If science fiction/fantasy has taught me anything, it's that cybernetic marines are AWESOME! Especially if there are any space demons nearby that need killing.
This doesn't even BEGIN to cover additional layers of deception and intrigue that open up. What about framing someone you want to hurt by taking some clean pictures of someone you hate, photoshopping in some alcoholic beverages? Create a new myspace or facebook with the said doctored photos of the person you're framing, whip up an accurate-enough profile of the real life person, and wait. Or go ahead and anonymously tip off the administrators to the new page you created. The owner doesn't even know about their doppelganger until it's too late!
"Well student Jones, I have hear some _picture evidence_ with *gasp* Alcohol in them. Enjoy your suspension from the football team and the corresponding loss of scholarships and college degrees and a good life."
"But... that isn't even my Facebook page! That isn't me in those pictures... I... well... I mean it is but those drinks weren't really there!"
Are the school principals technical enough to do digital image forensics? Is there even an appeals process? If you were falsely accused, would you have ANY way to clear your name? Is there even a "trial" or do they simply hit Print and go directly to the sentencing, life-ruining judgements against these kids?
I'll grant none of the kids involved this time claimed they were falsely accused, but it would be SO easy for tech-savvy geeks to frame up their enemies.
Ok, but when OLPC asked "Assuming you aren't saying you own the entire idea of a multi-language keyboard, which parts of your particular keyboard design are you even saying we stole from you?"
They didn't answer but they still want $20 million dollars.
The article describes Portal's mechanic as something never before seen. But Mario was jumping down warp pipes 20 years ago, and Pac * Man has a warp on one side that comes out on the other.
Portal is very original, sure, but the concept of warping around isn't completely inprecedented, in fact it's been pretty common in video games!
I don't know that games are being chosen for their value at being "highly effective murder trainers", they're being chosen because they're what many potential recruits are already interested in. The Army doesn't needs games to train recruits to use lethal force- but teenagers already interested in war games might find they are interested in the Army also.
When your brain doesn't have quite as much high-level conceptualization, optimizing for memorizing simpler patterns is probably a little easier. The gut reaction from this story is "OMG chimps are smarter than people!!!"
But the same human mind that isn't quite as good at memorizing sequences can easily do things that the chimps (or computers or pidgeons) can't, for example paraphrase in their own words the story of Goldilocks and Three Bears. I'm curious if the pidgeons (which are "programmable" in a lot of ways, but with presumably even less complex thought overhead than chimps) are even better at being programmed at this numbers-memorization technique than the chimps.
Given the increasing rates of obesity, I'd say the connection between sitting around playing games more and becoming more overweight is at least as important as the supposed link between games and violence.
In theory, my favorite game to play on the job is Miss Management. It's a game about people working in an office space- and your objective on some stages is to help your employees get in a certain amount of video game time in during working hours!
In practice I don't play a damn thing at work because I work for the Navy and it's a lawful order not to play any games at work. And we're at the same base the NSA is at here so I know they ARE watching.
My brother and I could beat Battletoads for the old NES. As if that weren't enough, we could beat it beat it playing straight through the twelve levels (ie, not warping.) On top of that, we did in two-player mode- ie, if one person failed, we both failed. Well, up until the second to last level that is. (The game cartridge has a bug on the clinger-winger stage where if you are playing two-player, player two loses control.) Looking back, I honestly can't believe we ever did that.
Battletoads starts out survivable and fun on stages one and two. Then on stage three, the speed bikes in the Turbo Tunnel, is as far as I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people will ever get. Walls come at you at maybe 60 miles per hour and you have to twitch your way around them. You have maybe a second of lead time.
Ice Cave- Slide around dangerous spikes Water Surfing- Surf around logs, beat very large and dangerous boss who can flatten you in one hit Snake Cave- Jump between spikes on giant metal snakes, finding difficult paths through Jets- Fly between tiny holes in the fire Tunnels- swim and jump through more dangerous spikes Rat Race- Race a rat downwards between girders to a bomb at the bottom. If he gets there first you die. Clinger Wingers- Suction cup unicycles. Outrun a deadly ying yang. If you twitch a corner just right you gain.1 seconds. Twisty Tower- a rotating 360 degree tower. To fall is to die. Climb to the top and defeat the Dark Queen.
I couldn't beat Battletoads today except in an emulator with Quicksave and Quickload. I have NO idea how we did twelve stages back to back where the slightest wrong twitch meant death. It reminds me of doing twelve complicated, difficult and dangerous circus tricks with no net, in game terms anyway.
I, for one, want the highly skilled and intelligent people to move to America. Every time increasingly strict immigration laws turn away someone with valuable skills and intelligence, we lose what they could have added to our country.
We pay an obscene amount of money for the content, and then pay again in eyeballs for advertising. Anybody feeling screwed yet?
Yeah, when I'm moving a platoon of a commandos through a city street, seeing a billboard for Coca-Cola painted the side of building in the background really ruins my immersion and makes me feel used./eyeroll Everyone knows that the real world has no advertising! I demand that games accurately recreate the real world in this regards.
Seriously though, giving the developers more cash in their pocket so they can afford to develop the games right, so long as the in-game advertising absolutely doesn't jump down my throat, is fine with me.
World of Warcraft is many ways boring and repetitive- but apparently that makes it tractable and enjoyable to, I dunno, 7 million players.
The other thing is- the game the article writer has in mind, where a new completely fresh war is launched every month with loads of content, may simply be beyond the limits of what is realistically possible in terms of human productivity. How many MMORPGs have had sweeping story arcs and fresh, dynamic stories? If they exist, why aren't they more popular, more recognized, and more successful than WoW?
Apparently it's really hard work to push out fresh content that doesn't break servers. If it were easy to make dynamic MMORPG storylines, I imagine companies less powerful than Blizzard would be doing it on a regular basis. If a "powerful" company like Blizzard only trusts themselves to push out quests with a limited scope and keep a mostly static world running, perhaps we can use that as a clue that it is difficult to push beyond such a stable world.
While details about when vary between different predictions, the theory of peak oil (and it applies to peak X where X is any extracted, non-renewable resource) is simply that at some point a maximum rate of production will be reached and after that never exceeded.
So, to put this into Starcraft terms we can all understand, if there are exactly 8 Vespene Gas vents on the map, at some a player might put mines on all eight of them. So for them, Peak Gas would be 64 units of gas per worker tick.
It's safe to say that if they are Protoss, they will have time to launch carriers before this Vespene Gas "production peak" occurs.
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."
It turns out the actual way to advertise a five-bladed razor is not the above slogans, but instead with visuals of "scientists" in white lab coats putting red and blue power cores into some kind of linear accelerator. After the torrents of awesome red and blue energy slam into each other they bring up the logo of Gillette Fusion. Apparently this is the most effective way of advertising a 5-bladed razor given today's marketing paradigms.
When I register a game from say, publisher Electronic Arts, they ask me "How did you hear about this game?"
A-Magazine B-Television C-Friend D-Saw it in a games store etc
They never ask E-I played the warez version and liked it enough to buy it. If they're not asking about that form of "demo-ing" a game, they'll never be able take into account people who want to try before they buy with the cracked version.
The one thing I can think of that could, in theory, even remotely justify our existence here is that we could maybe develop mass space travel and terraforming, and carry our ecosystems into space.
With no sentient life, Earth's ecosystems will thrive another, oh I dunno, ten billion (?) years or so, then the planet will overheat as the sun expands. IF humans or other post-human sentiences can survive even longer than that, and expand into space, maybe we could keep Earth's ecosystems alive even after Terra herself boils over. If we managed to terraform Mars, our little spaceships would be sort of like the spores of interplanetary reproduction, because we'd probably try to bring as complete an ecosystem as possible with us. Of course, we'd have to live a lot more sustainably to last even.1billion years without causing massive carbon-based global warming, destruction of biodiversity (burning down rainforests for corn farms), and releasing other nuclear, chemical, biological, and nanotechnological poisons into the biosphere. We'd have to learn to live a LOT more sustainably than we do to exist on the "billions" time scale.
But this kind of thing shows that if "Gaia" were consciously tolerating our presence here, the risk/reward ratio isn't TOO bad. If we can't get our act together? Well, we go extinct in well under a million years, the planet spends a few million more undoing our mess, not too bad in the long term view of things. Suppose we somehow learn NOT to completely strip mine everything to death and sustainably expand into space. (Space elevators powered by renewable energy and such.) If we manage to turn Mars green, that's two Gaias instead of one. Twice the survivability against big meteors hitting one of the two planets and causing massive biological damage. If we terraform a third planet outside the Sol system then from the biological security standpoint the gamble was well worth the polluting naughtiness of our current industrial sentience.
If all we're going to do with hydrocarbon fuels is drive our SUVs to the mall, then we really are just wasting resources. If we're going to use hydrocarbons to build an infrastructure that can later build better renewable energy sources and space travel, then maybe that might justify our resource usage.
I've been one of those guys with the orange shirts and the headsets who helps people out and find where they need to be and all that. We're all volunteers who work in exchange for a ticket to the show when we're not on duty. Our numbers have been increasing every year, up to 220 in 2006. I think it's safe to say CMP considers the ticket-for-work trade a good investment for the orange shirts.
With this increase in show floor and conference rooms, I think it's safe to say the amount of orange shirts is going to increase again this year. It's funny that I'm seeing one of my side moonlighting jobs get harder on slashdot first. "Hey guys, you've got three times as many rooms to cover in 2007."/jawdrop
If the theory behidn this works, then maybe companies will weed out irresponsible candidates and grow stronger.
On the other hand, if they weed out otherwise good candidates because they look irresponsible (but aren't really), then I guess companies are just hurting themselves and will weaken.
$15 a month is about $.50 cents a day. That's like putting two quarters in and then playing for hours. By that reasoning, coin-op arcade machines are the real rip-off by comparison. Put two quarters in those and play for one or two minutes? Movies in theaters, even rental movies, buying books from Amazon and then reading them, going to an amusement park, drinking in a bar, going to a strip joint... almost no other form of entertainment you can pay for is as cheap as subscription-based MMOs. Even buying a game off the shelf, if it's $40 and it entertains you for 40 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. If WoW entertains you for "only" two hours a day (and it goes FAR beyond that for many), you're paying only $.25/hr for entertainment, or one fourth the price of retail stand-alone computer games.
The only game-related alternative that comes to mind at the moment that is cheaper is buying a bargain bin classic like Master of Orion 2 for $5 and playing that for many excellent hours. But bargain bin prices aren't sustainable for developers, while MMO subscription models can rake in truckloads of money or at least break even for smaller titles and ARE sustainable.
Blizzard doesn't have shades of gray- it just has the illusion it does. Most of the decisions are bone-crunchingly simple. Bowazon or Javazon? Ice mage or fire mage? But it FEELS like there are enough choices to tempt people (much stupider than yourself) into doing something besides one of the two effective builds.
What would TRUE customization be? Diablo2 and World of Warcraft both let your characters choose from three pages custom-built talent trees per class. Imagine if you could make a custom character with three pages from ANY of the classes. Combine the necromancer's skeleton page, the druid's wolf/bear summoning page, and the assasin's shadow summoning page to make a "You and What Army?!" general. Or in WoW, combine the paladin's protection tree page with the warrior's protection page and a hunter's survival talents to make the character that can't reasonbly be killed.
Of course Blizzard doesn't allow that level of customizability. It would be a nightmare to playtest all the interactions and stop overpowered strategies. Blizzard allows enough multiple choice questions that players FEEL novel while still feeling the safety of using tried-and-true "cookie-cutter" builds identical to tens of thousands of other people. ("Combat Dagger - 15/31/5- Most experienced rogues agree this is the #1 raid dps build. White damage boosted by Slice and Dice provides exceptional sustained damage. If you want to be #1 on the damage meter, this is the build for you." http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=11961735&sid=1)
There's something soothing about knowing you can be the exact same well tested, well understood build as thousands of other rogues and really top the damage meters! Blizzard's tests are multiple choice, not essay questions, and a lot of people like it that way.
I'm worried the movie industry might be losing its "spark". Most of the movies are derivative and pigeon-holed into cookie-cutter genres such as comedy, action, horror, and romance. Sure, there are a few interesting indie or sleeper hits, but they don't get enough attention for my tastes. Yes, within moments the movie industry will be no more.
In a game like Diablo2, the fun is in earning the levels. Have you ever used a trainer just to hack your character to level 99 with the best items? It's boring to start out with an invincible character like that, but the people who enjoyed Diablo2 (and there were millions) found it fun to "earn" their way to higher levels.
Slashdot Mirror
If science fiction/fantasy has taught me anything, it's that cybernetic marines are AWESOME! Especially if there are any space demons nearby that need killing.
This doesn't even BEGIN to cover additional layers of deception and intrigue that open up. What about framing someone you want to hurt by taking some clean pictures of someone you hate, photoshopping in some alcoholic beverages? Create a new myspace or facebook with the said doctored photos of the person you're framing, whip up an accurate-enough profile of the real life person, and wait. Or go ahead and anonymously tip off the administrators to the new page you created. The owner doesn't even know about their doppelganger until it's too late!
... well... I mean it is but those drinks weren't really there!"
"Well student Jones, I have hear some _picture evidence_ with *gasp* Alcohol in them. Enjoy your suspension from the football team and the corresponding loss of scholarships and college degrees and a good life."
"But... that isn't even my Facebook page! That isn't me in those pictures... I
Are the school principals technical enough to do digital image forensics? Is there even an appeals process? If you were falsely accused, would you have ANY way to clear your name? Is there even a "trial" or do they simply hit Print and go directly to the sentencing, life-ruining judgements against these kids?
I'll grant none of the kids involved this time claimed they were falsely accused, but it would be SO easy for tech-savvy geeks to frame up their enemies.
Ok, but when OLPC asked "Assuming you aren't saying you own the entire idea of a multi-language keyboard, which parts of your particular keyboard design are you even saying we stole from you?"
They didn't answer but they still want $20 million dollars.
The article describes Portal's mechanic as something never before seen. But Mario was jumping down warp pipes 20 years ago, and Pac * Man has a warp on one side that comes out on the other.
Portal is very original, sure, but the concept of warping around isn't completely inprecedented, in fact it's been pretty common in video games!
I don't know that games are being chosen for their value at being "highly effective murder trainers", they're being chosen because they're what many potential recruits are already interested in. The Army doesn't needs games to train recruits to use lethal force- but teenagers already interested in war games might find they are interested in the Army also.
When your brain doesn't have quite as much high-level conceptualization, optimizing for memorizing simpler patterns is probably a little easier. The gut reaction from this story is "OMG chimps are smarter than people!!!"
But the same human mind that isn't quite as good at memorizing sequences can easily do things that the chimps (or computers or pidgeons) can't, for example paraphrase in their own words the story of Goldilocks and Three Bears. I'm curious if the pidgeons (which are "programmable" in a lot of ways, but with presumably even less complex thought overhead than chimps) are even better at being programmed at this numbers-memorization technique than the chimps.
I hope it logs when your knight kills the enemy queen in chess games, because that is totally violence against women. In a GAME no less!
Given the increasing rates of obesity, I'd say the connection between sitting around playing games more and becoming more overweight is at least as important as the supposed link between games and violence.
In theory, my favorite game to play on the job is Miss Management. It's a game about people working in an office space- and your objective on some stages is to help your employees get in a certain amount of video game time in during working hours!
In practice I don't play a damn thing at work because I work for the Navy and it's a lawful order not to play any games at work. And we're at the same base the NSA is at here so I know they ARE watching.
(You can play Miss Management at http://www.playfirst.com/game/missmanagement)
My brother and I could beat Battletoads for the old NES. As if that weren't enough, we could beat it beat it playing straight through the twelve levels (ie, not warping.) On top of that, we did in two-player mode- ie, if one person failed, we both failed. Well, up until the second to last level that is. (The game cartridge has a bug on the clinger-winger stage where if you are playing two-player, player two loses control.) Looking back, I honestly can't believe we ever did that.
.1 seconds.
Battletoads starts out survivable and fun on stages one and two. Then on stage three, the speed bikes in the Turbo Tunnel, is as far as I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people will ever get. Walls come at you at maybe 60 miles per hour and you have to twitch your way around them. You have maybe a second of lead time.
Ice Cave- Slide around dangerous spikes
Water Surfing- Surf around logs, beat very large and dangerous boss who can flatten you in one hit
Snake Cave- Jump between spikes on giant metal snakes, finding difficult paths through
Jets- Fly between tiny holes in the fire
Tunnels- swim and jump through more dangerous spikes
Rat Race- Race a rat downwards between girders to a bomb at the bottom. If he gets there first you die.
Clinger Wingers- Suction cup unicycles. Outrun a deadly ying yang. If you twitch a corner just right you gain
Twisty Tower- a rotating 360 degree tower. To fall is to die. Climb to the top and defeat the Dark Queen.
I couldn't beat Battletoads today except in an emulator with Quicksave and Quickload. I have NO idea how we did twelve stages back to back where the slightest wrong twitch meant death. It reminds me of doing twelve complicated, difficult and dangerous circus tricks with no net, in game terms anyway.
Then you tried to actually play the game and found out just how excruciatingly difficult it could be.
Some of the later levels have names like "Nightmare of Human" and "Nightmare of Dolphin".
I, for one, want the highly skilled and intelligent people to move to America. Every time increasingly strict immigration laws turn away someone with valuable skills and intelligence, we lose what they could have added to our country.
We pay an obscene amount of money for the content, and then pay again in eyeballs for advertising. Anybody feeling screwed yet?
/eyeroll Everyone knows that the real world has no advertising! I demand that games accurately recreate the real world in this regards.
Yeah, when I'm moving a platoon of a commandos through a city street, seeing a billboard for Coca-Cola painted the side of building in the background really ruins my immersion and makes me feel used.
Seriously though, giving the developers more cash in their pocket so they can afford to develop the games right, so long as the in-game advertising absolutely doesn't jump down my throat, is fine with me.
World of Warcraft is many ways boring and repetitive- but apparently that makes it tractable and enjoyable to, I dunno, 7 million players.
The other thing is- the game the article writer has in mind, where a new completely fresh war is launched every month with loads of content, may simply be beyond the limits of what is realistically possible in terms of human productivity. How many MMORPGs have had sweeping story arcs and fresh, dynamic stories? If they exist, why aren't they more popular, more recognized, and more successful than WoW?
Apparently it's really hard work to push out fresh content that doesn't break servers. If it were easy to make dynamic MMORPG storylines, I imagine companies less powerful than Blizzard would be doing it on a regular basis. If a "powerful" company like Blizzard only trusts themselves to push out quests with a limited scope and keep a mostly static world running, perhaps we can use that as a clue that it is difficult to push beyond such a stable world.
While details about when vary between different predictions, the theory of peak oil (and it applies to peak X where X is any extracted, non-renewable resource) is simply that at some point a maximum rate of production will be reached and after that never exceeded.
So, to put this into Starcraft terms we can all understand, if there are exactly 8 Vespene Gas vents on the map, at some a player might put mines on all eight of them. So for them, Peak Gas would be 64 units of gas per worker tick.
It's safe to say that if they are Protoss, they will have time to launch carriers before this Vespene Gas "production peak" occurs.
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."
6 194635055&q=gillette+fusion
It turns out the actual way to advertise a five-bladed razor is not the above slogans, but instead with visuals of "scientists" in white lab coats putting red and blue power cores into some kind of linear accelerator. After the torrents of awesome red and blue energy slam into each other they bring up the logo of Gillette Fusion. Apparently this is the most effective way of advertising a 5-bladed razor given today's marketing paradigms.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=676916747
When I register a game from say, publisher Electronic Arts, they ask me "How did you hear about this game?"
A-Magazine
B-Television
C-Friend
D-Saw it in a games store
etc
They never ask E-I played the warez version and liked it enough to buy it. If they're not asking about that form of "demo-ing" a game, they'll never be able take into account people who want to try before they buy with the cracked version.
The one thing I can think of that could, in theory, even remotely justify our existence here is that we could maybe develop mass space travel and terraforming, and carry our ecosystems into space.
.1billion years without causing massive carbon-based global warming, destruction of biodiversity (burning down rainforests for corn farms), and releasing other nuclear, chemical, biological, and nanotechnological poisons into the biosphere. We'd have to learn to live a LOT more sustainably than we do to exist on the "billions" time scale.
With no sentient life, Earth's ecosystems will thrive another, oh I dunno, ten billion (?) years or so, then the planet will overheat as the sun expands. IF humans or other post-human sentiences can survive even longer than that, and expand into space, maybe we could keep Earth's ecosystems alive even after Terra herself boils over. If we managed to terraform Mars, our little spaceships would be sort of like the spores of interplanetary reproduction, because we'd probably try to bring as complete an ecosystem as possible with us. Of course, we'd have to live a lot more sustainably to last even
But this kind of thing shows that if "Gaia" were consciously tolerating our presence here, the risk/reward ratio isn't TOO bad. If we can't get our act together? Well, we go extinct in well under a million years, the planet spends a few million more undoing our mess, not too bad in the long term view of things. Suppose we somehow learn NOT to completely strip mine everything to death and sustainably expand into space. (Space elevators powered by renewable energy and such.) If we manage to turn Mars green, that's two Gaias instead of one. Twice the survivability against big meteors hitting one of the two planets and causing massive biological damage. If we terraform a third planet outside the Sol system then from the biological security standpoint the gamble was well worth the polluting naughtiness of our current industrial sentience.
If all we're going to do with hydrocarbon fuels is drive our SUVs to the mall, then we really are just wasting resources. If we're going to use hydrocarbons to build an infrastructure that can later build better renewable energy sources and space travel, then maybe that might justify our resource usage.
I've been one of those guys with the orange shirts and the headsets who helps people out and find where they need to be and all that. We're all volunteers who work in exchange for a ticket to the show when we're not on duty. Our numbers have been increasing every year, up to 220 in 2006. I think it's safe to say CMP considers the ticket-for-work trade a good investment for the orange shirts.
/jawdrop
With this increase in show floor and conference rooms, I think it's safe to say the amount of orange shirts is going to increase again this year. It's funny that I'm seeing one of my side moonlighting jobs get harder on slashdot first. "Hey guys, you've got three times as many rooms to cover in 2007."
If the theory behidn this works, then maybe companies will weed out irresponsible candidates and grow stronger.
On the other hand, if they weed out otherwise good candidates because they look irresponsible (but aren't really), then I guess companies are just hurting themselves and will weaken.
Seriously, all they have to do is make it about guys in SUPIR armor fighting to unlock the mysteries of the SPACE RINGS and they're good to go.
$15 a month is about $.50 cents a day. That's like putting two quarters in and then playing for hours. By that reasoning, coin-op arcade machines are the real rip-off by comparison. Put two quarters in those and play for one or two minutes? Movies in theaters, even rental movies, buying books from Amazon and then reading them, going to an amusement park, drinking in a bar, going to a strip joint... almost no other form of entertainment you can pay for is as cheap as subscription-based MMOs. Even buying a game off the shelf, if it's $40 and it entertains you for 40 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. If WoW entertains you for "only" two hours a day (and it goes FAR beyond that for many), you're paying only $.25/hr for entertainment, or one fourth the price of retail stand-alone computer games.
The only game-related alternative that comes to mind at the moment that is cheaper is buying a bargain bin classic like Master of Orion 2 for $5 and playing that for many excellent hours. But bargain bin prices aren't sustainable for developers, while MMO subscription models can rake in truckloads of money or at least break even for smaller titles and ARE sustainable.
Blizzard doesn't have shades of gray- it just has the illusion it does. Most of the decisions are bone-crunchingly simple. Bowazon or Javazon? Ice mage or fire mage? But it FEELS like there are enough choices to tempt people (much stupider than yourself) into doing something besides one of the two effective builds.
i cId=11961735&sid=1)
What would TRUE customization be? Diablo2 and World of Warcraft both let your characters choose from three pages custom-built talent trees per class. Imagine if you could make a custom character with three pages from ANY of the classes. Combine the necromancer's skeleton page, the druid's wolf/bear summoning page, and the assasin's shadow summoning page to make a "You and What Army?!" general. Or in WoW, combine the paladin's protection tree page with the warrior's protection page and a hunter's survival talents to make the character that can't reasonbly be killed.
Of course Blizzard doesn't allow that level of customizability. It would be a nightmare to playtest all the interactions and stop overpowered strategies. Blizzard allows enough multiple choice questions that players FEEL novel while still feeling the safety of using tried-and-true "cookie-cutter" builds identical to tens of thousands of other people. ("Combat Dagger - 15/31/5- Most experienced rogues agree this is the #1 raid dps build. White damage boosted by Slice and Dice provides exceptional sustained damage. If you want to be #1 on the damage meter, this is the build for you." http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?top
There's something soothing about knowing you can be the exact same well tested, well understood build as thousands of other rogues and really top the damage meters! Blizzard's tests are multiple choice, not essay questions, and a lot of people like it that way.
I'm worried the movie industry might be losing its "spark". Most of the movies are derivative and pigeon-holed into cookie-cutter genres such as comedy, action, horror, and romance. Sure, there are a few interesting indie or sleeper hits, but they don't get enough attention for my tastes. Yes, within moments the movie industry will be no more.
In a game like Diablo2, the fun is in earning the levels. Have you ever used a trainer just to hack your character to level 99 with the best items? It's boring to start out with an invincible character like that, but the people who enjoyed Diablo2 (and there were millions) found it fun to "earn" their way to higher levels.