If you don't want to sound like an idiot, do one of two things. Either learn how to write or drop the hysteria that Steam is the first step towards a government conspiracy to monitor and limit everything we do.
Optimally, you would do both. Failing that, English is the medium through which you've chosen to push your opinions, so it's for your own good and the betterment of your argument that you learn to use it correctly.
I assumed he came up with a dumb metaphor to use as a starting point for an article with some substance, but the entire piece drags the metaphor on and on without ever saying anything. It's painfully obvious that the author was very amused with himself.
Their customer support has to deal with a flood of complaints about scams resulting from offsite trading. It causes them a lot of grief. If they want to provide the service but only on their own site where they can prevent scamming and the related customer service nightmare, that's neither hypocritical nor ironic.
I can't wait for Blizzard to release World of Warcraft. They're going to do the MMOG right, unlike Mythic, Sony, Origin, Turbine, and EA! Just you watch!
So, what's the yet-to-be-released game that everyone is saying is going to perfect and supplant all of those existing MMOGs where the incompetent developers hate the players?
"It would have been cool if he posted the engine files and it turned out to be way smaller than the scene in a FMV(full motion video) format, but no he posted a FMV that's just as big as any FMV for an animation this size."
If there was a free and lightweight viewer for HL2 files, that would be something that would add value to the platform for non-gaming, non-interactive videos. Files would be smaller and easier to distribute and people wouldn't need to own the game or have Quicktime installed to view the movies. Going back to Flash as an example, this is one of the strengths of that platform. (It certainly has weaknesses, as well.)
"The thing you're missing about machinima is that it's another medium for people to express themselves, even if this particular one is just a copy of existing work. If someone draws a painting of a scene from a movie, would you "get" that? Same thing here - in both mediums it's possible to copy existing content and to create your own."
Semaphore is another medium for people to express themselves in, but it doesn't mean that watching A Few Good Men performed in that medium wouldn't be tedious to watch, or that the medium would contribute something to the message instead of detract.
"Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)"
I would imagine that Aaron Sorkin's dialogue and the performances of the actors is what moved you. And if you've seen the movie, the context of the scene within the larger story. I think you're moved by it despite the medium, not because of it, based on your comment about not wanting to pay as much to see it as if it was in its original non-machinima form.
This is not impressive. Half-Life 2 was impressive. HL2 had an impressive engine, impressive lip synching code, impressive content. A Few Good Men was impressive. This scene had great dialogue and the actors performed it well. This movie does nothing original, it takes the content from the movie and uses the tools from Valve to create a copy of the scene in a quality low enough that no one would ever want to watch it if not for the gimmick coolness factor of having used an odd choice of tools to present existing content in a new way.
If they had added something to the experience, it could have been impressive and not merely a tech demo showing off Valve's engine and a developer's patience and skill at using the tools. HL2 itself is a much better example of that.
People must find this impressive because they like both HL2 and A Few Good Men and figure that anything containing both contexts is a good thing, without performing any sort of analysis of what it is they're actually seeing. I'm open to suggestions about what it is I'm missing that makes this impressive, aside from the patience and time that may have gone into creating it.
There's no reason for the whole concept of machinima except for people to think, "Hey, that's cool that they can do that with a game engine." But the reason stops there. I've not seen anything interesting ever done with it. I've seen interesting gameplay or physics manipulation videos on the internet, but never fiction.
I was expecting to see new character models that looked like the actors. I was expecting the facial animation to be great, since there's hardly any movement in the scene. When the characters were supposed to have a straight face, it was passable. Anytime they shouted/emoted, it looked awful.
Macromedia Flash is a great tool for artist-programmers to create great animations. Perhaps what we're seeing is that there would be a market for a version of that tool that could create the equivalent type of animations in 3d, with the same kind of ease, or at least as much ease as possible.
The Source engine wasn't designed to be that tool, and the fact that you can take their character models and put them in a room and use a combination of their lip synching tools and trial and error to get the lips to mostly match the words doesn't mean there's any reason to do so, other than a shallow coolness factor, which isn't enough to sustain machinima as an interesting concept.
As a typical end user, not one of those reasons matters to me at all. Disk space is cheap. Why do I care about bandwidth, I'm not choosing a technology based on P2P service download speeds being an important factor. Even if I did, it wouldn't save me any bandwidth costs, it would save me the last 10% of a download wait. I'm never going to sell music and I don't give a crap about how Epic Games puts music in a game I don't even play. Or even in a game I do play. Games are priced at $5 increments, and there's little variation at that; if Epic is saving $1 per copy of UT2003 sold, they're not selling the game for $39 instead of $40. And I will never notice the different between a good-quality MP3 file and a good-quality OGG file. The comparison is only useful between high- and low-quality bitrates, independent of format. And while you assure me I can use Vorbis and never have to look back, the simple fact is that I've been using MP3 for 8 years and never once had to look back. The fact that it's "proprietary" couldn't matter less to me. "Propietary" and "bad" are not synonyms just because you decide to use them that way. Switching formats for any of these reasons is just the tail wagging the dog.
The second thing you have to know is that the game stops being fun.
Because Sony has invented a form of objective fun.
The game becomes a source of frustration and anger instead of a source of entertainment and fun.
Hmm, it's fun for me. I think this guy has a lot of stress. Shrug.
After playing the game for a while, you'll start conversing with other players, and you'll see the one thing all players have in common is that they all hate Sony
I'm a player and I don't hate Sony.
You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consumed with getting that new item, or finishing that last quest, and while so consumed you begin to hate the game.
This is a page-turner... I can't wait to find out what I think next!
(It should be noted that Verant, the original development company, has been absorbed into Sony Online Entertainment -- so will be referred to as Sony for simplicity)
Everything about this article is simple.
Look a little deeper though, and you'll see that most people who dislike Sony
For continued simplicity, "most people who dislike Sony" should just be "most people", since "all players" hate Sony.
the consumers hate the company providing them with a service that they think they enjoy.
Hmm... I also thought I enjoyed The Two Towers, but now I'm not sure. I'll have to wait for this guy's next article.
you can go to bed one night with a great character and items, and wake up in the morning to find all that has changed; leaving you holding your member and your opinions
Now this guy is telling me about my masturbation habits?
and you and the 60 people in your guild are left holding your collective members for six months
My guild doesn't have 60 people and I'm sure some of us don't masturbate.
This 30 minutes of combat is certainly not fun, as all you do is point your character at a mob and press a single button to auto-attack.
How did I already know this guy didn't have the attention span or sophistication to play a caster class?
Many melee-classes go watch TV for the duration of the fight.
See, that's fun!
They seem oblivious to the fact that items are just as much a part of the game as classes though,
Except that the game has 15,000+ items.
It is not a game where you can ever feel secure.
I think this guy buys a lot of tinfoil. A whole lot.
Your guild is then left holding their collective members once again. Do you see the pattern forming here?
Yes. You think about sex too much.
If the game isn't fun and sucks this badly, why would anyone play it? Well, because they are addicted... They play on instead, hoping things will get better, and nursing a great and deep hatred for Sony and the game itself.
If you cant keep yourself from playing a stupid game and you're nursing a related "great and deep hatred," you have problems. Don't subject us to 15445 bytes of this prattle just because you didn't get the repsonse you wanted to some petition.
If you play long enough, you will see this as the universal truth.
Now this guy really has delusions of relevance.
People who quit are viewed as giving up on their guilds; they are ridiculed, denounced, and hated.
I've quit before... I'm shocked to hear that this is what was happening behind my back!
Perhaps now you've begun to see the other side of EQ: The buggier side, the darker side; the side of despair and anger, fear and frustration.
No, David... I think we've begun to see the other side of you.
The game will absorb your life
if you let it
My emphasis.
I have barely touched on the repetitive gameplay you must endure to reach the top levels of the game
I'd hate to think of how long this would have been if he'd gone into depth.
Disclaimer: I once worked for Sony. I don't speak for them in any way. I have my praise for them and my problems with them. But I don't get all whiny and specious about it in public.
Now, my question to you, is: If I can't spend my time playing EQ, and raising my daughter, do you want me selling a perscription legal meth to your brothers and sisters?
Those are our only choices? Asshole.
spam is not what the article is about
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This study has absolutely nothing to do with spam. Advertising is a medium that is supposed to be directed at a wide audience. The study is about diffusion of responsibility.
Neil Postman has a good book that takes a more serious look at these issues and others about where we're blindly marching in this century. His deconstruction of postmodernists is particularly amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Me." is not trademarked. Read the damn text you posted yourself.
You have no idea what the word "entrapment" actually means.
In "gaming "journalism"", a company not making the kind of titles you respect means they've "gone under" or something.
If you don't want to sound like an idiot, do one of two things. Either learn how to write or drop the hysteria that Steam is the first step towards a government conspiracy to monitor and limit everything we do.
Optimally, you would do both. Failing that, English is the medium through which you've chosen to push your opinions, so it's for your own good and the betterment of your argument that you learn to use it correctly.
I assumed he came up with a dumb metaphor to use as a starting point for an article with some substance, but the entire piece drags the metaphor on and on without ever saying anything. It's painfully obvious that the author was very amused with himself.
Their customer support has to deal with a flood of complaints about scams resulting from offsite trading. It causes them a lot of grief. If they want to provide the service but only on their own site where they can prevent scamming and the related customer service nightmare, that's neither hypocritical nor ironic.
I can't wait for Blizzard to release World of Warcraft. They're going to do the MMOG right, unlike Mythic, Sony, Origin, Turbine, and EA! Just you watch!
So, what's the yet-to-be-released game that everyone is saying is going to perfect and supplant all of those existing MMOGs where the incompetent developers hate the players?
"It would have been cool if he posted the engine files and it turned out to be way smaller than the scene in a FMV(full motion video) format, but no he posted a FMV that's just as big as any FMV for an animation this size."
If there was a free and lightweight viewer for HL2 files, that would be something that would add value to the platform for non-gaming, non-interactive videos. Files would be smaller and easier to distribute and people wouldn't need to own the game or have Quicktime installed to view the movies. Going back to Flash as an example, this is one of the strengths of that platform. (It certainly has weaknesses, as well.)
"The thing you're missing about machinima is that it's another medium for people to express themselves, even if this particular one is just a copy of existing work. If someone draws a painting of a scene from a movie, would you "get" that? Same thing here - in both mediums it's possible to copy existing content and to create your own."
Semaphore is another medium for people to express themselves in, but it doesn't mean that watching A Few Good Men performed in that medium wouldn't be tedious to watch, or that the medium would contribute something to the message instead of detract.
"Okay, it's still a dancing bear, but I was moved enough watching this that I could easily see myself sitting through a feature-length presentation in this format. (Of course, the quality is low enough that I'd probably wait to rent it for $.99, but still...)"
I would imagine that Aaron Sorkin's dialogue and the performances of the actors is what moved you. And if you've seen the movie, the context of the scene within the larger story. I think you're moved by it despite the medium, not because of it, based on your comment about not wanting to pay as much to see it as if it was in its original non-machinima form.
This is not impressive. Half-Life 2 was impressive. HL2 had an impressive engine, impressive lip synching code, impressive content. A Few Good Men was impressive. This scene had great dialogue and the actors performed it well. This movie does nothing original, it takes the content from the movie and uses the tools from Valve to create a copy of the scene in a quality low enough that no one would ever want to watch it if not for the gimmick coolness factor of having used an odd choice of tools to present existing content in a new way.
If they had added something to the experience, it could have been impressive and not merely a tech demo showing off Valve's engine and a developer's patience and skill at using the tools. HL2 itself is a much better example of that.
People must find this impressive because they like both HL2 and A Few Good Men and figure that anything containing both contexts is a good thing, without performing any sort of analysis of what it is they're actually seeing. I'm open to suggestions about what it is I'm missing that makes this impressive, aside from the patience and time that may have gone into creating it.
There's no reason for the whole concept of machinima except for people to think, "Hey, that's cool that they can do that with a game engine." But the reason stops there. I've not seen anything interesting ever done with it. I've seen interesting gameplay or physics manipulation videos on the internet, but never fiction.
I was expecting to see new character models that looked like the actors. I was expecting the facial animation to be great, since there's hardly any movement in the scene. When the characters were supposed to have a straight face, it was passable. Anytime they shouted/emoted, it looked awful.
Macromedia Flash is a great tool for artist-programmers to create great animations. Perhaps what we're seeing is that there would be a market for a version of that tool that could create the equivalent type of animations in 3d, with the same kind of ease, or at least as much ease as possible.
The Source engine wasn't designed to be that tool, and the fact that you can take their character models and put them in a room and use a combination of their lip synching tools and trial and error to get the lips to mostly match the words doesn't mean there's any reason to do so, other than a shallow coolness factor, which isn't enough to sustain machinima as an interesting concept.
As a typical end user, not one of those reasons matters to me at all. Disk space is cheap. Why do I care about bandwidth, I'm not choosing a technology based on P2P service download speeds being an important factor. Even if I did, it wouldn't save me any bandwidth costs, it would save me the last 10% of a download wait. I'm never going to sell music and I don't give a crap about how Epic Games puts music in a game I don't even play. Or even in a game I do play. Games are priced at $5 increments, and there's little variation at that; if Epic is saving $1 per copy of UT2003 sold, they're not selling the game for $39 instead of $40. And I will never notice the different between a good-quality MP3 file and a good-quality OGG file. The comparison is only useful between high- and low-quality bitrates, independent of format. And while you assure me I can use Vorbis and never have to look back, the simple fact is that I've been using MP3 for 8 years and never once had to look back. The fact that it's "proprietary" couldn't matter less to me. "Propietary" and "bad" are not synonyms just because you decide to use them that way. Switching formats for any of these reasons is just the tail wagging the dog.
Do you know what "entrapment" means? No, you don't.
Doesn't mean you should. Jesus christ, this is silly.
Snood was not original. The creator of Snood has admitted as much.
Disclaimer: I once worked for Sony. I don't speak for them in any way. I have my praise for them and my problems with them. But I don't get all whiny and specious about it in public.
Now, my question to you, is: If I can't spend my time playing EQ, and raising my daughter, do you want me selling a perscription legal meth to your brothers and sisters?
Those are our only choices? Asshole.
This study has absolutely nothing to do with spam. Advertising is a medium that is supposed to be directed at a wide audience. The study is about diffusion of responsibility.
Jesus.
> USA: $300,000,000,000/year on 'intelligence'
> and still they didn't see 11/9 coming.
Yes they did.
> 1. Is there intelligent life out there?
Yes.
> 2. Is there life in our solar system?
Yes, on the third planet.
> 3. Is there a God?
No. What's wrong with you?
> 4. Is the universe expanding or shrinking?
Doesn't matter, answer will change in a few years regardless.
> 5. Where is/is there dark matter?
There must be some between your eyes and your eyelids, or else you'd know what the inside of your eyelids looked like.
It's not 20 bytes you're buying, it's the rights to the character file, which is a 4k file on an NT server.
Neil Postman has a good book that takes a more serious look at these issues and others about where we're blindly marching in this century. His deconstruction of postmodernists is particularly amusing.
Neil Postman: Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
For what it's worth, I've read four of Sawyer's novels and I'd recommend the other three far above this one:
1. Flashforward
2. Calculating God
3. Factoring Humanity
4. Hominids
> I swear I'd own stock, if I wasn't a poor :(
> college student.
Dude, their stock is trading 80 cents right now.
i tried to read taht article but it wsa hard and i didt'n understad it