being seen by colleges students apply to. Skipping senior year and applying to college junior year would lead to junioritis. A wise idea would be to replace the normal classes seniors take with classes that can only be taken as a senior, classes that are interesting and apply to real life, such as those mysteriously vanishing civics classes. This measure would be doomed to fail anywhere that education is considered important, and where politicians use 'improving education' as part of their platform, as it creates an obvious slippery slope issue: why stop at cutting 12th grade, why not cut 11th? Why not privatize schooling completely? I worked with someone who didn't go to high school because her parents wouldn't pay the already subsidized price. If parents had to pay full price, how many would say 'screw it, my kids get to compete for jobs with robots and 3rd world laborers'?
Part of the problem is that the metaphors of padlocks, "secure" and "verified" don't mean what they suggest to users. What's actually involved are encryption and certificates. These concepts would need to be explained to users somehow (ideally through actions instead of words) in order for them to be effective and not just provide a false sense of security. If that means playing a minigame that involves (something like) navigating a maze to find a key to open the front door to let a stranger into your house, so be it. Or a brief multiple-choice quiz. "If you cheat, you're only cheating yourself" indeed.
Perhaps less invasively, levels of security could be conveyed, with 'just encryption' being represented with a graphic showing that it prevents MITM attacks, and verification that shows that the site is who it says it is. But of course that gets to the core of the certificate issue: the user is trusting the CA to verify sites, and if a CA ever issues a certificate without correctly doing the verification, they effectively become untrustworthy. Either a perfect CA has to be created/found, or the concept has to be scrapped. I can't think of a replacement that doesn't boil down to a whitelist version of an anti-phishing database.
Slashdot Mirror
What I really think is going on is that the huge number of casual gamers are convinced into buying some 'great game' by a friend who's a hardcore gamer, and then realizing a few hours in that they prefer Bejeweled over Halo.
Also, think about the traits that a modern AAA game has: fast-paced, cinematic, action-heavy, gives you a handful of ways to approach a problem (even if those ways are only superficially different). This tends to lead to two approaches: heavily scripted games with numerous weapons, and open-world games with a handful of mission types.
Heavily-scripted games tend to have you run through the environments at a quick pace and never go back, making environment modeling/texturing costs sky-high. Making one of these games last much more than 8 hours would be financially unfeasible.
Once an open world is modeled and the mission types are done, an infinite number of missions can take place there, limited only by voice acting costs and disc space. However, developers realize that doing the same mission type over and over gets boring. In my opinion, they 'realize' this too many hours after the point where the player is already bored.
So, 4-5 hours of play means that the player has already seen 80% of what the game has to offer. This doesn't apply to strategy games or RPGs, which have high replayability or play time respectively. Stopping 5 hours into a 40 hours RPG is against the point, if you care about the story.
He seems to come to an "I know it when I see it" definition for art, admitting that he can't find a solid definition. Ebert also seems to take the 'game' part of 'video game' literally and as the basis for his argument. Some things we call 'video games' don't have goals or challenges and thus don't meet his definition of 'video game' which is why it seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy; it may technically qualify as No True Scotsman but gamers' overbroad definition of 'video game' is partially at fault.
He referred to games like Chess and said that they're not art, and so by the same reasoning says that games played on screens aren't art either. He seems to be implying that a set of rules and goals and obstacles can't be art any more than an obstacle course can be art. None of the examples in Kellee Santiago's presentation explained the nitty-gritty of their mechanics, obstacles and goals and how they are artistic. If a few games by say Jason Rohrer were explained to Ebert he might come to a different conclusion, but few 'games' of that vein exist.
Putting DRM on a game nowadays is like shutting the barn door after the horse has left. It only stops people who aren't intimidated by PC games, don't mind infringing copyright, but don't know about the existence of cracks. Those of whom which the 1st and 3rd apply is but a small minority of PC gamers buying anything more sophisticated than The Sims.
Digital downloads (I hate that term) will be great for PC gaming, eventually. There's way too many great PC games that can't be found on Steam for it to be a one-stop shop; consolidation, expansion, or a 3rd party frontend is needed to make more games easily available, to avoid each publisher having their own platform with associated system tray icon, memory footprint and updater.
The PC is the best platform for indie game developers, since there's no devkit to buy or gatekeeper to pay in order to develop for it. Updates are as easy as FTPing a new binary to your server; open source games are especially unlikely to appear on consoles. Interesting experimental or hastily-made games which would never appear on a console due to lack of polish or content can be offered for free on PC. And finally, the standard input devices of mouse and keyboard aren't standard on any console, allowing more precision or more functions for PC games.
Cloud gaming won't be very interesting until bandwidth is high and unlimited and the lag is low. I imagine it would work better in Korea, since it's compatible with the net cafe business model, and they have very high speed internet.
Publishers start funding of downloadable console games at $300k-$500k, so anything expected to gross less than that needs a new funding source. It may be negligible to publishers which rake in Billions per year, but to a two-man team $250k can be a lot of money, the amount a niche game might make. Self-publishing for the PC is always an option.
You're not thinking from the gun-control point of view. Gun crime happens; gun crime is bad; gun crime couldn't happen if the criminals didn't have guns; therefore: ban guns. It's the exact same logic used for website filtering or other "ban bad stuff" schemes.
My hypothesis: I suspect that population density is a factor in crime rates, and Phoenix has 1/4 the population density of Chicago.
Seems our overlords learned from history and chose to repeat it.
The Obama administration is trying to close this loophole, by making it so that corporations make up the difference in tax rates. E.g. if they pay 12% to Ireland, they'll pay 23% to the U.S. govt. to bring it up to 35%. Assuming no loopholes, this should end the point of tax havens for American companies, although I don't see how they would be stopped from reforming as foreign companies. Worried corporations talk about the problem of foreign multinationals being potentially more competitive than domestic multinationals, although the key premise is that tax rates affect a corporation's competitiveness.
A year ago, Ubisoft released their new Prince of Persia game with no DRM as an experiment to see how it affected sales. Now, they're trying the opposite approach with draconian (and thus far uncracked) DRM. It will likely be cracked some day but most sales occur within the first couple months so that's all they need. They were skeptical that no DRM would work which is why they only released one game that way, yet have several new games with this new DRM that requires constant internet access. We have to do our part to ensure that they conclude that sales are better with no DRM than with this new DRM.
Google leaving China does do something for Chinese citizens -- it makes them wonder why Google pulled out. The Chinese govt. will have a difficult time offering a convincing explanation that isn't embarrassing. More convincing explanations will be found elsewhere on the internet, leading more people to distrust the Chinese government and start getting their news elsewhere.
I haven't read the text of the bill, but wouldn't this apply to worms as well? They pass data from victim to victim (peer to peer) without authorization. I wouldn't want to be liable for violating this law just because my computer was infected with a worm.
Also I wonder if folding@home and similar programs would also be prohibited from being installed on computers without authorization.
Senioritis is caused by senior year grades not being seen by colleges students apply to. Skipping senior year and applying to college junior year would lead to junioritis. A wise idea would be to replace the normal classes seniors take with classes that can only be taken as a senior, classes that are interesting and apply to real life, such as those mysteriously vanishing civics classes. This measure would be doomed to fail anywhere that education is considered important, and where politicians use 'improving education' as part of their platform, as it creates an obvious slippery slope issue: why stop at cutting 12th grade, why not cut 11th? Why not privatize schooling completely? I worked with someone who didn't go to high school because her parents wouldn't pay the already subsidized price. If parents had to pay full price, how many would say 'screw it, my kids get to compete for jobs with robots and 3rd world laborers'?
Part of the problem is that the metaphors of padlocks, "secure" and "verified" don't mean what they suggest to users. What's actually involved are encryption and certificates. These concepts would need to be explained to users somehow (ideally through actions instead of words) in order for them to be effective and not just provide a false sense of security. If that means playing a minigame that involves (something like) navigating a maze to find a key to open the front door to let a stranger into your house, so be it. Or a brief multiple-choice quiz. "If you cheat, you're only cheating yourself" indeed.
Perhaps less invasively, levels of security could be conveyed, with 'just encryption' being represented with a graphic showing that it prevents MITM attacks, and verification that shows that the site is who it says it is.
But of course that gets to the core of the certificate issue: the user is trusting the CA to verify sites, and if a CA ever issues a certificate without correctly doing the verification, they effectively become untrustworthy. Either a perfect CA has to be created/found, or the concept has to be scrapped. I can't think of a replacement that doesn't boil down to a whitelist version of an anti-phishing database.