One of the scariest things I ever did was play SystemShock2 in the dark... looking back, the graphics to that game weren't even anything special, but the story telling and atmosphere certainly surpassed some movies I've seen.
Some of the classic scary movies, like Hitchcock for example, are black and white films. But what's scary isn't what's happening on the screen, it's what's happening in your mind.
Unlike some MMOs, where all factions can talk to each other, WoW has by design a Language barrier. Horde and Alliance have anything they say translated to a sort of orderly gibberish when "heard" by the other factions. This was done to promote a feeling of togetherness with "your" side and foreign-ness to the "other" side.
Some players would like to pursue the ability to communicate with the other side, possibly via trading in talent points, a Linguistics profession, or perhaps a difficult quest series. Give that the Horde-Alliance rivalry is alrady well understood and entrenched, does Blizzard have any plans to implement the ability for some players to have an interesting experience bridging the language gap? How would it affect your game design of the language barrier to allow a relatively small and motivated percentage of the players act as emissaries by trading other abilities to learn other languages?
PS- What about learning same-side languages at the very least? I'm sick of those snotty night elves gossping right in front of me in Darnassian, me not being able to understand them!
There's aleady an adult arcade, it's called Dave and Buster's. Tons of games, and each one has a switch that turns on a light that summons a Beer Wench (er PC- Alcohol Attendant?) to you. Games and readily available alcohol- a good combination. If Nolan can improve on it, so much the better!
Hi, I'm the Audio Director for Flashbang Studios. We make small web/downloadable games, but we're a teeny tiny studio and budget for an entire game is less than a single voice actor working 8 hours in a studio for $375 dollars. Almost at the garage games level, but my job is to still come up with good audio, somehow.
I can tell you from personal experience that's it's possible to come up with very good quality audio for cheap by tapping the "semi-professional" vein. Not just conscripting your friends, which usually has a very amateur sound, but going a step up in quality. Tapping local college drama departments, theater clubs, even using Craigslist will net you a huge step up from just casting your friends for only a small price increase. Most people will record for just a few dozen dollars and a free copy of the game to show their spouse/kids.
In our most recently released Flashbang game, Glow Worm, I asked a friend of the family who is an opera professor if he would be the voice of our magician mascot, and he was totally willing. I paid him $40 in Domino's Pizza coupons and some free copies of the game, he was happy. If I had paid ten times more for an industry voiceover specialist, would it have been ten times better? I sincerely doubt it. If you like, judge for yourself how it turned out:
I just lent my skills to my colleague Britney Brimhall across town at Himalaya Studios. She asked me for help adding 24 voices to her upcoming adventure game, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine on a shoestring budget but didn't know how to go about doing it. I told her the same method I used myself- put out a call to local drama clubs and theater departments and see who you can rustle up. She did just that and the talent outpouring was amazing. We had hundreds of people turn out for the audition for the chance to be in the game- including some professionals ignoring their talent agetns and even a PhD in acting! They worked for between $25 and $45 for the entire session, plus a free copy of the game once it comes out. I'd say the talent of the people available in those auditions was excellent. She ended up castomg her programmer friend as the lead role instead of one of the actors who auditioned, regrettably- but she had the option to pick from a bevy of skilled actors at bargain prices. See some pictures of the range of voice actors willing to work for around $40/hr here at her site:
On our next game, I asked a talent agency if I could hire one of their voice actresses (Jennifer Hale, the voice of Bastila in KOTOR and many more! 3 ) to be the Witch in our next game, PotionMotion. I probably have about half an hour's worth of lines on the mic, and I told them my total audio budget was $200. That's $400 an hour. They haven't gotten back to me in several days. So I've already gone to my backup- a middle-aged mother who works in a local cafe in town. Maybe they'll still get back to me, but maybe not. If my $200-$400/hr just isn't good enough to land me a professional voice actress, I know I have a lot of extremely affordable options at the semi-professional level. If they want to make it extremely difficult for me to hire their services, I know at least one alternate path to landing "good enough" level acting.
So for us semi-indy style studios, there is a cornucopia of talent waiting out there. The professional voice actors out there rebuff especially lower-end game makers at their own peril.
Here a few more observations I've seen about games that have a good draw on Real Women(tm) I know:
Heroes of Might and Magic 3- Something about this series has a strong draw on my women friends. Could be the sparkly graphics and sound... maybe they also like the flow of gathering up resources and even making armies? I know several of my women friends who don't play that many games but played the Heroes 3 games like ("male") power gamers.
Caeser III, Pharaoh, Zeus Something about these citybuilder games have good appeal with my women friends.
Dungeon Keeper 2 My friend Kate craves to manage dungeons. She loves managing her minions and helping them to kick ass. The only reason she's losing interest in this game now is she's played it all the way through maybe six times now.
Tropico 2 Pirate's Cove Another citybuilder, except with pirates. A lot of the pirate captains are women in game.
A few observations- a common thread in all these games is they are all fundamentally more constructive than destructive, more creative than competitive. You spend the time building up interesting networks, not battering down fictional monster enemies. Same holds true with the Sims, DDR, even Katamari.. Could it be the start of a pattern?
It doesn't matter if I'm the greatest PvP'er who ever lived, I will never get the epic PvP sets, simply because there's no way I can get more kills in the 1-2 hours a night I have to play than the people who have 8 hours a day to play.
To balance this somewhat, the Honor System benefits from an offline bonus the same way Rest XP does. When you are logged out, you are slowly gaining bonus points added to your honorable kills when you are logged in, the same way you get bonus XP from being logged out a long time.
It can't completely compete with people who can PvP for 16 hours a day, but it's meant to help. You can still get to the middle ranks. If you really must have the top ranks of PvP combat, something we all managed to get along without before they were in... maybe you could use the money you make from working all day to hire some teenaged gamer to fight on your account for you while you're at work! ; -)
"Same time, hardcore John has myriads of grinds to keep him occupied. And if that isn't enough, he has still PvP, Upper Blackrock Spire, Molten Core and Onyxia."
That "myriad" isn't big enough. I've run Upper Blackrock Spire probably... thirty times since the first UBRS run on my server. Stratholme... fifteen times, Scholomance, maybe three times, Onyxia ten times... How many times am I supposed to run them? They're only really fun the first few times!
So I've run UBRS 40 times. I swear to you there will NOT be a 100th time. There won't even be a 50th time. Looking at the gas gauge, WoW is currently running on Empty. Aside from running these dungeons another dozen times each, without any Battlegronds or Honor System for PvP, there's no way I can meaningfully contribute to the world.
If I had to paraphrase the article, it would be that the casual MMORPGs are like a stick of gum. Easy to use, but by definition temporary. When you chew on them a little while, they flavor goes out. To get longer appeal, they need to be a buffet restaurant, where new and interesting dishes keep getting refreshed at the buffet line.
I've unsubscribed from WoW. If they can win me back I'll reactivate my account. Until then I'm lost to them. If I leave, it will tempt my friends to leave a bit more, and my guild will be slightly emptier. Some guild people have already left. This sort of effect could easily snowball into an exodus from WoW.
I've noticed that when people arm wrestle, there are a lot of vibrations as peoples' arms shake and strain against the other person pushing them. Micro fluctutations in increases and decreases in power.
Maybe something about her exact rate of acceleration and muscle shaking created some kind of harmonic flutter that the robotic muscles weren't preapred to deal with. Just a hypothesis about why she might have won when presumably other didn't.
I wonder what the odds are that they could ever put this game back into development, finish it like they were supposed to, and re-release it? Call it KOTOR 2B. People who already bought 2 get 2B for free.
Sadly, approaching zero odds they'd ever do that, but I wish they could just admit it was a mistake to release it like this, go back, and actually allocate resouces to finish it right. Release it as a patch if possible. As long as they got to the end result of KOTOR2 being awesome, I'd forgive them.
At one point, the Blizzard representative likened my request to buying an empty milk jug and returning to the store to demand more milk for free so I can use the jug.
A more apt analogy would be when an authentication key creates a login, it's like a block of wet clay being fired into a specific clay pot. They don't have a method for turning a fired pot back into wet clay and changing it into what you want.
But what's wrong with using their existing login name anyway? It might not be a name you like but it has no affect on in-game characters. Assuming the person you bought it is honest not to change anything right away, login with their login and password, change the password to something only you know, and the account is as good as yours.
Yes, the entire operation is shady and imperfect, which is partly why Blizzard prefers to completely wash their hands of the matter. Especially because money is changing hands between people they have no business relationship with.
The account login name for your key was created by the person before you.
The account key on your box has already been converted into an account such as SuperDude. The login doesn't get undone just because someone handed you the box and CDs in the real world. Get that account name and password from the person who resold the box to you. It won't affect in-game character names. No matter what the EULA says, once you get the login and password you can login.
So you aren't the original owner of that key/login-password combo. How can Blizzard tell?They'll be none the wiser and even if they knew, they don't really care where the $14.95 a month is coming from, it beats losing a customer. Granted, this is gray ops- if they caught wind of it they'd be within their EULA to turn off the account altogether. Yeah, they could maybe track IPs but not reasonably give how much people move around etc. If no one makes a fuss, there won't be a problem.
If your goal is to get a game into reality, Virtools is one good way to do that. You can still code with letters and words if you want to, but the main way you create a game in Virtools is defining behaviors, graphically linking code building blocks together. You'll have to learn how to use it, and I think you'll need a license for a student copy (think it was in the neighborhood of $99-$125 for a student license), but it can be worth it.
Hardcore coders sometimes scoff at Virtools because they see it as somehow less noble to use a middleware tool instead of re-inventing the wheel themselves every time. But you still have to know the logic behind every behavior you define, there's no "Create Game" button you can use. The bonus to Virtools is speed. Our lead programmer can make a small game where you fly a jetpack, swing around on vines through trees, or drive a pretty good rendition of a Halo jeep in about an hour. All through definining a few springs, key controls, and a few other behaviors, and a play space.
Got four months? Here's what we made and had commercially ready in four months thanks in part to Virtools:
Granted, we started that project knowing how to use it. But even with the learning curve you should be able to produce something playable and even pretty good. I'm recommending it because it works for us.
Oh by the way if you want to check it out it's at:
That's like $.50 a day to play online... if I put in five hours a day, that's only ten cents an hour for what is, to me, quality entertainment. (It's more likely I'll be putting in..uh... ten hour days for a while.)
Compare that to movies, buying beer, eating out, or even prostitution in dollars per month as alternate recreation and WoW becomes highly affordable to the point of being transparent. When it gets taken transparently out of one's credit card it becomes like the water or electricity bill- you don't even feel it.
Yes, you could pay once or not at all (for free/free beer games)for a single player experience that entertains you, alone, for longer time. But for me it's worth it to play online with lots of other people, friends and stranger alike. I don't mind dropping a negligible amount of money to cover the server and bandwidth costs I know MMORPGs generate.
It's funny to me to hear Slashdot users, who almost by definition of have computers and broadband (which represent plenty of disposable income) complaining that $14.95 a month is somehow breaking the bank. If anything, the largest cost involved in the game is the opportunity cost. If a slashdot geek's techno-time is worth even $20 an hour and they play one hour a day, that's... $600 in opportunity cost to relax and have some fun in WoW! $14.95 is NOTHING compared to that.
"The media is becoming lazy when it comes to really getting to the truth of the matter. Instead of getting to the facts, they figure it's good enough just to give two sides of a story.
Sometimes I think if President Bush came out and said the world was flat, the next day, the headlines would read 'Shape of Earth? Opinions Differ!' "
"THE TEST OF a weaponized UAV took place only after the US State Department lifted its objections because of concerns that a "weaponized" Predator could breach the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987 by the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Officials were concerned a Predator carrying a laser-guided Hellfire could be classified as a ground-launch cruise missile, which is restricted by the treaty. The State Department official was also worried that demonstrating Predator's ability to launch a Hellfire would worry the governments of Russia and European allies, which could host the platform in the future. Inside The Air Force first reported on the issue Dec. 8, 2000."
I said I'm "pretty" sure because multiple high level organazations were concerned about the legality but proceeded anyway. What changed to ease their concerns? It is not that the Predator became less deadly. I would suggest the War on Terror gave them additional leeway.
I'm pretty sure putting missiles on the unmanned Predator drones over Afghanistan was a violation of a similar treaty, one that said you can't weaponize drones (and thus make a hideous, inhuman robot army).
But that one kind of slipped by in the name of the War on Terror.
I have to say, what appears as a near-total disregard for the other countries in the world on the part of the US regarding sensitive and dangerous military issues bothers me, and I live here. Doctrine of Pre-Emptive war was a dangerous road to start walking down. The people who wrote the Weaponization of Space treaties knew that it was a also a treacherous path, and yet it seems we're about to start down that road too? What kind of future are we heading towards?
If you were to ask me, as soon as conception occurs, the right of the parent over their body is separate from the rights of the child, and terminating that child is murder.
Let X represent the percentage of your life lived. So level 100 is your death.
"Alas," you exclaim, upon reaching the end of your life "I have reached level 100, and there was nothing more! My whole life was for naught!"
Can't the journey of the game be meaningful in and of itself? I grant that the endgame can be important in keeping players in the long term, but to make it seem like players were robbed and the entire experience up to level cap was meaningless without some kind of endgame seems a bit extreme.
If the problem is not to have the astronauts go insane with boredom en route to Mars, may I suggest that computer games could go a long way towards this goal?
I've gone for days at a time, waking up, getting on my computer until I have to go to sleep, then sleeping and doing it again. I could porbably do it for months at a time if I had to. I could, in THEORY, even take short breaks to "do astronaut stuff" like checking systems and what not.
If NASA wants to fund some kind of "lock me in a room and play games" challenge, I'll participate. ; -)
It's one of those head trips people tend to think of in grade school:
"The water I drink has been on this planet for so long. Who knows where this drop of water right here has been before? Maybe it was even inside a dinosaur!"
It seems possible and maybe even likely that all the water you drink has been pissed out of SOMETHING in the billions of years this planet has existed. And it wasn't filtered by ZeeWeed then.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the scariest things I ever did was play SystemShock2 in the dark... looking back, the graphics to that game weren't even anything special, but the story telling and atmosphere certainly surpassed some movies I've seen.
Some of the classic scary movies, like Hitchcock for example, are black and white films. But what's scary isn't what's happening on the screen, it's what's happening in your mind.
And in doing so, also promoting Darwininism!
"So, I gave you money but I don't own this game? Hmm."
Unlike some MMOs, where all factions can talk to each other, WoW has by design a Language barrier. Horde and Alliance have anything they say translated to a sort of orderly gibberish when "heard" by the other factions. This was done to promote a feeling of togetherness with "your" side and foreign-ness to the "other" side.
Some players would like to pursue the ability to communicate with the other side, possibly via trading in talent points, a Linguistics profession, or perhaps a difficult quest series. Give that the Horde-Alliance rivalry is alrady well understood and entrenched, does Blizzard have any plans to implement the ability for some players to have an interesting experience bridging the language gap? How would it affect your game design of the language barrier to allow a relatively small and motivated percentage of the players act as emissaries by trading other abilities to learn other languages?
PS- What about learning same-side languages at the very least? I'm sick of those snotty night elves gossping right in front of me in Darnassian, me not being able to understand them!
There's aleady an adult arcade, it's called Dave and Buster's. Tons of games, and each one has a switch that turns on a light that summons a Beer Wench (er PC- Alcohol Attendant?) to you. Games and readily available alcohol- a good combination. If Nolan can improve on it, so much the better!
Hi, I'm the Audio Director for Flashbang Studios. We make small web/downloadable games, but we're a teeny tiny studio and budget for an entire game is less than a single voice actor working 8 hours in a studio for $375 dollars. Almost at the garage games level, but my job is to still come up with good audio, somehow.
m /
h tm
I can tell you from personal experience that's it's possible to come up with very good quality audio for cheap by tapping the "semi-professional" vein. Not just conscripting your friends, which usually has a very amateur sound, but going a step up in quality. Tapping local college drama departments, theater clubs, even using Craigslist will net you a huge step up from just casting your friends for only a small price increase. Most people will record for just a few dozen dollars and a free copy of the game to show their spouse/kids.
In our most recently released Flashbang game, Glow Worm, I asked a friend of the family who is an opera professor if he would be the voice of our magician mascot, and he was totally willing. I paid him $40 in Domino's Pizza coupons and some free copies of the game, he was happy. If I had paid ten times more for an industry voiceover specialist, would it have been ten times better? I sincerely doubt it. If you like, judge for yourself how it turned out:
http://www.flashbangstudios.com/downloads/glowwor
I just lent my skills to my colleague Britney Brimhall across town at Himalaya Studios. She asked me for help adding 24 voices to her upcoming adventure game, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine on a shoestring budget but didn't know how to go about doing it. I told her the same method I used myself- put out a call to local drama clubs and theater departments and see who you can rustle up. She did just that and the talent outpouring was amazing. We had hundreds of people turn out for the audition for the chance to be in the game- including some professionals ignoring their talent agetns and even a PhD in acting! They worked for between $25 and $45 for the entire session, plus a free copy of the game once it comes out. I'd say the talent of the people available in those auditions was excellent. She ended up castomg her programmer friend as the lead role instead of one of the actors who auditioned, regrettably- but she had the option to pick from a bevy of skilled actors at bargain prices. See some pictures of the range of voice actors willing to work for around $40/hr here at her site:
http://www.himalayastudios.com/designer_journals.
On our next game, I asked a talent agency if I could hire one of their voice actresses (Jennifer Hale, the voice of Bastila in KOTOR and many more! 3 ) to be the Witch in our next game, PotionMotion. I probably have about half an hour's worth of lines on the mic, and I told them my total audio budget was $200. That's $400 an hour. They haven't gotten back to me in several days. So I've already gone to my backup- a middle-aged mother who works in a local cafe in town. Maybe they'll still get back to me, but maybe not. If my $200-$400/hr just isn't good enough to land me a professional voice actress, I know I have a lot of extremely affordable options at the semi-professional level. If they want to make it extremely difficult for me to hire their services, I know at least one alternate path to landing "good enough" level acting.
So for us semi-indy style studios, there is a cornucopia of talent waiting out there. The professional voice actors out there rebuff especially lower-end game makers at their own peril.
Here a few more observations I've seen about games that have a good draw on Real Women(tm) I know:
Heroes of Might and Magic 3- Something about this series has a strong draw on my women friends. Could be the sparkly graphics and sound... maybe they also like the flow of gathering up resources and even making armies? I know several of my women friends who don't play that many games but played the Heroes 3 games like ("male") power gamers.
Caeser III, Pharaoh, Zeus Something about these citybuilder games have good appeal with my women friends.
Dungeon Keeper 2 My friend Kate craves to manage dungeons. She loves managing her minions and helping them to kick ass. The only reason she's losing interest in this game now is she's played it all the way through maybe six times now.
Tropico 2 Pirate's Cove Another citybuilder, except with pirates. A lot of the pirate captains are women in game.
A few observations- a common thread in all these games is they are all fundamentally more constructive than destructive, more creative than competitive. You spend the time building up interesting networks, not battering down fictional monster enemies. Same holds true with the Sims, DDR, even Katamari.. Could it be the start of a pattern?
It doesn't matter if I'm the greatest PvP'er who ever lived, I will never get the epic PvP sets, simply because there's no way I can get more kills in the 1-2 hours a night I have to play than the people who have 8 hours a day to play.
To balance this somewhat, the Honor System benefits from an offline bonus the same way Rest XP does. When you are logged out, you are slowly gaining bonus points added to your honorable kills when you are logged in, the same way you get bonus XP from being logged out a long time.
It can't completely compete with people who can PvP for 16 hours a day, but it's meant to help. You can still get to the middle ranks. If you really must have the top ranks of PvP combat, something we all managed to get along without before they were in... maybe you could use the money you make from working all day to hire some teenaged gamer to fight on your account for you while you're at work! ; -)
"Same time, hardcore John has myriads of grinds to keep him occupied. And if that isn't enough, he has still PvP, Upper Blackrock Spire, Molten Core and Onyxia."
That "myriad" isn't big enough. I've run Upper Blackrock Spire probably... thirty times since the first UBRS run on my server. Stratholme... fifteen times, Scholomance, maybe three times, Onyxia ten times... How many times am I supposed to run them? They're only really fun the first few times!
So I've run UBRS 40 times. I swear to you there will NOT be a 100th time. There won't even be a 50th time. Looking at the gas gauge, WoW is currently running on Empty. Aside from running these dungeons another dozen times each, without any Battlegronds or Honor System for PvP, there's no way I can meaningfully contribute to the world.
If I had to paraphrase the article, it would be that the casual MMORPGs are like a stick of gum. Easy to use, but by definition temporary. When you chew on them a little while, they flavor goes out. To get longer appeal, they need to be a buffet restaurant, where new and interesting dishes keep getting refreshed at the buffet line.
I've unsubscribed from WoW. If they can win me back I'll reactivate my account. Until then I'm lost to them. If I leave, it will tempt my friends to leave a bit more, and my guild will be slightly emptier. Some guild people have already left. This sort of effect could easily snowball into an exodus from WoW.
Just think of all the guys out there named Mario- Nintendo has doomed them to Nerdom!!
I've noticed that when people arm wrestle, there are a lot of vibrations as peoples' arms shake and strain against the other person pushing them. Micro fluctutations in increases and decreases in power.
Maybe something about her exact rate of acceleration and muscle shaking created some kind of harmonic flutter that the robotic muscles weren't preapred to deal with. Just a hypothesis about why she might have won when presumably other didn't.
I wonder what the odds are that they could ever put this game back into development, finish it like they were supposed to, and re-release it? Call it KOTOR 2B. People who already bought 2 get 2B for free.
Sadly, approaching zero odds they'd ever do that, but I wish they could just admit it was a mistake to release it like this, go back, and actually allocate resouces to finish it right. Release it as a patch if possible. As long as they got to the end result of KOTOR2 being awesome, I'd forgive them.
At one point, the Blizzard representative likened my request to buying an empty milk jug and returning to the store to demand more milk for free so I can use the jug.
A more apt analogy would be when an authentication key creates a login, it's like a block of wet clay being fired into a specific clay pot. They don't have a method for turning a fired pot back into wet clay and changing it into what you want.
But what's wrong with using their existing login name anyway? It might not be a name you like but it has no affect on in-game characters. Assuming the person you bought it is honest not to change anything right away, login with their login and password, change the password to something only you know, and the account is as good as yours.
Yes, the entire operation is shady and imperfect, which is partly why Blizzard prefers to completely wash their hands of the matter. Especially because money is changing hands between people they have no business relationship with.
When you go to the web page to create your accont, you spend one authentication key to create an account login.
: SuperDude P:sex
Example-
XXJP5-12345-OICUP0-NOTREAL-23492--->L
The account login name for your key was created by the person before you.
The account key on your box has already been converted into an account such as SuperDude. The login doesn't get undone just because someone handed you the box and CDs in the real world. Get that account name and password from the person who resold the box to you. It won't affect in-game character names. No matter what the EULA says, once you get the login and password you can login.
So you aren't the original owner of that key/login-password combo. How can Blizzard tell?They'll be none the wiser and even if they knew, they don't really care where the $14.95 a month is coming from, it beats losing a customer. Granted, this is gray ops- if they caught wind of it they'd be within their EULA to turn off the account altogether. Yeah, they could maybe track IPs but not reasonably give how much people move around etc. If no one makes a fuss, there won't be a problem.
If your goal is to get a game into reality, Virtools is one good way to do that. You can still code with letters and words if you want to, but the main way you create a game in Virtools is defining behaviors, graphically linking code building blocks together. You'll have to learn how to use it, and I think you'll need a license for a student copy (think it was in the neighborhood of $99-$125 for a student license), but it can be worth it.
h em/index.html
Hardcore coders sometimes scoff at Virtools because they see it as somehow less noble to use a middleware tool instead of re-inventing the wheel themselves every time. But you still have to know the logic behind every behavior you define, there's no "Create Game" button you can use. The bonus to Virtools is speed. Our lead programmer can make a small game where you fly a jetpack, swing around on vines through trees, or drive a pretty good rendition of a Halo jeep in about an hour. All through definining a few springs, key controls, and a few other behaviors, and a play space.
Got four months? Here's what we made and had commercially ready in four months thanks in part to Virtools:
http://www.adultswim.com/games/powerplay/sweetmay
Granted, we started that project knowing how to use it. But even with the learning curve you should be able to produce something playable and even pretty good. I'm recommending it because it works for us.
Oh by the way if you want to check it out it's at:
http://www.virtools.com/index.asp
That's like $.50 a day to play online... if I put in five hours a day, that's only ten cents an hour for what is, to me, quality entertainment. (It's more likely I'll be putting in..uh... ten hour days for a while.)
Compare that to movies, buying beer, eating out, or even prostitution in dollars per month as alternate recreation and WoW becomes highly affordable to the point of being transparent. When it gets taken transparently out of one's credit card it becomes like the water or electricity bill- you don't even feel it.
Yes, you could pay once or not at all (for free/free beer games)for a single player experience that entertains you, alone, for longer time. But for me it's worth it to play online with lots of other people, friends and stranger alike. I don't mind dropping a negligible amount of money to cover the server and bandwidth costs I know MMORPGs generate.
It's funny to me to hear Slashdot users, who almost by definition of have computers and broadband (which represent plenty of disposable income) complaining that $14.95 a month is somehow breaking the bank. If anything, the largest cost involved in the game is the opportunity cost. If a slashdot geek's techno-time is worth even $20 an hour and they play one hour a day, that's... $600 in opportunity cost to relax and have some fun in WoW! $14.95 is NOTHING compared to that.
"I'm not sure I understand the question"
You can't play it yet even if you get it boxed from a store- you've still gotta activate it on Steam.
"The media is becoming lazy when it comes to really getting to the truth of the matter. Instead of getting to the facts, they figure it's good enough just to give two sides of a story.
Sometimes I think if President Bush came out and said the world was flat, the next day, the headlines would read 'Shape of Earth? Opinions Differ!' "
http://www.stratmag.com/issueApr-1/page02.htm/
"THE TEST OF a weaponized UAV took place only after the US State Department lifted its objections because of concerns that a "weaponized" Predator could breach the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987 by the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Officials were concerned a Predator carrying a laser-guided Hellfire could be classified as a ground-launch cruise missile, which is restricted by the treaty. The State Department official was also worried that demonstrating Predator's ability to launch a Hellfire would worry the governments of Russia and European allies, which could host the platform in the future. Inside The Air Force first reported on the issue Dec. 8, 2000."
I said I'm "pretty" sure because multiple high level organazations were concerned about the legality but proceeded anyway. What changed to ease their concerns? It is not that the Predator became less deadly. I would suggest the War on Terror gave them additional leeway.
I'm pretty sure putting missiles on the unmanned Predator drones over Afghanistan was a violation of a similar treaty, one that said you can't weaponize drones (and thus make a hideous, inhuman robot army).
But that one kind of slipped by in the name of the War on Terror.
I have to say, what appears as a near-total disregard for the other countries in the world on the part of the US regarding sensitive and dangerous military issues bothers me, and I live here. Doctrine of Pre-Emptive war was a dangerous road to start walking down. The people who wrote the Weaponization of Space treaties knew that it was a also a treacherous path, and yet it seems we're about to start down that road too? What kind of future are we heading towards?
If you were to ask me, as soon as conception occurs, the right of the parent over their body is separate from the rights of the child, and terminating that child is murder.
What about rape?
Let X represent the percentage of your life lived. So level 100 is your death.
"Alas," you exclaim, upon reaching the end of your life "I have reached level 100, and there was nothing more! My whole life was for naught!"
Can't the journey of the game be meaningful in and of itself? I grant that the endgame can be important in keeping players in the long term, but to make it seem like players were robbed and the entire experience up to level cap was meaningless without some kind of endgame seems a bit extreme.
If the problem is not to have the astronauts go insane with boredom en route to Mars, may I suggest that computer games could go a long way towards this goal?
I've gone for days at a time, waking up, getting on my computer until I have to go to sleep, then sleeping and doing it again. I could porbably do it for months at a time if I had to. I could, in THEORY, even take short breaks to "do astronaut stuff" like checking systems and what not.
If NASA wants to fund some kind of "lock me in a room and play games" challenge, I'll participate. ; -)
It's one of those head trips people tend to think of in grade school:
"The water I drink has been on this planet for so long. Who knows where this drop of water right here has been before? Maybe it was even inside a dinosaur!"
It seems possible and maybe even likely that all the water you drink has been pissed out of SOMETHING in the billions of years this planet has existed. And it wasn't filtered by ZeeWeed then.