It was a great game until you get to the queen bee. She kicked my proto-lizard ass. Apparently the trick to beating her and other difficult opponents is repeatedly evolving and de-evolving your form, which has the side effect of restoring your health. Or maybe I just suck. Meh.
I just don't think that copyright has any bearing on the value of the original work.
Agreed.
I'm just tired of people here blaming copyright laws for everything. My apologies that I jumped to conclusions.
No problem, as long as you don't mind the fact that your response is what elicited the typical anti-copyright slashdot rant.;) I didn't initially intend on going off into a whole spiel, I was just adding to the parent's observation/opinion with what I thought was a related one of my own.
Personally, I would be very suprised to see copyright laws in their current form survive in our lifetime, let alone 500 years. The way we handle creative works has dramatically and fundamentally changed in a relatively short time. (50 years or so) The way we treat them legally will have to change as well to keep up. It won't be too long before the people running the country are the same people who grew up with digital distribution and file-sharing.
I hope you're right.:) Games and art that are lost to obscurity today and in the near future will be lost to generations in the distant future regardless of what their copyright laws look like.
Perpetual copyright is bad, agreed. But it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic at hand. Put your straw-man away.
If "paper vs. digital media" is relavent to the question of whether today's video games will be enjoyed as "classic art" hundreds of years in the future, then I have to think that copyright law in the coming years is also pertinent. Copyrighted work would seem less likely to be preserved via redundancy in media than content that can be shared freely without any fear of litigation.
Think about the next generation of games in particular, or games that are currently protected by systems such as Starforce which can sometimes make it difficult for even legitimate users using contemporary PCs to play the games sometimes. As the original media that these games are stored on deteroirates, and the inconvenience of playing these locked down games increases as a result of changes in hardware architecture and operating systems, I expect that within a century, many games will be scarely exist in anything resembling playable form any longer, especially if companies actively discourage their only means of distribution from person to person, because they can, because of perpetual copyright.
The advantage of paper, as the parent points out, is that it will always exist and that it doesn't require any special tools to be properly interpretered and understood by humans. This is an advantage that video games will never enjoy. However, computer games, as purely digital content, would at least be able to take advantage one of the advantages of digital media, and that is the ease and efficiency with which it can be copied. Work in the public domain can be legally modified to strip out or alter anything that might interfere with it running properly on a computer. Perpetual copyright, DRM, etc. all get in the way of this.
So, yeah, I think it's relavent. Maybe not to the issue of whether or not video games qualify as art in the same sense of Shakespeare, but it is relavent to the question of whether or not today's classic games will be a part of our culture and history in the distant future, assuming it is art (and I think it is).
You agree that perpetual copyright is a bad idea, but then you accuse me of using this is a straw-man argument. Sorry, but I thought the idea behind copyright was to grant limited protection from copying, with the understanding that it would eventually enter the public domain to the benefit of society and culture. If you agree that perpetual copyright is a bad idea, can you explain why, if you don't think it is relavent to the question of whether video games qualify as art, the impact it may have on culture and its likelihood of current works emerging as classics to be studied and enjoyed by future generations?
True, perpetual copyright is probably a threat to preservations of other art forms as well (such as music and movies, which are also increasingly created and distributed as digital media) but that doesn't invalidate my initial observation in any way that I can tell.
Plus there's the fact that Shakespeare wrote at a time when work would still enter the public domain, instead of being locked up in perpetual copyright.
I've said it manytimes, but I'm going to say it again... Spore looks like it will be a fun game, but what's most exciting to me about it is the heavy emphasis it puts on procedural generation... the way the game is smart enough to figure out how to animate the virtually endless variety of creatures you're going to be able to create... and also because of how easy Wil makes it look to create content using the tools included as a part of the game.
Raph Koster outlines in his presentation titled Moore's Wall how, right now, the growing power of computers is making games prohibitively expensive to produce. As the power of the machine grows, there is pressure to utitlize the new power to improve on the presentation (mainly, the graphics) of the game, which makes the game a lot more costly produce without adding much in terms of gameplay, and usually resulting in a reduction in the amount of actual game content.
One way to break this trend is to utilize the increasing CPU power of PCs to procedurally generate content, or to assist the player in creating his their own content. Of course, our procedural algorithims and software have to improve a lot if it's going to be an important supplement (let alone replacement) to the traditional way of doing things, which is to have professional artists hand-craft everything.
In this regard, Spore looks to be a huge step in the right direction. We need more projects like Spore to mature the technology. The fact that EA seems to be recognizing Wil's genious and throwing their support behind his project is a good thing, if the suits at top see the promise of this kind of approach, it can only mean good things for the industry. EA was not exactly in love with the idea of The Sims before it was proven an unmitigated success, despite the fact that Will was already an acclaimed game designer well before that game's release. So, even if EA isn't entirely turning over a new leaf, at least they're trusting their golden boy enough to say that they're pinning their hopes on his newest experimental idea.
(the St. Louis Hilton populated by hundreds of inebriated gaming geeks.)
Oops, it the Sheraton, not Hilton. I have to admit that it is all kind of a blur, given that I didn't get much sleep over the few days that I was there, owing to the fact that I was sharing a room (with two beds) with eleven other people.
Bearing in mind that I don't know her AT ALL and in fact she seems like a perfectly well-adjusted person from reading her webpages, I can't help but wonder why she isn't married - and has apparently never been - at the age of 48 which she's totally a reasonably attractive woman.
I think it's just that she's intelligent enough to realize that the idea of marriage doesn't appeal to her, though of course, there could be more to it than that. I don't know her personally, but I did meet her one year at SimuCon and the conversation I had with her strongly suggested to me that she is quite sexually liberated, and this may account for her apparent aversion to monogamy. She was flirtatious and didn't seem socially awkward to me, but then I suppose you have to consider the setting (the St. Louis Hilton populated by hundreds of inebriated gaming geeks.)
A lot of men would probably feel threatened by this type of woman, and that might make it difficult for her to find someone to settle down with, assuming she wants to.
Or course she could be wacko-nuts, for all I know, but I kind of doubt it. She's certainly different/special, and that alone, in the perceptions of many, would make her at least a little "crazy".
*sigh* Unless you're playing FFXI, Final Fantasy does not have a multiplayer component. Which is the whole purpose of LAN parties. How about you list every other console RPG ever made, and let us know how many LAN parties you've seen for those? And how LAN parties are the ultimate determination of every franchise ever?
Regardless, Final Fantasy is not the "end all and be all" of anything. Halo hasn't been around as long as Final Fantasy so it has a more limited track record, but so far, in terms of sales it's been at least as successful as the best selling Final Fantasy releases, if you compare them on a title-by-title basis.
Yeah. What kind of gaming company would pass up a chance for a commercial smash-hit like Second Life: The Second Coming in exchange for a derivative also-ran like World of Warcraft.
You kid, but the nature of World of Warcraft, and its immense success makes it a tough act to follow. Blizzard made it big with WoW because they produced a game that was exceptionally polished (at least compared to other MMOs out there) and to a lesser degree, because they had a name many people knew and trusted. The game took a fortune to develop. World of Warcraft is not particularly innovative, but it did raise the bar with regard to graphics/art style in MMOs, and it took some of the better aspects of other MMOs and packaged them together neatly with character progression (at the lower levels) that was less prohibitive than most other MMOs at the time.
The question is, will the same formula work a second time? In order to match the success of World of Warcraft, it will be necessary for people to either defect from WoW (or at else maintain multiple MMO subscriptions), or attract fresh blood (people who currently aren't interested in MMOs or don't know about them... this is what put WoW in its current position, I think).
It suppose it's possible that someone else might duplicate Blizzard's strategy and just create a more refined, polished, prettier game and enjoy a comparable number of buyers/subscribers, but it's far from a sure thing, and any attempt to one-up Blizzard is going to be enormously expensive in terms of development costs.
Which is not to say that it's a bad idea for anybody to pursue. I have no doubt that WoW would still be very profitable even if they only had a half or even a quarter of their current subscriptions and sales to date.
You can't expect gamers to get too excited over the next WoW clone, though, and I think that anybody who thinks they're going to duplicate WoW's success or even eclipse it by improving on WoW the same way that WoW improved on EverQuest is going to find themselves disappointed, or at very least, severely challenged.
But there is another way. There is Second Life... a "game" that many people dismiss, but the concept is exciting, even if the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Think of it was Ultima Online and the other early online games that came before the term "MMO" had been coined. Primitive in many respects, but a promising concept with a strong (albeit small) following, and vast room for improvement.
Content creation doesn't have to be hard. In Second Life, it's difficult, but watching Wil Wright's Spore presentation, you can see how it can be a lot easier.
I think the next big expolosion in the popularity of the MMO genre isn't going to be another fantasy hack and slash with prettier graphics, better designed content and a more tolerable system for character progression.
It's going to be a fusion of the maturing concepts being pioneered today by games like Second Life and Spore and others. Powerful, intuitive content creation tools in the hands of users. Vast worlds that are largely procedurally generated (or crafted by developers using tools that heavily rely on advanced prodcedural generation) that makes unnecessary and obsolete the hacky server shards and dungeon instancing that is the current status quo. It may be a "metaverse" reality that does not revolve around a single avenue of play (combat), but instead is a reality with many games to be played and tasked to be performed, each appealing in its own right, but still linked together as a whole in a coherant manner.
I'm not saying that this sort of game is just over the horizon. A few technologies still have a lot of maturing to do, and then it's going to take someone with the balls and bankroll to make it a reality, and even then, perfection in execution is far from being guaranteed. In a few generations though, I think that the evolved successor to Second Life is going to make the success of World of Warcraft (and its copycats) look absolutely quaint by comparison.
I'm of the opinion that we should reform our entire election process nearly from the ground up. Trash the electoral college and the plurality voting system and implement the Condorcet method instead and have everyone's vote count equally, regardless of their geographical location (assuming eligibility to vote on a particular ballot to begin with).
All voting machines should be open source and the systems should be utterly transparent. All machines should provide a paper receipt and ballot, to allow individuals to easily verify their selections and in the event that a manual recount is needed, for whatever reason.
Our elections are at the foundation of our democracy. If they are broken or flawed, our entire system of government is flawed. Reforming our elections to do everything humanly possible to make it so the system accurately reflects the will of the elecorate should be one of our nation's very highest priorities.
Seems like Nintendo had some kind of game coming in the fall though...jeez, what was it called? The Legend of something or other.
That was my initial thought as well, but guess what else is scheduled for a fall release? That's right, the Nintendo Revolution. So the Twilight Princess isn't exactly going to be the game that is going to hold us over until the release of the Revolution. If anything it may be the first game we play on the Revolution. It's the GameCube's swan song, or the Revolution's fanfare... probably not the GameCube's savior or life support mechanism.
"The way of the GameCube" likely refers to the plumetting number of consoles sold. The NES sold 60 million units. SNES sold 49 million. N64 sold 32 million. The GameCube has sold about 21 million. Not a good trend for Nintendo, regardless of how profitable they are.
If the Revolution sells fewer units than the GameCube, it's going to be hard for anybody, even Nintendo fanboys and Nintendo themselves to see that as anything but a failure. As the article explains, they need move beyond their niche appeal and break into the mainstream somehow if they don't want their home console business to sink into the abyss. If the rate of decline of sales in this generation doesn't improve from the last generation, the Revolution will barely sell more units than the Dreamcast.
I personally think Nintendo will recover in this generation, though. That's what I'm hoping, anyway. The 360 launch debacle and the PS3 delay certainly can't hurt. Nintendo is in a position to pull off a huge upset if things fall into place.
Re:4 of the top ten are Final Fantasy?
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Japan's Top 100 Games
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I saw this on Kotaku, and thought it was pretty hilarious. I can't understand how Dragon Quest III is rated above the Ocarina of Time. That particular iteration of Dragon Quest was not particularly outstanding, from what I've played of it... it's immediate successor, Dragon Quest IV was a lot better, IMO, but neither come close to touching the Ocarina of Time, which was a fresh, exciting game at the time of its release and screamed quality and fun from beginning to end.
Of course, you have to keep in mind that this a "player's choice" poll, not a list composed by critics or game developers, so it's not surprising to see so much fanboy influence. Still, it leads me to believe that Famitsu readers must be completely out of their gourd to be so utterly in love with menu-driven third person, turn-based RPG combat and cliched storylines to the exclusive of almost anything else.
The problem is that it's not your fault. It's a game-design fault. Why does the game require ridiculous amounts of game time?
I agree, in a way. This is why I find the Station Exchange somewhat offensive. What's Sony's solution to their poor game design that makes progress a slow, boring, repetitive grind? Have people to pay them more money to mitigate the unpleasant aspects of the game resulting from their design failures, of course. Maybe I'm just jealous that I haven't figured out a way to earn money from my deficiencies, though.
However, I don't think it's ever going to be possible to create a persistent world where the amount of time you put into the game isn't somehow significantly rewarded. What is needed is a way for players to feel as if they are always making steady progress, even if they only play a few hours per week, in 15-90 minute game sessions (oh, and these sessions should be fun), without quickly exhausting all of the game's content. Should it really matter if you never hit the level cap, or catch up to the high school kids, as long as it doesn't seem to take gross lengths of time to gain cool new skills and see interesting new areas?
Another approach would be a deemphasis on progression altogether, in favor of a setting that is more focused on providing "sandbox" styles of gameplay, or player vs. player activity, etc.
EVE Online - while I only played it shortly - appears to have one big part of the problem solved: Skills increase through automatic training that depends on only one factor: Real time passed. Whether you're online playing or offline sleeping/working/whatever doesn't matter. You gain x experience points per hour.
Which to me doesn't appear to do much beyond give those who have been playing the game longer (real time instead of play time) an insurmountable lead and exclusive access to certain abilities (or at least, exclusive access to a variety of abilities). Someone who opens a subscription today can never hope to achieve an avatar as skillful as someone who's been playing from day one, no matter how clever and skilled they might be as a player (correct me if I'm wrong here though, my EVE playtime was also very limited).
And there's still plenty of mind-numbing grinding to do in EVE if you want to progress, in the form of mining asteroids or whatever. Though EVE does support a thriving player driven economy from what I've seen, one that the enterprising, clever or devious player can take advantage of to get rich much more quickly than one could achieve merely from grinding asteroids or NPC pirates for ISK.
I do see EVE as a positive step in the right direction, because the players have a larger degree of control over the shape of the world, they can create their own challenges for themselves to keep the game interesting, without necessarily requiring the devs to release new content. Or at least, so it seems. Like I said, I haven't played the game a whole lot myself.
A good game should reward good playing, not more playing.
I agree, I would like to see more games that reward skill rather than playtime, but how to accomplish this? If it's a persistent world, then inevitably those who have more time to play not only spend more time honing their skills and are more likely to become a better player, but spend more time reaping the rewards of successful play, gaining mechanical advantages in the form of their avatar gaining more skill, better equipment, more privledges, etc.
The only way I can see to reward skill over time is to make it easy to lose progress you've made as a result of your failures. There are already games like this, but they are niche games, not massively popular ones like World of Warcraft.
Raph Koster put it this way, "... is there necessarily something wrong with giving people without significant skill (which is
Re:What exactly is this hurdle Blizzard speaks of?
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No WoW for the 360
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· Score: 1
WoW mods have created mods that have made it possible to create a list of every attack, ability and spell and cycle through them using one button. That pretty much screams "advantage" right there.
I was speaking of an advantage the PC user would have over a console user. If the PC user can customize and add new functionality to his interface in ways that a console user can't, the PC user has a definite advantage. As it is now, everybody who plays WoW can take advantage of virtually any addon out there if they want.
And WoW's interface is considered to be the WORST of all MMOs out there, so Blizzard isn't one to talk.
Considered the worst by whom? This is the first time I've ever heard anybody classify it as one of the "worst" UIs. I rarely hear any bad things about WoW's interface. The default set up is not my favorite, but it's sufficiently functional for most people once they get used to it... and considering that you can tweak/mod the interface to display and function just about any way you want, I can't see much reason to complain too much. Or is your chief complaint that it is too customizable, to the point where it's abusable and trivializes the gameplay? That's certainly a valid concern, but I think, for the most part, they have kept the UI in line. If anything this is a concern that they've made the UI too good.
I'm not some rabid Blizzard fanboy though. World of Warcraft is the first Blizzard game I've really gotten into, and I no longer play it because it simply doesn't appeal to me much at the moment. The interface is definitely not one of the things that drove me away, however (if anything, it's one of the things that kept me around so long... I loved tinkering with the interface), whereas in the case of Final Fantasy XI (the only console MMO I've played) the interface was one of my major sore points with the game, and definite a contributing factor to my decision to quit.
Re:What exactly is this hurdle Blizzard speaks of?
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No WoW for the 360
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· Score: 0, Troll
The thing about Final Fantasy XI is that the user interface sucks, hard... and I think a large part of that sucking has to do with the fact that you can't create an interface that is as robust or customizable on the console as you can for the PC.
This isn't a problem if you have a servicable but necessarily somewhat poor console interface, while allowing PC players to enjoy all of the benefits of having a more powerful UI... that isn't the route Square Enix has chosen to take, though, and it's one of the things that alienated me and ultimately drove me away from Final Fantasy XI. I suppose they don't want to give an "advantage" to PC users that console users don't have. Maybe Blizzard has similar reservations, but they don't have the option of crippling their existing game because it'd mean losing lots of customers.
And just because Square-Enix has shown that interoperability is possible, it doesn't mean it was easy for them, and this was a game that was created from the ground up to be playable on a PS2. Porting a game that was designed for the PC to a console would impose some significant new challenges, I would assume.
This is one of the things I liked most about Morrowind. I never even bothered to complete the main quest, I just had fun running around and finding new and very cool things. To each their type of play, I guess. For playing them since the old 'Arena' days, that's what always did it for me.
You're right, it all depends on what you're looking forward in a game. I found the exploration aspect of Morrowind to be mildly enjoyable, but fell far short of what I think of as a great gaming experience. That's why I'm presuming Oblivion will be a "good" game with a legion of obsessed players, but I'm not sold on Oblivion being a true gaming masterpiece as opposed to being an impressive virtual "art gallery" of sorts that the player has some limited interaction with.
Everything I've read at the bethesda site about the actual play time is quite ambiguous. Will there be a huge mess of side quests to get into? I really, REALLY loved that aspect in Morrowind. It's nice to know they'll still have guilds.
I've read in an interview or something somewhere that had a dev quoted as saying it's still a game that's measured in the hundreds of hours rather than the tens of hours (with 200 hours being the most often quoted figure, and about 20 hours for the main quest I believe).
Perhaps Oblivion is constrained by the enormous cpu/memory costs of having a LOT of Radiant AI characters in the virtual world?
Possibly, but I don't think this is it. Just like for graphics, there will be a "level of detail" for NPC AI so that distant NPCs participate in less complex behaviors and are checked for these behaviors much less frequently.
I forget the exact numbers, but I don't think there are going to be that many fewer NPCs/quests in Oblivion compared to Morrowind. Fewer, yes, but I'm not so sure it will really be that noticable of a difference, and the quality of the NPCs and quests is supposed to be higher.
No. Bestheda will be producing mods that you'll be able to purchase for a small fee, but the TES construction set will not be included with the 360 version, and to my knowledge, no player made mods will be usable on the 360.
This is one thing they are definitely addressing in Oblivion, with their vaunted Radiant AI. To summarize, NPCs will have goals and will have various means of achieving those goals. The most often mentioned example is that of an NPC getting hungry, and going to the store and buying some food. Or they might steal it, or go hunting for it.
It sounds promising. In the official Oblivion forums I read one of the anecdotes shared by the developers while testing/tinkering with NPCs. They created some NPC that had it as part of his daily schedule to sweep his porch (or something like that), the problem is they didn't give him a broom. So what does this enterprising NPC do? He goes inside his house, gets his trusty axe, and murders a fellow townsperson who happens to have a broom, takes the broom and proceeds to sweep his front porch.
Obviously at that point the AI required a bit of tweaking, but even in this "blooper" it demonstrates some of the game's promise in the area of NPC intelligence and behaviors.
I don't think there's much doubt that this is going to be a good game that many people will become obsessed with. The question is, will it live up to the hype? Arguably, Morrowind did not, due to a laundry list of deep flaws, not the least or greatest of which (in my opinion) were the bland NPCs. They have to figure out a way to make the game fun as opposed to just plopping the player down in a vast world and expecting him to be happy to wander around awestruck by the environments they're surrounded by.
The main issue I had with Morrowind is that it was too easy, and seemed almost designed to be exploited. I suppose this is a difficult problem to avoid in an open ended game where the player is supposed to be empowered to do any number of things any number of different ways, but it really weaken the entire game experience. I really hope they fix this in Oblivion.
Spore isn't exciting to me just because it looks like it'll be a really cool game. It's exciting because the ideas behind it could infuse some new life into the industry as a whole. The idea of giving players very simple, intuitive tools with which to create content, to actual make that content creation part of the game itself (as opposed to something you do externally with modding software) is promising.
Also, nice as the quasi-online element of Spore sounds to be, I long to see how this concept might be applied to more traditional online games, such as MMOs. With just a bit of extension, I could see the technologies being created/exploited in Spore applied to an online version of Starflight or The Ur-Quan Masters, but with even larger slices of the galaxy and more detailed planet surfaces, life forms, etc. and alien ships that you encounter are not pre-scripted encounters with NPCs (or at least, not all of them) but interactions with other players. Or your more traditional fantasy MMORPG, where instead of fighting the same re-textured orcs and rats for six months, each new area you explore features completely new monsters.
Best of all if they could combine these technologies (easy to use tools for developers and/or players to create stuff, procedural generation to breathe life into these creations and to populate vast landscapes very quickly), with other features and technologies that have been growing in popularity and maturity over the past couple years, such as realistic physics, destructible environments and more robust AI. This could open the door for a persistent world that is truly mutable, where players are free to create, destroy and explore an almost unimaginably vast world. It could be the ultimate sandbox experience that could combine aspects of various beloved genres as well (FPS, RPG, whatever).
If Spore itself doesn't qualify as something awesomely different from everything that has come before, then at least it could be a big step towards a game or games that do qualify as such.
The only thing holding me back from a definite DS Lite purchase (and preorder when they become available) is the fact that I just don't have much opportunity to game outside the house very often, and I feel a little silly playing a portable game console at home, when I could be playing games on my 21" TV or my 19" LCD monitor.
Although the unique games on the DS may make it worth it, I almost figure I might as well just hold out for the Revolution (which I am definitely preordering, barring the event that everybody who is privledged with a Revolution preview ending up saying the controller doesn't work well) which will surely offer many unique games of its own.
That, plus I just got an iPod for my birthday and I'm going to have enough trouble figuring out when I'm going to use it... I'm not sure I want my DS Lite competing with it for my time! I wish my birthday were several months later, then I could have just asked for the DS Lite (I didn't ask for the iPod).:\
Maybe their rationale is that LCDs are a better value overall, due to the fact that they consume a lot less space, less power (though it'd probably be a good long while before the price difference is recouped through electric bills) and are easier on the eyes than CRTs.
Going from an CRT to an LCD is a very noticable and appreciable upgrade for most people. It's not like adding a somewhat better processor that will give you an imperceptible 17% improvement in performance or whatever. Depends on your needs and preferences, that extra $100 is very well spent.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a great game until you get to the queen bee. She kicked my proto-lizard ass. Apparently the trick to beating her and other difficult opponents is repeatedly evolving and de-evolving your form, which has the side effect of restoring your health. Or maybe I just suck. Meh.
Agreed.
I'm just tired of people here blaming copyright laws for everything. My apologies that I jumped to conclusions.
No problem, as long as you don't mind the fact that your response is what elicited the typical anti-copyright slashdot rant. ;) I didn't initially intend on going off into a whole spiel, I was just adding to the parent's observation/opinion with what I thought was a related one of my own.
Personally, I would be very suprised to see copyright laws in their current form survive in our lifetime, let alone 500 years. The way we handle creative works has dramatically and fundamentally changed in a relatively short time. (50 years or so) The way we treat them legally will have to change as well to keep up. It won't be too long before the people running the country are the same people who grew up with digital distribution and file-sharing.
I hope you're right. :) Games and art that are lost to obscurity today and in the near future will be lost to generations in the distant future regardless of what their copyright laws look like.
If "paper vs. digital media" is relavent to the question of whether today's video games will be enjoyed as "classic art" hundreds of years in the future, then I have to think that copyright law in the coming years is also pertinent. Copyrighted work would seem less likely to be preserved via redundancy in media than content that can be shared freely without any fear of litigation.
Think about the next generation of games in particular, or games that are currently protected by systems such as Starforce which can sometimes make it difficult for even legitimate users using contemporary PCs to play the games sometimes. As the original media that these games are stored on deteroirates, and the inconvenience of playing these locked down games increases as a result of changes in hardware architecture and operating systems, I expect that within a century, many games will be scarely exist in anything resembling playable form any longer, especially if companies actively discourage their only means of distribution from person to person, because they can, because of perpetual copyright.
The advantage of paper, as the parent points out, is that it will always exist and that it doesn't require any special tools to be properly interpretered and understood by humans. This is an advantage that video games will never enjoy. However, computer games, as purely digital content, would at least be able to take advantage one of the advantages of digital media, and that is the ease and efficiency with which it can be copied. Work in the public domain can be legally modified to strip out or alter anything that might interfere with it running properly on a computer. Perpetual copyright, DRM, etc. all get in the way of this.
So, yeah, I think it's relavent. Maybe not to the issue of whether or not video games qualify as art in the same sense of Shakespeare, but it is relavent to the question of whether or not today's classic games will be a part of our culture and history in the distant future, assuming it is art (and I think it is).
You agree that perpetual copyright is a bad idea, but then you accuse me of using this is a straw-man argument. Sorry, but I thought the idea behind copyright was to grant limited protection from copying, with the understanding that it would eventually enter the public domain to the benefit of society and culture. If you agree that perpetual copyright is a bad idea, can you explain why, if you don't think it is relavent to the question of whether video games qualify as art, the impact it may have on culture and its likelihood of current works emerging as classics to be studied and enjoyed by future generations?
True, perpetual copyright is probably a threat to preservations of other art forms as well (such as music and movies, which are also increasingly created and distributed as digital media) but that doesn't invalidate my initial observation in any way that I can tell.
Plus there's the fact that Shakespeare wrote at a time when work would still enter the public domain, instead of being locked up in perpetual copyright.
Raph Koster outlines in his presentation titled Moore's Wall how, right now, the growing power of computers is making games prohibitively expensive to produce. As the power of the machine grows, there is pressure to utitlize the new power to improve on the presentation (mainly, the graphics) of the game, which makes the game a lot more costly produce without adding much in terms of gameplay, and usually resulting in a reduction in the amount of actual game content.
One way to break this trend is to utilize the increasing CPU power of PCs to procedurally generate content, or to assist the player in creating his their own content. Of course, our procedural algorithims and software have to improve a lot if it's going to be an important supplement (let alone replacement) to the traditional way of doing things, which is to have professional artists hand-craft everything.
In this regard, Spore looks to be a huge step in the right direction. We need more projects like Spore to mature the technology. The fact that EA seems to be recognizing Wil's genious and throwing their support behind his project is a good thing, if the suits at top see the promise of this kind of approach, it can only mean good things for the industry. EA was not exactly in love with the idea of The Sims before it was proven an unmitigated success, despite the fact that Will was already an acclaimed game designer well before that game's release. So, even if EA isn't entirely turning over a new leaf, at least they're trusting their golden boy enough to say that they're pinning their hopes on his newest experimental idea.
Oops, it the Sheraton, not Hilton. I have to admit that it is all kind of a blur, given that I didn't get much sleep over the few days that I was there, owing to the fact that I was sharing a room (with two beds) with eleven other people.
I think it's just that she's intelligent enough to realize that the idea of marriage doesn't appeal to her, though of course, there could be more to it than that. I don't know her personally, but I did meet her one year at SimuCon and the conversation I had with her strongly suggested to me that she is quite sexually liberated, and this may account for her apparent aversion to monogamy. She was flirtatious and didn't seem socially awkward to me, but then I suppose you have to consider the setting (the St. Louis Hilton populated by hundreds of inebriated gaming geeks.)
A lot of men would probably feel threatened by this type of woman, and that might make it difficult for her to find someone to settle down with, assuming she wants to.
Or course she could be wacko-nuts, for all I know, but I kind of doubt it. She's certainly different/special, and that alone, in the perceptions of many, would make her at least a little "crazy".
Regardless, Final Fantasy is not the "end all and be all" of anything. Halo hasn't been around as long as Final Fantasy so it has a more limited track record, but so far, in terms of sales it's been at least as successful as the best selling Final Fantasy releases, if you compare them on a title-by-title basis.
You kid, but the nature of World of Warcraft, and its immense success makes it a tough act to follow. Blizzard made it big with WoW because they produced a game that was exceptionally polished (at least compared to other MMOs out there) and to a lesser degree, because they had a name many people knew and trusted. The game took a fortune to develop. World of Warcraft is not particularly innovative, but it did raise the bar with regard to graphics/art style in MMOs, and it took some of the better aspects of other MMOs and packaged them together neatly with character progression (at the lower levels) that was less prohibitive than most other MMOs at the time.
The question is, will the same formula work a second time? In order to match the success of World of Warcraft, it will be necessary for people to either defect from WoW (or at else maintain multiple MMO subscriptions), or attract fresh blood (people who currently aren't interested in MMOs or don't know about them ... this is what put WoW in its current position, I think).
It suppose it's possible that someone else might duplicate Blizzard's strategy and just create a more refined, polished, prettier game and enjoy a comparable number of buyers/subscribers, but it's far from a sure thing, and any attempt to one-up Blizzard is going to be enormously expensive in terms of development costs.
Which is not to say that it's a bad idea for anybody to pursue. I have no doubt that WoW would still be very profitable even if they only had a half or even a quarter of their current subscriptions and sales to date.
You can't expect gamers to get too excited over the next WoW clone, though, and I think that anybody who thinks they're going to duplicate WoW's success or even eclipse it by improving on WoW the same way that WoW improved on EverQuest is going to find themselves disappointed, or at very least, severely challenged.
But there is another way. There is Second Life ... a "game" that many people dismiss, but the concept is exciting, even if the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Think of it was Ultima Online and the other early online games that came before the term "MMO" had been coined. Primitive in many respects, but a promising concept with a strong (albeit small) following, and vast room for improvement.
Content creation doesn't have to be hard. In Second Life, it's difficult, but watching Wil Wright's Spore presentation, you can see how it can be a lot easier.
I think the next big expolosion in the popularity of the MMO genre isn't going to be another fantasy hack and slash with prettier graphics, better designed content and a more tolerable system for character progression.
It's going to be a fusion of the maturing concepts being pioneered today by games like Second Life and Spore and others. Powerful, intuitive content creation tools in the hands of users. Vast worlds that are largely procedurally generated (or crafted by developers using tools that heavily rely on advanced prodcedural generation) that makes unnecessary and obsolete the hacky server shards and dungeon instancing that is the current status quo. It may be a "metaverse" reality that does not revolve around a single avenue of play (combat), but instead is a reality with many games to be played and tasked to be performed, each appealing in its own right, but still linked together as a whole in a coherant manner.
I'm not saying that this sort of game is just over the horizon. A few technologies still have a lot of maturing to do, and then it's going to take someone with the balls and bankroll to make it a reality, and even then, perfection in execution is far from being guaranteed. In a few generations though, I think that the evolved successor to Second Life is going to make the success of World of Warcraft (and its copycats) look absolutely quaint by comparison.
I've been wrong before, though.
All voting machines should be open source and the systems should be utterly transparent. All machines should provide a paper receipt and ballot, to allow individuals to easily verify their selections and in the event that a manual recount is needed, for whatever reason.
Our elections are at the foundation of our democracy. If they are broken or flawed, our entire system of government is flawed. Reforming our elections to do everything humanly possible to make it so the system accurately reflects the will of the elecorate should be one of our nation's very highest priorities.
That was my initial thought as well, but guess what else is scheduled for a fall release? That's right, the Nintendo Revolution. So the Twilight Princess isn't exactly going to be the game that is going to hold us over until the release of the Revolution. If anything it may be the first game we play on the Revolution. It's the GameCube's swan song, or the Revolution's fanfare ... probably not the GameCube's savior or life support mechanism.
If the Revolution sells fewer units than the GameCube, it's going to be hard for anybody, even Nintendo fanboys and Nintendo themselves to see that as anything but a failure. As the article explains, they need move beyond their niche appeal and break into the mainstream somehow if they don't want their home console business to sink into the abyss. If the rate of decline of sales in this generation doesn't improve from the last generation, the Revolution will barely sell more units than the Dreamcast.
I personally think Nintendo will recover in this generation, though. That's what I'm hoping, anyway. The 360 launch debacle and the PS3 delay certainly can't hurt. Nintendo is in a position to pull off a huge upset if things fall into place.
Of course, you have to keep in mind that this a "player's choice" poll, not a list composed by critics or game developers, so it's not surprising to see so much fanboy influence. Still, it leads me to believe that Famitsu readers must be completely out of their gourd to be so utterly in love with menu-driven third person, turn-based RPG combat and cliched storylines to the exclusive of almost anything else.
I agree, in a way. This is why I find the Station Exchange somewhat offensive. What's Sony's solution to their poor game design that makes progress a slow, boring, repetitive grind? Have people to pay them more money to mitigate the unpleasant aspects of the game resulting from their design failures, of course. Maybe I'm just jealous that I haven't figured out a way to earn money from my deficiencies, though.
However, I don't think it's ever going to be possible to create a persistent world where the amount of time you put into the game isn't somehow significantly rewarded. What is needed is a way for players to feel as if they are always making steady progress, even if they only play a few hours per week, in 15-90 minute game sessions (oh, and these sessions should be fun), without quickly exhausting all of the game's content. Should it really matter if you never hit the level cap, or catch up to the high school kids, as long as it doesn't seem to take gross lengths of time to gain cool new skills and see interesting new areas?
Another approach would be a deemphasis on progression altogether, in favor of a setting that is more focused on providing "sandbox" styles of gameplay, or player vs. player activity, etc.
EVE Online - while I only played it shortly - appears to have one big part of the problem solved: Skills increase through automatic training that depends on only one factor: Real time passed. Whether you're online playing or offline sleeping/working/whatever doesn't matter. You gain x experience points per hour.
Which to me doesn't appear to do much beyond give those who have been playing the game longer (real time instead of play time) an insurmountable lead and exclusive access to certain abilities (or at least, exclusive access to a variety of abilities). Someone who opens a subscription today can never hope to achieve an avatar as skillful as someone who's been playing from day one, no matter how clever and skilled they might be as a player (correct me if I'm wrong here though, my EVE playtime was also very limited).
And there's still plenty of mind-numbing grinding to do in EVE if you want to progress, in the form of mining asteroids or whatever. Though EVE does support a thriving player driven economy from what I've seen, one that the enterprising, clever or devious player can take advantage of to get rich much more quickly than one could achieve merely from grinding asteroids or NPC pirates for ISK.
I do see EVE as a positive step in the right direction, because the players have a larger degree of control over the shape of the world, they can create their own challenges for themselves to keep the game interesting, without necessarily requiring the devs to release new content. Or at least, so it seems. Like I said, I haven't played the game a whole lot myself.
A good game should reward good playing, not more playing.
I agree, I would like to see more games that reward skill rather than playtime, but how to accomplish this? If it's a persistent world, then inevitably those who have more time to play not only spend more time honing their skills and are more likely to become a better player, but spend more time reaping the rewards of successful play, gaining mechanical advantages in the form of their avatar gaining more skill, better equipment, more privledges, etc.
The only way I can see to reward skill over time is to make it easy to lose progress you've made as a result of your failures. There are already games like this, but they are niche games, not massively popular ones like World of Warcraft.
Raph Koster put it this way, "... is there necessarily something wrong with giving people without significant skill (which is
I was speaking of an advantage the PC user would have over a console user. If the PC user can customize and add new functionality to his interface in ways that a console user can't, the PC user has a definite advantage. As it is now, everybody who plays WoW can take advantage of virtually any addon out there if they want.
And WoW's interface is considered to be the WORST of all MMOs out there, so Blizzard isn't one to talk.
Considered the worst by whom? This is the first time I've ever heard anybody classify it as one of the "worst" UIs. I rarely hear any bad things about WoW's interface. The default set up is not my favorite, but it's sufficiently functional for most people once they get used to it ... and considering that you can tweak/mod the interface to display and function just about any way you want, I can't see much reason to complain too much. Or is your chief complaint that it is too customizable, to the point where it's abusable and trivializes the gameplay? That's certainly a valid concern, but I think, for the most part, they have kept the UI in line. If anything this is a concern that they've made the UI too good.
I'm not some rabid Blizzard fanboy though. World of Warcraft is the first Blizzard game I've really gotten into, and I no longer play it because it simply doesn't appeal to me much at the moment. The interface is definitely not one of the things that drove me away, however (if anything, it's one of the things that kept me around so long ... I loved tinkering with the interface), whereas in the case of Final Fantasy XI (the only console MMO I've played) the interface was one of my major sore points with the game, and definite a contributing factor to my decision to quit.
This isn't a problem if you have a servicable but necessarily somewhat poor console interface, while allowing PC players to enjoy all of the benefits of having a more powerful UI ... that isn't the route Square Enix has chosen to take, though, and it's one of the things that alienated me and ultimately drove me away from Final Fantasy XI. I suppose they don't want to give an "advantage" to PC users that console users don't have. Maybe Blizzard has similar reservations, but they don't have the option of crippling their existing game because it'd mean losing lots of customers.
And just because Square-Enix has shown that interoperability is possible, it doesn't mean it was easy for them, and this was a game that was created from the ground up to be playable on a PS2. Porting a game that was designed for the PC to a console would impose some significant new challenges, I would assume.
You're right, it all depends on what you're looking forward in a game. I found the exploration aspect of Morrowind to be mildly enjoyable, but fell far short of what I think of as a great gaming experience. That's why I'm presuming Oblivion will be a "good" game with a legion of obsessed players, but I'm not sold on Oblivion being a true gaming masterpiece as opposed to being an impressive virtual "art gallery" of sorts that the player has some limited interaction with.
I've read in an interview or something somewhere that had a dev quoted as saying it's still a game that's measured in the hundreds of hours rather than the tens of hours (with 200 hours being the most often quoted figure, and about 20 hours for the main quest I believe).
Possibly, but I don't think this is it. Just like for graphics, there will be a "level of detail" for NPC AI so that distant NPCs participate in less complex behaviors and are checked for these behaviors much less frequently.
I forget the exact numbers, but I don't think there are going to be that many fewer NPCs/quests in Oblivion compared to Morrowind. Fewer, yes, but I'm not so sure it will really be that noticable of a difference, and the quality of the NPCs and quests is supposed to be higher.
No. Bestheda will be producing mods that you'll be able to purchase for a small fee, but the TES construction set will not be included with the 360 version, and to my knowledge, no player made mods will be usable on the 360.
It sounds promising. In the official Oblivion forums I read one of the anecdotes shared by the developers while testing/tinkering with NPCs. They created some NPC that had it as part of his daily schedule to sweep his porch (or something like that), the problem is they didn't give him a broom. So what does this enterprising NPC do? He goes inside his house, gets his trusty axe, and murders a fellow townsperson who happens to have a broom, takes the broom and proceeds to sweep his front porch.
Obviously at that point the AI required a bit of tweaking, but even in this "blooper" it demonstrates some of the game's promise in the area of NPC intelligence and behaviors.
I don't think there's much doubt that this is going to be a good game that many people will become obsessed with. The question is, will it live up to the hype? Arguably, Morrowind did not, due to a laundry list of deep flaws, not the least or greatest of which (in my opinion) were the bland NPCs. They have to figure out a way to make the game fun as opposed to just plopping the player down in a vast world and expecting him to be happy to wander around awestruck by the environments they're surrounded by.
The main issue I had with Morrowind is that it was too easy, and seemed almost designed to be exploited. I suppose this is a difficult problem to avoid in an open ended game where the player is supposed to be empowered to do any number of things any number of different ways, but it really weaken the entire game experience. I really hope they fix this in Oblivion.
Yeah, but Antartica is located on the bottom of the world. We won't be able to see anything from there!
Also, completely different concept.
Spore isn't exciting to me just because it looks like it'll be a really cool game. It's exciting because the ideas behind it could infuse some new life into the industry as a whole. The idea of giving players very simple, intuitive tools with which to create content, to actual make that content creation part of the game itself (as opposed to something you do externally with modding software) is promising.
Also, nice as the quasi-online element of Spore sounds to be, I long to see how this concept might be applied to more traditional online games, such as MMOs. With just a bit of extension, I could see the technologies being created/exploited in Spore applied to an online version of Starflight or The Ur-Quan Masters, but with even larger slices of the galaxy and more detailed planet surfaces, life forms, etc. and alien ships that you encounter are not pre-scripted encounters with NPCs (or at least, not all of them) but interactions with other players. Or your more traditional fantasy MMORPG, where instead of fighting the same re-textured orcs and rats for six months, each new area you explore features completely new monsters.
Best of all if they could combine these technologies (easy to use tools for developers and/or players to create stuff, procedural generation to breathe life into these creations and to populate vast landscapes very quickly), with other features and technologies that have been growing in popularity and maturity over the past couple years, such as realistic physics, destructible environments and more robust AI. This could open the door for a persistent world that is truly mutable, where players are free to create, destroy and explore an almost unimaginably vast world. It could be the ultimate sandbox experience that could combine aspects of various beloved genres as well (FPS, RPG, whatever).
If Spore itself doesn't qualify as something awesomely different from everything that has come before, then at least it could be a big step towards a game or games that do qualify as such.
It pretty much looks like an iPod.
The only thing holding me back from a definite DS Lite purchase (and preorder when they become available) is the fact that I just don't have much opportunity to game outside the house very often, and I feel a little silly playing a portable game console at home, when I could be playing games on my 21" TV or my 19" LCD monitor.
Although the unique games on the DS may make it worth it, I almost figure I might as well just hold out for the Revolution (which I am definitely preordering, barring the event that everybody who is privledged with a Revolution preview ending up saying the controller doesn't work well) which will surely offer many unique games of its own.
That, plus I just got an iPod for my birthday and I'm going to have enough trouble figuring out when I'm going to use it ... I'm not sure I want my DS Lite competing with it for my time! I wish my birthday were several months later, then I could have just asked for the DS Lite (I didn't ask for the iPod). :\
Going from an CRT to an LCD is a very noticable and appreciable upgrade for most people. It's not like adding a somewhat better processor that will give you an imperceptible 17% improvement in performance or whatever. Depends on your needs and preferences, that extra $100 is very well spent.