The radio series was a curious mishmash of high and low tech. It was one of the first dramas to be recorded (or rather assembled) on multi-track track tape - and I believe it was one, if not the, first to be broadcast in stereo. Listening to it in headphones provides all manner of sonic trickery. That said, much of what was assembled was done in a low tech kind of way, such as playing stuff at the wrong speed and kicking effects boxes.
Actually - you can have multiple IEs on the same machine (as in box) if you run several virtual PCs on it. We have a box dedicated to exactly that for testing purposes.
The movie version of 'Day of the Triffids' had that very plot device. Which makes the psycho-vegetables' decision to hang out by a lighthouse a little...ill-advised. Intelligent plants? Pshaw! Their spelling was crap as well.
Well, no. MMORPGs usually have monthly subscription charges - so the longer (in months rather than more as in hours) you continue to play the more money is made. 200,000 players at 15/month (a la EQ and SWG) makes for an additional incentive to provide 'addictive' qualities in-game. There's a brief description of the 'Skinner' characteristics of EQ here.
You are correct that the actual game programmer might not be directly advantaged (except by continued employment and company stability) but the suit who writes his paycheck will be - providing more than enough incentive.
My own take is that the developers probably weren't purposely trying to make people emulate lab rats with food pellets - but CRPG games since, say, Wizardry had been evolving in this direction. The closest to a Skinner model so far - EQ - was such a financial success (for this and other reasons - social being high amongst them) that other companies are scrambling to incorporate their own versions. Eventually, though, the possible player base will max out, whereupon, with all those potential lab rats out there playing someone else's game - the purveyors of addictive pellets are going to have to really smarten them up, hopefully with actual content and not just eye candy.
Specifically, catharsis is the cleansing of emotions, described by Aristotle as the effect of watching drama - eg, if you watch a sad play you will feel better for having purged (kathairein) yourself of the emotion 'sadness'.
I don't know if performing virtual evil acts quite counts in this sense, unless you feel some kind of remorse or guilt for your virtual actions.
I have a grotty old PII 350 with 64mb on win98 (not SE - for some absurd historical reason that I no longer believe and I don't expect anyone else to either) and I use Moz exclusively for tabbed browsing and spam filtering goodness. It's faster than IE from my perspective and, unlike IE, doesn't fall over more often than a one legged man in a falling over competition.
I went through a similar thing myself, so I'm rather interested in some of the ideas behind Mythica. Largely MM but certain areas create 'Private Realms' for groups for a couple of hours. From the FAQ:
While other games use private instances as a solution to MMORPG overcrowding, Mythica uses Private Realms to significantly enhance the gameplay, providing such depth as cinematics, highly-scripted encounters, and destructible environments.
Of course, it's not actually here, and it's by M$, so you may wish to diss it out of hand. But it seems to answer a number of your issues - except possibly the death downtime.
A similar legislative goal is behind class action suits, but there are other goals, such as efficiency and conservation of scarce judicial resources.
Your judicial resources are currently inefficient and scarce. Click here to download FREE pop-up blocking and spam filtering software and register for a bonus actionLawsuit.class file.
Opencroquet as discussed here is all this and less - not a FPS, but none the less an interesting alternative to those other run-of-the-mill net-based 3d operating systems.
I, too, have a number one hit on Google - for hunkmuffin - referring to, interestingly enough, me noticing that I had the number one hit on Google for hunkmuffin. Pretty meta, eh?
Mind you - I haven't touched that blog in a couple of months as it was getting too damn cold to get out of bed in time to write it before work. Soon they'll want more money as well, so - sod it. It wasn't particularly funny anyway. Well, maybe once. Around last december.
I'm going to second this. I've been around machines for most of my life - my dad was a comp-sci lecturer. But I was always more interested in playing games, especially Infocom games, and used to play them for hours on end. Programming seemed to lead to a job working in a bank writing financial applications, so I never really bothered with it. I did Engligh Lit and Philosophy at varsity.
Flash forward to '96 (age 25) - I still didn't know much more than a few lines of BASIC but I came across Inform while surfing (via Lynx, natch) at work and, wanting to actually create what I'd enjoyed playing so much so many years ago, I began working on my first ever piece of compiled code. Happily - the explosion of the net took my tech writing job further and further into web-based stuff - for which I used my newfound, Inform-taught knowledge of to pick up Javascript and VBScript along with a smattering of db concepts. With a few minor apps under my belt as demos - I got a job as an Internet Developer (can you spell 'underprepared'?) and struggled to remain on top of the Perl and Java I was expected to handle. Now, a few years later, I'm writing TCL on-site. In a Bank. For a web-based financial application. GAHHHHH! What was I thinking?
That said - I would never have even gone down this path had there not been a specific result I wanted to achieve. I suspect children would be similar. If they enjoy reading, start with Inform. Cartoon junkie? - a little actionscript maybe, if you can afford the flash dev software. You want something that appeals to their existing talents and interests - I don't think it's a one size fits all scenario. Sure, anything with iteration, recursion, variables etc will do the job - but keep the end result in mind.
This is in line with my reaction to the whole Star Child story line: why throw religious mysticism into a sci-fi flick
Like 2001. Great movie, up until the appearance of that stupid star child. Ruined the whole thing. There should have been more HAL - he could've become corporeal and ridden a tandem bicycle with knives coming out of the wheels. That would have been kewl.
If our world were virtual, and had no detail below 10 microns, or a tenth of one, or a thousandth, scientists with knowledge of what should be, would notice
Surely it would be less cyle intensive to only run that kind of software when such thing were being measured or observed. They're entirely likely to figure out how to counteract Heisenberg in the next version.
Actually, biofeedback also includes neurofeedback. It's still a science in its infancy, but they use electroencepholgraphs to measure electrical activity in the brain - and can train it to achieve certain certain states. Of particular note to me was training towards what are normally considered sleep states while still conscious (alpha and theta states). These are done via sound cues, but while doing beta (a more typically conscious state) training you kept your eyes open - and the way you knew your brain was 'in the zone' was that a video game would show on the screen in front of you. You kept a horizontally mobile boat within boundaries, or got pacman to eat rather than wilt. I'm sure there are others. It's not Neverwinter Nights but still an interesting experiment in hacking your brain and also relatively legit
Philip Hose Farmer (of 'Riverworld' and 'Tarzan vs. Doc Savage with boners') wrote Venus on the Half Shell. It's more Farmer's pulpy-sex stylings than Vonnegut's/Trout's 'Farting and tap-dancing' kind of thing.
Beta testers volunteer. The cachet attached to being part of the beta, the ability to see things first, as well as the opportunity to make the game better is sufficient for them to to do so.
MMORPGs are, by definition, massive. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to get that level of stress testing if you had to pay the required number of people - even in freebies.
The number of successful vs unsuccessful launches of MMORPGs would be quite interesting to calculate.
Interesting comparison. Straczynski did practically all of the writing for late B5, whereas Whedon doesn't actually write or direct many episodes - though he is apparently involved in all of them.
Bear in mind, though, that B5 ran for only 5 seasons (which was planned, I know) - and in my humble opinion the final season was not his best work (I liked it, but not as much the previous two - if you loved it, good for you). I seem to recall that even he aquiesced to such criticism later, citing a certain tunnel vision derived from exhaustion - but I can't find a reference without looking even less like I'm working - you can always ask on usenet or something >;-). In any event - Whedon, too, is claiming tiredness in most of the interviews I've read.
Of course, the 5th was also the season B5 switched networks - like season 6 of Buffy. Perhaps there's a link to network hopping and shark jumping.
From Jules Verne, to Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Pope Gregory XIV (IIRC), to Thomas Edison... and millions more in the 19th they all used cocaine, frequently...
but they could have stopped any time they wanted, right?
On the other hand - "lies, swear words, misunderstandings, misspellings, everything" - this is also the situation with usenet and google separates that. That said - I have a blog (which I thoughtfully won't link to here), and I think the separation would be a good idea - despite the extra hits I get from people googling obscure children's movies that I mentioned in passing six months ago. I'd be happy enough with an opt-out situation, but I think google would be more useful to me if it filtered them by default and created a blogosphere search. Surely the aim is greater control over the types of hits a search returns. And how much do massive blogrolls skew pagerank anyway?
Budism on the other hand is different. I am not an expert of budism but I think it teaches that we are encarnated into other life forms depending how we lived our lives. If we live a good enough life we enter nirvana and break this continual reincarnation cycle.
Not so much. There's better states of existance ('gods') than this as well as worse ('hungry ghosts') to be 'reborn' into (a usually confusing choice of words considering the buddhist belief in anatman - or the lack of a continuing soul - just don't ask me to explain it). The way to nirvana is a bit more complex than merely being good.
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The radio series was a curious mishmash of high and low tech. It was one of the first dramas to be recorded (or rather assembled) on multi-track track tape - and I believe it was one, if not the, first to be broadcast in stereo. Listening to it in headphones provides all manner of sonic trickery. That said, much of what was assembled was done in a low tech kind of way, such as playing stuff at the wrong speed and kicking effects boxes.
Actually - you can have multiple IEs on the same machine (as in box) if you run several virtual PCs on it. We have a box dedicated to exactly that for testing purposes.
Heh - I liked how the 'La' is covered up on the Infinium Labs sign in 'Dude, Woah'. Subtle. Well, subtlish.
Yeah we did - it was just a non-localised phenomenon
The movie version of 'Day of the Triffids' had that very plot device. Which makes the psycho-vegetables' decision to hang out by a lighthouse a little...ill-advised. Intelligent plants? Pshaw! Their spelling was crap as well.
Well, no. MMORPGs usually have monthly subscription charges - so the longer (in months rather than more as in hours) you continue to play the more money is made. 200,000 players at 15/month (a la EQ and SWG) makes for an additional incentive to provide 'addictive' qualities in-game. There's a brief description of the 'Skinner' characteristics of EQ here.
You are correct that the actual game programmer might not be directly advantaged (except by continued employment and company stability) but the suit who writes his paycheck will be - providing more than enough incentive.
My own take is that the developers probably weren't purposely trying to make people emulate lab rats with food pellets - but CRPG games since, say, Wizardry had been evolving in this direction. The closest to a Skinner model so far - EQ - was such a financial success (for this and other reasons - social being high amongst them) that other companies are scrambling to incorporate their own versions. Eventually, though, the possible player base will max out, whereupon, with all those potential lab rats out there playing someone else's game - the purveyors of addictive pellets are going to have to really smarten them up, hopefully with actual content and not just eye candy.
Correct! You win a bottle of refreshing Slurm - fresh from the slug's plug!
Specifically, catharsis is the cleansing of emotions, described by Aristotle as the effect of watching drama - eg, if you watch a sad play you will feel better for having purged (kathairein) yourself of the emotion 'sadness'.
I don't know if performing virtual evil acts quite counts in this sense, unless you feel some kind of remorse or guilt for your virtual actions.
I have a grotty old PII 350 with 64mb on win98 (not SE - for some absurd historical reason that I no longer believe and I don't expect anyone else to either) and I use Moz exclusively for tabbed browsing and spam filtering goodness. It's faster than IE from my perspective and, unlike IE, doesn't fall over more often than a one legged man in a falling over competition.
Of course, it's not actually here, and it's by M$, so you may wish to diss it out of hand. But it seems to answer a number of your issues - except possibly the death downtime.
[ok] [ok spelled 'cancel']
Opencroquet as discussed here is all this and less - not a FPS, but none the less an interesting alternative to those other run-of-the-mill net-based 3d operating systems.
I, too, have a number one hit on Google - for hunkmuffin - referring to, interestingly enough, me noticing that I had the number one hit on Google for hunkmuffin. Pretty meta, eh?
Mind you - I haven't touched that blog in a couple of months as it was getting too damn cold to get out of bed in time to write it before work. Soon they'll want more money as well, so - sod it. It wasn't particularly funny anyway. Well, maybe once. Around last december.
I'm going to second this. I've been around machines for most of my life - my dad was a comp-sci lecturer. But I was always more interested in playing games, especially Infocom games, and used to play them for hours on end. Programming seemed to lead to a job working in a bank writing financial applications, so I never really bothered with it. I did Engligh Lit and Philosophy at varsity.
Flash forward to '96 (age 25) - I still didn't know much more than a few lines of BASIC but I came across Inform while surfing (via Lynx, natch) at work and, wanting to actually create what I'd enjoyed playing so much so many years ago, I began working on my first ever piece of compiled code. Happily - the explosion of the net took my tech writing job further and further into web-based stuff - for which I used my newfound, Inform-taught knowledge of to pick up Javascript and VBScript along with a smattering of db concepts. With a few minor apps under my belt as demos - I got a job as an Internet Developer (can you spell 'underprepared'?) and struggled to remain on top of the Perl and Java I was expected to handle. Now, a few years later, I'm writing TCL on-site. In a Bank. For a web-based financial application. GAHHHHH! What was I thinking?
That said - I would never have even gone down this path had there not been a specific result I wanted to achieve. I suspect children would be similar. If they enjoy reading, start with Inform. Cartoon junkie? - a little actionscript maybe, if you can afford the flash dev software. You want something that appeals to their existing talents and interests - I don't think it's a one size fits all scenario. Sure, anything with iteration, recursion, variables etc will do the job - but keep the end result in mind.
This is in line with my reaction to the whole Star Child story line: why throw religious mysticism into a sci-fi flick
Like 2001. Great movie, up until the appearance of that stupid star child. Ruined the whole thing. There should have been more HAL - he could've become corporeal and ridden a tandem bicycle with knives coming out of the wheels. That would have been kewl.
They also were looking for food, slaves, and soldiers, of which Europa had none.
Just keep on believing that, human. And attempt no landings there.
If our world were virtual, and had no detail below 10 microns, or a tenth of one, or a thousandth, scientists with knowledge of what should be, would notice
Surely it would be less cyle intensive to only run that kind of software when such thing were being measured or observed. They're entirely likely to figure out how to counteract Heisenberg in the next version.
Actually, biofeedback also includes neurofeedback. It's still a science in its infancy, but they use electroencepholgraphs to measure electrical activity in the brain - and can train it to achieve certain certain states. Of particular note to me was training towards what are normally considered sleep states while still conscious (alpha and theta states). These are done via sound cues, but while doing beta (a more typically conscious state) training you kept your eyes open - and the way you knew your brain was 'in the zone' was that a video game would show on the screen in front of you. You kept a horizontally mobile boat within boundaries, or got pacman to eat rather than wilt. I'm sure there are others. It's not Neverwinter Nights but still an interesting experiment in hacking your brain and also relatively legit
But yes - the graphics sucked.
Philip Hose Farmer (of 'Riverworld' and 'Tarzan vs. Doc Savage with boners') wrote Venus on the Half Shell. It's more Farmer's pulpy-sex stylings than Vonnegut's/Trout's 'Farting and tap-dancing' kind of thing.
On the other hand:
Beta testers volunteer. The cachet attached to being part of the beta, the ability to see things first, as well as the opportunity to make the game better is sufficient for them to to do so.
MMORPGs are, by definition, massive. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to get that level of stress testing if you had to pay the required number of people - even in freebies.
The number of successful vs unsuccessful launches of MMORPGs would be quite interesting to calculate.
Interesting comparison. Straczynski did practically all of the writing for late B5, whereas Whedon doesn't actually write or direct many episodes - though he is apparently involved in all of them.
Bear in mind, though, that B5 ran for only 5 seasons (which was planned, I know) - and in my humble opinion the final season was not his best work (I liked it, but not as much the previous two - if you loved it, good for you). I seem to recall that even he aquiesced to such criticism later, citing a certain tunnel vision derived from exhaustion - but I can't find a reference without looking even less like I'm working - you can always ask on usenet or something >;-). In any event - Whedon, too, is claiming tiredness in most of the interviews I've read.
Of course, the 5th was also the season B5 switched networks - like season 6 of Buffy. Perhaps there's a link to network hopping and shark jumping.
Until we are able to reduce productivity like dogs in the street we will not be free.
From Jules Verne, to Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Pope Gregory XIV (IIRC), to Thomas Edison... and millions more in the 19th they all used cocaine, frequently ...
but they could have stopped any time they wanted, right?
On the other hand - "lies, swear words, misunderstandings, misspellings, everything" - this is also the situation with usenet and google separates that. That said - I have a blog (which I thoughtfully won't link to here), and I think the separation would be a good idea - despite the extra hits I get from people googling obscure children's movies that I mentioned in passing six months ago. I'd be happy enough with an opt-out situation, but I think google would be more useful to me if it filtered them by default and created a blogosphere search. Surely the aim is greater control over the types of hits a search returns. And how much do massive blogrolls skew pagerank anyway?
Budism on the other hand is different. I am not an expert of budism but I think it teaches that we are encarnated into other life forms depending how we lived our lives. If we live a good enough life we enter nirvana and break this continual reincarnation cycle.
Not so much. There's better states of existance ('gods') than this as well as worse ('hungry ghosts') to be 'reborn' into (a usually confusing choice of words considering the buddhist belief in anatman - or the lack of a continuing soul - just don't ask me to explain it). The way to nirvana is a bit more complex than merely being good.