There is a simple fact that unless an executive is stupid, deranged or seriously in love with their own ideas, development money follows revenue money. That is, they're going to sink in money into more of whatever is earning them profits this time around. That's why we get sequels and copies of popular games. But it can also appeal to whole categories or qualities of games as well, and if revenue money is coming from casual games, most game companies are going to read the writing on the wall and go with it. Or else we'll have Darwinian selection at work and get the same result the hard way.
My own feeling is that as casual games start producing increasing amounts of profits or games that are friendly to a casual audience such as World of Warcraft (and yes, everything short of the endgame is very casual-friendly), then we are going to see development money be sunk into casual or casual-friendly games. I have little doubt that Blizzard is going to make sure that Diablo III is as easy as possible for casual gamers to pick up and play. Diablo and Diablo II were very simple point and click games on a fundamental level. There's a reason WoW has done so well.
The flip side of that is that as hardcore games start declining in terms of revenue, the development money is going to go out of them (as well as the marketing money, but that's just part of investment costs). That's probably going to produce a vicious circle in terms of the hardcore gaming industry. Not that it is going to die, but we're going to see a definite decline in AAA high development budget high marketing budget games. The money for the AAA blockbusters will be aiming at the much larger market of casual gamers of various sorts.
In the end, no gaming market will truly die off as long as there are developers willing to code what they want to play. And the existence of online gaming stores is going to make it easier for indie developers to put out small games. But my own feeling is that most of those gaming stores will be pushing the casual games and there's going to be a small section of the store with the label 'hardcore' on it catering to a smaller niche of gamers.
was not that we can't colonize space, but more that the classic SF view of people setting up space stations orbiting the sun, domed or underground colonies on the Moon and other planets, and space freighters setting up some sort of interplanetary trade (space pirates optional), much less interstellar freighters shipping people and goods between star systems ain't gonna happen barring a miracle that breaks the laws of physics as we know them. Which is not to say it can't happen but there are interesting consequences to such feats.
A lot of the focus in the essay was on human beings settling off Earth. If we go with robots, heavily altered human beings and various other forms of transcended beings, then colonization of other worlds is perfectly possible, as long as we adapt the people for harsh climes. But that's not the point of the essay. Humanity for the most part was evolved to live on Earth and getting us to survive anywhere else is next to impossible or of dubious effort at best.
And then there is the fact that for the energy/time cost of manufacturing widgets on one planet in our system and shipping it to another part, it would be a lot cheaper/faster to simply send the schematic by electromagnetic transmission and then have some manufacturing facility on the destination planet build it there. Moving matter is expensive. Moving information is a lot cheaper. Space freighters, whether interplanetary or interstellar, don't make any sense. Just because it worked for sea ships doesn't mean it works for space ships.
Does Charlie Stross think we couldn't send sentient robots to Mars to build a colony of sentient robots? I doubt it, but that wasn't the point of the essay. The question is whether humans could settle Mars, and he's rightfully skeptical of that. So am I. If anything from this world settles Mars and forms a viable self-sustaining colony there, it won't be human as we conceive of it.
There is a question here of why there is correlation in the first place. If it isn't the causation factor, what factor is causing the rise of autism that just happens to correlate with the rise of television viewing in these areas?
Actually, Airplane! was a remake of a movie called Zero Hour. Some of the scenes, some of the dialog even were lifted straight from the original movie. In fact the people who made Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour. So technically Airplane! is a remake.
Online gaming services. My own crystal ball version of the future indicates that we're going to see the collapse of computer game stores. Instead, consoles will probably be sold through conventional electronics retailers. Most games will be sold online and most of them will be going through conventional gaming services.
The MMORPGs will be only some of what is available through your online gaming service. Being able to log onto a server and play your favorite MMORPG or a networked FPS or even solo games and so on will become the thing of the future. Game publishers will transform into online game services, and the game development companies will push their stuff through the services. That will transform the PC gaming industry.
Gamasutra had an article on storytelling in games. They commented on the "show, don't tell" rule of traditional movies and books. They talked about the extension of this to games:
Do, don't show Show, don't tell
In other words, cutscenes are to be avoided as much as possible. Instead let the player work their way through the scene. Player action, then you show things, and then you have the boring exposition dead last.
Videogames as an entertainment medium are still very young. They're still trying to get the groundrules down right.
The thing is that blogs are competing for eyeballs, and while blogs do link to other blogs in a cooperative fashion, there is also an element of competition there. And if a blog screws up its factchecking or makes a wild and unfounded accusation, other blogs will turn on it and tear it apart. Or just mock it and make sure that everyone is aware the site messed up.
The stuff that tears through the whole blog community is the stuff that tends to get its facts checked and confirmed, and there's a certain critical mass of blogs that are needed for some of this stuff to take off. The whole kryptonite lock thing was something that was confirmed repeatedly by multiple blogs. And numerous eyeballs were aimed at Dan Rather's reports.
Who watches the blogs? The blogs police each other. And the blogs are scattered over too wide a political spectrum with no centralized control point for there to be much of a conspiracy across them.
Not all, mind you, but most of them. Effectively speaking, most movies run at a loss on their theatrical run, when you add the cost of making the movie to the advertising budget for the theatrical run and the distribution costs to the theatrical run. Most of the money of a movie and the ones that put the studios in the black come from the home entertainment division, which handles DVDs, television licensing, not to mention other merchandise from books.
The studios are aware that if they continue to shrink the window between theatrical run and DVD run, the theaters or the bulk of them will go out of business. But when you look at theatrical profits versus distribution and advertising costs for the theatrical run, the profit margins have been steadily shrinking since 1948, and for that matter the money home entertainemnt makes far overshadows it. If they can boost their profits from an earlier DVD run, it could compensate for the loss of theatrical run dollars easily.
The main problem the studios face is that the theatrical run is promo advertising for the DVD. They're going to have to find other ways to push the movie to the home audiance. My own feeling is that they're going to switch to television for that, especially once HDTV gets out. They show it on television and that will encourage people to go and buy the DVD.
Not that all theaters are going to die out. There are a number of specialty theaters out there, focusing on art films, indie movies and so on that will continue to survive because they don't care about modern movie releases and so on, but they're going to be a niche and the studios on the whole won't care about them.
Everything looks like a web service. I do not believe that Google is the end all and be all of computing, any more than I think that Microsoft is the end all and be all of computing either. My own feeling is that once we get the "the Network is the computer" sort of stuff out of our thinking and realize that actual usage is going to be some balance of locally hosted programs and data and Web-based applications and data, then we'll be able to make real progress.
Google Maps work because people don't want to allocate terabytes of storage for maps of the world. Web-based mail and homepages work because most people don't want the work of maintaining their own mail servers and web servers.
However that doesn't apply to an office suite, when you get down to it, or something using a local database on your machine. There aren't a huge number of advantages to hosting your office suite on a remote server and pulling the apps down the network when you want to run them, and there are a number of downsides.
I'm not saying that Google isn't going to become a major player in the web services business, or that MSN in time won't become an equally big player. But what I am saying is that locally hosted applications aren't going to go away either, and ultimately, the security of the PC depends on the security of the operating system running on it.
The author has managed to contradict himself. Two of his bullet points in fact go directly against one another, the cases of intellectual property and innovation.
The author uses a very vague definition of intellectual property in order to discuss intellectual property ownership. Now while corporations themselves tend to favor very loose definitions themselves, even they have certain limits on what intellectual property they care about. Most people in signing away their intellectual property rights tend to focus on discoveries that they make, new ideas and dare I say it innovations that they invent while they are being employed by their employer.
The big question is, if someone in their time away from work on non-work hardware writes the Great American Novel (which is not a thinly disguised satire of their workplace), does their employer own the intellectual property of the novel that they produced in their spare time? The answer is probably not, and even if they did, it's unlikely to hold up in court.
In general, businesses are mainly concerned with the invention of profit making IP that the company itself (or a competitor) could use, that in general can be patented. In general, corporations feel that they own all the discoveries and innovations their employees make. And yet the author then turns around and complains that OSS is derivative, more interested in copying existing proprietary software and not producing any real innovative work.
You can't have it both ways, Stephen. Either people are producing innovations and illegally incorporating them into OSS in violation of the corporate IP contracts the people have signed, or OSS isn't innovative, in which case the contracts those people signed do not apply in this case. The only real contracts that corporations make people sign that could lead to trouble are confidentiality agreements and non-competition agreements. The potential leak of proprietary IP into OSS is a much more valid point than the one that is actually made.
Then we get to the Conceptual Integrity section, which cites the need for small teams working under a strong leader. And of course there's no mention of Linus Torvald and Linux at all, or any examination of the other successful OSS projects and the fact that sooner or later every OSS project needs someone or a small group of people to decide what goes into the source code and what does not. The best OSS projects all have a small group of people who work well together and usually set up a clear roadmap of where their project is going.
In the Professionalism section, the author argues that bedroom programmers destroyed the games industry in the 1980's. This is despite the fact that the collapse of Atari involved a system that used cartridges that generally were not created or programmed by bedroom programmers, but in fact had to be done by software companies working with Atari. These folks were not 'bedroom programmers' by any stretch of the word. Most of the bedroom programmers were in the computer game industry, which managed to survive the collapse of Atari. In fact, one can make a case that the bedroom programmers had a better track record than the professionals in the eighties.
And for that matter, I seem to have this strange recollection of games company after games company going out of business over the last few years. Heck, over the decades. Badly selling games being the major source of all these collapses. Frankly, the gaming industry is the least stable segment of the software industry, and even now it's having problems. And given the number of bug fixes that come out for any given game, I really wonder by what criteria the author views this stuff as quality software by any definition. Games software tends to make most application software look good in comparison, honestly.
The author is clearly spouting off on their prejudices and has absolutely no idea of what is really going on with either proprietary or OSS.
First off, let's discuss my vision of an iBook. The iBook is a hardcover book, thin though, in the cheaper editions. The more expensive editions might run to hundreds of pages enough to cover Neal Stephenson's work or even Jo Rowling's, but the average book is going to be much shorter. The cover is thick and contains the flash memory and batteries that make the book work. How bendable the cover is will depend heavily on whether they can make bendable memory and batteries.
The inside cover tends to be where a lot of the action occurs. You can summon up a list of all the books that the iBook contains. Once you do that, if the iBook isn't large enough to display all of the pages of the book at once, it offers an option to specify where you want the iBook to start. Once you've finished reading through that section you switch to the front of the book and tell the inside cover to move on to the next section. The inside cover has a global/local search engine as well, allowing you to search the library as well as just searching inside a book or even a subsection of the book.
There. Something that has pretty much most of the benefits of a book. The main difference is that the book doesn't automatically have a page count to match the contents of the book that's being displayed. This is a minor point, as people don't read a whole book at a time, they only read a couple of pages at a time. Still, people like flipping through pages, and so the iBook accomodates that. It has a search engine and an updatable list of keywords that can be used as an index as well.
iBooks would logically come in a range. A small portable hardcover that fits into a pocket is one model, and then there are the big models that you keep at home, both in regular hardcover size as well as the oversized models that are used for displaying photographs. The number of pages an iBook has is also going to have a range. The ones that are kept around at home are likely to be heavy on the pages so someone can have the luxury of not having to go to the inside cover to scroll the book forward.
And yes, I can see this catching on and becoming mainstream. The ability to have an entire library of books in something with the same appearance and form-factor of a book, with more or less all the same benefits of a book, would probably catch on quickly. The main issue would be the availability of books. That's where Old Ways and New Ways collide with one another.
The iBook would do to the publishing industry what MP3 has done to the music industry, created an age where the electronic distribution of books and the potential for piracy becomes commonplace. Of course some publishers can refuse to put out books in electronic form, but someone with an automated scanner setup can defeat that. Buy one book, disassemble it, feed the pages through a scanner setup and then compile them into the right digital format.
Now as for mainstream acceptance of the iBook, I see it coming up from the bottom end. What is the bottom end? Newspapers and magazines. Newspapers in general spend a huge amount of money producing a few pieces of paper that get tossed after a day. A few sheets of e-paper in everyone's hands and they can save a huge amount of money printing newspapers. Even better, they don't have to worry about overprinting or underprinting a run. Magazines are also in a similar position. If people buy a blank magazine made of e-paper people can download their magazine every month for a lower price than the print edition, what do you think most people will do?
In time, people will be quite ready to accept the idea of e-books once they've accepted e-newspapers and e-magazines. The publishing industry will fight it for longer than the general public will, but in the end they'll have to go along.
If I want to shoot at the screen, I'll use a gun controller, which has a very comfortable grip and placement of controls for said purpose.
If I want to swing a sword or bat, I'll want a sword/bat-controller, which has a very comfortable grip and placement of controls for said purpose.
Incidentally, for driving games I want a steering wheel controller and some pedals because that has a good grip and control placement for those sorts of games as well.
For a general purpose controller, my personal favorite is the dual shock controller Sony came up with and has stuck with. My only fault with it is not enough feedback on the analog buttons for my taste. It's not perfect, but for a general purpose controller, it's perfectly fine.
The issue here isn't so much the overhead, it's locking someone into a position where they can't go to a competing product.
Any vendor could create a horrifically expensive product to read and write OpenDocument format files. However the company with a pile of OpenDocument files isn't going to be forced to use the horrifically expensive software product. They can use a much less expensive product if they so choose.
It's called capitalism... let the customer buy the best bargain without being forced to go to a specific vendor.
Microsoft isn't serious about not supporting the format. The fact is that as the OpenDocument format grows in support, Microsoft is going to have no choice but to support it unless they want to start losing chunks of their customer base.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't have to be nice about it. My suspicion is that any OpenDocument file opened in Word is going to be somewhat broken, and likewise any Word document will be somewhat broken as well. This is all due to OpenOffice being a broken format, obviously, and not Office's fault.
Of course OpenOffice will probably do just fine converting between OpenDocument and Word, or at least better than Microsoft Office anyway.
But I do agree that it is important to get a good Outlook killer on board.
For those who think that Hollywood is dying because of shrinking box office revenues, think again. Hollywood is doing just fine on its movies. Yes, when you look at the box office returns, a surprisingly high percentage of movies actually are pulling a loss when you deduct profits from box office against marketting.
Of course they make all of that and more off the DVD sales. Most Hollywood flicks are making far more money now off the DVD sales than they are off the theatrical runs and to some extent, licensing for television. But after Hollywood got over their fear of DVDs and realized what a profit center they were, most movies these days have the DVD planned out in conjunction with the movie.
Expect to see a future where the movie theatrical run is just viewed as advertising of sorts for the DVD run as well as the other media tie-ins such as video games.
I can easily forsee a future when a script is tossed back for revision because "it won't make a good videogame" or "the videogame designers want A, B and C out of the movie and X, Y, and Z put into the movie" and as a result, the script gets revised.
I can see the future of Hollywood IP being a war between the movie producers and the game producers each of whom want something different to produce the best possible product. What makes for a good movie can make a bad game and vice versa.
Is a four hour movie twice as enjoyable as a two hour movie?
Obviously not. Admittedly, games tend to be more of a stop and restart phenomena, like a movie on DVD, so that allows lengths to go up. However I think most movie directors (there are certainly exceptions) understand that a movie needs to be as long as you need it to be to tell the story and no longer than that. They may not always do a good job of it, but that's another story.
Honestly I like the idea of shorter games with less repetition and simple levelling up and with more focus on providing an interesting and varied experience. And delivered in episodic format as well.
My own feeling is that it's only a matter of time before consoles start getting USB mice and keyboards as standard or at least common equipment for consoles. Consoles are slowly but surely evolving into low end dedicated gaming PCs. When that happens, I tend to expect that there will be an even sharper decline in PC games produced, though for moddable games, I expect PCs to be around as the modding development platform of choice.
There's a spectrum of issues in the computing world, that range from computer science, which involves doing things where you don't know what the algorithms are to do what you want and have to invent them, to software engineering, which is building something which is extremely well known and understood.
Open source projects are on the whole better, or at least achieve success more quickly on software engineering problems than computer science problems. Writing a word processor is a software engineering problem. It's not like the concepts are not well understood and well documented all over the place, the trick is just building a solid and reliable instance of it. Because it's such a simple and well known problem you can bring in dozens to hundreds of programmers to work on it and there are few debates about how to do things, it's usually more an issue of prioritizing feature lists and bug fixes.
Linux is a software engineering project in the classic sense. Linus and others have been rebuilding Unix, which is extremely well understood. Everyone more or less understood and agreed on how Unix systems work. It's not a question of how to build a memory management algorithm with acceptable performance, but rather which existing algorithm has the best peformance. In general, Linux tends to spend more time debating between existing solutions than trying to find a solution to a problem. The reason that Linux has come so far so fast is that it's treading on extremely familiar ground and isn't really trying to do anything new from a computer science level.
Hurd is more in the area of computer science. They don't have thirty years of precedence going in their favor. While there has been plenty of work in microkernels, there's far less of work there than for Unix. The Hurd people are trying to make something new, rather than reinvent something that's familiar, which is a much easier task by far. So the fact that the Hurd people are moving more slowly is more an indication of the difficulty of the task.
Now the question is, why work on Hurd at all? Well, the answer to that is the answer to the question of whether or not there are things with a microkernel that you cannot do with a regular kernel, and whether these things are worth doing. It is entirely possible on a security level for Linux to hit a dead end, running into the limits of a monolithic kernel architecture. That if there is to be any progress past a certain point, that a rearchitecture is needed to switch to a microkernel architecture. I'm not saying this is the case, but I am saying that it is not an impossibility.
If that is the case, then Linus and others will need to do a major rearchitecture in a new release, or they need to switch over to an existing microkernel project that they feel is acceptable to them. Even if the Linux people decide to do their own microkernel architecture from scratch in that case, they will almost certainly be going over the entire history and the results of the GNU/Hurd project with a fine tooth comb for data on how to build a viable microkernel operating system.
To say that microkernels are slower than monolithic kernels is on some level unimportant. CPU speeds have slowed down somewhat but we're still improving the speed of systems. The question becomes are you willing to trade a performance hit for security. Would you rather have a fast system that is more vulnerable to nasty software or would you rather have a slower but more secure system? So the Hurd people are focusing on security since that is potentially the greatest strength of microkernels over monolithic kernels.
So look at the Hurd project, like a bunch of other projects as a research project. And yes, it's taking them a heck of a long time to get results but they're not in any particular hurry. It's like Linux versus Windows, Linux doesn't need to "win" next year. It just keeps on chugging and eventually grinds away at the opposition. Hurd just keeps getting better every year and maybe someday it will clearly surpass Linux in a few areas. Probably not anytime soon, but this isn't a race.
So no, Hurd isn't a waste of time. It's a research project and one that may be of significant importance to Linux down the road.
KOTOR II had a lot of stuff that should have been in KOTOR I. For example, the upgrade system was much improved, as well as being able to have two weapon sets to switch between instantly and in some cases, automatically.
I also liked the concept that your Light/Dark choices would have an impact on who you got for a companion, and to a lesser extent your gender would as well. If anything, I thought that they didn't go far enough with this angle.
They were also doing an amazing job, up until the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine of building up an incredible sense of atmosphere and tension. There were all sorts of hidden angles going on there between all of the characters. Even nice little T3-M4 was prone to even creepy behavior at various points.
And it all fell apart after that. One of the reasons I'm so terribly disappointed with the ending of KOTOR II is that they had such a powerful setup and they fell short of that. It could have been a truly mind blowing game and in the end they weren't able to sustain it.
Something to remember is that almost all of the technologies that we use today date back to the sixties. Object oriented programming dates back to the sixties, and yet it wasn't until C++ that it finally broke out into the mainstream. Likewise, it took how many years for the Internet to break out and become useful to people?
The fact is that most stuff that comes out of the Computer Science departments takes years before it can become a useful and practical in the real world. The people sneering at microkernels as an old CS idea that will never work probably were the same folks sneering at OOP when C++ first came out, discussing how broken the C++ implementation was. Or a bunch of other concepts.
The fact is that in time Linux may well shift over to a microkernel to provide advance functionality someday. It may be that microkernel technology is just a little ahead of its time and it's just going to take a few more years for the computer world to catch up to it.
I believe that Microsoft is aware that Linux more or less dooms them on the desktop. They can't admit that though. If they admit it, it will mean a defection from their platform. Every businessman knows that you never admit your product is being beaten by another product, you always focus on why people should buy your product, even if you have to make up reasons for it.
They are quite aware that their long term viability in the desktop market is doomed and they're getting pounded in the server market. They're losing ground in the third world nations and that isn't good for them. Those third world nations can ultimately improve open source software to the point it can hammer products in the first world.
So they're busy looking for escape routes and shifting to a new business model, and they're going to squeeze as much as they can out of existing markets until they get their escape route set up. Heck, even after they get it set up they will squeeze every last penny they can out if it, just because that makes good business sense. And they will never admit that Windows is an inferior product until they finally pull the plug on it and Office.
The article states that Microsoft has matured and forget the growth in the PC market that it used to have. The only sensible thing for Microsoft to do is to find a new market to grow in, and that's what they're doing right now. MSN, X-Box, X-Box Online and the Microsoft Media Center are all areas that they're looking to find new sources of revenue and growth in.
Microsoft has paid attention to what happened to IBM, and I think they are aware that sooner or later the time will come when they have to switch from profits from monopoly leverage to finding some other way to make money. They can't and won't admit it because it would damage their position in the market badly to actually come out and admit it. They don't have a good escape route now, a path to new growth, and until they find it, they have to claim that their current position is strong.
SF writing has gotten a lot harder than before because we have an increasing familiarity and sophistication with technology on all levels, not just scientific but economic, political and social issues. That raises the bar for what science fiction writers have to worry about when they build a new world.
It used to be that science fiction writers would only have to worry about the physics of what they were inventing, or make it scientific enough to sound plausible. They could afford only to look at the obvious consequences of their technology. Quite consistantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain inventions were believed quite seriously by some people to bring in a new golden age for mankind.
In modern times, we understand all too well that the fundamental problems to creating a golden age for mankind are not technological but social. We also understand how a piece of technology can have social impacts that are not entirely positive, or at least very disruptive. The automobile, television, the Internet, while these all have had positive aspects to them, only the most deluded would deny negative impacts.
And given all the social, economic and political issues about technological developments these days, one of the first things an SF author who has someone invent a new piece of technology has to worry about are who funded the technology and how do they intend to economically exploit it to get their research funds back. They also have to look at how people are going to be abusing the technology and the disruptive social impacts of said technology as well.
Email leads to spam and overloaded channels of communication. All of a sudden you have to deal with filtering mechanisms and means, technological, legal and social to cope with those things (which we still need to figure out). You invent something spiffy and all of a sudden there are consequences all over the place.
I have mixed feelings about D&D computer games. The fact of the matter is that PnP RPGs and CRPGs have different strengths and weaknesses. What works for one does not necessarily work for the other.
For example, the strength of PnP RPGs is that you have a human being running them and can handle all the social interactions that a computer simply can't, not until we solve the AI problem anyway. On the other hand, computers laugh at the more bookkeeping heavy PnP RPGs. Computers can handle incredibly complicated mechanics and keep track of thousands of numbers without trouble.
Frankly, I think Bioware is heading in the right direction. They really need to do a game with a ruleset that from the ground up takes advantages of the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of CRPGs, instead of dealing with the legacies of a PnP RPG.
Now people who say that people who get older should stop playing videogames and go on to more adult concerns can go and look at the fact that there are plenty of real life entertainment activities that have different versions for young and old players. Touch football is a young person's sport. Golf is an older person's sport. Dancing has variations based on age as well. Card games really don't have an age component to them, which shows that some recreational activities are not strictly age dependent.
Just as there are computer games for young people, there will be different computer games favored by old people, and some games that will have a fairly timeless appeal to them. I think as the computer game industry matures you'll find games that take into account the above factors and are tailored more towards older gamers. These games will be less enjoyable for younger gamers, but the fact is that these games aren't aimed at younger players.
Many of these games will be easy by younger player's standards. Sports for older people tend to be less physically demanding overall. But challenges can be shifted into more intellectual and contemplative areas for those who want those sorts of games. In wargames and various sorts of strategy games, experience tends to count more than youth. Of course kids tend to have a lot of time for playing these games but if a game has enough longevity older players can hold their own by more years at it.
So lets cover the effects of getting older and the implications:
I. Slowing reflexes Older people generally aren't as quick as younger people. Once you hit your twenties, it's all downhill from there. Once you hit your thirties, you really start to notice it. Any game for older gamers is going to have to deal with decays in speed. There are a couple of ways to deal with this approach.
A. Turn based games It should be noted that where sports like football, volleyball and games like raquetball are favored by younger players, older players like golf, which is a turn based game that can be played more or less at leisure. Turn based games allow older players to sit and contemplate their next move in an unhurried fashion (which can be taken overboard, admittedly). Recreational games like poker and bridge it should be noted, also are turn based games as well.
B. Openended PvE games which start slow and speed up Tetris is the archetypical example. These sorts of games start out easy and then the player can play up to where they get overwhelmed and driven out of the game. Over time their high scores will drop but that isn't the issue. They have fun playing it easy at the start and working their way up. It should also be noted that these games never 'finish' either, so there isn't the sense of frustration that one is missing something or that one has 'failed to complete the game' in some way.
C. Pure PvP games Playing tennis can go on for many years, but in general old players do not take on young and skilled players. At best they will go up against young inexperienced players. A game like Quake can be perfectly fine in pure PvP mode for someone in their fifties, assuming everyone else is in the same shape. One should be careful to have a non-challenging environment in such cases, so that all the challenge comes from other opponents likewise who have either a lack of experience or slower reflexes themselves.
II. Decaying memories People don't want to memorize a zillion facets about the game, stuff they'll never need to know after the game, and stuff they need to know during the game as well. There are numerous features that can be used to deal with this.
A. Only a few list of potential types of actions at any given point. This sounds restrictive, but when you look at games like golf, poker, and popular board games, there really aren't a huge number of different types of moves. Having five hundred different commands at any one point isn't always going to make a huge level of difference. The best games have a few simple
In my opinion, there are multiple uncanny valleys that gasmes can fall into. Graphics is only one of them and the most obvious of them. The other two things that have uncanny valleys are AI and physics.
One of the problems that people are having now is the ability to make characters in the game behave in a realistic fashion. In older games, you had things that behaved in such an artificial manner that it didn't jar our expectations. Now that we're trying to make games more realistic, creating characters that act like humans, we're going to find the ways they fall short of actual humans rather jarring, for the same reason that we find the zombies of modern games disturbing. We're wired to react to people socially. We can deal with artificial things easily enough, but someone that acts like a weird human will push mental buttons that clearly artificial things won't.
Likewise with physics. I think one of the reason a lot of very old games do very well in replayability is that they had totally unrealistic physics. Of course they had totally unrealistic worlds so we weren't jarred by the fact that things did not obey the normal laws of physics. Why did the things in Centipede or an early platformer act the way they did? That's just the way the world worked, and that was that.
Now we're trying to create games with realistic looking worlds. And people wonder why they can't pick up a rock and break open a window. Or move aside crates blocking a hallway. Games are getting more real, and that means we're sliding into the Uncanny Valley again as our expectations rise up to demand realism and what we are wired to expect.
Eventually things will get better, as we get good at creating synthetic digital actors who can express a range of emotions, and artificial personality programs that process player-NPC interaction and generate appropriate NPC reactions, and we have libraries that automatically model the physics and behavior of realistic objects.
Incidentally, even as the polygon count goes up, I don't expect the artistic cost to go up proportionally. I do expect the artistic tools to get better over time. An artist who wants a forest scene will just tell the computer to create a forest and he'll be able to tweak parameters and make a few manual adjustments over time. Just because an object has a zillion polygons doesn't mean an artist has to specify each one by hand. I do expect the demands on artists to level off.
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There is a simple fact that unless an executive is stupid, deranged or seriously in love with their own ideas, development money follows revenue money. That is, they're going to sink in money into more of whatever is earning them profits this time around. That's why we get sequels and copies of popular games. But it can also appeal to whole categories or qualities of games as well, and if revenue money is coming from casual games, most game companies are going to read the writing on the wall and go with it. Or else we'll have Darwinian selection at work and get the same result the hard way.
My own feeling is that as casual games start producing increasing amounts of profits or games that are friendly to a casual audience such as World of Warcraft (and yes, everything short of the endgame is very casual-friendly), then we are going to see development money be sunk into casual or casual-friendly games. I have little doubt that Blizzard is going to make sure that Diablo III is as easy as possible for casual gamers to pick up and play. Diablo and Diablo II were very simple point and click games on a fundamental level. There's a reason WoW has done so well.
The flip side of that is that as hardcore games start declining in terms of revenue, the development money is going to go out of them (as well as the marketing money, but that's just part of investment costs). That's probably going to produce a vicious circle in terms of the hardcore gaming industry. Not that it is going to die, but we're going to see a definite decline in AAA high development budget high marketing budget games. The money for the AAA blockbusters will be aiming at the much larger market of casual gamers of various sorts.
In the end, no gaming market will truly die off as long as there are developers willing to code what they want to play. And the existence of online gaming stores is going to make it easier for indie developers to put out small games. But my own feeling is that most of those gaming stores will be pushing the casual games and there's going to be a small section of the store with the label 'hardcore' on it catering to a smaller niche of gamers.
was not that we can't colonize space, but more that the classic SF view of people setting up space stations orbiting the sun, domed or underground colonies on the Moon and other planets, and space freighters setting up some sort of interplanetary trade (space pirates optional), much less interstellar freighters shipping people and goods between star systems ain't gonna happen barring a miracle that breaks the laws of physics as we know them. Which is not to say it can't happen but there are interesting consequences to such feats.
A lot of the focus in the essay was on human beings settling off Earth. If we go with robots, heavily altered human beings and various other forms of transcended beings, then colonization of other worlds is perfectly possible, as long as we adapt the people for harsh climes. But that's not the point of the essay. Humanity for the most part was evolved to live on Earth and getting us to survive anywhere else is next to impossible or of dubious effort at best.
And then there is the fact that for the energy/time cost of manufacturing widgets on one planet in our system and shipping it to another part, it would be a lot cheaper/faster to simply send the schematic by electromagnetic transmission and then have some manufacturing facility on the destination planet build it there. Moving matter is expensive. Moving information is a lot cheaper. Space freighters, whether interplanetary or interstellar, don't make any sense. Just because it worked for sea ships doesn't mean it works for space ships.
Does Charlie Stross think we couldn't send sentient robots to Mars to build a colony of sentient robots? I doubt it, but that wasn't the point of the essay. The question is whether humans could settle Mars, and he's rightfully skeptical of that. So am I. If anything from this world settles Mars and forms a viable self-sustaining colony there, it won't be human as we conceive of it.
There is a question here of why there is correlation in the first place. If it isn't the causation factor, what factor is causing the rise of autism that just happens to correlate with the rise of television viewing in these areas?
Actually, Airplane! was a remake of a movie called Zero Hour. Some of the scenes, some of the dialog even were lifted straight from the original movie. In fact the people who made Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour. So technically Airplane! is a remake.
Online gaming services. My own crystal ball version of the future indicates that we're going to see the collapse of computer game stores. Instead, consoles will probably be sold through conventional electronics retailers. Most games will be sold online and most of them will be going through conventional gaming services.
The MMORPGs will be only some of what is available through your online gaming service. Being able to log onto a server and play your favorite MMORPG or a networked FPS or even solo games and so on will become the thing of the future. Game publishers will transform into online game services, and the game development companies will push their stuff through the services. That will transform the PC gaming industry.
Gamasutra had an article on storytelling in games. They commented on the "show, don't tell" rule of traditional movies and books. They talked about the extension of this to games:
Do, don't show
Show, don't tell
In other words, cutscenes are to be avoided as much as possible. Instead let the player work their way through the scene. Player action, then you show things, and then you have the boring exposition dead last.
Videogames as an entertainment medium are still very young. They're still trying to get the groundrules down right.
The thing is that blogs are competing for eyeballs, and while blogs do link to other blogs in a cooperative fashion, there is also an element of competition there. And if a blog screws up its factchecking or makes a wild and unfounded accusation, other blogs will turn on it and tear it apart. Or just mock it and make sure that everyone is aware the site messed up.
The stuff that tears through the whole blog community is the stuff that tends to get its facts checked and confirmed, and there's a certain critical mass of blogs that are needed for some of this stuff to take off. The whole kryptonite lock thing was something that was confirmed repeatedly by multiple blogs. And numerous eyeballs were aimed at Dan Rather's reports.
Who watches the blogs? The blogs police each other. And the blogs are scattered over too wide a political spectrum with no centralized control point for there to be much of a conspiracy across them.
Not all, mind you, but most of them. Effectively speaking, most movies run at a loss on their theatrical run, when you add the cost of making the movie to the advertising budget for the theatrical run and the distribution costs to the theatrical run. Most of the money of a movie and the ones that put the studios in the black come from the home entertainment division, which handles DVDs, television licensing, not to mention other merchandise from books.
The studios are aware that if they continue to shrink the window between theatrical run and DVD run, the theaters or the bulk of them will go out of business. But when you look at theatrical profits versus distribution and advertising costs for the theatrical run, the profit margins have been steadily shrinking since 1948, and for that matter the money home entertainemnt makes far overshadows it. If they can boost their profits from an earlier DVD run, it could compensate for the loss of theatrical run dollars easily.
The main problem the studios face is that the theatrical run is promo advertising for the DVD. They're going to have to find other ways to push the movie to the home audiance. My own feeling is that they're going to switch to television for that, especially once HDTV gets out. They show it on television and that will encourage people to go and buy the DVD.
Not that all theaters are going to die out. There are a number of specialty theaters out there, focusing on art films, indie movies and so on that will continue to survive because they don't care about modern movie releases and so on, but they're going to be a niche and the studios on the whole won't care about them.
Everything looks like a web service. I do not believe that Google is the end all and be all of computing, any more than I think that Microsoft is the end all and be all of computing either. My own feeling is that once we get the "the Network is the computer" sort of stuff out of our thinking and realize that actual usage is going to be some balance of locally hosted programs and data and Web-based applications and data, then we'll be able to make real progress.
Google Maps work because people don't want to allocate terabytes of storage for maps of the world. Web-based mail and homepages work because most people don't want the work of maintaining their own mail servers and web servers.
However that doesn't apply to an office suite, when you get down to it, or something using a local database on your machine. There aren't a huge number of advantages to hosting your office suite on a remote server and pulling the apps down the network when you want to run them, and there are a number of downsides.
I'm not saying that Google isn't going to become a major player in the web services business, or that MSN in time won't become an equally big player. But what I am saying is that locally hosted applications aren't going to go away either, and ultimately, the security of the PC depends on the security of the operating system running on it.
The author has managed to contradict himself. Two of his bullet points in fact go directly against one another, the cases of intellectual property and innovation.
The author uses a very vague definition of intellectual property in order to discuss intellectual property ownership. Now while corporations themselves tend to favor very loose definitions themselves, even they have certain limits on what intellectual property they care about. Most people in signing away their intellectual property rights tend to focus on discoveries that they make, new ideas and dare I say it innovations that they invent while they are being employed by their employer.
The big question is, if someone in their time away from work on non-work hardware writes the Great American Novel (which is not a thinly disguised satire of their workplace), does their employer own the intellectual property of the novel that they produced in their spare time? The answer is probably not, and even if they did, it's unlikely to hold up in court.
In general, businesses are mainly concerned with the invention of profit making IP that the company itself (or a competitor) could use, that in general can be patented. In general, corporations feel that they own all the discoveries and innovations their employees make. And yet the author then turns around and complains that OSS is derivative, more interested in copying existing proprietary software and not producing any real innovative work.
You can't have it both ways, Stephen. Either people are producing innovations and illegally incorporating them into OSS in violation of the corporate IP contracts the people have signed, or OSS isn't innovative, in which case the contracts those people signed do not apply in this case. The only real contracts that corporations make people sign that could lead to trouble are confidentiality agreements and non-competition agreements. The potential leak of proprietary IP into OSS is a much more valid point than the one that is actually made.
Then we get to the Conceptual Integrity section, which cites the need for small teams working under a strong leader. And of course there's no mention of Linus Torvald and Linux at all, or any examination of the other successful OSS projects and the fact that sooner or later every OSS project needs someone or a small group of people to decide what goes into the source code and what does not. The best OSS projects all have a small group of people who work well together and usually set up a clear roadmap of where their project is going.
In the Professionalism section, the author argues that bedroom programmers destroyed the games industry in the 1980's. This is despite the fact that the collapse of Atari involved a system that used cartridges that generally were not created or programmed by bedroom programmers, but in fact had to be done by software companies working with Atari. These folks were not 'bedroom programmers' by any stretch of the word. Most of the bedroom programmers were in the computer game industry, which managed to survive the collapse of Atari. In fact, one can make a case that the bedroom programmers had a better track record than the professionals in the eighties.
And for that matter, I seem to have this strange recollection of games company after games company going out of business over the last few years. Heck, over the decades. Badly selling games being the major source of all these collapses. Frankly, the gaming industry is the least stable segment of the software industry, and even now it's having problems. And given the number of bug fixes that come out for any given game, I really wonder by what criteria the author views this stuff as quality software by any definition. Games software tends to make most application software look good in comparison, honestly.
The author is clearly spouting off on their prejudices and has absolutely no idea of what is really going on with either proprietary or OSS.
First off, let's discuss my vision of an iBook. The iBook is a hardcover book, thin though, in the cheaper editions. The more expensive editions might run to hundreds of pages enough to cover Neal Stephenson's work or even Jo Rowling's, but the average book is going to be much shorter. The cover is thick and contains the flash memory and batteries that make the book work. How bendable the cover is will depend heavily on whether they can make bendable memory and batteries.
The inside cover tends to be where a lot of the action occurs. You can summon up a list of all the books that the iBook contains. Once you do that, if the iBook isn't large enough to display all of the pages of the book at once, it offers an option to specify where you want the iBook to start. Once you've finished reading through that section you switch to the front of the book and tell the inside cover to move on to the next section. The inside cover has a global/local search engine as well, allowing you to search the library as well as just searching inside a book or even a subsection of the book.
There. Something that has pretty much most of the benefits of a book. The main difference is that the book doesn't automatically have a page count to match the contents of the book that's being displayed. This is a minor point, as people don't read a whole book at a time, they only read a couple of pages at a time. Still, people like flipping through pages, and so the iBook accomodates that. It has a search engine and an updatable list of keywords that can be used as an index as well.
iBooks would logically come in a range. A small portable hardcover that fits into a pocket is one model, and then there are the big models that you keep at home, both in regular hardcover size as well as the oversized models that are used for displaying photographs. The number of pages an iBook has is also going to have a range. The ones that are kept around at home are likely to be heavy on the pages so someone can have the luxury of not having to go to the inside cover to scroll the book forward.
And yes, I can see this catching on and becoming mainstream. The ability to have an entire library of books in something with the same appearance and form-factor of a book, with more or less all the same benefits of a book, would probably catch on quickly. The main issue would be the availability of books. That's where Old Ways and New Ways collide with one another.
The iBook would do to the publishing industry what MP3 has done to the music industry, created an age where the electronic distribution of books and the potential for piracy becomes commonplace. Of course some publishers can refuse to put out books in electronic form, but someone with an automated scanner setup can defeat that. Buy one book, disassemble it, feed the pages through a scanner setup and then compile them into the right digital format.
Now as for mainstream acceptance of the iBook, I see it coming up from the bottom end. What is the bottom end? Newspapers and magazines. Newspapers in general spend a huge amount of money producing a few pieces of paper that get tossed after a day. A few sheets of e-paper in everyone's hands and they can save a huge amount of money printing newspapers. Even better, they don't have to worry about overprinting or underprinting a run. Magazines are also in a similar position. If people buy a blank magazine made of e-paper people can download their magazine every month for a lower price than the print edition, what do you think most people will do?
In time, people will be quite ready to accept the idea of e-books once they've accepted e-newspapers and e-magazines. The publishing industry will fight it for longer than the general public will, but in the end they'll have to go along.
If I want to shoot at the screen, I'll use a gun controller, which has a very comfortable grip and placement of controls for said purpose.
If I want to swing a sword or bat, I'll want a sword/bat-controller, which has a very comfortable grip and placement of controls for said purpose.
Incidentally, for driving games I want a steering wheel controller and some pedals because that has a good grip and control placement for those sorts of games as well.
For a general purpose controller, my personal favorite is the dual shock controller Sony came up with and has stuck with. My only fault with it is not enough feedback on the analog buttons for my taste. It's not perfect, but for a general purpose controller, it's perfectly fine.
The issue here isn't so much the overhead, it's locking someone into a position where they can't go to a competing product.
Any vendor could create a horrifically expensive product to read and write OpenDocument format files. However the company with a pile of OpenDocument files isn't going to be forced to use the horrifically expensive software product. They can use a much less expensive product if they so choose.
It's called capitalism... let the customer buy the best bargain without being forced to go to a specific vendor.
Microsoft isn't serious about not supporting the format. The fact is that as the OpenDocument format grows in support, Microsoft is going to have no choice but to support it unless they want to start losing chunks of their customer base.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't have to be nice about it. My suspicion is that any OpenDocument file opened in Word is going to be somewhat broken, and likewise any Word document will be somewhat broken as well. This is all due to OpenOffice being a broken format, obviously, and not Office's fault.
Of course OpenOffice will probably do just fine converting between OpenDocument and Word, or at least better than Microsoft Office anyway.
But I do agree that it is important to get a good Outlook killer on board.
For those who think that Hollywood is dying because of shrinking box office revenues, think again. Hollywood is doing just fine on its movies. Yes, when you look at the box office returns, a surprisingly high percentage of movies actually are pulling a loss when you deduct profits from box office against marketting.
Of course they make all of that and more off the DVD sales. Most Hollywood flicks are making far more money now off the DVD sales than they are off the theatrical runs and to some extent, licensing for television. But after Hollywood got over their fear of DVDs and realized what a profit center they were, most movies these days have the DVD planned out in conjunction with the movie.
Expect to see a future where the movie theatrical run is just viewed as advertising of sorts for the DVD run as well as the other media tie-ins such as video games.
I can easily forsee a future when a script is tossed back for revision because "it won't make a good videogame" or "the videogame designers want A, B and C out of the movie and X, Y, and Z put into the movie" and as a result, the script gets revised.
I can see the future of Hollywood IP being a war between the movie producers and the game producers each of whom want something different to produce the best possible product. What makes for a good movie can make a bad game and vice versa.
Is a four hour movie twice as enjoyable as a two hour movie?
Obviously not. Admittedly, games tend to be more of a stop and restart phenomena, like a movie on DVD, so that allows lengths to go up. However I think most movie directors (there are certainly exceptions) understand that a movie needs to be as long as you need it to be to tell the story and no longer than that. They may not always do a good job of it, but that's another story.
Honestly I like the idea of shorter games with less repetition and simple levelling up and with more focus on providing an interesting and varied experience. And delivered in episodic format as well.
My own feeling is that it's only a matter of time before consoles start getting USB mice and keyboards as standard or at least common equipment for consoles. Consoles are slowly but surely evolving into low end dedicated gaming PCs. When that happens, I tend to expect that there will be an even sharper decline in PC games produced, though for moddable games, I expect PCs to be around as the modding development platform of choice.
There's a spectrum of issues in the computing world, that range from computer science, which involves doing things where you don't know what the algorithms are to do what you want and have to invent them, to software engineering, which is building something which is extremely well known and understood.
Open source projects are on the whole better, or at least achieve success more quickly on software engineering problems than computer science problems. Writing a word processor is a software engineering problem. It's not like the concepts are not well understood and well documented all over the place, the trick is just building a solid and reliable instance of it. Because it's such a simple and well known problem you can bring in dozens to hundreds of programmers to work on it and there are few debates about how to do things, it's usually more an issue of prioritizing feature lists and bug fixes.
Linux is a software engineering project in the classic sense. Linus and others have been rebuilding Unix, which is extremely well understood. Everyone more or less understood and agreed on how Unix systems work. It's not a question of how to build a memory management algorithm with acceptable performance, but rather which existing algorithm has the best peformance. In general, Linux tends to spend more time debating between existing solutions than trying to find a solution to a problem. The reason that Linux has come so far so fast is that it's treading on extremely familiar ground and isn't really trying to do anything new from a computer science level.
Hurd is more in the area of computer science. They don't have thirty years of precedence going in their favor. While there has been plenty of work in microkernels, there's far less of work there than for Unix. The Hurd people are trying to make something new, rather than reinvent something that's familiar, which is a much easier task by far. So the fact that the Hurd people are moving more slowly is more an indication of the difficulty of the task.
Now the question is, why work on Hurd at all? Well, the answer to that is the answer to the question of whether or not there are things with a microkernel that you cannot do with a regular kernel, and whether these things are worth doing. It is entirely possible on a security level for Linux to hit a dead end, running into the limits of a monolithic kernel architecture. That if there is to be any progress past a certain point, that a rearchitecture is needed to switch to a microkernel architecture. I'm not saying this is the case, but I am saying that it is not an impossibility.
If that is the case, then Linus and others will need to do a major rearchitecture in a new release, or they need to switch over to an existing microkernel project that they feel is acceptable to them. Even if the Linux people decide to do their own microkernel architecture from scratch in that case, they will almost certainly be going over the entire history and the results of the GNU/Hurd project with a fine tooth comb for data on how to build a viable microkernel operating system.
To say that microkernels are slower than monolithic kernels is on some level unimportant. CPU speeds have slowed down somewhat but we're still improving the speed of systems. The question becomes are you willing to trade a performance hit for security. Would you rather have a fast system that is more vulnerable to nasty software or would you rather have a slower but more secure system? So the Hurd people are focusing on security since that is potentially the greatest strength of microkernels over monolithic kernels.
So look at the Hurd project, like a bunch of other projects as a research project. And yes, it's taking them a heck of a long time to get results but they're not in any particular hurry. It's like Linux versus Windows, Linux doesn't need to "win" next year. It just keeps on chugging and eventually grinds away at the opposition. Hurd just keeps getting better every year and maybe someday it will clearly surpass Linux in a few areas. Probably not anytime soon, but this isn't a race.
So no, Hurd isn't a waste of time. It's a research project and one that may be of significant importance to Linux down the road.
KOTOR II had a lot of stuff that should have been in KOTOR I. For example, the upgrade system was much improved, as well as being able to have two weapon sets to switch between instantly and in some cases, automatically.
I also liked the concept that your Light/Dark choices would have an impact on who you got for a companion, and to a lesser extent your gender would as well. If anything, I thought that they didn't go far enough with this angle.
They were also doing an amazing job, up until the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine of building up an incredible sense of atmosphere and tension. There were all sorts of hidden angles going on there between all of the characters. Even nice little T3-M4 was prone to even creepy behavior at various points.
And it all fell apart after that. One of the reasons I'm so terribly disappointed with the ending of KOTOR II is that they had such a powerful setup and they fell short of that. It could have been a truly mind blowing game and in the end they weren't able to sustain it.
Something to remember is that almost all of the technologies that we use today date back to the sixties. Object oriented programming dates back to the sixties, and yet it wasn't until C++ that it finally broke out into the mainstream. Likewise, it took how many years for the Internet to break out and become useful to people?
The fact is that most stuff that comes out of the Computer Science departments takes years before it can become a useful and practical in the real world. The people sneering at microkernels as an old CS idea that will never work probably were the same folks sneering at OOP when C++ first came out, discussing how broken the C++ implementation was. Or a bunch of other concepts.
The fact is that in time Linux may well shift over to a microkernel to provide advance functionality someday. It may be that microkernel technology is just a little ahead of its time and it's just going to take a few more years for the computer world to catch up to it.
I believe that Microsoft is aware that Linux more or less dooms them on the desktop. They can't admit that though. If they admit it, it will mean a defection from their platform. Every businessman knows that you never admit your product is being beaten by another product, you always focus on why people should buy your product, even if you have to make up reasons for it.
They are quite aware that their long term viability in the desktop market is doomed and they're getting pounded in the server market. They're losing ground in the third world nations and that isn't good for them. Those third world nations can ultimately improve open source software to the point it can hammer products in the first world.
So they're busy looking for escape routes and shifting to a new business model, and they're going to squeeze as much as they can out of existing markets until they get their escape route set up. Heck, even after they get it set up they will squeeze every last penny they can out if it, just because that makes good business sense. And they will never admit that Windows is an inferior product until they finally pull the plug on it and Office.
The article states that Microsoft has matured and forget the growth in the PC market that it used to have. The only sensible thing for Microsoft to do is to find a new market to grow in, and that's what they're doing right now. MSN, X-Box, X-Box Online and the Microsoft Media Center are all areas that they're looking to find new sources of revenue and growth in.
Microsoft has paid attention to what happened to IBM, and I think they are aware that sooner or later the time will come when they have to switch from profits from monopoly leverage to finding some other way to make money. They can't and won't admit it because it would damage their position in the market badly to actually come out and admit it. They don't have a good escape route now, a path to new growth, and until they find it, they have to claim that their current position is strong.
SF writing has gotten a lot harder than before because we have an increasing familiarity and sophistication with technology on all levels, not just scientific but economic, political and social issues. That raises the bar for what science fiction writers have to worry about when they build a new world.
It used to be that science fiction writers would only have to worry about the physics of what they were inventing, or make it scientific enough to sound plausible. They could afford only to look at the obvious consequences of their technology. Quite consistantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain inventions were believed quite seriously by some people to bring in a new golden age for mankind.
In modern times, we understand all too well that the fundamental problems to creating a golden age for mankind are not technological but social. We also understand how a piece of technology can have social impacts that are not entirely positive, or at least very disruptive. The automobile, television, the Internet, while these all have had positive aspects to them, only the most deluded would deny negative impacts.
And given all the social, economic and political issues about technological developments these days, one of the first things an SF author who has someone invent a new piece of technology has to worry about are who funded the technology and how do they intend to economically exploit it to get their research funds back. They also have to look at how people are going to be abusing the technology and the disruptive social impacts of said technology as well.
Email leads to spam and overloaded channels of communication. All of a sudden you have to deal with filtering mechanisms and means, technological, legal and social to cope with those things (which we still need to figure out). You invent something spiffy and all of a sudden there are consequences all over the place.
I have mixed feelings about D&D computer games. The fact of the matter is that PnP RPGs and CRPGs have different strengths and weaknesses. What works for one does not necessarily work for the other.
For example, the strength of PnP RPGs is that you have a human being running them and can handle all the social interactions that a computer simply can't, not until we solve the AI problem anyway. On the other hand, computers laugh at the more bookkeeping heavy PnP RPGs. Computers can handle incredibly complicated mechanics and keep track of thousands of numbers without trouble.
Frankly, I think Bioware is heading in the right direction. They really need to do a game with a ruleset that from the ground up takes advantages of the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of CRPGs, instead of dealing with the legacies of a PnP RPG.
Now people who say that people who get older should stop playing videogames and go on to more adult concerns can go and look at the fact that there are plenty of real life entertainment activities that have different versions for young and old players. Touch football is a young person's sport. Golf is an older person's sport. Dancing has variations based on age as well. Card games really don't have an age component to them, which shows that some recreational activities are not strictly age dependent.
Just as there are computer games for young people, there will be different computer games favored by old people, and some games that will have a fairly timeless appeal to them. I think as the computer game industry matures you'll find games that take into account the above factors and are tailored more towards older gamers. These games will be less enjoyable for younger gamers, but the fact is that these games aren't aimed at younger players.
Many of these games will be easy by younger player's standards. Sports for older people tend to be less physically demanding overall. But challenges can be shifted into more intellectual and contemplative areas for those who want those sorts of games. In wargames and various sorts of strategy games, experience tends to count more than youth. Of course kids tend to have a lot of time for playing these games but if a game has enough longevity older players can hold their own by more years at it.
So lets cover the effects of getting older and the implications:
I. Slowing reflexes
Older people generally aren't as quick as younger people. Once you hit your twenties, it's all downhill from there. Once you hit your thirties, you really start to notice it. Any game for older gamers is going to have to deal with decays in speed. There are a couple of ways to deal with this approach.
A. Turn based games
It should be noted that where sports like football, volleyball and games like raquetball are favored by younger players, older players like golf, which is a turn based game that can be played more or less at leisure. Turn based games allow older players to sit and contemplate their next move in an unhurried fashion (which can be taken overboard, admittedly). Recreational games like poker and bridge it should be noted, also are turn based games as well.
B. Openended PvE games which start slow and speed up
Tetris is the archetypical example. These sorts of games start out easy and then the player can play up to where they get overwhelmed and driven out of the game. Over time their high scores will drop but that isn't the issue. They have fun playing it easy at the start and working their way up. It should also be noted that these games never 'finish' either, so there isn't the sense of frustration that one is missing something or that one has 'failed to complete the game' in some way.
C. Pure PvP games
Playing tennis can go on for many years, but in general old players do not take on young and skilled players. At best they will go up against young inexperienced players. A game like Quake can be perfectly fine in pure PvP mode for someone in their fifties, assuming everyone else is in the same shape. One should be careful to have a non-challenging environment in such cases, so that all the challenge comes from other opponents likewise who have either a lack of experience or slower reflexes themselves.
II. Decaying memories
People don't want to memorize a zillion facets about the game, stuff they'll never need to know after the game, and stuff they need to know during the game as well. There are numerous features that can be used to deal with this.
A. Only a few list of potential types of actions at any given point.
This sounds restrictive, but when you look at games like golf, poker, and popular board games, there really aren't a huge number of different types of moves. Having five hundred different commands at any one point isn't always going to make a huge level of difference. The best games have a few simple
In my opinion, there are multiple uncanny valleys that gasmes can fall into. Graphics is only one of them and the most obvious of them. The other two things that have uncanny valleys are AI and physics.
One of the problems that people are having now is the ability to make characters in the game behave in a realistic fashion. In older games, you had things that behaved in such an artificial manner that it didn't jar our expectations. Now that we're trying to make games more realistic, creating characters that act like humans, we're going to find the ways they fall short of actual humans rather jarring, for the same reason that we find the zombies of modern games disturbing. We're wired to react to people socially. We can deal with artificial things easily enough, but someone that acts like a weird human will push mental buttons that clearly artificial things won't.
Likewise with physics. I think one of the reason a lot of very old games do very well in replayability is that they had totally unrealistic physics. Of course they had totally unrealistic worlds so we weren't jarred by the fact that things did not obey the normal laws of physics. Why did the things in Centipede or an early platformer act the way they did? That's just the way the world worked, and that was that.
Now we're trying to create games with realistic looking worlds. And people wonder why they can't pick up a rock and break open a window. Or move aside crates blocking a hallway. Games are getting more real, and that means we're sliding into the Uncanny Valley again as our expectations rise up to demand realism and what we are wired to expect.
Eventually things will get better, as we get good at creating synthetic digital actors who can express a range of emotions, and artificial personality programs that process player-NPC interaction and generate appropriate NPC reactions, and we have libraries that automatically model the physics and behavior of realistic objects.
Incidentally, even as the polygon count goes up, I don't expect the artistic cost to go up proportionally. I do expect the artistic tools to get better over time. An artist who wants a forest scene will just tell the computer to create a forest and he'll be able to tweak parameters and make a few manual adjustments over time. Just because an object has a zillion polygons doesn't mean an artist has to specify each one by hand. I do expect the demands on artists to level off.