Though (as others have pointed out) the/. editors are not journalists, the quote you used seems quite objective to me. I read the article, and the Diebold people do in fact seem confused. Just because there are two sides doesn't mean that one of the sides isn't obviously being stupid.
If anyone could say with a straight face that game criticism in general had risen above the level of trash, metacritic ratings might be a little more interesting.
You got some answers which are good enough, but I'd like to add a point.
Further development in materials and energy sources today relies upon gaining a better understanding of the physics involved. After all, it's hard to do engineering when you don't know the rules. While we have very good models for large-scale physics, we're still lacking at the subatomic level.
The difficulty of subatomic physics is that the particles are so small that their influences are difficult to detect. One way to solve that is to accelerate them to very large energies, high enough that we could notice a single quark out of place. That's the principle of a particle accelerator.
The problem is that we can only get so much energy, and on a small scale, with our puny devices here on Earth. Out there in space, some processes have way more energy than we could ever harness, so we can learn important things about physics just by watching. The reason to simulate a supernova is so that we know what we should expect given our current models. Likely, observation of actual supernovas is going to show discrepancies with the simulation, and those discrepancies will be grounds for further research to improve our models.
Games must be fun, because Fun is the art. It's unfortunate that our language has such poor vocabulary for fun, because "fun" really encompasses a wide range of emotions that can't be found in cinema. What's dumb is to say that games should be like cinema; we have cinema to be cinema. Games should be fun; beyond fun there isn't a reason to make a game.
I guess this goes back to the days, not so long ago, where "fun" meant running around outside. If you want to be adult about this, consider Super Mario Bros. No plot, no characters, no story beyond "our princess is in another castle!" Yet gamers around the world will submit that as a defining moment in the art form, because it presented a new, fresh experience. Call this the Game as Experience Theory, if you will.
I don't have anything against story games, any more than I have anything against music videos. But when we talk about gameplay, there's a reason why Advance Wars is so great, while a game with the same plot, setting, and characters could just as easily be very bad, if it wasn't fun to play. The difference between the two is, in my view, quite deep. Often I think people believe it to be shallow due simply to ignorance. Take board games for example; a lot of people might look at Settlers of Catan and think "I could do that, it's easy, just some cards and some rules." In fact, it's very difficult, much like producing a great photograph.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but it does bear repeating. If you think the Wii launch is bad, take a look at what games were available for the PS2 a few months after launch. I was there, and I have a copy of Fantavision to prove it.
Or, like the sibling poster pointed out, consider the DS. I have a copy of Ridge Racer DS and the Mario 64 port (which is borderline unplayable). Against that kind of history, ZeldaTP, WarioWare, and Trauma Center seem like a flood of greatness.
Due to its lack of a magnetic field, the solar wind pushes gases off Mars, resulting in an atmosphere which is much thinner than it would be otherwise.
If they don't, then they are out of compliance with the spec. Besides, one of these days someone is going to use it as a legal defense. "Your Honor, the prosecution alleges that my client's DoS attack was intended to bring their systems down, but as you can see in this packet trace, he had the evil bit set. As RFC 3514 requires that firewalls drop all packets with the evil bit set, my client could not have possibly meant for these packets to actually get through."
Yeah, and I do hope he finds a better solution than POTS. But at the same time, the poster was right to point out that a lot of professional radio is done that way. I'm not sure that a high percentage of casual listeners even notice.
Don't be stupid on purpose. Talk radio shows (the people who have "group conversations") often interview guests over POTS, as you are well aware, so there's no excuse to play like the GP can't tell the difference between a professional rig and a telephone.
While LittleBigPlanet looks fairly cool, it's not by any stretch of the imagination "available". As far as I know, nobody outside the development team has played it yet. It's WAY to soon to try and prove that particular pudding. I speculate that the excitement over the demo is largely relief among Playstation fans that there was finally some GOOD news. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I'm sorry but "fun" is not a genre, it's the form. If a game isn't fun, it shouldn't be a game. Fun is the reason for games to exist.
You can get all that other stuff -- suspense, mystery, sadness, whatever -- in cinema. I think FF7 was great, but the death of Aeris was a cinematic moment, not a gameplay one. There's no reason to go to the trouble of making a game just to jerk around traditional emotions.
I believe that fun has been made into an art form; High Fun if you will. I don't know about you, but when I see a big bad monster on the horizon, and I give a flick of my wrist to draw Link's sword, the feeling, the emotion, isn't the same as what I get from watching a movie or a sword-fighting cutscene. That's because I'm going to go kill that big bad monster, not somebody else. If I win, the victory will be mine directly, not mine through some character on the screen. If I lose, the agony of defeat will be mine.
Aeris's death was tragic, and tragedy is great... but real heartbreak is when you make it all the way to the last level, and fall into a pit. There's a whole world of different experiences available through video games, and our poor language denigrates them all into "fun". So don't tell me that "fun" isn't "art".
if nintendo released the wiimote back in the 80s instead of the control pad, we would all be clamoring about how the new control pads are so great: "wow, i can control the actions with just a press of a few buttons instead of moving my whole arm/hand. this is great and simplifies interaction to allow me to concentrate on the actual game!".
Don't be silly. Think about it for half a minute. If the PS3 had been released in 1980, the Atari wouldn't be some sort of improvement. "Wow, I can see what's going on by only looking at three sprites instead of a whole screen of 3d figures!" Absurd.
In your rush to make analogies between gaming and the visual arts, you've forgotten that gaming isn't a visual art. You're missing the symphony, complaining that the violin isn't a Stradivarius. (Don't ask me to spell it right -- the point is that I don't care.)
Gaming is an aggregate art form so it's easy to make the mistake. Consider film -- while it may have music, the purpose of film isn't the music. While each frame is technically a photograph, the meaning of film isn't the same as photography.
Where it comes to games, the core of the form isn't story, or sound, or visuals, though all of these may be present. The purpose of gaming -- the reason we have a new art form in the first place -- is the "constructed experience". Who cares that the court in Wii Tennis doesn't look like real grass? The point is the sensation of playing tennis. Who cares if Twilight Princess isn't cinematic? The point is playing out what it feels like to be the legendary hero who ventures into the dungeon and rescues the princess.
Consider FFX -- cinematically impressive, but as a game I feel that it falls flat, because it doesn't capture any particular experience -- it isn't fun. You can trivialize the word "fun" all you want, but I think to seasoned gamers it can really have quite a deep meaning. If fun is so trivial, why is it so common for a game to fail to be fun?
The Wii allows for new experiences to be constructed in a new way. That's why it's an important advancement in the state of gaming art.
Oh, the answer is simple. Based on studies done back in the '50s, it's believed that moving the clocks forward for more of the year saves energy. Enough energy, in fact, that within a million years the change will have paid for an ENTIRE DAY of the war in Iraq. And people are complaining that the previous session of Congress didn't do anything!
I doubt that a particularly high percentage of/. mods are making six figures, though thanks for the laugh on that one. But don't worry; after a while this batch of newbies will find another board to go be clueless on. I'm sure you'll remember that this sort of stupid-plague has hit before.
Sure, when the discrimination is stupid and pointless. Are you against gays claiming to be straight to get into the military? How about black people in the past who claimed to be white to buy land?
These are perhaps excessive examples, but it's the same issue. When society creates a meaningless class system, whether based on race, gender, economic situation, or imagined metrics of intelligence and education, it's inevitable that people will lie to get around them. It's never been wrong before and it's not wrong now.
Notice that this person never said he had a degree from any specific institution. I can write up a Degree in Timsterist Mechanics if I want, and grant it to whoever I like. I'm claming that the "degree" by itself is a completely meaningless construct. If he claimed to have a degree from a specific university, that would be fraud. Not the case here.
And go ahead, mod me down again. I'm not off-topic, I'm not calling anyone names, and I'm not disrupting the discussion. Goes to show what a civil statement of dissenting opinions gets you these days. Is the university education system really such a sacred cow?
Right now you're modded as a troll, but I want to say that you're right; the moderator should be ashamed. A degree isn't a holy sacrament (even if it is supposedly in theology). If people will listen to you because you claim to have a piece of paper which doesn't prove anything, then perhaps the lie is necessary to get past their biased discrimination. As far as I can tell, he didn't claim it for purposes of getting a job or otherwise defrauding someone.
Nonsense. The GPL doesn't give any rights to persons who do not obtain the software. So if you do work for a customer and distribute it only to them, including the source and redistribution rights, it meets the definition of Free Software. This has NEVER meant that you are obligated to send the code to anyone who asks.
Sure, your customer has the right to distribute the code if they wish, but even if they do, they are only obligated to provide source code to the parties that they distribute the software to directly.
We shouldn't pretend that a patent cloud over MP3 means that everyone will move to Vorbis. The trouble is that the numerous patents for audio compression aren't limited to any specific format; they are patents on ideas and mathematical functions, like all software patents. So it's hard to say that Vorbis doesn't infringe just because it's open. Remember with patents, you are still liable even if you come up with the same idea independently.
So does anybody really know if there are any patent issues with Vorbis? Has an audit been done somewhere that I haven't heard about?
Slashdot Mirror
You must be really, REALLY new here.
This has got to be the most effective troll ever. I can't believe how many people actually believe that you are a Mac user. Congrats.
I'm shocked that it's so far down. I can't believe all the people in above threads complaining about why this is on Slashdot.
One of these days somebody will make a statue of Natalie Portman and nobody will even care. Sad.
Though (as others have pointed out) the /. editors are not journalists, the quote you used seems quite objective to me. I read the article, and the Diebold people do in fact seem confused. Just because there are two sides doesn't mean that one of the sides isn't obviously being stupid.
My modern $15 portable radio from walmart is more high-tech than radios of the 1940s, and requires much less maintenance.
If anyone could say with a straight face that game criticism in general had risen above the level of trash, metacritic ratings might be a little more interesting.
I don't understand this mentality. If I didn't want to play the game, why would I be playing?
You got some answers which are good enough, but I'd like to add a point.
Further development in materials and energy sources today relies upon gaining a better understanding of the physics involved. After all, it's hard to do engineering when you don't know the rules. While we have very good models for large-scale physics, we're still lacking at the subatomic level.
The difficulty of subatomic physics is that the particles are so small that their influences are difficult to detect. One way to solve that is to accelerate them to very large energies, high enough that we could notice a single quark out of place. That's the principle of a particle accelerator.
The problem is that we can only get so much energy, and on a small scale, with our puny devices here on Earth. Out there in space, some processes have way more energy than we could ever harness, so we can learn important things about physics just by watching. The reason to simulate a supernova is so that we know what we should expect given our current models. Likely, observation of actual supernovas is going to show discrepancies with the simulation, and those discrepancies will be grounds for further research to improve our models.
Games must be fun, because Fun is the art. It's unfortunate that our language has such poor vocabulary for fun, because "fun" really encompasses a wide range of emotions that can't be found in cinema. What's dumb is to say that games should be like cinema; we have cinema to be cinema. Games should be fun; beyond fun there isn't a reason to make a game.
I guess this goes back to the days, not so long ago, where "fun" meant running around outside. If you want to be adult about this, consider Super Mario Bros. No plot, no characters, no story beyond "our princess is in another castle!" Yet gamers around the world will submit that as a defining moment in the art form, because it presented a new, fresh experience. Call this the Game as Experience Theory, if you will.
I don't have anything against story games, any more than I have anything against music videos. But when we talk about gameplay, there's a reason why Advance Wars is so great, while a game with the same plot, setting, and characters could just as easily be very bad, if it wasn't fun to play. The difference between the two is, in my view, quite deep. Often I think people believe it to be shallow due simply to ignorance. Take board games for example; a lot of people might look at Settlers of Catan and think "I could do that, it's easy, just some cards and some rules." In fact, it's very difficult, much like producing a great photograph.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but it does bear repeating. If you think the Wii launch is bad, take a look at what games were available for the PS2 a few months after launch. I was there, and I have a copy of Fantavision to prove it.
Or, like the sibling poster pointed out, consider the DS. I have a copy of Ridge Racer DS and the Mario 64 port (which is borderline unplayable). Against that kind of history, ZeldaTP, WarioWare, and Trauma Center seem like a flood of greatness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_belts
1 .htm
Due to its lack of a magnetic field, the solar wind pushes gases off Mars, resulting in an atmosphere which is much thinner than it would be otherwise.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_
If they don't, then they are out of compliance with the spec. Besides, one of these days someone is going to use it as a legal defense. "Your Honor, the prosecution alleges that my client's DoS attack was intended to bring their systems down, but as you can see in this packet trace, he had the evil bit set. As RFC 3514 requires that firewalls drop all packets with the evil bit set, my client could not have possibly meant for these packets to actually get through."
Yeah, and I do hope he finds a better solution than POTS. But at the same time, the poster was right to point out that a lot of professional radio is done that way. I'm not sure that a high percentage of casual listeners even notice.
Don't be stupid on purpose. Talk radio shows (the people who have "group conversations") often interview guests over POTS, as you are well aware, so there's no excuse to play like the GP can't tell the difference between a professional rig and a telephone.
While LittleBigPlanet looks fairly cool, it's not by any stretch of the imagination "available". As far as I know, nobody outside the development team has played it yet. It's WAY to soon to try and prove that particular pudding. I speculate that the excitement over the demo is largely relief among Playstation fans that there was finally some GOOD news. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I'm sorry but "fun" is not a genre, it's the form. If a game isn't fun, it shouldn't be a game. Fun is the reason for games to exist.
You can get all that other stuff -- suspense, mystery, sadness, whatever -- in cinema. I think FF7 was great, but the death of Aeris was a cinematic moment, not a gameplay one. There's no reason to go to the trouble of making a game just to jerk around traditional emotions.
I believe that fun has been made into an art form; High Fun if you will. I don't know about you, but when I see a big bad monster on the horizon, and I give a flick of my wrist to draw Link's sword, the feeling, the emotion, isn't the same as what I get from watching a movie or a sword-fighting cutscene. That's because I'm going to go kill that big bad monster, not somebody else. If I win, the victory will be mine directly, not mine through some character on the screen. If I lose, the agony of defeat will be mine.
Aeris's death was tragic, and tragedy is great... but real heartbreak is when you make it all the way to the last level, and fall into a pit. There's a whole world of different experiences available through video games, and our poor language denigrates them all into "fun". So don't tell me that "fun" isn't "art".
if nintendo released the wiimote back in the 80s instead of the control pad, we would all be clamoring about how the new control pads are so great: "wow, i can control the actions with just a press of a few buttons instead of moving my whole arm/hand. this is great and simplifies interaction to allow me to concentrate on the actual game!".
Don't be silly. Think about it for half a minute. If the PS3 had been released in 1980, the Atari wouldn't be some sort of improvement. "Wow, I can see what's going on by only looking at three sprites instead of a whole screen of 3d figures!" Absurd.
In your rush to make analogies between gaming and the visual arts, you've forgotten that gaming isn't a visual art. You're missing the symphony, complaining that the violin isn't a Stradivarius. (Don't ask me to spell it right -- the point is that I don't care.)
Gaming is an aggregate art form so it's easy to make the mistake. Consider film -- while it may have music, the purpose of film isn't the music. While each frame is technically a photograph, the meaning of film isn't the same as photography.
Where it comes to games, the core of the form isn't story, or sound, or visuals, though all of these may be present. The purpose of gaming -- the reason we have a new art form in the first place -- is the "constructed experience". Who cares that the court in Wii Tennis doesn't look like real grass? The point is the sensation of playing tennis. Who cares if Twilight Princess isn't cinematic? The point is playing out what it feels like to be the legendary hero who ventures into the dungeon and rescues the princess.
Consider FFX -- cinematically impressive, but as a game I feel that it falls flat, because it doesn't capture any particular experience -- it isn't fun. You can trivialize the word "fun" all you want, but I think to seasoned gamers it can really have quite a deep meaning. If fun is so trivial, why is it so common for a game to fail to be fun?
The Wii allows for new experiences to be constructed in a new way. That's why it's an important advancement in the state of gaming art.
If a Javascript program is written in the woods, but the user doesn't run it, is the Anonymous Coward an idiot?
Sounds to me like a multi-user version of what Microsoft was doing in 1995:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Oh, the answer is simple. Based on studies done back in the '50s, it's believed that moving the clocks forward for more of the year saves energy. Enough energy, in fact, that within a million years the change will have paid for an ENTIRE DAY of the war in Iraq. And people are complaining that the previous session of Congress didn't do anything!
I doubt that a particularly high percentage of /. mods are making six figures, though thanks for the laugh on that one. But don't worry; after a while this batch of newbies will find another board to go be clueless on. I'm sure you'll remember that this sort of stupid-plague has hit before.
Sure, when the discrimination is stupid and pointless. Are you against gays claiming to be straight to get into the military? How about black people in the past who claimed to be white to buy land?
These are perhaps excessive examples, but it's the same issue. When society creates a meaningless class system, whether based on race, gender, economic situation, or imagined metrics of intelligence and education, it's inevitable that people will lie to get around them. It's never been wrong before and it's not wrong now.
Notice that this person never said he had a degree from any specific institution. I can write up a Degree in Timsterist Mechanics if I want, and grant it to whoever I like. I'm claming that the "degree" by itself is a completely meaningless construct. If he claimed to have a degree from a specific university, that would be fraud. Not the case here.
And go ahead, mod me down again. I'm not off-topic, I'm not calling anyone names, and I'm not disrupting the discussion. Goes to show what a civil statement of dissenting opinions gets you these days. Is the university education system really such a sacred cow?
Right now you're modded as a troll, but I want to say that you're right; the moderator should be ashamed. A degree isn't a holy sacrament (even if it is supposedly in theology). If people will listen to you because you claim to have a piece of paper which doesn't prove anything, then perhaps the lie is necessary to get past their biased discrimination. As far as I can tell, he didn't claim it for purposes of getting a job or otherwise defrauding someone.
Nonsense. The GPL doesn't give any rights to persons who do not obtain the software. So if you do work for a customer and distribute it only to them, including the source and redistribution rights, it meets the definition of Free Software. This has NEVER meant that you are obligated to send the code to anyone who asks.
Sure, your customer has the right to distribute the code if they wish, but even if they do, they are only obligated to provide source code to the parties that they distribute the software to directly.
We shouldn't pretend that a patent cloud over MP3 means that everyone will move to Vorbis. The trouble is that the numerous patents for audio compression aren't limited to any specific format; they are patents on ideas and mathematical functions, like all software patents. So it's hard to say that Vorbis doesn't infringe just because it's open. Remember with patents, you are still liable even if you come up with the same idea independently.
So does anybody really know if there are any patent issues with Vorbis? Has an audit been done somewhere that I haven't heard about?