Seeing as how 3 of those movies on the list have sequels also on that list, I don't think these movies are bombing at the box office. Critically, yes, but they have to be making their money back if they keep making sequels to them.
If you ask a thousand car engineers why they got into their profession, I bet you'd find a large percentage of them would say it's because they liked driving, or car culture, or something related to the act of using cars and not of making them. I'm an animator. I got into my profession because I liked cartoons. I liked them so much that I decided to learn how to make them and now I am. My story is not in any way unique, so it's silly for all of the replies to this person who likes games telling him that it takes more than liking games to make them. Of course it takes more than liking them. That's why he chose to log in and ask people for advice on where to start to creating and not just appreciating.
He didn't say he has a lot of experience in game programming. He said he has a lot of experience WITH games, just like you have a lot of experience WITH porn, space movies, and the Risk board game. As such, being passionate about gaming is definitely a plus in making great games.
Seeing as how the White House seems to have never cared about the people's opinion or has listened to it in such a direct manner, I think it's a welcome change.
Ok/. people, get to work on turning this post into an old curmudgeon meme:
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I preferred the simpler games, the ones that didn't have new technology and things of the nature. Compare modern genre and compare them to the classics like example, example or example. They were so much fun because handling was so easy, you could move, you could strafe, etc. It was so much better! And yet, as games become more realistic, all that happens is that your character becomes more sluggish and less powerful, harder to manipulate. All for the sake of reality, and graphics which will always get old. But the gameplay never gets old. That's why classics are what they are - they're acceptable graphically and a hell of a lot of fun to play.
Want proof? They still have classic example tournaments, Melee tournaments, etc. if you look around in the right places. On the other hand, who cares anymore about popular new game? Man, even playing different classic example is much more fun than sequel on the modern console, simply by virtue of the fact that the older one is simpler, freer, gives you more control, more imagination, more room to enjoy it.
Seriously? It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality. I wish we'd drop the reality of things and just make games fun. But I guess now I'm old enough to just make my own games. Sigh. It had to come down to this, didn't it?
If I or a colleague said anything, it was a leak... But if someone on top said something, well, that was strategic.
But that is a huge distinction. If I tell you my secret, that's me confiding in you. If you tell someone else my secret, you're breaking my trust. Since the people at the top are the ones who own the secrets, it's theirs to tell.
Well, now that they've bloated it up pretty nice and well, they could continue their employment by going through and unbloating it. After that happens, the process could start again.
Boycotts are the only way these companies are gonna learn that customers won't tolerate DRM.
When are people gonna learn that boycotts haven't worked for 60 years? We're dealing with multi-national corporations now. Bitching about their products on the internet will get you further than a boycott. If you were going to purchase a Zune and decided against it due to ethical issues, then Microsoft's out $100. If you run a popular blog and bitch about it and get a thousand people to not purchase the product, then Microsoft is out hundreds of thousands of dollars, regardless of whether you yourself have purchased the Zune or not. In some cases, it's even better to purchase the product because then you have more credibility when you say the product is defective. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
I put the listing at $1.92 million for the starting bid.
That's your problem right there. You have to put the starting bid a little lower and have people work their way up to $1.92 million. Try starting at $1.5 mil.
Particularly ironic considering the events of the past week in Iran and the internet's enabling role in that continuing saga.
It's not ironic at all. The Iranian government would have been completely overthrown by now if half the population wasn't too busy wasting time "twittering" on the internet.
Jobs is one of the architects of the computer age and is still very much a part of it. If he dies, the technological landscape will change, so I would say it's worth knowing how he's doing.
If I understand what you're trying to say, then the mechanics of gameplay aren't the same as the mechanics of projecting light through a film reel, the gaming equivalent would be something like the installation process or double clicking on an executable. That's just the process of displaying the art form. The art comes in what's being displayed. In film, it's similar to a painting in that it's non-interactive and the viewer is expected to just watch and listen. In games, there is the visual element too but it adds another element - the interactivity. This adds immersion to the experience. When you look at the larger view, as you say, not all art is created equal. For every great painting, there's a thousand bad ones, and the same goes for movies and games. Gore splattered zombie killing games might not be advancing the medium, but to discredit games as an art form just because there are a ton of games that are just bad, even if the technical achievements are impressive, is discrediting the games that actually do it really well. Even if there is violent zombie-killing, it can be done in such a way that it is effective in communicating whatever message the designer wants to say. An example is how anybody who has played Grand Theft Auto 4 until the end and did not get caught up solely in the wanton violence and destruction that the media only portrays it as, saw a story that was just as compelling as anything in film today. Godfather was violent, Scarface was violent, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan was violent and those movies are considered classic, high-class cinema. Saw and Hostel were also violent, but they treat the violence differently and aren't put into the same classification as the aforementioned films. The same type of thought process and craft and technical expertise goes into any game that goes into any movie and even any painting. The only difference is that games are interactive by their nature and it seems like that's enough of a disqualification among the art community.
To respond to your other post, yes, I would say by virtue of its existence, a game is art. Art is anything which contains human expression. Art can be music, poetry, novels, essays, stories, paintings, acting performances, movies, scrapbooks, crochet, crafts, clever coding and games. In all of those, if you change the artist, the artwork is intrinsically changed in the process because it was the artist who put the vision into the art. This doesn't mean the art is good, as it's up to the artist to bring their talent to the table. Maybe this classification is too broad for you and you only feel that art is anything a museum will purchase and put on it's walls, as most art critics do, but that's only the case because their livelihood depends on categorizing art into something that they only have control over.
Censorship doesn't stifle creativity; It enhances it. Throughout history you'll find instances of art being what it is because of the threat of censorship. It's the artists job to find the taboos of the day and push them. Mr. Tambourin Man was code word for drug dealers, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is about LSD, Star Trek was set in the future because Roddenberry couldn't tell the stories he wanted to without it. Pretty much any significant piece of art has pushed some boundary. I don't know why people now feel there should be an anything goes attitude about art - it practically kills the art of it. What's so artistic about 90% of video games involving some kind of killing of another living creature? It is that way not because game developers are artists and are pushing the boundaries but because it sells. Games and movies have become so homogenized that we should be questioning their validity as an art form. 90% of games and movies are sequels or spin-offs of other franchises off different mediums, why are we still considering such a homogenized structure as an unquestionable artform?
That's a silly argument. Is a movie considered art? Why? It's also a "container" for things of high artistic value, be it showing off an actor acting or the lighting or the editing, or the writing. You'll be hard pressed to find an art critic who doesn't consider a movie as art. Why is this not so for a game? It has the same elements, tons of real artists working on it for years at a time, and the good games have a cohesive whole that is more than the sum of the quality of the models or animation. Some games make you feel things - fear, anger, love, pity, etc much more than a museum will by entering and viewing the artwork within. That is what separates it as an art form.
It's really no different than our society today. Want to grow up to be a model? Sorry, kid, your parents were ugly so you too got the ugly gene. Humans do rudimentary genetic screening every single time they choose a mate. Pretty people date pretty people, smart people date smart people, etc. How does genetic designing emphasize this gap? The beautiful people of today will still have beautiful people of tomorrow, and more importantly, the rich people of today will still give one leg up to their children of tomorrow. People's class isn't chosen by genetics, it's chosen by money. Bill Gates is a really rich person who could never be a model, but he came from rich parents so he's had the fortunate opportunities that poorer people didn't. There are also plenty more ugly, stupid, brown haired, brown eyed, short, fat rich people who are also in the upper class because they've inherited it. On the other side, there are plenty of blue eyed, blond haired, tall, slender, smart people who will never have the opportunities to come out of their inherited poverty.
Also, while cosmetic medicine like this is expensive and can only be afforded by wealthy people at first, the price goes down where anyone can afford it. Look at boob jobs and lasik. You could get each of those for a few grand today, whereas it cost in the tens of thousands a few years ago. Those cosmetic surgeries are now open to people of all classes, as will this one.
I want a kunfu game where my actions dodge or hit the enemies
You're the only one. Maybe you're a kung-fu master, but 99.999999% percent of people purchasing the games aren't, so why would they want their inability to actually fight affect their fantasy gaming? I don't want to undergo years of sword-fighting training just so I could play a lightsaber game. I don't want to have to spend weeks learning how to effectively use a whip in order to play the next Indiana Jones game. I also don't want to spend years becoming a guitar hero in order to play the next Guitar Hero. Games are a cheap reflection of reality in order to make the player feel more powerful - that is why people play games in the first place. If you want to actually do Kung Fu, then go and do Kung Fu - but leave it out of my gaming.
At it's launch, there was considerable difference in the results of the two (Google giving far more relevant results). But Bing has been rapidly improving and now I get pretty much identical results from both.
So their version of improvement is doing a google search and routing it through the Bing.com website? Brilliant!
...and he's worried about the ramifications that will have as the company develops the PS4.
It's actually so difficult to contain leaks that the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America has himself resorted to leaking the news there's a new Playstation console coming out in the future. THANKS third party publishers!
Saying 'We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there.' is trying to put it all on a somewhat equal footing - "well, they're good at math, but we're as good at sports as they are at math!" Given that the Olympics were just a few months ago, it seems they also do the same thing with athletics as we do with athletics, but they also treat math and science with that highly competitive regard as well. It's all about competition, and we just don't treat math and science as competitively as we treat sports. Just look at what happens when we do treat education competitively - we get spelling bees with 5th and 6th graders who can out-spell 99% of English speakers of any age.
If a self-aware machine like Skynet gets built, with the ability to invent and manufacture new technologies, why would it need to destroy humanity? Skynet doesn't need much of earth's resources, just invent a rocket ship and fly into space. It doesn't have to worry about consuming oxygen or food, it could explore space indefinitely looking for resources it needs to built a base of robots while humans are twiddling around on earth. The war against the humans from Skynet's POV would not be very efficient. Especially given that Skynet had to discover time travel to attempt to destroy John Connor, why even bother?
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as how 3 of those movies on the list have sequels also on that list, I don't think these movies are bombing at the box office. Critically, yes, but they have to be making their money back if they keep making sequels to them.
If you ask a thousand car engineers why they got into their profession, I bet you'd find a large percentage of them would say it's because they liked driving, or car culture, or something related to the act of using cars and not of making them. I'm an animator. I got into my profession because I liked cartoons. I liked them so much that I decided to learn how to make them and now I am. My story is not in any way unique, so it's silly for all of the replies to this person who likes games telling him that it takes more than liking games to make them. Of course it takes more than liking them. That's why he chose to log in and ask people for advice on where to start to creating and not just appreciating.
He didn't say he has a lot of experience in game programming. He said he has a lot of experience WITH games, just like you have a lot of experience WITH porn, space movies, and the Risk board game. As such, being passionate about gaming is definitely a plus in making great games.
You people are really making asses of yourselves.
Seeing as how the White House seems to have never cared about the people's opinion or has listened to it in such a direct manner, I think it's a welcome change.
Ok /. people, get to work on turning this post into an old curmudgeon meme:
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I preferred the simpler games, the ones that didn't have new technology and things of the nature. Compare modern genre and compare them to the classics like example, example or example. They were so much fun because handling was so easy, you could move, you could strafe, etc. It was so much better! And yet, as games become more realistic, all that happens is that your character becomes more sluggish and less powerful, harder to manipulate. All for the sake of reality, and graphics which will always get old. But the gameplay never gets old. That's why classics are what they are - they're acceptable graphically and a hell of a lot of fun to play.
Want proof? They still have classic example tournaments, Melee tournaments, etc. if you look around in the right places. On the other hand, who cares anymore about popular new game? Man, even playing different classic example is much more fun than sequel on the modern console, simply by virtue of the fact that the older one is simpler, freer, gives you more control, more imagination, more room to enjoy it.
Seriously? It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality. I wish we'd drop the reality of things and just make games fun. But I guess now I'm old enough to just make my own games. Sigh. It had to come down to this, didn't it?
If I or a colleague said anything, it was a leak... But if someone on top said something, well, that was strategic.
But that is a huge distinction. If I tell you my secret, that's me confiding in you. If you tell someone else my secret, you're breaking my trust. Since the people at the top are the ones who own the secrets, it's theirs to tell.
Well, now that they've bloated it up pretty nice and well, they could continue their employment by going through and unbloating it. After that happens, the process could start again.
Boycotts are the only way these companies are gonna learn that customers won't tolerate DRM.
When are people gonna learn that boycotts haven't worked for 60 years? We're dealing with multi-national corporations now. Bitching about their products on the internet will get you further than a boycott. If you were going to purchase a Zune and decided against it due to ethical issues, then Microsoft's out $100. If you run a popular blog and bitch about it and get a thousand people to not purchase the product, then Microsoft is out hundreds of thousands of dollars, regardless of whether you yourself have purchased the Zune or not. In some cases, it's even better to purchase the product because then you have more credibility when you say the product is defective. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
I put the listing at $1.92 million for the starting bid.
That's your problem right there. You have to put the starting bid a little lower and have people work their way up to $1.92 million. Try starting at $1.5 mil.
Particularly ironic considering the events of the past week in Iran and the internet's enabling role in that continuing saga.
It's not ironic at all. The Iranian government would have been completely overthrown by now if half the population wasn't too busy wasting time "twittering" on the internet.
OMG... the Internet is in the Mushroom Kingdom!
I'd verify your statement, but my only contact there - a Princess Toadstool - has apparently been kidnapped.
Jobs is one of the architects of the computer age and is still very much a part of it. If he dies, the technological landscape will change, so I would say it's worth knowing how he's doing.
If I understand what you're trying to say, then the mechanics of gameplay aren't the same as the mechanics of projecting light through a film reel, the gaming equivalent would be something like the installation process or double clicking on an executable. That's just the process of displaying the art form. The art comes in what's being displayed. In film, it's similar to a painting in that it's non-interactive and the viewer is expected to just watch and listen. In games, there is the visual element too but it adds another element - the interactivity. This adds immersion to the experience. When you look at the larger view, as you say, not all art is created equal. For every great painting, there's a thousand bad ones, and the same goes for movies and games. Gore splattered zombie killing games might not be advancing the medium, but to discredit games as an art form just because there are a ton of games that are just bad, even if the technical achievements are impressive, is discrediting the games that actually do it really well. Even if there is violent zombie-killing, it can be done in such a way that it is effective in communicating whatever message the designer wants to say. An example is how anybody who has played Grand Theft Auto 4 until the end and did not get caught up solely in the wanton violence and destruction that the media only portrays it as, saw a story that was just as compelling as anything in film today. Godfather was violent, Scarface was violent, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan was violent and those movies are considered classic, high-class cinema. Saw and Hostel were also violent, but they treat the violence differently and aren't put into the same classification as the aforementioned films. The same type of thought process and craft and technical expertise goes into any game that goes into any movie and even any painting. The only difference is that games are interactive by their nature and it seems like that's enough of a disqualification among the art community.
To respond to your other post, yes, I would say by virtue of its existence, a game is art. Art is anything which contains human expression. Art can be music, poetry, novels, essays, stories, paintings, acting performances, movies, scrapbooks, crochet, crafts, clever coding and games. In all of those, if you change the artist, the artwork is intrinsically changed in the process because it was the artist who put the vision into the art. This doesn't mean the art is good, as it's up to the artist to bring their talent to the table. Maybe this classification is too broad for you and you only feel that art is anything a museum will purchase and put on it's walls, as most art critics do, but that's only the case because their livelihood depends on categorizing art into something that they only have control over.
Censorship doesn't stifle creativity; It enhances it. Throughout history you'll find instances of art being what it is because of the threat of censorship. It's the artists job to find the taboos of the day and push them. Mr. Tambourin Man was code word for drug dealers, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is about LSD, Star Trek was set in the future because Roddenberry couldn't tell the stories he wanted to without it. Pretty much any significant piece of art has pushed some boundary. I don't know why people now feel there should be an anything goes attitude about art - it practically kills the art of it. What's so artistic about 90% of video games involving some kind of killing of another living creature? It is that way not because game developers are artists and are pushing the boundaries but because it sells. Games and movies have become so homogenized that we should be questioning their validity as an art form. 90% of games and movies are sequels or spin-offs of other franchises off different mediums, why are we still considering such a homogenized structure as an unquestionable artform?
That's a silly argument. Is a movie considered art? Why? It's also a "container" for things of high artistic value, be it showing off an actor acting or the lighting or the editing, or the writing. You'll be hard pressed to find an art critic who doesn't consider a movie as art. Why is this not so for a game? It has the same elements, tons of real artists working on it for years at a time, and the good games have a cohesive whole that is more than the sum of the quality of the models or animation. Some games make you feel things - fear, anger, love, pity, etc much more than a museum will by entering and viewing the artwork within. That is what separates it as an art form.
It's really no different than our society today. Want to grow up to be a model? Sorry, kid, your parents were ugly so you too got the ugly gene. Humans do rudimentary genetic screening every single time they choose a mate. Pretty people date pretty people, smart people date smart people, etc. How does genetic designing emphasize this gap? The beautiful people of today will still have beautiful people of tomorrow, and more importantly, the rich people of today will still give one leg up to their children of tomorrow. People's class isn't chosen by genetics, it's chosen by money. Bill Gates is a really rich person who could never be a model, but he came from rich parents so he's had the fortunate opportunities that poorer people didn't. There are also plenty more ugly, stupid, brown haired, brown eyed, short, fat rich people who are also in the upper class because they've inherited it. On the other side, there are plenty of blue eyed, blond haired, tall, slender, smart people who will never have the opportunities to come out of their inherited poverty.
Also, while cosmetic medicine like this is expensive and can only be afforded by wealthy people at first, the price goes down where anyone can afford it. Look at boob jobs and lasik. You could get each of those for a few grand today, whereas it cost in the tens of thousands a few years ago. Those cosmetic surgeries are now open to people of all classes, as will this one.
I want a kunfu game where my actions dodge or hit the enemies
You're the only one. Maybe you're a kung-fu master, but 99.999999% percent of people purchasing the games aren't, so why would they want their inability to actually fight affect their fantasy gaming? I don't want to undergo years of sword-fighting training just so I could play a lightsaber game. I don't want to have to spend weeks learning how to effectively use a whip in order to play the next Indiana Jones game. I also don't want to spend years becoming a guitar hero in order to play the next Guitar Hero. Games are a cheap reflection of reality in order to make the player feel more powerful - that is why people play games in the first place. If you want to actually do Kung Fu, then go and do Kung Fu - but leave it out of my gaming.
So their version of improvement is doing a google search and routing it through the Bing.com website? Brilliant!
It's actually so difficult to contain leaks that the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America has himself resorted to leaking the news there's a new Playstation console coming out in the future. THANKS third party publishers!
Saying 'We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there.' is trying to put it all on a somewhat equal footing - "well, they're good at math, but we're as good at sports as they are at math!" Given that the Olympics were just a few months ago, it seems they also do the same thing with athletics as we do with athletics, but they also treat math and science with that highly competitive regard as well. It's all about competition, and we just don't treat math and science as competitively as we treat sports. Just look at what happens when we do treat education competitively - we get spelling bees with 5th and 6th graders who can out-spell 99% of English speakers of any age.
If a self-aware machine like Skynet gets built, with the ability to invent and manufacture new technologies, why would it need to destroy humanity? Skynet doesn't need much of earth's resources, just invent a rocket ship and fly into space. It doesn't have to worry about consuming oxygen or food, it could explore space indefinitely looking for resources it needs to built a base of robots while humans are twiddling around on earth. The war against the humans from Skynet's POV would not be very efficient. Especially given that Skynet had to discover time travel to attempt to destroy John Connor, why even bother?
Seems like now that they've gone and made 1984 a reality, they need new material to work off of.
Hey, who invited the logic guy to this Microsoft bashing thread?
At least Taco Bell won't destroy your colon at that point.