We have to wait and see how it turns out, but so far pretty much any depiction of war in video games was a glorification, because they are always extremely one sited, never have civilians in it and you are always in the winning team. And when they are labeled "accurate" that pretty much only means that they will fill you with straight American propaganda.
Now of course, there are some rare exceptions, such as Operation Flashpoint: Resistance, which starts you as civilian, then your little island gets invaded by the Russians, many of your friends get executed or die and you end up basically the insurgence fighting back the invasion. You also happen to die at the end. But such exceptions are very rare.
but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay.
Innovating in gameplay is pretty hard in FOSS games, since its really hard to get anybody interested in an unproved original idea, its much easier to get people interested in a clone of their favorite game that they already know and love. Only exception of course are those ideas that are simple enough that you can implement them on your own.
Also its not just commercial games to which FOSS gaming as to catch up, its also the MOD community which is way ahead of FOSS games. I guess that has largely to do with commercial titles actually having solid engines and tools, while FOSS games most often have neither a solid engine nor proper tools to create content for them, which of course makes it hard to get any serious artists involved.
"A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game?
I didn't ignore the scene, it just didn't exactly impress me much, because it had *ZERO* impact on the actual game. You could tack that on to any random FPS or game for that matter, since pretty much all allow you no freedom of any sorts and it would "work", but a sentence spoken close to the end of the game doesn't turn it into a masterpiece. I don't deny that Bioshock is a good game, hey I had fun playing it, but it wasn't exactly a mind blowing experience. It was just another FPS, certainly one placed in a more interesting setting, but still just a FPS, you run around shooting dudes and thats pretty much all you do.
You hate the way the main character looks in Mass Effect, even though that is a totally customizable asset (even hair). You obviously didn't play it, but you saw a baldish guy on the cover so oh, it must be terrible right?
I never said I hate it, its one of those few games I am looking up to be playing one day (lacking Xbox360 currently). But that doesn't change the fact that the range of male guys you can play in current day video games is rather slim and almost always quite close to the 'military bald guy' sterotype.
But hey, you played the demo for 30 seconds so it must be terrible right?
No, I watched the tech-demos some years earlier and they looked a lot more impressive. My main problem with the whole physic engine stuff is simply that they are used way to much for big explosion and stuff, not for more subtle elements. Screens full of explosions are fun for a while, but then they just get boring.
Every Monkey Island was the same thing.
Well, yeah, after the second one the series went downhill, can't deny that, never touched the fourth part. That doesn't stop the first one from being awesome.
Every graphic adventure game of that era was the same thing.
Mechanically, yes, they where pretty much the same. Same basic gameplay, just a little improvement and shuffling of game mechanics here and there. However the stories that they told where all across the board, from the crazy time travel stuff of a Day of Tentacle, to the becoming a pirate of Money Island to the realistic and gritty stuff of a Gabriel Knight. The adventure genre is probably still the most flexible around in terms of what story it can tell and that flexibility is pretty much lost today, since the adventure genre isn't that popular anymore and got replaced mostly by shooter games.
Take off your sepia-toned goggles and realize that things -have- advanced, and quite a bit.
Some things have advanced a lot, some other things have advanced not at all or done plenty of steps back. For a worst case, look at the flightsim genre, its a total joke on consoles, you can take a 15 years old PC sim and it will completly obliterate a current day console sim in terms of realism. It might not look half as shiny, but it actually feels like flying a plane. And that has nothing to do with the controller, as EF2000 played quite fine in Dosbox with a Xbox360 gamepad.
What do I expect? Well, simply a little depth for a start would be nice. Give me all the meta-game of UFO hunting, research and economy of XCom, but replace the round-based strategy with Gears of War coop-style gameplay or something taken from Full Spectrum Warrior, make it all dynamic, randomly generated, huge and replayable and I might be impressed. Its not like all games today are awful, its just that they to often miserably fail in areas that should have been solved long ago. I really like a lot of what Assassins Creed tries to do, but the mission design in that game is a total utter joke. The crowd, while plenty full, doesn't allow any way to talk or interact with them other then bumping into them. GRID, while having a great looking destructable cars, has invisible walls all around the track just like 15 years ago and a extremely limited camera control. GTAIV has a great look city, but again, doesn't really have anything to do in it, missions still are triggered by cutscenes and don't naturally follow out of gameplay. Its moral choices are also limited to a ridiculous degree ("Shoot guy" or "Scare guy away so that we will never ever set food in the city again").
Seeing games struggling with the same issues that have annoyed me 15 years ago just isn't pretty and its even worse when some of those issues where already solved in other genres but then got lost (dynamic campaigns where standard in flightsims a decade ago, yet most FPS still don't come close).
To flip that I could bring up the cast of Mass Effect and say nothing in any of the generic fantasy 2D sidescrollers of the 80s compares to them in character personality.
The difference is that LucasArts had a new adventure game with interesting characters and stuff ready *every year*. How often do see stuff of that quality today? Even Mass Effect, while certainly one of more interesting games out there, features 'generic looking military bald guy' as a main character. The crazy humorous types of a Monkey Island or Day of Tentacle have pretty much died out (Telltale is trying, but still far away from full LucasArts quality).
There are plenty of physics puzzles out there.
Stacking boxes doesn't exactly impress me, most the time it annoys me because its far to obvious that its just a physics-engine techdemo with a bit paint on it. I want realistic and meaningful interaction with the world and there just hasn't been much progress at all in that area, its still just multiple choice dialog and a handful of items that trigger stuff.
Look at Force Unleashed for beautiful physics applications.
Only played the demo, but that didn't exactly impress me, plenty of predefined door-bending animation, plenty of enemies falling apart in predefined spots. A lot of fluff, but in the end just another random third-person action game.
I still see plenty of stunning landscapes in new games, with great stories, and characters that I enjoy.
Well, yeah, not everything is awful today, in fact most stuff is quite good from a pure technical standpoint. But most of it are sequels or games doing the same thing that last years games already did. The amount of fresh ideas that actually turn into a full and good games is pretty damn slim today and even worse many old ideas are lost and forgotten. As said, the main problem I have today isn't so much with the games itself, but with that the games don't hold up to my expectations. Back then 15 years ago there was fully destructible terrain in XCom:UFO, a few years later there was a fully dynamic simulated war in EF2000, there was random level generation and plenty more great ideas and concepts. Where can I get that same experience today in an improved version or something original of the same quality?
The difference between today and back then, is that back then games left a lasting impression because they did something new or different, that just doesn't happen any more. In the last five years there simply was way to much repetition of already well know genres. Its just not fun when half the games play almost exactly like each other. Another factor is that games today lack personality, random military shooters with random military guys just looks pretty random and uninteresting, compare that to a Guybrush Threepwood and you will see quite a bit of difference. Now of course, all that is a gross simplification and there are exceptions every now and then, but with all the sequels (some running for well over 10 years) and genre recycling there is just very little to actually amaze you.
In the end however I think my biggest problem with games today is simply that they haven't kept up with my expectations. Sure, graphics today are awesome, but the depth with which you can interact with the world has had almost no progression at all in the last 20 or so years. Enemy AI is still pretty much non-existent and AI of team members is even worse. The interaction with items and objects has made pretty much no progression at all and a 20 year old game like Maniac Mansion still is superior or at least equal to almost anything out there. Physics engines promise some possible progress in that area, but I am still waiting for a game that turns some of what was shown in the Euphoria techdemos into actual meaningful gameplay.
But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.
Bioshock, just like many Bioware games, has completly black&white choices, it is "kill sisters" or "save sisters", there is no grey area in between. I don't feel that this gives me freedom, it just makes the limits so more obvious. The little freedom that Bioshock has is that it allows some non-linear exploration of the levels, which is a nice touch, but its not exactly a new thing, Doom1 had that and just like in all other games Bioshock still restricts you to those areas where it wants you to go, you are not allowed to roam around freely through Rapture. Neither does Bioshock allow any communication with NPCs, its all just monologue.
That Bioshock is hailed as a masterpiece, just shows how primitive the story telling in games is and how little it has progressed over the years. Maniac Mansion, which is over 20 years old and run on a C64, was much more advanced in many areas of storytelling then many of the stuff that is thrown at us today.
I've had plenty of games that were totally satisfying in terms of interaction...
So have I, that doesn't mean that I don't see the inherent limits games today have.
The claim was that games offer richer interaction than other forms of personal entertainment (e.g. books, films, music, etc.)
No, the claim was that they offer "richer forms of entertainment" due to interaction. Now one can have of course different definitions of "rich", but for me its mainly the amount of variety in terms of what stories can be told and I see plenty of more of that in movies and books then I see in games.
Games are simply for most part a matter of "There are monsters, go kill them". Even the good games, while they might have better storys and dialog, follow the same underlying mechanics and are still not far away from Space Invaders. A large part of that is because the interaction is extremely primitive and no good for actual storytelling, at best it can be used to trigger a pre-scripted story event, but it does little to let an interesting story evolve out of actual gameplay.
There are of course a few exceptions with things like The Sims, which allow a rich set of actions and which allows dynamic stories to evolve, but then its still kind of at the level of mix of slapstick comedy and soap operas at best and doesn't get all that much deeper at this point in time.
The point I am trying to make isn't that books or movies are somehow better, but that the interactive parts of games doesn't really help that much when it comes to storytelling, in fact it often does exactly the opposite.
To phrase it another way, there has yet to be a single game that gets me emotionally involved due to its interactive parts. It just doesn't happen. The involvement comes due to cutscenes and predefined sequences, but not due to my own doing and those games that get close, just to often spoil it due to bad AI, stupid NPCs or simple save/reload cycles that can undo any dramatic event that happened.
If you're going to simplify things to that extent,
Thing is, its not a simplification, its what you do in most games. If you want to be picky, sure you also have a reload button and a button to change your gun and maybe you can jump to, but none of those help to give the story much depths or complexity.
you might as well say that watching a film is "nothing more that sitting and staring at a screen for a couple of hours"
That is a perfectly true statement, it however misses the point. The problem isn't how much or little I have to waggle the controller to get my in game character moving, but how much meaningful ways you have to drive the story forward. A movie doesn't need those since it progresses on its own. A game on the other side is about interaction and thus it becomes important how you can interact with the game world and in very many you simply don't have any other means of interaction then your gun. Games are simply extremely primitive when it comes no non-violent character interaction, in the best cases you have a multiple choice dialog tree to walk done, which is fine, but doesn't leave much freedom, in the other case you have nothing at all or blunt "yes/no" choices or not even that. All the complexity of real human interaction either completly prescripted or simply non existant in todays games.
being a part of the story rather than simply observing it.
But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride. Giving him not only the non-interactivity of a book or movie, but also all the restriction that come from being locked to the viewpoint of a single character and of course the whole immersion breaking parts of pre-scripted events, bad AI and bad user interfaces.
As a medium, video games have the potential to go further, much further than that.
I don't disagree with that, after all everything from Tetris to the Holodeck falls into the 'game' category, so there is plenty of room left to explore. But so far games have at best scratched the surface of their potential, leaving a lot to be desired.
since the interaction between a player and a game is much more deep and complex than that between a reader and a book
The interaction between a player and a game is extremely simple and most of the time not much deeper then "press button, see character fall dead". Even worse, since the players view in a game is more or less 'locked' to the main character, games have a far smaller range on how to present things, since it would break the gameplay to move away to a non-playable character. Also because a game needs to fill the player with constant interaction, games tend to be pretty comical and unbelievable.
That said, not every game has to be a typical current day first person shooter. We already have Tetris, Wii Sports, abstract stuff like Passage or story driven things like Monkey Island, Planscape Tourment and we will certainly see completly new genres emerge in future. But most stuff that would fall into the "deep and complex" category just fails mass-market appeal and thus never gets made in the first place, which leaves current day games fall quite a bit behind their potential.
So instead of basing your judgement on what the actual climate scientist say, you prefer to base it on two talkers that don't actually work in the field. Good luck with that. Just because a lot of the global warming paranoia is complete bullshit doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening or that burning fossil fuels is a good idea.
I prefer to base my judgement on good old common sense: polluting the environment has never produced much good, so we should limit it whenever possible. Global warming or not, clean air is a good thing either way.
Without serial keys, anyone could just buy say, an RTS like AoE3 and install it on all your friends computers real quick so you can play together online.
Once upon a time, support for doing multiple installations from a single CD for multiplayer was actually provided as a feature in games, not as an illegal thing that needs to be stopped.
As is, this seems relatively easy to defeat and well within reach of available technology. The number of 3D models is rather low and they have a very clear silhouette and also a very distinct one for each models. So all one has to do is to search for the best matching silhouette.
The good thing however is that 3d models have enough flexibility so that one could conquer many attacks, adding background images and texture would make it much more difficult to get a clear silhouette and one could of course easily introduce many more models into the mix.
Teaching them how to use just use it, is of course truly useless, since they will figure that out by themselves just fine, likely must faster then most of their teachers. However teaching them how to work with it, how to interpret it, who controls it and how the whole thing works in the first place is very important. Using the Internet is easy, understanding how it all works behind the scene and how its organized however is far less obvious and often times important. Don't believe that, just look at all those retard comments on Youtube. And of course there is the whole publishing side of things, when people publish things on the net there are plenty of dangers involved, from privacy issues to getting into defamation and copyright lawsuits, a little teaching in that area can't hurt.
Somehow in our culture it became ok to steal music and now video, how did this happen?
It didn't became 'ok', it already *was* ok for thousands of years. Thats how culture spreads. Even the "lend music from your friend and copy it" was perfectly legal in a lot of countries before the Internet hit mainstream. Its only recently that common practices have become illegal. Lending a digital book to your friend is now illegal, because it requires working around copy protection and stuff. How did that ever happen against the will of the people? The whole crux is simply that RIAA and friends have become obsolete by new technologies and now try all they can to somehow stay alive, instead of trying to figure out how to do business in a digital world.
I disagree with putting the blame on Javascript, the whole problem starts already with HTML/CSS. Webpages these days are something that is generated, not something that is written, meaning what the user gets to see isn't the real data, but just some more or less usable rendering of it and thats pretty much where the trouble starts. The whole notion that its the browsers job to render a webpage in a style chosen by a user, has pretty much completly fade away, today you are basically left with the choice between pixel-perfect representation of what the webdesigner had in mind and absolutely no style at all, there is no in between, no clean separation between actual content and user interface. Even something simply as changing the font size will break close to 100% of all non-trivial webpages out there, on some its just a little glitch (like "Reply to this" button falling appart on Slashdot) while other get completly unusable because elements end up being hidden below others. This whole mess has to stop. I don't mean that webpages should go back to HTML2 or whatever, but simply that they should allow raw access to their content, I don't want a news article flooded with navigation bar and crap, I want the raw news article and nothing else. I doubt that this will happen on a large scale anytime soon, since it would make it to easy to filter away all advertisment, but then even webpages without any advertisment suffers from this very same problem.
And it would do this even if you were driving on your own private road, or driving a tractor on your own land
Doesn't sound likely, it would be to easy to build GPS into the thing that then could handle your private road just fine. Also your car will probably just switch to autopilot if you drank to much, its the future after all.
I have some doubt about terraforming. With genetic engineering getting more and more common and computers getting faster all the time, I think its much more likely that we simply transform the human race itself to be suitable for life on other planets then transforming the planets themselves. Quite a bit cheaper to engineer a few cyborg colonist then to put a breathable atmosphere on Mars, after all we already kind of done the former, the rovers just need to get a little more clever.
All the money in the world doesn't allow you to break the laws of physics. And even if you can construct a theoretical possibility of FTL, you will likely have a really hard time implementing it, i.e. for a wormhole you might need two black holes, which aren't exactly easy to come by and then you have to find a way to survive traveling through that thing and all that stuff. So not likely to happen. Much more likely that the Kurzweil's singularity will happen, we will all turn into a cyboard super race and then no longer need FTL, because we can all put our brains on sleep for a few hundred or thousand years. Another alternative would be to simply construct interstellar travel with our current day technology, which isn't all that bad, you can reach the next star in around 100 years.
It might be 3 years from now or perhaps even more but when ipv4 becomes scarce(and it will),
IPv4 addresses have been scare for a decade or so, the answer so far was to cripple the net with NAT or simply to raise prices when you want a real static IPv4 address instead of a dynamic one. I don't see that changing anytime soon. The problem is simply that IPv6 doesn't really provide any instant advantage, since hardly anything is available on IPv6 that isn't on IPv4. And the whole 'it will make networking simpler' isn't something the average user will grasp anytime soon, even worse, addding an IPv6 record to a webpage these days will break it for many people, because IPv6 routing is rather broken (i.e. you can get it easily via 6to4, but half the IPv6 webpages will not work with it).
Unless the government steps in and actually requires IPv6 for certain services I don't see anything changing. The most likely cause these days seems to be that China and other emerging markets go IPv6, while western world stays IPv4 for a while to come and then maybe slowly switch over to not end up disconnected to China and Co.
I imagine it will take a lot of work but at least with Free Software this can be fixed.
The applications aren't broken, what they do is perfectly normal and taught in pretty much an C programming book out there. Adding fsync() all over the place wouldn't fix anything. For one thing it would mean inserting platform specific code into every application that might otherwise be completly portable ANSI-C or ISO-C++, which would be really ugly, but it would also make the filessytem extremely slow, since now everything gets written to disk instantly and can't be cached. If you want to have fast and secure file writing there is only one place where you can fix that and that is the filesystem.
The point is that there are many ANSI-C and ISO-C++ applications out there, if the OS can't execute them properly, that's a problem with the OS, not the applications
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If you don't want massacres, then don't fight the USA.
They didn't, the US invaded their country and started the war.
hat the USA can massacre its opponents is a GOOD thing, as it brings more American soldiers home alive.
How about not sending them oversees to fight unjustified wars in the first place?
We have to wait and see how it turns out, but so far pretty much any depiction of war in video games was a glorification, because they are always extremely one sited, never have civilians in it and you are always in the winning team. And when they are labeled "accurate" that pretty much only means that they will fill you with straight American propaganda.
Now of course, there are some rare exceptions, such as Operation Flashpoint: Resistance, which starts you as civilian, then your little island gets invaded by the Russians, many of your friends get executed or die and you end up basically the insurgence fighting back the invasion. You also happen to die at the end. But such exceptions are very rare.
but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay.
Innovating in gameplay is pretty hard in FOSS games, since its really hard to get anybody interested in an unproved original idea, its much easier to get people interested in a clone of their favorite game that they already know and love. Only exception of course are those ideas that are simple enough that you can implement them on your own.
Also its not just commercial games to which FOSS gaming as to catch up, its also the MOD community which is way ahead of FOSS games. I guess that has largely to do with commercial titles actually having solid engines and tools, while FOSS games most often have neither a solid engine nor proper tools to create content for them, which of course makes it hard to get any serious artists involved.
Banning guns will not ban mass killings.
But it will make them quite a bit more difficulty.
if you ban guns it sets a society up for even more criminal activity because they know law-abiding citizens will be unarmed.
Large part of the rest of the world gets by quite fine without guns.
"A man chooses, a slave obeys" scene or did you just not play that far into the game?
I didn't ignore the scene, it just didn't exactly impress me much, because it had *ZERO* impact on the actual game. You could tack that on to any random FPS or game for that matter, since pretty much all allow you no freedom of any sorts and it would "work", but a sentence spoken close to the end of the game doesn't turn it into a masterpiece. I don't deny that Bioshock is a good game, hey I had fun playing it, but it wasn't exactly a mind blowing experience. It was just another FPS, certainly one placed in a more interesting setting, but still just a FPS, you run around shooting dudes and thats pretty much all you do.
You hate the way the main character looks in Mass Effect, even though that is a totally customizable asset (even hair). You obviously didn't play it, but you saw a baldish guy on the cover so oh, it must be terrible right?
I never said I hate it, its one of those few games I am looking up to be playing one day (lacking Xbox360 currently). But that doesn't change the fact that the range of male guys you can play in current day video games is rather slim and almost always quite close to the 'military bald guy' sterotype.
But hey, you played the demo for 30 seconds so it must be terrible right?
No, I watched the tech-demos some years earlier and they looked a lot more impressive. My main problem with the whole physic engine stuff is simply that they are used way to much for big explosion and stuff, not for more subtle elements. Screens full of explosions are fun for a while, but then they just get boring.
Every Monkey Island was the same thing.
Well, yeah, after the second one the series went downhill, can't deny that, never touched the fourth part. That doesn't stop the first one from being awesome.
Every graphic adventure game of that era was the same thing.
Mechanically, yes, they where pretty much the same. Same basic gameplay, just a little improvement and shuffling of game mechanics here and there. However the stories that they told where all across the board, from the crazy time travel stuff of a Day of Tentacle, to the becoming a pirate of Money Island to the realistic and gritty stuff of a Gabriel Knight. The adventure genre is probably still the most flexible around in terms of what story it can tell and that flexibility is pretty much lost today, since the adventure genre isn't that popular anymore and got replaced mostly by shooter games.
Take off your sepia-toned goggles and realize that things -have- advanced, and quite a bit.
Some things have advanced a lot, some other things have advanced not at all or done plenty of steps back. For a worst case, look at the flightsim genre, its a total joke on consoles, you can take a 15 years old PC sim and it will completly obliterate a current day console sim in terms of realism. It might not look half as shiny, but it actually feels like flying a plane. And that has nothing to do with the controller, as EF2000 played quite fine in Dosbox with a Xbox360 gamepad.
What do I expect? Well, simply a little depth for a start would be nice. Give me all the meta-game of UFO hunting, research and economy of XCom, but replace the round-based strategy with Gears of War coop-style gameplay or something taken from Full Spectrum Warrior, make it all dynamic, randomly generated, huge and replayable and I might be impressed. Its not like all games today are awful, its just that they to often miserably fail in areas that should have been solved long ago. I really like a lot of what Assassins Creed tries to do, but the mission design in that game is a total utter joke. The crowd, while plenty full, doesn't allow any way to talk or interact with them other then bumping into them. GRID, while having a great looking destructable cars, has invisible walls all around the track just like 15 years ago and a extremely limited camera control. GTAIV has a great look city, but again, doesn't really have anything to do in it, missions still are triggered by cutscenes and don't naturally follow out of gameplay. Its moral choices are also limited to a ridiculous degree ("Shoot guy" or "Scare guy away so that we will never ever set food in the city again").
Seeing games struggling with the same issues that have annoyed me 15 years ago just isn't pretty and its even worse when some of those issues where already solved in other genres but then got lost (dynamic campaigns where standard in flightsims a decade ago, yet most FPS still don't come close).
To flip that I could bring up the cast of Mass Effect and say nothing in any of the generic fantasy 2D sidescrollers of the 80s compares to them in character personality.
The difference is that LucasArts had a new adventure game with interesting characters and stuff ready *every year*. How often do see stuff of that quality today? Even Mass Effect, while certainly one of more interesting games out there, features 'generic looking military bald guy' as a main character. The crazy humorous types of a Monkey Island or Day of Tentacle have pretty much died out (Telltale is trying, but still far away from full LucasArts quality).
There are plenty of physics puzzles out there.
Stacking boxes doesn't exactly impress me, most the time it annoys me because its far to obvious that its just a physics-engine techdemo with a bit paint on it. I want realistic and meaningful interaction with the world and there just hasn't been much progress at all in that area, its still just multiple choice dialog and a handful of items that trigger stuff.
Look at Force Unleashed for beautiful physics applications.
Only played the demo, but that didn't exactly impress me, plenty of predefined door-bending animation, plenty of enemies falling apart in predefined spots. A lot of fluff, but in the end just another random third-person action game.
I still see plenty of stunning landscapes in new games, with great stories, and characters that I enjoy.
Well, yeah, not everything is awful today, in fact most stuff is quite good from a pure technical standpoint. But most of it are sequels or games doing the same thing that last years games already did. The amount of fresh ideas that actually turn into a full and good games is pretty damn slim today and even worse many old ideas are lost and forgotten. As said, the main problem I have today isn't so much with the games itself, but with that the games don't hold up to my expectations. Back then 15 years ago there was fully destructible terrain in XCom:UFO, a few years later there was a fully dynamic simulated war in EF2000, there was random level generation and plenty more great ideas and concepts. Where can I get that same experience today in an improved version or something original of the same quality?
The difference between today and back then, is that back then games left a lasting impression because they did something new or different, that just doesn't happen any more. In the last five years there simply was way to much repetition of already well know genres. Its just not fun when half the games play almost exactly like each other. Another factor is that games today lack personality, random military shooters with random military guys just looks pretty random and uninteresting, compare that to a Guybrush Threepwood and you will see quite a bit of difference. Now of course, all that is a gross simplification and there are exceptions every now and then, but with all the sequels (some running for well over 10 years) and genre recycling there is just very little to actually amaze you.
In the end however I think my biggest problem with games today is simply that they haven't kept up with my expectations. Sure, graphics today are awesome, but the depth with which you can interact with the world has had almost no progression at all in the last 20 or so years. Enemy AI is still pretty much non-existent and AI of team members is even worse. The interaction with items and objects has made pretty much no progression at all and a 20 year old game like Maniac Mansion still is superior or at least equal to almost anything out there. Physics engines promise some possible progress in that area, but I am still waiting for a game that turns some of what was shown in the Euphoria techdemos into actual meaningful gameplay.
But then you have masterpieces like Bioshock which centres its narrative around that very phenomenon, and still gives you some freedom of choice to affect the outcome of the story.
Bioshock, just like many Bioware games, has completly black&white choices, it is "kill sisters" or "save sisters", there is no grey area in between. I don't feel that this gives me freedom, it just makes the limits so more obvious. The little freedom that Bioshock has is that it allows some non-linear exploration of the levels, which is a nice touch, but its not exactly a new thing, Doom1 had that and just like in all other games Bioshock still restricts you to those areas where it wants you to go, you are not allowed to roam around freely through Rapture. Neither does Bioshock allow any communication with NPCs, its all just monologue.
That Bioshock is hailed as a masterpiece, just shows how primitive the story telling in games is and how little it has progressed over the years. Maniac Mansion, which is over 20 years old and run on a C64, was much more advanced in many areas of storytelling then many of the stuff that is thrown at us today.
I've had plenty of games that were totally satisfying in terms of interaction...
So have I, that doesn't mean that I don't see the inherent limits games today have.
The claim was that games offer richer interaction than other forms of personal entertainment (e.g. books, films, music, etc.)
No, the claim was that they offer "richer forms of entertainment" due to interaction. Now one can have of course different definitions of "rich", but for me its mainly the amount of variety in terms of what stories can be told and I see plenty of more of that in movies and books then I see in games.
Games are simply for most part a matter of "There are monsters, go kill them". Even the good games, while they might have better storys and dialog, follow the same underlying mechanics and are still not far away from Space Invaders. A large part of that is because the interaction is extremely primitive and no good for actual storytelling, at best it can be used to trigger a pre-scripted story event, but it does little to let an interesting story evolve out of actual gameplay.
There are of course a few exceptions with things like The Sims, which allow a rich set of actions and which allows dynamic stories to evolve, but then its still kind of at the level of mix of slapstick comedy and soap operas at best and doesn't get all that much deeper at this point in time.
The point I am trying to make isn't that books or movies are somehow better, but that the interactive parts of games doesn't really help that much when it comes to storytelling, in fact it often does exactly the opposite.
To phrase it another way, there has yet to be a single game that gets me emotionally involved due to its interactive parts. It just doesn't happen. The involvement comes due to cutscenes and predefined sequences, but not due to my own doing and those games that get close, just to often spoil it due to bad AI, stupid NPCs or simple save/reload cycles that can undo any dramatic event that happened.
If you're going to simplify things to that extent,
Thing is, its not a simplification, its what you do in most games. If you want to be picky, sure you also have a reload button and a button to change your gun and maybe you can jump to, but none of those help to give the story much depths or complexity.
you might as well say that watching a film is "nothing more that sitting and staring at a screen for a couple of hours"
That is a perfectly true statement, it however misses the point. The problem isn't how much or little I have to waggle the controller to get my in game character moving, but how much meaningful ways you have to drive the story forward. A movie doesn't need those since it progresses on its own. A game on the other side is about interaction and thus it becomes important how you can interact with the game world and in very many you simply don't have any other means of interaction then your gun. Games are simply extremely primitive when it comes no non-violent character interaction, in the best cases you have a multiple choice dialog tree to walk done, which is fine, but doesn't leave much freedom, in the other case you have nothing at all or blunt "yes/no" choices or not even that. All the complexity of real human interaction either completly prescripted or simply non existant in todays games.
being a part of the story rather than simply observing it.
But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride. Giving him not only the non-interactivity of a book or movie, but also all the restriction that come from being locked to the viewpoint of a single character and of course the whole immersion breaking parts of pre-scripted events, bad AI and bad user interfaces.
As a medium, video games have the potential to go further, much further than that.
I don't disagree with that, after all everything from Tetris to the Holodeck falls into the 'game' category, so there is plenty of room left to explore. But so far games have at best scratched the surface of their potential, leaving a lot to be desired.
since the interaction between a player and a game is much more deep and complex than that between a reader and a book
The interaction between a player and a game is extremely simple and most of the time not much deeper then "press button, see character fall dead". Even worse, since the players view in a game is more or less 'locked' to the main character, games have a far smaller range on how to present things, since it would break the gameplay to move away to a non-playable character. Also because a game needs to fill the player with constant interaction, games tend to be pretty comical and unbelievable.
That said, not every game has to be a typical current day first person shooter. We already have Tetris, Wii Sports, abstract stuff like Passage or story driven things like Monkey Island, Planscape Tourment and we will certainly see completly new genres emerge in future. But most stuff that would fall into the "deep and complex" category just fails mass-market appeal and thus never gets made in the first place, which leaves current day games fall quite a bit behind their potential.
So instead of basing your judgement on what the actual climate scientist say, you prefer to base it on two talkers that don't actually work in the field. Good luck with that. Just because a lot of the global warming paranoia is complete bullshit doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening or that burning fossil fuels is a good idea.
I prefer to base my judgement on good old common sense: polluting the environment has never produced much good, so we should limit it whenever possible. Global warming or not, clean air is a good thing either way.
Without serial keys, anyone could just buy say, an RTS like AoE3 and install it on all your friends computers real quick so you can play together online.
Once upon a time, support for doing multiple installations from a single CD for multiplayer was actually provided as a feature in games, not as an illegal thing that needs to be stopped.
As is, this seems relatively easy to defeat and well within reach of available technology. The number of 3D models is rather low and they have a very clear silhouette and also a very distinct one for each models. So all one has to do is to search for the best matching silhouette.
The good thing however is that 3d models have enough flexibility so that one could conquer many attacks, adding background images and texture would make it much more difficult to get a clear silhouette and one could of course easily introduce many more models into the mix.
Teaching them how to use just use it, is of course truly useless, since they will figure that out by themselves just fine, likely must faster then most of their teachers. However teaching them how to work with it, how to interpret it, who controls it and how the whole thing works in the first place is very important. Using the Internet is easy, understanding how it all works behind the scene and how its organized however is far less obvious and often times important. Don't believe that, just look at all those retard comments on Youtube. And of course there is the whole publishing side of things, when people publish things on the net there are plenty of dangers involved, from privacy issues to getting into defamation and copyright lawsuits, a little teaching in that area can't hurt.
Somehow in our culture it became ok to steal music and now video, how did this happen?
It didn't became 'ok', it already *was* ok for thousands of years. Thats how culture spreads. Even the "lend music from your friend and copy it" was perfectly legal in a lot of countries before the Internet hit mainstream. Its only recently that common practices have become illegal. Lending a digital book to your friend is now illegal, because it requires working around copy protection and stuff. How did that ever happen against the will of the people? The whole crux is simply that RIAA and friends have become obsolete by new technologies and now try all they can to somehow stay alive, instead of trying to figure out how to do business in a digital world.
I disagree with putting the blame on Javascript, the whole problem starts already with HTML/CSS. Webpages these days are something that is generated, not something that is written, meaning what the user gets to see isn't the real data, but just some more or less usable rendering of it and thats pretty much where the trouble starts. The whole notion that its the browsers job to render a webpage in a style chosen by a user, has pretty much completly fade away, today you are basically left with the choice between pixel-perfect representation of what the webdesigner had in mind and absolutely no style at all, there is no in between, no clean separation between actual content and user interface. Even something simply as changing the font size will break close to 100% of all non-trivial webpages out there, on some its just a little glitch (like "Reply to this" button falling appart on Slashdot) while other get completly unusable because elements end up being hidden below others. This whole mess has to stop. I don't mean that webpages should go back to HTML2 or whatever, but simply that they should allow raw access to their content, I don't want a news article flooded with navigation bar and crap, I want the raw news article and nothing else. I doubt that this will happen on a large scale anytime soon, since it would make it to easy to filter away all advertisment, but then even webpages without any advertisment suffers from this very same problem.
And it would do this even if you were driving on your own private road, or driving a tractor on your own land
Doesn't sound likely, it would be to easy to build GPS into the thing that then could handle your private road just fine. Also your car will probably just switch to autopilot if you drank to much, its the future after all.
I have some doubt about terraforming. With genetic engineering getting more and more common and computers getting faster all the time, I think its much more likely that we simply transform the human race itself to be suitable for life on other planets then transforming the planets themselves. Quite a bit cheaper to engineer a few cyborg colonist then to put a breathable atmosphere on Mars, after all we already kind of done the former, the rovers just need to get a little more clever.
All the money in the world doesn't allow you to break the laws of physics. And even if you can construct a theoretical possibility of FTL, you will likely have a really hard time implementing it, i.e. for a wormhole you might need two black holes, which aren't exactly easy to come by and then you have to find a way to survive traveling through that thing and all that stuff. So not likely to happen. Much more likely that the Kurzweil's singularity will happen, we will all turn into a cyboard super race and then no longer need FTL, because we can all put our brains on sleep for a few hundred or thousand years. Another alternative would be to simply construct interstellar travel with our current day technology, which isn't all that bad, you can reach the next star in around 100 years.
It might be 3 years from now or perhaps even more but when ipv4 becomes scarce(and it will),
IPv4 addresses have been scare for a decade or so, the answer so far was to cripple the net with NAT or simply to raise prices when you want a real static IPv4 address instead of a dynamic one. I don't see that changing anytime soon. The problem is simply that IPv6 doesn't really provide any instant advantage, since hardly anything is available on IPv6 that isn't on IPv4. And the whole 'it will make networking simpler' isn't something the average user will grasp anytime soon, even worse, addding an IPv6 record to a webpage these days will break it for many people, because IPv6 routing is rather broken (i.e. you can get it easily via 6to4, but half the IPv6 webpages will not work with it).
Unless the government steps in and actually requires IPv6 for certain services I don't see anything changing. The most likely cause these days seems to be that China and other emerging markets go IPv6, while western world stays IPv4 for a while to come and then maybe slowly switch over to not end up disconnected to China and Co.
I imagine it will take a lot of work but at least with Free Software this can be fixed.
The applications aren't broken, what they do is perfectly normal and taught in pretty much an C programming book out there. Adding fsync() all over the place wouldn't fix anything. For one thing it would mean inserting platform specific code into every application that might otherwise be completly portable ANSI-C or ISO-C++, which would be really ugly, but it would also make the filessytem extremely slow, since now everything gets written to disk instantly and can't be cached. If you want to have fast and secure file writing there is only one place where you can fix that and that is the filesystem.
The point is that there are many ANSI-C and ISO-C++ applications out there, if the OS can't execute them properly, that's a problem with the OS, not the applications