We expect more of software because those higher expectations can be met
Let's not forget, we expect more of software also because while one jerk on the subway can inconvienience ten people, one jerk on a system can inconvienience 5,000. And that jerk can be remote, and invisible, and automatic. So now you have every jerk in the world, essentially, and if any one of those automated scripts worms their way in, all of your users are going to have a bad day. It's thousands of hackers versus one system, and if one of them gets through, thousands of people (or more) have a very bad day.
Actually this is some very basic HTML hacking. He went to their service, which re-directs all new people to their home page. He directory surfed around the web server, and found a few dozen other sites, as well as the company's home page. He tried some very basic password combinations, (like test:test), and got control over some active sites. These sites included customer information and credit card databases.
So really, the site that served images from an unobfuscated directory allowed the person to know what to look for, the directory was fully listed in a way that directories shouldn't. The passwords were very, very insecure. This had nothing to do with wireless security, but rather web services security, and basic things for security that people don't do.
The passwords in the article, BTW, no longer function. At least, not form my remote machine. Anyone reading this from South Station wish to see if the passwords still work on-network?
Possibly because those people who use BSD code aren't required to disclose it? I've always wondered how much out there was running on BSD and nobody knew it. I'm reminded of the exploit discovered in the BSD TCP-IP stack which effected machines running Windows as well.
BSD should stand for BSD is Silent but Deadly. Your car, or DVD player, or cable box, or router could be running on BSD, and you would never know.
To be fair, Resident Evil the movie actually had a good plot and some great ideas. Unfortunately it also had a laughably bad CG monster and dogs covered in prosciutto. Mortal Kombat the movie needed some help, but if it were in the hands of a skilled producer it could have been great. Tank Girl "could" have been based on a game, though there wasn't any game in particular that it was based upon. A Silent Hill movie could be great.
Sadly, there was no helping Alone in the Dark, though Christian Slater really helped drag it away from totally unwatchable.
I thought Game Over the TV series, which is based upon video gaming in general, was quite good.
There is no technical reason why movies based upon games will suck any more than there is why games based upon movies will suck. The problem, though, is that these are considered by the studios to be cash-ins. Laura Croft, being essentially a modern Indiana Jones, could have had a great movie in the hands of a skilled director. While Final Fantasy the movie may have been terrible, Fatal Fury the anime was actually quite good. Blood Rayne is just begging to be made into an Uwe Bowl movie (and, in fact, is). The Matrix could easily have been renamed Shawodrun the movie, and it would have been just as believeable. Wargames was an excellent movie based upon Missile Command. Tron was an excellent movie co-developed with the videogame of the same name.
Don't dismiss video games as a source for movies just because most of them have been money grabs. It may be a while, but eventually we will see good movies based upon worlds created in good games.
They've patented the standard way of doing online cross-game friends detection, but With an IM client. I see they've found up my patented "Way of patenting things with superficial addition X, with a browser" Since they already know it, I'd like to share it with you all.
Remember that this way of patenting things (with a browser) is patented, and is available for a nominal lawsuit when I catch you.
First take an everyday concept, like buying dogfood or raking your lawn. Explain this in excruiciatingly exacting language, carefully crafted to be as broad and unintelligible as possible. If necessary, run it through an obfuscation program to get the broadest possible interpretation bork. Then, and this is key, to the end of the patent add the words "with an X" where X is something the patent clerk doesn't really understand with a browser.
Here are some examples of things that you can get away with, err, add to the end of everyday activities, to get your own shiny new patent.
With the internet With a CPU (whatever that would mean) With an IM client With XML Live With one click With a shared data management paradigm arrangement With multiple people at once With an electronic circuit With a cellular data network* With a frick'in laser beam With an open-source environment With a closed-source environment With a plug-in With metadata Automatically With subdomains With an encryption layer (cover all of your bases and encrypt this patent)
If you are still having trouble thinking up things to patent, see also this helpful list. No idea is too obvious or too widely in practice to slip by the patent office with a browser. Yes, for just 20 million dollars in theoretical damages awarded by a judge who also didn't know what they were doing, you too could sue the pants off of anyone mowing their lawn in a closed-source environment. I guarentee it!**
*Note that while "With a multiuser telephonic networking connection" is acceptable, "over the phone" is not.
But you see, there it goes again. Not all games are problems to be solved, and a lot of the fun of games comes from things that are incidental to the gameplay itself. I was just playing through The Wind Waker (Yeah, yeah, I need to get caught up. It was crunch!) and got to a point where you have to wander through a maze. While wandering through the maze I came across a cute little mouse who twitched it's nose in a sadistic fashion, yanked on a bell tied to a red ribbon, and caused me to fall out of the maze and back onto the beach. It was terribly entertaining, and really "made" the maze. But it was irrelevant to the maze itself. The fun there didn't come from anything that could even be stretched to be considered "puzzle". On that same island there is a game you can play, where the host (a bored frenchman) keeps holding cutouts of paintings in front of his face to overact different characters. Again, it has nothing to do with the "gameplay," but it does fall in the lap of the game designer and it is terribly entertaining.
The last game that I've shipped, [PLUG] Eyetoy:Antigrav, [/PLUG] was fun because it was visceral. We spent a lot of effort getting the patterns of targets just right to create different feelings in the player. The patterns themselves were not problems to be solved... they were straightforward bits of arm movement that had to be recognized, responded to, and remembered. But the overall sensation was satisfying and enjoyable. Even the general steering and navigation was a lot more fun because the players were viscerally involved, despite their relative simplicity.
Again, look at the assumptions in your language. "A problem to be solved." Solving implies intellectual pursuit. You wouldn't describe a pile of laundry to be put away as a problem to be "solved." You wouldn't describe Missile Command as a "problem that needs to be solved." The intellectual pursuit of gaming is just one of the ways of engaging the player. There are a lot more out there, and as many of them as you can find should be in your bag of tricks.
I'm reacting as strongly as I am because there are so many great game designers that get lured down the easy path of considering the source of fun and good game design to be about puzzles or "things to be solved," which it's really not. It's almost as much of a mantra as "the free market will solve everything," and it is about as useful. The source of fun in games is not that they are problems to be dealt with any more than the souce of fun in games being that they are interactive computer programs. While they may be technically correct, neither is at all helpful in making a great game.
If it's firing falsely and not springing back up, it sounds like one of the foam sensor separators has been crushed. I'm guessing they have been dancing with shoes, which is usually what leads to that situation.
The Red Octane ignition pads, on the other hand, really do rock. They're about the best non-hard pads you can get. The foam is very, very strong, the pads actually require some real pressure to trigger, and there is some feeling there for when you're stepping on a button and when you're not. I just completed Tsugaru Maniac on one, a feat I can't do on anything but high-end metal pads and the arcade unit.
On the other hand, they're about as expensive as a cheap plastic hard mat (which are roundly terrible, BTW), or a used metal pad. But if you're not about to mess around trying to solder sensors onto a homebrew hard mat, the Ignition really is the way to go.
Like all pads, you "may" want to tape them to the floor, but this depends on your particular play style. Again, I've been playing on this thing on various carpet surfaces and I'd say it only moves about 15 degrees per song on maniac songs. Pretty solid overall... good choice. Just take your shoes off.
I don't know if I would consider interface elements the right way of making your point, as if it is unfamiliar to the player it will be difficult to use. However, if you look at the fan boards for any major game, you will see thousands of good examples. People wanting to add RPG elements to Quake, or who want Worms in real-time, or who want grossly unbalancing weapons, powers, etc. The best example of a fan-designed game would have to be Masters of Orion 3, a game that certain people assure me is fun to play but after several hours with it I still hadn't figured out how to build a ship, it was so buried in unnecessary options.
The fans are great. I love the fans. And a few of them have great, implementable ideas. Maybe I'm just jaded, but most of the time they suggest things that are either grossly out of scope, is for a different style of game, or which has already been shot down in a discussion you have had internally and they are not privy to. In other words, fan suggestions follow a 90 / 9 / 1 rule, where 90% are just impossible, 9% are good but have already been discussed, and 1% ought to be implemented right now but drowned in the other 99%.
When dealing with any fan-suggestions, first try to figure out what it is they want, and why it is they suggested the thing that they suggested. Knowing what they want and trying to address that is far more important to a team than trying to implement everyone's suggestions.
By "entertaining problem" you're now essentially defining "puzzle" as "something fun to do." This is not a puzzle. And unfortunately most of the people in the industry that I've met that use the word puzzle do mean puzzle, and this informs all of the design decisions they make.
Reading other reviews os the book, I don't think Koster meant puzzle. He did say that things that are fun will be fun outside of a graphical or cultural context, an assertion that I find overly reductionist. Zelda, for example, is all about culture in subtle ways.
And where is all of this financial success he thinks we're crowning on about? Can I have some of this financial success?
I'm not convinced. Part of the engineering team's goal is to be the best darned engineered software it can be. Part of the Art team's goal is that it can be the most beautiful, fluidly moving software ever. I fail to see the advantage of a programmer pondering "is this fun?" while changing a lookup table to a hash table in an attempt gain an extra 3fps on the 60fps goal. An artist trying to get the IK correct for a character opening a door may at some point ask "is this fun?" but that doesn't really help them do what they're trying to do. Yes, all programmers should be game designers who have other things to focus on, but basically all of them are. Same thing with the artists. But on day-to-day tasks, you really do have to lose big picture status so that you can figure out how to regigger a menu system to reduce the number of clicks required to enter a game. Or temporarily set aside the concept of fun when trying to paint a progressive skybox.
Don't knock engine work. A clean, well constructed engine is worth it's weight in gold, and will allow you to polish and extend a game until it's fun, in ways that otherwise wouldn't be possible.
Let's not forget that the ultimate example of "Design is King" was Daikatana. It had design... and no art, engineering, or project oversight.
Uh, you just contradicted your statement right there. The "Puzzle to Solve" in this case is "How do I acquire as much in-game wealth and property to satisfy my insatiable greed without mindlessly acquiring it?"
But while the game may contain puzzles, and it may even be said to be puzzle-like, the fun isn't puzzles. Dance Dance Revolution is a terrible lot of fun, but it contains no hidden or puzzle-like information at all. Tennis contains very little that can be considered puzzle-like. Neither does skeet shooting, or Quake 3.
Puzzles are slow and contemplative by nature, whereas most videogames are simply not. I've seen this happen with other people in the industry... If to you everything is a puzzle to be solved, you won't "get" what is enjoyable about a battle of wits at Street Fighter. You won't be able to reproduce the joys of million-mile an hour carnage in Burnout 3. Even though it was slower and more contemplative, Metroid Prime was fun for the exploration aspect... keeping tons of low-hanging fruit around for you to pluck the moment you found a bigger stick. Katamari Damacy also had basically no puzzle aspect to it, but it was fun because you were acquiring rediculous things and growing bigger and bigger (comment on society, perhaps?).
Grandparent is right. If Koster actually feels that all games are puzzle games, he will be missing out on ways in which games can be made fun. Whenever in the past I've sat down and tried to create grand unified theories of why games are fun, I've always walked into work to find dozens of new and fun things that I left out. Why is Animal Crossing so rediculously fun? Why is Diablo? Is it building something? Watching something grow? Solving puzzles? Physical reactions? All of the above?
That's not to say that many games that are fun can't be said to be puzzles, if you force it into that mold. But puzzles are not the source of fun in most of these games. There are as many ways to make a game fun as there are ways to have fun. If the core of your game design practice breaks down into just making puzzles, you are in trouble.
You do realize that most of those are just getting stripped overseas in harsh inhuman chemically-polluting factories, right? I mean, why would someone need a 486 when they don't have electricity? You strip them for heavy metals with workers that dip them by hand into vats of heavy acids, remove anything that solidifies out, and pour the waste into the river, with big piles of melty plastic junk piled up by the side of the road. You then sell the metal for more than you paid for the computer. This is usually how it goes, and this is why environmentalists don't like selling old computers overseas: the environmental damage of stripping something improperly is tremendous.
Before we make artificial intelligence, we need to make artificial stupidity. Or in less poetic terms, we need to create robots with basic instincts and abilities before we concentrate on robots with higher abilities. Well, we should be looking at the basics in parallel, at least.
We hardly understand the weighted chemical system that rules our bodies. While we always emphasize the logical aspect of thought and processing, we don't talk about how the level of adrenaline in someone's bloodstream will affect their choice of whether or not to sign a 4-year contract.
I wouldn't be surprised if the focus on truly logical beings has drawn attention away from ways that robots can exist in a world of greatly imperfect knowledge.
msn search: Bill Gates ate my balls - 43,085 google search: Bill Gates ate my balls - 47,000
Interestingly enough, the first page on google are all "ate my balls" references, including some Bill Gates bought my balls which I don't even remember. Sadly, MSN search included such things as a complete listing of 2600 cartridges, and has no real balls to it.
Well, one could interpret the what they said to mean that anyone can get Microsoft's data and can implement a reader without violating their license. It would be a big step forward for Open Office to have a perfectly compatible reader, especially as it can write to an RTF format that Word reads.
Of course that's not going to happen, because we have no system of accountability in place to hold companies to their Word. I guess it will be a long time before we see an open office Word Text Format (WTF{tm}).
The game that he wrote was incredible. It was this twisted mind-meld of everything in the books taken and shoved backwards into the brain of an insane loony. One of the goals of the game is to acquire both tea and no tea at the same time, impressing a smarter-than-thou door enough that it will let you through. You also have to go in and take out parts of your own brain, prevent an armed and deadly armada from being eaten by a small dog by feeding it a terrible bar-room sandwich, and a legendary sequence involving trying to catch a fish in a rue-goldbergesque nightmare of cleaning robots. Unfortunately it's so mind-bendingly difficulty that few people ever make it past the introduction alive.
I recommend sitting down with a guide and the game, for a light evening of laughter and murderous rage.
The analogy is even worse if you try to say why selling Razors are like selling iPods. The razor people are making a killing on blades, taking something that is essentially free to them and selling it at an enormous markup using a forced lock-in to try and milk every last drop. Few people buy an iPod because they're locked into apple music.
The iPod is neither free, nor is it being given away as free. The songs are neither free nor are they being given away as free. You can't really say that the razor blades are like the songs, or that the handle is like the iPod. The analogy falls down, and therefore the reverse analogy falls down.
If you're looking for reasons for Apple's success... How about they invested a lot in elegance and simplicity of design, created something truly usable, and sold it for a little more than other devices? People are willing to pay for well-designed things, especially when it comes to consumer entertainment devices. Why is this such a hard concept?
Slashdot Mirror
We expect more of software because those higher expectations can be met
Let's not forget, we expect more of software also because while one jerk on the subway can inconvienience ten people, one jerk on a system can inconvienience 5,000. And that jerk can be remote, and invisible, and automatic. So now you have every jerk in the world, essentially, and if any one of those automated scripts worms their way in, all of your users are going to have a bad day. It's thousands of hackers versus one system, and if one of them gets through, thousands of people (or more) have a very bad day.
Actually this is some very basic HTML hacking. He went to their service, which re-directs all new people to their home page. He directory surfed around the web server, and found a few dozen other sites, as well as the company's home page. He tried some very basic password combinations, (like test:test), and got control over some active sites. These sites included customer information and credit card databases.
So really, the site that served images from an unobfuscated directory allowed the person to know what to look for, the directory was fully listed in a way that directories shouldn't. The passwords were very, very insecure. This had nothing to do with wireless security, but rather web services security, and basic things for security that people don't do.
The passwords in the article, BTW, no longer function. At least, not form my remote machine. Anyone reading this from South Station wish to see if the passwords still work on-network?
I happened to notice that it was possible to take control of the entire station's wireless network,
That's great. Can you wait until after I get to work on Monday before you do this? Thanks.
Quite frankly if anyone can figure out a way to get a cat to chase a shiny, irregularly moving spot of invisible light, they're welcome to the patent.
To understand, think "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux".
When you put it that way, it makes me really care what the sci-fi community wants to be called.
If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux?
Possibly because those people who use BSD code aren't required to disclose it? I've always wondered how much out there was running on BSD and nobody knew it. I'm reminded of the exploit discovered in the BSD TCP-IP stack which effected machines running Windows as well.
BSD should stand for BSD is Silent but Deadly. Your car, or DVD player, or cable box, or router could be running on BSD, and you would never know.
Well spoken from the man whose handle is "Nutscrape Sucks".
To be fair, Resident Evil the movie actually had a good plot and some great ideas. Unfortunately it also had a laughably bad CG monster and dogs covered in prosciutto. Mortal Kombat the movie needed some help, but if it were in the hands of a skilled producer it could have been great. Tank Girl "could" have been based on a game, though there wasn't any game in particular that it was based upon. A Silent Hill movie could be great.
Sadly, there was no helping Alone in the Dark, though Christian Slater really helped drag it away from totally unwatchable.
I thought Game Over the TV series, which is based upon video gaming in general, was quite good.
There is no technical reason why movies based upon games will suck any more than there is why games based upon movies will suck. The problem, though, is that these are considered by the studios to be cash-ins. Laura Croft, being essentially a modern Indiana Jones, could have had a great movie in the hands of a skilled director. While Final Fantasy the movie may have been terrible, Fatal Fury the anime was actually quite good. Blood Rayne is just begging to be made into an Uwe Bowl movie (and, in fact, is). The Matrix could easily have been renamed Shawodrun the movie, and it would have been just as believeable. Wargames was an excellent movie based upon Missile Command. Tron was an excellent movie co-developed with the videogame of the same name.
Don't dismiss video games as a source for movies just because most of them have been money grabs. It may be a while, but eventually we will see good movies based upon worlds created in good games.
They've patented the standard way of doing online cross-game friends detection, but With an IM client. I see they've found up my patented "Way of patenting things with superficial addition X, with a browser" Since they already know it, I'd like to share it with you all.
Remember that this way of patenting things (with a browser) is patented, and is available for a nominal lawsuit when I catch you.
First take an everyday concept, like buying dogfood or raking your lawn. Explain this in excruiciatingly exacting language, carefully crafted to be as broad and unintelligible as possible. If necessary, run it through an obfuscation program to get the broadest possible interpretation bork. Then, and this is key, to the end of the patent add the words "with an X" where X is something the patent clerk doesn't really understand with a browser.
Here are some examples of things that you can get away with, err, add to the end of everyday activities, to get your own shiny new patent.
With the internet
With a CPU (whatever that would mean)
With an IM client
With XML
Live
With one click
With a shared data management paradigm arrangement
With multiple people at once
With an electronic circuit
With a cellular data network*
With a frick'in laser beam
With an open-source environment
With a closed-source environment
With a plug-in
With metadata
Automatically
With subdomains
With an encryption layer (cover all of your bases and encrypt this patent)
If you are still having trouble thinking up things to patent, see also this helpful list. No idea is too obvious or too widely in practice to slip by the patent office with a browser. Yes, for just 20 million dollars in theoretical damages awarded by a judge who also didn't know what they were doing, you too could sue the pants off of anyone mowing their lawn in a closed-source environment. I guarentee it!**
*Note that while "With a multiuser telephonic networking connection" is acceptable, "over the phone" is not.
**Not an express or implied guarentee.
But you see, there it goes again. Not all games are problems to be solved, and a lot of the fun of games comes from things that are incidental to the gameplay itself. I was just playing through The Wind Waker (Yeah, yeah, I need to get caught up. It was crunch!) and got to a point where you have to wander through a maze. While wandering through the maze I came across a cute little mouse who twitched it's nose in a sadistic fashion, yanked on a bell tied to a red ribbon, and caused me to fall out of the maze and back onto the beach. It was terribly entertaining, and really "made" the maze. But it was irrelevant to the maze itself. The fun there didn't come from anything that could even be stretched to be considered "puzzle". On that same island there is a game you can play, where the host (a bored frenchman) keeps holding cutouts of paintings in front of his face to overact different characters. Again, it has nothing to do with the "gameplay," but it does fall in the lap of the game designer and it is terribly entertaining.
The last game that I've shipped, [PLUG] Eyetoy:Antigrav, [/PLUG] was fun because it was visceral. We spent a lot of effort getting the patterns of targets just right to create different feelings in the player. The patterns themselves were not problems to be solved... they were straightforward bits of arm movement that had to be recognized, responded to, and remembered. But the overall sensation was satisfying and enjoyable. Even the general steering and navigation was a lot more fun because the players were viscerally involved, despite their relative simplicity.
Again, look at the assumptions in your language. "A problem to be solved." Solving implies intellectual pursuit. You wouldn't describe a pile of laundry to be put away as a problem to be "solved." You wouldn't describe Missile Command as a "problem that needs to be solved." The intellectual pursuit of gaming is just one of the ways of engaging the player. There are a lot more out there, and as many of them as you can find should be in your bag of tricks.
I'm reacting as strongly as I am because there are so many great game designers that get lured down the easy path of considering the source of fun and good game design to be about puzzles or "things to be solved," which it's really not. It's almost as much of a mantra as "the free market will solve everything," and it is about as useful. The source of fun in games is not that they are problems to be dealt with any more than the souce of fun in games being that they are interactive computer programs. While they may be technically correct, neither is at all helpful in making a great game.
If it's firing falsely and not springing back up, it sounds like one of the foam sensor separators has been crushed. I'm guessing they have been dancing with shoes, which is usually what leads to that situation.
The Red Octane ignition pads, on the other hand, really do rock. They're about the best non-hard pads you can get. The foam is very, very strong, the pads actually require some real pressure to trigger, and there is some feeling there for when you're stepping on a button and when you're not. I just completed Tsugaru Maniac on one, a feat I can't do on anything but high-end metal pads and the arcade unit.
On the other hand, they're about as expensive as a cheap plastic hard mat (which are roundly terrible, BTW), or a used metal pad. But if you're not about to mess around trying to solder sensors onto a homebrew hard mat, the Ignition really is the way to go.
Like all pads, you "may" want to tape them to the floor, but this depends on your particular play style. Again, I've been playing on this thing on various carpet surfaces and I'd say it only moves about 15 degrees per song on maniac songs. Pretty solid overall... good choice. Just take your shoes off.
I don't know if I would consider interface elements the right way of making your point, as if it is unfamiliar to the player it will be difficult to use. However, if you look at the fan boards for any major game, you will see thousands of good examples. People wanting to add RPG elements to Quake, or who want Worms in real-time, or who want grossly unbalancing weapons, powers, etc. The best example of a fan-designed game would have to be Masters of Orion 3, a game that certain people assure me is fun to play but after several hours with it I still hadn't figured out how to build a ship, it was so buried in unnecessary options.
The fans are great. I love the fans. And a few of them have great, implementable ideas. Maybe I'm just jaded, but most of the time they suggest things that are either grossly out of scope, is for a different style of game, or which has already been shot down in a discussion you have had internally and they are not privy to. In other words, fan suggestions follow a 90 / 9 / 1 rule, where 90% are just impossible, 9% are good but have already been discussed, and 1% ought to be implemented right now but drowned in the other 99%.
When dealing with any fan-suggestions, first try to figure out what it is they want, and why it is they suggested the thing that they suggested. Knowing what they want and trying to address that is far more important to a team than trying to implement everyone's suggestions.
By "entertaining problem" you're now essentially defining "puzzle" as "something fun to do." This is not a puzzle. And unfortunately most of the people in the industry that I've met that use the word puzzle do mean puzzle, and this informs all of the design decisions they make.
Reading other reviews os the book, I don't think Koster meant puzzle. He did say that things that are fun will be fun outside of a graphical or cultural context, an assertion that I find overly reductionist. Zelda, for example, is all about culture in subtle ways.
And where is all of this financial success he thinks we're crowning on about? Can I have some of this financial success?
I'm not convinced. Part of the engineering team's goal is to be the best darned engineered software it can be. Part of the Art team's goal is that it can be the most beautiful, fluidly moving software ever. I fail to see the advantage of a programmer pondering "is this fun?" while changing a lookup table to a hash table in an attempt gain an extra 3fps on the 60fps goal. An artist trying to get the IK correct for a character opening a door may at some point ask "is this fun?" but that doesn't really help them do what they're trying to do. Yes, all programmers should be game designers who have other things to focus on, but basically all of them are. Same thing with the artists. But on day-to-day tasks, you really do have to lose big picture status so that you can figure out how to regigger a menu system to reduce the number of clicks required to enter a game. Or temporarily set aside the concept of fun when trying to paint a progressive skybox.
Don't knock engine work. A clean, well constructed engine is worth it's weight in gold, and will allow you to polish and extend a game until it's fun, in ways that otherwise wouldn't be possible.
Let's not forget that the ultimate example of "Design is King" was Daikatana. It had design... and no art, engineering, or project oversight.
Uh, you just contradicted your statement right there. The "Puzzle to Solve" in this case is "How do I acquire as much in-game wealth and property to satisfy my insatiable greed without mindlessly acquiring it?"
But while the game may contain puzzles, and it may even be said to be puzzle-like, the fun isn't puzzles. Dance Dance Revolution is a terrible lot of fun, but it contains no hidden or puzzle-like information at all. Tennis contains very little that can be considered puzzle-like. Neither does skeet shooting, or Quake 3.
Puzzles are slow and contemplative by nature, whereas most videogames are simply not. I've seen this happen with other people in the industry... If to you everything is a puzzle to be solved, you won't "get" what is enjoyable about a battle of wits at Street Fighter. You won't be able to reproduce the joys of million-mile an hour carnage in Burnout 3. Even though it was slower and more contemplative, Metroid Prime was fun for the exploration aspect... keeping tons of low-hanging fruit around for you to pluck the moment you found a bigger stick. Katamari Damacy also had basically no puzzle aspect to it, but it was fun because you were acquiring rediculous things and growing bigger and bigger (comment on society, perhaps?).
Grandparent is right. If Koster actually feels that all games are puzzle games, he will be missing out on ways in which games can be made fun. Whenever in the past I've sat down and tried to create grand unified theories of why games are fun, I've always walked into work to find dozens of new and fun things that I left out. Why is Animal Crossing so rediculously fun? Why is Diablo? Is it building something? Watching something grow? Solving puzzles? Physical reactions? All of the above?
That's not to say that many games that are fun can't be said to be puzzles, if you force it into that mold. But puzzles are not the source of fun in most of these games. There are as many ways to make a game fun as there are ways to have fun. If the core of your game design practice breaks down into just making puzzles, you are in trouble.
You do realize that most of those are just getting stripped overseas in harsh inhuman chemically-polluting factories, right? I mean, why would someone need a 486 when they don't have electricity? You strip them for heavy metals with workers that dip them by hand into vats of heavy acids, remove anything that solidifies out, and pour the waste into the river, with big piles of melty plastic junk piled up by the side of the road. You then sell the metal for more than you paid for the computer. This is usually how it goes, and this is why environmentalists don't like selling old computers overseas: the environmental damage of stripping something improperly is tremendous.
Before we make artificial intelligence, we need to make artificial stupidity. Or in less poetic terms, we need to create robots with basic instincts and abilities before we concentrate on robots with higher abilities. Well, we should be looking at the basics in parallel, at least.
We hardly understand the weighted chemical system that rules our bodies. While we always emphasize the logical aspect of thought and processing, we don't talk about how the level of adrenaline in someone's bloodstream will affect their choice of whether or not to sign a 4-year contract.
I wouldn't be surprised if the focus on truly logical beings has drawn attention away from ways that robots can exist in a world of greatly imperfect knowledge.
msn search: Bill Gates ate my balls - 43,085
google search: Bill Gates ate my balls - 47,000
Interestingly enough, the first page on google are all "ate my balls" references, including some Bill Gates bought my balls which I don't even remember. Sadly, MSN search included such things as a complete listing of 2600 cartridges, and has no real balls to it.
Well, one could interpret the what they said to mean that anyone can get Microsoft's data and can implement a reader without violating their license. It would be a big step forward for Open Office to have a perfectly compatible reader, especially as it can write to an RTF format that Word reads.
Of course that's not going to happen, because we have no system of accountability in place to hold companies to their Word. I guess it will be a long time before we see an open office Word Text Format (WTF{tm}).
Give a monkey some spending money, and he'll blow it on pictures of women monkeys.
I wish they would stop referring to the students at Duke like that.
Linky
Those security researchers will get what's coming to them when the DMCA subpoenas start flying!
What's that? Oh right, it's just a car. Nevermind.
Why not play it again?
The game that he wrote was incredible. It was this twisted mind-meld of everything in the books taken and shoved backwards into the brain of an insane loony. One of the goals of the game is to acquire both tea and no tea at the same time, impressing a smarter-than-thou door enough that it will let you through. You also have to go in and take out parts of your own brain, prevent an armed and deadly armada from being eaten by a small dog by feeding it a terrible bar-room sandwich, and a legendary sequence involving trying to catch a fish in a rue-goldbergesque nightmare of cleaning robots. Unfortunately it's so mind-bendingly difficulty that few people ever make it past the introduction alive.
I recommend sitting down with a guide and the game, for a light evening of laughter and murderous rage.
The analogy is even worse if you try to say why selling Razors are like selling iPods. The razor people are making a killing on blades, taking something that is essentially free to them and selling it at an enormous markup using a forced lock-in to try and milk every last drop. Few people buy an iPod because they're locked into apple music.
The iPod is neither free, nor is it being given away as free. The songs are neither free nor are they being given away as free. You can't really say that the razor blades are like the songs, or that the handle is like the iPod. The analogy falls down, and therefore the reverse analogy falls down.
If you're looking for reasons for Apple's success... How about they invested a lot in elegance and simplicity of design, created something truly usable, and sold it for a little more than other devices? People are willing to pay for well-designed things, especially when it comes to consumer entertainment devices. Why is this such a hard concept?