Do game makers lack so much imagination that they are relying upon movies or books for their storylines? If this is the case, then gaming is doomed to be a mere wanna-be art medium.
I think it might be a sign of the times. But the same could be said of film these days. You bring up an interesting point with Mozart not bitching about not having a mixer, or Fritz Lang being fine without a light meter. All of those artists had to suffer for their art and make do with what they had. Maybe that's where the great art comes from. With these millions of dollar budgets, movies and games become more of a commodity than an art form because there's too much at stake to create a compelling piece of storytelling. Especially when you could simply license a tried and true one out.
The best art comes when one free-thinking artist is put to task. The handful of game designers you could think of seemingly operate as one man shows. Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc. I say seemingly because sure, they don't single handedly write the code and create the art assets, but they're basically where the heart of the game is. When a company throws millions of dollars at a game, it just becomes a collaborative effort with people who don't really have the capacity to create artistic content because they have the money.
Eh, this bill seems so vague that the only good it will do is give lawyers jobs for years debating what constitutes "morbid interest in violence" or what is "literary, political, artistic or scientific value" which is probably the point altogether.
Anyway, if this bill passes, will it force developers to get creative with games? Eh, probably not, they'll just hire more lawyers to oppose it while making the same stuff. It's kind of a shame. I think some of the best art is created when artists are pressured with social or political censorship, and games might need that in order to get out of their sequel slump.
Well, maybe we don't have anything else to talk about because we value work so much? You might say that you're not your job, but I think a job is something that we take for granted until we don't have it, but it's still a major factor in our identity. If you lost your job, would you be happy? I know when I was out of work for 3 months, that was one of the few things I thought about, and I was getting more miserable by the day. Work gives us purpose and direction, even though once we have it we could just shrug it off and go "yeah, it's a job."
Also, if you lost your job would people view you the same way? Our ancestors hunted for their food. We work a 9 - 5 for ours. We view people who don't have jobs as lazy and incapable of taking care of themselves and their families, while people who work hard and have high paying jobs are viewed more favorably. The Alpha Male is the guy who gets paid the most.
Umm... I think you're very wrong about that. Taken to the context in movies, I've watched great comedy films over and over again long after the action and drama films are collecting dust on the shelf. If comedy is well done, there's infinite replayability. Why do we quote Simpsons and Futurama episodes OVER AND OVER again? Because they're still funny even after first viewing. The simple fact is that good comedy is a lot harder than action. It's much easier to throw a bunch of enemies into a game that the player has to kill, then have a writer make up a funny situation, and keep coming up with funny situations consistently enough to fill a game.
Re:That this question is even being asked
on
On Point On Slacking
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That this even is being asked illustrates a very serious problem in this country.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment. I don't know how things are like overseas, but Americans take a lot of pride in their jobs. "What do you do?" is one of the first questions asked after an introduction to another person. We put our own personal value into the jobs we do. That this question is being asked illustrates to me that Americans have been spending so much time working that they're wondering if they spend too much time doing it, and if there's something else that might be more important.
I haven't bought Blade Runner because the "special edition" was always on the horizon and that was preventing me from picking up the old disc. Now that the release date is finally more solid, I'm glad I can finally pick it up.
Parent is absolutely right. A friend of mine moved for a job opportunity a little over a year ago. The move put a lot of stress on his relationship with his wife, as she was feeling resentment and loneliness in the new town. It eventually caused their divorce. I could also say the same about a different friend at another job, who moved with his wife and child down for the job. Again, the move and new town caused stress in their relationship. They moved again a little while later, and they're still together, but if you take the job, you're probably going to be in for some stressful times. And as the parent said, even if you don't take the job you might feel resentment that you didn't take it.
"The Board of Directors believes that the name change would be in the best interests of the Company because the new name better reflects the long-term growth strategy of the Company."
With the education system as it is now, how did anyone even think of something this inane? We don't have enough teachers to teach, yet alone enough teachers to sift through kids' blogs looking to see if they did something illegal or "inappropriate."
at least read the article summary. It says: When a user touches the screen an electrical signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair
so it doesn't differentiate between different people sitting at the chair on front of the computer - only between 2 people on different chairs.
I don't work in the software industry, but I do work in the animation industry, and it's probably the same principle with software. Short production schedules, limited budget until the product needs to get out the door, incompetent people who are there due solely to the length of their resume, ineffecient scheduling of people's individual tasks, and the fact that the product you're producing could be sent out uncompleted and still sell are all reasons software has bugs in it. Making software isn't like building a bridge, which is what many people love comparing it to. If a bridge falls down, people die. If software crashes due to a bug, people learn to work around the bug.
The fixing non-critical bugs stage in software development is the equivalent of the "finessing" stage in animation. You can finesse a project forever, fix bugs, add features, etc, but there comes a point when it just has to be put out the door.
I think the ability to research and find information is one of, if not the most important thing in becoming not just computer literate, but literate. Knowing where to go to search for topics online, knowing where to go to search for help for your word processor, etc are all very important. I spend a good portion of my time at work looking through help files and web sites trying to figure out how to do new things. I also spend a good portion of time researching things on my personal time through Wikipedia. As Einstein said, "Never memorize something that you can look up."
I think a lot of computer illiterate users are that way because they never bother (or don't know how) to find the answers to the simplest questions on their own. As an aside, though, while the knowledge of proper searching can be taught, most people would rather have the answer handed to them, so even if they know how to find the solution themselves, they'll still bug the tech guy. You can lead a horse to water...
I took those numbers into account. But I wasn't the one to make the comparison to the Incredibles - he did. At Pixar, the animation quota is something like 2-4 seconds of animation a week but is largely dependent on the shot. On Jimmy Neutron, however, animation quotas were 20 - 45 seconds a week. Having the 1.5 months a minute, which is 10 - 15 seconds a week is very feasible to do good - great animation. At my current job, I long for those types of quotas as we're doing 20 - 30 seconds a week.
Any animator worth his salt studies real actors, and is a "real actor" in their own right. Acting is a huge part of learning animation, and books have been written on the topic. That said, acting is also a later step in the learning process. Before that, animation teaching is usually started with the 12 principles of animation which are:
1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
6. Slow In and Slow Out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing
12. Appeal
These principles were defined by the original Disney animators in the 40s and 50s, and are widely used today as the base of animation learning. You can check out a great resource about the animation process, written by 2 of Disney's Nine Old Men, here.
Ton in the interview said: ...so you accept a certain level of non-realism easily. (Check the weird walk cycles in The Incredibles for example).
This kinda just goes to show that he's just spouting off a "factoid" he's read or heard about. The "weird" walk cycles in The Incredibles - while maybe not "photorealistic" - are done that way for a purpose, following the principles listed above to make the character and animation more appealing. Animation is often about getting an appealing looking movement than a "realistic" looking movement. It's just that oftentimes, if you make a movement too unrealistic, people who are used to seeing such a movement will notice that there's something wrong with the animation.
Also, whether the character is "realistic" is irrelevent. The 12 principles still apply, but are just toned down. These things weren't pulled out of a hat. They were observed in human movement and exaggerated to make those movements more clear. Nobody could deny that the original Disney animators really observed what they were trying to animate. In fact, during the making of Bambi, Disney brought in a deer carcass so that animators could study the skeleton and muscle systems in a real deer. One of my professors in school who used to work for Disney showed the class the resulting book they made out of that research.
I thought the questions asked were really great compared to most animation interviews I've read which usually just appear fanboyish. I'm glad the interviewer asked about the story and character animation which I felt were the films biggest weaknesses. It's too bad that Ton decided to side-step the issue and not admit flaws.
"Yeah, the challenge the artists set themselves - to use quite realistic personages - is also something that easily works against you"
yeah yeah, we all know about the "uncanny valley" (and if you don't, there's a link:]) but that wasn't the problem that Elephant's Dream had. The animation was just bad. It was obvious that most of the people working on it were better at modeling, texturing, and lighting than animation. This is something that's fairly common in CG animation. It's usually broken down into "character animation" and "everything else." Where you'll find lots of great generalists who know about modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, particles, etc and then you have the animators who don't do the technical stuff as well but can bring the characters to life.
When I look for a gaming console, I don't care if it plays 8 tracks
You might not care if the game plays off 8-tracks but remember when Nintendo announced that their N64 system is going to be CARTRIDGES? Nintendo came upon a lot of attack for doing that when the Playstation and Dreamcast were advancing to CDs. So yeah, people care about the medium they're playing on. Whether they care about Blu-Ray remains to be seen, though.
but isn't it kinda true that most games are just around to satisfy the morbid curiosity for violence? If you look at any other entertainment medium - books, television, film - video games would come out on top for violent content. The games where your objective isn't going around and killing something are pretty few and far between. Why is this? Is it just the easy road to take? "How do we make this level harder? Oh, just add a couple of monsters to kill." While I don't like the passing of this bill, I wish game developers would take more of a high road and actually make games where violence isn't the main point of the game.
I went to E3 this year and got pretty tired of going from booth to booth and seeing FMV videos of guys shooting other guys or guys running other guys through with a sword - even if the bad guys were cave trolls or other monsters.
It's just kind of stupid to make a game based on a real-life massacre. This topic has already been exhausted in the year or 2 following the shootings. Remember Jon Katz with his daily updates on what he thought, and how nerds everywhere are now being harrassed? Yeah, me too. Right now it's just gratuitous, and he's getting the same response as he would be getting if he made a game where you're Hitler and you have to go around killing Jews. No more talking is going to go out about it. The creator is just viewed as an insensitive jerk.
Anyway, people should just chill out. He made a lame game in his own spare time using a click and create type game system. If it was any other topic the website would die out in obscurity, but since it got a couple of people's panties in a bunch, he got a newspaper article about it, and now a slashdot article. Basically, too much attention for something that's about the equivalent of a high school kid drawing violent sketches in the margins of his notebook pages. His website design sucks too.
Maybe it doesn't look as good in the end? for a realistic procedural texture, you're going to have to add a lot of layers to make it look any decent. It's much less processor intensive to create a raster image with all of those layers already combined. Also, with raster, there is the ability to fine tune where you want, say, a specific clump of dirt to show up. Maybe you want more dirt to pile up in the corners of a room compared to the middle. This would require some sort of raster image to define areas where you want the procedural dirt layer to show through.
This is at least the case in pre-rendered 3d animation, I don't know if the case is much different for real-time effects, but I don't see why it would be.
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere...[shudder] and I thought I saw a two. Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the most hilariously ironic quote I've read today!
Woohoo! Finally something the President is good for!
Do game makers lack so much imagination that they are relying upon movies or books for their storylines? If this is the case, then gaming is doomed to be a mere wanna-be art medium.
I think it might be a sign of the times. But the same could be said of film these days. You bring up an interesting point with Mozart not bitching about not having a mixer, or Fritz Lang being fine without a light meter. All of those artists had to suffer for their art and make do with what they had. Maybe that's where the great art comes from. With these millions of dollar budgets, movies and games become more of a commodity than an art form because there's too much at stake to create a compelling piece of storytelling. Especially when you could simply license a tried and true one out.
The best art comes when one free-thinking artist is put to task. The handful of game designers you could think of seemingly operate as one man shows. Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc. I say seemingly because sure, they don't single handedly write the code and create the art assets, but they're basically where the heart of the game is. When a company throws millions of dollars at a game, it just becomes a collaborative effort with people who don't really have the capacity to create artistic content because they have the money.
Eh, this bill seems so vague that the only good it will do is give lawyers jobs for years debating what constitutes "morbid interest in violence" or what is "literary, political, artistic or scientific value" which is probably the point altogether.
Anyway, if this bill passes, will it force developers to get creative with games? Eh, probably not, they'll just hire more lawyers to oppose it while making the same stuff. It's kind of a shame. I think some of the best art is created when artists are pressured with social or political censorship, and games might need that in order to get out of their sequel slump.
Well, maybe we don't have anything else to talk about because we value work so much? You might say that you're not your job, but I think a job is something that we take for granted until we don't have it, but it's still a major factor in our identity. If you lost your job, would you be happy? I know when I was out of work for 3 months, that was one of the few things I thought about, and I was getting more miserable by the day. Work gives us purpose and direction, even though once we have it we could just shrug it off and go "yeah, it's a job."
Also, if you lost your job would people view you the same way? Our ancestors hunted for their food. We work a 9 - 5 for ours. We view people who don't have jobs as lazy and incapable of taking care of themselves and their families, while people who work hard and have high paying jobs are viewed more favorably. The Alpha Male is the guy who gets paid the most.
Umm... I think you're very wrong about that. Taken to the context in movies, I've watched great comedy films over and over again long after the action and drama films are collecting dust on the shelf. If comedy is well done, there's infinite replayability. Why do we quote Simpsons and Futurama episodes OVER AND OVER again? Because they're still funny even after first viewing. The simple fact is that good comedy is a lot harder than action. It's much easier to throw a bunch of enemies into a game that the player has to kill, then have a writer make up a funny situation, and keep coming up with funny situations consistently enough to fill a game.
That this even is being asked illustrates a very serious problem in this country.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment. I don't know how things are like overseas, but Americans take a lot of pride in their jobs. "What do you do?" is one of the first questions asked after an introduction to another person. We put our own personal value into the jobs we do. That this question is being asked illustrates to me that Americans have been spending so much time working that they're wondering if they spend too much time doing it, and if there's something else that might be more important.
Sure, you can start a small business, but if it get's too busy you'll have to pay more...
Isn't that the case right now? Bandwidth isn't free. If your site gets too popular, you have to pay more.
I haven't bought Blade Runner because the "special edition" was always on the horizon and that was preventing me from picking up the old disc. Now that the release date is finally more solid, I'm glad I can finally pick it up.
Parent is absolutely right. A friend of mine moved for a job opportunity a little over a year ago. The move put a lot of stress on his relationship with his wife, as she was feeling resentment and loneliness in the new town. It eventually caused their divorce. I could also say the same about a different friend at another job, who moved with his wife and child down for the job. Again, the move and new town caused stress in their relationship. They moved again a little while later, and they're still together, but if you take the job, you're probably going to be in for some stressful times. And as the parent said, even if you don't take the job you might feel resentment that you didn't take it.
"The Board of Directors believes that the name change would be in the best interests of the Company because the new name better reflects the long-term growth strategy of the Company."
I'll say.
With the education system as it is now, how did anyone even think of something this inane? We don't have enough teachers to teach, yet alone enough teachers to sift through kids' blogs looking to see if they did something illegal or "inappropriate."
at least read the article summary. It says:
When a user touches the screen an electrical signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair
so it doesn't differentiate between different people sitting at the chair on front of the computer - only between 2 people on different chairs.
I don't work in the software industry, but I do work in the animation industry, and it's probably the same principle with software. Short production schedules, limited budget until the product needs to get out the door, incompetent people who are there due solely to the length of their resume, ineffecient scheduling of people's individual tasks, and the fact that the product you're producing could be sent out uncompleted and still sell are all reasons software has bugs in it. Making software isn't like building a bridge, which is what many people love comparing it to. If a bridge falls down, people die. If software crashes due to a bug, people learn to work around the bug.
The fixing non-critical bugs stage in software development is the equivalent of the "finessing" stage in animation. You can finesse a project forever, fix bugs, add features, etc, but there comes a point when it just has to be put out the door.
It would also be great if they hired Tom Hanks back for reshoots.
I think the ability to research and find information is one of, if not the most important thing in becoming not just computer literate, but literate. Knowing where to go to search for topics online, knowing where to go to search for help for your word processor, etc are all very important. I spend a good portion of my time at work looking through help files and web sites trying to figure out how to do new things. I also spend a good portion of time researching things on my personal time through Wikipedia. As Einstein said, "Never memorize something that you can look up."
I think a lot of computer illiterate users are that way because they never bother (or don't know how) to find the answers to the simplest questions on their own. As an aside, though, while the knowledge of proper searching can be taught, most people would rather have the answer handed to them, so even if they know how to find the solution themselves, they'll still bug the tech guy. You can lead a horse to water...
How this article is posted minutes after another article where a portion of the article is copied verbatim in the story summary.
I took those numbers into account. But I wasn't the one to make the comparison to the Incredibles - he did. At Pixar, the animation quota is something like 2-4 seconds of animation a week but is largely dependent on the shot. On Jimmy Neutron, however, animation quotas were 20 - 45 seconds a week. Having the 1.5 months a minute, which is 10 - 15 seconds a week is very feasible to do good - great animation. At my current job, I long for those types of quotas as we're doing 20 - 30 seconds a week.
Any animator worth his salt studies real actors, and is a "real actor" in their own right. Acting is a huge part of learning animation, and books have been written on the topic. That said, acting is also a later step in the learning process. Before that, animation teaching is usually started with the 12 principles of animation which are:
...so you accept a certain level of non-realism easily. (Check the weird walk cycles in The Incredibles for example).
1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
6. Slow In and Slow Out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing
12. Appeal
These principles were defined by the original Disney animators in the 40s and 50s, and are widely used today as the base of animation learning. You can check out a great resource about the animation process, written by 2 of Disney's Nine Old Men, here.
Ton in the interview said:
This kinda just goes to show that he's just spouting off a "factoid" he's read or heard about. The "weird" walk cycles in The Incredibles - while maybe not "photorealistic" - are done that way for a purpose, following the principles listed above to make the character and animation more appealing. Animation is often about getting an appealing looking movement than a "realistic" looking movement. It's just that oftentimes, if you make a movement too unrealistic, people who are used to seeing such a movement will notice that there's something wrong with the animation.
Also, whether the character is "realistic" is irrelevent. The 12 principles still apply, but are just toned down. These things weren't pulled out of a hat. They were observed in human movement and exaggerated to make those movements more clear. Nobody could deny that the original Disney animators really observed what they were trying to animate. In fact, during the making of Bambi, Disney brought in a deer carcass so that animators could study the skeleton and muscle systems in a real deer. One of my professors in school who used to work for Disney showed the class the resulting book they made out of that research.
I thought the questions asked were really great compared to most animation interviews I've read which usually just appear fanboyish. I'm glad the interviewer asked about the story and character animation which I felt were the films biggest weaknesses. It's too bad that Ton decided to side-step the issue and not admit flaws.
:]) but that wasn't the problem that Elephant's Dream had. The animation was just bad. It was obvious that most of the people working on it were better at modeling, texturing, and lighting than animation. This is something that's fairly common in CG animation. It's usually broken down into "character animation" and "everything else." Where you'll find lots of great generalists who know about modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, particles, etc and then you have the animators who don't do the technical stuff as well but can bring the characters to life.
"Yeah, the challenge the artists set themselves - to use quite realistic personages - is also something that easily works against you"
yeah yeah, we all know about the "uncanny valley" (and if you don't, there's a link
When I look for a gaming console, I don't care if it plays 8 tracks
You might not care if the game plays off 8-tracks but remember when Nintendo announced that their N64 system is going to be CARTRIDGES? Nintendo came upon a lot of attack for doing that when the Playstation and Dreamcast were advancing to CDs. So yeah, people care about the medium they're playing on. Whether they care about Blu-Ray remains to be seen, though.
but isn't it kinda true that most games are just around to satisfy the morbid curiosity for violence? If you look at any other entertainment medium - books, television, film - video games would come out on top for violent content. The games where your objective isn't going around and killing something are pretty few and far between. Why is this? Is it just the easy road to take? "How do we make this level harder? Oh, just add a couple of monsters to kill." While I don't like the passing of this bill, I wish game developers would take more of a high road and actually make games where violence isn't the main point of the game.
I went to E3 this year and got pretty tired of going from booth to booth and seeing FMV videos of guys shooting other guys or guys running other guys through with a sword - even if the bad guys were cave trolls or other monsters.
It's just kind of stupid to make a game based on a real-life massacre. This topic has already been exhausted in the year or 2 following the shootings. Remember Jon Katz with his daily updates on what he thought, and how nerds everywhere are now being harrassed? Yeah, me too. Right now it's just gratuitous, and he's getting the same response as he would be getting if he made a game where you're Hitler and you have to go around killing Jews. No more talking is going to go out about it. The creator is just viewed as an insensitive jerk.
Anyway, people should just chill out. He made a lame game in his own spare time using a click and create type game system. If it was any other topic the website would die out in obscurity, but since it got a couple of people's panties in a bunch, he got a newspaper article about it, and now a slashdot article. Basically, too much attention for something that's about the equivalent of a high school kid drawing violent sketches in the margins of his notebook pages. His website design sucks too.
Maybe it doesn't look as good in the end? for a realistic procedural texture, you're going to have to add a lot of layers to make it look any decent. It's much less processor intensive to create a raster image with all of those layers already combined. Also, with raster, there is the ability to fine tune where you want, say, a specific clump of dirt to show up. Maybe you want more dirt to pile up in the corners of a room compared to the middle. This would require some sort of raster image to define areas where you want the procedural dirt layer to show through.
This is at least the case in pre-rendered 3d animation, I don't know if the case is much different for real-time effects, but I don't see why it would be.
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere...[shudder] and I thought I saw a two.
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.