I am a game developer. Let me assure you that explicit racism and sexism is long a thing of the past in video games. Today's problem is getting past the archytypical stereotypes that all media reach for when it is 9 PM and you really need to write in a character before you can go home.
In terms of racism, video games have more or less the same preponderance of "Black best friends" as other modern media. There is the spunky old black engineer with only the slightest bit of white hair. There are the seductive, ass-kicking amazonian black women. There is the black player 2 character, who is black mainly so that he looks different from player 1. You won't see any blackface 1930's stereotypes, but you also won't see a lot of black leading men in nontraditional roles.
Gender tends to receive a worse treatment than other media, unfortunately, as A: there are far fewer female game developers, which tends to promote a teenage view of gender and B: gender stereotypes are actually useful from a gameplay context (rescue the princess, smaller / faster / weaker, etc). I haven't ever seen a game where the female character is a worse driver, but I've definitely seen games where the female characters needed to be a bit less of a teenage male fantasy. Female representations in gaming are approximately at the same place as they were in early 90's music videos: better than 10 years ago, but still with a ways to go.
A low interest loan from the government in this case could be an investment that pays off for the country. What value could be applied if Tesla became the next Toyota? What are the risk valuations for a small chance of being enormously valuable to our economy?
When you're driving your gas powered car on private roads with a private police force, a private emergency response system, and are contributing zero pollution to the public air and water, then you can refuse to pay for improvements. In the meantime, the rest of us will do what we can to improve safety, sustainability, and overall costs of our country's very real public transportation infrastructure.
It's time for real solutions for real people. "The free market will decide everything" is no more real or moral a solution to the substantive issues of our times than "power comes at the end of a gun."
No offence, as I'm quite happy with the update. But taking an existing offering, updating it slightly for new technology, and re-releasing it seems to have been Capcom's modern plan since the launch of the Xbox 360. It also describes exactly what they did to drive Street Fighter into the ground.
I give them lots of credit for creating a modern re-release of a classic franchise, even if it is to draw up interest before a new iteration (ala Bionic Commando). Hopefully they will have learned their lesson about over-milking specific franchises, and will let this one stand for a while before another iteration. It has been what, 2 years since the SF2HCE release?
If they don't get greedy, this could be the start of a good trend. Might I suggest Strider for the next treatment?
This is key. All of the "high-def" feeds I've seen in electronics stores are shimmery, overcompressed pieces of garbage. In the race to have the most HD channels, we've lost the HD portion. There needs to be a specified min bitrate and max recompression standards to be considered HD. Until then, I wouldn't bother subscribing.
To be fair, DSL companies really have no idea how dirty your line will be until it is fully hooked up. Is it a problem in your house? Last mile copper? Switch box? Nobody really has a way of knowing, and it is bloody expensive to find out.
They're not stiffing people through neglect or malice, but rather because of technological limitations.
Remember, employment contracts usually cover ideas created while at a company as well as implementations. Check yours carefully, but chances are they already own the rights to the idea of what you're going to create, simply because you thought of it while working at the company.
On another note, it sounds like what you're doing is "management doesn't want us to do this properly, so we're going to leave and do it on our own." You're current company turned down one direction it could take, and you want to follow it anyway. Unfortunately, at this point that's their business plan whether they optioned it or not.
"look and feel" copyright claims have also been upheld in many courts, so you might want to avoid doing too close of a copy.
It sounds like you're getting yourself in for a world of hurt. If your "large" software corporation is truly large, they can simply outsurvive you in a lawsuit, whether or not they win. And considering what you're doing, there may very well be a strong enough case that a good lawyer can win. And that's all they would need to shut you down.
âoeThe real question,â Mr. Rose said, âoeis how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?â
Arguably, when the record industry lost their stranglehold on the various ways that the public could be introduced to new acts, their marketing and launch management value creation was significantly reduced. Furthermore, competing in the much larger pool of availble unlimited digital stock, one would naturally expect prices to compete downward.
Also, the number of ways in which the record industry payout structure has been unfairly skewed towards the record labels is well documented. One would expect this to gradually tip downwards back to a more reasonable medium.
In the grand scheme of things, a decent recording can be made at a 10,000 dollar studio, pressed at one of any number of professional CD producers, and distributed by any number of available distributers. Add in a 1,000 dollar HD video camera for youtube promotion, and you have a comparable music system powered by the creator's time. That's a highly efficient alternative that didn't exist ten years ago.
Assuming our cultural music needs are being met, a 25% drop in overall spending on music could easily be because we have become 25% more efficient.
I am a game developer. And while I have the highest respect for Gambit, I have to disagree with Matthew Weise here (and, strangely, agree with Ernest Adams).
Parent poster is spot on... Any 4th wall violations in video gaming should be very carefully planned. One of Weise's arguments is because the technology is always inherently present, game / reality interactions are less intrusive. I'd argue that because the technology is always present, creation of a true suspension of disbelief is incredibly difficult, and inherently more valuable.
All semantics aside, you're trying to get the player into a flow state where they forget the controller, and interact with the video-game world as if their own didn't exist. If you have done that, you have successfully engaged the player. There is definitely some degree of "press the X button to continue" that players have been trained to accept without losing that sense of engagement. But at some point you're arguing that the player *should* remain engaged due to syntactic reasoning, rather than dealing with the reality of how average people interact with their entertainment.
I'd argue that Psycho Mantis in MGS was more of a clever parlor trick or large explosion than a shining example of player interaction. MGS is an interesting choice, as it is notorious for finding all new and unique sharks to jump. Lots of players complained about broken immersion at the end of MGS2, and most of MGS4.
Of course, all of this is academic until you hook the player's head up to some electrodes and see how their brain pattern responds to real stimulus. Unfortunately, I don't have one of those labs handy. We may have to agree to disagree until such a time as we can get some time on loan.
1. Interstate 10 east doesn't lie between major population centers, and as such makes sense to do in a 3rd pass. You may live there, but there really isn't a "connection" between population centers that you would need to maximize. 2. "20 miles down the road" would be a 50% derivation, and would be the difference between missing a station and still being fine, and missing a station and being totally screwed. Also, real estate in Buelton is quite a bit cheaper than Santa Barbara, and having an EV charging station in your hometown doesn't make a lot of sense when you're supposed to charge at home. 3. This "proposal" map has nothing to do with the Bay Area's charging stations, which sound like more of a done deal. There would be at least 10 years to hash out the details of favoring Bakersfield vs the surrounding areas.
I think the success Asus has had with the EeePC doesn't come so much from the PC's form factor or scale, as from the fact that it's... just a PC, i.e. an open platform that doesn't require people to buy special software, and lets them run whatever they want on it.
I'd argue that the Asus EeePC finally filled the need for an ultraportable on a realistic budget. 2 years ago you had to spend at least 1,400 dollars for a Dell XPS or equivalent if you wanted a notebook you could carry comfortably. The EeePC dropped that 30% more weight, offered a more portable formfactor, and put the cost comparable to that of an Xbox.
Would it have been unsuccessful with a custom OS? Probably, as the appeal was that it was a tiny, cheap laptop. Was it successful "because" it had no DRM? I don't think that was on most purchaser's radars. It would be just as fair to say that it was successful "because" it had a monitor.
Also remote storage. Having a bunch of in-progress documents available on Google Apps is very convienient when switching between home, work, and other computers.
If you have only one laptop following you around, then it becomes a bit redundant. But for those of us who regularly work on three or more different machines, it can be quite convienient.
Can I just say that as a user the "survive on service" model makes me uncomfortable. We're disencentivizing making robust, easy-to-use software in exchange for one that requires some degree of brokenness to survive. I'd rather pay someone for their software than being stuck with their services because their software is somehow unintelligible.
That might not be such a bad idea. The stockholders are both investors in and owners of the company. If the voting shareholders were legally liable for any court rulings for misbehavior of this magnitude, they might vote a little less recklessly.
As parent poster points out, the publisher / developer relationship is a lot more complicated than the original poster seems to think. Publishers don't just publish, they also generally fund, shape, drive development, and eventually publish as an afterthought. Generally speaking, taking a finished game to a traditional publisher will get you a nice message saying "that's pretty, but we really were looking for something more X." Now that you've fully created the game, you can't switch to the X that they happen to feel is a hole in their lineup for that quarter. And as they haven't helped fund the development or shape the final product, they don't feel invested in its success. In general, it's a bad thing to take a finished game to a publisher and attempt to get them to provide the service that their name would imply.
I am not a cellphone game creator, but my understanding is that the usual relationship limits publishers to very few games per year, each hand-picked by the carrier. The carrier almost always goes for showy games with name recognition, ensuring that any publisher who wants to survive can only invest in high-profile tie-ins and porting successful games from other platforms. In other words, if you can find a publisher you can get who can get you on a network, jump on them.
The alternatives to this model are the iPhone and Android. The iPhone provides a model whereby you sell whatever you want (with little approval hurdles), with Apple managing the money backend, as well as distribution and the actual selling interface. I'm not so sure about Android, but going to a phone without competition might be good too.
There is also the question of student research going into patents. I can't think of another area of the economy where one person pays money for the priviledge of doing work, which is then auctioned off to the highest bidder for an exclusive contract. This strikes me as the sort of thing that California loves to find unfair.
yes sorry about that. Either way, my post was about how protections wouldn't apply due to the level of downright collusion needed to spam from US isps. Apparently said protections don't apply anyway.
companies charge what the market will bear. If the market was ok with a price jack by each company individually, they would charge it already. Collusion is a means by which you make a market accept an artificially inflated price.
I.e. The fine should have no bearing on retail price, if these companies intend to remain competitive.
Common carrier laws apply to ISP's because they are providing a neutral gateway, and is no more aware of the details of what is going on their network than the Highway service knows what I'm keeping in the trunk of my car.
Spam senders, however, is different. It takes a large amount of network resources, spawns repeated complaints, and triggers most network system warning bells. You can't spam on any real scale and not be noticed. No ISP would accidentally allow spammers to operate on their network for any length of time... there must be complicity.
ISP's generally don't like to talk about it, but the usual arrangement is that you get to spam X amount in exchange for X extra cash per month, or similar. Unless McColo was extraordinarily incompetent, they must have had a similar arrangement. I think it's fair to say that level of interaction (and kickback) takes them out of common carrier status.
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I am a game developer. Let me assure you that explicit racism and sexism is long a thing of the past in video games. Today's problem is getting past the archytypical stereotypes that all media reach for when it is 9 PM and you really need to write in a character before you can go home.
In terms of racism, video games have more or less the same preponderance of "Black best friends" as other modern media. There is the spunky old black engineer with only the slightest bit of white hair. There are the seductive, ass-kicking amazonian black women. There is the black player 2 character, who is black mainly so that he looks different from player 1. You won't see any blackface 1930's stereotypes, but you also won't see a lot of black leading men in nontraditional roles.
Gender tends to receive a worse treatment than other media, unfortunately, as A: there are far fewer female game developers, which tends to promote a teenage view of gender and B: gender stereotypes are actually useful from a gameplay context (rescue the princess, smaller / faster / weaker, etc). I haven't ever seen a game where the female character is a worse driver, but I've definitely seen games where the female characters needed to be a bit less of a teenage male fantasy. Female representations in gaming are approximately at the same place as they were in early 90's music videos: better than 10 years ago, but still with a ways to go.
A low interest loan from the government in this case could be an investment that pays off for the country. What value could be applied if Tesla became the next Toyota? What are the risk valuations for a small chance of being enormously valuable to our economy?
When you're driving your gas powered car on private roads with a private police force, a private emergency response system, and are contributing zero pollution to the public air and water, then you can refuse to pay for improvements. In the meantime, the rest of us will do what we can to improve safety, sustainability, and overall costs of our country's very real public transportation infrastructure.
It's time for real solutions for real people. "The free market will decide everything" is no more real or moral a solution to the substantive issues of our times than "power comes at the end of a gun."
No offence, as I'm quite happy with the update. But taking an existing offering, updating it slightly for new technology, and re-releasing it seems to have been Capcom's modern plan since the launch of the Xbox 360. It also describes exactly what they did to drive Street Fighter into the ground.
I give them lots of credit for creating a modern re-release of a classic franchise, even if it is to draw up interest before a new iteration (ala Bionic Commando). Hopefully they will have learned their lesson about over-milking specific franchises, and will let this one stand for a while before another iteration. It has been what, 2 years since the SF2HCE release?
If they don't get greedy, this could be the start of a good trend. Might I suggest Strider for the next treatment?
This is key. All of the "high-def" feeds I've seen in electronics stores are shimmery, overcompressed pieces of garbage. In the race to have the most HD channels, we've lost the HD portion. There needs to be a specified min bitrate and max recompression standards to be considered HD. Until then, I wouldn't bother subscribing.
To be fair, DSL companies really have no idea how dirty your line will be until it is fully hooked up. Is it a problem in your house? Last mile copper? Switch box? Nobody really has a way of knowing, and it is bloody expensive to find out.
They're not stiffing people through neglect or malice, but rather because of technological limitations.
Remember, employment contracts usually cover ideas created while at a company as well as implementations. Check yours carefully, but chances are they already own the rights to the idea of what you're going to create, simply because you thought of it while working at the company.
On another note, it sounds like what you're doing is "management doesn't want us to do this properly, so we're going to leave and do it on our own." You're current company turned down one direction it could take, and you want to follow it anyway. Unfortunately, at this point that's their business plan whether they optioned it or not.
"look and feel" copyright claims have also been upheld in many courts, so you might want to avoid doing too close of a copy.
It sounds like you're getting yourself in for a world of hurt. If your "large" software corporation is truly large, they can simply outsurvive you in a lawsuit, whether or not they win. And considering what you're doing, there may very well be a strong enough case that a good lawyer can win. And that's all they would need to shut you down.
Have you listened to the clipping on a modern audio CD?
You might have a point that convienience trums fidelity in this case, except that the labels have been throwing fidelity away for years.
âoeThe real question,â Mr. Rose said, âoeis how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?â
Arguably, when the record industry lost their stranglehold on the various ways that the public could be introduced to new acts, their marketing and launch management value creation was significantly reduced. Furthermore, competing in the much larger pool of availble unlimited digital stock, one would naturally expect prices to compete downward.
Also, the number of ways in which the record industry payout structure has been unfairly skewed towards the record labels is well documented. One would expect this to gradually tip downwards back to a more reasonable medium.
In the grand scheme of things, a decent recording can be made at a 10,000 dollar studio, pressed at one of any number of professional CD producers, and distributed by any number of available distributers. Add in a 1,000 dollar HD video camera for youtube promotion, and you have a comparable music system powered by the creator's time. That's a highly efficient alternative that didn't exist ten years ago.
Assuming our cultural music needs are being met, a 25% drop in overall spending on music could easily be because we have become 25% more efficient.
I am a game developer. And while I have the highest respect for Gambit, I have to disagree with Matthew Weise here (and, strangely, agree with Ernest Adams).
Parent poster is spot on... Any 4th wall violations in video gaming should be very carefully planned. One of Weise's arguments is because the technology is always inherently present, game / reality interactions are less intrusive. I'd argue that because the technology is always present, creation of a true suspension of disbelief is incredibly difficult, and inherently more valuable.
All semantics aside, you're trying to get the player into a flow state where they forget the controller, and interact with the video-game world as if their own didn't exist. If you have done that, you have successfully engaged the player. There is definitely some degree of "press the X button to continue" that players have been trained to accept without losing that sense of engagement. But at some point you're arguing that the player *should* remain engaged due to syntactic reasoning, rather than dealing with the reality of how average people interact with their entertainment.
I'd argue that Psycho Mantis in MGS was more of a clever parlor trick or large explosion than a shining example of player interaction. MGS is an interesting choice, as it is notorious for finding all new and unique sharks to jump. Lots of players complained about broken immersion at the end of MGS2, and most of MGS4.
Of course, all of this is academic until you hook the player's head up to some electrodes and see how their brain pattern responds to real stimulus. Unfortunately, I don't have one of those labs handy. We may have to agree to disagree until such a time as we can get some time on loan.
1. Interstate 10 east doesn't lie between major population centers, and as such makes sense to do in a 3rd pass. You may live there, but there really isn't a "connection" between population centers that you would need to maximize.
2. "20 miles down the road" would be a 50% derivation, and would be the difference between missing a station and still being fine, and missing a station and being totally screwed. Also, real estate in Buelton is quite a bit cheaper than Santa Barbara, and having an EV charging station in your hometown doesn't make a lot of sense when you're supposed to charge at home.
3. This "proposal" map has nothing to do with the Bay Area's charging stations, which sound like more of a done deal. There would be at least 10 years to hash out the details of favoring Bakersfield vs the surrounding areas.
If his driving off a cliff is your cause of death, good luck on extracting any useful info.
I think the success Asus has had with the EeePC doesn't come so much from the PC's form factor or scale, as from the fact that it's ... just a PC, i.e. an open platform that doesn't require people to buy special software, and lets them run whatever they want on it.
I'd argue that the Asus EeePC finally filled the need for an ultraportable on a realistic budget. 2 years ago you had to spend at least 1,400 dollars for a Dell XPS or equivalent if you wanted a notebook you could carry comfortably. The EeePC dropped that 30% more weight, offered a more portable formfactor, and put the cost comparable to that of an Xbox.
Would it have been unsuccessful with a custom OS? Probably, as the appeal was that it was a tiny, cheap laptop. Was it successful "because" it had no DRM? I don't think that was on most purchaser's radars. It would be just as fair to say that it was successful "because" it had a monitor.
Also remote storage. Having a bunch of in-progress documents available on Google Apps is very convienient when switching between home, work, and other computers.
If you have only one laptop following you around, then it becomes a bit redundant. But for those of us who regularly work on three or more different machines, it can be quite convienient.
Can I just say that as a user the "survive on service" model makes me uncomfortable. We're disencentivizing making robust, easy-to-use software in exchange for one that requires some degree of brokenness to survive. I'd rather pay someone for their software than being stuck with their services because their software is somehow unintelligible.
That might not be such a bad idea. The stockholders are both investors in and owners of the company. If the voting shareholders were legally liable for any court rulings for misbehavior of this magnitude, they might vote a little less recklessly.
As parent poster points out, the publisher / developer relationship is a lot more complicated than the original poster seems to think. Publishers don't just publish, they also generally fund, shape, drive development, and eventually publish as an afterthought. Generally speaking, taking a finished game to a traditional publisher will get you a nice message saying "that's pretty, but we really were looking for something more X." Now that you've fully created the game, you can't switch to the X that they happen to feel is a hole in their lineup for that quarter. And as they haven't helped fund the development or shape the final product, they don't feel invested in its success. In general, it's a bad thing to take a finished game to a publisher and attempt to get them to provide the service that their name would imply.
I am not a cellphone game creator, but my understanding is that the usual relationship limits publishers to very few games per year, each hand-picked by the carrier. The carrier almost always goes for showy games with name recognition, ensuring that any publisher who wants to survive can only invest in high-profile tie-ins and porting successful games from other platforms. In other words, if you can find a publisher you can get who can get you on a network, jump on them.
The alternatives to this model are the iPhone and Android. The iPhone provides a model whereby you sell whatever you want (with little approval hurdles), with Apple managing the money backend, as well as distribution and the actual selling interface. I'm not so sure about Android, but going to a phone without competition might be good too.
if you gave us their IP range and a favorite website of one of the workers, I'm sure we could configure it for for them.
Exactly. Besides, the live webcam looks fine.
There is also the question of student research going into patents. I can't think of another area of the economy where one person pays money for the priviledge of doing work, which is then auctioned off to the highest bidder for an exclusive contract. This strikes me as the sort of thing that California loves to find unfair.
Exactly. In this case, it's like a roommate being paid not to see the child abuse going on. It's illegal, amoral, and really slimey.
yes sorry about that. Either way, my post was about how protections wouldn't apply due to the level of downright collusion needed to spam from US isps. Apparently said protections don't apply anyway.
companies charge what the market will bear. If the market was ok with a price jack by each company individually, they would charge it already. Collusion is a means by which you make a market accept an artificially inflated price.
I.e. The fine should have no bearing on retail price, if these companies intend to remain competitive.
Common carrier laws apply to ISP's because they are providing a neutral gateway, and is no more aware of the details of what is going on their network than the Highway service knows what I'm keeping in the trunk of my car.
Spam senders, however, is different. It takes a large amount of network resources, spawns repeated complaints, and triggers most network system warning bells. You can't spam on any real scale and not be noticed. No ISP would accidentally allow spammers to operate on their network for any length of time... there must be complicity.
ISP's generally don't like to talk about it, but the usual arrangement is that you get to spam X amount in exchange for X extra cash per month, or similar. Unless McColo was extraordinarily incompetent, they must have had a similar arrangement. I think it's fair to say that level of interaction (and kickback) takes them out of common carrier status.
There was, actually. It was called The Sims Online. While the idea can be said to be good, the implementation was terrible.