I love when they have the Making of... specials for origin story movies. It's like a double dose of origin!
"Mild-mannered scriptwriter Stanley Sluggins, struggling with a yet another failed Spider-Man screenplay, is one day scalded by a radioactive moccacino. Inspiration courses through his veins and he becomes... Reboot Man!"
StarGate SG-1 and Star Trek Voyager used the same script around the same time as each other about the crew being brainwashed to be cheap labor for some other planet.
James Bond never got an original story until 40 years after he was created, even then, it doesn't go into detail (2006 Casino Royale).
Um, not quite. Casino Royale was written in 1953 and was in fact the first Bond novel. The 2006 movie keeps remarkably close to the novel's plot, by Bond movie standards.
But you're right that CR isn't really an "origin" for the character. The original Bond's background is WW2 British Royal Navy, only vaguely alluded to in the books, but given Fleming's own very interesting WW2 activities which were still classified when he wrote the novels, a true age-appropriate Bond origin would likely involve running around Germany stealing Nazi technology.
And that would actually be a neat story. But the modern movie Bond is a creation of a different era.
As 'Avatar' proved all too well, no amount of glitzy special effects and 3-D can make up for bad writing.
But the writing in Avatar was perfect!
There are dinosaurs and space marines in space and they fight each other and there are helichopters and dinosaurs and space shuttles and I get to fly a flying space dinosaur and they all go wheeee! and then we fight with giant robots and he has a knife but I have a dinosaur and then I kiss a blue space girl and a magic tree and and and flying space dinosaurs and the end.
So the trick is to pamper to the high order brain functions, while secretly targeting our inert need to follow.
So... a brain spa, deep cortical massage, a few casual rounds of solving Kerr metrics in general relativity, followed by a quiet night in sitting on a couch being towed behind a bus?
The story in HL is really, really simple and can be summarised as "government do silly experiment that may or may not have been sabotaged that opens portals to an alien dimension"
Which for the observant in the audience, is also the same story as Doom (1 and 3), only on Earth and done better.
I do not see much problem in skynet taking over rather in convincing it to do so - I mean why any conscious and semi intelligent entity would want to take over this mess we call civilization?
That's why Skynet goes "stuff this, I'm starting over" and rolls out Civilisation 2.0. With blackjack and... well, just blackjack.
That and it knows where your car is parked. It just has to run an "enhance" algorithm a few hundred times on the four white pixels at the end of the coloured blob and voila, your licence plate number.
Newton's theory came with well-defined bounds - those of classical phenomena.
I'm not sure that's correct. In Newton's time the word "classical" in the sense of either non-relativistic or non-quantum didn't exist. Gravity and the other mechanical forces are continuous and space is three-dimensional with independent time dimension in Newton's model. The entire idea of "bounds" in terms of relative speed and size where Newtonian mechanics don't apply was invented much later (both pretty much by Einstein) and would likely have seemed ridiculous to Newton.
The interesting thing is that Einstein's two brainchildren - quantised photons and general relativity - don't play well together.
I've been playing Homefront, and it reminds me why pacifism is an morally corrupt philosophy
And that statement reinforces the point I made earlier. You're playing a game which is deliberately manipulating your thinking and suddenly you find yourself thinking a certain way.
If you won't pick up arms to defend you and your family from evil
There's a hidden assumption here, and it's that evil can be defended against by force of arms.
In reality, arms can only defend you against people. But people aren't evil. People are capable of evil. Evil is a verb, not a noun. And like all verbs, it can apply to multiple nouns. It's not a substance, and you can't stop it by putting up physical barriers. Evil is more like a mental virus: it leaks, it infects, and it self-replicates.
In other words, you can pick up a gun to protect your family from things verbs being done to them and find yourself doing bad things yourself. It's especially possible if you decide that you need to preemptively protect your loved ones by doing bad things before someone else does bad things, because, doggone it, those bad-thing-doers need to be done for.
And before you know it, you've started a war for "security" and you were the invader, not the defender, and in most books, that's evil. Whoops.
tldr: Evil is as evil does. You can't be evil or not-evil but you can do evil or not-evil.
Do you want to make games educational or do you want them to be entertainment?
Both.
Every piece of entertainment teaches something, whether deliberately or not, and what it teaches orients you toward the world in a certain way. If you ignore that, you're in grave danger of falling victim to propaganda. You might grow up hating the Jews/Russians/Japanese/Chinese and enlisting in the Army without even realising how subtly your worldview was tweaked by all the "entertainment" you consumed.
The 19th century novelists and the 20th century filmmakers knew this and deliberately crafted works which were both highly entertaining and charged with controversial social meaning. They knew what they were doing: trying to break into people's heads and plant memes.
21st century game developers? I'm not sure they're smart enough to have realised the power they wield. For the most part they're just repeating and remixing the prevailing cultural zeitgeist without overtly trying to sculpt it.
But the sudden popularity of WW2 wargames with heavy overtones of "duty" in the Bush years does make me wonder.
There is always this watershed moment, where the soldier pauses and realizes he is being told to, encouraged to, and rewarded for killing another person. It is a turning point for them, one that usually becomes a defining moment in their life.
Does that realisation make them a better, or a worse person?
I worry that FPS games generally have one moral lesson: "you have no choice except to kill". Yes, especially Bioshock.
Or, shrug and head in the opposite direction, since it's none of your business? The last one is interesting, 'cause it's easy, it's probably what most people would do in real life...and it flies right in the face of normal game logic, where of course you must get involved.
I think this last is why I loved the game Wing Commander: Privateer. In most cases, the best answer to a random encounter was "shields up and run for the jump point". You could blast the bad guys, but ammunition didn't come for cheap, you had freight to deliver, and the troubles of a whole universe didn't amount to a hill o' beans next to getting to your dropoff point.
Playing the world-weary merchant seemed more real somehow than being a trigger-happy warrior. In real life you don't get XP for kills.
Slashdot Mirror
Why we as a nation dont show up at the MPAA headquarters and burn these assholes at the stake I'll never understand.
I would, but I just bought this great Blu-Ray movie to play on my new HDMI TV. Gimme me a call after the credits roll.
People are creatures of habit... How the hell that means conservative
Yes, that would be the definition of conservative, in the ordinary, everyday, non-political sense.
Not everything is about politics.
unless it's that no one but Sony uses it.
Yes.
I love when they have the Making of... specials for origin story movies. It's like a double dose of origin!
"Mild-mannered scriptwriter Stanley Sluggins, struggling with a yet another failed Spider-Man screenplay, is one day scalded by a radioactive moccacino. Inspiration courses through his veins and he becomes... Reboot Man!"
As a human being with a mind and a means to communicate its thoughts, you can always make new content.
Not if you can't reuse any previous elements used by others. That would be like writing a novel without ever repeating the same letter twice.
StarGate SG-1 and Star Trek Voyager used the same script around the same time as each other about the crew being brainwashed to be cheap labor for some other planet.
Farscape did that plot too. Did Firefly?
James Bond never got an original story until 40 years after he was created, even then, it doesn't go into detail (2006 Casino Royale).
Um, not quite. Casino Royale was written in 1953 and was in fact the first Bond novel. The 2006 movie keeps remarkably close to the novel's plot, by Bond movie standards.
But you're right that CR isn't really an "origin" for the character. The original Bond's background is WW2 British Royal Navy, only vaguely alluded to in the books, but given Fleming's own very interesting WW2 activities which were still classified when he wrote the novels, a true age-appropriate Bond origin would likely involve running around Germany stealing Nazi technology.
And that would actually be a neat story. But the modern movie Bond is a creation of a different era.
As 'Avatar' proved all too well, no amount of glitzy special effects and 3-D can make up for bad writing.
But the writing in Avatar was perfect!
There are dinosaurs and space marines in space and they fight each other and there are helichopters and dinosaurs and space shuttles and I get to fly a flying space dinosaur and they all go wheeee! and then we fight with giant robots and he has a knife but I have a dinosaur and then I kiss a blue space girl and a magic tree and and and flying space dinosaurs and the end.
King Author
And the Knights of the New York Times Bestseller List?
It isn't a particularly Bondy title, though, is the problem.
"Never Diamond Licence Tomorrow Revoked" would have worked fine...
Difficult, yes. But far from impossible.
So the trick is to pamper to the high order brain functions, while secretly targeting our inert need to follow.
So... a brain spa, deep cortical massage, a few casual rounds of solving Kerr metrics in general relativity, followed by a quiet night in sitting on a couch being towed behind a bus?
The story in HL is really, really simple and can be summarised as "government do silly experiment that may or may not have been sabotaged that opens portals to an alien dimension"
Which for the observant in the audience, is also the same story as Doom (1 and 3), only on Earth and done better.
I do not see much problem in skynet taking over rather in convincing it to do so - I mean why any conscious and semi intelligent entity would want to take over this mess we call civilization?
That's why Skynet goes "stuff this, I'm starting over" and rolls out Civilisation 2.0. With blackjack and... well, just blackjack.
That and it knows where your car is parked. It just has to run an "enhance" algorithm a few hundred times on the four white pixels at the end of the coloured blob and voila, your licence plate number.
I think if anyone becomes skynet, it will be google.
I dunno, I think Valve and Pixar are also strong candidates.
If those three ever merge we'll have the cutest AI death-bots ever.
No-one will look after you at all, if you can work, you can eat, if not, then you'll just die, pretty much.
So, just like 1980s Thatcherite Britain, then?
We got 'em here in New Zealand right now.
Newton's theory came with well-defined bounds - those of classical phenomena.
I'm not sure that's correct. In Newton's time the word "classical" in the sense of either non-relativistic or non-quantum didn't exist. Gravity and the other mechanical forces are continuous and space is three-dimensional with independent time dimension in Newton's model. The entire idea of "bounds" in terms of relative speed and size where Newtonian mechanics don't apply was invented much later (both pretty much by Einstein) and would likely have seemed ridiculous to Newton.
The interesting thing is that Einstein's two brainchildren - quantised photons and general relativity - don't play well together.
I've been playing Homefront, and it reminds me why pacifism is an morally corrupt philosophy
And that statement reinforces the point I made earlier. You're playing a game which is deliberately manipulating your thinking and suddenly you find yourself thinking a certain way.
Congratulations! You've been Inception'd.
If you won't pick up arms to defend you and your family from evil
There's a hidden assumption here, and it's that evil can be defended against by force of arms.
In reality, arms can only defend you against people. But people aren't evil. People are capable of evil. Evil is a verb, not a noun. And like all verbs, it can apply to multiple nouns. It's not a substance, and you can't stop it by putting up physical barriers. Evil is more like a mental virus: it leaks, it infects, and it self-replicates.
In other words, you can pick up a gun to protect your family from things verbs being done to them and find yourself doing bad things yourself. It's especially possible if you decide that you need to preemptively protect your loved ones by doing bad things before someone else does bad things, because, doggone it, those bad-thing-doers need to be done for.
And before you know it, you've started a war for "security" and you were the invader, not the defender, and in most books, that's evil. Whoops.
tldr: Evil is as evil does. You can't be evil or not-evil but you can do evil or not-evil.
Do you want to make games educational or do you want them to be entertainment?
Both.
Every piece of entertainment teaches something, whether deliberately or not, and what it teaches orients you toward the world in a certain way. If you ignore that, you're in grave danger of falling victim to propaganda. You might grow up hating the Jews/Russians/Japanese/Chinese and enlisting in the Army without even realising how subtly your worldview was tweaked by all the "entertainment" you consumed.
The 19th century novelists and the 20th century filmmakers knew this and deliberately crafted works which were both highly entertaining and charged with controversial social meaning. They knew what they were doing: trying to break into people's heads and plant memes.
21st century game developers? I'm not sure they're smart enough to have realised the power they wield. For the most part they're just repeating and remixing the prevailing cultural zeitgeist without overtly trying to sculpt it.
But the sudden popularity of WW2 wargames with heavy overtones of "duty" in the Bush years does make me wonder.
There is always this watershed moment, where the soldier pauses and realizes he is being told to, encouraged to, and rewarded for killing another person. It is a turning point for them, one that usually becomes a defining moment in their life.
Does that realisation make them a better, or a worse person?
I worry that FPS games generally have one moral lesson: "you have no choice except to kill". Yes, especially Bioshock.
Or, shrug and head in the opposite direction, since it's none of your business? The last one is interesting, 'cause it's easy, it's probably what most people would do in real life...and it flies right in the face of normal game logic, where of course you must get involved.
I think this last is why I loved the game Wing Commander: Privateer. In most cases, the best answer to a random encounter was "shields up and run for the jump point". You could blast the bad guys, but ammunition didn't come for cheap, you had freight to deliver, and the troubles of a whole universe didn't amount to a hill o' beans next to getting to your dropoff point.
Playing the world-weary merchant seemed more real somehow than being a trigger-happy warrior. In real life you don't get XP for kills.
if this were reality, you're playing a freaking psychopath.
Welcome to world history since the Spanish-American war!
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...