Virtual world? It's just a damn chat room
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 1
Once I finally played it I found out it was just a clumsy hack of the original game. It feels like a half-ass job.
The graphics, objects (with few exceptions) and same single-lot you occupy are all still there. You just warp around lot-to-lot. It doesn't feel like a neighborhood. There's no scarcity. There's no real economy. The only real appeal is the social aspect. Making friends is the only real way to get ahead. Making money is totally linked to having friends- I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but there's no creativity really, just fill up your lot with the maximum number of visitors and have them all make lawn gnomes together. Wow, fun. You had better like chatting with them or you'll go nuts standing around. The gnomes don't go anywhere either. They disappear and money just drops out of the sky.
The goal of the game is pretty much to create a kick-ass house that people will like hanging out in. Not that it fails at that- but it is still a disappointment after games like Ultima Online that really felt like functioning worlds. Without being able to exchange anything tangible except money and lots (and by that I mean just the lot-sans house) the scope of interesting possibilities is diminished. You could loan money (good luck getting it back) or launch a gambling parlor but thats about it (besides the depressing 'services' that some people offer to 'provide' *shudder*). I wanted to have a shop or a business or something. All you get to do is hang out at someone's house and make pizza for christ's sake. What the hell kind of innovation is a pretty looking chat room?
I admit I don't like fantasy role playing games as a genre quite as much (too much RL AD&D), so I was really excited about this game. Unfortunately, while the original Sims really felt like a Sim, the Sims Online feels very far from it. It's not a world modeled after much in the real world. It's a fun place to hang out for a while but I could never want to stay. I'm still hopeful though. Some other online games took a while to come into their own. I'm skeptical of EA though. They are too economical for their own good. I think the recycled feel of the game is a bad sign. They wanted to cash in quick. Just my opinion.
True. That's not lost on me. Heh I stopped sharing- I certainly don't want to, um, 'win' the RIAA lottery. I accept that it is illegal- but I don't see why is HAS to be that way. You can look at it my way just as easily as the music industry's I think- thats my big point. Some things like murder are clearly wrong. Things like this are more arbitrary I think. We have to do the best thing for everyone and I really think that's to allow this sort of thing. Music would get better and more people would be helped than hurt.
MHO of course.
"Because their own, mass marketed, youth culture sucks ass. They'd rather feed off the ghosts of the past than starve with the shades of present"
Nah. It's just the math. You'd get better music when you are willing to look at the last five decades instead of the last five months. The pool of stuff you're willing to listen to gets a lot bigger this way. People can like subpar bands or they can look back. Quality is always limited at any given time, and many people end up picking the higher quality old stuff over what might have been their favorite sound once they start to exhaust the talent there.
I refuse to believe that file sharing is stealing simply because the music industry tells me it is. They got away with selling sound (sound!) for many years and now they have to deal with reality.
It's ridiculous to think that downloading mp3's is theft because there is no scarcity. Downloading an MP3 does not mean a CD suddenly disappears from your local Best Buy. The 'theft' is an entirely theoretical loss of _potential revenue_. You may choose not to buy a CD for many reasons. You may borrow it from a friend and decide it sucks, or he may give it to you outright because he already knows it does. You could even buy a used copy off eBay. All of these options cost music companies revenue. Is this stealing too? It's beyond silly. I had a song stuck in my head the other day- am I a criminal? You'd laugh if someone called you a thief after you told your friend who was about to go see "The Hot Chick" that it sucked because he ended up not seeing it. The movie companies still 'lost' the same $8.50 though. Shame on you for taking food out of Rob Schneider's mouth.
If I were a freak show performer and people paid five bucks to see me at the state fair that doesn't mean the people seeing me at the grocery store are stealing from me. Hell, I might think everyone walking behind me on the street should pay ten dollars for the privilege of viewing my sexy ass, but that sure as heck doesn't mean it's going to happen. Why the hell is this any different? No one has an inalienable right to make money anyway they want to. I don't sit around and fucking cry because money doesn't grow on trees and they shouldn't either.
Anyone who tells you that disregarding all this idiocy will hurt music is on crack. You can cut an album for a few thousand. Even if you spend way more by far the biggest expense is still making all those damned CD which we don't even need anymore. You can still charge for concerts and T-shirts and a lot of other things that actually make sense. Excellent artists make music for nothing all the time. Hell some of them you couldn't pay enough to stop. And yes, being in a cool band will get you laid regardless. We are in for a sorry future if every single piece of crap that you happen to spout out of your mouth is suddenly worthy of protection by the government. I tremble when I think how they might actually do that. Look at the war on drugs and be really fucking afraid.
You have to feel that way to stay sane. The amount of suffering that goes on in the world is profoundly large. You'd never be able to leave the house if you were anything but numb to nearly all of it.
It seems to make us cold but it's just necessary. You can feel nothing for the starving children and still find their conditions deplorable. Feeling bad by itself never helped anyone anyway- actions do. You can only cry so much before crying is just unproductive repetition.
I don't think gun control is going to work in the future because they will just be too easy to make. Even if you won't be able to make your own(though you could), someone else with some informal skills and pro-am equipment will be able to do it for you- and at rock bottom prices. Guns will soon be like Marijuana or Crystal Meth- you'll be able to make them anywhere, basically.
I'd bet one American dollar that before I die I'll be able to buy a little PC-driven fabricating machine that can can build an astonishing number of everyday things from CAD files- including guns (legally or not).
IIRC, there have been a few stories here about "3D printers" used for prototyping machine components. Assuming the basic theory behind it is sound, the tech could come along quickly. Print extra dishes when company comes over? I think its coming. Seems too profitable of an idea to pass up.
Compared with today's technology, a gun is pretty simple. Making one would be trivial with this machine as long as the layered compostites or whatever are strong enough. Powder you might have to come up with on your own, but this isn't terribly difficult.
Aren't you being a little unfair? I can think of about a million games before and since Doom that were repetitive and violent. Just because it missed an opportunity in your eyes is no reason to criticize it. After all, making that game as immersive as it was took enough work. They can't be blamed for not having the time to make a game with complex and rich gameplay. They did enough- netplay- convincing 3d worlds. I know you think the technology has been wasted since but they really did get the ball rolling. I guess its a glass half full kind of thing for me. As for the violence, it's been the demographic for video games I'm afraid. Fortunately thats changing though.
The sad thing is that depth must be programed by people and that takes a lot of effort and time. The guys at ID know this limitation and strive to do only a few things well while making the tech available as a platform for others ID has consistently done well while many wildly ambitious games have sucked. There's a limit to how much you can do.
If you really want that sort of thing, I think the new MMP RPGs offer a lot of hope. It's hard to make cool worlds, though. Its a ton of work and they're aren't many shortcuts. The money involved in computer gaming nowdays is finally making some of this possible. That wasn't true in Doom's day.
Twitch games have always been a hell of a lot easier to make and surprisingly fun despite their simplicity. No wonder they're everywhere. Its a practical problem and I more than anyone wish it wasn't so. But whatcha gonna do.
Private companies are the only ones allowed to have their own moralities today. All others have the morality of the marketplace. The fact that the ownership of public companies is traded around so frequently shouldn't make this shocking. Large institutions such as mutal funds, pention funds and banks own the majority of all public companies. Any company is one out of a portfolio of maybe hundreds of others and is dropped at the first hint of trouble. They're chits, peices of paper and the purpose is to build a strong portfolio. The only question anyone would be asking is "What's Yahoo doing?" or "What is MSN doing?" Protecting themselves from liability is the closet thing to morality in most times. They are quite willing to accept the law as their moral code. Why you decided to make money for your clients and stay in buisiness is a lot easier to explain to the boss than the ethical problems of buying a profitable company that advertises legal products. Google's owners might be better off keeping it private. However, since the company isn't hugely profitable (except for an internet company), they might be giving up the only real change to grow it. You exchange a share of your personal morality along with everything else when you sell the company. They could sell stock with limited voting rights though. Would people buy it? Probably for far less. The assesment is usually that the best thing to do take the mavericks who started the company out of a lot of decisions that 'professional' management could do better.
If this is true then the Italian Government has commited Cybercrime
But Wait...
Cybercrime is Terrorism!
and...
If they are committing a Kind of Terrorism then they clearly support Terror, right?
so, really, we have no choice but to consider them an enemy in our great struggle against terror
which means...
Whoo-Hoo! War on Italy!!
Sorry guys- we just have no choice. With us or against us, you know how it goes...
Fortunately we found lots of Ex-Italian-parliment menbers who were more then happy to show us where they're all hiding. Send the AC-130's! Oh wait... we were supposed to not fall for that again...
I don't think 1984 was supposed to be a futurist sort of work. It was about the time when it was written (published in 1949, a year later.) The frightening government was England's. It had in many sorts of ways become like the one in the book during World War Two, though not as literally of course.
I think everyone who is bringing up the current war on terrorism is on to something. Now just imagine what WWII did to personal freedom. The concern for Orwell I think was that the British government did not change back to it's pre-war self as mush as it needed to. If you have ever wondered why Winston Churchill wasn't re-elected after the war this was the big issue. Churchill wanted to go back and people disagreed. England became a much more socialist state after the war. I dont know if socialism was the big issue or just the fact tha the government had an obscene amout of power for a free country.
There was actually a very critical piece on page one of the marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal today, about these hearings and other recent and silly government proposals for the net and tech industry. Proposals like the ones on net radio royalites (twice that of terestrial stations) and DSL deregulation (though cynics say the Bells have killed competion anyway... so why not?) The point of the article: The government shouldn't mess with something it so clearly does not understand.
One of the nation's most decidedly pro-capitalist newspapers called Holling's plan "such a bad idea it's scary." and asked why the senator should even begin to have the gall to think that the government would have better sense designing computers than the private sector, and going on to recognize, quite correctly, that the wonder of the PC is its open and adaptable nature. ("A technological swiss army knife") The article concluded by saying that the bill did a wonderful job of defending the movie studios intrests at a time when Washington's slience on consumer's needs was deafening.
It was beautiful. You could have read it here.
It isn't big business in general we have to fear. We put up with capitalism because it benefits consumers most of all when it works like we know it can. The bad guy here is, not surprisingly, special intrest. Free markets are ultimately genuinely democratic institutions, but we shouldn't forget that Government can destroy them as such just as easily as they can and should curb their admitted excesses.
Don't fear the MPAA folks. Fear tech-dumb crusaders in congress with one hand in the cookie jar.
Slashdot Mirror
Once I finally played it I found out it was just a clumsy hack of the original game. It feels like a half-ass job.
The graphics, objects (with few exceptions) and same single-lot you occupy are all still there. You just warp around lot-to-lot. It doesn't feel like a neighborhood. There's no scarcity. There's no real economy. The only real appeal is the social aspect. Making friends is the only real way to get ahead. Making money is totally linked to having friends- I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but there's no creativity really, just fill up your lot with the maximum number of visitors and have them all make lawn gnomes together. Wow, fun. You had better like chatting with them or you'll go nuts standing around. The gnomes don't go anywhere either. They disappear and money just drops out of the sky.
The goal of the game is pretty much to create a kick-ass house that people will like hanging out in. Not that it fails at that- but it is still a disappointment after games like Ultima Online that really felt like functioning worlds. Without being able to exchange anything tangible except money and lots (and by that I mean just the lot-sans house) the scope of interesting possibilities is diminished. You could loan money (good luck getting it back) or launch a gambling parlor but thats about it (besides the depressing 'services' that some people offer to 'provide' *shudder*). I wanted to have a shop or a business or something. All you get to do is hang out at someone's house and make pizza for christ's sake. What the hell kind of innovation is a pretty looking chat room?
I admit I don't like fantasy role playing games as a genre quite as much (too much RL AD&D), so I was really excited about this game. Unfortunately, while the original Sims really felt like a Sim, the Sims Online feels very far from it. It's not a world modeled after much in the real world. It's a fun place to hang out for a while but I could never want to stay. I'm still hopeful though. Some other online games took a while to come into their own. I'm skeptical of EA though. They are too economical for their own good. I think the recycled feel of the game is a bad sign. They wanted to cash in quick. Just my opinion.
Still sticking to RL i guess. Damn it all.
True. That's not lost on me. Heh I stopped sharing- I certainly don't want to, um, 'win' the RIAA lottery. I accept that it is illegal- but I don't see why is HAS to be that way. You can look at it my way just as easily as the music industry's I think- thats my big point. Some things like murder are clearly wrong. Things like this are more arbitrary I think. We have to do the best thing for everyone and I really think that's to allow this sort of thing. Music would get better and more people would be helped than hurt.
MHO of course.
"Because their own, mass marketed, youth culture sucks ass. They'd rather feed off the ghosts of the past than starve with the shades of present"
Nah. It's just the math. You'd get better music when you are willing to look at the last five decades instead of the last five months. The pool of stuff you're willing to listen to gets a lot bigger this way. People can like subpar bands or they can look back. Quality is always limited at any given time, and many people end up picking the higher quality old stuff over what might have been their favorite sound once they start to exhaust the talent there.
I refuse to believe that file sharing is stealing simply because the music industry tells me it is. They got away with selling sound (sound!) for many years and now they have to deal with reality.
It's ridiculous to think that downloading mp3's is theft because there is no scarcity. Downloading an MP3 does not mean a CD suddenly disappears from your local Best Buy. The 'theft' is an entirely theoretical loss of _potential revenue_. You may choose not to buy a CD for many reasons. You may borrow it from a friend and decide it sucks, or he may give it to you outright because he already knows it does. You could even buy a used copy off eBay. All of these options cost music companies revenue. Is this stealing too? It's beyond silly. I had a song stuck in my head the other day- am I a criminal? You'd laugh if someone called you a thief after you told your friend who was about to go see "The Hot Chick" that it sucked because he ended up not seeing it. The movie companies still 'lost' the same $8.50 though. Shame on you for taking food out of Rob Schneider's mouth.
If I were a freak show performer and people paid five bucks to see me at the state fair that doesn't mean the people seeing me at the grocery store are stealing from me. Hell, I might think everyone walking behind me on the street should pay ten dollars for the privilege of viewing my sexy ass, but that sure as heck doesn't mean it's going to happen. Why the hell is this any different? No one has an inalienable right to make money anyway they want to. I don't sit around and fucking cry because money doesn't grow on trees and they shouldn't either.
Anyone who tells you that disregarding all this idiocy will hurt music is on crack. You can cut an album for a few thousand. Even if you spend way more by far the biggest expense is still making all those damned CD which we don't even need anymore. You can still charge for concerts and T-shirts and a lot of other things that actually make sense. Excellent artists make music for nothing all the time. Hell some of them you couldn't pay enough to stop. And yes, being in a cool band will get you laid regardless. We are in for a sorry future if every single piece of crap that you happen to spout out of your mouth is suddenly worthy of protection by the government. I tremble when I think how they might actually do that. Look at the war on drugs and be really fucking afraid.
You have to feel that way to stay sane. The amount of suffering that goes on in the world is profoundly large. You'd never be able to leave the house if you were anything but numb to nearly all of it.
It seems to make us cold but it's just necessary. You can feel nothing for the starving children and still find their conditions deplorable. Feeling bad by itself never helped anyone anyway- actions do. You can only cry so much before crying is just unproductive repetition.
we can have free speech inside and keep others' illegal speech out
Good idea- I'll call China. They know just how to do that.
I don't think gun control is going to work in the future because they will just be too easy to make. Even if you won't be able to make your own(though you could), someone else with some informal skills and pro-am equipment will be able to do it for you- and at rock bottom prices. Guns will soon be like Marijuana or Crystal Meth- you'll be able to make them anywhere, basically.
I'd bet one American dollar that before I die I'll be able to buy a little PC-driven fabricating machine that can can build an astonishing number of everyday things from CAD files- including guns (legally or not).
IIRC, there have been a few stories here about "3D printers" used for prototyping machine components. Assuming the basic theory behind it is sound, the tech could come along quickly. Print extra dishes when company comes over? I think its coming. Seems too profitable of an idea to pass up.
Compared with today's technology, a gun is pretty simple. Making one would be trivial with this machine as long as the layered compostites or whatever are strong enough. Powder you might have to come up with on your own, but this isn't terribly difficult.
Aren't you being a little unfair? I can think of about a million games before and since Doom that were repetitive and violent. Just because it missed an opportunity in your eyes is no reason to criticize it. After all, making that game as immersive as it was took enough work. They can't be blamed for not having the time to make a game with complex and rich gameplay. They did enough- netplay- convincing 3d worlds. I know you think the technology has been wasted since but they really did get the ball rolling. I guess its a glass half full kind of thing for me. As for the violence, it's been the demographic for video games I'm afraid. Fortunately thats changing though.
The sad thing is that depth must be programed by people and that takes a lot of effort and time. The guys at ID know this limitation and strive to do only a few things well while making the tech available as a platform for others ID has consistently done well while many wildly ambitious games have sucked. There's a limit to how much you can do.
If you really want that sort of thing, I think the new MMP RPGs offer a lot of hope. It's hard to make cool worlds, though. Its a ton of work and they're aren't many shortcuts. The money involved in computer gaming nowdays is finally making some of this possible. That wasn't true in Doom's day.
Twitch games have always been a hell of a lot easier to make and surprisingly fun despite their simplicity. No wonder they're everywhere. Its a practical problem and I more than anyone wish it wasn't so. But whatcha gonna do.
Private companies are the only ones allowed to have their own moralities today.
All others have the morality of the marketplace. The fact that the ownership of public companies is traded around so frequently shouldn't make this shocking. Large institutions such as mutal funds, pention funds and banks own the majority of all public companies. Any company is one out of a portfolio of maybe hundreds of others and is dropped at the first hint of trouble. They're chits, peices of paper and the purpose is to build a strong portfolio. The only question anyone would be asking is "What's Yahoo doing?" or "What is MSN doing?" Protecting themselves from liability is the closet thing to morality in most times. They are quite willing to accept the law as their moral code. Why you decided to make money for your clients and stay in buisiness is a lot easier to explain to the boss than the ethical problems of buying a profitable company that advertises legal products. Google's owners might be better off keeping it private. However, since the company isn't hugely profitable (except for an internet company), they might be giving up the only real change to grow it. You exchange a share of your personal morality along with everything else when you sell the company. They could sell stock with limited voting rights though. Would people buy it? Probably for far less. The assesment is usually that the best thing to do take the mavericks who started the company out of a lot of decisions that 'professional' management could do better.
If this is true then the Italian Government has commited Cybercrime But Wait... Cybercrime is Terrorism! and... If they are committing a Kind of Terrorism then they clearly support Terror, right? so, really, we have no choice but to consider them an enemy in our great struggle against terror which means... Whoo-Hoo! War on Italy!! Sorry guys- we just have no choice. With us or against us, you know how it goes... Fortunately we found lots of Ex-Italian-parliment menbers who were more then happy to show us where they're all hiding. Send the AC-130's! Oh wait... we were supposed to not fall for that again...
I don't think 1984 was supposed to be a futurist sort of work. It was about the time when it was written (published in 1949, a year later.) The frightening government was England's. It had in many sorts of ways become like the one in the book during World War Two, though not as literally of course. I think everyone who is bringing up the current war on terrorism is on to something. Now just imagine what WWII did to personal freedom. The concern for Orwell I think was that the British government did not change back to it's pre-war self as mush as it needed to. If you have ever wondered why Winston Churchill wasn't re-elected after the war this was the big issue. Churchill wanted to go back and people disagreed. England became a much more socialist state after the war. I dont know if socialism was the big issue or just the fact tha the government had an obscene amout of power for a free country.
There was actually a very critical piece on page one of the marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal today, about these hearings and other recent and silly government proposals for the net and tech industry. Proposals like the ones on net radio royalites (twice that of terestrial stations) and DSL deregulation (though cynics say the Bells have killed competion anyway... so why not?) The point of the article: The government shouldn't mess with something it so clearly does not understand.
One of the nation's most decidedly pro-capitalist newspapers called Holling's plan "such a bad idea it's scary." and asked why the senator should even begin to have the gall to think that the government would have better sense designing computers than the private sector, and going on to recognize, quite correctly, that the wonder of the PC is its open and adaptable nature. ("A technological swiss army knife") The article concluded by saying that the bill did a wonderful job of defending the movie studios intrests at a time when Washington's slience on consumer's needs was deafening.
It was beautiful. You could have read it here.
It isn't big business in general we have to fear. We put up with capitalism because it benefits consumers most of all when it works like we know it can. The bad guy here is, not surprisingly, special intrest. Free markets are ultimately genuinely democratic institutions, but we shouldn't forget that Government can destroy them as such just as easily as they can and should curb their admitted excesses.
Don't fear the MPAA folks. Fear tech-dumb crusaders in congress with one hand in the cookie jar.