Has anyone ever designed a computer game with the same design principles that go into board games?
Ask yourself how often new great board games come out. Then look here: games.yahoo.com/
The real question is "Has anyone designed a graphically immersive 3D game with the same design principles that go into board games?"
No but we're getting closer. Unreal 2 XMP is pretty fantastic. Far from the regular Unreal frag fests, it has replayability, consistency, good rule sets, etc. It is team based capture the flag with some complexity thrown in in just the right places. I'm looking forward to more and better games that require strategy and teamwork like that. There is so much more potential there, in that space between multiplayer frag fest and MMORPGs.
With no brick and mortar address, and this: antiquities@websitecompany.co.uk as their contact address, the Honourable Company site does look quite suspicious. Not to mention selling thousand year old museum pieces for the price of department store "costume" jewelry.
Also, when THIS gives you only 8 results, only 1 of them relevant, you KNOW something is up. Nobody has anything to say about these people at all?
With results like that I'm sure you could build a page and get it ranked so that they would loose a ton of business. No matter though I'm sure they're chameleons and would just change the name and site.
A Good Company often has a page dealing with secure shopping.
Re:Something it didn't say
on
H2G2 Film Website
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think ^that says the most about the upcoming movie. It will be an Adams-esque movie, wrapped in a Somebody Else's Humor Field so that only those who are looking for the differences can tell.
But the difference really do matter. "again" really tickles the funny bone. "YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED" is only mildly amusing.
Just like the web site, the movie is sure to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Adams.
Hey there is no such thing as a "correct" internal clock. And it certainly doesn't help that we still live by an agrarian schedule even though none of us are agrarian workers. Don't believe it? Then explain why if you arrive late it's a HUGE deal, but if you stay late no one cares at all. We still live by the agrarian clock and we still live by agrarian prejudices that place your internal clock (and mine) at the bottom of the abused minority list. Ben Franklin is a total asshole for coining that self fulfulling quote of his - "early to be and early to rise..." With the stroke of his pen he turned NON-morning people into second class citizens.
Anyway, you'll NEVER "fix" your clock, because there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is with something I'm overly fond of calling "Circadian Discrimination". You're a gay mulato Muslim? NO problem! As long as you're a morning person.
All you can do is work around it. Either by using sleep and wake techniques or by changing your schedule. You can make the early schedule Tolerable, or you can try to arrange an Enjoyable later schedule.
The other thing that helps tremendously is a job that doesn't bore you to death.
or, Hard Boiled Egg Plot Involves High Risk of Blood Clot.
I am happy full of glee
that you clone some eggs from me. Science good, coersion bad, I'll be a mommy AND a dad! No wait, eggs of mine They are not Please excuse mine english is rot.
Western values rule the day You don't see this game we play? In other News,
(Hold your breath!) Some Koreans, HAVE BREASTS! But of course! We'll use the Force! Nothing to see here. You're looking for a beer.
> if you want to make it an offense (like a misdemeanor) for providing rated content to an underage child
No I want to put parents on trial for complicity and negligence on a case by case basis. That way your neighbor analogy and most minor offenses, mistakes that ALL parents make, and factors beyond their control would not implicate them in a crime.
I want to try them before a jury of their peers to decide if lack of parental involvement or damaging involvement contributed significantly to the childs actions.
It IS a difficult line to walk. I'm not even too sure the benefits would outway the problems that arise with such a "solution". But it might be worth trying.
Should we start holding parents criminally responsible for the actions of their children?
If that bad parent knew that they would be the one sent to jail if Little Johnny goes ape-shit with a gun... maybe that one bad parent would make a better effort?
Of course it wouldn't be automatic, but a trial for criminal negligence and complicity.
> Microsoft could take away our ability to exercise freedom of speach and press by controlling the only medium available with a still-low-enough barrier to entry.
3 words, 2 phases:
China, Russia, OSS, hordes of programmers, laughing at US patents.
Or to put it another way, when enough people violate a patent and post it free for download...
Really I can't see how any of the doomsday scenarios posted here can come about without an unprecedented national policy of isolationism that includes a pretty totalitarian U.S. National Firewall. Dell and MS are going to have us ALL arrested? I don't think so.
"Do you think it could happen here?"
In this context the whole interweb thingy changes everything about the word "here". For our purposes today "here" is Earth. No I don't think it could happen here. As long as we keep hacking xbox's, building community WLANs, cheering on our Skylarov's, and writing OSS, we'll keep ahead of the Corporate Nobility.
Worse comes to worst, there will be a black market here for foreign non-DRM hardware and a string of International WLANS along the borders pumping free software inwards. They don't have a Department of Corporateland Security everywhere.
> For all the griping we do about the duplicitous nature of certain 'fair and balanced' news outlets (and their ilk), it would seem we'd hold Slashdot to some sort of standard.
Well the YRO section has degenerated into "We want free entertainment media". Being so unfair and unbalanced (and therefore useless) is perhaps why I just recently needed to change my sig...
EDITORS: a useless whine-fest WILL get blocked by most major corporations. Where will/. be then?
Shenzhou 5, - Pretty sure I had that for lunch today!
On a serious note, [asbestos suit=ON] how much did our neo-con nationalistic isolationist Executive Branch have to do with this decision. I realize that China would likely get all the tech benefits of any cooperation, but the benefits don't end with technology. Johnson-Freese sounds like a highly qualified technical advisor, but not an international policy maker. Right now China is a sleeping bear. It might be wise to extend some neighborly friendship now, while China is still in a position where they can't just defacto turn their noses up at it.
It's a safe bet that in a decade or two Chinese languages will be more popular in U.S. public schools than Spanish.
I'm not saying we should be afraid of the Chinese, especially not to the point of handing them our technologies. But it's also never wise to foster the creation of a powerful enemy.
Bottom line, I certianly think the U.S. could've handled this more diplomatically. Of couse you can say that about so much these days.
> This conclusion results from the fact that in such a universe one ultimately has access to only a finite volume, even after an infinite time
[IANA Scientist of any kind] but don't things like quantum mechanics and chaos theory tell us that some things can have an infinite number of states? Might not an infinite number of states over an infinite amount of time give us access to infinite computing and consciousness w/o limit?
My layman's knee is jerking at the concept of "reality in a box".
WRONG. It proves that good story based products , good music, and good film will do well regardless of whether they're Bible based or not. Good art / good media is NOT PREACHY.
"Christian Rock" "Christian Books" "Christian Film" and now "Christian Games". These usually turn out awful because A:They're more concerned with evangelizing the audience than with telling a good story or being entertaining. And B:The people making them are Christians first and producers of art/media/content second. It usually comes out like it was produced in a church basement by people with left over bake-sale cookies and a very inflated sense of relevance.
Sure they'll tell you that "OF COURSE we're Christians first above all else." But we all have rolls to play in life. You don't see any Christian Football Players. No, you see Football players who happen to be Christian.
If you want to build "Christian Games" then first concentrate on the game, the message comes second (or forget it). If you build Christian morality into something like for instance the Sims (community, teamwork, tolerance, sharing, caring generosity, etc.) then you'll have a great Christian game that's for everyone and teaches Christian values to the masses. So much better than a preachy Christian game for Christians that re-cements their already well indoctrinated beliefs.
Feel free to replace "games" with "music", "books", etc. above.
> but Enterprise seems pretty early in the Trek timeline
But this is Star Trek. Discussing any "timeline" is like speculating a dice roll.
Anybody who cares enough about continuity probably gave up on the Star Trek universe awhile back. Worf magically reappearing in his old job on the Enterprise after being promoted to chief of security for an entire space station (DS9) was the last straw for me. They could've at least come up with something, welcome him back for cross training or something, but no, there he was, like he never left.
Berman is to Star Trek as Eisner is to Disney. And Gene and Walt are wretching in their graves.
Insights about the way things are or the way things were (Dickens et al)just don't tantalize some of us like insight into the way things could be (Arthur C. Clark et al). New worlds excite the imagination, or send the most effective chills down your spine because it could happen.
One could argue it takes a much more developed imagination, knowledge of society and science, insight on the past, etc, to be able to fabricate a believable future with culture, economy, technology, politics, etc that explore where we are heading while commenting on where we are now. If you can do all this and write like a lit. major, it's even more impressive.
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." That stuff is very impressive... for totally different reasons than this:
"Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze a lot of neighbourhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don't have their own police force - no immigration control - undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything."
Creepy imagining that. It was published in 1992. They've now got "light beer versions" of burbclaves from WV to Oregon. In FL and CA they come even closer to Neal's vision. Gotta stay safe and keep them immagrunts out!
Why not give up 19 century industrialism and bring family farms into the 21st century? Let's call it Sustainable Agriculture while we're at it, that way folks don't have to be related to each other to run one.
Well if you do any gaming with an optical mouse, especially FPS, something like The XTrac Hammer
makes a very appreciable difference from cloth, woodgrain, glossy, or just not-built-for-optical surfaces. It's huge, precise, and fast.
Not cheap for a mouse pad, but it is infinitely cheap next to the things people put into gaming rigs. I saw a big improvement in marksmanship when fraggin away. Of course I had a lot of room for improvement.:]
Now that the weather's nice I feel silly about my sweet gaming mousepad. But in February it was a welcome excitement.
What is your favorite robot/cyborg character in written or film fiction? Why?
For instance, I'm happy to admit mine is Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Most especially the earlier seasons. Reason: I'm not much of a "trekkie" but that character made me consider so many different possible aspects of AI and of being not-human. From trying to understand other humans' emotions to his contrast with 'The Borg' down to what it might be like to have an "internal chronometer". For totally different reasons I loved Douglas Adams 'Marvin the Depressed Robot' in HHGTTG.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone ever designed a computer game with the same design principles that go into board games?
Ask yourself how often new great board games come out. Then look here: games.yahoo.com/
The real question is "Has anyone designed a graphically immersive 3D game with the same design principles that go into board games?"
No but we're getting closer. Unreal 2 XMP is pretty fantastic. Far from the regular Unreal frag fests, it has replayability, consistency, good rule sets, etc. It is team based capture the flag with some complexity thrown in in just the right places. I'm looking forward to more and better games that require strategy and teamwork like that. There is so much more potential there, in that space between multiplayer frag fest and MMORPGs.
With no brick and mortar address, and this: antiquities@websitecompany.co.uk as their contact address, the Honourable Company site does look quite suspicious. Not to mention selling thousand year old museum pieces for the price of department store "costume" jewelry.
Also, when THIS gives you only 8 results, only 1 of them relevant, you KNOW something is up. Nobody has anything to say about these people at all?
With results like that I'm sure you could build a page and get it ranked so that they would loose a ton of business. No matter though I'm sure they're chameleons and would just change the name and site.
A Good Company often has a page dealing with secure shopping.
I think ^that says the most about the upcoming movie. It will be an Adams-esque movie, wrapped in a Somebody Else's Humor Field so that only those who are looking for the differences can tell.
But the difference really do matter. "again" really tickles the funny bone. "YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED" is only mildly amusing.
Just like the web site, the movie is sure to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Adams.
Hey there is no such thing as a "correct" internal clock. And it certainly doesn't help that we still live by an agrarian schedule even though none of us are agrarian workers. Don't believe it? Then explain why if you arrive late it's a HUGE deal, but if you stay late no one cares at all. We still live by the agrarian clock and we still live by agrarian prejudices that place your internal clock (and mine) at the bottom of the abused minority list. Ben Franklin is a total asshole for coining that self fulfulling quote of his - "early to be and early to rise..." With the stroke of his pen he turned NON-morning people into second class citizens.
Anyway, you'll NEVER "fix" your clock, because there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is with something I'm overly fond of calling "Circadian Discrimination". You're a gay mulato Muslim? NO problem! As long as you're a morning person.
All you can do is work around it. Either by using sleep and wake techniques or by changing your schedule. You can make the early schedule Tolerable, or you can try to arrange an Enjoyable later schedule.
The other thing that helps tremendously is a job that doesn't bore you to death.
or, Hard Boiled Egg Plot Involves High Risk of Blood Clot.
I am happy full of glee
that you clone some eggs from me.
Science good, coersion bad,
I'll be a mommy AND a dad!
No wait, eggs of mine
They are not
Please excuse
mine english is rot.
Western values rule the day
You don't see this game we play?
In other News, (Hold your breath!)
Some Koreans, HAVE BREASTS!
But of course!
We'll use the Force!
Nothing to see here.
You're looking for a beer.
> if you want to make it an offense (like a misdemeanor) for providing rated content to an underage child
No I want to put parents on trial for complicity and negligence on a case by case basis. That way your neighbor analogy and most minor offenses, mistakes that ALL parents make, and factors beyond their control would not implicate them in a crime.
I want to try them before a jury of their peers to decide if lack of parental involvement or damaging involvement contributed significantly to the childs actions.
It IS a difficult line to walk. I'm not even too sure the benefits would outway the problems that arise with such a "solution". But it might be worth trying.
70's: Left---Center---Right
90's: -------Left-----Center-----Right
What used to be considered middle of the road in the 70's is today considered Liberal Left.
How did THAT happen??
Questions for the /. masses, especially parents:
Should we start holding parents criminally responsible for the actions of their children?
If that bad parent knew that they would be the one sent to jail if Little Johnny goes ape-shit with a gun... maybe that one bad parent would make a better effort?
Of course it wouldn't be automatic, but a trial for criminal negligence and complicity.
Why don't we see more of this already?
> sliding glass shower/tub door
Oh I HATE those. You go to sit on the side of the tub and get painful Slide Rail Ass.
You're married aren't you?
> Microsoft could take away our ability to exercise freedom of speach and press by controlling the only medium available with a still-low-enough barrier to entry.
3 words, 2 phases:
China, Russia, OSS, hordes of programmers, laughing at US patents.
Or to put it another way, when enough people violate a patent and post it free for download...
Really I can't see how any of the doomsday scenarios posted here can come about without an unprecedented national policy of isolationism that includes a pretty totalitarian U.S. National Firewall. Dell and MS are going to have us ALL arrested? I don't think so.
"Do you think it could happen here?"
In this context the whole interweb thingy changes everything about the word "here". For our purposes today "here" is Earth. No I don't think it could happen here. As long as we keep hacking xbox's, building community WLANs, cheering on our Skylarov's, and writing OSS, we'll keep ahead of the Corporate Nobility.
Worse comes to worst, there will be a black market here for foreign non-DRM hardware and a string of International WLANS along the borders pumping free software inwards. They don't have a Department of Corporateland Security everywhere.
> For all the griping we do about the duplicitous nature of certain 'fair and balanced' news outlets (and their ilk), it would seem we'd hold Slashdot to some sort of standard.
/. be then?
Well the YRO section has degenerated into "We want free entertainment media". Being so unfair and unbalanced (and therefore useless) is perhaps why I just recently needed to change my sig...
EDITORS: a useless whine-fest WILL get blocked by most major corporations. Where will
Shenzhou 5, - Pretty sure I had that for lunch today!
On a serious note, [asbestos suit=ON] how much did our neo-con nationalistic isolationist Executive Branch have to do with this decision. I realize that China would likely get all the tech benefits of any cooperation, but the benefits don't end with technology. Johnson-Freese sounds like a highly qualified technical advisor, but not an international policy maker. Right now China is a sleeping bear. It might be wise to extend some neighborly friendship now, while China is still in a position where they can't just defacto turn their noses up at it.
It's a safe bet that in a decade or two Chinese languages will be more popular in U.S. public schools than Spanish.
I'm not saying we should be afraid of the Chinese, especially not to the point of handing them our technologies. But it's also never wise to foster the creation of a powerful enemy.
Bottom line, I certianly think the U.S. could've handled this more diplomatically. Of couse you can say that about so much these days.
Using computers and brains to compute the limits of computers and brains.
That alone implies enough assumptions to turn the whole thing into a fairly pointless mental excercise.
> This conclusion results from the fact that in such a universe one ultimately has access to only a finite volume, even after an infinite time
[IANA Scientist of any kind] but don't things like quantum mechanics and chaos theory tell us that some things can have an infinite number of states? Might not an infinite number of states over an infinite amount of time give us access to infinite computing and consciousness w/o limit?
My layman's knee is jerking at the concept of "reality in a box".
WRONG. It proves that good story based products , good music, and good film will do well regardless of whether they're Bible based or not. Good art / good media is NOT PREACHY.
"Christian Rock"
"Christian Books"
"Christian Film"
and now "Christian Games". These usually turn out awful because
A:They're more concerned with evangelizing the audience than with telling a good story or being entertaining. And
B:The people making them are Christians first and producers of art/media/content second. It usually comes out like it was produced in a church basement by people with left over bake-sale cookies and a very inflated sense of relevance.
Sure they'll tell you that "OF COURSE we're Christians first above all else." But we all have rolls to play in life. You don't see any Christian Football Players. No, you see Football players who happen to be Christian.
If you want to build "Christian Games" then first concentrate on the game, the message comes second (or forget it). If you build Christian morality into something like for instance the Sims (community, teamwork, tolerance, sharing, caring generosity, etc.) then you'll have a great Christian game that's for everyone and teaches Christian values to the masses. So much better than a preachy Christian game for Christians that re-cements their already well indoctrinated beliefs.
Feel free to replace "games" with "music", "books", etc. above.
Don't miss Star Woz at The New HOPE.
Yeah.. it's a slow day.
Comic Book Guy lives and breathes it and won't shut up about. Shakrai I'm betting is thoughtfully adding to the discussion at hand.
+6 I'd say.
There hasn't been an episode with Truth in it since...??
> but Enterprise seems pretty early in the Trek timeline
But this is Star Trek. Discussing any "timeline" is like speculating a dice roll.
Anybody who cares enough about continuity probably gave up on the Star Trek universe awhile back. Worf magically reappearing in his old job on the Enterprise after being promoted to chief of security for an entire space station (DS9) was the last straw for me. They could've at least come up with something, welcome him back for cross training or something, but no, there he was, like he never left.
Berman is to Star Trek as Eisner is to Disney. And Gene and Walt are wretching in their graves.
Insights about the way things are or the way things were (Dickens et al)just don't tantalize some of us like insight into the way things could be (Arthur C. Clark et al). New worlds excite the imagination, or send the most effective chills down your spine because it could happen.
One could argue it takes a much more developed imagination, knowledge of society and science, insight on the past, etc, to be able to fabricate a believable future with culture, economy, technology, politics, etc that explore where we are heading while commenting on where we are now. If you can do all this and write like a lit. major, it's even more impressive.
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." That stuff is very impressive... for totally different reasons than this:
"Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze a lot of neighbourhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don't have their own police force - no immigration control - undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything."
Creepy imagining that. It was published in 1992. They've now got "light beer versions" of burbclaves from WV to Oregon. In FL and CA they come even closer to Neal's vision. Gotta stay safe and keep them immagrunts out!
Oh yeah, Orwell was largly SF by the way.
> nobody wants to get with the 21st century and give up family farms.
There are definitely major nasty drawbacks on several fronts to "giving up family farms".
Why not give up 19 century industrialism and bring family farms into the 21st century? Let's call it Sustainable Agriculture while we're at it, that way folks don't have to be related to each other to run one.
Does that mean this is The Year Of Linux?
Well if you do any gaming with an optical mouse, especially FPS, something like The XTrac Hammer
makes a very appreciable difference from cloth, woodgrain, glossy, or just not-built-for-optical surfaces. It's huge, precise, and fast.
Not cheap for a mouse pad, but it is infinitely cheap next to the things people put into gaming rigs. I saw a big improvement in marksmanship when fraggin away. Of course I had a lot of room for improvement.
Now that the weather's nice I feel silly about my sweet gaming mousepad. But in February it was a welcome excitement.
What is your favorite robot/cyborg character in written or film fiction? Why?
For instance, I'm happy to admit mine is Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Most especially the earlier seasons. Reason: I'm not much of a "trekkie" but that character made me consider so many different possible aspects of AI and of being not-human. From trying to understand other humans' emotions to his contrast with 'The Borg' down to what it might be like to have an "internal chronometer". For totally different reasons I loved Douglas Adams 'Marvin the Depressed Robot' in HHGTTG.
> I can't think of any technology that has successfully spanned this many decades from proof-of-concept to practical reality.
How about The Marquand Logic Machine?
That's a pretty impressive scaling up over the last 12+ decades.