And it worked. Over a decade later, I'm still programming. I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Logo was my first brush with programming. I still have fond memories. Obviously, no one approach works for everyone and just because one way worked for you, that does not mean another might not work for someone else.
Even if people don't become programmers, just understanding the way computers work is invaluable. Where I work, I'm providing classes on how to do reporting off our CRM system. Do I expect every user to write their own reports? Not really. The hat I was hired in under is report writer and there's a lot of stuff that's too complex for the typical user to figure out. But with a proper grounding in the theory of how the system works, I can at least have a productive conversation when troubleshooting a report.
What really astounds me is when people show a fundamental lack of understanding of their own business logic. No, this isn't computer stuff I'm asking you to learn. If computers were never invented, you'd be doing this with index cards. The same logic would apply. But they don't get it. I just can't understand the thinking that goes behind "I have no idea what I'm asking for and wouldn't recognize the correct solution if I saw it but I'm in charge and do what I say." But fixing that kind of disconnect is above my pay grade.
I'm not sure if the engine referenced is responsible for rendering graphics. I am a HUGE Bethesda fanboy... I'll admit it. I LOVE Oblivion and all of it's DLC as well as Morrowind and Fallout 3. However, those plastic looking expressionless faces are sub par for such fantastic games. I realize that this is a difficult thing to accomplish with current technology and that most games suffer from this to some extent. The other thing that bugs me about the engine is that the women are very manly looking. If I were Bethesda, my big focus for my next engine iteration would be on having the character models show at least a little bit of emotion and make the women look like women.
It's not a limitation of the engine, just the meshes and textures used with it. There are plug-ins for Oblivion to make pretty characters. The results are extraordinary. There's also nudie plugins so you can have your character running around naked and bursting with nipply health.
If anything, Bethesda's next big game should find it even easier to make pretty characters, assuming they put forth the effort.
C&C has always been my favourite RTS series. It has a nice balance of not being overly complicated, so that you can focus on the actually strategy part, without being overly involved with micromanaging things like upgrading buildings and researching new technologies. I am looking forward to playing this one.
Interesting. I dislike it for the simplicity and lack of innovation.
The damn AI's make me want to cry in these games. Here's all this new graphical bling and we're seeing the same pathfinding problems first encountered a decade ago. Graphics don't matter if the stupid's no better.
I think the reason why Dune 2 didn't suffer as much was because they didn't try as much. When you can select a gaggle of troops, give a move command and watch them fail, you get frustrated. In Dune 2, you couldn't select like that, you had to click on each unit to give movement orders. With the smaller maps and smaller battles, I know I ended up micromanaging every movement, there wasn't an opportunity for the AI to do anything stupid. With the newer games, the scale prevents that kind of play and so the weakness of the AI's becomes harder to ignore.
On the console, Armored Core is considered a tweaker's delight but there's just too many options of marginal difference. I like the broad categories of adding armor, trading armor for speed, etc, but Armored Core took it to the point where you needed a PhD in Fanwank to come up with anything.
The thing that never made any sense to me with the Battletech setting is everyone runs a personal mech and few units shared two mechs of the same type. How in the hell do you run supply lines like that? Ok, maybe the merc outfits in the boonies would be scraping together a mixed team but you'd think the major Houses would operate uniform units simply to keep the supply chain sensible.
I had a berry at the last job with telenav. It was very slick but telenav was a fee every month, plus ridiculous berry charges. I don't have a job that comes with a berry so I have a cheapie cell now. Do I feel some tech lust when looking at the latest smartphones? Sure, but the monthly fee is like a swift kick to the crotch, erasing all interest. No fucking way I'm paying that much. Get back to me when unmetered data plans are part of the basic package.
While the downside with stand-alone GPS receivers is that they only get updated maps once a year, the upside is that there's no recurring fee with them. You pays your admission and you pays no more. And the Garmin Navi's have gotten really frickin' cheap! Reliable, dependable, great maps for the areas I drive in.
I think there will always be a market for stand-alone gps just like there's always going to be a market for bargain basement no-frills cell phones.
I, for one, keep to the old ways. I keep a compass and a paper map in my car and have thusfar avoided buying a satnav for fear of blunting my orienteering skills gained through my time spent in Scouts. A valuable skill which I'm sure will keep me from hitting the wall when the revolution comes.
A car? Such extravagance! Me and mine don't cotton to such tomfoolery, no sir. A horse and buggy were good enough for my sire and his his sire before him and on back some ten generations. If it's good enough for them, then by the heavens above, it's good enough for me. I suppose you wear buttons, too.
Taking a bet that fails isn't necessarily a mistake.
Yeah, but there's a good bet and there's a stupid bet. It's like building a golf course in the desert. Yes, it can be done, people do it. But the irrigation demands will be far higher than in sane places and even a child could tell you that you'd need to make sure you have access to water for it to even be feasible. No water, no golf course. This is just basic due diligence. It's like aluminum smelting plants, they use gigawatts of electricity to separate aluminum from the ore. Because of the ridiculous power demands, smelters need to be located near cheap power like hydro-electric. That's one of the primary driving factors for determining where the work is done. It's more efficient to ship the unprocessed ore to a distant smelter than to try and do it near the mine with expensive local electricity.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
There has to be something more to it than that. Maybe he thought he could get the state to pay for it or something the way sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club. These public-private partnerships usually end up being a way to fuck the public out of tax dollars.
Electrical transmission technology is well-understood. There shouldn't be any technical surprises. The wind turbines are the new wrinkle but even they shouldn't be that big of a problem. It's not like he's trying to build a fusion reactor with technology that doesn't exist yet. There has to be a non-technical reason behind this.
Wow. I've seen this same kind of mistake happen in the little companies I work for, spending money on stuff right before plans change. I've seen this kind of mistake but never personally witnessed one of them this big. Looks like I'm going to have to RTFA to see what changed the deal after all the checks were signed.
Given the state of the net, it's not really built for twitch gaming, at least in certain mmo's. Eve Online makes you fly your ship through autopilot. How fun is that? I want a joystick! Well, joysticks would suck. The game is laggy and you couldn't possibly enjoy it like that. Using autopilot and hotkeys, less twitching is required.
That being said, there were specific reasons why I found EVE difficult and un-fun and quit. The ship customization system didn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense to me. A lot of people enjoyed it but I found it illogical and counter-intuitive. The grinding to get anywhere lost appeal and I didn't have the time to devote to becoming a member of an elite company to do stuff. Then there's also the amount of time it takes to build a character. You need to be familiar with the game or have a friend who knows how to advise you to become useful at anything. Players said they could get a month-old account combat-worthy with the right skills learned but someone trying to make a rounded character would suffer for it. Obsessives would multi-account and have a miner, fighter, industrialist, etc.
In EVE you could really stack things against noobs. PVE setups aren't always good for PVP. The PVP guy comes into the fight with the ship rigged for exactly that. Carebear goes lowsec to hunt pirates, the PVPer is sitting there running probes. Finds out where the noob is, warps in, noob starts to panic because he sees a new hostile. PVP guy already has scramble drones out, has a real good chance of nailing the target down before he can warp out. He has optimized weapons for the fight, knows how to tank his shields or armor, carebear is soon dead. Carebear likely won't know why he's dead but is furious that he lost a ton of isk just trying to get rats.
The problem with EVE is that a certain set believe that harshness is a good thing and want as grim and unpleasant an environment as possible. But to have fun with that, the wolves need sheep -- carebears in this case. And so carebears just want to have some fun, build up some nice ships, not do anything hasty or risky. But it's difficult to get anywhere in highsec and so forays into lowsec are made, wolves pounce and say the game is great. Carebears eventually get fed up and leave.
I gave up on EVE because it required a ridiculous investment of time to learn the ropes and get everywhere. Yes, I could probably have mastered all of the intricacies of politics and equipping my ship and learning how to pvp properly but jesus christ, I've got shit to do! Real life shit! I want my video games to be relaxing, not a second job.
"This is the best sunspot I've seen in two years."
... MAN does this guy need to get laid.
For all you know he could be one of those bad-ass astronomers they make movies about and he could have been sitting at the 'scope looking at the spot while getting a blow job from a hot chick like in Swordfish.
Media Player will try to download codecs for certain wmv files. I stick with VLC and never use wmv's. But someone I know used the wmv and downloaded the codec and got a rootkit instead. I'd not previously heard of this method of attack but it doesn't surprise me a jot.
Tie Fighter is still one of my absolute favorite games of all time. Even as I upgraded my computer for years I'd make sure I could still play it somehow. Its also the only reason I have a joystick.
So yes, I'd love to see it come back. I love Tie Fighters version of space combat.
Get X-Wing Alliance. Seriously. It's the last of the Original Trilogy space games, or so LucasArts pledged when the nuTrilogy was coming out. All the yummy Tie Fighter goodness with a much better story! Worth playing.
Just think one day we can grow massive "pillars" in the earth, and these "pillars" can sequester carbon and be powered by the sun as they grow. Then as they reach a certain height and are no longer as efficient as they once were, we can take them down and use them as fuel. We can then plant new pillars to grow and use the by products from old burnt "pillars" to help the new ones grow. Perhaps then if we properly manage these "pillar farms" and modify the "pillars" just right we can have them absorb more carbon from the air than they release when burned for fuel.
But then we'd have these "pillars" all over the place and would not be able to see the forest for them.
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
last time i saw a serious discussion about this sort of thing, it came up that when you use 3D instead of 2D, alot of special effect break. E.G.It becomes quite obvious that that choreographed punch went behind the other actors head. Will the worry of special/camera effects breaking put tv/film producers off encouraging the leap to 3D?
If this means the actors will have to actually take the punch now, I think I might start enjoying Nicholas Cage movies.
Trust is inherently illogical and irrational and yet it works. Society is built on networks of trust -- most of our institutions and infrastructure that allow life to go on the way it does right now depends on the vast majority of people playing by the rules. Rules which, for the most part, are arbitrary. There are very few rules that are "naturally derived" -- For example, not murdering people is a naturally derived rule because we can't exactly make going extinct legal. O.o Traffic laws are, for the most part, arbitrary -- red means stop, green means go, drive on the left (or right), etc. But we'd never be able to use the shared public resource (the highway) without them.
Human beings are social creatures. In order to survive, we have to trust one another. Every social organizational structure is derived from this basic concept -- it simply varies in how we trust, to what degree, and to whom.
If you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, trust is an excellent adaptation for a social species. Being trusting is the sort of thing that might not work so well for a given individual but works out for the species in the long run. It's like cuteness. What's the evolutionary purpose of finding creatures with infantile features and proportions cute? Easy: it's so we don't murder our young. If those little darlings didn't worm their way into our hearts at first sight, it's for damn sure they wouldn't make it through the third night of random crying, feeding, and diaper changes.
Of course, it's always possible to push the boundaries of society to the point where people stop trusting. We're in danger of this very thing right now. I mean shit, there's a lot of trust involved in working for two weeks with the understanding that there will be a paycheck on payday! I've seen smaller companies so fucked up that the boss has to pay on a weekly, sometimes daily schedule because people don't trust him. We're seeing that in the economy at large as the expectations of the common citizen have become more and more cynical through time. Republicans exist to fuck the poor to death. Democrats exist to pretend to be an alternative to getting fucked to death and while they're taking no direct part in the rape, they're standing in the corner stroking their puds while the Republicans go to town.
Once that social contract is broken, all the scotch tape in the world won't put it back together again.
EVE continues to be an interesting study in politics and intrigue but I will forever fail to understand its appeal as an MMO. I've tried playing it - it totally does not appeal to me in any way, what-so-ever. It was about as dreadfully boring as a game could possibly be without being nothing at all. In my opinion. But, its political backstabbings and manipulations of its systems sure as hell generate some interesting stories... Intensely interesting and dreadfully boring at the same time.
Perversely enough, those are exactly the play mechanics they wanted to emulate.
MMORPG's are weird beasts. On one hand, it doesn't feel like an RPG because nobody is in character, nobody is playing according to the setting's fluff. It all feels like a bunch of game geeks dorking around on a video game. But on the other hand, these seemingly average, real-life people can be anything but. I'm not just talking about the mild-mannered high school mathlete who becomes a griefing dickhead when he gets online, I'm talking about the people who work out the elaborate con jobs. There was one massive screw-job that took over a year to plan and execute. You don't really know anyone.
I played EVE briefly and am firmly in the carebear camp. If a game is any bit more complicated and involved than an FPS deathmatch, I'd prefer to be playing as a team rather than in competition.
The time it takes to put into a game like this, to get anywhere, to pull off these virtual coups, it's mental illness in a can. We're talking obsessive behavior, unhealthy commitments of time not seen outside of stalker/murderer ex's and the terminally ambitious.
Of the rpg's I've played in recent years, the ones that were the most tedious were the ones lacking in good stories. It makes the entire play experience feel like a chore.
If bad storytelling is the first sin, then the second has to be needless complication. Oblivion is the prettiest rpg I have ever seen but the leveling mechanics were atrocious.
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming. I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks. If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.
Slashdot Mirror
And it worked. Over a decade later, I'm still programming. I'm not really convinced that "game" based programming systems do anything to inspire the young programmer. I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Logo was my first brush with programming. I still have fond memories. Obviously, no one approach works for everyone and just because one way worked for you, that does not mean another might not work for someone else.
Even if people don't become programmers, just understanding the way computers work is invaluable. Where I work, I'm providing classes on how to do reporting off our CRM system. Do I expect every user to write their own reports? Not really. The hat I was hired in under is report writer and there's a lot of stuff that's too complex for the typical user to figure out. But with a proper grounding in the theory of how the system works, I can at least have a productive conversation when troubleshooting a report.
What really astounds me is when people show a fundamental lack of understanding of their own business logic. No, this isn't computer stuff I'm asking you to learn. If computers were never invented, you'd be doing this with index cards. The same logic would apply. But they don't get it. I just can't understand the thinking that goes behind "I have no idea what I'm asking for and wouldn't recognize the correct solution if I saw it but I'm in charge and do what I say." But fixing that kind of disconnect is above my pay grade.
I'm not sure if the engine referenced is responsible for rendering graphics. I am a HUGE Bethesda fanboy... I'll admit it. I LOVE Oblivion and all of it's DLC as well as Morrowind and Fallout 3. However, those plastic looking expressionless faces are sub par for such fantastic games. I realize that this is a difficult thing to accomplish with current technology and that most games suffer from this to some extent. The other thing that bugs me about the engine is that the women are very manly looking. If I were Bethesda, my big focus for my next engine iteration would be on having the character models show at least a little bit of emotion and make the women look like women.
It's not a limitation of the engine, just the meshes and textures used with it. There are plug-ins for Oblivion to make pretty characters. The results are extraordinary. There's also nudie plugins so you can have your character running around naked and bursting with nipply health.
If anything, Bethesda's next big game should find it even easier to make pretty characters, assuming they put forth the effort.
C&C has always been my favourite RTS series. It has a nice balance of not being overly complicated, so that you can focus on the actually strategy part, without being overly involved with micromanaging things like upgrading buildings and researching new technologies. I am looking forward to playing this one.
Interesting. I dislike it for the simplicity and lack of innovation.
The damn AI's make me want to cry in these games. Here's all this new graphical bling and we're seeing the same pathfinding problems first encountered a decade ago. Graphics don't matter if the stupid's no better.
I think the reason why Dune 2 didn't suffer as much was because they didn't try as much. When you can select a gaggle of troops, give a move command and watch them fail, you get frustrated. In Dune 2, you couldn't select like that, you had to click on each unit to give movement orders. With the smaller maps and smaller battles, I know I ended up micromanaging every movement, there wasn't an opportunity for the AI to do anything stupid. With the newer games, the scale prevents that kind of play and so the weakness of the AI's becomes harder to ignore.
On the console, Armored Core is considered a tweaker's delight but there's just too many options of marginal difference. I like the broad categories of adding armor, trading armor for speed, etc, but Armored Core took it to the point where you needed a PhD in Fanwank to come up with anything.
The thing that never made any sense to me with the Battletech setting is everyone runs a personal mech and few units shared two mechs of the same type. How in the hell do you run supply lines like that? Ok, maybe the merc outfits in the boonies would be scraping together a mixed team but you'd think the major Houses would operate uniform units simply to keep the supply chain sensible.
I had a berry at the last job with telenav. It was very slick but telenav was a fee every month, plus ridiculous berry charges. I don't have a job that comes with a berry so I have a cheapie cell now. Do I feel some tech lust when looking at the latest smartphones? Sure, but the monthly fee is like a swift kick to the crotch, erasing all interest. No fucking way I'm paying that much. Get back to me when unmetered data plans are part of the basic package.
While the downside with stand-alone GPS receivers is that they only get updated maps once a year, the upside is that there's no recurring fee with them. You pays your admission and you pays no more. And the Garmin Navi's have gotten really frickin' cheap! Reliable, dependable, great maps for the areas I drive in.
I think there will always be a market for stand-alone gps just like there's always going to be a market for bargain basement no-frills cell phones.
I, for one, keep to the old ways. I keep a compass and a paper map in my car and have thusfar avoided buying a satnav for fear of blunting my orienteering skills gained through my time spent in Scouts. A valuable skill which I'm sure will keep me from hitting the wall when the revolution comes.
A car? Such extravagance! Me and mine don't cotton to such tomfoolery, no sir. A horse and buggy were good enough for my sire and his his sire before him and on back some ten generations. If it's good enough for them, then by the heavens above, it's good enough for me. I suppose you wear buttons, too.
I still haven't figured out what constitutes a valid submission and what would be considered mindless tosh to be rejected.
Taking a bet that fails isn't necessarily a mistake.
Yeah, but there's a good bet and there's a stupid bet. It's like building a golf course in the desert. Yes, it can be done, people do it. But the irrigation demands will be far higher than in sane places and even a child could tell you that you'd need to make sure you have access to water for it to even be feasible. No water, no golf course. This is just basic due diligence. It's like aluminum smelting plants, they use gigawatts of electricity to separate aluminum from the ore. Because of the ridiculous power demands, smelters need to be located near cheap power like hydro-electric. That's one of the primary driving factors for determining where the work is done. It's more efficient to ship the unprocessed ore to a distant smelter than to try and do it near the mine with expensive local electricity.
From the article:
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He'd hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
There has to be something more to it than that. Maybe he thought he could get the state to pay for it or something the way sports team owners seem to expect the taxpayers should pay for their little athletic club. These public-private partnerships usually end up being a way to fuck the public out of tax dollars.
Electrical transmission technology is well-understood. There shouldn't be any technical surprises. The wind turbines are the new wrinkle but even they shouldn't be that big of a problem. It's not like he's trying to build a fusion reactor with technology that doesn't exist yet. There has to be a non-technical reason behind this.
Wow. I've seen this same kind of mistake happen in the little companies I work for, spending money on stuff right before plans change. I've seen this kind of mistake but never personally witnessed one of them this big. Looks like I'm going to have to RTFA to see what changed the deal after all the checks were signed.
Given the state of the net, it's not really built for twitch gaming, at least in certain mmo's. Eve Online makes you fly your ship through autopilot. How fun is that? I want a joystick! Well, joysticks would suck. The game is laggy and you couldn't possibly enjoy it like that. Using autopilot and hotkeys, less twitching is required.
That being said, there were specific reasons why I found EVE difficult and un-fun and quit. The ship customization system didn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense to me. A lot of people enjoyed it but I found it illogical and counter-intuitive. The grinding to get anywhere lost appeal and I didn't have the time to devote to becoming a member of an elite company to do stuff. Then there's also the amount of time it takes to build a character. You need to be familiar with the game or have a friend who knows how to advise you to become useful at anything. Players said they could get a month-old account combat-worthy with the right skills learned but someone trying to make a rounded character would suffer for it. Obsessives would multi-account and have a miner, fighter, industrialist, etc.
In EVE you could really stack things against noobs. PVE setups aren't always good for PVP. The PVP guy comes into the fight with the ship rigged for exactly that. Carebear goes lowsec to hunt pirates, the PVPer is sitting there running probes. Finds out where the noob is, warps in, noob starts to panic because he sees a new hostile. PVP guy already has scramble drones out, has a real good chance of nailing the target down before he can warp out. He has optimized weapons for the fight, knows how to tank his shields or armor, carebear is soon dead. Carebear likely won't know why he's dead but is furious that he lost a ton of isk just trying to get rats.
The problem with EVE is that a certain set believe that harshness is a good thing and want as grim and unpleasant an environment as possible. But to have fun with that, the wolves need sheep -- carebears in this case. And so carebears just want to have some fun, build up some nice ships, not do anything hasty or risky. But it's difficult to get anywhere in highsec and so forays into lowsec are made, wolves pounce and say the game is great. Carebears eventually get fed up and leave.
I gave up on EVE because it required a ridiculous investment of time to learn the ropes and get everywhere. Yes, I could probably have mastered all of the intricacies of politics and equipping my ship and learning how to pvp properly but jesus christ, I've got shit to do! Real life shit! I want my video games to be relaxing, not a second job.
"This is the best sunspot I've seen in two years."
... MAN does this guy need to get laid.
For all you know he could be one of those bad-ass astronomers they make movies about and he could have been sitting at the 'scope looking at the spot while getting a blow job from a hot chick like in Swordfish.
I haven't been this surprised since Amazon turned a profit.
Media Player will try to download codecs for certain wmv files. I stick with VLC and never use wmv's. But someone I know used the wmv and downloaded the codec and got a rootkit instead. I'd not previously heard of this method of attack but it doesn't surprise me a jot.
The summary is leaving me confused. Is this an amateur video satirizing the RIAA or is this really from an anti-copyright infringement group?
Tie Fighter is still one of my absolute favorite games of all time. Even as I upgraded my computer for years I'd make sure I could still play it somehow. Its also the only reason I have a joystick.
So yes, I'd love to see it come back. I love Tie Fighters version of space combat.
Get X-Wing Alliance. Seriously. It's the last of the Original Trilogy space games, or so LucasArts pledged when the nuTrilogy was coming out. All the yummy Tie Fighter goodness with a much better story! Worth playing.
Just think one day we can grow massive "pillars" in the earth, and these "pillars" can sequester carbon and be powered by the sun as they grow. Then as they reach a certain height and are no longer as efficient as they once were, we can take them down and use them as fuel. We can then plant new pillars to grow and use the by products from old burnt "pillars" to help the new ones grow. Perhaps then if we properly manage these "pillar farms" and modify the "pillars" just right we can have them absorb more carbon from the air than they release when burned for fuel.
But then we'd have these "pillars" all over the place and would not be able to see the forest for them.
A food that, when eaten, transforms an agressive predator into a passive life form....
Wedding cake.
Passive-aggressive life form you mean.
I think it's wonderful that the code has been reintroduced to the wild. Looks like their captive breeding program has been quite a success!
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
So maybe it was a pretty day out?
Hopefully the station's AI won't go rampant this time around.
last time i saw a serious discussion about this sort of thing, it came up that when you use 3D instead of 2D, alot of special effect break. E.G.It becomes quite obvious that that choreographed punch went behind the other actors head. Will the worry of special/camera effects breaking put tv/film producers off encouraging the leap to 3D?
If this means the actors will have to actually take the punch now, I think I might start enjoying Nicholas Cage movies.
Trust is inherently illogical and irrational and yet it works. Society is built on networks of trust -- most of our institutions and infrastructure that allow life to go on the way it does right now depends on the vast majority of people playing by the rules. Rules which, for the most part, are arbitrary. There are very few rules that are "naturally derived" -- For example, not murdering people is a naturally derived rule because we can't exactly make going extinct legal. O.o Traffic laws are, for the most part, arbitrary -- red means stop, green means go, drive on the left (or right), etc. But we'd never be able to use the shared public resource (the highway) without them.
Human beings are social creatures. In order to survive, we have to trust one another. Every social organizational structure is derived from this basic concept -- it simply varies in how we trust, to what degree, and to whom.
If you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, trust is an excellent adaptation for a social species. Being trusting is the sort of thing that might not work so well for a given individual but works out for the species in the long run. It's like cuteness. What's the evolutionary purpose of finding creatures with infantile features and proportions cute? Easy: it's so we don't murder our young. If those little darlings didn't worm their way into our hearts at first sight, it's for damn sure they wouldn't make it through the third night of random crying, feeding, and diaper changes.
Of course, it's always possible to push the boundaries of society to the point where people stop trusting. We're in danger of this very thing right now. I mean shit, there's a lot of trust involved in working for two weeks with the understanding that there will be a paycheck on payday! I've seen smaller companies so fucked up that the boss has to pay on a weekly, sometimes daily schedule because people don't trust him. We're seeing that in the economy at large as the expectations of the common citizen have become more and more cynical through time. Republicans exist to fuck the poor to death. Democrats exist to pretend to be an alternative to getting fucked to death and while they're taking no direct part in the rape, they're standing in the corner stroking their puds while the Republicans go to town.
Once that social contract is broken, all the scotch tape in the world won't put it back together again.
EVE continues to be an interesting study in politics and intrigue but I will forever fail to understand its appeal as an MMO. I've tried playing it - it totally does not appeal to me in any way, what-so-ever. It was about as dreadfully boring as a game could possibly be without being nothing at all. In my opinion. But, its political backstabbings and manipulations of its systems sure as hell generate some interesting stories... Intensely interesting and dreadfully boring at the same time.
Perversely enough, those are exactly the play mechanics they wanted to emulate.
MMORPG's are weird beasts. On one hand, it doesn't feel like an RPG because nobody is in character, nobody is playing according to the setting's fluff. It all feels like a bunch of game geeks dorking around on a video game. But on the other hand, these seemingly average, real-life people can be anything but. I'm not just talking about the mild-mannered high school mathlete who becomes a griefing dickhead when he gets online, I'm talking about the people who work out the elaborate con jobs. There was one massive screw-job that took over a year to plan and execute. You don't really know anyone.
I played EVE briefly and am firmly in the carebear camp. If a game is any bit more complicated and involved than an FPS deathmatch, I'd prefer to be playing as a team rather than in competition.
The time it takes to put into a game like this, to get anywhere, to pull off these virtual coups, it's mental illness in a can. We're talking obsessive behavior, unhealthy commitments of time not seen outside of stalker/murderer ex's and the terminally ambitious.
Of the rpg's I've played in recent years, the ones that were the most tedious were the ones lacking in good stories. It makes the entire play experience feel like a chore.
If bad storytelling is the first sin, then the second has to be needless complication. Oblivion is the prettiest rpg I have ever seen but the leveling mechanics were atrocious.
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming. I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks. If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.