Colorblind. Can't help you with this new feature. You'll find that about 9% of your male audience will also be unable to use it correctly (not that some of them won't try.)
In general, color-coding is a poor practice when designing any UI. Especially contiguous spectrums.
Call me when you rank your firehose stories by popularity using a number, okay?
If you are pretending to do the things you would never do, are you still doing them?
No, you're doing safe, legal alternatives to them. Which is a significant advantage over the real thing.
Me, I'd rather *do* the things I'd never do.
Have you looked at a list of popular internet fetishes lately? They include rape, torture, suicide and worse. Me, I'd rather not *be* a monster, even if pretending to be one every now and then is relaxing.
And that's without touching on fantasies that are physically impossible to do in real life -- vampirism, zero gee, vore, etc, all of which can be found in Second Life. Internet sex is all about the fantastical nature of it. Making it real would make the people who enjoy the fantasy run away screaming.:)
I think you miss the point of sex in Second Life, or anywhere else online. 'Physical touch' has nothing to do with it.
Internet sex is all about the fantasy. The point of it is doing things you would never do, whether that be new partners, positions, or species. It might be as timid as a housewife who would never cheat in RL experiencing a fake affair, or it might be as extreme as snuff/vore/rape play. Either way, it's about experiences one would never and should never pursue in real life. Making it more 'realistic' -- as in better graphics -- would be nice, but making it real would *ruin* the concept.
You don't pay hookers in real life to have sex with you, you pay them to go away afterwards. You don't pay hookers over the internet to have sex with you, you pay them to be imaginary and stay that way.
That's right -- go make your own virtual life, with blackjack, and hookers!
Seriously, the entire economy of SL revolved around gambling, prostitution, and the sale of devices intended to aid gambling and prostitution. I'm having a hard time picturing how this is going to fall out. A flight to an lawless 'third life' might actually happen.
I was a guide on Everquest, and got to see some of the back room dealings that went on in maintaining the game. I saw GMs giving loot to their favorite guilds, I saw edicts handed down by Sony (then Verant) that we should lie to players to keep them playing, and I saw a corporation whose business plan revolved around free labor and addicted consumers.
I won't play Blizzard on-line games because I distrust their privacy policy -- IMHO they're not evil, I just don't trust them. I don't shop at Wal-Mart, eat at McDonald's, or buy RIAA music. I use a Microsoft operating system (haven't upgraded past W2k) because no other OS offered the features I needed in 2001 when I last bought a PC. My next PC will likely not be MS. I practice the advice, 'Vote with your Wallet'.
But now that I've justified myself, let me reiterate that it's not about me. There's a general feeling among gamers that SOE is evil and no good will come from dealing with them. The backlash will have nothing to do with the quality of the Pirates game, it's just that some consumers will be driven away by SOE's stench. It will add up to a weak de facto boycott, not an organized or even conscious one. And Flying Labs should realize that it's coming, and why.
Lots of people trying to calm everybody down by explaining how distant the relationship between Flying Labs and SOE will be. Those people are missing the point.
People choose what games to play based on more than just the quality of the game. I quit Everquest vowing never to give SOE (or any company with Brad McQuaid) another dime, no matter how good their future games might be. And I will avoid this Pirates game, not because I think SOE will somehow screw it up, but because part of its revenue would go to fund SOE. I choose not to fund incompetant and unethical companies.
Flying Labs just struck a deal with the devil, from many gamers' points of view. They shouldn't be surprised if people quietly cross themselves and scurry away from them, no matter how good their product may be.
Yes, I've used my main email address for Usenet posts for over a decade, and I get hundreds of spams a day. That's okay, though, I have filters up to the task.
Part of the problem, I feel, are legitimate organizations who sell their client lists to spammers. My work address never got spam until I got published in a professional journal. That journal sold its contributors' email addresses to someone, and I started receiving spam. I have no good solution here -- I'm a scientist, and have to publish or perish. I'd like to avoid that publisher but it's one of the big journals of my profession.
Even worse is when I signed up with a new ISP. Having my own email, I never used the free email account that came with my new DSL connection. But when I checked the email there out of curiosity, it was awash in spam. My ISP appears to be selling its email addresses to spammers, as a short-sighted means of quick income. Despicable.
I think that this is an area where the law can help. A government-mandated privacy policy (put it in the Bill of Rights) would allow people to dodge spam by being selective about where their email address appears.
No, no, no...I think it's worth time dwelling on the fact that our legal system allows people to send letters that say 'cease and desist not buying from us'. I mean, extreme absurdity is a good sign that something is broken, wouldn't you say?
Well...they're different beasts. They weren't 3D, and many of them were on BBSes, predating the internet itself. They're definitely what MMOs evolved from, but they deserve a category in history of their own.
There's also the first M in MMO -- 'Massively'. I think a MUD can handle a couple hundred players tops, and I've personally never seen one with more than 50. That might not qualify as massively multiplayer. Today's games handle millions of players at a time (though not in the same area).
Oh and another sad comment on MMO's, this is the one and only MMO to have women who run using their hips. If nothing else, Vanguard will go down in history as the first MMO ever to have a good walking animation for the females.
Haven't seen Vanguard, but have you seen Guild Wars? The females in GW are very well-proportioned and well-animated. GW may have the highest 'pixellated boobie rating' of any MMOG out there, with excellent and attractive character designs.
This is important if, like me, you choose your character build based on what kind of backside you want to watch running across the landscape for hours on end.
I wrote about MMORPGs for a gaming site in 2000/2001, and played almost all of those early games, so I have a little experience to base all that on. I also posted the same link you did about eight minutes ahead of you.
But yes, my initial post (somebody mod it down, please) was based on memory, and my memory was faulty. AC was released almost simultaneously with Everquest. Lineage actually predated Everquest in Asia, although it didn't reach America for a few years. Everything else I wrote (especially the warnings about Funcom) is pretty accurate.
So, I apologize, mea culpa -- memory error, data corrupted. Take whatever you find useful, discard the rest. Then we can all get around to speculating about Spore again. Here's hoping it dents WoW's dominance.
Gah, I keep forgetting Meridian 59, which was 3D and predated Everquest by a few years. It was one of the few early MMOs I never played.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a good history of MMORPGs, although they only define three distinct generations. I think the popularity of games like Lineage and the visibility of games like SWG caused the WoW phenomenon, and should be seen as the fathers of the current generation of games.
SWG was in the third generation of MMOGs. Everquest and 10six were the first generation of 3D MMOs. (There were dozens of 2D and text games that qualified as massively multiplayer before them, Ultima Online being the most well-known. Call them the zeroth generation.) The second wave included DAoC, AC, and AO. None of them hit it big, and some were laughingstocks like WWIIOnline. The third generation is when MMOGs really got rolling, with CoH, SWG, and Lineage. WoW is in the fourth generation, and has become the 800 pound gorilla of the internet.
Incidentally, the second generation MMOG Anarchy Online was also made by Funcom, the people who are doing the Age of Conan. Considering what a buggy, frustrating and at times repellent mess AO was, I'd stay far away from Age of Conan. These are people with grand ideas and wonderful creativity, but they cannot code worth a damn.
A tablet is superior to a mouse for just about any photoediting purpose, and most drawing purposes. So yeah, it's an alternative. However, most of the value of having a tablet is its pressure sensitivity, which this device does not have. So I wouldn't say it's a 'good' alternative to a real tablet.
Rape in online games is almost impossible to pull off. You have to Get the person to stand still for it, not report you, and not log off.
Eh...in Second Life it's a little different. Users can create customized animations that can be very detailed and last a long time, and their environment is a working physics simulation. You can use that physics to harass others -- knocking people into orbit is a common form of griefing on SL. Or you can trick someone into accepting and running your animation -- all it takes is for them to click on an object you control once. If they do that, you gain the ability to make their avatar do anything you want, as if you installed a rootkit on their avatar. So 'standing still' isn't a problem. You can be tricked into cooperating.
As the article mentions, 'logging off' isn't always an answer, especially if you're doing business on SL. Logging off then means closing up shop, and that's a bad solution.
The good solutions are reporting it to Linden and getting a (hopefully) swift response, or using common sense and anti-griefer tools to protect yourself. I think this is all going to boil down to 'should we protect people with bad judgement online?' And I think the correct answer is, 'If they're adults, then No.'
Don't underestimate the hammer. Remember the Blacksmith of Brandywine.
During the US revolutionary war, a blacksmith performed an errand for General Washington, only to return home and find that redcoats had murdered his family in his absence. The blacksmith took a heavy sledge from his workshop and walked onto the battlefield of Brandywine. There, before they finally brought him down, he slew 20 british soldiers. With a hammer.
No, I'm not being serious about a hammer being a viable weapon, not these days. (Although note that the Blacksmith story is true, from all references I can find.)
I just found it ironic, that the Blacksmith of Brandywine went on a murderous rampage in response to oppression from a ruthless government...and now, our government is so scared of our children that they're even taking our hammers away.
There is one possible consequence that should be examined. There is another ultra-hyperbolic 6-dimensional spacetime theory -- Heim theory. But Heim theory predicts that there is a gravitational force for each time-like dimension, and in the right circumstances these forces can be repulsive. In other words, Sparling's work could be another step towards a theory of anti-gravitational forces.
It's a longshot, but it's a possibility, and a surer bet than any useful impacts on our understanding of human consciousness.
Well, if you don't like the thought of a grassroot effort to make public sentiment known to the principal's employers, perhaps you could suggest another means of communicating the message?
It's easy to say 'Don't do that, it's rude'. It's a lot harder to come up with means of civil expression that AREN'T rude. And if rudeness is the only the public has left of expressing our disgust at the actions of authorities, then I say bring on the rudeness.
Slashdot Mirror
Colorblind. Can't help you with this new feature. You'll find that about 9% of your male audience will also be unable to use it correctly (not that some of them won't try.)
In general, color-coding is a poor practice when designing any UI. Especially contiguous spectrums.
Call me when you rank your firehose stories by popularity using a number, okay?
If you are pretending to do the things you would never do, are you still doing them?
:)
No, you're doing safe, legal alternatives to them. Which is a significant advantage over the real thing.
Me, I'd rather *do* the things I'd never do.
Have you looked at a list of popular internet fetishes lately? They include rape, torture, suicide and worse. Me, I'd rather not *be* a monster, even if pretending to be one every now and then is relaxing.
And that's without touching on fantasies that are physically impossible to do in real life -- vampirism, zero gee, vore, etc, all of which can be found in Second Life. Internet sex is all about the fantastical nature of it. Making it real would make the people who enjoy the fantasy run away screaming.
I think you miss the point of sex in Second Life, or anywhere else online. 'Physical touch' has nothing to do with it.
Internet sex is all about the fantasy. The point of it is doing things you would never do, whether that be new partners, positions, or species. It might be as timid as a housewife who would never cheat in RL experiencing a fake affair, or it might be as extreme as snuff/vore/rape play. Either way, it's about experiences one would never and should never pursue in real life. Making it more 'realistic' -- as in better graphics -- would be nice, but making it real would *ruin* the concept.
You don't pay hookers in real life to have sex with you, you pay them to go away afterwards. You don't pay hookers over the internet to have sex with you, you pay them to be imaginary and stay that way.
That's right -- go make your own virtual life, with blackjack, and hookers!
Seriously, the entire economy of SL revolved around gambling, prostitution, and the sale of devices intended to aid gambling and prostitution. I'm having a hard time picturing how this is going to fall out. A flight to an lawless 'third life' might actually happen.
Maybe we can put this in a way more /. geeks will understand.
Seizure: 'chown su *'
Freezing: 'chmod 000 *'
I don't care what you call it, it shouldn't be done on a whim and I don't want it happening to me.
Someone mod the parent up. I was going to post much the same thing, and read through the thread to see that nerdup beat me to it.
It's a sad, sad comment on the industry when a developer 'hopes' to do something original *once* in their career.
You can put it even simpler by using an analogy:
In many ways, Fascism is much more efficient than a Democracy. But that doesn't mean it's the best choice.
"The media companies that give him an outlet make money off his attention-whoring -- they are acting quite rationally."
This is only true if you believe that making money by spreading disinformation is a rational act. Most people with morals would disagree.
I was a guide on Everquest, and got to see some of the back room dealings that went on in maintaining the game. I saw GMs giving loot to their favorite guilds, I saw edicts handed down by Sony (then Verant) that we should lie to players to keep them playing, and I saw a corporation whose business plan revolved around free labor and addicted consumers.
I won't play Blizzard on-line games because I distrust their privacy policy -- IMHO they're not evil, I just don't trust them. I don't shop at Wal-Mart, eat at McDonald's, or buy RIAA music. I use a Microsoft operating system (haven't upgraded past W2k) because no other OS offered the features I needed in 2001 when I last bought a PC. My next PC will likely not be MS. I practice the advice, 'Vote with your Wallet'.
But now that I've justified myself, let me reiterate that it's not about me. There's a general feeling among gamers that SOE is evil and no good will come from dealing with them. The backlash will have nothing to do with the quality of the Pirates game, it's just that some consumers will be driven away by SOE's stench. It will add up to a weak de facto boycott, not an organized or even conscious one. And Flying Labs should realize that it's coming, and why.
Lots of people trying to calm everybody down by explaining how distant the relationship between Flying Labs and SOE will be. Those people are missing the point.
People choose what games to play based on more than just the quality of the game. I quit Everquest vowing never to give SOE (or any company with Brad McQuaid) another dime, no matter how good their future games might be. And I will avoid this Pirates game, not because I think SOE will somehow screw it up, but because part of its revenue would go to fund SOE. I choose not to fund incompetant and unethical companies.
Flying Labs just struck a deal with the devil, from many gamers' points of view. They shouldn't be surprised if people quietly cross themselves and scurry away from them, no matter how good their product may be.
Yes, I've used my main email address for Usenet posts for over a decade, and I get hundreds of spams a day. That's okay, though, I have filters up to the task.
Part of the problem, I feel, are legitimate organizations who sell their client lists to spammers. My work address never got spam until I got published in a professional journal. That journal sold its contributors' email addresses to someone, and I started receiving spam. I have no good solution here -- I'm a scientist, and have to publish or perish. I'd like to avoid that publisher but it's one of the big journals of my profession.
Even worse is when I signed up with a new ISP. Having my own email, I never used the free email account that came with my new DSL connection. But when I checked the email there out of curiosity, it was awash in spam. My ISP appears to be selling its email addresses to spammers, as a short-sighted means of quick income. Despicable.
I think that this is an area where the law can help. A government-mandated privacy policy (put it in the Bill of Rights) would allow people to dodge spam by being selective about where their email address appears.
No, no, no...I think it's worth time dwelling on the fact that our legal system allows people to send letters that say 'cease and desist not buying from us'. I mean, extreme absurdity is a good sign that something is broken, wouldn't you say?
I love the idea of randomly generated maps. Still dreaming of a 3D FPS version of Nethack.
Daikatana. That way I'll get sick of it quickly, and I'll be able to play the 'how do I get off this damn island' game.
Alternately, I'll take Duke Nukem Forever to a desert island. And you can put me on the island just as soon as the game is released.
Well...they're different beasts. They weren't 3D, and many of them were on BBSes, predating the internet itself. They're definitely what MMOs evolved from, but they deserve a category in history of their own.
There's also the first M in MMO -- 'Massively'. I think a MUD can handle a couple hundred players tops, and I've personally never seen one with more than 50. That might not qualify as massively multiplayer. Today's games handle millions of players at a time (though not in the same area).
Oh and another sad comment on MMO's, this is the one and only MMO to have women who run using their hips. If nothing else, Vanguard will go down in history as the first MMO ever to have a good walking animation for the females.
Haven't seen Vanguard, but have you seen Guild Wars? The females in GW are very well-proportioned and well-animated. GW may have the highest 'pixellated boobie rating' of any MMOG out there, with excellent and attractive character designs.
This is important if, like me, you choose your character build based on what kind of backside you want to watch running across the landscape for hours on end.
I wrote about MMORPGs for a gaming site in 2000/2001, and played almost all of those early games, so I have a little experience to base all that on. I also posted the same link you did about eight minutes ahead of you.
But yes, my initial post (somebody mod it down, please) was based on memory, and my memory was faulty. AC was released almost simultaneously with Everquest. Lineage actually predated Everquest in Asia, although it didn't reach America for a few years. Everything else I wrote (especially the warnings about Funcom) is pretty accurate.
So, I apologize, mea culpa -- memory error, data corrupted. Take whatever you find useful, discard the rest. Then we can all get around to speculating about Spore again. Here's hoping it dents WoW's dominance.
Gah, I keep forgetting Meridian 59, which was 3D and predated Everquest by a few years. It was one of the few early MMOs I never played.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a good history of MMORPGs, although they only define three distinct generations. I think the popularity of games like Lineage and the visibility of games like SWG caused the WoW phenomenon, and should be seen as the fathers of the current generation of games.
SWG was in the third generation of MMOGs. Everquest and 10six were the first generation of 3D MMOs. (There were dozens of 2D and text games that qualified as massively multiplayer before them, Ultima Online being the most well-known. Call them the zeroth generation.) The second wave included DAoC, AC, and AO. None of them hit it big, and some were laughingstocks like WWIIOnline. The third generation is when MMOGs really got rolling, with CoH, SWG, and Lineage. WoW is in the fourth generation, and has become the 800 pound gorilla of the internet.
Incidentally, the second generation MMOG Anarchy Online was also made by Funcom, the people who are doing the Age of Conan. Considering what a buggy, frustrating and at times repellent mess AO was, I'd stay far away from Age of Conan. These are people with grand ideas and wonderful creativity, but they cannot code worth a damn.
A tablet is superior to a mouse for just about any photoediting purpose, and most drawing purposes. So yeah, it's an alternative. However, most of the value of having a tablet is its pressure sensitivity, which this device does not have. So I wouldn't say it's a 'good' alternative to a real tablet.
Rape in online games is almost impossible to pull off. You have to Get the person to stand still for it, not report you, and not log off.
Eh...in Second Life it's a little different. Users can create customized animations that can be very detailed and last a long time, and their environment is a working physics simulation. You can use that physics to harass others -- knocking people into orbit is a common form of griefing on SL. Or you can trick someone into accepting and running your animation -- all it takes is for them to click on an object you control once. If they do that, you gain the ability to make their avatar do anything you want, as if you installed a rootkit on their avatar. So 'standing still' isn't a problem. You can be tricked into cooperating.
As the article mentions, 'logging off' isn't always an answer, especially if you're doing business on SL. Logging off then means closing up shop, and that's a bad solution.
The good solutions are reporting it to Linden and getting a (hopefully) swift response, or using common sense and anti-griefer tools to protect yourself. I think this is all going to boil down to 'should we protect people with bad judgement online?' And I think the correct answer is, 'If they're adults, then No.'
If being raped in Second Life is a crime, then we need to invent new punishments for what happened to me on Furrymuck.
Don't underestimate the hammer. Remember the Blacksmith of Brandywine.
During the US revolutionary war, a blacksmith performed an errand for General Washington, only to return home and find that redcoats had murdered his family in his absence. The blacksmith took a heavy sledge from his workshop and walked onto the battlefield of Brandywine. There, before they finally brought him down, he slew 20 british soldiers. With a hammer.
No, I'm not being serious about a hammer being a viable weapon, not these days. (Although note that the Blacksmith story is true, from all references I can find.)
I just found it ironic, that the Blacksmith of Brandywine went on a murderous rampage in response to oppression from a ruthless government...and now, our government is so scared of our children that they're even taking our hammers away.
There is one possible consequence that should be examined. There is another ultra-hyperbolic 6-dimensional spacetime theory -- Heim theory. But Heim theory predicts that there is a gravitational force for each time-like dimension, and in the right circumstances these forces can be repulsive. In other words, Sparling's work could be another step towards a theory of anti-gravitational forces.
It's a longshot, but it's a possibility, and a surer bet than any useful impacts on our understanding of human consciousness.
Well, if you don't like the thought of a grassroot effort to make public sentiment known to the principal's employers, perhaps you could suggest another means of communicating the message?
It's easy to say 'Don't do that, it's rude'. It's a lot harder to come up with means of civil expression that AREN'T rude. And if rudeness is the only the public has left of expressing our disgust at the actions of authorities, then I say bring on the rudeness.