Despite the brevity, this post makes a lot of sense. Art is subjective. Viewing or participating in art causes different reactions in different people. So does creating it.
It's not going out on a limb to say there's any empirically "correct" definition of what "art" is. Whether games can qualify as art depends on the definition, obviously.
IMO, art is solely in the eye of the beholder. If the proverbial million monkeys at a million typewriters pounded out Crime and Punishment, it wouldn't be any less a work of art simply because it was generated randomly...the author's intentions are not the be-all, end-all of "art," because what's there is there, regardless of the intent behind the creation.
Games are a medium. Sometimes they are original, creative, abstract, thoughtful, profound, beautiful, meaningful, and philosophical. Sometimes they are literal, ugly, unoriginal, stupid, and meaningless. There are probably no media about which you couldn't say the same, however. Like film - both The Seventh Seal and Porky's are art. One, however, is good art and one is dreck. The same goes for games. I don't think there's any question that games are art. The real question is...how many are good art?
well I would agree on the merits of the multiplay alone but thats not all there is. we have as yet to taste the single player experience.
I'm not sure how you can agree on the "merits of the multiplay" alone...the mod isn't really like anything that was included in the Q3 box - it's got most in common with CounterStrike. Unless the "merits" you're talking about are the idea of shooting other people from the first-person view, online. I suppose it's a "q3 clone" to the extent that it is based on the q3 engine, but of course being developed under license and supervision by iD, that's hardly surprising...
The surprising part for me is that Gray Matter is doing the single-player component while Nerve Software is developing the multiplayer. I don't know if this is the very first time that the single- and multi-player modes have been divided between different development houses, but it's definitely not a common practice. Normally this would be a good thing, since multiplayer is usually treated like an afterthought, but in this case....Gray Matter are many of the same people who made Kingpin, which had a flat single-player mode, but very good multi. Having a demonstrated aptitude for online multi-player FPS, I'm surprised it's out of their hands...and kind of disappointed. But hopefully Nerve will get the job done right. I hope the multiplayer isn't limited to the CounterStrike clone from the test...as fun as it can be, I never really understood the appeal behind CS and its knockoffs....
Nor do we execute you for voicing your opinion against the government. Such is the beauty of freedom.
I found a fairly interesting article at CityPaper describing some of the treatment that writers are getting, when they express an opinion that sounds like dissent, or questioning the administration's reactions to the terrorist attacks. While the administration itself has "only" been guilty of suggesting that dissenters kindly shut up, the citizenry hasn't been quite so restrained, threatening violence and occasionally death against writers who don't seem to be quite patriotic enough.
Regardless of how you view the attacks and the response to them, the irony is hard to miss.
Actually, the.pdf budget you linked up there shows $5.6 billion for the manned spaceflight budget only. It looks like the total budget for NASA is around $14.25 billion. However, even at that amount, it's still only about 7/10ths of one percent of the federal budget...
Re:He has some good points...but
on
The Future of Gaming
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· Score: 2, Informative
The reason I say that, is that the auther doesn't seem to understand why multi-player games are so succesful. The most popular PC game in the world is not Black and White, it's not The Sims, it's not Baldur's Gate, it's not even Diablo II. The most widely played game (for some time now) is Half-life Counter-Strike.
At any given moment, there are usually more people playing EverQuest than there are playing (online) CounterStrike, Q3, and UT combined. You used to be able to check the specific numbers at www.everquest.com, but in the last two weeks they've taken out the specific numbers. The last time I compared on a weeknight however, there were about 35,000 CounterStrike players online, compared with about 80,000 EverQuest players.
At this moment, GameSpy is showing about 50,000 CounterStrikers, while there are about 194,000 using Battle.net right now...most of those in Diablo2 and StarCraft.
CounterStrike is undoubtedly the 600-pound gorilla of online shooters, but it is not the single most popular online game. If you also count parlor games like cards and chess, CounterStrike isn't even close.
When Sims Online comes out, I think it will dwarf CounterStrike. It will be a slow-paced, social, online game that will have low system requirements, and low bandwidth requirements. It's why designers and publishers are already gunshy about the hardcore gaming market - while there always will be money to be made by offering the best graphics, the most content, and the most features, in doing so you also shut out all the PC owners who don't know a GeForce from a ham sandwich, and have no interest in learning what it takes to get a 'net game of Unreal Tournament running. Why bother, when Rollercoaster Tycoon works right out of the box and is fun to boot?
There will be a demand for Deus Ex and Doom III, and so there will be a supply. But there will be a much bigger demand for Sims Online, and clones. Accordingly, there will be a much bigger supply of those.
Ion Storm [daikatana.com]? Aren't those the guys who released that pile of executable diarrhea, "Daikatana"? This whole article reads like, "And now, from the people who brought you Daikatana... WE PRESENT TO YOU, THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!!"..Sounds to me like one last gasp of a company on the brink of failure trying desparately to associate its name to The Next Big Thing (tm)..
There were several branches to Ion Storm. The Dallas office was home to Romero, Todd Porter, Jerry Flaherty, and was responsible for the execrable Daikatana.
The Austin office of Ion Storm, however, was where Deus Ex was made, headed up by Warren Spector who has made some of the best games ever produced. Harvey Smith, the author in question, came from the Austin office.
It may have taken them several years and tens of millions of dollars, but Ion's publisher Eidos finally showed some sense when they closed down Ion Dallas, but kept Ion Austin running. They're making Thief 3 and the sequel to Deus Ex. For the most part, they know what they're talking about:)
The problem with this reasoning is that just about every poll showed that Perot drew voters equally from Clinton and Dole (and earlier Bush). In contrast, Nader voters overwhelmingly say they would have voted for Gore had Nader not been available as an alternative.
Look at the actual facts, not what the talking heads "think" was going to happen.
True, but fortunately, most sites have a simple method of retribution - leave the ad network. OK, it's not always *quite* that simple, but it would seem to be in a network's best interests to treat their member sites fairly. After all, it won't take much burning for sites to flee en masse, and spread the word to potential new recruits.
I run a site that used to be part of the GameFan network as well. We signed up a few months ago, noticed we were never getting paid OR serving ads for anything other than express.com, and promptly left. Yeah, I feel a bit burned, but having control over my site's DNS, and local backups of our files made it easy to nip the abuse in the bud:)
...and the PCData chart for the same week pegged it at #18. They also listed actual figures, and they were pretty weak. It's pretty questionable to claim that Daikatana has been vindicated by the marketplace, at this point....
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Despite the brevity, this post makes a lot of sense. Art is subjective. Viewing or participating in art causes different reactions in different people. So does creating it.
It's not going out on a limb to say there's any empirically "correct" definition of what "art" is. Whether games can qualify as art depends on the definition, obviously.
IMO, art is solely in the eye of the beholder. If the proverbial million monkeys at a million typewriters pounded out Crime and Punishment, it wouldn't be any less a work of art simply because it was generated randomly...the author's intentions are not the be-all, end-all of "art," because what's there is there, regardless of the intent behind the creation.
Games are a medium. Sometimes they are original, creative, abstract, thoughtful, profound, beautiful, meaningful, and philosophical. Sometimes they are literal, ugly, unoriginal, stupid, and meaningless. There are probably no media about which you couldn't say the same, however. Like film - both The Seventh Seal and Porky's are art. One, however, is good art and one is dreck. The same goes for games. I don't think there's any question that games are art. The real question is...how many are good art?
The surprising part for me is that Gray Matter is doing the single-player component while Nerve Software is developing the multiplayer. I don't know if this is the very first time that the single- and multi-player modes have been divided between different development houses, but it's definitely not a common practice. Normally this would be a good thing, since multiplayer is usually treated like an afterthought, but in this case....Gray Matter are many of the same people who made Kingpin, which had a flat single-player mode, but very good multi. Having a demonstrated aptitude for online multi-player FPS, I'm surprised it's out of their hands...and kind of disappointed. But hopefully Nerve will get the job done right. I hope the multiplayer isn't limited to the CounterStrike clone from the test...as fun as it can be, I never really understood the appeal behind CS and its knockoffs....
Actually, the .pdf budget you linked up there shows $5.6 billion for the manned spaceflight budget only. It looks like the total budget for NASA is around $14.25 billion. However, even at that amount, it's still only about 7/10ths of one percent of the federal budget...
At this moment, GameSpy is showing about 50,000 CounterStrikers, while there are about 194,000 using Battle.net right now...most of those in Diablo2 and StarCraft.
CounterStrike is undoubtedly the 600-pound gorilla of online shooters, but it is not the single most popular online game. If you also count parlor games like cards and chess, CounterStrike isn't even close.
When Sims Online comes out, I think it will dwarf CounterStrike. It will be a slow-paced, social, online game that will have low system requirements, and low bandwidth requirements. It's why designers and publishers are already gunshy about the hardcore gaming market - while there always will be money to be made by offering the best graphics, the most content, and the most features, in doing so you also shut out all the PC owners who don't know a GeForce from a ham sandwich, and have no interest in learning what it takes to get a 'net game of Unreal Tournament running. Why bother, when Rollercoaster Tycoon works right out of the box and is fun to boot?
There will be a demand for Deus Ex and Doom III, and so there will be a supply. But there will be a much bigger demand for Sims Online, and clones. Accordingly, there will be a much bigger supply of those.
There were several branches to Ion Storm. The Dallas office was home to Romero, Todd Porter, Jerry Flaherty, and was responsible for the execrable Daikatana.
The Austin office of Ion Storm, however, was where Deus Ex was made, headed up by Warren Spector who has made some of the best games ever produced. Harvey Smith, the author in question, came from the Austin office.
It may have taken them several years and tens of millions of dollars, but Ion's publisher Eidos finally showed some sense when they closed down Ion Dallas, but kept Ion Austin running. They're making Thief 3 and the sequel to Deus Ex. For the most part, they know what they're talking about
The problem with this reasoning is that just about every poll showed that Perot drew voters equally from Clinton and Dole (and earlier Bush). In contrast, Nader voters overwhelmingly say they would have voted for Gore had Nader not been available as an alternative. Look at the actual facts, not what the talking heads "think" was going to happen.
True, but fortunately, most sites have a simple method of retribution - leave the ad network. OK, it's not always *quite* that simple, but it would seem to be in a network's best interests to treat their member sites fairly. After all, it won't take much burning for sites to flee en masse, and spread the word to potential new recruits.
:)
I run a site that used to be part of the GameFan network as well. We signed up a few months ago, noticed we were never getting paid OR serving ads for anything other than express.com, and promptly left. Yeah, I feel a bit burned, but having control over my site's DNS, and local backups of our files made it easy to nip the abuse in the bud
...and the PCData chart for the same week pegged it at #18. They also listed actual figures, and they were pretty weak. It's pretty questionable to claim that Daikatana has been vindicated by the marketplace, at this point....