I think if it doesn't include a sandbox painting tool, then the whole project will be something of a wash. It HAS to include content creation tools, or the thing will be useless since waving a Revolution wand around to paint, for all its coolness, is still dissimilar enough to applying a brush to canvas that little will be actually learned by the process.
By the way, I would love to see a new Mario Paint after all this time. I think that would be most, most excellent.
Well I can't argue with you there, heh. I *did* like the toolkit though. I always kind of considered the real game to be the Aurora Toolset. It's a programming game, like a logic puzzle. Unfortunately your primary opponents is the sheer number of quirks and lack of documentation....
Yes, I recognized as I typed it that almost all games are role-playing games. Even things like Monopoly and Risk, if you think about it.
It's obvious that a like must be drawn somewhere, however, and I think Diablo is on the "RPG" side of it, even if it's *just* over the line. It's about as far as Nethack, and Nethack's definitely an RPG, at any rate.
No, that statement isn't true. RPG stands for Role Playing Game, and in Diablo you do, indeed, play a role. It doesn't have much character development, but you can be an RPG without that.
Whether you enjoyed reading it is the measure of quality. Other than that, no measure is possible.
I think I would agree... but to remind that after increasingly long periods of time, the things that are remembered and continue to be read are often quite different from what is popular at the time, and that people do enjoy reading literature. Maybe not you, but Shakespeare is read profitably, and enjoyably, by many even now.
Well, that is kind of self fullfilling- in 100 years, if we still remember it, its remembered through the ages:)
But whether it's remembered after a century is my definition of art. You can say something is art and artistic now, and you might even make a pretty good guess and such guesses are important.
By "remember," note what I mean is "remember in a way that is not obscure." You can look up the names of all kinds of things that were published Way Back When, they're remembered in that sense, but lots of them are not read anymore.
More BS. Another way of saying the same as the above.
No, I have to disagree with you completely there. A reader, in interpreting a work, can never conjure the precise images the original author intended when he wrote. There is always something of the reader in what he takes a work to mean.
Not likely. I kno the number *is* non-zero, but its pretty damn small.
I disagree. But I also point out, again, that what becomes popular and is widely read is often more a function of advertising dollars than book quality. How many books has Danielle Steele sold? How many copies did The Da Vinci Code sell? If you say that a story's worth should be determined solely by its grippingness, then how come so many utterly non-gripping stories become popular?
Dear god, when you read the book did you totally skip the introduction? The part where he says there is NO allegory or symbolism in the book? THis is an example of the worst kind of lit bullshit- the author friggin TELLS YOU that there is no symbolism, and you try and add it to try and prove your point.
Why should I try to prove something that seems obvious? If it's not hard to prove, then why is it worth proving?
1. The worth of a book, even artistic worth, is more than its contained allegory or symbolism. 2. Symbols, as I said before, have a way of sneaking into works whether you want them to or not. Which is some of what that fairly geek-friendly english guy, Joseph Campbell, said. 3. I think what's getting in the way here is that you have a beef against the very idea of the study of literature. You think it's not worth studying Conan novels? I say it is. In fact, I say if you enjoy something enough then you can't help but study it.
WHich goes back to my point that 90% of all symbolism you guys talk about doesn't exist.
Your use of the term "you guys" is enlightening.
Why do you think I post on Slashdot? I was doing so before I decided to major in literature. I still consider myself a geek first. Part of the reason I got into English was to find answers to the very questions you have been asking. The answers I've given you are the ones I've arrived at myself.
If you're really interested in resolving the questions you ask instead of merely dismissing an entire swath of human experience in a broad stroke, and you don't want to take my word for it, then do what I have done. Or at least work to bridge the gap of understanding.
A combination of economic issues (expense of printings and ROI), and the fact that there are so many books being written today (and people are reading less and less) that noone can keep up. Only the ones that get good word of mouth manage to get a following and sell large numbers.
So you yourself admit that the thing that everyone's reading is not always the most worthy?
This exchange has gotten unwieldly, so I'm afraid it might be difficult to continue the conversation. If you're interested in continuing the discussion through email though, feel free to drop me a line.
One of the cleverest bits of Infocom's classic (extremely cool) sci-fi adventure Starcross is that, although it takes place a couple of centuries from now in an alien space probe carved out of an asteroid, when you walk into a dark place, you can still get eaten by a grue!
I always wondered, in that game, when you manage to finally turn on the lights in the dark area, what happened to the grues? They vanish entirely from the game.
As I said in another part of the thread- appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.
Well that's getting us off to a great start. (groan) I said maybe I could provide some insight, and I provided the justification I used for why I thought it was worth providing. I was trying to help, not posit my words as the be-and-end-all of truth. Of course I think I'm right, otherwise I wouldn't think it. Of course also, you're free to take it, leave it, or (to slip into english student mode) engage with it and work towards a synthesis.
And no, the thing that makes good books lasting has nothing to do with insight into the human condition. Thats not why I read books. Its not why the vast majority of people read books, as proven by the fact that "literature" is nowhere near the top of the best seller list. The story and its presentation is all that matters. As shown by the fact every Harry Potter book *does* hit the top of the best seller list.
Well that brings up an interesting question: are readers the only measure of book quality that matters? If so, then the way to become a great author is get Oprah to pimp your book, for by your measure, advertising makes one a great writer.
Of course, we both kind of have after-the-fact definitions of greatness. I stick by mine, which is kind of like yours but after several decades have passed. We've already established that the people living at the time of a book's initial publication are not the best judges as to whether it'll become remembered through the ages or not.
Now *you* might like stories with hidden meanings and symbolism and allegory (despite the fact that I'm convinced the majority of the stuff people read into books is crap the author didn't mean).
It's a funny thing, that. There is a school of thought that, even if the writer didn't consciously mean it, he still meant it subconsciously. And there's another way of thinking about it that states, what the reader brings to the work, that's what really matters. And you could also say that people are a product of their environment, and things sneak into your work that can only be seen from a distance of decades even if there's no physical neuron in your skull labeled "subtext."
It can be shown, however, that the lasting works are those that have something more than thrills and spills, for the same reason that people won't remember Underworld: Evolution in ten years. (If they even remember it now, it's kinda fuzzy....)
As for what makes "literature" lasting- the fact that professors and high school english teachers make people continue to buy copies. The number of people who decide to read Kafka's Metamorphisis for fun is vanishingly small.
You might be surprised, my friend.
Compare to Tolkien, who tells a great story. He's still selling orders of magnitude more the Kafka.
And how many Tolkiens are there? How much of that is quality, and how much is branding? How much is the marketing push of those recent movies?
But really that's beside the point. The fact is, Tolkien does contain subtexts. It's not just a yarn. It does have something to say about the human condition. And it's ultimately a very, nay an extremely Catholic story. You don't have to be an English student to see that the story contains no less than three Christ figures, one of which is an almost literal messiah.
Nope. Its the fact that people don't enjoy it. Most people don't enjoy symbolism, they don't enjoy allegory. But I know very few people who don't enjoy a good story.
Your argument is starting to become akin to "No, you're wrong!" over and over, hm.
Beyond that- of all the things you can do in your life, why the hell would you want to *study* literature?
Um, to learn about the world and yourself? To try to gain some tricks to use in your own writing? To gain insight on what life was like back then? To expose yourself to new ideas? Enjoyment enters into it as well, of course.
If we want well written stories, game companies need to start accepting scripts written by honest-to-god authors, and realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But we're not talking about merely good stories here. There are plenty of great stories that are the furtherest thing from "gripping." Many authors could care less about providing you with viceral thrills. There are good adventure tales that have stood out over time, but there's always something there other than just being an adventure.
Most game developers want a gripping story, but most good authors, if they're really good, have their own ideas, and publishers usually don't want that. They just want a script they can plug assets into and make a pile of cash. The last thing they want is a soul.
We can do better, dammit, but it is definitely going to need a shift in thinking.
I agree, but who's thinking is it that must be shifted?
War and Peace isn't really that interesting. In fact, of all the "great literature" that english majors like to rave about, I find that less than 10% of it even makes the level of decent, much less good.
I'm a geek who's a graduate student in English Literature, so perhaps I can provide some special insight into the matter. Ready? Here we go:
YOU'RE WRONG!!!!11!!
Okay seriously, the thing is that what makes "literature" lasting doesn't so much have to do with its engagingness as a story as to its level of philosophical insight into the human condition. Ideally it should work as *both* insight and a good story.
The thing here is that, really, you have to train yourself to read good literature. Just like everyone must train themselves to learn how to read any language, they must train themselves in its understanding. That's one of the big reasons there are classes in these works -- if they were completely comprehensible to us today unaided, they wouldn't be needed. Anything older than you will have an unavoidable distance between the time it was written and your own perspective, and the greater the time, the larger the gulf that must be crossed. I think it's this distance that throws a lot of people off the study of literature.
Hell, the set of what's included as art doesn't even stay the same.
Of course it doesn't. Spenser's Faerie Queene is on its way out in critical circles, after all. But that doesn't mean it's not a great achievement. We still consider it art, it's just not art that's studied and read as much as it once was.
Remberandt and Van Gogh were starving artists.
Yes, so? There are people starving right now, people you're ignoring yourself, who will be famous for their work in 50 years. H.P. Lovecraft was almost unknown in his time except among a small circle of faithful pulp magazine readers. These days, it's not easy to determine if he's art or not, but a lot more people read him so it's looking good. In a way, if you're remembered eighty years after your death, you're automatically art.
And to extend the analogy there are games you've ignored that you'd probably love if you tried them. The GC and PS2 game Ribbit King jumps readily to mind. Although I know of few who play the game now, I think it's got a better chance of being played in twenty years than Oblivion. Who these days, after all, still plays Daggerfall? Okay, this being Slashdot, I'm sure SOMEONE will chime in with "I do!," but I think my point still stands, these games are still treated as disposable commodities, even by their creators.
Shakespear was considered lewd and crude in his day and lambasted for appealing to the masses.
Ah, I think the problem with your perspective is revealed there. He is also considered lewd and crude today in many ways. That's not a problem with Shakespeare, it is a strength. He contains both the weighty perspective into humanity (very cunningly written to as to avoid taking sides -- we really don't know what Shakespeare himself thought of anything, because he was so careful to keep himself out of it), and also the jokes, puns and sometimes very pointed sexual innuendo that pleases, these days, just about everyone who studies Shakespeare, if they have a soul.
Forget about striving to become art or creating something for the ages. Make a game thats fun. In the end, thats all that matters.
Think about the nature of literature, and the nature of games. A game is an intrinsically different medium than a book. A lasting game will have different qualities than a book will.
I believe this: if one makes a game that's truly, universally fun, it will last the ages, and be considered art a hundred years from now.
The purpose of universality is there is to minimize the distance in perspective between the future game players and the game. So what's universal? It's hard to tell at the moment, but I'd be willing to bet that Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Shado
Re:Depends on your definition of "good".
on
Once Upon A Game
·
· Score: 2
How strange... I just the oddest senation of thousands of World Lit 101 teachers spinning in their graves.
Well... he *is* hot stuff, design-wise. His reputation is well-established from designing Raid on Bungling Bay, SimCity, and the The Sims. (He also designed The Sims Online, but three out of four ain't bad.) The only person I can think of who I'd rate more highly might be Miyamoto himself, and it might be a toss-up between the two.
I never had any of the Turbografx systems, but I sort of wanted one, if only to play Blazing Lazers, one of the most kickass of Compile's venerable shmuppy legacy.
Don't worry about it. The thing that's made the N64 Zeldas and Wind Waker different from Link to the Past in feel isn't so much the graphics but the fact that it's a 3D-style game. The footage of Phantom Hourglass makes it obvious that while it uses 3D Wind Waker-style graphics, it's still definitely a 2D Zelda. Remember, Wind Waker's graphics were made cel-shaded not just to do something new, but because the style was the best way to have old style character designs and visuals in a 3D world.
I agree, that's a much better ending to the whole damn Matrix thing. Already I reflexively roll my eyes whenever anyone in any book, movie, show or game is "chosen" in any way. When it's Keanu Reeves that turns out to be the Messiah, it makes me want to shake my fist at God.
The entire point of Will's article is exactly the opposite of what you've written. The old-school way was to say "you can do and go and interact with what I've created only. Otherwise we get off track and potentially buggy." But now, developers are starting to get the idea that players really dig doing their own thing. Crafting in MMORPGS, user-created content in the Sims, and now, with Spore, it's this whole "we give you the pieces, you build the worlds" idea.
Maybe you're playing some game I'm not aware of, but isn't MMORPG "crafting" really a matter, mostly, of producing pre-made objects actually created by the developers and artists? The Sims is interesting, but mostly because the same guy designed it.
Outside of Will Wright and a few isolated instances (City of Heroes/Villains character designer, and of course Second Life), I honestly don't see much of this attitude of unfettering player creativity. Most games are still as inflexible and unsupportative of player invention as ever.
I was a prior subscriber whose subscription had lapsed when tagging was introduced, and I had the tag entry box. I *think* an idiosyncratic tag I had entered had turned up later on, too, so if that's true then prior subscriber status may play a role. I've also submitted a small number of stories that have made the front page, if that's a factor.
I'm a subscriber again at the moment, and I've definitely noticed since that some tags I submitted appearing on articles, although it's always possible that someone else submitted them too. (How does that work? Do submitted tags become suggestions? Does the system apply them if some minimum number of users apply them to an article?)
In any case, I'm all for judgemental tags like crap, and the popular tag fud, so long as they fit the norms of the Slashdot readership. Other suggestions: sucks, hype, profit and sovietrussia. People using a slashbot tag, however, should be hanged by the neck until dead.
The same document, in the next section, suggests tricks, some of which may already be used in commercial software (like Mario Kart DS), for getting around that limit, including loading new vertex information on each scanline. Those techniques may not be universally applicable (it suggests that Mario Kart DS has some camera limitations because of it), but it seems that the limit may be escaped with clever programming.
The document also admits that it's the product of homebrew reverse engineering and may be inaccurate. Although honestly I'm inclined to accept their judgements, there's the possibility that there's some undeciphered register in the DS' banks that would allow more vertex data to be uploaded.
In any case, the thing about Katamari is, once objects are absorbed into the ball, once they're beyond the surface layer, they don't affect gameplay. So one could very well make a Katamari Damacy for DS if one didn't care about rendering the internal contents of the ball. That would eliminate some of the game's charm, although how much would require performing experiments to see how many objects could be discarded from the inside of the ball without being noticable, which would be a larger number than on the PS2 or even PSP because of the DS' lower resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if it doesn't include a sandbox painting tool, then the whole project will be something of a wash. It HAS to include content creation tools, or the thing will be useless since waving a Revolution wand around to paint, for all its coolness, is still dissimilar enough to applying a brush to canvas that little will be actually learned by the process.
By the way, I would love to see a new Mario Paint after all this time. I think that would be most, most excellent.
It's true that it could be annoying that only one screen is touch-sensitive, but it's still better than the PSP, which has *no* touch screen....
"Good vs. Evil" is not a theme. It's a cliche, and one of the worst.
Well I can't argue with you there, heh. I *did* like the toolkit though. I always kind of considered the real game to be the Aurora Toolset. It's a programming game, like a logic puzzle. Unfortunately your primary opponents is the sheer number of quirks and lack of documentation....
Yes, I recognized as I typed it that almost all games are role-playing games. Even things like Monopoly and Risk, if you think about it.
It's obvious that a like must be drawn somewhere, however, and I think Diablo is on the "RPG" side of it, even if it's *just* over the line. It's about as far as Nethack, and Nethack's definitely an RPG, at any rate.
Neverwinter Night's primary campaign is essentially a single-player game.
Repeat after me: Diablo is NOT an RPG
No, that statement isn't true. RPG stands for Role Playing Game, and in Diablo you do, indeed, play a role. It doesn't have much character development, but you can be an RPG without that.
Whether you enjoyed reading it is the measure of quality. Other than that, no measure is possible.
:)
I think I would agree... but to remind that after increasingly long periods of time, the things that are remembered and continue to be read are often quite different from what is popular at the time, and that people do enjoy reading literature. Maybe not you, but Shakespeare is read profitably, and enjoyably, by many even now.
Well, that is kind of self fullfilling- in 100 years, if we still remember it, its remembered through the ages
But whether it's remembered after a century is my definition of art. You can say something is art and artistic now, and you might even make a pretty good guess and such guesses are important.
By "remember," note what I mean is "remember in a way that is not obscure." You can look up the names of all kinds of things that were published Way Back When, they're remembered in that sense, but lots of them are not read anymore.
More BS. Another way of saying the same as the above.
No, I have to disagree with you completely there. A reader, in interpreting a work, can never conjure the precise images the original author intended when he wrote. There is always something of the reader in what he takes a work to mean.
Not likely. I kno the number *is* non-zero, but its pretty damn small.
I disagree. But I also point out, again, that what becomes popular and is widely read is often more a function of advertising dollars than book quality. How many books has Danielle Steele sold? How many copies did The Da Vinci Code sell? If you say that a story's worth should be determined solely by its grippingness, then how come so many utterly non-gripping stories become popular?
Dear god, when you read the book did you totally skip the introduction? The part where he says there is NO allegory or symbolism in the book? THis is an example of the worst kind of lit bullshit- the author friggin TELLS YOU that there is no symbolism, and you try and add it to try and prove your point.
Why should I try to prove something that seems obvious? If it's not hard to prove, then why is it worth proving?
1. The worth of a book, even artistic worth, is more than its contained allegory or symbolism.
2. Symbols, as I said before, have a way of sneaking into works whether you want them to or not. Which is some of what that fairly geek-friendly english guy, Joseph Campbell, said.
3. I think what's getting in the way here is that you have a beef against the very idea of the study of literature. You think it's not worth studying Conan novels? I say it is. In fact, I say if you enjoy something enough then you can't help but study it.
WHich goes back to my point that 90% of all symbolism you guys talk about doesn't exist.
Your use of the term "you guys" is enlightening.
Why do you think I post on Slashdot? I was doing so before I decided to major in literature. I still consider myself a geek first. Part of the reason I got into English was to find answers to the very questions you have been asking. The answers I've given you are the ones I've arrived at myself.
If you're really interested in resolving the questions you ask instead of merely dismissing an entire swath of human experience in a broad stroke, and you don't want to take my word for it, then do what I have done. Or at least work to bridge the gap of understanding.
A combination of economic issues (expense of printings and ROI), and the fact that there are so many books being written today (and people are reading less and less) that noone can keep up. Only the ones that get good word of mouth manage to get a following and sell large numbers.
So you yourself admit that the thing that everyone's reading is not always the most worthy?
This exchange has gotten unwieldly, so I'm afraid it might be difficult to continue the conversation. If you're interested in continuing the discussion through email though, feel free to drop me a line.
Indeed, the grue does lives long....
One of the cleverest bits of Infocom's classic (extremely cool) sci-fi adventure Starcross is that, although it takes place a couple of centuries from now in an alien space probe carved out of an asteroid, when you walk into a dark place, you can still get eaten by a grue!
I always wondered, in that game, when you manage to finally turn on the lights in the dark area, what happened to the grues? They vanish entirely from the game.
"Regardless of the field in which you work?" What was I thinking when I wrote that? You're right, period.
As I said in another part of the thread- appeal to authority is a logical fallacy.
Well that's getting us off to a great start. (groan) I said maybe I could provide some insight, and I provided the justification I used for why I thought it was worth providing. I was trying to help, not posit my words as the be-and-end-all of truth. Of course I think I'm right, otherwise I wouldn't think it. Of course also, you're free to take it, leave it, or (to slip into english student mode) engage with it and work towards a synthesis.
And no, the thing that makes good books lasting has nothing to do with insight into the human condition. Thats not why I read books. Its not why the vast majority of people read books, as proven by the fact that "literature" is nowhere near the top of the best seller list. The story and its presentation is all that matters. As shown by the fact every Harry Potter book *does* hit the top of the best seller list.
Well that brings up an interesting question: are readers the only measure of book quality that matters? If so, then the way to become a great author is get Oprah to pimp your book, for by your measure, advertising makes one a great writer.
Of course, we both kind of have after-the-fact definitions of greatness. I stick by mine, which is kind of like yours but after several decades have passed. We've already established that the people living at the time of a book's initial publication are not the best judges as to whether it'll become remembered through the ages or not.
Now *you* might like stories with hidden meanings and symbolism and allegory (despite the fact that I'm convinced the majority of the stuff people read into books is crap the author didn't mean).
It's a funny thing, that. There is a school of thought that, even if the writer didn't consciously mean it, he still meant it subconsciously. And there's another way of thinking about it that states, what the reader brings to the work, that's what really matters. And you could also say that people are a product of their environment, and things sneak into your work that can only be seen from a distance of decades even if there's no physical neuron in your skull labeled "subtext."
It can be shown, however, that the lasting works are those that have something more than thrills and spills, for the same reason that people won't remember Underworld: Evolution in ten years. (If they even remember it now, it's kinda fuzzy....)
As for what makes "literature" lasting- the fact that professors and high school english teachers make people continue to buy copies. The number of people who decide to read Kafka's Metamorphisis for fun is vanishingly small.
You might be surprised, my friend.
Compare to Tolkien, who tells a great story. He's still selling orders of magnitude more the Kafka.
And how many Tolkiens are there? How much of that is quality, and how much is branding? How much is the marketing push of those recent movies?
But really that's beside the point. The fact is, Tolkien does contain subtexts. It's not just a yarn. It does have something to say about the human condition. And it's ultimately a very, nay an extremely Catholic story. You don't have to be an English student to see that the story contains no less than three Christ figures, one of which is an almost literal messiah.
Nope. Its the fact that people don't enjoy it. Most people don't enjoy symbolism, they don't enjoy allegory. But I know very few people who don't enjoy a good story.
Your argument is starting to become akin to "No, you're wrong!" over and over, hm.
Beyond that- of all the things you can do in your life, why the hell would you want to *study* literature?
Um, to learn about the world and yourself? To try to gain some tricks to use in your own writing? To gain insight on what life was like back then? To expose yourself to new ideas? Enjoyment enters into it as well, of course.
I think you're absolutely right on that point, regardless of the field in which you work.
If we want well written stories, game companies need to start accepting scripts written by honest-to-god authors, and realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But we're not talking about merely good stories here. There are plenty of great stories that are the furtherest thing from "gripping." Many authors could care less about providing you with viceral thrills. There are good adventure tales that have stood out over time, but there's always something there other than just being an adventure.
Most game developers want a gripping story, but most good authors, if they're really good, have their own ideas, and publishers usually don't want that. They just want a script they can plug assets into and make a pile of cash. The last thing they want is a soul.
We can do better, dammit, but it is definitely going to need a shift in thinking.
I agree, but who's thinking is it that must be shifted?
It's not, because you took it out of context. Context is everything. What is the grue's motivation?
War and Peace isn't really that interesting. In fact, of all the "great literature" that english majors like to rave about, I find that less than 10% of it even makes the level of decent, much less good.
I'm a geek who's a graduate student in English Literature, so perhaps I can provide some special insight into the matter. Ready? Here we go:
YOU'RE WRONG!!!!11!!
Okay seriously, the thing is that what makes "literature" lasting doesn't so much have to do with its engagingness as a story as to its level of philosophical insight into the human condition. Ideally it should work as *both* insight and a good story.
The thing here is that, really, you have to train yourself to read good literature. Just like everyone must train themselves to learn how to read any language, they must train themselves in its understanding. That's one of the big reasons there are classes in these works -- if they were completely comprehensible to us today unaided, they wouldn't be needed. Anything older than you will have an unavoidable distance between the time it was written and your own perspective, and the greater the time, the larger the gulf that must be crossed. I think it's this distance that throws a lot of people off the study of literature.
Hell, the set of what's included as art doesn't even stay the same.
Of course it doesn't. Spenser's Faerie Queene is on its way out in critical circles, after all. But that doesn't mean it's not a great achievement. We still consider it art, it's just not art that's studied and read as much as it once was.
Remberandt and Van Gogh were starving artists.
Yes, so? There are people starving right now, people you're ignoring yourself, who will be famous for their work in 50 years. H.P. Lovecraft was almost unknown in his time except among a small circle of faithful pulp magazine readers. These days, it's not easy to determine if he's art or not, but a lot more people read him so it's looking good. In a way, if you're remembered eighty years after your death, you're automatically art.
And to extend the analogy there are games you've ignored that you'd probably love if you tried them. The GC and PS2 game Ribbit King jumps readily to mind. Although I know of few who play the game now, I think it's got a better chance of being played in twenty years than Oblivion. Who these days, after all, still plays Daggerfall? Okay, this being Slashdot, I'm sure SOMEONE will chime in with "I do!," but I think my point still stands, these games are still treated as disposable commodities, even by their creators.
Shakespear was considered lewd and crude in his day and lambasted for appealing to the masses.
Ah, I think the problem with your perspective is revealed there. He is also considered lewd and crude today in many ways. That's not a problem with Shakespeare, it is a strength. He contains both the weighty perspective into humanity (very cunningly written to as to avoid taking sides -- we really don't know what Shakespeare himself thought of anything, because he was so careful to keep himself out of it), and also the jokes, puns and sometimes very pointed sexual innuendo that pleases, these days, just about everyone who studies Shakespeare, if they have a soul.
Forget about striving to become art or creating something for the ages. Make a game thats fun. In the end, thats all that matters.
Think about the nature of literature, and the nature of games. A game is an intrinsically different medium than a book. A lasting game will have different qualities than a book will.
I believe this: if one makes a game that's truly, universally fun, it will last the ages, and be considered art a hundred years from now.
The purpose of universality is there is to minimize the distance in perspective between the future game players and the game. So what's universal? It's hard to tell at the moment, but I'd be willing to bet that Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Shado
How strange... I just the oddest senation of thousands of World Lit 101 teachers spinning in their graves.
I'm spinning, and I haven't even died yet!
Well... he *is* hot stuff, design-wise. His reputation is well-established from designing Raid on Bungling Bay, SimCity, and the The Sims. (He also designed The Sims Online, but three out of four ain't bad.) The only person I can think of who I'd rate more highly might be Miyamoto himself, and it might be a toss-up between the two.
One day someone will think eating and shitting should go into a game because there's a bathroom to use. This is not a good idea.
Like in that multi-million dollar blockbuster, The Sims?
I never had any of the Turbografx systems, but I sort of wanted one, if only to play Blazing Lazers, one of the most kickass of Compile's venerable shmuppy legacy.
Don't worry about it. The thing that's made the N64 Zeldas and Wind Waker different from Link to the Past in feel isn't so much the graphics but the fact that it's a 3D-style game. The footage of Phantom Hourglass makes it obvious that while it uses 3D Wind Waker-style graphics, it's still definitely a 2D Zelda. Remember, Wind Waker's graphics were made cel-shaded not just to do something new, but because the style was the best way to have old style character designs and visuals in a 3D world.
I agree, that's a much better ending to the whole damn Matrix thing. Already I reflexively roll my eyes whenever anyone in any book, movie, show or game is "chosen" in any way. When it's Keanu Reeves that turns out to be the Messiah, it makes me want to shake my fist at God.
The entire point of Will's article is exactly the opposite of what you've written. The old-school way was to say "you can do and go and interact with what I've created only. Otherwise we get off track and potentially buggy." But now, developers are starting to get the idea that players really dig doing their own thing. Crafting in MMORPGS, user-created content in the Sims, and now, with Spore, it's this whole "we give you the pieces, you build the worlds" idea.
Maybe you're playing some game I'm not aware of, but isn't MMORPG "crafting" really a matter, mostly, of producing pre-made objects actually created by the developers and artists? The Sims is interesting, but mostly because the same guy designed it.
Outside of Will Wright and a few isolated instances (City of Heroes/Villains character designer, and of course Second Life), I honestly don't see much of this attitude of unfettering player creativity. Most games are still as inflexible and unsupportative of player invention as ever.
I was a prior subscriber whose subscription had lapsed when tagging was introduced, and I had the tag entry box. I *think* an idiosyncratic tag I had entered had turned up later on, too, so if that's true then prior subscriber status may play a role. I've also submitted a small number of stories that have made the front page, if that's a factor.
I'm a subscriber again at the moment, and I've definitely noticed since that some tags I submitted appearing on articles, although it's always possible that someone else submitted them too. (How does that work? Do submitted tags become suggestions? Does the system apply them if some minimum number of users apply them to an article?)
In any case, I'm all for judgemental tags like crap, and the popular tag fud, so long as they fit the norms of the Slashdot readership. Other suggestions: sucks, hype, profit and sovietrussia. People using a slashbot tag, however, should be hanged by the neck until dead.
The same document, in the next section, suggests tricks, some of which may already be used in commercial software (like Mario Kart DS), for getting around that limit, including loading new vertex information on each scanline. Those techniques may not be universally applicable (it suggests that Mario Kart DS has some camera limitations because of it), but it seems that the limit may be escaped with clever programming.
The document also admits that it's the product of homebrew reverse engineering and may be inaccurate. Although honestly I'm inclined to accept their judgements, there's the possibility that there's some undeciphered register in the DS' banks that would allow more vertex data to be uploaded.
In any case, the thing about Katamari is, once objects are absorbed into the ball, once they're beyond the surface layer, they don't affect gameplay. So one could very well make a Katamari Damacy for DS if one didn't care about rendering the internal contents of the ball. That would eliminate some of the game's charm, although how much would require performing experiments to see how many objects could be discarded from the inside of the ball without being noticable, which would be a larger number than on the PS2 or even PSP because of the DS' lower resolution.
I'm unsure. In any case, I'm going to need a confirmation of the 2000 triangles figure, that seems too small for even Mario 64.
(I'm not saying the DS IS strong enough to run a version of Katamari, just that 2,000 seems too small.)