This was also the mechanism for what many DAOCers consider to be the best era in DAOC PvP. Namely, in the period after Darkness Falls was introduced, when PvP and XPing were intertwined through and within it in an interesting way.
It's somewhat unsurprising that a variety of con artistry should overtake a variety of contraband trafficking and sale in profits without too much trouble, when it comes down to it. After all, a good deal of cybercrime doesn't actually provide a service or a product, in order to acquire its profits, while markets in contraband goods, being markets after all, need to contend against competitive pricing and provide a product subject to some degree of genuine scarcity (varying greatly, depending on the product).
And so my question is, how many game designers trained in the high art of game design itself do we realistically need in the modern world? We certainly need lots of modelers, graphic artists, coders and testers who will often employ their skills working on game projects for game companies, but by comparison, what kind of market is there out there for a 'game design' graduate who isn't an expert either in the business end of game design (a gaping hole in the collective expertise of many a small game company, who believe they can succeed in the market on design talent alone) or the particular areas in which one needs well-developed specialised skills. There are certainly great designers out there who just do design and they're the ones we tend to celebrate most from the various great dev teams of history, but is shooting for 'designer' shooting for too small a target market?
Actually, I'd argue this is the last place on earth (or elsewhere in the universe) you'd expect to find arguments precisely to that effect.
The thing is, many of the great works in this so-called geek canon aren't chiefly admired for their literary qualities at all. If there's anything that serves as the basis for self-important pretentiousness in geek reading preference, it's a bias favouring substance over form and ideas over aesthetics. The theoretical or philosophical over the literary or poetical, if it has to be one or the other.
There's many an Asimov fan who while holding up 'hard sci-fi' as the true geek literature, will quite readily admit that Asimov isn't a great fiction writer, considered amongst the elite of great fiction writers in general. He's a great thinker who conceived his ideas in fiction writing, not a great fiction writer who happened upon some interesting observations while he went about the business of crafting masterful narrative and perfecting the storytelling art.
There is of course in stark contrast to this 'hard sci-fi' preference a large demographic who proudly declare their love for imaginative fantasy written mostly for the sake of telling a story and immersing the reader in an impossible universe of the author's conception. But so far in history, this has been a preference declared in defiance of respectable preference more often than in celebration of it, despite the tremendously widespread popularity of fantasy writing in general.
Around release, Sony had stated that characters would not be retained after account cancellation. There was a rather large, prolonged and furious response from the community over this policy. Doing some further reading on fan experiences in resubscribing a while post-release, it looks like they never stuck with that policy, perhaps as a consequence of the extremely negative response over it or perhaps because they were never serious about it to begin with and were merely attempting to fearmonger people into not cancelling in the first place.
You can let your account expire when you want and pick it back up when you want.
This is true of most of WoW's competitors and always has been. Exceptions are 1) SWG deletes characters shortly after account cancelation because Sony is in league with Satan 2) UO does not delete characters immediately, but, based on the account in question, purges characters after extended periods of dormancy 3) EQ has purged meaninglessly low-level characters on dormant accounts. Otherwise, if you have a character in AC, UO, EQ, DAOC, etc., your character and their equipment will be there when you get back.
Personally, I recently went back to AC after four and a half years of dormancy. My character was exactly where I left him in 2000.
A very important distinction needs to be made between specifically erotic clothing and merely attractive clothing, however. And this is a distinction that straight men frequently miss, because they don't generally have much if any experience trying on, wearing and seeing themselves and other members of their gender in erotic clothing.
Put a women in an attractive evening gown, and both men and women of all sorts will prefer to look at her as opposed to a not equally attractive figure.
But put a women in a thong and fetishistic apparel and you have something quite different. It's the difference between a man in a smart suit on the one hand and a man in a pair of assless chaps, a cowboy hat and leather armbands on the other. The first is attractive, while the latter is overtly erotic. Many men would be uncomfortable dressed in the latter, and many men would have a hard time imagining themselves as being a character dressed in the latter. And men need to grasp this.
Not all characters benefit from being eroticised. It may simply not fit their character at all. And this is a problem in game design presently - sacrificing all believability in the name of exposing skin. And regardless, not everyone wants to look at erotic images constantly whilst gaming.
They could make a version of Hamlet in which the main characters consistently walk around nearly nude, in thongs, bikinis and lingerie. But it wouldn't be very believable. And on the whole, audiences tend to favour believability over eroticism in cinema where the two are in contention. They are not always in contention, by any means. But frequently when they contend against each other in gaming at present, eroticism gets chosen over believability.
Being dressed in erotic clothing feels fundamentally different from being dressed in merely attractive clothing. And playing a character dressed in erotic clothing does similarly, for those who understand that distinction.
For those interested in women gamers as a distinct phenomenon and the perspectives of women gamers as relevant to game design choices, I find womengamers.com's analysis of various prominent female characters from recent gaming history fascinating. Certainly worth the read.
This would be terrific if it were integrated into a device with the ability to store, display and customise the viewing of a wide array of formats and with better protection for the LCD and the ability to keep the surface clean, clear and protected...
Except then it would just be a low-contrast, vastly oversized greyscale Palm Pilot circa 1997, presumably with most useful functionality removed.
Am I the only one who prefers to read on a nicely backlit colour LCD? I read a very large amount, and most of it is on a Pocket PC. I like all that extra functionality being there, the support for a very large range of formats and the ability to read in any lighting conditions. What does a greyscale standalone low-contrast flexible LCD panel bring to the picture?
With the way the American dollar has been trading against most international currencies over the past few years, I don't know why anyone would trade their hard-farmed gold for the monopoly money their employers are paying them.
I've paid cash for gold in a couple of games. And each time, it made perfect sense. In most games, gold farming, especially solo at low levels, is rather dull. Skipping a dull part of the game for more interesting parts, even moreso if you've done it before in the same game (and are moving to a new server or playing a new account), doesn't sound crazy to me, nor did it ever turn out to be in practice.
I've also bought an account with a little startup cash and equipment (didn't use the characters) as a secondary account in a game I already had a character in. That made sense too. Cost little more than the box price at the time, and circumvented some dull gameplay.
110 words, the rest is ads. What an absolutely useless website.
This ignores the fact that these 110 words are themselves basically an ad for the product. My thoughts were something more along the lines of "a 110 word ad, paid for by a plethora of ads surrounding it. What an absolutely useless website."
More interesting by far than this old marketing ploy of taking a popular brand from one saleable medium (games) and transplanting it into another market (books), is the phenomenon which is occuring within gaming itself with regard to story-telling. The most interesting convergence of recent years between literary story-telling and gameworld story-telling occurred not in literature but in games themselves. I consider one fascinating example of that to be the creation of the Planescape: Torment Novelisation.
Not a book written based on the gameworld. Not a book written in imitation of the game's story. There was a Torment novel. It was absolutely atrocious. What's more interesting is the novelisation of the game's text. What's more interesting is the quality of writing that comes through even when the medium changes. What's more interesting is that the game's text doesn't need to be rewritten to be considered a cohesive piece of storytelling.
Game writing has come of age over the last decade (although some would argue we're merely rediscovering what text adventures had already managed to create in the '70s and '80s). What's significant is the transplantation of narratives which stand on their own as cohesive storylines with coherent character development into gameworlds where gameplay itself does not by nature necessitate high quality narrative story-telling.
The reinterpretation of game stories into novels is, by comparison, trivial as a marketing phenomenon. It's not, in Planescape's case, the fact that the game narrative was transplanted into a horrifically bad knockoff novel that is interesting. That kind of merchandising bridging the gap between various media formats is nothing new. What's remarkable is that the horrifically bad knockoff novel can be held up against the quality of the in-game narrative in the present and the latter, the game narrative, as it was written and novelised stands up and has always has stood up as the far superior narrative of the two.
MCA:Well, it sold all right, although it didn't do Baldur's Gate numbers, but rarely did a PC RPG do that well anyway. I guess some obstacles to its sales were the nature of the game itself (very text heavy, non-traditional gameworld), a shitty box cover (all that had to be done was make a box cover that looked similar to the Baldur's Gate one, and be done with it), and those are the only factors I can see. There was probably more, but those are the ones I can point to and wince.
Wouldn't this necessitate that they duplicate the system-side functionality of the 10NES chip in such a way as to violate Nintendo's patent? Seeing as precedent stands in Nintendo's favour regarding the replication of cart-side 10NES functionality, with Tengen having lost its case, if the patent is still valid, one would think that this hardware would not be legal in the United States. But has the 10NES patent expired? Or do carts function without 10NES hardware on the system side, though the reverse is not the case?
But an astute observation, consequently. Erotic images of Slashdotters might indeed be expected to cause not only temporary but indeed much more permanent forms of blindness amongst afflicted test subjects.
Naturally, many people hear about Radical Islam on the web and the investigative types want to see it for themselves. Well, obviously, unless you can read Arabic or a few others languages with large activist Muslim populations, you won't get very far with that idea.
One site political observers may find interesting in light of Iraq, however, is Kavkazcenter (formerly Kavkaz.org). One might consider Chechnya to be Russia's Iraq. It remains a quagmire in which any obvious means of extricating military control becomes ever more remote as time goes on and the reasons for and results of each conflict share many similarities (though Chechnya is arguably a much, much more ancient one). Like Iraq, the threat of jihadism has radically increased with "foreign occupation" as an extremely successful rallying point for it, while secular nationalism has fallen to the wayside as a dissident cause (and was, I would say, dealt a death blow when Russia killed Aslan Maskhadov, its former figurehead). If you want to read jihadism unapologetically propounded in English, in depth, in light of current events, Kavkaz Center is about as good as source as you'll find.
The problem with this list is they're trying to straddle the line between honouring games which offer the best possible gameplay to players of any era and, simultaneously, games which, while historically signficant and great in their time, are now far from the best of their kind. And these two categories do not necessarily have anything to do with each other, in many cases.
If this were a list of the 100 Most Historically Important Games of All Time, Super Mario Brothers would certainly fit in their as crucially influential. But few will argue that Super Mario Brothers is a better game than Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, and various successors in the genre. It probably shouldn't even be in a list of the "best" games of all time at all, evaluated independent of any and all history associated with it as a present day, uncontextualised gameplay experience. If SMB1 were released today as a never-before-seen title, it's fairly obvious what reviewers would have to say about it. Something I expect to the effect that, as free Flash games go, it's pretty dull. You certainly couldn't charge money for it.
Creating a list which mixes unrelated criteria (good games and historically influential ones) as its basis for honouring certain titles is a ridiculous and purposeless exercise. Some will say any sort of list of this type is a purposeless exercise, but I think having an active critical discourse in the gaming world is crucial to its functioning as a meaningful artistic and recreational culture. But naming the "Top" games without basing those choices on something more specific is especially silly.
I should think that London, like New York, has many thousands of cabs in its fleets (despite the comparatively strict regulation of the taxi system). What kind of dint can you make in that kind of business by sending out a few fake calls?
Amidst real estate where several taxis pass by every minute, what do you do to substantially increase taxi visits? Hire out a call centre in India?
Slashdot Mirror
This was also the mechanism for what many DAOCers consider to be the best era in DAOC PvP. Namely, in the period after Darkness Falls was introduced, when PvP and XPing were intertwined through and within it in an interesting way.
It's somewhat unsurprising that a variety of con artistry should overtake a variety of contraband trafficking and sale in profits without too much trouble, when it comes down to it. After all, a good deal of cybercrime doesn't actually provide a service or a product, in order to acquire its profits, while markets in contraband goods, being markets after all, need to contend against competitive pricing and provide a product subject to some degree of genuine scarcity (varying greatly, depending on the product).
It turns out that god does throw dice. And Albert failed his saving throw. Such is life.
And so my question is, how many game designers trained in the high art of game design itself do we realistically need in the modern world? We certainly need lots of modelers, graphic artists, coders and testers who will often employ their skills working on game projects for game companies, but by comparison, what kind of market is there out there for a 'game design' graduate who isn't an expert either in the business end of game design (a gaping hole in the collective expertise of many a small game company, who believe they can succeed in the market on design talent alone) or the particular areas in which one needs well-developed specialised skills. There are certainly great designers out there who just do design and they're the ones we tend to celebrate most from the various great dev teams of history, but is shooting for 'designer' shooting for too small a target market?
Mod -1 post starts with the word 'actually'
I wholeheartedly endore such a moderation. That word's horribly overused, and I well deserve to be chastised for having started a post with it.
And look forward to playing exciting new titles, Only For Xbox(tm)
My literary preferences are better than yours!
Actually, I'd argue this is the last place on earth (or elsewhere in the universe) you'd expect to find arguments precisely to that effect.
The thing is, many of the great works in this so-called geek canon aren't chiefly admired for their literary qualities at all. If there's anything that serves as the basis for self-important pretentiousness in geek reading preference, it's a bias favouring substance over form and ideas over aesthetics. The theoretical or philosophical over the literary or poetical, if it has to be one or the other.
There's many an Asimov fan who while holding up 'hard sci-fi' as the true geek literature, will quite readily admit that Asimov isn't a great fiction writer, considered amongst the elite of great fiction writers in general. He's a great thinker who conceived his ideas in fiction writing, not a great fiction writer who happened upon some interesting observations while he went about the business of crafting masterful narrative and perfecting the storytelling art.
There is of course in stark contrast to this 'hard sci-fi' preference a large demographic who proudly declare their love for imaginative fantasy written mostly for the sake of telling a story and immersing the reader in an impossible universe of the author's conception. But so far in history, this has been a preference declared in defiance of respectable preference more often than in celebration of it, despite the tremendously widespread popularity of fantasy writing in general.
Around release, Sony had stated that characters would not be retained after account cancellation. There was a rather large, prolonged and furious response from the community over this policy. Doing some further reading on fan experiences in resubscribing a while post-release, it looks like they never stuck with that policy, perhaps as a consequence of the extremely negative response over it or perhaps because they were never serious about it to begin with and were merely attempting to fearmonger people into not cancelling in the first place.
You can let your account expire when you want and pick it back up when you want.
This is true of most of WoW's competitors and always has been. Exceptions are 1) SWG deletes characters shortly after account cancelation because Sony is in league with Satan 2) UO does not delete characters immediately, but, based on the account in question, purges characters after extended periods of dormancy 3) EQ has purged meaninglessly low-level characters on dormant accounts. Otherwise, if you have a character in AC, UO, EQ, DAOC, etc., your character and their equipment will be there when you get back.
Personally, I recently went back to AC after four and a half years of dormancy. My character was exactly where I left him in 2000.
A very important distinction needs to be made between specifically erotic clothing and merely attractive clothing, however. And this is a distinction that straight men frequently miss, because they don't generally have much if any experience trying on, wearing and seeing themselves and other members of their gender in erotic clothing.
Put a women in an attractive evening gown, and both men and women of all sorts will prefer to look at her as opposed to a not equally attractive figure.
But put a women in a thong and fetishistic apparel and you have something quite different. It's the difference between a man in a smart suit on the one hand and a man in a pair of assless chaps, a cowboy hat and leather armbands on the other. The first is attractive, while the latter is overtly erotic. Many men would be uncomfortable dressed in the latter, and many men would have a hard time imagining themselves as being a character dressed in the latter. And men need to grasp this.
Not all characters benefit from being eroticised. It may simply not fit their character at all. And this is a problem in game design presently - sacrificing all believability in the name of exposing skin. And regardless, not everyone wants to look at erotic images constantly whilst gaming.
They could make a version of Hamlet in which the main characters consistently walk around nearly nude, in thongs, bikinis and lingerie. But it wouldn't be very believable. And on the whole, audiences tend to favour believability over eroticism in cinema where the two are in contention. They are not always in contention, by any means. But frequently when they contend against each other in gaming at present, eroticism gets chosen over believability.
Being dressed in erotic clothing feels fundamentally different from being dressed in merely attractive clothing. And playing a character dressed in erotic clothing does similarly, for those who understand that distinction.
For those interested in women gamers as a distinct phenomenon and the perspectives of women gamers as relevant to game design choices, I find womengamers.com's analysis of various prominent female characters from recent gaming history fascinating. Certainly worth the read.
A School acting in loco parentis doesn't trump the actual parents
On the other hand, maybe crazy parents are the problem, if the child is attending such an institution.
Wait, that was Legal Spanglish, right? If it hasn't caught on yet, it will soon.
This would be terrific if it were integrated into a device with the ability to store, display and customise the viewing of a wide array of formats and with better protection for the LCD and the ability to keep the surface clean, clear and protected...
Except then it would just be a low-contrast, vastly oversized greyscale Palm Pilot circa 1997, presumably with most useful functionality removed.
Am I the only one who prefers to read on a nicely backlit colour LCD? I read a very large amount, and most of it is on a Pocket PC. I like all that extra functionality being there, the support for a very large range of formats and the ability to read in any lighting conditions. What does a greyscale standalone low-contrast flexible LCD panel bring to the picture?
With the way the American dollar has been trading against most international currencies over the past few years, I don't know why anyone would trade their hard-farmed gold for the monopoly money their employers are paying them.
I've paid cash for gold in a couple of games. And each time, it made perfect sense. In most games, gold farming, especially solo at low levels, is rather dull. Skipping a dull part of the game for more interesting parts, even moreso if you've done it before in the same game (and are moving to a new server or playing a new account), doesn't sound crazy to me, nor did it ever turn out to be in practice.
I've also bought an account with a little startup cash and equipment (didn't use the characters) as a secondary account in a game I already had a character in. That made sense too. Cost little more than the box price at the time, and circumvented some dull gameplay.
110 words, the rest is ads. What an absolutely useless website.
This ignores the fact that these 110 words are themselves basically an ad for the product. My thoughts were something more along the lines of "a 110 word ad, paid for by a plethora of ads surrounding it. What an absolutely useless website."
A countdown to September 27th, 2005, noon?
Well, I suppose it's worthwhile enough to have a countdown to the 100th anniversary of the publication date of "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"
More interesting by far than this old marketing ploy of taking a popular brand from one saleable medium (games) and transplanting it into another market (books), is the phenomenon which is occuring within gaming itself with regard to story-telling. The most interesting convergence of recent years between literary story-telling and gameworld story-telling occurred not in literature but in games themselves. I consider one fascinating example of that to be the creation of the Planescape: Torment Novelisation.
Not a book written based on the gameworld. Not a book written in imitation of the game's story. There was a Torment novel. It was absolutely atrocious. What's more interesting is the novelisation of the game's text. What's more interesting is the quality of writing that comes through even when the medium changes. What's more interesting is that the game's text doesn't need to be rewritten to be considered a cohesive piece of storytelling.
Game writing has come of age over the last decade (although some would argue we're merely rediscovering what text adventures had already managed to create in the '70s and '80s). What's significant is the transplantation of narratives which stand on their own as cohesive storylines with coherent character development into gameworlds where gameplay itself does not by nature necessitate high quality narrative story-telling.
The reinterpretation of game stories into novels is, by comparison, trivial as a marketing phenomenon. It's not, in Planescape's case, the fact that the game narrative was transplanted into a horrifically bad knockoff novel that is interesting. That kind of merchandising bridging the gap between various media formats is nothing new. What's remarkable is that the horrifically bad knockoff novel can be held up against the quality of the in-game narrative in the present and the latter, the game narrative, as it was written and novelised stands up and has always has stood up as the far superior narrative of the two.
Indeed, this is a point which Chris Avellone made fairly recently in an interview with gamegirl.org
Specifically,
MCA: Well, it sold all right, although it didn't do Baldur's Gate numbers, but rarely did a PC RPG do that well anyway. I guess some obstacles to its sales were the nature of the game itself (very text heavy, non-traditional gameworld), a shitty box cover (all that had to be done was make a box cover that looked similar to the Baldur's Gate one, and be done with it), and those are the only factors I can see. There was probably more, but those are the ones I can point to and wince.
Wouldn't this necessitate that they duplicate the system-side functionality of the 10NES chip in such a way as to violate Nintendo's patent? Seeing as precedent stands in Nintendo's favour regarding the replication of cart-side 10NES functionality, with Tengen having lost its case, if the patent is still valid, one would think that this hardware would not be legal in the United States. But has the 10NES patent expired? Or do carts function without 10NES hardware on the system side, though the reverse is not the case?
But an astute observation, consequently. Erotic images of Slashdotters might indeed be expected to cause not only temporary but indeed much more permanent forms of blindness amongst afflicted test subjects.
Naturally, many people hear about Radical Islam on the web and the investigative types want to see it for themselves. Well, obviously, unless you can read Arabic or a few others languages with large activist Muslim populations, you won't get very far with that idea.
One site political observers may find interesting in light of Iraq, however, is Kavkazcenter (formerly Kavkaz.org). One might consider Chechnya to be Russia's Iraq. It remains a quagmire in which any obvious means of extricating military control becomes ever more remote as time goes on and the reasons for and results of each conflict share many similarities (though Chechnya is arguably a much, much more ancient one). Like Iraq, the threat of jihadism has radically increased with "foreign occupation" as an extremely successful rallying point for it, while secular nationalism has fallen to the wayside as a dissident cause (and was, I would say, dealt a death blow when Russia killed Aslan Maskhadov, its former figurehead). If you want to read jihadism unapologetically propounded in English, in depth, in light of current events, Kavkaz Center is about as good as source as you'll find.
The problem with this list is they're trying to straddle the line between honouring games which offer the best possible gameplay to players of any era and, simultaneously, games which, while historically signficant and great in their time, are now far from the best of their kind. And these two categories do not necessarily have anything to do with each other, in many cases.
If this were a list of the 100 Most Historically Important Games of All Time, Super Mario Brothers would certainly fit in their as crucially influential. But few will argue that Super Mario Brothers is a better game than Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, and various successors in the genre. It probably shouldn't even be in a list of the "best" games of all time at all, evaluated independent of any and all history associated with it as a present day, uncontextualised gameplay experience. If SMB1 were released today as a never-before-seen title, it's fairly obvious what reviewers would have to say about it. Something I expect to the effect that, as free Flash games go, it's pretty dull. You certainly couldn't charge money for it.
Creating a list which mixes unrelated criteria (good games and historically influential ones) as its basis for honouring certain titles is a ridiculous and purposeless exercise. Some will say any sort of list of this type is a purposeless exercise, but I think having an active critical discourse in the gaming world is crucial to its functioning as a meaningful artistic and recreational culture. But naming the "Top" games without basing those choices on something more specific is especially silly.
I should think that London, like New York, has many thousands of cabs in its fleets (despite the comparatively strict regulation of the taxi system). What kind of dint can you make in that kind of business by sending out a few fake calls?
Amidst real estate where several taxis pass by every minute, what do you do to substantially increase taxi visits? Hire out a call centre in India?
It helps if you picture Comic Book Store Guy while you read the article:
Spy: Can you surf the Web on any of these systems?
Clerk: No [clearly disgusted].
Spy: How about movies? Can I watch movies on any of them?
Clerk: [Deep, horrified sigh] Yes, but you'll need to buy an extra remote for the Xbox.