It is also erroneous to suggest that the purpose of art is to simulate reality... likewise, I'll take my cartoonish World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy over some ultra-realistic NFL game any day.
I appreciate that, and I think I may have miscommunicated a little bit. Here's another try...
Philosophically, everything is a simulation of reality in some form. It doesn't need to match reality, but we need some contextual grounding in order to make sense of it. Even Picasso had those groundings - he simply viewed them through a unique lens.
The only exceptions are truly abstract games, such as Qix, Tetris, and (arguably) tempest. And, interestingly, for those games, additions to the graphical detail do very little to alter the gaming experience.
I agree that WoW has excellent art direction. But, it doesn't look like I'm playing Shrek (as an example, albeit one that's heavily CGI based). Or Treasure Planent / Aladdin / The Lion King. Conversely, it doesn't look like I'm playing LoTR either. Elements are far too repetitive, and there's not enough variation in character design to be truly interesting in an artistic sense. The landscape is interesting in a macro sense, as that's where the design effort has gone. However, it's missing the "messiness" and randomality of reality. And, I don't think that was due to artistic desires - it was due to design constraints. And that, in a nutshell, is what I'm talking about. It looks good, but it still looks like a game. I don't feel like I'm truly in Azeroth, I feel like I'm playing a game that's simulating my presense in Azeroth. SD / HD has nothing to do with that - to paraphrase, "it's the immersion, stupid".;)
Drawing everything by hand won't get us there - as you say, it's too labour intensive. But, moving to HD does very little either. The scale of this stuff means it's only going to be possible with two things:
algorithmically generated randomality sufficient to provide "realistic" variation across all graphical elements
rendering capability to scale the sheer number of these elements relative to current games by a number of factors
Moving to HD provides limited generalisable scalar improvements (as you've said), but in the grand scheme of things, it's still polishing a turd...
And staying in SD hurts my eyes.
Interesting that you say that - I take it you really dislike watching DVDs?
I wonder how much this trend will continue. Will later games (1.5, 2nd gen) look better at SDTV than current games (excluding a little anti-aliasing), or have we reached the end of what SDTV can show us.
Considering that SDTV still manages to provide an image that looks much more realistic than any game on a PC running at 1700x1200 (consider a well mastered DVD), I think there's a long way we could go yet with SD games. HDTV on games is like polishing a turd (if you'll excuse the crass analogy). It looks like a prettier turd, but it's still a turd.
Fundamentally, computer games still look like computer games. That's not the way it should be. Going to HD rather than staying SD with more processing power only hurts the immersion and simulation of reality. What they should be doing is upping the poly counts on SD resolutions as much as possible to make it look better, not simplying upping the resolution and maintaining the current standard of "art direction". Lower resolutions mean you can spend more cycles on making things look better, not just making them look sharper.
Sony and Microsoft are using the Korean business model - market based on specs, probably mainly because they know men tend to buy into the whole numbers BS. I'm sure things will look better than the current generation of consoles, but I also think that fundamentally, they're chasing the wrong goal. I'm really hoping Nintendo goes in the opposite direction, based on their comments about HD. You don't need HD to have stunning graphics. We can't even do realistic SD graphics yet - how is moving to HD going to help the situation?
You've also got the following problem (which there may be a solution for that I'm not aware of using SQL).
Assume you have a survey with 100 questions. Assume you gave the survey to 1000 people. Each response constitutes a single record. So, you've got 101 (one column for the respondent identifier) columns by 1000 records. With the 100 column (question) schema, you can query and return all the answers for 50 responses.
So, with one query, you can find out the average response for questions 1, 10, and 25 for a subgroup of respondents.
With the vertical schema, you've got 100 records for each response. So, you've got 3 columns (one respondent identifier, one question lookup, one question answer) by 100*1000 records.
While it's now easily extensible, AFAICS you can't do the example above. Say I want to get the average response for questions 1, 10, and 25 for a subgroup of respondents. With another language like SAS it's trivial to pivot the records into columns for viewing and analysis, but with SQL, I need to execute at least 3 separate queries.
It's possibly my inexperience with SQL. But, a real-world example I once worked with was basically similar to the above, but with around 1,200 different columns. The DB used the vertical structure, which made for great storage and single-variable reporting, but it made simultaneous analysis of multiple variables extremely hard.
You said it yourself. Phantasy Star, an inferior game to Final Fantasy in most ways, was released after Final Fantasy was. Whoopee, first-person dungeon crawling - hardly worth the mention.
My point wasn't so much to do with quality of game design, it had more to do with the Nintendo-centric focus of the book. Phantasy Star was no less story driven than most of the other RPGs mentioned in that time-frame in the book, yet it wasn't mentioned (even in passing). I just found it a strange omission.
The fact that Sega was founded by an American has no bearing on anything here. I question you for mentioning this fact as if to point out some glaring error of ethnocentrism that the author has made, particularly because of the italicized emphasis you use in your original posting.
Apologies for the miscommunication - I italicised it to try and imagine some sort of justification as to why it could have been excluded, nothing more. All I was saying was that possibly Chris had excluded it because under the boundaries of his choice of topic, he had chosen to focus specifically on games made by Japanese developers, not games by Japanese companies (hence italicising "American"). I wasn't claiming any ethnocentrism, I was claiming a possible deliberate restriction of topic by Chris to focus his argument. And, as I said, I found that hard to believe as well.
In the end, what I was trying to say was that I found it a strange omission, nothing more.
Re:Physician, heal thyself
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However, I could point towards Another World and Flashback on the Amiga.
Very good point - my only rebuttal would be that Another World came out in about 1991, which is a bit too far down the track (relatively speaking) to be used to demonstrate pioneering use of narrative. Captain Blood, on the other hand, is a far better example, having been released in 1988.
I'm sure there's more examples, it's just that like I said, I don't have a good enough recall of specifically European developed games to be able to think of them. I'll have to think about it a bit more.:)
Conceded. It was still a terrible platform however, until the world more-or-less standardised on a 486 DX2/66 with 4Mb RAM, Soundblaster-compatible and a Diamond Viper or similar graphics card. Things really took off from there. Until then, the other platforms had it beaten.
Yeah, that's definitely true. Can't argue with that in the slighest. Hell, you could even argue it was a horrendous platform right up until Windows 95 became mainstream. Extended / expanded memory sucked. Especially when you were trying to get that extra 6k of conventional so you could see the explosions in Wing Commander I...
Re:Physician, heal thyself
on
Power Up
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· Score: 1
Believe it or not, the first cut I did was actually longer and dealt with some of those issues. I didn't refer specifically to Captain Blood, but I did refer to European gaming development. Unfortunately, I somehow dropped that during editing.
Having said that, I don't know how narrative driven European game development was during that time period. For example, Populous was an excellent game technically and innovatively, but I'd argue it didn't do much to advance anything that Chris Kohler was talking about in his book. The key distinction is that Chris isn't talking about them in terms of game design more broadly, but in terms of character development and narrative elements. Captain Blood is the exception that proves the rule.
However, I'll freely admit that that could be my lack of knowledge of European game deveopment - I know the games, but (interestingly, now that you point it out) I've never really thought of them as separate in their own right.
I would disagree, though, with your statement that PC gaming was essentially farcial until the arrival of the 486 DX2 66mhz. Ultima 4 came out well before then, as did King Quest I-IV. There are other examples, but those are the ones that popped into my head.
If you're basing your falsifiability on any number of statistical tests, there's an implicit probability of making a Type I or a Type II error. The fact that that error occured (due to too small or too large a sample size, frequently) doesn't technically mean that it's not reproducible - it means that statistical error was introduced, which makes the results questionable. Reproducibility is about both the process and the results.
Without knowing the details about how the studies that were later contradicted were conducted (not having read the article and not having the time at this exact moment), it's hard to make any conclusions about whether the process is working or not. If they had appropriate sample sizes, strong statistical results, didn't violate any assumptions, and used appropriate testing / control techniques and were later disproved conclusively, then I'd agree there's a problem.
I'm being a bit pedantic, but if you're using Popper as your starting point (carrying on from the grandparent), you can't even prove anything. Science therefore works on disproving hypotheses, hence the falsifiability requirements for it to be called "science".
Besides, contradictory results over the short-term aren't anything new - measurement error, misspecification error, and misdiagnosis are all well understood to exist within "Science". The whole point of the process is to eventually move towards broad agreement. Remember that "truth" is a construct we've created - a theory is (almost) always an abstraction of reality, and as an abstraction, will never be truly "correct". The Scientific Process makes no statement as to how long it'll take for broad agreement to occur, nor does is actually specify that we'll eventually come to the truth. There is no end to the process, which for the public can be hard to understand and, sometimes, seem somewhat pointless...
Marketshare's bollocks, anyway. All that's really important is profitability first, and growth second. Marketshare gets so much time because it's easy to measure and because it's easy to report on. Profitability is hard unless you've got a fully developed ABM backend, something few (if any) organisations can actually do well enough to generate dynamic pricing information.
In an accounting sense, it depends on how you define "profit". There's incremental profit, and cumulative profit. Incrementally, it's completely possible that Sony (or any other manufacturer) was making a profit on each console unit sold. If inputs costs were (say) $200, and they were selling it for $299, they would have been making a profit on each unit sold of $99.
If it's cumulative profit, they need to recoup the R&D and capital sunk costs incurred prior to release. So, they'll only make a cumulative profit after X sales, where X equal the R&D costs divided by the incremental profit per unit. In the above situation, the PS2 would not have been sold for a loss, yet Sony would still have had to sell a million units to turn a profit.
Most people seem to think the incremental profit of consoles is negative - in other words, the manufacturer is losing money on each unit sold before capital investment and development costs are taken into account. That's not necessarily the case.
I agree with furiousgeorge - you're worrying a little too much. I'm on a 512/128 DSL link, and I get 14 gig peak (6AM to 12AM), 14 gig off-peak (12PM to 6AM). And, for that, I pay roughly $45 US. I never get a slowdown.
If I wanted to move to 30 gig / 30 gig (60 gig a month), the price would become $60 US. Bigger plans exist (as well as flatrate plans), too. Sure, there are far cheaper places around the world, but it's not as bad as people make out.
I believe that you may actually be confusing athiesm with agnosticism. To categorically state that God does not exist requires equally as much faith as stating that God does exist, hence the equating athiesim to a religion.
Courts are supposed to be agnostic - they make no conclusions about the existence or lack thereof of God. They simply examine the facts and rule appropriately.
Here's EzyDVD, a site in Australia. The only problems as far as you're concerned are that it's PAL and Region 4, so if you haven't got an unlocked multisystem TV / DVD player, you're no better off. It'll cost you around $15US at current exchange rates to buy it and ship it.
Quikah is right. It resampled everything to 16/48, not 16/44.1. Recording with low latency was only possible if you recorded at 16/48. Anything else would go (Analog Signal) -> 16/48 -> 16/44.1. Sucks if you're trying to record for CD.
Slashdot Mirror
It is also erroneous to suggest that the purpose of art is to simulate reality ... likewise, I'll take my cartoonish World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy over some ultra-realistic NFL game any day.
I appreciate that, and I think I may have miscommunicated a little bit. Here's another try ...
Philosophically, everything is a simulation of reality in some form. It doesn't need to match reality, but we need some contextual grounding in order to make sense of it. Even Picasso had those groundings - he simply viewed them through a unique lens.
The only exceptions are truly abstract games, such as Qix, Tetris, and (arguably) tempest. And, interestingly, for those games, additions to the graphical detail do very little to alter the gaming experience.
I agree that WoW has excellent art direction. But, it doesn't look like I'm playing Shrek (as an example, albeit one that's heavily CGI based). Or Treasure Planent / Aladdin / The Lion King. Conversely, it doesn't look like I'm playing LoTR either. Elements are far too repetitive, and there's not enough variation in character design to be truly interesting in an artistic sense. The landscape is interesting in a macro sense, as that's where the design effort has gone. However, it's missing the "messiness" and randomality of reality. And, I don't think that was due to artistic desires - it was due to design constraints. And that, in a nutshell, is what I'm talking about. It looks good, but it still looks like a game. I don't feel like I'm truly in Azeroth, I feel like I'm playing a game that's simulating my presense in Azeroth. SD / HD has nothing to do with that - to paraphrase, "it's the immersion, stupid". ;)
Drawing everything by hand won't get us there - as you say, it's too labour intensive. But, moving to HD does very little either. The scale of this stuff means it's only going to be possible with two things:
Moving to HD provides limited generalisable scalar improvements (as you've said), but in the grand scheme of things, it's still polishing a turd ...
And staying in SD hurts my eyes.
Interesting that you say that - I take it you really dislike watching DVDs?
I wonder how much this trend will continue. Will later games (1.5, 2nd gen) look better at SDTV than current games (excluding a little anti-aliasing), or have we reached the end of what SDTV can show us.
Considering that SDTV still manages to provide an image that looks much more realistic than any game on a PC running at 1700x1200 (consider a well mastered DVD), I think there's a long way we could go yet with SD games. HDTV on games is like polishing a turd (if you'll excuse the crass analogy). It looks like a prettier turd, but it's still a turd.
Fundamentally, computer games still look like computer games. That's not the way it should be. Going to HD rather than staying SD with more processing power only hurts the immersion and simulation of reality. What they should be doing is upping the poly counts on SD resolutions as much as possible to make it look better, not simplying upping the resolution and maintaining the current standard of "art direction". Lower resolutions mean you can spend more cycles on making things look better, not just making them look sharper.
Sony and Microsoft are using the Korean business model - market based on specs, probably mainly because they know men tend to buy into the whole numbers BS. I'm sure things will look better than the current generation of consoles, but I also think that fundamentally, they're chasing the wrong goal. I'm really hoping Nintendo goes in the opposite direction, based on their comments about HD. You don't need HD to have stunning graphics. We can't even do realistic SD graphics yet - how is moving to HD going to help the situation?
You've also got the following problem (which there may be a solution for that I'm not aware of using SQL).
Assume you have a survey with 100 questions. Assume you gave the survey to 1000 people. Each response constitutes a single record. So, you've got 101 (one column for the respondent identifier) columns by 1000 records. With the 100 column (question) schema, you can query and return all the answers for 50 responses.
So, with one query, you can find out the average response for questions 1, 10, and 25 for a subgroup of respondents.
With the vertical schema, you've got 100 records for each response. So, you've got 3 columns (one respondent identifier, one question lookup, one question answer) by 100*1000 records.
While it's now easily extensible, AFAICS you can't do the example above. Say I want to get the average response for questions 1, 10, and 25 for a subgroup of respondents. With another language like SAS it's trivial to pivot the records into columns for viewing and analysis, but with SQL, I need to execute at least 3 separate queries.
It's possibly my inexperience with SQL. But, a real-world example I once worked with was basically similar to the above, but with around 1,200 different columns. The DB used the vertical structure, which made for great storage and single-variable reporting, but it made simultaneous analysis of multiple variables extremely hard.
You said it yourself. Phantasy Star, an inferior game to Final Fantasy in most ways, was released after Final Fantasy was. Whoopee, first-person dungeon crawling - hardly worth the mention.
My point wasn't so much to do with quality of game design, it had more to do with the Nintendo-centric focus of the book. Phantasy Star was no less story driven than most of the other RPGs mentioned in that time-frame in the book, yet it wasn't mentioned (even in passing). I just found it a strange omission.
The fact that Sega was founded by an American has no bearing on anything here. I question you for mentioning this fact as if to point out some glaring error of ethnocentrism that the author has made, particularly because of the italicized emphasis you use in your original posting.
Apologies for the miscommunication - I italicised it to try and imagine some sort of justification as to why it could have been excluded, nothing more. All I was saying was that possibly Chris had excluded it because under the boundaries of his choice of topic, he had chosen to focus specifically on games made by Japanese developers, not games by Japanese companies (hence italicising "American"). I wasn't claiming any ethnocentrism, I was claiming a possible deliberate restriction of topic by Chris to focus his argument. And, as I said, I found that hard to believe as well.
In the end, what I was trying to say was that I found it a strange omission, nothing more.
However, I could point towards Another World and Flashback on the Amiga.
Very good point - my only rebuttal would be that Another World came out in about 1991, which is a bit too far down the track (relatively speaking) to be used to demonstrate pioneering use of narrative. Captain Blood, on the other hand, is a far better example, having been released in 1988.
I'm sure there's more examples, it's just that like I said, I don't have a good enough recall of specifically European developed games to be able to think of them. I'll have to think about it a bit more. :)
Conceded. It was still a terrible platform however, until the world more-or-less standardised on a 486 DX2/66 with 4Mb RAM, Soundblaster-compatible and a Diamond Viper or similar graphics card. Things really took off from there. Until then, the other platforms had it beaten.
Yeah, that's definitely true. Can't argue with that in the slighest. Hell, you could even argue it was a horrendous platform right up until Windows 95 became mainstream. Extended / expanded memory sucked. Especially when you were trying to get that extra 6k of conventional so you could see the explosions in Wing Commander I ...
Believe it or not, the first cut I did was actually longer and dealt with some of those issues. I didn't refer specifically to Captain Blood, but I did refer to European gaming development. Unfortunately, I somehow dropped that during editing.
Having said that, I don't know how narrative driven European game development was during that time period. For example, Populous was an excellent game technically and innovatively, but I'd argue it didn't do much to advance anything that Chris Kohler was talking about in his book. The key distinction is that Chris isn't talking about them in terms of game design more broadly, but in terms of character development and narrative elements. Captain Blood is the exception that proves the rule.
However, I'll freely admit that that could be my lack of knowledge of European game deveopment - I know the games, but (interestingly, now that you point it out) I've never really thought of them as separate in their own right.
I would disagree, though, with your statement that PC gaming was essentially farcial until the arrival of the 486 DX2 66mhz. Ultima 4 came out well before then, as did King Quest I-IV. There are other examples, but those are the ones that popped into my head.
Dear God. I remember playing Space Quest I on 10 (I think) double sided Apple II floppies. I don't think a game's ever lasted as long ...
If you're basing your falsifiability on any number of statistical tests, there's an implicit probability of making a Type I or a Type II error. The fact that that error occured (due to too small or too large a sample size, frequently) doesn't technically mean that it's not reproducible - it means that statistical error was introduced, which makes the results questionable. Reproducibility is about both the process and the results.
Without knowing the details about how the studies that were later contradicted were conducted (not having read the article and not having the time at this exact moment), it's hard to make any conclusions about whether the process is working or not. If they had appropriate sample sizes, strong statistical results, didn't violate any assumptions, and used appropriate testing / control techniques and were later disproved conclusively, then I'd agree there's a problem.
I'm being a bit pedantic, but if you're using Popper as your starting point (carrying on from the grandparent), you can't even prove anything. Science therefore works on disproving hypotheses, hence the falsifiability requirements for it to be called "science".
Besides, contradictory results over the short-term aren't anything new - measurement error, misspecification error, and misdiagnosis are all well understood to exist within "Science". The whole point of the process is to eventually move towards broad agreement. Remember that "truth" is a construct we've created - a theory is (almost) always an abstraction of reality, and as an abstraction, will never be truly "correct". The Scientific Process makes no statement as to how long it'll take for broad agreement to occur, nor does is actually specify that we'll eventually come to the truth. There is no end to the process, which for the public can be hard to understand and, sometimes, seem somewhat pointless ...
Marketshare's bollocks, anyway. All that's really important is profitability first, and growth second. Marketshare gets so much time because it's easy to measure and because it's easy to report on. Profitability is hard unless you've got a fully developed ABM backend, something few (if any) organisations can actually do well enough to generate dynamic pricing information.
What makes the game work is how well everything is dog.
Must be good. The subliminal advertising seems to be working a treat. :)
In an accounting sense, it depends on how you define "profit". There's incremental profit, and cumulative profit. Incrementally, it's completely possible that Sony (or any other manufacturer) was making a profit on each console unit sold. If inputs costs were (say) $200, and they were selling it for $299, they would have been making a profit on each unit sold of $99.
If it's cumulative profit, they need to recoup the R&D and capital sunk costs incurred prior to release. So, they'll only make a cumulative profit after X sales, where X equal the R&D costs divided by the incremental profit per unit. In the above situation, the PS2 would not have been sold for a loss, yet Sony would still have had to sell a million units to turn a profit.
Most people seem to think the incremental profit of consoles is negative - in other words, the manufacturer is losing money on each unit sold before capital investment and development costs are taken into account. That's not necessarily the case.
Just to (sort-of) back that up, here's a bit of history:
The Mythology of Loss-leaders
It appears that Nintendo may have taken a loss for some of the lifecycle of the Gamecube, but this was most definitely not the norm.
Someone's been playing "Return to Mysterious Island" a bit too much lately ...
I agree with furiousgeorge - you're worrying a little too much. I'm on a 512/128 DSL link, and I get 14 gig peak (6AM to 12AM), 14 gig off-peak (12PM to 6AM). And, for that, I pay roughly $45 US. I never get a slowdown.
e .on.netn et.com.au
If I wanted to move to 30 gig / 30 gig (60 gig a month), the price would become $60 US. Bigger plans exist (as well as flatrate plans), too. Sure, there are far cheaper places around the world, but it's not as bad as people make out.
Check out:
http://www.netspace.net.au
http://www.internod
http://www.westnet.com.au
http://www.ii
There are cheaper ISPs, but they're probably the biggest and most well known after Telstra.
I believe that you may actually be confusing athiesm with agnosticism. To categorically state that God does not exist requires equally as much faith as stating that God does exist, hence the equating athiesim to a religion.
Courts are supposed to be agnostic - they make no conclusions about the existence or lack thereof of God. They simply examine the facts and rule appropriately.
Don't know about Commodore roms, but there's definitely an Apple disk image of it on the Apple mirror:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/gam es/adventure/portal/
"Looser"?
...
And this on Slashdot. With this article.
Oh, the irony
Mind bending - the US hasn't released it, but we've already got it in Australia. There's a first.
Here's Amazon, but it's obviously not out yet.
Here's EzyDVD, a site in Australia. The only problems as far as you're concerned are that it's PAL and Region 4, so if you haven't got an unlocked multisystem TV / DVD player, you're no better off. It'll cost you around $15US at current exchange rates to buy it and ship it.
It is on DVD ... I own a copy.
Exactly :)
Quikah is right. It resampled everything to 16/48, not 16/44.1. Recording with low latency was only possible if you recorded at 16/48. Anything else would go (Analog Signal) -> 16/48 -> 16/44.1. Sucks if you're trying to record for CD.
Very true :)
If he's guilty of anything, it's of being a bad leader.
Don't blame Ziggy. Blame the board and all the current shareholders. He's limited by what they tell him to do.
Vampire taps. Gotta love 'em.