I guess the other responses already sum this up pretty well, but I thought that RT took a pretty minimalist approach to the production, but chose not to do so. They could have had variant images of each type of industry to look a bit less repetitive. They could have had a 3d engine allowing arbitrary rotation of the map. They could have had a more powerful interface for setting up trains and telling them where to go (I spent a lot of time going click-click-click...)
There is no reason this trend cannot continue in game producing.
Yes, there is.
Most current games on consoles allow one to be in some sort of 3d world that one can at least semi-freely explore. It may be just an arena (Soul Calibur 2), may be a mountainside (SSX), or may be a series of islands (MDK2).
When making a movie, you have to ensure that the area currently being shown by the camera looks right. The director controls the camera. In a video game, everywhere you go, things have to look right. Things have to interact fairly reasonably as well. There is a lot more work involved in producing a scene for a game than there is in producing and 3d-rendering the exact smae scene for a movie.
Agreed. It seems that I've heard "Game X has an amazing story" for *ages*...but really, the dialog and plots of good video games generally don't match up all that well to good movies. I could never figure it out -- I see art budgets that are clearly enormous, but then there's always a glaring flaw of some sort. Perhaps the voice acting is atrocious (that's generally gotten better, admittedly, but there's still not much like Jagged Alliance 2 out there) or the dialog is really simplistic or awkward (especially in Japanese games...for *Chrissake*, *why* can't developers do indirect translations that sound smooth and good? Every time I see dialog in a video game, I think "gosh, *I* could do better than that". Finally, there's plot. There have been few video games with class A Hollywood-style plots.
Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person.
I dunno. I'd say that MDK2 had a lot of character. I would also say that Dogfight (or whatever the heck that thing with 100 or so different two-player dogfighting and tank-battling games was) didn't have a lot of character, just because the resource limitations of the system restricted it too much.
There are still shareware games out there made by small teams, but I think it's easy to fall into nostalgia. In most cases, I think that modern games *are* more entertaining than older games. We just had much lower standards back in the day.
1. The technological plateau he speaks of is merely a graphical one, and it only seems like a plateau because new game consoles don't come out every month.
I don't think it *is* a plateau. It *is* a sloping off -- the derivative of the slope is moving closer to zero -- but there is no halt in improvement. He showed two tiny, static screenshots. Yes, with microscoplic, tiny screenshots, one notices resolution changes very easily (Atari to NES), and not so much fine color details (Goldeneye to RF2). Furthermore, a lot of changes have been in motion. Fog bursts and fades away, characters move realistically, etc. I like Street Fighter 2, and a static screenshot of it looks pretty good -- however, watching Soul Calibur 2 smoothly transitioning between moves and the series of hand-drawn sprites in SF2 flip-booking along is quite an experience, and one that requires video, not just a screenshot, to appreciate. Consciously or not, I think that Mr. Wong chose his visual examples to bias evidence towards supporting his story.
There's more to games than polygon count.
There is *still* not a single game out there that I can play where I am not acutely aware at all times that I am looking at a bunch of polygonx with some textures slapped on top. Until video games look like films of real life, graphical improvement will continue.
2. He didn't really seem to have an argument in this section. ??? His view of the types of enjoyment derived from video games is a bit limited.
I didn't think that his categorization was particularly on either. He seems to break up old-school arcade/Atari games (didn't have much room for content, so relied entirely upon simple, repetitive, but carefully-balanced gameplay) and newer "exploration" games (just about anything out for a modern console).
Also, I'm not sure about his claim that all thirty-five-year-olds are suddenly going to stop playing games. His analysis of time usage is valid -- a married and working person has less time -- but that just dictates a change in the type of game. I've found myself starting to dislike RPGs or anything that is repetitive, takes time to get into, or takes a large time investment recently. Say that a person likes playing chess (or Go, say). I could see having fun playing a simple 2d chess implementation against the computer. On the other hand, I'd also, given the option, probably rather play a variant where I'm sitting in a perfectly rendered castle, playing with polished marble pieces against a realistic human opponent (with a model built up to represent the style this person uses of playing). Maybe have some muted music in the background, and environmental sound, and I could see really enjoying this more than a standard 2d chess game. So even with a game that can be represented simply and *only* cosmetic improvements, there's still drive to improve games.
5. He might be right here. I already have home theater stuff. I want a game console to play games. I don't need a jack of all trades, master of none. That's why I expect a minicrash when these All In One systems fail to sell.
Yeah, probably. The DVD player was a big deal with the current generation of consoles.
There are a lot of people that really *cannot* maintain a personal computer reasonably well and have simple needs -- as folks have pointed out, there's a reason companies keep trying to make WebTV-style boxes -- it's because they fill a pretty obvious need. If you have a box that lets you do email and browse the Web with some kind of limited subset of functionality, I think a lot of people would be happy. It's just a slab of plastic, and doesn't require the care and feeding that a personal computer does.
6. Agreed on the online play. I know Final Fantasy *fanatics* who have zero desire in FF11 Online. The reaction is usually, "Wait, I bought a game and I have to keep paying every month?"
I really don't like online play much. Online play, I've found, has some to
Microsoft has little benefit in ensuring that IE complies with standards -- as a matter of fact, now that they have over eighty percent marketshare, I would go so far as to say that it is to their benefit to have divergent behavior. Nobody cares about a bunch of web designers grumbling about a broken browser when the masses Just Want It To Look Right and blame the designer when it doesn't.
Wouldn't life be grand if Microsoft shipped the open source Mozilla as their default browser?
All this means is that FreeBSD distribution is broken (failing to give you proper releases), not that GNOME is broken.
Finally, if one more goddamn person claims that "Miguel likes C#, so GNOME is going to become C#", I swear I'm going to go nuts. Miguel may like C#. That's great. Lots of the *rest* of us like to write software in C. Guess what? We aren't changing, and nobody has proposed to do so! Guillame Laurent likes C++, but you didn't see GNOME get converted to C++, did you?
There is almost certainly *someone* involved with the core KDE team that likes ocaml or ruby. Incredibly enough, *KDE is not written in ocaml or ruby*! It's written in -- wait for it -- good ol' C++, same as it always has been!
Microsoft has a *huge* patent portfolio. If you honestly believe that Microsoft doesn't have at least one patent against most major projects, you're being terribly optimistic.
2. Realize that not every decision or assertion made in Canada is made by our PM. I'm assuming that you do realize that Canada is quite a large country - our parliament contains 301 seats that are filled by asses of people who are *constantly* searching for a way to get into the news.
Most of the outrageous and stupid claims made by the US federal government, however, come from Bush Jr., so it's a reasonable analogy to draw.
It's too easy to have a "Misc" account specifically notes as being "for covert operations". There are plenty of organizations that have areas in their budget that have minimal oversight -- I believe that a Congressional board is the only group able to see some CIA fund areas, for example.
Why would someone go to the effort of mucking around with accounts like this? Especially with civilian contractors obviously involved, I'm much more inclined to blame the good old standard buddy-network-with-corruption solution than an X-Files style far-reaching conspiracy with black ops. Mr. Smith is an old college buddy of Mr. Jones, and Mr. Smith is a high-ranking government official, and manages to shuffle some funds over to Mr. Jones, and gets a kickback from Mr. Jones.
Granted, money upwards of $100M is pushing one's luck, but I'm sure that there's all kinds of small scale corruption and cronyism all over both business and government.
Note that I'm not considering OS in this. These are general suggestions.
* Anything in the "programming game" genre. When doing this, a player designs a robot to go through some kind of puzzle or challenge (or theoretically fight, though as much of this is rather abstract, it may work under your violence issues). The original game in this genre is "Core Wars" (despite the name, if you consider this violent, I will be impressed), where little bits of code struggled desperately to try to control more memory. There are other games in this genre, like "Mindrover". I found a quick list of games in the genre here
* There are a number of simulation games that would work. Most games in the sim genre really *are* okay. The SimCities have been in the educational market forever for a good reason (makes me realize how dated my educational software knowledge is, though). For Linux, Lincity is good -- plays quite different from SimCity, with distribution of goods and power more of an emphasis than utilitiy coverage.
* Many puzzle games can be considered educational. Go to Info-Mac or another Mac software site and look under "Puzzle". I'm personally rather fond of sobokan and clones, where one pushes boxes around in a "warehouse" into proper locations. It's untimed, but fun.
* The Simple End User Linux (SEUL) project maintains a lot of links to software (including educational software) for Linux. Open source software has a way of getting ported, and I suspect you'll find that a fair amount works on OS X. Take a look here
* Ultimately, I'd say that web-browsing can be an awfully educational experience (seriously, I've learned so much of what I know from the Internet that it's nuts -- almost anything you want to know is out on the Web somewhere), more so than most "educational" games. If they have a laptop, they can browse the web, no?
I never thought much of the whole brand of "educational" software. The ones that simply included some interesting facts, like Oregon Trail or Sim City, seemed to provide a relatively low amount of knowledge for the amount of effort that gets put into them. The ones that made you do math quickly to play the game just doesn't seem to help real-world math skills much. When I learned to do math rapidly in my head, it was not using a video game.
The Web is a fantastic research tool -- boy, it's irritating when teachers try to discourage students from using any Web sources. As a matter of fact, I'd consider having a web browser always available to be one of the most valuable educational resources available. When I didn't know what a word meant, my mother always tried to train me and my siblings to go find a dictionary and look it up. The problem is that it's a real pain in the ass to do so, especially if I'm comfortably reading a book. If I have a nice, fast, stable-and-not-swapping system with a web browser up that doesn't need to run through a modem (most people used to get this in university for the first time), I'd very inclined to look up words and concepts that I'm interested about. Just recently, I read an article on "The Onion", a decidedly non-educational piece of satire that alluded to the Dauphin, some sort of French nobility. I got curious. I never, ever would have done this if I had to use paper encyclopedias, because of the effort involved, but I read up on the Dauphin, and ended up reading for much of the day about French political and military history.
Here's another example. I use a middleman a la ZK to get anonymized email and anonymized e-banking. I then (under my nym) provide a significant deposit to someone to give me a cert. Sure, I can spam, but then I lose my deposit (making spammers not go for this).
Or I can set up a nym, built up trust as that nym (without producing a mapping between the nym and me), and just acquire endorsements from trusted entities the same way I would in real life.
Compromised hosts are ultimately lost. You can't "fix" a compromised host. Even a C/R system can be beaten (especially if C/R becomes commonplace and there is standardization on one system) by making (usually) an image recognition system or by having bogus "legitimate" emails come in to a user so that he thinks that he's doing C/R on a legitimate email when he's actually doing it on a spam. Say it starts eating all his email and replacing it with ads...
Also, the usability problems inherent in a non-whitelist C/R system are too overwhelming for me to deal with them. I just refuse to jump through a hoop to send each email.
They're also polluting key registries with their garbage - that's a big negative.
So do something like having each domain maintain a key registry server, just as they currently do for DNS. It's not that hard -- it's just up until now, PGP needs have been met by a handful of servers, so each server handles "all and sundry" domains.
Actually, when the current federal antispam law went in, "political emails" were exempted -- those legislators wanted to be able to get in on this cheap communication, even if companies couldn't.
Of course, that means that spamming people regarding Bush's or Cheney's flaws is entirely legal and legitimate.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the other responses already sum this up pretty well, but I thought that RT took a pretty minimalist approach to the production, but chose not to do so. They could have had variant images of each type of industry to look a bit less repetitive. They could have had a 3d engine allowing arbitrary rotation of the map. They could have had a more powerful interface for setting up trains and telling them where to go (I spent a lot of time going click-click-click...)
There is no reason this trend cannot continue in game producing.
Yes, there is.
Most current games on consoles allow one to be in some sort of 3d world that one can at least semi-freely explore. It may be just an arena (Soul Calibur 2), may be a mountainside (SSX), or may be a series of islands (MDK2).
When making a movie, you have to ensure that the area currently being shown by the camera looks right. The director controls the camera. In a video game, everywhere you go, things have to look right. Things have to interact fairly reasonably as well. There is a lot more work involved in producing a scene for a game than there is in producing and 3d-rendering the exact smae scene for a movie.
Agreed. It seems that I've heard "Game X has an amazing story" for *ages*...but really, the dialog and plots of good video games generally don't match up all that well to good movies. I could never figure it out -- I see art budgets that are clearly enormous, but then there's always a glaring flaw of some sort. Perhaps the voice acting is atrocious (that's generally gotten better, admittedly, but there's still not much like Jagged Alliance 2 out there) or the dialog is really simplistic or awkward (especially in Japanese games...for *Chrissake*, *why* can't developers do indirect translations that sound smooth and good? Every time I see dialog in a video game, I think "gosh, *I* could do better than that". Finally, there's plot. There have been few video games with class A Hollywood-style plots.
Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person.
I dunno. I'd say that MDK2 had a lot of character. I would also say that Dogfight (or whatever the heck that thing with 100 or so different two-player dogfighting and tank-battling games was) didn't have a lot of character, just because the resource limitations of the system restricted it too much.
There are still shareware games out there made by small teams, but I think it's easy to fall into nostalgia. In most cases, I think that modern games *are* more entertaining than older games. We just had much lower standards back in the day.
1. The technological plateau he speaks of is merely a graphical one, and it only seems like a plateau because new game consoles don't come out every month.
I don't think it *is* a plateau. It *is* a sloping off -- the derivative of the slope is moving closer to zero -- but there is no halt in improvement. He showed two tiny, static screenshots. Yes, with microscoplic, tiny screenshots, one notices resolution changes very easily (Atari to NES), and not so much fine color details (Goldeneye to RF2). Furthermore, a lot of changes have been in motion. Fog bursts and fades away, characters move realistically, etc. I like Street Fighter 2, and a static screenshot of it looks pretty good -- however, watching Soul Calibur 2 smoothly transitioning between moves and the series of hand-drawn sprites in SF2 flip-booking along is quite an experience, and one that requires video, not just a screenshot, to appreciate. Consciously or not, I think that Mr. Wong chose his visual examples to bias evidence towards supporting his story.
There's more to games than polygon count.
There is *still* not a single game out there that I can play where I am not acutely aware at all times that I am looking at a bunch of polygonx with some textures slapped on top. Until video games look like films of real life, graphical improvement will continue.
2. He didn't really seem to have an argument in this section. ??? His view of the types of enjoyment derived from video games is a bit limited.
I didn't think that his categorization was particularly on either. He seems to break up old-school arcade/Atari games (didn't have much room for content, so relied entirely upon simple, repetitive, but carefully-balanced gameplay) and newer "exploration" games (just about anything out for a modern console).
Also, I'm not sure about his claim that all thirty-five-year-olds are suddenly going to stop playing games. His analysis of time usage is valid -- a married and working person has less time -- but that just dictates a change in the type of game. I've found myself starting to dislike RPGs or anything that is repetitive, takes time to get into, or takes a large time investment recently. Say that a person likes playing chess (or Go, say). I could see having fun playing a simple 2d chess implementation against the computer. On the other hand, I'd also, given the option, probably rather play a variant where I'm sitting in a perfectly rendered castle, playing with polished marble pieces against a realistic human opponent (with a model built up to represent the style this person uses of playing). Maybe have some muted music in the background, and environmental sound, and I could see really enjoying this more than a standard 2d chess game. So even with a game that can be represented simply and *only* cosmetic improvements, there's still drive to improve games.
5. He might be right here. I already have home theater stuff. I want a game console to play games. I don't need a jack of all trades, master of none. That's why I expect a minicrash when these All In One systems fail to sell.
Yeah, probably. The DVD player was a big deal with the current generation of consoles.
There are a lot of people that really *cannot* maintain a personal computer reasonably well and have simple needs -- as folks have pointed out, there's a reason companies keep trying to make WebTV-style boxes -- it's because they fill a pretty obvious need. If you have a box that lets you do email and browse the Web with some kind of limited subset of functionality, I think a lot of people would be happy. It's just a slab of plastic, and doesn't require the care and feeding that a personal computer does.
6. Agreed on the online play. I know Final Fantasy *fanatics* who have zero desire in FF11 Online. The reaction is usually, "Wait, I bought a game and I have to keep paying every month?"
I really don't like online play much. Online play, I've found, has some to
Microsoft has little benefit in ensuring that IE complies with standards -- as a matter of fact, now that they have over eighty percent marketshare, I would go so far as to say that it is to their benefit to have divergent behavior. Nobody cares about a bunch of web designers grumbling about a broken browser when the masses Just Want It To Look Right and blame the designer when it doesn't.
Wouldn't life be grand if Microsoft shipped the open source Mozilla as their default browser?
Alternate mass distribution mechanisms that will work for folks without a T3 at their disposal:
* Tarball the website, and hand out an ed2k url aimed at the hash of the tarball.
* Put it on Freenet.
* Post it to USENET.
When you hear the term 'Utility Computing', what do you think?"
Natalie Portman. Naked and petrified. With grits being poured down the front of her pants.
Ask a silly question...
We took oil from Iraq forcibly, and that's across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and a couple of land masses in the way.
That doesn't happen on my Red Hat system.
All this means is that FreeBSD distribution is broken (failing to give you proper releases), not that GNOME is broken.
Finally, if one more goddamn person claims that "Miguel likes C#, so GNOME is going to become C#", I swear I'm going to go nuts. Miguel may like C#. That's great. Lots of the *rest* of us like to write software in C. Guess what? We aren't changing, and nobody has proposed to do so! Guillame Laurent likes C++, but you didn't see GNOME get converted to C++, did you?
There is almost certainly *someone* involved with the core KDE team that likes ocaml or ruby. Incredibly enough, *KDE is not written in ocaml or ruby*! It's written in -- wait for it -- good ol' C++, same as it always has been!
Christ.
Microsoft has a *huge* patent portfolio. If you honestly believe that Microsoft doesn't have at least one patent against most major projects, you're being terribly optimistic.
Rumsfield.
Are you "anti-life" or "anti-choice"?
Let's vote against the "PATRIOT Act"!
Politics are full of marketing. The only reason TIA got shot down is because the guy in charge of it was awful at marketing.
Prolly you had to have them do it or you couldn't get the rest of the service contract.
Companies are good at inserting hidden costs. Technology companies are really good at it.
Pipeline to port + tankers. Works everywhere else in the world.
2. Realize that not every decision or assertion made in Canada is made by our PM. I'm assuming that you do realize that Canada is quite a large country - our parliament contains 301 seats that are filled by asses of people who are *constantly* searching for a way to get into the news.
Most of the outrageous and stupid claims made by the US federal government, however, come from Bush Jr., so it's a reasonable analogy to draw.
Wow. I thought that the US government was awfully vulnerable to vendor fraud, but the Canadian government is definitely trying to compete.
I believe "practise" is accepted in US English as an alternate spelling. It is listed on Mirriam-Webster without a "British variant" note.
It's too easy to have a "Misc" account specifically notes as being "for covert operations". There are plenty of organizations that have areas in their budget that have minimal oversight -- I believe that a Congressional board is the only group able to see some CIA fund areas, for example.
Why would someone go to the effort of mucking around with accounts like this? Especially with civilian contractors obviously involved, I'm much more inclined to blame the good old standard buddy-network-with-corruption solution than an X-Files style far-reaching conspiracy with black ops. Mr. Smith is an old college buddy of Mr. Jones, and Mr. Smith is a high-ranking government official, and manages to shuffle some funds over to Mr. Jones, and gets a kickback from Mr. Jones.
Granted, money upwards of $100M is pushing one's luck, but I'm sure that there's all kinds of small scale corruption and cronyism all over both business and government.
Note that I'm not considering OS in this. These are general suggestions.
* Anything in the "programming game" genre. When doing this, a player designs a robot to go through some kind of puzzle or challenge (or theoretically fight, though as much of this is rather abstract, it may work under your violence issues). The original game in this genre is "Core Wars" (despite the name, if you consider this violent, I will be impressed), where little bits of code struggled desperately to try to control more memory. There are other games in this genre, like "Mindrover". I found a quick list of games in the genre here
* There are a number of simulation games that would work. Most games in the sim genre really *are* okay. The SimCities have been in the educational market forever for a good reason (makes me realize how dated my educational software knowledge is, though). For Linux, Lincity is good -- plays quite different from SimCity, with distribution of goods and power more of an emphasis than utilitiy coverage.
* Many puzzle games can be considered educational. Go to Info-Mac or another Mac software site and look under "Puzzle". I'm personally rather fond of sobokan and clones, where one pushes boxes around in a "warehouse" into proper locations. It's untimed, but fun.
* The Simple End User Linux (SEUL) project maintains a lot of links to software (including educational software) for Linux. Open source software has a way of getting ported, and I suspect you'll find that a fair amount works on OS X. Take a look here
* Ultimately, I'd say that web-browsing can be an awfully educational experience (seriously, I've learned so much of what I know from the Internet that it's nuts -- almost anything you want to know is out on the Web somewhere), more so than most "educational" games. If they have a laptop, they can browse the web, no?
I never thought much of the whole brand of "educational" software. The ones that simply included some interesting facts, like Oregon Trail or Sim City, seemed to provide a relatively low amount of knowledge for the amount of effort that gets put into them. The ones that made you do math quickly to play the game just doesn't seem to help real-world math skills much. When I learned to do math rapidly in my head, it was not using a video game.
The Web is a fantastic research tool -- boy, it's irritating when teachers try to discourage students from using any Web sources. As a matter of fact, I'd consider having a web browser always available to be one of the most valuable educational resources available. When I didn't know what a word meant, my mother always tried to train me and my siblings to go find a dictionary and look it up. The problem is that it's a real pain in the ass to do so, especially if I'm comfortably reading a book. If I have a nice, fast, stable-and-not-swapping system with a web browser up that doesn't need to run through a modem (most people used to get this in university for the first time), I'd very inclined to look up words and concepts that I'm interested about. Just recently, I read an article on "The Onion", a decidedly non-educational piece of satire that alluded to the Dauphin, some sort of French nobility. I got curious. I never, ever would have done this if I had to use paper encyclopedias, because of the effort involved, but I read up on the Dauphin, and ended up reading for much of the day about French political and military history.
That's one solution, though not the only one.
Here's another example. I use a middleman a la ZK to get anonymized email and anonymized e-banking. I then (under my nym) provide a significant deposit to someone to give me a cert. Sure, I can spam, but then I lose my deposit (making spammers not go for this).
Or I can set up a nym, built up trust as that nym (without producing a mapping between the nym and me), and just acquire endorsements from trusted entities the same way I would in real life.
Compromised hosts are ultimately lost. You can't "fix" a compromised host. Even a C/R system can be beaten (especially if C/R becomes commonplace and there is standardization on one system) by making (usually) an image recognition system or by having bogus "legitimate" emails come in to a user so that he thinks that he's doing C/R on a legitimate email when he's actually doing it on a spam. Say it starts eating all his email and replacing it with ads...
Also, the usability problems inherent in a non-whitelist C/R system are too overwhelming for me to deal with them. I just refuse to jump through a hoop to send each email.
They're also polluting key registries with their garbage - that's a big negative.
So do something like having each domain maintain a key registry server, just as they currently do for DNS. It's not that hard -- it's just up until now, PGP needs have been met by a handful of servers, so each server handles "all and sundry" domains.
Actually, when the current federal antispam law went in, "political emails" were exempted -- those legislators wanted to be able to get in on this cheap communication, even if companies couldn't.
Of course, that means that spamming people regarding Bush's or Cheney's flaws is entirely legal and legitimate.
Having a system whereby anybody can communicate at virtually zero cost without unsolicited commercial messages are mutually exclusive goals.
It's not quite simple. If the communications system accepts email to anyone from anyone with out restriction, then you might be right.
Antispam systems are designed to poke at exactly that point.