There must be a way to just "slip" these into the discussion, but why bother? What's the good of an article ranting about webcomics without finding new, good web comics?
The analogy is off because laws are preventative, whereas games are implemented... In other words, laws subtract what you can do in the real world, whereas with games basically everything you can do must be constructed.
Someone had to implement a Mug() function. The developers made it possible to assault other players and take their money... not just in a shoddy-construction-made-it-possible sort of way, but in a god-made-the-world-in-7-days sort of way. The problem it seems is not that he mugged other players (P2P is a big draw in lineage), but that he was too good at it. He figured out the system, and built himself a robot to do it for him. He then sold his winnings. It's really analogus to writing a script to play online poker for you. Nothing you do is illegal, and in fact all of the little steps are encouraged, but to automate the system and do it well takes the game out of it.
Again, if there were anything legally wrong with virtually mugging someone in Lineage the function wouldn't have been implemented. We're not talking about complex interactions of systems here, we're talking about the decision to allow and reward PvP activities.
Should using an in-game ability lead to real life jail? Me thinks he'd have a good case against the developers if that were so.
What they don't get to do is associate themselves with the Olympics without permission.
Why not? "While at the Olympics, stay at the Ramada Inn next to the Main Olympic Stadium." Replace the word "Olympics," with "Downtown London," "The Statue of Liberty," or any number of other things, and you have a perfectly acceptable arrangement. Why is it unreasonable to use the term Olympics without saying "endorsed by the" or "sponsor of?"
The Olympics are a huge, multi-thousand-year-old event. Saying that you can't refer to the olympics in your advertising is basically saying that you can't state facts about what you legally provide without paying someone.
It's hard to hype an original title before launch. Street Fighter 360 makes for better press than Famu Street Brawler 360. Once the system is near the shelves and they're ready to get in-depth we should see more of the original titles.
Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently. Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
Point out to your customer that I.E. is not static... If they want their investment to still be paying off when I.E. 7 and 8 come out, they need to code to the standards of the web, not to the quirks of I.E.
Sites that were coded for I.E. only can expect to spend more than their initial technology investment to maintain the site across it's lifetime as new versions of I.E. are released.Ultimately it's much cheaper to code a website once that will work in all browsers, rather than to attempt to make it work for each individual version of I.E.
Google desktop offers search functionality across your AIM (and MSN?) chat conversations, with a plug in available for trillian. It's pretty convienient if you are looking for something and don't know if it was on e-mail, IM, or Newsgroup.
Can't this just be an emotionally complex situation? Why does it have to be that because a government involved itself in pointless wars and needless civillian deaths that it is OK to obliterate the innocent population of two of their major cities? We're allowed as human beings to both feel relief that a major threat was removed and remorse that in order to remove it the option we exercized caused the deaths of many, many innocent people. We're also allowed to feel remorse at our actions and sad about the people we've killed without feeling regret that we made the wrong decision.
I won't say whose situation this parallels, because it has become terribly terribly cliche. But just think for a moment where leads the equation "warlike government = ok to kill civillans."
This whole broadband thing is going to tear holes through the ethernet. This will bring about the end of all things network-based. Good thing this doesn't apply to me. You see,my ISP doesn't connect via broadband, but by a T3 trunk. I don't connect via broadband, but by an 802.11g wireless networking signal.
In fact, the only thing that I can think of that would be effected by this would be DSL subscribers, as THAT'S WHAT THE FRICKIN TERM REFERS TO. I hate it when government bodies try to regulate things they can't even fucking name properly.
In the meantime various cast members from the previous Kombat films are negotiating contracts to return in the third installment.
Kooke: "Pleeeeeease?"
Casting Agent: "No!"
Kooke: "But I played Scorpion and Mr. Freeze!"
Casting Agent: "Sub-Zero. And that was somebody else - you were Reptile"
Kooke: "I wasn't that bad."
Casting Agent: "What do you think Lambert?"
Lambert: "I've been alive for four and a half centuries, and I've never seen an actor as bad as you. Except maybe that Sonya girl. Or the guy who played Johnny Cage. Oh, and that guy who played Ted from Bill and Ted."
Kooke: "Acting advice from Mr. Beowolf"
Lambert: "Hey! I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan. I needed the money."
Kooke: "You need to stop hanging out with Adam West and start taking your pills."
Lambert: "Your acting is stale and inhuman. You looked dead on the screen."
Kooke: "Hello? Undead lizard with Paul Anderson directing?"
Casting Agent: "...Good point. Welcome to the cast."
Yeah. I wound up slamming into an invisible wall for a few hours while trying to avoid the quickly-running death character. By the time I finally snuck past it with a few well-placed jumps I just didn't care anymore.
One of the best things about The Sands of Time was the playful atmosphere of the world and the depth and interest generated by the characters. For the Warrior Within they decided to be "mature," which apparently means cardboard cutout characters in a really, really dark brown world. Ultimately I gave up (besides that bloody invisible wall... how did that make it past QA?) because it really felt like they were padding the game using a stereotypical situation. You were sent on a quest to the four towers to open one door, which necessitated running back and forth across geometry that you had already played. It just seemed so forced.
That's not to say the game is bad. The gameplay is every bit as good as the original, albeit with a more gratuitous fights. However, the emotional undertones are very different. Ironically, The Sands of Time came off as a lot more mature of a game, while The Warrior Within, in striving to be more mature just seemed more like a 13 year old's view of being cool.
If they have a great lineup for 2006, it's foolish for Sony to sit on their hands for another year. However, if their launch lineup is as weak as the 360's appears like it is going to be, and the 360 doesn't pose an immediate threat, they're best served by not losing the hype around a new system release. If they've got the goods, they can ride a hype wave and launch properly. But if they don't have the goods, they'll disappoint a lot of people on launch and will regret launching at all.
The question isn't having games vs not having games, the question is whether it is better to have crappy games or hold off on launching. I think the high road in this situation is the correct one. Microsoft can release the next Halo whether or not the PS3 is on the shelves. But if the PS3 games on the shelves are weak, it will just make Microsoft's next Halo look that much better.
Geeks need to get out of the habit of assuming that a default configuration amounts to "permission to use". It doesn't. Only permission to use is permission to use. The only surefire way to know if you have permission or not to use a network is to look for a publically posted notice, or to get written or oral permission from the network's owner. One day, 802.11* might have something added to make it easier to make it possible for a user to unambigiously give other's permission to use their networks (and that would be a useful feature anyway), but until then, look for notices, or talk to the operator. Don't assume.
That wireless routers ship unsecured in their default configuration is a problem with the vendors (and it wasn't always like this). Vendors do this to make it easier for people to setup their first wireless network... in fact it's basically automatic. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. Period. Allow me to repeat this. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. But people really do need to log in and change the default configuration, both for security purposes (it's trivially easy to find default passwords online), and functionality reasons. But the biggest reason is that the way to say something is available for use in the online world is to allow people to use it without authentication.
The standard way of saying something is open and available on the 'net is to not require a password. If you put your pictures up on your http site even if you don't publish the link anywhere you're giving your consent for people to connect and look at your pictures. Not just your consent... your hardware, which is your stand-in online, is actively doing it. The moment you put a password on your http site, you're showing that the site is private, and attempts to enter can be considered hacking. If you have an FTP site with no password, you're giving people permission to use it. Open chat servers, bulletin boards, p2p nodes... The universally accepted convention about networking protocols is "open unless locked." I don't need to call you and get your explicit permission to connect to your website if it isn't locked... by not having a password on something you are showing that it is available for all to use. This post bounced through 20 or so routers at various locations throughout the world, but I didn't need to get explicit permission to use any of them. I didn't have to: I had implicit permission built into the hardware's choice of protocol.
Likewise, if you have networking hardware that has no password or protection whatsoever, you're giving people permission to route through it. In fact, hardware you own is more than facilitating it... it's broadcasting its SSID, it's responding to my card's MAC address, it's responding to my session handshake, and it's not asking for authentication. That's no less than four steps along the line when it could have simply and trivially stopped anyone whom the owner didn't want on the network. The hardware actively engaged in the process. This isn't like checking everyone's door to see which is unlocked, this is like walking past a building downtown and having the glass door automatically open for you.
I should also say that lots of people do intentionally share their wireless networks, out of a sense of social support. There are several 802.11b networks permeating my apartment right now, several of which have altered SSID's and configurations but which are unlocked all the same, showing that the owners knew enough to change the configuration of their routers but still chose to leave them unlocked. This turned out to be good for me, as I had been unintentionally connecting to a neighbor's wireless network for about 1/2 of a year... My wireless card had a faulty WEP driver, and for half a year I didn't notice that it would fail to connect to my network and automatically went out and found another
I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD. You could, for example, render out a version of all of your textures with time-of-day effects, and swap between them mid-game. You could add modifiers to all of your audio streams to get audio for various locations. You could pregen background or in-game assets, like applying a movie to a wall texture to make it appear that it has more depth than it does. You could pregenerate a thousand different havok crash animations, and randomly select between them. You can use a slow algorithm to populate a forest, make a few large-scale, adjustments, and save out the results as a sectionally loaded world the size of montana.
When the transition was made between CD and DVD games, it was said that a DVD would never be filled. Well, they're filled. And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over?
The question, really, is will anyone release games on HD-DVD instead of DVD? I'm betting so, as there will be blue-ray games getting ported from the PS3. And when that happens, whoever bought the DVD version of the Xbox will be screwed out of playing the lastest Final Fantasy, or Gran Turismo 5, or Fable 2.
As a HD-DVD player I could care less. But as a game console that is supposed to play HD-DVD games, this will anger a lot of suddenly ex-customers.
One of the things about a valley is that it sticks up on both sides. People frequently misinterpret his research as a warning that the closer we get to looking human, The more wrong it will look. But that's not what he said... he said there was a region where people were forgiving of things that didn't look human, considering them impressions of humans, and regions where people scrutinize things more highly. And in this second region, if you are not highly accurate in your representation, people will respond more negatively than they would to a less accurate representation, as they are judging it by different standards.
However, none of that says that as we get closer to looking human, the worse things will look, just that we judge things by different standards. And we may just be on the other side of that valley.
Actually, math comes in really handy. Your first pass at balancing anything will need to be a mathematical one. You'll need math and algorithms to create healthy systems.
Far more than anything, though, you will need economics. The feedback systems that economics focuses on are exactly the sort of things that you will need as a game designer, without the stuff like calculus and O of n.
Of course, you will also need a healthy dose of writing and management. Design is 1 part writing designs, and one part managing teams.
To counterpoint the original poster, things you will need as a designer:
1. Backgrounds in basically everything. This ranges from the history of 17th century naval battles to being able to name all modern men's shoe styles. Everything comes in handy somewhere along the line.
A. Take Art. If you're a bad artist, or not an artist, this is even more important.
B. Take Programming. If you're a bad programmer, or not a computer guy, this is even more important.
C. Take film studies.
D. Take management.
E. Take economics.
F. Take a little of everything else you can get your hands on.
2. Yes, know all of the games out there. Play them all. Try to avoid making the same mistakes that 30 other teams already have.
3. Be stubborn sometimes. Being a designer involves adhering to a vision doggedly, which can be hard after 13 months of development. Be flexible, but when need be stick your foot down to stay true to the experience of the game.
4. Stay focused on what you're making. Remember, while it may be 13 months to you, it's 4 hours to the player.
5. Become a good communicator. Design is to a large degree about communication. Learn how to tell someone that something they just spent 6 weeks on sucks without discouraging them.
6. Be aware of yourself and your experience. You know, that touchy-feely junk. You are your best laboratory. You're also not your only laboratory, so run playtest sessions, but you really do need to know how you're experiencing things at all time.
Usually the person behind you gets the message if you start tapping your brakes. That gives them fair warning that you're about to snap and screw them up.
Of course, you could just start throwing things out the window. The airstream usually ensures that whatever you throw out your window gets sucked back behind your car, to hit the car behind you smack in the windscreen.
But, well, if the city is Los Angeles, and the city is basically one huge smog-trapping bowl surrounded by mountains, and the smoke-belching hydrogen plant is on the other side of the mountains, then never mind the global CO2 levels, you've still made Los Angeles a significantly more pleasant place to live.
I've found the best strategy is to move your emissions to New York. I don't know if it made Los Angeles a significantly more pleasant place to live, but things are certainly looking up for me.
This was done by somebody. Somebody liked the idea, worked out a plan, and made a mini game about it. Several people, probably, as this required art, code, and sound support... maybe this was made just as a proof of concept so they could see how potentially offensive it might be.
So the likely hood is that when somebody said "no, that's too offensive / stupid / not fun," the people tasked with removing it did so reluctantly. They did the bare minimum required and removed the way to access it, probably with the forgotten intention of removing the whole thing "at some point."
This happens quite often when you're pressed for time. Old assets linger for very long during game development. Maybe they forgot about it entirely. Maybe they hoped that they would have time to polish it to an acceptable state during Beta. Maybe they just were more worried about getting the game to a playable state and out the door than they were that someone would hack the code and discover their minigame. Again, old stuff lingers... the dialog in KOTR2 and the levels in Legacy of Kain prove that. Quite frequently hacking around you can find old enemies that went unused, but still wound up on the disk, or prototype art, or what have you. This is really probably no different.
And since nobody has linked to any images of what we're arguing about, here is someone who has.
Oddly enough, I know a large number of post-mid-life-crisis people who play GTA. It's not as bad as it has been made out to be in the press. It's not really stealing cars and killing people... think of it as picking fruit from a tree. You get to try out any car you want, at any time, just by seeing it. See a fruit on a tree you like? Pluck it and try it out. See a juicy car? Just get near and press the X button.
You can run people down arbitrarily, but that pulls down the heat and ends your joyride really fast. You can go on a murderous rampage with guns, but A: that also pulls down the heat and B: guns in GTA are not really fun.
GTA is not an immoral world. It is mostly a morally vaccuous world, or a slightly morally positive world, where you can do what your impulses say so long as you don't do bad things too much or in front of the police.
I'm not saying kids don't buy GTA. But I'd be surprised if more than 25% of their sales came from kids under 18. I'm guessing the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series in the 80's pulled in a lot more kids than that.
Personally, I'd like to see a game like Basic Instinct... something so inciteful that people protest out front shouting "think of the children!" yet is so genuinely good that all of the children's parents have to go out to watch it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how many day-to-day operations require the inadvertent use of Windows in our daily lives.
Like the grammar checker in Word?
http://www.questionablecontent.net/
e =1
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
http://www.catandgirl.com/
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=631
http://www.bobandgeorge.com/Archive/Apr04.php?dat
There must be a way to just "slip" these into the discussion, but why bother? What's the good of an article ranting about webcomics without finding new, good web comics?
The analogy is off because laws are preventative, whereas games are implemented... In other words, laws subtract what you can do in the real world, whereas with games basically everything you can do must be constructed.
Someone had to implement a Mug() function. The developers made it possible to assault other players and take their money... not just in a shoddy-construction-made-it-possible sort of way, but in a god-made-the-world-in-7-days sort of way.
The problem it seems is not that he mugged other players (P2P is a big draw in lineage), but that he was too good at it. He figured out the system, and built himself a robot to do it for him. He then sold his winnings. It's really analogus to writing a script to play online poker for you. Nothing you do is illegal, and in fact all of the little steps are encouraged, but to automate the system and do it well takes the game out of it.
Again, if there were anything legally wrong with virtually mugging someone in Lineage the function wouldn't have been implemented. We're not talking about complex interactions of systems here, we're talking about the decision to allow and reward PvP activities.
Should using an in-game ability lead to real life jail? Me thinks he'd have a good case against the developers if that were so.
What they don't get to do is associate themselves with the Olympics without permission.
Why not? "While at the Olympics, stay at the Ramada Inn next to the Main Olympic Stadium." Replace the word "Olympics," with "Downtown London," "The Statue of Liberty," or any number of other things, and you have a perfectly acceptable arrangement. Why is it unreasonable to use the term Olympics without saying "endorsed by the" or "sponsor of?"
The Olympics are a huge, multi-thousand-year-old event. Saying that you can't refer to the olympics in your advertising is basically saying that you can't state facts about what you legally provide without paying someone.
You mean the timelords?
It's hard to hype an original title before launch. Street Fighter 360 makes for better press than Famu Street Brawler 360. Once the system is near the shelves and they're ready to get in-depth we should see more of the original titles.
Most of our customers think we are nuts when we suggest spending more time (their money) so we can get those 2-5% chunks of the browser market, each of which behaves a bit differently. Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
Point out to your customer that I.E. is not static... If they want their investment to still be paying off when I.E. 7 and 8 come out, they need to code to the standards of the web, not to the quirks of I.E.
Sites that were coded for I.E. only can expect to spend more than their initial technology investment to maintain the site across it's lifetime as new versions of I.E. are released.Ultimately it's much cheaper to code a website once that will work in all browsers, rather than to attempt to make it work for each individual version of I.E.
Google desktop offers search functionality across your AIM (and MSN?) chat conversations, with a plug in available for trillian. It's pretty convienient if you are looking for something and don't know if it was on e-mail, IM, or Newsgroup.
It's been about 2 years since Google stopped returning useful results. Now, most of the results are crap.
Have you noticed what's happened to the internet recently?
Somewhere out there someone is furiously creating an extreme penguin homosexuality webpage...
Can't this just be an emotionally complex situation? Why does it have to be that because a government involved itself in pointless wars and needless civillian deaths that it is OK to obliterate the innocent population of two of their major cities? We're allowed as human beings to both feel relief that a major threat was removed and remorse that in order to remove it the option we exercized caused the deaths of many, many innocent people. We're also allowed to feel remorse at our actions and sad about the people we've killed without feeling regret that we made the wrong decision.
I won't say whose situation this parallels, because it has become terribly terribly cliche. But just think for a moment where leads the equation "warlike government = ok to kill civillans."
This whole broadband thing is going to tear holes through the ethernet. This will bring about the end of all things network-based. Good thing this doesn't apply to me. You see,my ISP doesn't connect via broadband, but by a T3 trunk. I don't connect via broadband, but by an 802.11g wireless networking signal.
In fact, the only thing that I can think of that would be effected by this would be DSL subscribers, as THAT'S WHAT THE FRICKIN TERM REFERS TO. I hate it when government bodies try to regulate things they can't even fucking name properly.
In the meantime various cast members from the previous Kombat films are negotiating contracts to return in the third installment.
Kooke: "Pleeeeeease?"
Casting Agent: "No!"
Kooke: "But I played Scorpion and Mr. Freeze!"
Casting Agent: "Sub-Zero. And that was somebody else - you were Reptile"
Kooke: "I wasn't that bad."
Casting Agent: "What do you think Lambert?"
Lambert: "I've been alive for four and a half centuries, and I've never seen an actor as bad as you. Except maybe that Sonya girl. Or the guy who played Johnny Cage. Oh, and that guy who played Ted from Bill and Ted."
Kooke: "Acting advice from Mr. Beowolf"
Lambert: "Hey! I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan. I needed the money."
Kooke: "You need to stop hanging out with Adam West and start taking your pills."
Lambert: "Your acting is stale and inhuman. You looked dead on the screen."
Kooke: "Hello? Undead lizard with Paul Anderson directing?"
Casting Agent: "...Good point. Welcome to the cast."
Was QA at Ubisoft entirely publisher side, or is there a policy of having QA members at the developer?
Yeah. I wound up slamming into an invisible wall for a few hours while trying to avoid the quickly-running death character. By the time I finally snuck past it with a few well-placed jumps I just didn't care anymore.
One of the best things about The Sands of Time was the playful atmosphere of the world and the depth and interest generated by the characters. For the Warrior Within they decided to be "mature," which apparently means cardboard cutout characters in a really, really dark brown world. Ultimately I gave up (besides that bloody invisible wall... how did that make it past QA?) because it really felt like they were padding the game using a stereotypical situation. You were sent on a quest to the four towers to open one door, which necessitated running back and forth across geometry that you had already played. It just seemed so forced.
That's not to say the game is bad. The gameplay is every bit as good as the original, albeit with a more gratuitous fights. However, the emotional undertones are very different. Ironically, The Sands of Time came off as a lot more mature of a game, while The Warrior Within, in striving to be more mature just seemed more like a 13 year old's view of being cool.
If they have a great lineup for 2006, it's foolish for Sony to sit on their hands for another year. However, if their launch lineup is as weak as the 360's appears like it is going to be, and the 360 doesn't pose an immediate threat, they're best served by not losing the hype around a new system release. If they've got the goods, they can ride a hype wave and launch properly. But if they don't have the goods, they'll disappoint a lot of people on launch and will regret launching at all.
The question isn't having games vs not having games, the question is whether it is better to have crappy games or hold off on launching. I think the high road in this situation is the correct one. Microsoft can release the next Halo whether or not the PS3 is on the shelves. But if the PS3 games on the shelves are weak, it will just make Microsoft's next Halo look that much better.
Geeks need to get out of the habit of assuming that a default configuration amounts to "permission to use". It doesn't. Only permission to use is permission to use. The only surefire way to know if you have permission or not to use a network is to look for a publically posted notice, or to get written or oral permission from the network's owner. One day, 802.11* might have something added to make it easier to make it possible for a user to unambigiously give other's permission to use their networks (and that would be a useful feature anyway), but until then, look for notices, or talk to the operator. Don't assume.
That wireless routers ship unsecured in their default configuration is a problem with the vendors (and it wasn't always like this). Vendors do this to make it easier for people to setup their first wireless network... in fact it's basically automatic. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. Period. Allow me to repeat this. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. But people really do need to log in and change the default configuration, both for security purposes (it's trivially easy to find default passwords online), and functionality reasons. But the biggest reason is that the way to say something is available for use in the online world is to allow people to use it without authentication.
The standard way of saying something is open and available on the 'net is to not require a password. If you put your pictures up on your http site even if you don't publish the link anywhere you're giving your consent for people to connect and look at your pictures. Not just your consent... your hardware, which is your stand-in online, is actively doing it. The moment you put a password on your http site, you're showing that the site is private, and attempts to enter can be considered hacking. If you have an FTP site with no password, you're giving people permission to use it. Open chat servers, bulletin boards, p2p nodes... The universally accepted convention about networking protocols is "open unless locked." I don't need to call you and get your explicit permission to connect to your website if it isn't locked... by not having a password on something you are showing that it is available for all to use. This post bounced through 20 or so routers at various locations throughout the world, but I didn't need to get explicit permission to use any of them. I didn't have to: I had implicit permission built into the hardware's choice of protocol.
Likewise, if you have networking hardware that has no password or protection whatsoever, you're giving people permission to route through it. In fact, hardware you own is more than facilitating it... it's broadcasting its SSID, it's responding to my card's MAC address, it's responding to my session handshake, and it's not asking for authentication. That's no less than four steps along the line when it could have simply and trivially stopped anyone whom the owner didn't want on the network. The hardware actively engaged in the process. This isn't like checking everyone's door to see which is unlocked, this is like walking past a building downtown and having the glass door automatically open for you.
I should also say that lots of people do intentionally share their wireless networks, out of a sense of social support. There are several 802.11b networks permeating my apartment right now, several of which have altered SSID's and configurations but which are unlocked all the same, showing that the owners knew enough to change the configuration of their routers but still chose to leave them unlocked. This turned out to be good for me, as I had been unintentionally connecting to a neighbor's wireless network for about 1/2 of a year... My wireless card had a faulty WEP driver, and for half a year I didn't notice that it would fail to connect to my network and automatically went out and found another
I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD. You could, for example, render out a version of all of your textures with time-of-day effects, and swap between them mid-game. You could add modifiers to all of your audio streams to get audio for various locations. You could pregen background or in-game assets, like applying a movie to a wall texture to make it appear that it has more depth than it does. You could pregenerate a thousand different havok crash animations, and randomly select between them. You can use a slow algorithm to populate a forest, make a few large-scale, adjustments, and save out the results as a sectionally loaded world the size of montana.
When the transition was made between CD and DVD games, it was said that a DVD would never be filled. Well, they're filled. And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over?
The question, really, is will anyone release games on HD-DVD instead of DVD? I'm betting so, as there will be blue-ray games getting ported from the PS3. And when that happens, whoever bought the DVD version of the Xbox will be screwed out of playing the lastest Final Fantasy, or Gran Turismo 5, or Fable 2.
As a HD-DVD player I could care less. But as a game console that is supposed to play HD-DVD games, this will anger a lot of suddenly ex-customers.
One of the things about a valley is that it sticks up on both sides. People frequently misinterpret his research as a warning that the closer we get to looking human, The more wrong it will look. But that's not what he said... he said there was a region where people were forgiving of things that didn't look human, considering them impressions of humans, and regions where people scrutinize things more highly. And in this second region, if you are not highly accurate in your representation, people will respond more negatively than they would to a less accurate representation, as they are judging it by different standards.
However, none of that says that as we get closer to looking human, the worse things will look, just that we judge things by different standards. And we may just be on the other side of that valley.
Actually, math comes in really handy. Your first pass at balancing anything will need to be a mathematical one. You'll need math and algorithms to create healthy systems.
Far more than anything, though, you will need economics. The feedback systems that economics focuses on are exactly the sort of things that you will need as a game designer, without the stuff like calculus and O of n.
Of course, you will also need a healthy dose of writing and management. Design is 1 part writing designs, and one part managing teams.
To counterpoint the original poster, things you will need as a designer:
1. Backgrounds in basically everything. This ranges from the history of 17th century naval battles to being able to name all modern men's shoe styles. Everything comes in handy somewhere along the line.
A. Take Art. If you're a bad artist, or not an artist, this is even more important.
B. Take Programming. If you're a bad programmer, or not a computer guy, this is even more important.
C. Take film studies.
D. Take management.
E. Take economics.
F. Take a little of everything else you can get your hands on.
2. Yes, know all of the games out there. Play them all. Try to avoid making the same mistakes that 30 other teams already have.
3. Be stubborn sometimes. Being a designer involves adhering to a vision doggedly, which can be hard after 13 months of development. Be flexible, but when need be stick your foot down to stay true to the experience of the game.
4. Stay focused on what you're making. Remember, while it may be 13 months to you, it's 4 hours to the player.
5. Become a good communicator. Design is to a large degree about communication. Learn how to tell someone that something they just spent 6 weeks on sucks without discouraging them.
6. Be aware of yourself and your experience. You know, that touchy-feely junk. You are your best laboratory. You're also not your only laboratory, so run playtest sessions, but you really do need to know how you're experiencing things at all time.
Oddly enough, I'm not getting you on the first page. Perhaps Google is looking at your history and considers you especially relevant to yourself?
Usually the person behind you gets the message if you start tapping your brakes. That gives them fair warning that you're about to snap and screw them up.
Of course, you could just start throwing things out the window. The airstream usually ensures that whatever you throw out your window gets sucked back behind your car, to hit the car behind you smack in the windscreen.
Man, I lived in LA too long.
But, well, if the city is Los Angeles, and the city is basically one huge smog-trapping bowl surrounded by mountains, and the smoke-belching hydrogen plant is on the other side of the mountains, then never mind the global CO2 levels, you've still made Los Angeles a significantly more pleasant place to live.
I've found the best strategy is to move your emissions to New York. I don't know if it made Los Angeles a significantly more pleasant place to live, but things are certainly looking up for me.
This was done by somebody. Somebody liked the idea, worked out a plan, and made a mini game about it. Several people, probably, as this required art, code, and sound support... maybe this was made just as a proof of concept so they could see how potentially offensive it might be.
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So the likely hood is that when somebody said "no, that's too offensive / stupid / not fun," the people tasked with removing it did so reluctantly. They did the bare minimum required and removed the way to access it, probably with the forgotten intention of removing the whole thing "at some point."
This happens quite often when you're pressed for time. Old assets linger for very long during game development. Maybe they forgot about it entirely. Maybe they hoped that they would have time to polish it to an acceptable state during Beta. Maybe they just were more worried about getting the game to a playable state and out the door than they were that someone would hack the code and discover their minigame. Again, old stuff lingers... the dialog in KOTR2 and the levels in Legacy of Kain prove that. Quite frequently hacking around you can find old enemies that went unused, but still wound up on the disk, or prototype art, or what have you. This is really probably no different.
And since nobody has linked to any images of what we're arguing about, here is someone who has.
http://www.gtasanandreas.net/news/single.php?id=1
Oddly enough, I know a large number of post-mid-life-crisis people who play GTA. It's not as bad as it has been made out to be in the press. It's not really stealing cars and killing people... think of it as picking fruit from a tree. You get to try out any car you want, at any time, just by seeing it. See a fruit on a tree you like? Pluck it and try it out. See a juicy car? Just get near and press the X button.
You can run people down arbitrarily, but that pulls down the heat and ends your joyride really fast. You can go on a murderous rampage with guns, but A: that also pulls down the heat and B: guns in GTA are not really fun.
GTA is not an immoral world. It is mostly a morally vaccuous world, or a slightly morally positive world, where you can do what your impulses say so long as you don't do bad things too much or in front of the police.
I'm not saying kids don't buy GTA. But I'd be surprised if more than 25% of their sales came from kids under 18. I'm guessing the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series in the 80's pulled in a lot more kids than that.
Personally, I'd like to see a game like Basic Instinct... something so inciteful that people protest out front shouting "think of the children!" yet is so genuinely good that all of the children's parents have to go out to watch it.