Imagine a FPS with all features the community wants and desires, like dynamic realistic environment, distance based fog, complex particle effects, high-resolution multilayered textures, detailed and fluid playermodels, surround sound, flexible and learning AI, demanding tactics and stategy, an extensive SDK, optimized netprotocols, cheater-proof code.
Imagine now that the players would be colorful clowns, running around in wonderful circus environments, using weapons like rubber-hammer, cake-shooter, water-pistol that knock out but not kill the other clowns, the knocked out one sitting on the floor for 5 seconds with stars rotating above his head. Parents would laugh about the game, find it even amusing, not being shocked about it or roll their eyes in disgust or confussion.
Would this game be popular ? Would this game fill thousands of servers worldwide ? How much is violence part of the gaming thrill ?
A touch cynical, I agree. But in my experience (N>50), these three countries have caused the stereotypical responses from non-Europeans: Germany - East or West ? - So, you're from Skandinavia. Real high taxes there I hear. - Hey, no worries mate!
A well known experiment from cognitive psychology is the following:
Novice and expert chess players are confronted with two types of chess setups and are asked to analyze the positions. Setup type 1 is an actually possible setup (e.g. can be reached by legal moves), while type 2 could never occur during the normal course of a game.
The novices do equally well for both setup types. Unexpectedly, the chess expert don't! While type 1 setups are analyzed very fast, the experts take approx as long to analyze the impossible setups (corrected for trained mind etc) as the novices.
A chess computer will probably behave as a novice in the above experiment (if the setup is not in the library), ie take the same analyzation time for both setup types.
Hence, this could lead to the conclusion that even a tiny adjustment in the rules could shift the odds heavily towards the computer, if these rules suddenly allow positions not possible previously.
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Imagine a FPS with all features the community wants and desires, like dynamic realistic environment, distance based fog, complex particle effects, high-resolution multilayered textures, detailed and fluid playermodels, surround sound, flexible and learning AI, demanding tactics and stategy, an extensive SDK, optimized netprotocols, cheater-proof code.
Imagine now that the players would be colorful clowns, running around in wonderful circus environments, using weapons like rubber-hammer, cake-shooter, water-pistol that knock out but not kill the other clowns, the knocked out one sitting on the floor for 5 seconds with stars rotating above his head. Parents would laugh about the game, find it even amusing, not being shocked about it or roll their eyes in disgust or confussion.
Would this game be popular ? Would this game fill thousands of servers worldwide ? How much is violence part of the gaming thrill ?
A touch cynical, I agree. But in my experience (N>50), these three countries have caused the stereotypical responses from non-Europeans: Germany - East or West ? - So, you're from Skandinavia. Real high taxes there I hear. - Hey, no worries mate!
Novice and expert chess players are confronted with two types of chess setups and are asked to analyze the positions. Setup type 1 is an actually possible setup (e.g. can be reached by legal moves), while type 2 could never occur during the normal course of a game.
The novices do equally well for both setup types. Unexpectedly, the chess expert don't! While type 1 setups are analyzed very fast, the experts take approx as long to analyze the impossible setups (corrected for trained mind etc) as the novices.
A chess computer will probably behave as a novice in the above experiment (if the setup is not in the library), ie take the same analyzation time for both setup types.
Hence, this could lead to the conclusion that even a tiny adjustment in the rules could shift the odds heavily towards the computer, if these rules suddenly allow positions not possible previously.