If you were a 3rd party looking to develop games for the 360, then a sell out is not what you're looking for. What you want to see is everyone who wants an X-Box gets one as soon as possible, so your game has more people to sell to. A shortage means people who might have bought your game won't, as they have nothing to play it on. Or to look at it from the other side, if you have a game idea and you want to make a lot of money on it, you'll bring it to all the platforms it makes sense to. Because there's many tradeoffs in designing a multi-platform game, the payoff better be pretty big to justify a multiplatform launch. Since the payoff is limited by the number of games you can sell, a larger userbase (especially one that doesn't own multiple platforms) will move the decision towards including your platform, and if you get big enough, its possible that it makes sense to release for a single architecture -- you can tweak the models, texture resolutions etc to match the system in ways that are hard to justify with a multiplatform launch (hence the "looks like ps2" syndrome).
I really don't care either way so I haven't investigated the truth behind the shortage theory. But if MS really cares about "Developers" then they'd better be telling the truth somewhere about the number of 360's in people's hands and the number of hands left looking for them, or developers will look elsewhere.
Then I suppose Zeitgeist was never an appropriate word, as it doesn't exist. I think the two terms are generally interchangable, unless you want to claim that Zeitgeist is somehow universal worldwide.
Maybe I'm crazy, but my family does the same thing FOR A REASON. We have a fairly large HDTV in the basement. Cable box connected to it. We paid comcast their blood money for access to HDTV channels, and what do we find? The local station's hdtv feeds are just the same damn resolution, just now centered in the middle of the screen.
Now maybe I just missed all the programming that utilized the full resolution of HDTV. But since I don't want to watch this tiny HDTV BS, I'm waiting till all the shows are broadcast in HDTV SENSIBLY.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future. They also will face a very likely suit in court for defrauding investors. In Japan, it seems businessmen apologize for everything, yet very little gets fixed. I guess I'd understand the culture more if I lived there for long enough, but it seems a bit strange to me.
Don't take this as a defense of American corporate ethos, or a criticism of Japanese ones, though. The two countries simply have different Zeitgeists. For whatever reasons the massive conglomerates that dominate Japan are never upset by newer competition. What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Of course, the master's response to the effervescent personality of the nearly-parted is to respond, "Why, yes, it's GREAT that you'll be gone so soon! I only wish we could make it faster!"
What I really want to see is a driver for DVI or VGA. And maybe some more RAM. But moore's law means in a few years that extra memory is practically a given. Maybe I should just buy a mac mini instead =/
It's a spoof, but what's the meaning behind it? If it's a parody of the "new technology is bad" idea (of which"frames are bad" is a member), then the article implies that browsers and usage evolve over time, and we should expect frames to see widespread use. Instead most websites have abandoned the usage of frames, and instead rely on well thought out tables and div sections. In fact, the only webpage I can recall that I've used that had frames in the last year is the Java API javadocs. And that one at least has a NOFRAMES option that's nearly as useful. So that meaning can't be it. Is it spoofing the entire meaningless debate of AJAX or not? I can't tell =(
Ultimately, if we accept that browsers and markup languages evolve together over time, then I think its safe to say that an idealized version of web page languages of the future will look like LISP, perhaps with less parens and more angle brackets.
The stock market isn't rooted in the idea that a company needs capital to continue growing. Some people have used that to rationalize the IPO market, but that's also not quite true. The stock market is rooted in a need to make the ownership of a company more liquid. This lets initial investors divest easily, for example. In fact, very few companies actually pursue new stock issues to gain more capital. Most prefer to pursue a loan and finance growth that way. If anything, investment itself is rooted in the idea that you need capital to enact ideas.
Of course, anything the record companies do is a self-preserving act. I don't expect to see them do anything with the intent of killing their company any time soon: there's no incentive, either for investors or for management. Nobody gets fat bonuses for dissolving a company's assests and returning them to investors. And investors can't delay taxes easily on such a dividend or return of capital. So almost every publicly traded company lives on as a going concern, even if going into bankruptcy.
The most important thing record companies can do to survive is focus on what they know how to do better than anyone else: promoting and recording. Distribution is waning and will eventually need to be addressed, likely by outsourcing to a music market like Apple. Record promoters know the radio circuits better than most new-comers. And we've seen the incestuous relationship between what stations play and what the public buys, so that should probably continue to be a focus of the company. Recording studios and producers are another thing that the company provides expertise in, and I don't see the need for this refuted in your post: recording equipment is expensive, and your average musician doesn't have the skills or time to negotiate a good rate on time. Websites can do marketing, but websites aren't people. I'd be scared to see the effectiveness your average musician would do for designing a website intended to get people to buy their music.
Remember: the music Apple or whoever sells has to come from somewhere. Recording isn't cheap, and every decent artist I've ever known was starving!
Re:Hey Tynes, get a clue
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Why We Fight
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I definately agree that the author makes several leaps to bad conclusions. I suspect "his friend" was merely himself in the example given. The professor was likely mostly excited that someone brought up an alternative solution, based on the events of the Pol Pot and Papa Doc, even if it was an attempt at trolling the exercise (death camps a good idea? you've pretty much nailed the problems with it) . The exercise is but one example of that. Near the end, he makes the statement "I believe humans have a deep longing for authority, to possess it or to obey it." Yet his entire paper focuses on the possession of power, not the deeply rooted instinct to obey authority. Probably because it doesn't exist. Violence isn't how the fascist state solves fundamentally unresolved conflicts; its how every state resolves conflict. The process for approving or denying the use of force may be different in a fascist state than a democratic one, but we can come up with examples of all sorts of states applying violence to completely resolve a conflict.
In fact, the best games available today are team based games. Counterstrike, day of defeat, UT2k4 (the better variants, anyways), CTF, Battlefield. Here in the multiplayer conflict space, we can observe human nature in action. Of course at a fundamental level these games are still not perfect; if one team "wins" the other "loses." But here, in the team based combat world, you have a common goal, and different ideas of how to accomplish them. To take battlefield 2, you've got lone wolf snipers, squads following together, commanders of all sorts. Which are the most popular servers? Those that are highly policed by a few authortarian admins, or those that employ democratic administrative methods? I believe people will gravitate towards servers whose policies best suit their interests. Of course this ease of immigration is found nowhere else in reality, but it still serves to highlight the human nature of voting with your feet.
Essentially, this man is overreaching both his own talents and reality. Which is why I hardly ever read fan 'zines. If you've got a great idea about games, I'd much rather see you implement it than write about it.
I think there are a great number of people out there capable of equalling Ebert's film criticisms. There's plenty of such who are also good enough writers to form the online magazine The Escapist.
I just really don't think that a video game nessecarily qualifies as "Art" in as much as the word art has any meaning. Tetris is simply a puzzle with time as a dimension, and a time constraint. This isn't to say that games can't be art, but that Tetris in my opinion, qualifies as an excellent game that isn't art. Tetris is simply too abstract to be art. Tic-Tac-Toe: boring game, not art. Deus Ex: good game, decent art. Rez: bad game, decent art. Nethack: decent game, bad art.
Artistry is simply orthoganal to the quality of game. Think of it this way: if I place an image of the Mona Lisa in a game, is the game now art? What if I place an image of the Mona Lisa with a mustache in the game instead? Once the term art comes to include more than just a visual expression, the meaning must dratistically change to acommodate what we consider art these days: writing, music, and film.
Essentially Ebery is right for the wrong reasons. Most games aren't art. Most of the games he thinks are art aren't art. Most of the people who tell us that games are stories don't understand games, or at least aren't talented enough to come up with something truly better than what we have today. Ebert is wrong that authorial control is lost within a game. A game designer can still have tragic things happen to the player character without a loss of play (though few have taken the efforts to do so). A game designer could offer a series of decisions to the player while still maintaining the illusion of a single authorial control. Game storylines are best represented with a decision 'tree.' Most story lines either look like a line or at least have several joining edges where the plot forks left and right but either way eventually meets up with the other. Games have a far greater potential for artistic expression that has thus far remained untapped.
It wouldn't be difficult to make a game that qualifies as both a good game and good art. The question then is economic; whether the effort to make good art is rewarded. For Square, you might say they have been. For most PC games, I'd say the answer is no.
PC games have been using higher resolution for years and rarely need multiple DVDs. I haven't really paid attention to how the 360 compares to a PC, but if they're about on par, then something's amiss.
Of course, if the 360 boasts larger texture capabilities, or more polys, that's potentially more texture sizes and more geometry data to store. It's also possible that console games include more full motion video cutscenes than a PC game, which 360 owners would naturally prefer at HiDef resolutions.
Naturally there is a compression tradeoff between space and time. By now many./ readers have likely seen the.kkreiger game that fits in like 96K. This is of course an extreme tradeoff while you wait for the game to recreate all its textures from high level combinations to bitmaps. But texture compression is nothing new and is often seen in 3d hardware. Again, I haven't dug into the 360, but I would imagine there's one or two texture compression options available and build into the hardware. Either the company isnt using them, or the compression isn't enough.
When you speak of great dramatists, poets, composers and filmmakers etc, you speak of literature and art. Things of high social impact.
While Tetris is a fine game, and perhaps one of the best we've ever witnessed, it has nothing to say. It has as much impact on culture and thinking as the game Tic-Tac-Toe. Sure, common culture might reference terms within the game such as "Cats game" or some such, but as a work of art it communicates nothing to the player, and most if not all attempts to claim the opposite are heavily contrived and require incredibly deep thought that few who've played the game have. For example, you might that combined with the communist Russian background of the author, the game is a subtle commentary on how capitalism requires its people to work harder and harder to compete, and your ultimate demise will be an inevitable inability to match pace with the status quo. I'm sure you can do better though.
I must repeat that I deeply appreciate Tetris, and have spent many an hour on similar games like Crack-Attack (an open source openGL variation on Tetris-Attack), and plenty of other games. But Tetris does not appear to be an artistic expression of anything other than Asperger's Syndrome.
Submitting phony nonsense articles to postmodern and feminist journals to "expose" may have no business in an academic setting, but it's been done and met with some degree of praise. Furthermore, I can think of no reasonable motive other than intolerance and hatred. Finally, it's difficult to seperate one's self from their ideas. Hardly anyone comes up with a hypothesis, gets funding to test it, tests it, and decides the hypothesis is wrong when the experiment fails. Animosity becomes a key motivator for scientific inquiry, as an attack on one's ideas is nearly equivilant to an attack on oneself ('They're my ideas, might as well be my children'). Dispute is healthy, and it comes with some degree of internal sentiment exactly as expressed by the professor. His mistake, then, was twofold: 1) publicly declaring his sentiment and 2) cancelling the class.
The instructor in question is closer to offfering a class "debunking computational physics" in an experimental physics department. Two wildly differing opinions on a subject both equally deserving of the title physics.
And you certainly can't wave your arms and yell "ID is the end of science in America!" when by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism, whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability, and teaching both implicitly and explicitly that all "so-called facts," science included, are subjective social constructions with no true validity. Where is the outcry?
The outcry came in the form of budget cuts and a lack of respectability outside the walls of their own departments and a few costal elite universities who's primary value is public perception.
The truth is that neither ID nor postmodernism presents a significant threat to scientific inquiry. Biologists will continue to speak in evolutionary terms, and scientific method will still reign as a fundamental process to sceintific inquiry, reguardless of what high school students are taught or what students of literature are learning. The largest threat ID poses is swaying public opinion of basic scientific research funding. NSF funding and other national programs have not yet been targeted by ID proponents, and I think the worst they could do is perhaps steal some grants which might have otherwise gone to evolutionists. This is something I'm willing to live with, as long as ID participates in the spirit of scientific inquiry. What's much more likely to be in jeopardy is the local state budget allocation.
As it stands, most of the KBOR institutions recieve 25 percent or less of their funding from the state in which they reside (and falling yearly). If the Board of Education's stance is prevailant among legislators in Topeka, then it's certainly possible that a few unwise Congresspeople will propose and pass something to the affect of not funding evolutionary research. I'm not a genius when it comes to Consitutional law, but I believe the Establishment clause only governs Congress rather than the states. Naturally, such a manuver has unintended consequences. If this happens, you can expect a great flurry of controversy over KBOR's decision to reject state funding outright. Our state schools are already approaching a break even point where the money we receive by satifying Topeka beurocrats is outweighed by the costs of satisfying them, even without additional "help" from Congress. Even if they do this, they're only accellerating the inevitable: western kansas is allergic to taxes and the state income as a whole is declining. It's always possible that lowering taxes can yield higher income, but that would require a massive reprioritization in Kansas.
As an amusing side effect of going private, there stands a good chance that the postmodernists would be cut from the schools entirely, as a matter of costs versus income. (Un?)Fortunately, I suspect most of this Intelligent Design crisis is manufactured in the interests of electability rather than solving a fundamental problem in our society. That is, the Board of Education is seen as a springboard into higher political office, and as such you see people doing silly political manuvers that will have unintended consequences well after they've left office for greener pastures.
Strangely, I seem to recall the ps2's first Christmas as easily being within the six month time frame. I also recall seeing a literal wall of ps's stocked at the local Best Buy. Perhaps they kept them in stock by raising prices 50 to 100 dollars over retail?
The TV series Stand-Alone Complex appears to have done a good job of caging Shirow. No overt intellectual penis waving, less lesbian sex fan service, and a plot that makes sense most of the time. By contrast, the second movie is far more like the manga, what with an entire conversation consisting of people quoting books at one another.
Well, whatever ADV has done with EVA, they need to forward the corrected version to cartoon network asap, cuz it's nearly unwatchable. Given the incestuous relationship between broadcasts and the sales of the product, you'd expect them to put their best foot forward here. Hell, I've seen fansubs of it more watchable despite being lower quality.
The last thing I want in a relationship is to sleep on the couch because I abuse the bananna peel in Mario Kart too much. They let you drag it along for a reason, damnit!
Or something perhaps a bit less sexist; that's all I could come with on short notice. Point is, the operating system is fine and dandy for general purpose computing, and has lots of tweaks, but at the end of the day the general purpose OS must to generalize it's algorithms for ALL programs by definition, wheras the application itself knows best which parts of its working set are nessecary and which are trivial.
Exokernels take this concept to the extreme and let applications decide where to allocate their resources and whatnot, while the OS simply "securely multiplexes hardware." I have yet to discover how this can possibly work safely, but my gut intuition is that even if this does work, most application developers aren't prepared to take on the burden traditionally handled by the OS.
But even without having super duper access to resource allocation primitives, you can still make some sensible choices. For example, a tradeoff between CPU cycles and memory utilization like compressing large images. If your computer consistantly triggers underclocking because it's not used much, it might make sense to compress images and free up more space for other applications or more file cache.
There's another consideration with multiplayer games: matchups. I'm not certain why it takes so long to find a match online-- I suspect it has to do with finding groups of people with acceptable latencies to one another. I haven't gone to the trouble of sniffing the network for connections yet, but I've heard that everyone connects directly to one another, meaning that there are several latencies and synchronization is going to be a bigger bitch as that max latency rises.
Given this footwork of guessing, imagine how long it would take to match up 8 players. It's already bad enough at 4. I hope the times improve as more players looking.
There's also some battle mode maps. I'm a bit dissapointed they didn't include any classic battle maps from the original. It was always neat to see if you could get a red shell to orbit another player in the first. The biggest map is probably the most appropriate for this. Fortunately that had the insight to bring back block fort, the bestest map ever.
Because its made of several parts intended for space grade usage and cost millions of dollars. Nobody wants to face owing the space research center their money back because their part failed first, so they set a number as a minimum. Clearly they aimed too low, although I've heard unfounded assertions that the 90 day target was because it was easier to budget the manpower that way.
Is that publishers are chiefly successful as they are because developer studios are equally bad at business. The great majority of developer studios exist as a team of developers, rather than a game development company, and the skills nessecary for a development team to write new code from scratch appear to be seperate from the skills nessecary to keep such a team in the black. Assembly code does not negotiate, and royalty payments are notoriously difficult to "profile."
Notably absent from the Bill of Rights: the ability to prevent the sony rootkit disaster from happening. It's hardly a "creative dispute," and might fall under means of distribution, but the author appears to mean the medium such as internet, CDs in a box at retail, or a cell phone, rather than any copy protections. Of course, the rootkit disaster has already happened; gamers have just gotten used to the notion that it's okay to let a networked game operate in full Administator mode, for better or for worse. For products specifically designed for games and games alone, such as the Nintendo DS, this is largely irrelevant.
The question is, how do developers negotiate these "rights"? At the moment there's scant few with the money and know-how to successfully enter the business of publishing. With so few publishers (growing smaller every day) and so many development studios aiming for their attention, it's difficult to get even something as trivial as the right to buy your property back after five years when any given publisher knows that their rivals don't routinely offer such a provision. Internet distribution is okay for PC, but every day it seems as though PC is becoming less and less relevant (thanks, X-Box!), and advertising such a product is nebulus at best.
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If you were a 3rd party looking to develop games for the 360, then a sell out is not what you're looking for. What you want to see is everyone who wants an X-Box gets one as soon as possible, so your game has more people to sell to. A shortage means people who might have bought your game won't, as they have nothing to play it on. Or to look at it from the other side, if you have a game idea and you want to make a lot of money on it, you'll bring it to all the platforms it makes sense to. Because there's many tradeoffs in designing a multi-platform game, the payoff better be pretty big to justify a multiplatform launch. Since the payoff is limited by the number of games you can sell, a larger userbase (especially one that doesn't own multiple platforms) will move the decision towards including your platform, and if you get big enough, its possible that it makes sense to release for a single architecture -- you can tweak the models, texture resolutions etc to match the system in ways that are hard to justify with a multiplatform launch (hence the "looks like ps2" syndrome).
I really don't care either way so I haven't investigated the truth behind the shortage theory. But if MS really cares about "Developers" then they'd better be telling the truth somewhere about the number of 360's in people's hands and the number of hands left looking for them, or developers will look elsewhere.
Then I suppose Zeitgeist was never an appropriate word, as it doesn't exist. I think the two terms are generally interchangable, unless you want to claim that Zeitgeist is somehow universal worldwide.
Maybe I'm crazy, but my family does the same thing FOR A REASON. We have a fairly large HDTV in the basement. Cable box connected to it. We paid comcast their blood money for access to HDTV channels, and what do we find? The local station's hdtv feeds are just the same damn resolution, just now centered in the middle of the screen.
Now maybe I just missed all the programming that utilized the full resolution of HDTV. But since I don't want to watch this tiny HDTV BS, I'm waiting till all the shows are broadcast in HDTV SENSIBLY.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future. They also will face a very likely suit in court for defrauding investors. In Japan, it seems businessmen apologize for everything, yet very little gets fixed. I guess I'd understand the culture more if I lived there for long enough, but it seems a bit strange to me.
Don't take this as a defense of American corporate ethos, or a criticism of Japanese ones, though. The two countries simply have different Zeitgeists. For whatever reasons the massive conglomerates that dominate Japan are never upset by newer competition. What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Of course, the master's response to the effervescent personality of the nearly-parted is to respond, "Why, yes, it's GREAT that you'll be gone so soon! I only wish we could make it faster!"
;)
That should at least deflate their sails a bit
He didn't. He specifically said that when a patent is disputed, ie it might get overturned, would be the Big Time Money.
What I really want to see is a driver for DVI or VGA. And maybe some more RAM. But moore's law means in a few years that extra memory is practically a given. Maybe I should just buy a mac mini instead =/
It's a spoof, but what's the meaning behind it? If it's a parody of the "new technology is bad" idea (of which"frames are bad" is a member), then the article implies that browsers and usage evolve over time, and we should expect frames to see widespread use. Instead most websites have abandoned the usage of frames, and instead rely on well thought out tables and div sections. In fact, the only webpage I can recall that I've used that had frames in the last year is the Java API javadocs. And that one at least has a NOFRAMES option that's nearly as useful. So that meaning can't be it. Is it spoofing the entire meaningless debate of AJAX or not? I can't tell =(
Ultimately, if we accept that browsers and markup languages evolve together over time, then I think its safe to say that an idealized version of web page languages of the future will look like LISP, perhaps with less parens and more angle brackets.
The stock market isn't rooted in the idea that a company needs capital to continue growing. Some people have used that to rationalize the IPO market, but that's also not quite true. The stock market is rooted in a need to make the ownership of a company more liquid. This lets initial investors divest easily, for example. In fact, very few companies actually pursue new stock issues to gain more capital. Most prefer to pursue a loan and finance growth that way. If anything, investment itself is rooted in the idea that you need capital to enact ideas.
Of course, anything the record companies do is a self-preserving act. I don't expect to see them do anything with the intent of killing their company any time soon: there's no incentive, either for investors or for management. Nobody gets fat bonuses for dissolving a company's assests and returning them to investors. And investors can't delay taxes easily on such a dividend or return of capital. So almost every publicly traded company lives on as a going concern, even if going into bankruptcy.
The most important thing record companies can do to survive is focus on what they know how to do better than anyone else: promoting and recording. Distribution is waning and will eventually need to be addressed, likely by outsourcing to a music market like Apple. Record promoters know the radio circuits better than most new-comers. And we've seen the incestuous relationship between what stations play and what the public buys, so that should probably continue to be a focus of the company. Recording studios and producers are another thing that the company provides expertise in, and I don't see the need for this refuted in your post: recording equipment is expensive, and your average musician doesn't have the skills or time to negotiate a good rate on time. Websites can do marketing, but websites aren't people. I'd be scared to see the effectiveness your average musician would do for designing a website intended to get people to buy their music.
Remember: the music Apple or whoever sells has to come from somewhere. Recording isn't cheap, and every decent artist I've ever known was starving!
I definately agree that the author makes several leaps to bad conclusions. I suspect "his friend" was merely himself in the example given. The professor was likely mostly excited that someone brought up an alternative solution, based on the events of the Pol Pot and Papa Doc, even if it was an attempt at trolling the exercise (death camps a good idea? you've pretty much nailed the problems with it) . The exercise is but one example of that. Near the end, he makes the statement "I believe humans have a deep longing for authority, to possess it or to obey it." Yet his entire paper focuses on the possession of power, not the deeply rooted instinct to obey authority. Probably because it doesn't exist. Violence isn't how the fascist state solves fundamentally unresolved conflicts; its how every state resolves conflict. The process for approving or denying the use of force may be different in a fascist state than a democratic one, but we can come up with examples of all sorts of states applying violence to completely resolve a conflict.
In fact, the best games available today are team based games. Counterstrike, day of defeat, UT2k4 (the better variants, anyways), CTF, Battlefield. Here in the multiplayer conflict space, we can observe human nature in action. Of course at a fundamental level these games are still not perfect; if one team "wins" the other "loses." But here, in the team based combat world, you have a common goal, and different ideas of how to accomplish them. To take battlefield 2, you've got lone wolf snipers, squads following together, commanders of all sorts. Which are the most popular servers? Those that are highly policed by a few authortarian admins, or those that employ democratic administrative methods? I believe people will gravitate towards servers whose policies best suit their interests. Of course this ease of immigration is found nowhere else in reality, but it still serves to highlight the human nature of voting with your feet.
Essentially, this man is overreaching both his own talents and reality. Which is why I hardly ever read fan 'zines. If you've got a great idea about games, I'd much rather see you implement it than write about it.
I think there are a great number of people out there capable of equalling Ebert's film criticisms. There's plenty of such who are also good enough writers to form the online magazine The Escapist.
I just really don't think that a video game nessecarily qualifies as "Art" in as much as the word art has any meaning. Tetris is simply a puzzle with time as a dimension, and a time constraint. This isn't to say that games can't be art, but that Tetris in my opinion, qualifies as an excellent game that isn't art. Tetris is simply too abstract to be art. Tic-Tac-Toe: boring game, not art. Deus Ex: good game, decent art. Rez: bad game, decent art. Nethack: decent game, bad art.
Artistry is simply orthoganal to the quality of game. Think of it this way: if I place an image of the Mona Lisa in a game, is the game now art? What if I place an image of the Mona Lisa with a mustache in the game instead? Once the term art comes to include more than just a visual expression, the meaning must dratistically change to acommodate what we consider art these days: writing, music, and film.
Essentially Ebery is right for the wrong reasons. Most games aren't art. Most of the games he thinks are art aren't art. Most of the people who tell us that games are stories don't understand games, or at least aren't talented enough to come up with something truly better than what we have today. Ebert is wrong that authorial control is lost within a game. A game designer can still have tragic things happen to the player character without a loss of play (though few have taken the efforts to do so). A game designer could offer a series of decisions to the player while still maintaining the illusion of a single authorial control. Game storylines are best represented with a decision 'tree.' Most story lines either look like a line or at least have several joining edges where the plot forks left and right but either way eventually meets up with the other. Games have a far greater potential for artistic expression that has thus far remained untapped.
It wouldn't be difficult to make a game that qualifies as both a good game and good art. The question then is economic; whether the effort to make good art is rewarded. For Square, you might say they have been. For most PC games, I'd say the answer is no.
Certainly a beautiful creation in some way is a reflection on the human condition?
PC games have been using higher resolution for years and rarely need multiple DVDs. I haven't really paid attention to how the 360 compares to a PC, but if they're about on par, then something's amiss.
./ readers have likely seen the .kkreiger game that fits in like 96K. This is of course an extreme tradeoff while you wait for the game to recreate all its textures from high level combinations to bitmaps. But texture compression is nothing new and is often seen in 3d hardware. Again, I haven't dug into the 360, but I would imagine there's one or two texture compression options available and build into the hardware. Either the company isnt using them, or the compression isn't enough.
Of course, if the 360 boasts larger texture capabilities, or more polys, that's potentially more texture sizes and more geometry data to store. It's also possible that console games include more full motion video cutscenes than a PC game, which 360 owners would naturally prefer at HiDef resolutions.
Naturally there is a compression tradeoff between space and time. By now many
When you speak of great dramatists, poets, composers and filmmakers etc, you speak of literature and art. Things of high social impact.
While Tetris is a fine game, and perhaps one of the best we've ever witnessed, it has nothing to say. It has as much impact on culture and thinking as the game Tic-Tac-Toe. Sure, common culture might reference terms within the game such as "Cats game" or some such, but as a work of art it communicates nothing to the player, and most if not all attempts to claim the opposite are heavily contrived and require incredibly deep thought that few who've played the game have. For example, you might that combined with the communist Russian background of the author, the game is a subtle commentary on how capitalism requires its people to work harder and harder to compete, and your ultimate demise will be an inevitable inability to match pace with the status quo. I'm sure you can do better though.
I must repeat that I deeply appreciate Tetris, and have spent many an hour on similar games like Crack-Attack (an open source openGL variation on Tetris-Attack), and plenty of other games. But Tetris does not appear to be an artistic expression of anything other than Asperger's Syndrome.
Submitting phony nonsense articles to postmodern and feminist journals to "expose" may have no business in an academic setting, but it's been done and met with some degree of praise. Furthermore, I can think of no reasonable motive other than intolerance and hatred. Finally, it's difficult to seperate one's self from their ideas. Hardly anyone comes up with a hypothesis, gets funding to test it, tests it, and decides the hypothesis is wrong when the experiment fails. Animosity becomes a key motivator for scientific inquiry, as an attack on one's ideas is nearly equivilant to an attack on oneself ('They're my ideas, might as well be my children'). Dispute is healthy, and it comes with some degree of internal sentiment exactly as expressed by the professor. His mistake, then, was twofold: 1) publicly declaring his sentiment and 2) cancelling the class.
The instructor in question is closer to offfering a class "debunking computational physics" in an experimental physics department. Two wildly differing opinions on a subject both equally deserving of the title physics.
And you certainly can't wave your arms and yell "ID is the end of science in America!" when by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism, whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability, and teaching both implicitly and explicitly that all "so-called facts," science included, are subjective social constructions with no true validity. Where is the outcry?
The outcry came in the form of budget cuts and a lack of respectability outside the walls of their own departments and a few costal elite universities who's primary value is public perception.
The truth is that neither ID nor postmodernism presents a significant threat to scientific inquiry. Biologists will continue to speak in evolutionary terms, and scientific method will still reign as a fundamental process to sceintific inquiry, reguardless of what high school students are taught or what students of literature are learning. The largest threat ID poses is swaying public opinion of basic scientific research funding. NSF funding and other national programs have not yet been targeted by ID proponents, and I think the worst they could do is perhaps steal some grants which might have otherwise gone to evolutionists. This is something I'm willing to live with, as long as ID participates in the spirit of scientific inquiry. What's much more likely to be in jeopardy is the local state budget allocation.
As it stands, most of the KBOR institutions recieve 25 percent or less of their funding from the state in which they reside (and falling yearly). If the Board of Education's stance is prevailant among legislators in Topeka, then it's certainly possible that a few unwise Congresspeople will propose and pass something to the affect of not funding evolutionary research. I'm not a genius when it comes to Consitutional law, but I believe the Establishment clause only governs Congress rather than the states. Naturally, such a manuver has unintended consequences. If this happens, you can expect a great flurry of controversy over KBOR's decision to reject state funding outright. Our state schools are already approaching a break even point where the money we receive by satifying Topeka beurocrats is outweighed by the costs of satisfying them, even without additional "help" from Congress. Even if they do this, they're only accellerating the inevitable: western kansas is allergic to taxes and the state income as a whole is declining. It's always possible that lowering taxes can yield higher income, but that would require a massive reprioritization in Kansas.
As an amusing side effect of going private, there stands a good chance that the postmodernists would be cut from the schools entirely, as a matter of costs versus income. (Un?)Fortunately, I suspect most of this Intelligent Design crisis is manufactured in the interests of electability rather than solving a fundamental problem in our society. That is, the Board of Education is seen as a springboard into higher political office, and as such you see people doing silly political manuvers that will have unintended consequences well after they've left office for greener pastures.
Strangely, I seem to recall the ps2's first Christmas as easily being within the six month time frame. I also recall seeing a literal wall of ps's stocked at the local Best Buy. Perhaps they kept them in stock by raising prices 50 to 100 dollars over retail?
The TV series Stand-Alone Complex appears to have done a good job of caging Shirow. No overt intellectual penis waving, less lesbian sex fan service, and a plot that makes sense most of the time. By contrast, the second movie is far more like the manga, what with an entire conversation consisting of people quoting books at one another.
Well, whatever ADV has done with EVA, they need to forward the corrected version to cartoon network asap, cuz it's nearly unwatchable. Given the incestuous relationship between broadcasts and the sales of the product, you'd expect them to put their best foot forward here. Hell, I've seen fansubs of it more watchable despite being lower quality.
The last thing I want in a relationship is to sleep on the couch because I abuse the bananna peel in Mario Kart too much. They let you drag it along for a reason, damnit!
Or something perhaps a bit less sexist; that's all I could come with on short notice. Point is, the operating system is fine and dandy for general purpose computing, and has lots of tweaks, but at the end of the day the general purpose OS must to generalize it's algorithms for ALL programs by definition, wheras the application itself knows best which parts of its working set are nessecary and which are trivial.
Exokernels take this concept to the extreme and let applications decide where to allocate their resources and whatnot, while the OS simply "securely multiplexes hardware." I have yet to discover how this can possibly work safely, but my gut intuition is that even if this does work, most application developers aren't prepared to take on the burden traditionally handled by the OS.
But even without having super duper access to resource allocation primitives, you can still make some sensible choices. For example, a tradeoff between CPU cycles and memory utilization like compressing large images. If your computer consistantly triggers underclocking because it's not used much, it might make sense to compress images and free up more space for other applications or more file cache.
There's another consideration with multiplayer games: matchups. I'm not certain why it takes so long to find a match online-- I suspect it has to do with finding groups of people with acceptable latencies to one another. I haven't gone to the trouble of sniffing the network for connections yet, but I've heard that everyone connects directly to one another, meaning that there are several latencies and synchronization is going to be a bigger bitch as that max latency rises.
Given this footwork of guessing, imagine how long it would take to match up 8 players. It's already bad enough at 4. I hope the times improve as more players looking.
There's also some battle mode maps. I'm a bit dissapointed they didn't include any classic battle maps from the original. It was always neat to see if you could get a red shell to orbit another player in the first. The biggest map is probably the most appropriate for this. Fortunately that had the insight to bring back block fort, the bestest map ever.
Because its made of several parts intended for space grade usage and cost millions of dollars. Nobody wants to face owing the space research center their money back because their part failed first, so they set a number as a minimum. Clearly they aimed too low, although I've heard unfounded assertions that the 90 day target was because it was easier to budget the manpower that way.
Is that publishers are chiefly successful as they are because developer studios are equally bad at business. The great majority of developer studios exist as a team of developers, rather than a game development company, and the skills nessecary for a development team to write new code from scratch appear to be seperate from the skills nessecary to keep such a team in the black. Assembly code does not negotiate, and royalty payments are notoriously difficult to "profile."
Notably absent from the Bill of Rights: the ability to prevent the sony rootkit disaster from happening. It's hardly a "creative dispute," and might fall under means of distribution, but the author appears to mean the medium such as internet, CDs in a box at retail, or a cell phone, rather than any copy protections. Of course, the rootkit disaster has already happened; gamers have just gotten used to the notion that it's okay to let a networked game operate in full Administator mode, for better or for worse. For products specifically designed for games and games alone, such as the Nintendo DS, this is largely irrelevant.
The question is, how do developers negotiate these "rights"? At the moment there's scant few with the money and know-how to successfully enter the business of publishing. With so few publishers (growing smaller every day) and so many development studios aiming for their attention, it's difficult to get even something as trivial as the right to buy your property back after five years when any given publisher knows that their rivals don't routinely offer such a provision. Internet distribution is okay for PC, but every day it seems as though PC is becoming less and less relevant (thanks, X-Box!), and advertising such a product is nebulus at best.