Take a look at some of the advance press for Dungeons and Dragons Online. They've explicitly stated a goal of making the game involve more `player skill' than most MMORPGs.
While no one yet knows for sure how it'll turn out, they've said a couple things on this issue:
a) The game isn't `FPS Fast' or `twitch-based', but you will certainly feel some pain if you don't know how to use the controls.
b) The mixture of traditional D&D abstract combat (all stat-based) and first-person action is tricky, but looks fun (at the moment, they have passable implementations of combat and stealth, so the demos feature that).
c) They explicitly want to break the idea `hit auto-attack and go to the bathroom', which was apparently a common enough theme that it got a serious laugh from nearly everyone in an audience chamber well above 500 people.
For your mac laptop, take a look at uControl. It won't totally negate your desire for a scroll wheel, but it will cut it down quite a bit. Plus, it's open source.
If you're bothered by time == power == fun, then try City of Heroes. They've done an beautiful job of making the game play for for various levels, making it possible to play in groups of wildly mixed levels, etc. There are things that you'll miss if you only play at the lower levels (basically, some of the bad guy groups only appear at minimum levels), but they're pretty minor. I've been playing for a few months, and I keep starting new characters to try out the variations in the game; I don't miss the `high level' play at all. Most people I know have at least 2 alts, often more.
The downside? They've simplified gameplay to hell and back to accomplish this. You'll either like it or you won't. There is some variation in game play (attack or support, group or solo), but it's pretty much all the same. There's no crafting, and very little equipment or economy.
The final result, though, is really very good. I came to CoH from SWG (Star Wars Galaxies), where I played a Doctor/Bio-Engineer, a pure support/crafting/economy style of play. I do miss the crafting sometimes (once you got past the grind, it could be fun), but I'm really enjoying City of Heroes, even with the different style of play.
Cheating at `frivolous' things such as games can rob people of the sense of accomplishment derived from, more or less, `not cheating'. Further, frequent cheating can evolve into a general technique for approaching challenge in life.
No, I'm not saying that children who cheat at games will become bad people. What I am saying, though, is this: nearly everything children do often or for long periods of time has a learning element, often a social learning element. That's (part of) why we've been playing games for so long, as a species. You point out that the ``risks and rewards (and morals) are of a completely different category'' -- this is exactly the sort of thing that children pick up very late in life (and this fact is the basis for a huge swath of stories, books, movies, etc. for children).
Finally, you say ``And it lets you get a fuller enjoyment out of your investment'' -- I would say that this is only true if you assume (and you seem to assume it) that the cheating is required to derive the `fuller' enjoyment. I deny this as a general claim, and I would suggest that it points directly at the issue.
I realize that this isn't entirely on-topic, but I've been doing a lot of study on the social effects of games lately, so please forgive me.:-)
Plan 9 provides mk, as a replacement for make. There are unix ports available. Since this isn't really a `better make' story, I'll not post more, but the papers and manual pages (yes, actually used in Plan 9) are often interesting reading regardless.
I used BlogLines and Safari, and I'm generally pleased with the results. I've tried some `dedicated' RSS feeds, but I find that I prefer the `in the browser' approach, since that's typically where I want to be reading such things...
For some reason, when I do this, it also turns on greyscale mode (12" Powerbook, 10.3.4). Anyone know why, or how to avoid it? I find that I need to switch back and forth between inverse and normal video often enough that I really desire the quick-switch key.
I do higly recommend a modern font system on an LCD for reducing eyestrain. Those of you stuck with Windows, I would highly recomend changing the default theme; I find it tiring on the eyes.
I should have made it clear that ``back when I worked at MIT'', we were setting up kerberos 4 realms, since kerberos 5 (mostly) didn't exist yet.
As far ``why isn't it used?'', I've seen kerberos deployed in a number of small, medium, and large installations, corporate and educational, but it's far from ubiquitous. AFS and DCE installations are almost certain to be using kerberos, for example.
I would suggest a two-part reason for the lack of widespread kerberos adoption: lack of client support in closed-source software, and reliance on old, insecure tools, especially in mixed-platform environments. Basically, if you were using Windows or Macintosh computers, adding kerberos support was extra effort, and quite often your commercial software (one big reason that you'd be using those platforms) wouldn't support kerberos (why not? Export restrictions certainly helped). This meant that you'd either have to use something else in addition to kerberos (NFS, SMB, AppleTalk, for example), and that often required that you firewall your local network and simply trust it. At that point, the value/hardship tradeoff of kerberos leans strongly against, so people either don't take the extra effort to install and maintain it, or they bypass and eventually ignore it.
This suggestion (that kerb5 is so hard to set up) makes me sad.. Is it the kerberos side that's the trouble, or the ldap part (or both, I guess)?
Back when I worked at MIT, we used to joke about setting up test kerberos realms while holding our breath, it was so easy. I know at least two people who did it, just to prove the point.
Your point is very good, but it's not the only serious problem with a primary speech-recog system. It turns out that speech systems are much more tiring to use for long periods of time than keyboards.
So, basically, speech recognition systems are:
* hard to do well (requires new tech, eats computing power)
* hard to use in many environments (they both cause and are seriously hurt by noise polution)
* harder on the majority of users (your speech apparatus gets tired faster than your hands, and the degradation makes the whole problem harder)
There are some good, nifty uses of speech recognition systems, and you're sure to see them in the future (automated phone service systems based on speech recog are starting to get really interesting, for example). `Replacing the keyboard' for complicated tasks isn't likely to be one of them any time soon, in my opinion.
Actually, there have been numerous studies/surveys by roughly every major `business market analyst' company (Gartner, Jupiter, et al) that show that Win9x variants are more widely used than all other Windows OS's combined, by a decent margin.
Perhaps your personal experience in server rooms has misled you about the HUGE number of Win9x installations on user desktops?
I'll second the notion of BG: Dark Alliance, and mention that a sequel is due out soon (no dates mentioned, though, sadly).
We loved BG:DA and disliked D&D:Heroes, although part of that may have been my SO's dislike of the xbox controller, and a big part of it was her extreme dislike for the lack of an overhead map.
Right now, Mario Kart: Double Dash (GCN) has been our two-player console game of choice...
I've done this myself, in the past, with pleasant results. It was a bit of a fad at MIT several years ago, even going so far as to spawn nawm, `Not A Window Manager'. More recent versions of nawm are much more featureful, but still very spare and lightweight -- many people would use it with another windowmanager.
xwit, the X Window Interface Tool, is a command-line program that provides access to many of the widnow manager features from the underlying protocol; it might be helpful in this case.
Myself, I used twm, and then vtwm, with almost all of the decorations turned off. Worked quite well for me on a variety of 800x600 and 1024x768 laptops back in the day.
I don't know what things were like back then, but the current state of the game works like this:
There's the ultra-simple stuff, made from raw materials.
There's the mid-level stuff, that requires multiple different low-level products (not materials, products).
There's the high-level stuff, that requires multiple different low-level products made in specific ways (generally from factories, which cost enough that generally only mid-high level crafters bother). along with some of those low-level products from before.
That's only one facet, though. There are three other critical bits:
All of these products are made from materials. All it takes to collect materials is (usually) having the right profession, plus maybe an ultra-cheap tool. At least two of the six starting professions can do this IMMEDIATELY on starting the game. To make good stuff, you need better quality materials. Finding better quality materials is MUCH more dependant on time invested than any sort of skill. Material quality is a huge factor in final item quality.
Making these products requires materials that all come from the same source. For example, if your stimpack requires 14 units of organic material, your 8 units of bone and 6 of hide are both useless - you need 14 units of materials taken from the same type of source (not just 14 bone, but 14 avian bone from capper spineflaps, or from peko pekos, etc).
Making the really good stuff requires using optional products. These optional products are made from high numbers of extremely specific materials (14 units of Lokian Wild Wheat, rather than 8 units of flora). These materials are found on several different planets (so they have to be moved around somehow). Some of these optional products are very rare and hard to come by (some are occasionally found on high-level monsters, some are only found in extremely small numbers, and so require massive numbers of gathering efforts, etc).
All small economies are Very Hard to do well. SWG's economy is far from perfect, but some parts of it work pretty well.
What you're talking about is entertainment versus fun. Some people play to be entertained -- like going to a movie or a concert. There is some amount of interaction, but generally you're led/directed/showed/told/entertained. Only in very odd dialects of english do people get `funned'. In this sort of game, the system is designed to entertain. For example, the Star Wars KOTOR game (very popular, from what I hear).
Other people play these games to have fun, to hang out in a social situation, join up with some people/things to compete with/against some other people/things, etc. In this sort of situation, the game is an enabler -- it lets people get together and have fun. These people have to make their own fun, to some large extent. This can be very very good, though -- it takes much fewer developer resources and results in a lot of content (which does fall under the ''90% of everything is crap'' rule, to be sure).
Neither approach is inhierently better or worse than the other -- they appeal to different people (and to different needs of different people). That's why some people love SWG and some hate it. SWG is a game that tries to be about `fun' (some people who are about `fun', as I use the term, think that it fails). Many of the other games are more about entertainment, which leads to dissapointment when they go to SWG.
1) People don't want to pay $500-$1000 for a compiler. 2) The existance of g77 means that they don't have to.
What's the problem again? Shouldn't people be able to make a ``less featureful, less money'' decision? (..and that totally ignores the other values of having a free-as-in-speach compiler).
Nintendo is notoriously closed-mouth about such financial details (even more so than, say, Sony or Sega are/were), but the indications are that Nintendo is losing somewhere around US$20-US$30 per GameCube sold in the US, at the new prices. It is believed that Microsoft is losing in the neghborhood of US$120 per XBox sold in the US, again at the `new' prices.
I'll grant that these numbers are highly suspicious, especially since the people who *do* have the data *do not* want most people to have it. That said, I expect that the GameCube is at best, a break-even hardware endeavor, rather than a money-maker. (Don't forget that there is a lot of overhead involved, even in Nintendo/Microsoft/anyone's part of getting the hardware to the distributors -- it's not just the stuff in the box that costs them moeny per box).
Nintendo is pursuing an interesting strategy at the moment, with the confluence of `family-friendly-platform' and `Resident Evil Exclusive', plus the GCN+GBA cross-linking stuff. I will also add that the GBASP is my current favorite `console' (maybe `game platform' is a better term) by far -- there's some excellent stuff there; I recommend checking it out.
I own an xbox, and am quite happy with the purchase. As non-handware-mod-linux-on-xbox gets closer and closer to reality, I get even happier. I also own Halo, and am very happy with it.
However, there seem to be some factual problems with your story. Microsoft spent several tens of millions of dollars advertising the XBox based on Halo alone. The *PlayStation* was a surprise breakaway hit; it was only expected to do numbers roughly equivalent to the current XBox/GameCube numbers. Instead, it dramatically expanded a market that Nintendo squandered and that Microsoft wants to join. The PS/2, by contrast, was expected to be a huge hit, and was. The question, after the world knew about the XBox and the GameCube, was whether or not it would continue to so thoroughly dominate the market. It has. You made the statement that it's not fair to compare PS/2 and XBox console sales, given the PS/2's lead. The actual story is worse for both Microsoft and Nintendo: the PS/2 sells very favorably (by many measures, better) than either the XBox or the GameCube, in spite of the expected sales drop over time.
You make some good points, but then draw questionable conclusions from them. Neither the XBox, nor the GameCube are failures, but both are somewhat dissapointing at the moment; the GameCube more so than the XBox, if for no other reason than the lack of a statement from Nintendo that they're expecting to lose approximately US$1.5 *billion* per year on the XBox for at least the next couple years (over US$40 billion in the bank lets you do things like that).
Advanced users of speach-audio systems can reliably process speach must faster than the average `books on tape' voice; in fact, many visually impaired computer users regularly use text-to-speach systems running so fast that people unfamiliar with the TTS system cannot reliably keep up. It's really quite extraordinary.
This is still MUCH slower than a trained, experienced reader can read written text. Human beings, at least at this stage in thier evolution, are simply much faster at accumulating `raw text' visually; it's a matter of the `hardware'.
As an aside: there are suggestions that this may not have been true several hundred years ago. This is especially interesting to the current audience, which is mostly composed of people for whom the link between``see text'' and ``comprehend subject'' is so critical and exercised (i.e. people who stare at screens *all* the time).
I suspect that your intuitions are coming from the simple fact that `raw text' is only a part of what most people encounter in the communication with their everyday lives. Human speach is incredibly nuanced and rich; this is a big trouble for computer TTS systems (and a big part of the reason that the aforementioned IBM system uses pre-recorded human speach samples). This is why most people find telephone calls so much more `personal', `useful', and `connective' than things like IM. Of course, actually being able to see *and* hear the person is even better...
You seem to be considering a position, so let put forward a simple analogy:
There are people who find pornography and obscentiy objectionable. As a society, we've made the decision (in general) that at least parts of these things (obscenity, child pornography, etc.) are unacceptible for at least part of our population (minors, for example).
Consider the combination of paper and pen/pencil/brush/printer/etc. This clearly represents a method through which such things could be rendered and shown to people who find them objectionable. Historically, in fact, such things were done, and, at times, things like printing presses were restricted in ownership because of it. Thankfully, we don't (in the USofA) generally do such things right now.
One part of the problem with ``the loss of personal responsibility'' that's infected our culture(s), I claim, is a new desire to criminalize/impair the ability of people to do things that might be problematic in some situations.
As a society, we decide to give up some certain parts of our individual freedoms so that the whole group of us can better carry out our lives; in fact, this is a pretty fair definition of `society'. The United States of America was originally founded on the (IMHO good) idea that we should use a `minimum necessary' approach to giving up our freedoms. While I enjoy gaming more than 99% of the planet, and on-line gaming quite a lot, is the ability to enjoy XBox Live (which I personally do) really so valuable that we have to restrict our society's abilities to tinker, learn, explore, and generally `own' their property? Do we really think we should restrict ourselves just because someone might take advantage of those rights to maybe do something ELSE that hurts others? If the ability to do things like XBox Live enables are really so precious and deserving of such protection, wouldn't it be better to simply restrict the offending actions, rather than restricting things that might lead to offending actions, some of the time?
My friend, I think that you've missed a few important points in your understanding.
TSR went out of business well before 3.0 ever came out. They didn't actually close the doors, but they had upwards of 3 months of products that were `delayed' because the printers wouldn't let them out of the warehouses -- because TSR was so far in arrears. Wizards of the Coast temporarily saved TSR on the the strength of the Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon collectible trading card game business, but that fell (as everyone knew it would), and WotC itself was in danger. Thankfully, the Pokemon brand was still strong then, so they were able to entice Hasbro into buying the company. Now, largely as a result of the OGL/3.0 edition of D&D (my opinion), they were able to weather somewhat the worst U.S. economy in years, although they lost a huge number of excellent staff in the process (thankfully, the OGL has pushed the freelance/indpendant publisher market enough that they're still doing good stuff for the game).
As for the `price increase', WotC said publicly several months BEFORE the 3.0 books ever hit the market that the MSRP of the books would be $30. As an incentive, they announced that they would initially lower the costs of each fo the three `Core Rulebooks' to $20. The demand was much greater than they expected, which allowed them to keep the prices low for quite a while, but they'd announced the `regular' prices for 3.0 (not 3.5) quite a while ago, and I believe that they have been officially priced at $29.95 for some time.
Currently, it is the case for both the 3.0 and the 3.5 versions of the books that the street price is roughly $20, in spite of the official price of $30. There have been few reliable indications as to how long this will be the case, although it seems likely that this is an initial introductory incentive only.
As to your point about `expensive upgrades', it is almost certainly done for a combination of `need money' and `need to fix the game'. I'd say that those two factors are both very strongly, roughly equal. The game has a dangerously large errata (one thing that hurt M:tG), and clearly needed some further changes for balance). The best way to make large changes to such a game is to put out new hardcover rulebooks (the industry likes this MUCH better than `update books').
Certainly, the chance to sell a large number of new core rulebooks was a big factor. I've heard a few reliable rumours that the decision to push a 3.5 hardcover set was the alternative to pushing the costs of the 3.0 books up such that distributors would actually have to start charging $30 (which virutally no one did). Given the fact that a person of little means *CAN* play the new game with the old books, and given the fact that $20 is well below industry standard (almost all popular RPG books that aren't the D&D core rulebooks sell for $30-$40), it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
I'm glad for you that you can `keep up with the game' even without paying between $60 and $90 to upgrade. I'm glad for *me* that I can afford to pay the cost for the new books (I drop well more than that for the time invested on console games, computer games, movies, etc).
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Take a look at some of the advance press for Dungeons and Dragons Online. They've explicitly stated a goal of making the game involve more `player skill' than most MMORPGs.
:-)
While no one yet knows for sure how it'll turn out, they've said a couple things on this issue:
a) The game isn't `FPS Fast' or `twitch-based', but you will certainly feel some pain if you don't know how to use the controls.
b) The mixture of traditional D&D abstract combat (all stat-based) and first-person action is tricky, but looks fun (at the moment, they have passable implementations of combat and stealth, so the demos feature that).
c) They explicitly want to break the idea `hit auto-attack and go to the bathroom', which was apparently a common enough theme that it got a serious laugh from nearly everyone in an audience chamber well above 500 people.
Is it any good? We'll see.
For your mac laptop, take a look at uControl. It won't totally negate your desire for a scroll wheel, but it will cut it down quite a bit. Plus, it's open source.
If you're bothered by time == power == fun, then try City of Heroes. They've done an beautiful job of making the game play for for various levels, making it possible to play in groups of wildly mixed levels, etc. There are things that you'll miss if you only play at the lower levels (basically, some of the bad guy groups only appear at minimum levels), but they're pretty minor. I've been playing for a few months, and I keep starting new characters to try out the variations in the game; I don't miss the `high level' play at all. Most people I know have at least 2 alts, often more.
The downside? They've simplified gameplay to hell and back to accomplish this. You'll either like it or you won't. There is some variation in game play (attack or support, group or solo), but it's pretty much all the same. There's no crafting, and very little equipment or economy.
The final result, though, is really very good. I came to CoH from SWG (Star Wars Galaxies), where I played a Doctor/Bio-Engineer, a pure support/crafting/economy style of play. I do miss the crafting sometimes (once you got past the grind, it could be fun), but I'm really enjoying City of Heroes, even with the different style of play.
Cheating at `frivolous' things such as games can rob people of the sense of accomplishment derived from, more or less, `not cheating'. Further, frequent cheating can evolve into a general technique for approaching challenge in life.
:-)
No, I'm not saying that children who cheat at games will become bad people. What I am saying, though, is this: nearly everything children do often or for long periods of time has a learning element, often a social learning element. That's (part of) why we've been playing games for so long, as a species. You point out that the ``risks and rewards (and morals) are of a completely different category'' -- this is exactly the sort of thing that children pick up very late in life (and this fact is the basis for a huge swath of stories, books, movies, etc. for children).
Finally, you say ``And it lets you get a fuller enjoyment out of your investment'' -- I would say that this is only true if you assume (and you seem to assume it) that the cheating is required to derive the `fuller' enjoyment. I deny this as a general claim, and I would suggest that it points directly at the issue.
I realize that this isn't entirely on-topic, but I've been doing a lot of study on the social effects of games lately, so please forgive me.
Plan 9 provides mk, as a replacement for make. There are unix ports available. Since this isn't really a `better make' story, I'll not post more, but the papers and manual pages (yes, actually used in Plan 9) are often interesting reading regardless.
I used BlogLines and Safari, and I'm generally pleased with the results. I've tried some `dedicated' RSS feeds, but I find that I prefer the `in the browser' approach, since that's typically where I want to be reading such things...
For some reason, when I do this, it also turns on greyscale mode (12" Powerbook, 10.3.4). Anyone know why, or how to avoid it? I find that I need to switch back and forth between inverse and normal video often enough that I really desire the quick-switch key.
I do higly recommend a modern font system on an LCD for reducing eyestrain. Those of you stuck with Windows, I would highly recomend changing the default theme; I find it tiring on the eyes.
It's probably fixed in krb5, but the krb4 ksu was crap that should never be used or installed.
Whoops!
I should have made it clear that ``back when I worked at MIT'', we were setting up kerberos 4 realms, since kerberos 5 (mostly) didn't exist yet.
As far ``why isn't it used?'', I've seen kerberos deployed in a number of small, medium, and large installations, corporate and educational, but it's far from ubiquitous. AFS and DCE installations are almost certain to be using kerberos, for example.
I would suggest a two-part reason for the lack of widespread kerberos adoption: lack of client support in closed-source software, and reliance on old, insecure tools, especially in mixed-platform environments. Basically, if you were using Windows or Macintosh computers, adding kerberos support was extra effort, and quite often your commercial software (one big reason that you'd be using those platforms) wouldn't support kerberos (why not? Export restrictions certainly helped). This meant that you'd either have to use something else in addition to kerberos (NFS, SMB, AppleTalk, for example), and that often required that you firewall your local network and simply trust it. At that point, the value/hardship tradeoff of kerberos leans strongly against, so people either don't take the extra effort to install and maintain it, or they bypass and eventually ignore it.
This suggestion (that kerb5 is so hard to set up) makes me sad.. Is it the kerberos side that's the trouble, or the ldap part (or both, I guess)?
Back when I worked at MIT, we used to joke about setting up test kerberos realms while holding our breath, it was so easy. I know at least two people who did it, just to prove the point.
A similiar product for Mac OS X is Ambrosia Software's WireTap.
Your point is very good, but it's not the only serious problem with a primary speech-recog system. It turns out that speech systems are much more tiring to use for long periods of time than keyboards.
So, basically, speech recognition systems are:
* hard to do well (requires new tech, eats computing power)
* hard to use in many environments (they both cause and are seriously hurt by noise polution)
* harder on the majority of users (your speech apparatus gets tired faster than your hands, and the degradation makes the whole problem harder)
There are some good, nifty uses of speech recognition systems, and you're sure to see them in the future (automated phone service systems based on speech recog are starting to get really interesting, for example). `Replacing the keyboard' for complicated tasks isn't likely to be one of them any time soon, in my opinion.
I'll second the recomendation of Puzzle Pirates.. Good Game.
Actually, there have been numerous studies/surveys by roughly every major `business market analyst' company (Gartner, Jupiter, et al) that show that Win9x variants are more widely used than all other Windows OS's combined, by a decent margin.
Perhaps your personal experience in server rooms has misled you about the HUGE number of Win9x installations on user desktops?
I'll second the notion of BG: Dark Alliance, and mention that a sequel is due out soon (no dates mentioned, though, sadly).
We loved BG:DA and disliked D&D:Heroes, although part of that may have been my SO's dislike of the xbox controller, and a big part of it was her extreme dislike for the lack of an overhead map.
Right now, Mario Kart: Double Dash (GCN) has been our two-player console game of choice...
I've done this myself, in the past, with pleasant results. It was a bit of a fad at MIT several years ago, even going so far as to spawn nawm, `Not A Window Manager'. More recent versions of nawm are much more featureful, but still very spare and lightweight -- many people would use it with another windowmanager.
xwit, the X Window Interface Tool, is a command-line program that provides access to many of the widnow manager features from the underlying protocol; it might be helpful in this case.
Myself, I used twm, and then vtwm, with almost all of the decorations turned off. Worked quite well for me on a variety of 800x600 and 1024x768 laptops back in the day.
I don't know what things were like back then, but the current state of the game works like this:
There's the ultra-simple stuff, made from raw materials.
There's the mid-level stuff, that requires multiple different low-level products (not materials, products).
There's the high-level stuff, that requires multiple different low-level products made in specific ways (generally from factories, which cost enough that generally only mid-high level crafters bother). along with some of those low-level products from before.
That's only one facet, though. There are three other critical bits:
All of these products are made from materials. All it takes to collect materials is (usually) having the right profession, plus maybe an ultra-cheap tool. At least two of the six starting professions can do this IMMEDIATELY on starting the game. To make good stuff, you need better quality materials. Finding better quality materials is MUCH more dependant on time invested than any sort of skill. Material quality is a huge factor in final item quality.
Making these products requires materials that all come from the same source. For example, if your stimpack requires 14 units of organic material, your 8 units of bone and 6 of hide are both useless - you need 14 units of materials taken from the same type of source (not just 14 bone, but 14 avian bone from capper spineflaps, or from peko pekos, etc).
Making the really good stuff requires using optional products. These optional products are made from high numbers of extremely specific materials (14 units of Lokian Wild Wheat, rather than 8 units of flora). These materials are found on several different planets (so they have to be moved around somehow). Some of these optional products are very rare and hard to come by (some are occasionally found on high-level monsters, some are only found in extremely small numbers, and so require massive numbers of gathering efforts, etc).
All small economies are Very Hard to do well. SWG's economy is far from perfect, but some parts of it work pretty well.
What you're talking about is entertainment versus fun. Some people play to be entertained -- like going to a movie or a concert. There is some amount of interaction, but generally you're led/directed/showed/told/entertained. Only in very odd dialects of english do people get `funned'. In this sort of game, the system is designed to entertain. For example, the Star Wars KOTOR game (very popular, from what I hear).
Other people play these games to have fun, to hang out in a social situation, join up with some people/things to compete with/against some other people/things, etc. In this sort of situation, the game is an enabler -- it lets people get together and have fun. These people have to make their own fun, to some large extent. This can be very very good, though -- it takes much fewer developer resources and results in a lot of content (which does fall under the ''90% of everything is crap'' rule, to be sure).
Neither approach is inhierently better or worse than the other -- they appeal to different people (and to different needs of different people). That's why some people love SWG and some hate it. SWG is a game that tries to be about `fun' (some people who are about `fun', as I use the term, think that it fails). Many of the other games are more about entertainment, which leads to dissapointment when they go to SWG.
Let me get this straight:
1) People don't want to pay $500-$1000 for a compiler.
2) The existance of g77 means that they don't have to.
What's the problem again? Shouldn't people be able to make a ``less featureful, less money'' decision? (..and that totally ignores the other values of having a free-as-in-speach compiler).
Nintendo is notoriously closed-mouth about such financial details (even more so than, say, Sony or Sega are/were), but the indications are that Nintendo is losing somewhere around US$20-US$30 per GameCube sold in the US, at the new prices. It is believed that Microsoft is losing in the neghborhood of US$120 per XBox sold in the US, again at the `new' prices.
I'll grant that these numbers are highly suspicious, especially since the people who *do* have the data *do not* want most people to have it. That said, I expect that the GameCube is at best, a break-even hardware endeavor, rather than a money-maker. (Don't forget that there is a lot of overhead involved, even in Nintendo/Microsoft/anyone's part of getting the hardware to the distributors -- it's not just the stuff in the box that costs them moeny per box).
Nintendo is pursuing an interesting strategy at the moment, with the confluence of `family-friendly-platform' and `Resident Evil Exclusive', plus the GCN+GBA cross-linking stuff. I will also add that the GBASP is my current favorite `console' (maybe `game platform' is a better term) by far -- there's some excellent stuff there; I recommend checking it out.
I own an xbox, and am quite happy with the purchase. As non-handware-mod-linux-on-xbox gets closer and closer to reality, I get even happier. I also own Halo, and am very happy with it.
However, there seem to be some factual problems with your story. Microsoft spent several tens of millions of dollars advertising the XBox based on Halo alone. The *PlayStation* was a surprise breakaway hit; it was only expected to do numbers roughly equivalent to the current XBox/GameCube numbers. Instead, it dramatically expanded a market that Nintendo squandered and that Microsoft wants to join. The PS/2, by contrast, was expected to be a huge hit, and was. The question, after the world knew about the XBox and the GameCube, was whether or not it would continue to so thoroughly dominate the market. It has. You made the statement that it's not fair to compare PS/2 and XBox console sales, given the PS/2's lead. The actual story is worse for both Microsoft and Nintendo: the PS/2 sells very favorably (by many measures, better) than either the XBox or the GameCube, in spite of the expected sales drop over time.
You make some good points, but then draw questionable conclusions from them. Neither the XBox, nor the GameCube are failures, but both are somewhat dissapointing at the moment; the GameCube more so than the XBox, if for no other reason than the lack of a statement from Nintendo that they're expecting to lose approximately US$1.5 *billion* per year on the XBox for at least the next couple years (over US$40 billion in the bank lets you do things like that).
Advanced users of speach-audio systems can reliably process speach must faster than the average `books on tape' voice; in fact, many visually impaired computer users regularly use text-to-speach systems running so fast that people unfamiliar with the TTS system cannot reliably keep up. It's really quite extraordinary.
This is still MUCH slower than a trained, experienced reader can read written text. Human beings, at least at this stage in thier evolution, are simply much faster at accumulating `raw text' visually; it's a matter of the `hardware'.
As an aside: there are suggestions that this may not have been true several hundred years ago. This is especially interesting to the current audience, which is mostly composed of people for whom the link between``see text'' and ``comprehend subject'' is so critical and exercised (i.e. people who stare at screens *all* the time).
I suspect that your intuitions are coming from the simple fact that `raw text' is only a part of what most people encounter in the communication with their everyday lives. Human speach is incredibly nuanced and rich; this is a big trouble for computer TTS systems (and a big part of the reason that the aforementioned IBM system uses pre-recorded human speach samples). This is why most people find telephone calls so much more `personal', `useful', and `connective' than things like IM. Of course, actually being able to see *and* hear the person is even better...
You seem to be considering a position, so let put forward a simple analogy:
There are people who find pornography and obscentiy objectionable. As a society, we've made the decision (in general) that at least parts of these things (obscenity, child pornography, etc.) are unacceptible for at least part of our population (minors, for example).
Consider the combination of paper and pen/pencil/brush/printer/etc. This clearly represents a method through which such things could be rendered and shown to people who find them objectionable. Historically, in fact, such things were done, and, at times, things like printing presses were restricted in ownership because of it. Thankfully, we don't (in the USofA) generally do such things right now.
One part of the problem with ``the loss of personal responsibility'' that's infected our culture(s), I claim, is a new desire to criminalize/impair the ability of people to do things that might be problematic in some situations.
As a society, we decide to give up some certain parts of our individual freedoms so that the whole group of us can better carry out our lives; in fact, this is a pretty fair definition of `society'. The United States of America was originally founded on the (IMHO good) idea that we should use a `minimum necessary' approach to giving up our freedoms. While I enjoy gaming more than 99% of the planet, and on-line gaming quite a lot, is the ability to enjoy XBox Live (which I personally do) really so valuable that we have to restrict our society's abilities to tinker, learn, explore, and generally `own' their property? Do we really think we should restrict ourselves just because someone might take advantage of those rights to maybe do something ELSE that hurts others? If the ability to do things like XBox Live enables are really so precious and deserving of such protection, wouldn't it be better to simply restrict the offending actions, rather than restricting things that might lead to offending actions, some of the time?
That's about $285 each, for the PlayStation? Did it ever retail for that price in the US? Maybe 10 years ago...
My friend, I think that you've missed a few important points in your understanding.
TSR went out of business well before 3.0 ever came out. They didn't actually close the doors, but they had upwards of 3 months of products that were `delayed' because the printers wouldn't let them out of the warehouses -- because TSR was so far in arrears. Wizards of the Coast temporarily saved TSR on the the strength of the Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon collectible trading card game business, but that fell (as everyone knew it would), and WotC itself was in danger. Thankfully, the Pokemon brand was still strong then, so they were able to entice Hasbro into buying the company. Now, largely as a result of the OGL/3.0 edition of D&D (my opinion), they were able to weather somewhat the worst U.S. economy in years, although they lost a huge number of excellent staff in the process (thankfully, the OGL has pushed the freelance/indpendant publisher market enough that they're still doing good stuff for the game).
As for the `price increase', WotC said publicly several months BEFORE the 3.0 books ever hit the market that the MSRP of the books would be $30. As an incentive, they announced that they would initially lower the costs of each fo the three `Core Rulebooks' to $20. The demand was much greater than they expected, which allowed them to keep the prices low for quite a while, but they'd announced the `regular' prices for 3.0 (not 3.5) quite a while ago, and I believe that they have been officially priced at $29.95 for some time.
Currently, it is the case for both the 3.0 and the 3.5 versions of the books that the street price is roughly $20, in spite of the official price of $30. There have been few reliable indications as to how long this will be the case, although it seems likely that this is an initial introductory incentive only.
As to your point about `expensive upgrades', it is almost certainly done for a combination of `need money' and `need to fix the game'. I'd say that those two factors are both very strongly, roughly equal. The game has a dangerously large errata (one thing that hurt M:tG), and clearly needed some further changes for balance). The best way to make large changes to such a game is to put out new hardcover rulebooks (the industry likes this MUCH better than `update books').
Certainly, the chance to sell a large number of new core rulebooks was a big factor. I've heard a few reliable rumours that the decision to push a 3.5 hardcover set was the alternative to pushing the costs of the 3.0 books up such that distributors would actually have to start charging $30 (which virutally no one did). Given the fact that a person of little means *CAN* play the new game with the old books, and given the fact that $20 is well below industry standard (almost all popular RPG books that aren't the D&D core rulebooks sell for $30-$40), it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
I'm glad for you that you can `keep up with the game' even without paying between $60 and $90 to upgrade. I'm glad for *me* that I can afford to pay the cost for the new books (I drop well more than that for the time invested on console games, computer games, movies, etc).