I got and played Balance of Power when it came out, and I love games of that genre. I got into learning all the rules and the map and thinking about what to do and was really into it. But when I had played a few times, I realized that you could not win. I always either had the world blow up or lost badly by points. I ended up trying hard to win for a while, and was never able to. (I am gnerally good at games.) I finally gave up. Later I read an article about how he wanted to educate people politically using that game, and teach them how bad the cold war was. I was pretty unhappy, as he had made a game no fun *ON PURPOSE* in order to try and make a political point. So I think that makes him a terrible game designer. Games are supposed to be fun, and he actually made a game no fun on purpose. He has great ideas but if the game is not fun, it's no good.
It did not suprise me that BoP did not sell well. No fun should = bad sales.
There is a big difference between real-time (game) and cinematic rendering. Movies can and do take longer then 1 second to render 1 second of film, they fix quality and vary time to render. Games only have one second to render one second, and thus vary quality.
Once the frames of a cinematic sequence have been rendered, they go to film (disk first really), and are played back at full speed. Which is how game pre-generated cinematics are done as well.
I think that you should have been fired for this. The company's email is owned by the company, the CEO is the head of the company and his request was not to do something illegal. If he had asked you to delete email talking about plans to break the law, that would be bad. Deleting an email to avoid hurting someone's feelings is neither illegal or immoral. He was 100% within his rights to ask you to delete the email, and he was also asking nothing unethical. A private email system is private, and your postal service analogy is wrong.
I could swear that I read about the Mushroom planet and several "voyages" to it when I was younger. It was not really a planet of course, as it orbited the earth, closer than the moon. But it was small so I am sure the center of gravity was within the earth. Inhabited too as I recall....
The first person to distribute blankets with smallpox to the indians was an officer in the *British* army. Now back then there was no American army, so I suppose you could argue it being sort of the same. But the idea that only the US has ever used smallpox (or blankies) as a weapon is wrong.
You are at risk of hurting your career if you push this too hard if there is no audience. If the top management does not want to hear they have a problem, then they will not, and they will get mad at you for pushing it. Send out a butt-covering memo. (Another post covered that well.) and then make sure all of your stuff and your teams stuff is backed up and protected as well as possible, and then drop it.
The only thing worse than seeing it coming and having it happen, is seeing it coming, having it happen, and then people being mad at you for it. People tend to vent on people in a position to say "I told you so".
Hmm, can the court write opinions against Microsoft using MS software, or would that violate their EULA? IF MS can just get all the courts to adopt word they would be safe forever.
Civ2 is(was?) my favorite game ever. I have been playing Civ3 for two nights, and have gotten to the end of the first era 5 times. This thing that I have noticed is that for 4 of the five games I played, I ended up in a position where my starting location put me at a serious disadvantage. I had games of Civ2 where this happened as well, but those were rare and tended to involve small islands. Does anyone else think that the terrain and resource rules add a big, and maybe too big, random element to the game? Or am I just lame?
IAAGD (I am a game designer)
One hundred times more important than your idea is your abillity to implement your ideas. A really clear and complete design doc is a start, but even more important for investors is having a team of developers with a track record of making games. Investors usually can't tell a great design form a lame one; what they can look at and understand is a history of success.
The team that developed Majesty got it's start making add on packs, as did Breakaway Games. That is a great way to get started and some experience in the industry. Once you have a record, you should be able to find someone to invest in or publish you.
If you are hoping to be a lone designer, I suggest you find a new plan. One of the best game designers I know was unable to make a living freelance even with a good record and years of contacts. Making games is a group activity, so it's best to be part of a group.
I think the best thing about this response is it sounds reasonable and sane and is not rabid anit-Microsoft/IP vitriol. I am really happy to see the open source movement present itself well to the public. (Even if it took a while to write.)
If open source games get going, on PC's or on a custom box, they could end up doing very well as people reuse, improve, and tune them. Polish is a key to making great games, and open source helps lots with that.
However, the trick is to get a user base. How TuxBox can get that competeing with Nintendo and Sony I don't know. And good games are hard to make. They may look easy, but they are not. So I think they are right about how well it could work if it works, but getting it to work at all will be very hard indeed. I hope they make it.
The first thing I thought of was "remind me not to use this." Then I wondered if that is possible. What is passport linked into. I used to have a hotmail account, does that matter? What else will go through this? No patches to their products without using passport?
Tom Dusenberry, who was president of Hasbro Interactive and worked in Hasbro's aquisitions group before that, had been trying to buy WOTC for years before the deal was finally done. Around 95 Hasbro passed up a chance to buy WOTC for $5 million. Dusenberry wanted them to do it and they passed. Then WOTC became big, Tom got to say "I told you so" and got promoted.
WOTC decided to sell itself beacuse all the investors had stock options they could not sell. They, quite understandably, wanted to turn their paper money into real money. Most of them, like Peter Adkinson, were ready to get out anyway.
The layoffs at WOTC were part of a Hasbro wide layoff. When Alan Hassenfled tells your business unit to lose X number of people, you lose X number of people. The reason they were in such trouble was the giant failure of the Star Wars: Phantom Menace line. They paid a BILLION dollars for rights, and it tanked.
Hasbro sold off Hasbro Interactive because the toy industry execs just did not get the computer game industry. They did okay when they were small and did just a few well choosen products, but got the idea than any Hasbro brand would make a good computer game. They also got seduced by wacky ideas like their line of E-mail games, which were fun but had no market.
I do not know for sure if this influenced Hasbro's decision to sell the computer rights to WOTC's games, but the WOTC guy in charge of their computer division royally pissed off some Hasbro Interactive decision makers. They also showed less grasp of the computer game industry than the Hasbro Interactive Execs, which was scary.
While I only knew a few WOTC employees, they were very nice people.
...if Verisign bears any liabillity for this.
If people start doing this very much, it will undermine confidence in Verisign. I wonder how they are dealing with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I got and played Balance of Power when it came out, and I love games of that genre. I got into learning all the rules and the map and thinking about what to do and was really into it. But when I had played a few times, I realized that you could not win. I always either had the world blow up or lost badly by points. I ended up trying hard to win for a while, and was never able to. (I am gnerally good at games.) I finally gave up. Later I read an article about how he wanted to educate people politically using that game, and teach them how bad the cold war was. I was pretty unhappy, as he had made a game no fun *ON PURPOSE* in order to try and make a political point. So I think that makes him a terrible game designer. Games are supposed to be fun, and he actually made a game no fun on purpose. He has great ideas but if the game is not fun, it's no good.
It did not suprise me that BoP did not sell well. No fun should = bad sales.
These scenes are not generated in real time.
There is a big difference between real-time (game) and cinematic rendering. Movies can and do take longer then 1 second to render 1 second of film, they fix quality and vary time to render. Games only have one second to render one second, and thus vary quality.
Once the frames of a cinematic sequence have been rendered, they go to film (disk first really), and are played back at full speed. Which is how game pre-generated cinematics are done as well.
IWAGP (I was a game producer)
I think that you should have been fired for this. The company's email is owned by the company, the CEO is the head of the company and his request was not to do something illegal. If he had asked you to delete email talking about plans to break the law, that would be bad. Deleting an email to avoid hurting someone's feelings is neither illegal or immoral. He was 100% within his rights to ask you to delete the email, and he was also asking nothing unethical. A private email system is private, and your postal service analogy is wrong.
I could swear that I read about the Mushroom planet and several "voyages" to it when I was younger. It was not really a planet of course, as it orbited the earth, closer than the moon. But it was small so I am sure the center of gravity was within the earth. Inhabited too as I recall....
The first person to distribute blankets with smallpox to the indians was an officer in the *British* army. Now back then there was no American army, so I suppose you could argue it being sort of the same. But the idea that only the US has ever used smallpox (or blankies) as a weapon is wrong.
You are at risk of hurting your career if you push this too hard if there is no audience. If the top management does not want to hear they have a problem, then they will not, and they will get mad at you for pushing it. Send out a butt-covering memo. (Another post covered that well.) and then make sure all of your stuff and your teams stuff is backed up and protected as well as possible, and then drop it.
The only thing worse than seeing it coming and having it happen, is seeing it coming, having it happen, and then people being mad at you for it. People tend to vent on people in a position to say "I told you so".
Hmm, can the court write opinions against Microsoft using MS software, or would that violate their EULA? IF MS can just get all the courts to adopt word they would be safe forever.
Civ2 is(was?) my favorite game ever. I have been playing Civ3 for two nights, and have gotten to the end of the first era 5 times. This thing that I have noticed is that for 4 of the five games I played, I ended up in a position where my starting location put me at a serious disadvantage. I had games of Civ2 where this happened as well, but those were rare and tended to involve small islands. Does anyone else think that the terrain and resource rules add a big, and maybe too big, random element to the game? Or am I just lame?
IAAGD (I am a game designer) One hundred times more important than your idea is your abillity to implement your ideas. A really clear and complete design doc is a start, but even more important for investors is having a team of developers with a track record of making games. Investors usually can't tell a great design form a lame one; what they can look at and understand is a history of success. The team that developed Majesty got it's start making add on packs, as did Breakaway Games. That is a great way to get started and some experience in the industry. Once you have a record, you should be able to find someone to invest in or publish you. If you are hoping to be a lone designer, I suggest you find a new plan. One of the best game designers I know was unable to make a living freelance even with a good record and years of contacts. Making games is a group activity, so it's best to be part of a group.
I think the best thing about this response is it sounds reasonable and sane and is not rabid anit-Microsoft/IP vitriol. I am really happy to see the open source movement present itself well to the public. (Even if it took a while to write.)
If open source games get going, on PC's or on a custom box, they could end up doing very well as people reuse, improve, and tune them. Polish is a key to making great games, and open source helps lots with that. However, the trick is to get a user base. How TuxBox can get that competeing with Nintendo and Sony I don't know. And good games are hard to make. They may look easy, but they are not. So I think they are right about how well it could work if it works, but getting it to work at all will be very hard indeed. I hope they make it.
Anyone know Erin Brockovitch's Phone number?
The first thing I thought of was "remind me not to use this." Then I wondered if that is possible. What is passport linked into. I used to have a hotmail account, does that matter? What else will go through this? No patches to their products without using passport?
Tom Dusenberry, who was president of Hasbro Interactive and worked in Hasbro's aquisitions group before that, had been trying to buy WOTC for years before the deal was finally done. Around 95 Hasbro passed up a chance to buy WOTC for $5 million. Dusenberry wanted them to do it and they passed. Then WOTC became big, Tom got to say "I told you so" and got promoted. WOTC decided to sell itself beacuse all the investors had stock options they could not sell. They, quite understandably, wanted to turn their paper money into real money. Most of them, like Peter Adkinson, were ready to get out anyway. The layoffs at WOTC were part of a Hasbro wide layoff. When Alan Hassenfled tells your business unit to lose X number of people, you lose X number of people. The reason they were in such trouble was the giant failure of the Star Wars: Phantom Menace line. They paid a BILLION dollars for rights, and it tanked. Hasbro sold off Hasbro Interactive because the toy industry execs just did not get the computer game industry. They did okay when they were small and did just a few well choosen products, but got the idea than any Hasbro brand would make a good computer game. They also got seduced by wacky ideas like their line of E-mail games, which were fun but had no market. I do not know for sure if this influenced Hasbro's decision to sell the computer rights to WOTC's games, but the WOTC guy in charge of their computer division royally pissed off some Hasbro Interactive decision makers. They also showed less grasp of the computer game industry than the Hasbro Interactive Execs, which was scary. While I only knew a few WOTC employees, they were very nice people.
...if Verisign bears any liabillity for this. If people start doing this very much, it will undermine confidence in Verisign. I wonder how they are dealing with it.