First of all, EVERYTHING is based on EVERYTHING ELSE. Each of us creates new things by assimilating and processing all the old things that surround us.
Of course, this is correct. But the actual combination of parts into a new synthesis, that's where creativity lies. Do not discount the importance of this! In a way, the degree of separation from an included idea from that expected is a measure of the creativty inherent in the inclusion.
Our culture is a huge collaborative thing, and anyone who tries to tell you they've come up with something entirely new with no basis in anything that exists already is lying to you (or to themselves).
It is unfortunate that our legal system does not recognize this....
Second, THIS IS A GOOD THING. I don't want every new first person shooter that comes out to have some new and unusual control scheme. I don't want grenades to work totally differently in every game. I don't want to have to read a fucking book before I can start playing. I WANT and EXPECT my games to follow some sort of reasonable conventions.
You were doing well up to this point. I would say that most games are far too insular, instead of looking outside gaming to find their new ideas, they are, more and more often, looking at other games for inspiration.
Of course, it's possible to be too creative. It's possible to be so creative that no one understands you, which is a good working definition of madness. Pure randomness is infinitely creative, but is also meaningless. I think that's the core of your idea, really, but I think you examples don't push it far enough.
My own examples: A game set in a garden with little plant-monsters terrorizing the local wildlife, now that's creative. A game that's like Goldeneye with more guns and different missions, that's not so creative.
A game that's just a series of giant boss battles, which play like "vertical dungeons," and no low-level monsters at all, now that's creative. Yet another Madden game, that's SO not creative.
This goes for storyline elements, too. I want a plot with a beginning, middle, and end.
Oh, do you? And what does that mean? The best stories play around with those conventions instead of following them unquestioningly. They may have false climaxes, jumping into the middle of the story from the beginning and saving exposition for later, or bitter-sweet endings. Rather, I would say you enjoy a story for its telling, and not because of those structural elements, which may be conducive to a good story but are not its cause.
Cars haven't been new and different for a hundred years; every car is totally derivative, a "ripoff" of the very first car. SO WHAT? It drives, it's nice, I like it.
One could argue that we need a new kind of car. We've been promised flying vehicles in the near-to-mid future since the fifties, and wouldn't it be cool to have one? There's not a tremendous need for one, but wouldn't you just *love* to tool around in a flying car?
That sense of coolness, that spark of novelty, is what drives videogaming, and the greatest danger to the health of gaming is the possibility that this spark is being lost. That's the entire reason so many people can't shut up about Katamari Damacy -- I can't think of another game that has that spark to greater degree.
That's a non-sequitur. That he doesn't want Boll to direct a MGS movie has nothing to do with art. He doesn't want Boll to direct his movie because Uwe Boll sucks.
I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if Kojima wouldn't want to direct such a movie himself. Think about it: it would be very, very easy for a know-nothing director to make a Metal Geal Solid game into some sort of crappy, Tom Clancyesque, military-celebrating, mass-market travesty.
A good Metal Gear Solid movie could never be a generic videogame movie, and that's all Boll makes.
But those games you mention put the player in specific environments and ask him to deal with them. There's always a basic sameness to the game because of that, later plays of a level will always be easier than the first time, because the player will learn what comes up when. Geometry Wars, on the other hand, is dynamically-generated, which has the potential to make it a better shmup than a static-level game could ever be.
This is one of the major reasons why the old NES game ZANAC is still among the best shmups ever made -- the game randomized enemy appearances, and kept track of various statistics of the player's performance and dynamically adjusted enemy attacks based on them. For example, pick up a forward-shield powerup, and you're very likely to get attacked by foes that attack from the site in the near future....
Lying requires more brain horsepower than telling the truth and the parts of the brain used for lying are known. They are different than just recall.
I'm still dubious. If the subject has worked out his lie ahead of time, as any good liar will, then there is no creativity involved at the time of the scan.
There is no "part of the brain for lying," just as there is no part of the brain for making an omlette. There are parts of the brain that activate when a lie is told, but a good liar knowing he's going up against such a machine will go so far as to practice visualizing the lie.
Also, don't forget: creativity is part of telling the truth, too. Our memories are a lot more sketchy than we notice, and we often internally reconstruct events that are not explictly recorded. The human brain is not a VCR.
We are in agreement, generally, and it is an excellent point that "condemnation creep" tends to result in censorous borderline cases. (Basically, this is what got Randall McMurphy in trouble in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest....)
Actually, I was replying in an economic sense. Does consuming something create a 'need' for it economically? the Laws of economics agree. If a man buys child porn, then there is a market for such things (the 'fuel'), and the producers will continue to produce. That is the 'fire'.
But: 1. The laws of economics break down somewhat in this area, because internet pornography doesn't involve scarcity. Copy it, and nothing is lost. One person could get a copy for almost the same cost as a hundred. One could argue that porn is one of the few types of intellectual object that is "used up" over time (eww), but that's a separate point. If you want to make it go ahead, but I hope you wash your hands afterwards. 2. We're getting away from the issue of whether consuming this material actually encourages people to act upon it, which is what makes the "fire" damaging. And obtaining the fuel isn't damaging either, if it's computer generated.
(Yeah, it feels weird to be defending child porn, although what I'm really defending is freedom of speech. Even so, there are probably some very interested FBI agents putting stuff into my file right about now....)
Is that cultural taboo/restriction on child pornography really something that you want loosened at all then?
(This is the kind of question by which debators are measured. Let's see if I'm up to it....)
Yes, if retaining it means the kinds of idiot, draconian, internet-strangling censorship that is being promoted in its name!
Of course I'm not for child pornography, but neither am I particularly against it. What I am against is its creation, and thus I am also against people profiting from its creation because of the economic support it would provide to it.
But now, even simulated, computer-generated child pornography is illegal, and that's a terrible precedent. And the people who use child porn as a hot-button issue do not use the kinds of reasoned arguments we're trying to make. They use it as an emotional issue, they seek to place, in the minds of the public, a mythical gigantic child pornography ring of which they can inspire fear.
That's the kind of culture of control, for example, that has the preachers of thousands of churches nationwide teaching their flocks about the vast conspiracy surrounding the supposed "Church of Satan." I heard about that dozens of times back at the Depressingly Christian Private High School I attended. As with many of the threats that were posed back then, once I started looking into them myself they turned out to be overblown at best, and non-existent at worst.
Of course child pornography is bad. But just "consuming" a work that contains it won't make you a frothing-at-the-mouth pedophile, and needlessly censoring works that "contain" it when no child has been harmed causes real artistic harm -- the novel Lolita, one of the greatest modern works of English literature, recently celebrated an anniversary. Its protagonist, Humbert Humbert, was a pedophile, and not a sympathetic character, but that didn't stop people from censoring it then, and it doesn't stop people from censoring it now.
Consumption of child pornography seems to normalize the behavior, and is reinforced by the pedophile community on the Internet.
Being in a reinforcing community isn't illegal, and isn't the original issue raised.
Normalizing doesn't "fuel" consumption of porn, it would simply break down a cultural taboo in the consumer's mind. That doesn't provide impetitus, it just loosens a restriction.
And, that can work both ways. You can be disgusted with porn enough so that it drives you away from it, just as anyone who has ever been caught unawares by goatse will never think of the human colon in a friendly manner ever again.
If you ignore the fact that mass producing of Child porn only fuels the interest for more child porn, adding 'fuel' to their proverbial 'fire'.
False analogy, non sequitur: It is unproven that consumption of child pornography causes one to desire it more.
Indeed, "using" pornography produces an immediate decrease in that desire. Over the long term it could increase, decrease, or stay constant, but whichever occurs, and if that is caused by the action taken or if it would have done such anyway, is uncertain.
Child pornography laws are aimed at preventing the exploitation of children. The viewing of children as an object of sexual attraction, while greatly distasteful to us and 99% of the rest of the world, is not illegal.
Ah, interesting, although SoulCalibur predates Tekken 3 if I remember correctly (and since I don't generally keep up with fighting games I may very well be wrong on this).
I think DOA's innovation is supposed to be that reversals are a key part of the game system, although certainly if you learn them in SoulCalibur you can rock with a great and exceeding rockage.
From the article on Dead or Alive 4: In the game, a counter often does substantially more damage than a standard attack with extra points being awarded for better timing. The difficulty is predicting the opponent's attack and timing your counter. This produces a very challenging and varied experience where it is crucial that your attacks remain unpredictable, making it difficult for your opponent to compete, and where it's also crucial to be familiar enough with your opponent's fighting style so that you can time your holds and counters appropriately.
He gives this as an example of something that shows DOA4 is an improvement over other fighting games, but isn't this just a different version of SoulCalibur's Guard Impacts, or (if I have my facts straight) Street Fighter 3's Parries?
"New Game Enhancements," it is the term that the developers of Star Wars Galaxies uses to describe the masssive changes they made to the game to make it more "action-oriented" and reduce the number of character classes.
It's exactly what a guy would say attempting to get people to overlook the incredibly crappy decisions his company has made.
They HAVE made crappy decisions, that cannot be argued against. Either they made them with NGE, or they made them originally and the NGE was required to fix them. However you look at it, it is their fault.
The guy's entire statement reeks of insincere appeasement. They're upset to have removed creatures from the game and will be put back in soon? Then hold off on the NGE until they're ready! They have to plan for the long term? Sure, that explains why they pissed people off by giving them absolutely no warning and released a full, pay expansion a couple of days before NGE hit! They can't put up an unsupported server running the old game because someone might find an exploit? Surely they could just release security fixes for it and not introduce new content! The game wasn't working as a business before? It is not the job of players to be understanding of the corporate behemoths to which they've paid hundreds of dollars just to have much of their work pulled out from under them!
The problem is that, to its core, Star Wars Galaxies under NGE is a different game than Star Wars Galaxies. Even the words behind the acronym, "New Game Enhancements," seem calculated to get people to swallow a pill. They didn't "enhance" the game, they made a "new game" that just happens to use the resources and maps of the old one, and completely replaced the old game with it.
It seems to me that this is just about the most unforgivable thing a MMORPG company could do that isn't actually fraud. Maybe I misunderstand the situation, or my argument is faulty? I kind of hope it is, for Sony's sake. Someone, respond to me on this. Tell me how I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, dammit!
While I think perhaps you're being a little too paranoid concerning that evil evil cookie, you bring up a good point: the person who decides what is and is not spyware is in a prime position to abuse the system.
Google now produces several pieces of desktop software, including a browser toolbar that sometimes gets installed from a checkbox during the installation of other software. They're all free. Some could in the future, become a vector for ads. It seems unlikely that Google would declare their own stuff adware.
Sun, likewise, sees fit to install a tray icon that is usually visible whenever the Java Virtual Machine is running, that among other things checks for updated software versions. No one considers that spyware yet, but if the public starts to get uppity about what other companies do with their machines, they'd get an important say in the matter on many of the machines that run the recently-released Google Pack (which, though it's been underreported, also contains a Google Updater that checks for updates).
I don't like pointing out the possibility of evil in Google, since they haven't lost a great deal of my respect yet, but I have to call them as I see them....
SimCity is cool. The Sims is cool. Electronic Arts, well...
Sure, they used to be cool. In the old days, Electronic Arts was remarkably enlighened as publishers go. They presented to us, direct from the original developers (who EA typically didn't own) the original computer versions of Marble Madness, five great construction set programs (Music-, Adventure-, Bard's Tale- and Bill Budge's Pinball-, as well as Racing Destruction Set), all of Interplay's classic early work including the three Bard's Tale games, Dragon Wars and Wasteland, and of course M.U.L.E.
Lately, however, they have SUCKED ON TOAST. The absurd profits possible from releasing the same sports games every year have largely ruined the company. Even their critical successes, like The Sims, have largely been a result of success despite EA's involvement, instead of because of it.
Indeed, Crazy Taxi had both those destinations, as well as Levi's, FINA and Pizza Hut. I can understand they could be excused by arguing realism, but even so they were annoying. (And I'm saying that as a great admirer of the game.)
Interestingly, all the product placement locations were in the "early" portions of the city, the zones you could still concievably get to without knowing the advanced "Limit Cut" skill that made respectable-length games possible. The "later" areas, after the highway but before laping back around to start, were entirely free of product placement.
Brain did not "bumble." He was often foiled by outside circumstances, and often by his associate. Those cases in which it was his plan's fault, usually it was 90% successful but that last little bit was enough to wreck the whole thing.
Hell, Brain'd be a much better ruler than Bush. I mean, if he ran, I'd vote for him rather than just about any Republican these days.
"Vote Brain in 2008. At least he's up front about his plans for world domination!"
Both systems seem to be selling well. Being "in the lead" doesn't seem to matter for as much this time, since both systems are doing well.
The reason that it is good to follow the leadership of the various game system races so closely is that, if one system gains a substantial lead over a competitor, then developers will have to take a hard look at the opportunity costs of developing for one that's further behind.
In Japan, the DS has a clean, substantial lead, enough that it may begin to attract developer attention away from the PSP because of these opportunity costs. The fact that both systems are worldwide concerns mitigates this, but on the other hand, Japanese publishers (including, it needs to be said, Nintendo) tend to focus on the Japanese market first and foremost. But then, western developers also develop for their own markets, which may explain why GTA games and Halo do much better in the U.S. and Europe than over there.
However more open-ended games like Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, or Morrowind have a lot of the problems that the grandparent mentioned. I find those games do suffer a lot in the storyline angle. (Not that it's always bad, but it's much harder to succeed)
One way to overcome this is to leave some of the "story" in the mind of the reader. It's not easy to do itself, but when it works it can be potent. This is one of the things that make Nethack interesting, in that the game is so complex that it begs the player to compose a narrative about his character. Many of the more interesting posts over at rec.games.roguelike.nethack are those in which these stories are related.
The Sims is also a game in which the player's mind supplies the story. Indeed, if you don't look at it that way, there's not really a whole lot of game there.
In the future, algorithmic storytelling will be a potential source of aid in making open-ended stories possible, although it is a field in which surprisingly little work has been done. (Here's hoping Chris Crawford is hurrying as fast he can....)
Well, adventure games are generally an ignored genre at the moment. Of course Infocom featured some of the best writing seen in any computer entertainment, Lucasarts made some *wonderful* games, and there's even the occaisional recent success like Phoenix Wright. But on the whole, there are not a lot of adventure games being released these days. Perhaps it's even directly because of their great emphasis on story.
The amount of dialog in some games is comparable to a novel (those epic RPGs with 20, 30, 40+ hours in them). No wonder the quality suffers.
No, that's not actually true. You forget that by far the biggest time-consumer in an RPG is combat, which has very little text compared to dialogue.
The reason most RPG stories stuck (even Final Fantasy stories) is that their inspiration is typically fantasy literature, which has always had a potboiler reputation, and because their target audience is easily impressed with a thin veneer of insight: "It's great because, in this one, God and the church is evil, and the devil is actually good!"
There are RPGs with good writing, however. The Grandia games, I've always found, are extremely well-written and filled with memorable characters. Dragon Quest/Warrior games are among the most text-heavy RPGs you can find and usually it's not bad. The various Mario RPGs (I don't know about the original since it's been too long, but definitely the two Paper Marios and two Mario & Luigis) have sparkling writing.
And of course there may be others outside my experiential radar. But I really don't think that the majority of them are well-written.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, EVERYTHING is based on EVERYTHING ELSE. Each of us creates new things by assimilating and processing all the old things that surround us.
Of course, this is correct. But the actual combination of parts into a new synthesis, that's where creativity lies. Do not discount the importance of this! In a way, the degree of separation from an included idea from that expected is a measure of the creativty inherent in the inclusion.
Our culture is a huge collaborative thing, and anyone who tries to tell you they've come up with something entirely new with no basis in anything that exists already is lying to you (or to themselves).
It is unfortunate that our legal system does not recognize this....
Second, THIS IS A GOOD THING. I don't want every new first person shooter that comes out to have some new and unusual control scheme. I don't want grenades to work totally differently in every game. I don't want to have to read a fucking book before I can start playing. I WANT and EXPECT my games to follow some sort of reasonable conventions.
You were doing well up to this point. I would say that most games are far too insular, instead of looking outside gaming to find their new ideas, they are, more and more often, looking at other games for inspiration.
Of course, it's possible to be too creative. It's possible to be so creative that no one understands you, which is a good working definition of madness. Pure randomness is infinitely creative, but is also meaningless. I think that's the core of your idea, really, but I think you examples don't push it far enough.
My own examples:
A game set in a garden with little plant-monsters terrorizing the local wildlife, now that's creative. A game that's like Goldeneye with more guns and different missions, that's not so creative.
A game that's just a series of giant boss battles, which play like "vertical dungeons," and no low-level monsters at all, now that's creative. Yet another Madden game, that's SO not creative.
This goes for storyline elements, too. I want a plot with a beginning, middle, and end.
Oh, do you? And what does that mean? The best stories play around with those conventions instead of following them unquestioningly. They may have false climaxes, jumping into the middle of the story from the beginning and saving exposition for later, or bitter-sweet endings. Rather, I would say you enjoy a story for its telling, and not because of those structural elements, which may be conducive to a good story but are not its cause.
Cars haven't been new and different for a hundred years; every car is totally derivative, a "ripoff" of the very first car. SO WHAT? It drives, it's nice, I like it.
One could argue that we need a new kind of car. We've been promised flying vehicles in the near-to-mid future since the fifties, and wouldn't it be cool to have one? There's not a tremendous need for one, but wouldn't you just *love* to tool around in a flying car?
That sense of coolness, that spark of novelty, is what drives videogaming, and the greatest danger to the health of gaming is the possibility that this spark is being lost. That's the entire reason so many people can't shut up about Katamari Damacy -- I can't think of another game that has that spark to greater degree.
That's a non-sequitur. That he doesn't want Boll to direct a MGS movie has nothing to do with art. He doesn't want Boll to direct his movie because Uwe Boll sucks.
I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if Kojima wouldn't want to direct such a movie himself. Think about it: it would be very, very easy for a know-nothing director to make a Metal Geal Solid game into some sort of crappy, Tom Clancyesque, military-celebrating, mass-market travesty.
A good Metal Gear Solid movie could never be a generic videogame movie, and that's all Boll makes.
But those games you mention put the player in specific environments and ask him to deal with them. There's always a basic sameness to the game because of that, later plays of a level will always be easier than the first time, because the player will learn what comes up when. Geometry Wars, on the other hand, is dynamically-generated, which has the potential to make it a better shmup than a static-level game could ever be.
This is one of the major reasons why the old NES game ZANAC is still among the best shmups ever made -- the game randomized enemy appearances, and kept track of various statistics of the player's performance and dynamically adjusted enemy attacks based on them. For example, pick up a forward-shield powerup, and you're very likely to get attacked by foes that attack from the site in the near future....
I'd really like to play the game -- there's literally no other Xbox 360 game I care about.
That doesn't make Robotron any less awesome.
Lying requires more brain horsepower than telling the truth and the parts of the brain used for lying are known. They are different than just recall.
I'm still dubious. If the subject has worked out his lie ahead of time, as any good liar will, then there is no creativity involved at the time of the scan.
There is no "part of the brain for lying," just as there is no part of the brain for making an omlette. There are parts of the brain that activate when a lie is told, but a good liar knowing he's going up against such a machine will go so far as to practice visualizing the lie.
Also, don't forget: creativity is part of telling the truth, too. Our memories are a lot more sketchy than we notice, and we often internally reconstruct events that are not explictly recorded. The human brain is not a VCR.
Hear hear! You saved me from having to write all that out myself, good work.
We are in agreement, generally, and it is an excellent point that "condemnation creep" tends to result in censorous borderline cases. (Basically, this is what got Randall McMurphy in trouble in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest....)
Actually, I was replying in an economic sense. Does consuming something create a 'need' for it economically? the Laws of economics agree. If a man buys child porn, then there is a market for such things (the 'fuel'), and the producers will continue to produce. That is the 'fire'.
But:
1. The laws of economics break down somewhat in this area, because internet pornography doesn't involve scarcity. Copy it, and nothing is lost. One person could get a copy for almost the same cost as a hundred. One could argue that porn is one of the few types of intellectual object that is "used up" over time (eww), but that's a separate point. If you want to make it go ahead, but I hope you wash your hands afterwards.
2. We're getting away from the issue of whether consuming this material actually encourages people to act upon it, which is what makes the "fire" damaging. And obtaining the fuel isn't damaging either, if it's computer generated.
(Yeah, it feels weird to be defending child porn, although what I'm really defending is freedom of speech. Even so, there are probably some very interested FBI agents putting stuff into my file right about now....)
Is that cultural taboo/restriction on child pornography really something that you want loosened at all then?
(This is the kind of question by which debators are measured. Let's see if I'm up to it....)
Yes, if retaining it means the kinds of idiot, draconian, internet-strangling censorship that is being promoted in its name!
Of course I'm not for child pornography, but neither am I particularly against it. What I am against is its creation, and thus I am also against people profiting from its creation because of the economic support it would provide to it.
But now, even simulated, computer-generated child pornography is illegal, and that's a terrible precedent. And the people who use child porn as a hot-button issue do not use the kinds of reasoned arguments we're trying to make. They use it as an emotional issue, they seek to place, in the minds of the public, a mythical gigantic child pornography ring of which they can inspire fear.
That's the kind of culture of control, for example, that has the preachers of thousands of churches nationwide teaching their flocks about the vast conspiracy surrounding the supposed "Church of Satan." I heard about that dozens of times back at the Depressingly Christian Private High School I attended. As with many of the threats that were posed back then, once I started looking into them myself they turned out to be overblown at best, and non-existent at worst.
Of course child pornography is bad. But just "consuming" a work that contains it won't make you a frothing-at-the-mouth pedophile, and needlessly censoring works that "contain" it when no child has been harmed causes real artistic harm -- the novel Lolita, one of the greatest modern works of English literature, recently celebrated an anniversary. Its protagonist, Humbert Humbert, was a pedophile, and not a sympathetic character, but that didn't stop people from censoring it then, and it doesn't stop people from censoring it now.
(How'd I do?)
Consumption of child pornography seems to normalize the behavior, and is reinforced by the pedophile community on the Internet.
Being in a reinforcing community isn't illegal, and isn't the original issue raised.
Normalizing doesn't "fuel" consumption of porn, it would simply break down a cultural taboo in the consumer's mind. That doesn't provide impetitus, it just loosens a restriction.
And, that can work both ways. You can be disgusted with porn enough so that it drives you away from it, just as anyone who has ever been caught unawares by goatse will never think of the human colon in a friendly manner ever again.
If you ignore the fact that mass producing of Child porn only fuels the interest for more child porn, adding 'fuel' to their proverbial 'fire'.
False analogy, non sequitur: It is unproven that consumption of child pornography causes one to desire it more.
Indeed, "using" pornography produces an immediate decrease in that desire. Over the long term it could increase, decrease, or stay constant, but whichever occurs, and if that is caused by the action taken or if it would have done such anyway, is uncertain.
Child pornography laws are aimed at preventing the exploitation of children. The viewing of children as an object of sexual attraction, while greatly distasteful to us and 99% of the rest of the world, is not illegal.
Ah, interesting, although SoulCalibur predates Tekken 3 if I remember correctly (and since I don't generally keep up with fighting games I may very well be wrong on this).
I think DOA's innovation is supposed to be that reversals are a key part of the game system, although certainly if you learn them in SoulCalibur you can rock with a great and exceeding rockage.
From the article on Dead or Alive 4:
In the game, a counter often does substantially more damage than a standard attack with extra points being awarded for better timing. The difficulty is predicting the opponent's attack and timing your counter. This produces a very challenging and varied experience where it is crucial that your attacks remain unpredictable, making it difficult for your opponent to compete, and where it's also crucial to be familiar enough with your opponent's fighting style so that you can time your holds and counters appropriately.
He gives this as an example of something that shows DOA4 is an improvement over other fighting games, but isn't this just a different version of SoulCalibur's Guard Impacts, or (if I have my facts straight) Street Fighter 3's Parries?
"New Game Enhancements," it is the term that the developers of Star Wars Galaxies uses to describe the masssive changes they made to the game to make it more "action-oriented" and reduce the number of character classes.
It's exactly what a guy would say attempting to get people to overlook the incredibly crappy decisions his company has made.
They HAVE made crappy decisions, that cannot be argued against. Either they made them with NGE, or they made them originally and the NGE was required to fix them. However you look at it, it is their fault.
The guy's entire statement reeks of insincere appeasement. They're upset to have removed creatures from the game and will be put back in soon? Then hold off on the NGE until they're ready! They have to plan for the long term? Sure, that explains why they pissed people off by giving them absolutely no warning and released a full, pay expansion a couple of days before NGE hit! They can't put up an unsupported server running the old game because someone might find an exploit? Surely they could just release security fixes for it and not introduce new content! The game wasn't working as a business before? It is not the job of players to be understanding of the corporate behemoths to which they've paid hundreds of dollars just to have much of their work pulled out from under them!
The problem is that, to its core, Star Wars Galaxies under NGE is a different game than Star Wars Galaxies. Even the words behind the acronym, "New Game Enhancements," seem calculated to get people to swallow a pill. They didn't "enhance" the game, they made a "new game" that just happens to use the resources and maps of the old one, and completely replaced the old game with it.
It seems to me that this is just about the most unforgivable thing a MMORPG company could do that isn't actually fraud. Maybe I misunderstand the situation, or my argument is faulty? I kind of hope it is, for Sony's sake. Someone, respond to me on this. Tell me how I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, dammit!
While I think perhaps you're being a little too paranoid concerning that evil evil cookie, you bring up a good point: the person who decides what is and is not spyware is in a prime position to abuse the system.
Google now produces several pieces of desktop software, including a browser toolbar that sometimes gets installed from a checkbox during the installation of other software. They're all free. Some could in the future, become a vector for ads. It seems unlikely that Google would declare their own stuff adware.
Sun, likewise, sees fit to install a tray icon that is usually visible whenever the Java Virtual Machine is running, that among other things checks for updated software versions. No one considers that spyware yet, but if the public starts to get uppity about what other companies do with their machines, they'd get an important say in the matter on many of the machines that run the recently-released Google Pack (which, though it's been underreported, also contains a Google Updater that checks for updates).
I don't like pointing out the possibility of evil in Google, since they haven't lost a great deal of my respect yet, but I have to call them as I see them....
SimCity is cool. The Sims is cool. Electronic Arts, well...
Sure, they used to be cool. In the old days, Electronic Arts was remarkably enlighened as publishers go. They presented to us, direct from the original developers (who EA typically didn't own) the original computer versions of Marble Madness, five great construction set programs (Music-, Adventure-, Bard's Tale- and Bill Budge's Pinball-, as well as Racing Destruction Set), all of Interplay's classic early work including the three Bard's Tale games, Dragon Wars and Wasteland, and of course M.U.L.E.
Lately, however, they have SUCKED ON TOAST. The absurd profits possible from releasing the same sports games every year have largely ruined the company. Even their critical successes, like The Sims, have largely been a result of success despite EA's involvement, instead of because of it.
Indeed, Crazy Taxi had both those destinations, as well as Levi's, FINA and Pizza Hut. I can understand they could be excused by arguing realism, but even so they were annoying. (And I'm saying that as a great admirer of the game.)
Interestingly, all the product placement locations were in the "early" portions of the city, the zones you could still concievably get to without knowing the advanced "Limit Cut" skill that made respectable-length games possible. The "later" areas, after the highway but before laping back around to start, were entirely free of product placement.
Brain did not "bumble." He was often foiled by outside circumstances, and often by his associate. Those cases in which it was his plan's fault, usually it was 90% successful but that last little bit was enough to wreck the whole thing.
Hell, Brain'd be a much better ruler than Bush. I mean, if he ran, I'd vote for him rather than just about any Republican these days.
"Vote Brain in 2008. At least he's up front about his plans for world domination!"
Both systems seem to be selling well. Being "in the lead" doesn't seem to matter for as much this time, since both systems are doing well.
The reason that it is good to follow the leadership of the various game system races so closely is that, if one system gains a substantial lead over a competitor, then developers will have to take a hard look at the opportunity costs of developing for one that's further behind.
In Japan, the DS has a clean, substantial lead, enough that it may begin to attract developer attention away from the PSP because of these opportunity costs. The fact that both systems are worldwide concerns mitigates this, but on the other hand, Japanese publishers (including, it needs to be said, Nintendo) tend to focus on the Japanese market first and foremost. But then, western developers also develop for their own markets, which may explain why GTA games and Halo do much better in the U.S. and Europe than over there.
Aaah, everyone raves about Planescape Torment. I've gotta find a copy somewhere -- right after I find copies of Grim Fandango and Starship Titanic.
However more open-ended games like Knights of the Old Republic, Fable, or Morrowind have a lot of the problems that the grandparent mentioned. I find those games do suffer a lot in the storyline angle. (Not that it's always bad, but it's much harder to succeed)
One way to overcome this is to leave some of the "story" in the mind of the reader. It's not easy to do itself, but when it works it can be potent. This is one of the things that make Nethack interesting, in that the game is so complex that it begs the player to compose a narrative about his character. Many of the more interesting posts over at rec.games.roguelike.nethack are those in which these stories are related.
The Sims is also a game in which the player's mind supplies the story. Indeed, if you don't look at it that way, there's not really a whole lot of game there.
In the future, algorithmic storytelling will be a potential source of aid in making open-ended stories possible, although it is a field in which surprisingly little work has been done. (Here's hoping Chris Crawford is hurrying as fast he can....)
Er, I hope I'm not being blitheringly stupid when I ask, what is MCA?
Well, adventure games are generally an ignored genre at the moment. Of course Infocom featured some of the best writing seen in any computer entertainment, Lucasarts made some *wonderful* games, and there's even the occaisional recent success like Phoenix Wright. But on the whole, there are not a lot of adventure games being released these days. Perhaps it's even directly because of their great emphasis on story.
The amount of dialog in some games is comparable to a novel (those epic RPGs with 20, 30, 40+ hours in them). No wonder the quality suffers.
No, that's not actually true. You forget that by far the biggest time-consumer in an RPG is combat, which has very little text compared to dialogue.
The reason most RPG stories stuck (even Final Fantasy stories) is that their inspiration is typically fantasy literature, which has always had a potboiler reputation, and because their target audience is easily impressed with a thin veneer of insight: "It's great because, in this one, God and the church is evil, and the devil is actually good!"
There are RPGs with good writing, however. The Grandia games, I've always found, are extremely well-written and filled with memorable characters. Dragon Quest/Warrior games are among the most text-heavy RPGs you can find and usually it's not bad. The various Mario RPGs (I don't know about the original since it's been too long, but definitely the two Paper Marios and two Mario & Luigis) have sparkling writing.
And of course there may be others outside my experiential radar. But I really don't think that the majority of them are well-written.