A system similar to this has been in place for a while at the University of Florida. I talked to several of our professors using it and they claim that it is quite effective. It detects the obvious ways that students try to obfuscate their cheating, e.g. changing variable names, whitespace, etc. Whenever the program turns up a match, the professor examines them by hand before calling the students into his office. In almost all cases, the students confess. The first semester it was put in place, nearly a third of the students in the Intro course were caught cheating! The rate hasn't been that high since.
When the programs assigned are sufficiently complex, the odds of finding two people with the exact same decision tree is quite small.
I've been thinking about this a lot since I took those CS theory classes. Since so many problems can be "reduced" to each other (that is a solution for one can be converted to a solution to the other) you would think that some of those problems would be fun to solve, while others would be boring. Just think if we could find a "fun" variant of Travelling Salesperson...
IANAL, but didn't the Lotus/Quattro Pro case from back in the 80s say that the user interface for a piece of software wasn't covered by copyright? I think the judge compared it to all VCRs having the same sequence of REW-PLAY-FF-STOP.
What about Lara Croft? Given the incredible popularity of her games despite their repetitive gameplay, I think that would make her a sex symbol and teen idol.
I've been toying around with the idea of using mine to build one of those old table-top arcade cabinets. You know, the old ones where each player would sit across from each other and look at the screen embedded in the table. The only real problem is getting the screen to flip vertically when its the other player's turn. Don't really know how to deal with that. (Beyond the low-tech solution of mounting the TV on a rotating wheel and turning it myself...)
I got my latest job using that exact strategy. I put together an open source web logging app (Lumberjack) and that certainly helped me get this job. Without that, I was just another recent graduate with no "real" experience.
Why is this such a big deal? Both of these systems are mega-hyped, and will undoubtedly both sell out, regardless of a few days difference between the two. The only effect this move might have is making the systems sell out faster, cause if you went to the store to buy an Xbox, but they were all out, you might just pick up a Gamecube instead, and vice versa. You can't increase sales beyond the number of units you can make.
Games such as RPGs, RTS, etc are obviously art, since a storyline is often involved, and I'm pretty sure that most people will agree that story telling is an artform.
Why do so many people insist that the artistic merit of a game is based in its ablility to tell a story? Art doesn't need to tell a story: look and painting or sculpture. Especially modern works. A game itself is a work of art, not just the story part of it (if it even has one). There are many art forms for which story-telling is far better suited: film, novel, spoken word, etc. Surely no one would suggest that Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was art because it told a story, but not his "Symphony #6" because it didn't! There is a lot more to art than telling a story.
Re:creative writing vs. technical writing
on
Are Videogames Art?
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· Score: 1
The defining factor, I think, is the fact that it has a story. A computer game tells a story with a protagonist, an antagonist, a setting, theme, plot, climax...everything you need for a decent novel.
It certainly doesn't take a story to make a good video game. Look at Tetris, or Pac-Man.
The important thing about a video game in making it art isn't the story. That just make it a narrative, which no one argues is an art form. The question is whether or not a game, that is a rule system, is art. A good game creates its own story. The story of playing it. People will come from a game of Starcraft and tell you how close they were to stopping that zerg rush this time. Or about that time they caught a diving catch in the end zone. Or how they took this huge gamble and managed to nab the other guys Queen.
Before one can consider question as to whether video games are art, one should first consider whether other types of games are art as well. Why should a game, when implemented by a computer, suddenly become art? If the new edition of Candyland has really well-done pictures, does that make it better art than the older version of Candyland? No, we would just say that the pictures are very nice art. The real question here is whether or not the system of rules that make the game, as opposed to its trappings, is art or not. Any good game designer spends much more time on balancing the rules of the game (unit power, skill level, etc.), than coming up with a compelling story. A good game doesn't need a narrative. The best traditional games, Chess, Go, Poker, Football, etc. have no narrative at all aside from the player's experience with the game.
Its extremely difficult to discuss the relative merits of games because we have yet to develop a universe of discourse for discussing them. That's why when you read video game critics they often go on and on about the latest Final Fantasy and its compelling storyline. We already have a way to discuss story (through literature) and in the past century we've developed a way to talk about film. We simply need to find a way to talk about the unique aspects of games. Currently, this is limited to vague ramblings about "gameplay." Why is chess so fun for its players? What is it people like about watching soccer? Why don't people play poker with all the cards wild? These are questions about games that need to be answered before we can discuss games as art. Until then, all we can say is whether we like X game better than Y game or not.
The thing that computers bring into the equation is the ability to use much more complicated rule system, and have those rule systems be transparent to the player. This is already creating much more sophisticated games by increasing dramatically the amount of tweaking and sculpting a game designer can do.
My senior year, the CISE dept. at UF switched to more team-oriented assignments at the request of the Industry folks who said that our graduates didn't know how to work in teams. Thus, every class I had my senior year had some sort of group project requirement. One class even allowed us to use unlicensed Internet code and other resources which are usually forbidden. I thought it worked well, and now that I have my first job in the "real world," I find that things work a lot more like those team projects. I found more satisfaction as the team leader of a project that actually did something, than being the sole coder on a little toy program that everyone else wrote too. The team approach also allowed our professors to make individual assignments for each team, so cheating was drastically reduced. Of course, these were all advanced classes, and everyone in them already had solid programming skills. I'm not sure if team-based projects would be good for the intro course. Far too easy for someone who doesn't know what they're doing to just slide through and and up dead-weight on an team at a later stage.
Slashdot Mirror
A system similar to this has been in place for a while at the University of Florida. I talked to several of our professors using it and they claim that it is quite effective. It detects the obvious ways that students try to obfuscate their cheating, e.g. changing variable names, whitespace, etc. Whenever the program turns up a match, the professor examines them by hand before calling the students into his office. In almost all cases, the students confess. The first semester it was put in place, nearly a third of the students in the Intro course were caught cheating! The rate hasn't been that high since. When the programs assigned are sufficiently complex, the odds of finding two people with the exact same decision tree is quite small.
A similar system was developed at Columbia.
Now all you have to do is define 'force'.
Even more difficult would be trying to define 'property.'
I've been thinking about this a lot since I took those CS theory classes. Since so many problems can be "reduced" to each other (that is a solution for one can be converted to a solution to the other) you would think that some of those problems would be fun to solve, while others would be boring. Just think if we could find a "fun" variant of Travelling Salesperson...
IANAL, but didn't the Lotus/Quattro Pro case from back in the 80s say that the user interface for a piece of software wasn't covered by copyright? I think the judge compared it to all VCRs having the same sequence of REW-PLAY-FF-STOP.
As far as I can tell, all the Midwest customers are still out. I'm in Michiana, and my only connection is at work.
What about Lara Croft? Given the incredible popularity of her games despite their repetitive gameplay, I think that would make her a sex symbol and teen idol.
First seen in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
I've been toying around with the idea of using mine to build one of those old table-top arcade cabinets. You know, the old ones where each player would sit across from each other and look at the screen embedded in the table. The only real problem is getting the screen to flip vertically when its the other player's turn. Don't really know how to deal with that. (Beyond the low-tech solution of mounting the TV on a rotating wheel and turning it myself...)
I got my latest job using that exact strategy. I put together an open source web logging app (Lumberjack) and that certainly helped me get this job. Without that, I was just another recent graduate with no "real" experience.
Why is this such a big deal? Both of these systems are mega-hyped, and will undoubtedly both sell out, regardless of a few days difference between the two. The only effect this move might have is making the systems sell out faster, cause if you went to the store to buy an Xbox, but they were all out, you might just pick up a Gamecube instead, and vice versa. You can't increase sales beyond the number of units you can make.
Games such as RPGs, RTS, etc are obviously art, since a storyline is often involved, and I'm pretty sure that most people will agree that story telling is an artform. Why do so many people insist that the artistic merit of a game is based in its ablility to tell a story? Art doesn't need to tell a story: look and painting or sculpture. Especially modern works. A game itself is a work of art, not just the story part of it (if it even has one). There are many art forms for which story-telling is far better suited: film, novel, spoken word, etc. Surely no one would suggest that Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was art because it told a story, but not his "Symphony #6" because it didn't! There is a lot more to art than telling a story.
It certainly doesn't take a story to make a good video game. Look at Tetris, or Pac-Man.
The important thing about a video game in making it art isn't the story. That just make it a narrative, which no one argues is an art form. The question is whether or not a game, that is a rule system, is art. A good game creates its own story. The story of playing it. People will come from a game of Starcraft and tell you how close they were to stopping that zerg rush this time. Or about that time they caught a diving catch in the end zone. Or how they took this huge gamble and managed to nab the other guys Queen.
Its extremely difficult to discuss the relative merits of games because we have yet to develop a universe of discourse for discussing them. That's why when you read video game critics they often go on and on about the latest Final Fantasy and its compelling storyline. We already have a way to discuss story (through literature) and in the past century we've developed a way to talk about film. We simply need to find a way to talk about the unique aspects of games. Currently, this is limited to vague ramblings about "gameplay." Why is chess so fun for its players? What is it people like about watching soccer? Why don't people play poker with all the cards wild? These are questions about games that need to be answered before we can discuss games as art. Until then, all we can say is whether we like X game better than Y game or not.
The thing that computers bring into the equation is the ability to use much more complicated rule system, and have those rule systems be transparent to the player. This is already creating much more sophisticated games by increasing dramatically the amount of tweaking and sculpting a game designer can do.
My senior year, the CISE dept. at UF switched to more team-oriented assignments at the request of the Industry folks who said that our graduates didn't know how to work in teams. Thus, every class I had my senior year had some sort of group project requirement. One class even allowed us to use unlicensed Internet code and other resources which are usually forbidden. I thought it worked well, and now that I have my first job in the "real world," I find that things work a lot more like those team projects. I found more satisfaction as the team leader of a project that actually did something, than being the sole coder on a little toy program that everyone else wrote too. The team approach also allowed our professors to make individual assignments for each team, so cheating was drastically reduced. Of course, these were all advanced classes, and everyone in them already had solid programming skills. I'm not sure if team-based projects would be good for the intro course. Far too easy for someone who doesn't know what they're doing to just slide through and and up dead-weight on an team at a later stage.