You didn't need a story line to go defeat Bowser in Mario.
Well, yeah, different games have different requirements. I certainly enjoyed the stories in Monkey Island, The Dig, The Longest Journey and a dozen of other games.
if you want a story, go read a book or a watch a movie, but a game is meant to be played.
Todays movies are really no better then todays games and even if their are, they still have the problem of just having 120minutes to get it done while games can have 20 hours, books simply lack the graphics and sound aspect, which I kind of like.
A top-down shooter requires good reflexes, but it has nowhere near as many seizure-inducing flashing going on as todays FPS games. There simply is a big difference between a 32x32 sprite going 'bum' and your whole screen going all blurry and shacky because a grenade exploded near by, not even counting the dozen of particle effect right near by.
Or maybe it's not nostalgia, and you're just really, really bad at picking out games.
Or maybe the games he liked are simply no longer being made. There are certainly a lot of genre and game concept that I haven't seen being used in a long long while. While other genres that I have goten already tired of long ago get new releases every month (FPS,...).
Is that nostalgia, maybe a little, but that still wouldn't explain why I even enjoy old games that I never had contact with back in the day.
Much the same, crashes are arguably not important for a racing simulation.
Sorry, but that is quite seriously complete and utter bullshit. When you don't have crashes you have no penalty for driving into walls and other cars and when you don't have that penalty such crazy unrealistic driving becomes a valid practice to race around the track faster and to take over opponents, turning what might have been a reasonable simulation into a game of bumper cars. And no, they didn't fixed that, since I used that tactic throughout all of Grand Turismo games I have played, include 4 and it works just as well as ever.
Take GRID for example a game that might be quite a bit more arcady then GT, but actually does feature crashes, still not very realistic ones, but realstic enough that driving your car into a wall ends your race. Switching from GT to GRID required me to rethink my driving tactics pretty much completly because all that bullshit that GT trained me no longer worked, my car would be a wreak after the first turn with my GT driving behavior.
Not putting realistic crashes into the game does not mean it's a failure of RACING simulation, just that it's not accurate in the non-racing parts.
Crashes are a major part of racing, I have yet to see a single Formula 1 race where all cars end up over the finish line, it simply never happens, since vehicle are fragile in reality, not indestructible pieces of video game goo.
Many games try to claim they're not part of a genre.
They certainly are part of a genre, but a genre which pretty much died out years ago and was never existent on consoles to begin with, we used to call those games 'simulations'. You might remember the kind of 'games' that tries to make things primary real, not making them primary fun (i.e. no leveling up, no primary focus on graphic, no unlockables, etc.). Its pretty obvious why they try to distance themselves from the rest, since most of what qualifies as 'simulations' these days is really pretty laughable when it comes to 'simulation', just look at Grand Turismo, it has all the graphic superiority money can buy, but you can still drive into a wall at 300mph and not have a scratch on your car, even Pitfall2 on the C64 was more realistic then that when it comes to crashes.
One might of course still call the result a video game, but a simulation is still quite a different kind of genre that pretty much all other.
If people choose to live unhealthy lifestyles than I'm not going to get real worked up about it.
The problem is that they don't chose that lifestyle. They don't go out and consciously decide that they want to become fat and addicted to smokes, instead it happens as a combination of genes and their social surroundings. Evolution simply hasn't build humans to live in the conditions we currently live in and thats why people end up getting fat when there is more food around then they can eat. And well, the result of that are then higher tax and insurance costs and those become a problem for society.
The tricky part of course is to shape the whole environment in such a way that those problems no longer appear in the first place. Just blaming the fat people to do more exercise isn't going to do it on a large scale and just outlawing smokes and fat food isn't going to find many friends either, but on the other side just saying its personal choice isn't really helping either, since the problem of unhealthy lifestyle are what is causing problems for society as a whole.
Just because we don't know how to fix the problem, doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying and just blame it on the individual.
In the case of Fallout however you couldn't even blame them, since the game expects quite a bit of in-depth knowledge of role playing right before it even starts. One of the major annoyances for me with those RPGs is that the skill setting happens before the game even starts. How shall I know what good any of those dozens of attributes is when I haven't even set a single foot in the gaming world?
I agree that todays games have tons of faults, but some old school games really require a lot of familiarity with the genre before you can even start making a meaningful decision about what you want to do in the game and you aren't gaining that knowledge from just starting to play the game, since those games aren't really trying much to tutor you.
You are talking about a different market then I am. I am talking about the home computer (C64, Amiga, PC) era of the early 1990s and that was definitvly a very different kind of "business" then today.
Stop right there! This is just what I mean by selective memory. For every of these "classic" years, go and take a look at all the games released and then tell me how large the portion of truly memorable games is.
My point is that there actually were "classics". People still fondly remember a Monkey Island or a Another World, but will they care about GTAIV when they are already playing GTAX? Todays games simply have very little that makes them stand out and especially over time there simply is nothing that makes them stand really apart from the mass, since with sequels and clones its all just the same. A look at the top games from the Playstation3 or XBox360 is simply depression, because its just sequel over sequel. And even those highly original games like Braid, are often based very much in the past and tributes to past games instead of being completly self standing.
Also PSN and XBLA is still very much business driven, there are a handful of exceptions, but most stuff are really just remakes of past games or clones of other successful games in that place (see the tons of dual analogstick shooters).
There never was a period when graphics didn't matter, or a period when crap shovelware games didn't exist.
True, but there was a time when games had variety. The by far biggest annoyance of todays games is that they simply all play the same and even if a game comes up with a new idea, its instantly cloned in every other game, so that nothing stays unique for long. It simply doesn't matter if I play a Gears of War, a Uncharted or a GTAIV, its all the very same game mechanic and even a Metal Gear 4 isn't far away. And if that weren't enough, there are of course a ton of sequels, so you will already be quite familiar with any piece of story and characters that a game has to offer. Games these days simply get really boring really quickly. You still can waste time with them and have some fun, but noteworthy games that I will fondly remember in ten years down the line? Nope, most of them are pretty forgettable stuff that will be superseded by the improved sequel next year anyway.
It's really all rose-colored glasses and extremely selective memories.
There is always a little rose-tinting going on, but the games industry of the past was a very different then what it is today and that shows in the games. The uniqueness that you got back in the day, thanks to small teams and unique ideas, is pretty much gone in todays business driven world where each and every aspect of a game gets watered down so much that its near indistinguishable form the stuff you played last year.
Those other buildings weren't the WTC. It doesn't require much imagination no conclude that maybe the WTC wasn't build to be the strongest building in town, but to be the highest and that stability suffered from that goal.
And also, why the fuck would anybody place explosives in the building and risk being caught while doing that? Even if you assume conspiration, they already got two planes hitting the buildings, shouldn't that have been more then enough to get their agenda going? The problem with conspiration theorist is that they go all wildly speculative and nitpicky on topics they have no clue about. So something in the collapse didn't go as expected? Big woop, buildings are complex and the conditions here are rather special, so you really haven't much, if anything, to compare it to, 400 meter high buildings don't get hit by planes every day. I mean how do you expect it would have looked when they collapsed without a controlled demolition? Kind of pretty much exactly the same?
The problem is that a MMO is by definition a multiplayer game and simple tasks that work fine in a single player game really feel silly in a multiplayer one. When I have to get in line and wait for my turn to kill that very same boar that all those people before me already killed all my suspense of disbelieve goes right out the windows and I would very much welcome some added persistence even when it makes the overall game a little more complicated.
The real 3D is already there, you get a point cloud in the background that is a pretty good 3D model already, if only they would fill it and plaster the photos over it as textures. I don't really understand why they haven't already done it, since it doesn't sound like a very complicated task compared to getting the point cloud in the first place. Maybe real fully textured 3D will come in the next version.
It's clear you are highly confident that you are right so you will no doubt be surprised to learn that you are simply uneducated.
No, I am just being ignorant for solutions that are searching for a problem. Pen&paper works, is easy to understand and any piece of electronic equipment between me and the paper is just a useless piece of junk that shouldn't be there in the first place. Just because we can do electronic voting, doesn't mean we should.
The point cloud is definitively impressive, but the lack of textures 3D model feels weird, especially since it shouldn't be hard to create once you have the point cloud and the photos in the right spots.
The way in which the 2D pictures are blending into the 3D view currently feels weird, since the pictures are shown in their flat 2D form they are often heavily deformed to fit the perspective, which makes it hard to predict where the picture will end up being.
A main reason for that is that most picture viewers suck quite a lot, they make photo viewing a chore instead of making it fun, since you either have to navigate manually from photo to photo or because you have to wait quite a while for the thumbnails to load, which then of course are not big enough to be of much use. When on the other side you have something like Surface or Photosynth where you can freely zoom in and out and navigate the photos in a quick and painless manner, things start to become fun and photobrowsing becomes more an activity like searching through a treasure trove then watching a boring slideshow. You of course still won't look at the photos every day, but with such software you can actually browse large collections of unsorted pictures and have fun doing so.
Because the only open voting system is the one that uses pen&paper, everything else is just a little less obscure then any random proprietary system, since you don't have any guarantee that the system you are voting on is actually the one they claim it is.
The crux with any kind of electronic voting system is that it can't be verified by the voter and if you can't do that, then it should have no place in a democracy. Now you can of course add a paper trail to any electronic voting machine, but if you have so little trust in electronic voting, then why even start it in the first place? Pen&paper works, is cheap and easy to understand by everybody.
Perspective tricks only work from a single perspective, the moment you see the object from more then one view point you no longer have an illusion, but only a weird formed object. So it shouldn't cause much trouble here, since the software works with multiple photos.
A story designed by committee could be rather crappy. However what could be useful is testing the game via a community a lot, so that you can catch all those places where item X combined with item Y would make sense, but wasn't handled by the author.
For me the main reason is that C and C++ allow you access to the "real thing", while other languages just wrapper things up and these wrapper have the tendency to be unmaintained, buggy, limited or simply being non-existent. So instead of writing tons of wrapper code and hunting bugs in wrapper code, I simply write it directly in C++.
Another advantage is that C++ is statically typed, never could see much of a real benefit of dynamic typing, since it just moves errors that your compiler would have found automatically down to runtime where you have to find them one by one, pretty annoying an time consuming.
That of course doesn't mean that C++ is perfect, it has tons of problems, but since none of the alternatives can do what C++ can do, there often isn't really much of a choice.
Neither Dreamfall nor TLJ is a MMO and TLJ is by a lot of people to considered one of the best video game stories ever right next to Planescape Tourment.
The problem with Dreamfall was that the story as a whole simply made very little sense, maybe things will be cleared up in Dreamfall:Chapters, but Dreamfall taken by itself is really weird. The Faith subplot itself gets resolved ok, but the whole April subplot feels very out of place, half the game you spend to find her and then you find her and nothing happens, the whole visit to Acadia doesn't really accomplishes a thing and is more a tour-guide through nice places that you already new from TLJ then something that makes much sense in terms of the story. And there are a ton of other subplots that don't go anywhere either.
Dreamfall is a fun ride while it lasts and I enjoyed it a lot, but when one looks back at the plot as a whole it just doesn't feel exactly very complete, it feels like half the game is missing.
That all ignores the fact that the interactivity of a game leads to a greater immersion, and a better experience than passively watching a movie or reading a book.
Depends, in by far the most games interaction is what ruins the immersion instead of creating it. Simple example: a character dies in a movie, you cry or feel sad, a character dies in a videogame, you feel annoyed and hit reload and try again. Not exactly very immersive. That is also why by far most games these days tell all their plot points in precreated cutscenes, sometimes these days you get a little bit of interaction like in Half Life 2, but its still a precreated cutscene.
Now there are of course exceptions, games are great at creating frustration and anger, but those are most often directed at the game mechanics. Games also can be good at giving a feeling of accomplishment, but then thats also not really the classic emotion that you want to evoke with storytelling.
There are of course also a few exceptions of the different kind that actually create emotions such as a movie or a book, adventure games being the most easy ones, since their storytelling isn't all that different from a movie or a book. And since they are basically one big long cutscene with a few puzzles mixed in, they have it relatively easy to avoid immersion-breaking save/reload cycles or other distracting events. The other exception is actually the interesting one: simulations. Some games give the player enough freedom and persistence to create feelings right out of the gameplay, with no predefined tricks. I consider Operation Flashpoint for example pretty much the thing about the war ever created, better then any movie or book I have watched or read. It does that because it gives you a realistic an intimidating feeling for the chaos and cruelty of war, the interaction part is important here because it makes the events feel authentic, the prescripting is kept at a minimum and pretty much all events play out dynamically and different each time, which removes the fakeness feeling that movies can invoke quite easily. Some RPGs also go into that direction, the freedom they give can be used by the player to create his own stories inside the gameworld, without being forced on a predefined path. Sadly however few games these days, especially on consoles, try actually give the player the freedom necessary to create emotions from gameplay alone, most fall back to simple predefined cutscenes, which while sometimes nice, are most often far to disconnected from the actually gameplay.
There is no reason a machine counted vote can't be just as verifiable as a human counted vote.
How is my grandma supposed to verify a voting machine? If the common voter can't verify a voting machine, then its not useful if you want a trustful voting process, since your whole democrazy will end up in the hands of a tiny few 'experts'. And heck, even a computer expert will have a very hard time proving that a machine is doing what it is supposed to do, even when he is allowed to disassemble every piece of it, its a pretty much a near impossible task. And well, disassembling each and every voting machine isn't even an option to begin with, most of them will simply run as blackboxes with nobody doing any verification at all.
Just because diebold built a "black box" doesn't mean it needs to be that way.
Computers are blackboxes kind of by definition, at least I have never seen a computer chip that isn't.
aving the code that runs in the machine open source means that anyone can verify the way in which the machine has processed the vote.
No, having it open source doesn't solve anything, people still have absolutely zero guarantee that the machine that they are voting on is actually running the code it is supposed to be and even if they had, they still have no guarantee that somebody hasn't rerouted the touchscreen or the display to misdirect your button presses to that other field.
The notion that people counting votes by hand is somehow always more accurate than a machine counted vote is ludicrous to me.
The point isn't perfect accuracy, but being temper proof. Sure a bit of random error will always happen in hand counting, but you have multiple people doing the counting, so the error rate will be pretty low and if in doubt you simply do another recount. With a machine you have no way to do a recount and a shitloads of way to temper with it without anybody noticing anything ever. You have no such problems with hand counting and that bit of random error is really no problem at all, compared to the gigantic temper potential that you get with a voting black box.
I wouldn't even trust myself to count votes accurately.
You don't have to, thats why there are multiple people doing the counting and people watching their backs while doing so.
The problem was that there were using a machine. From a voting system used in a proper democracy I expect that it is verifiable by the voters themselves, pen&paper is exactly that, a machine doesn't even come close and never will, since kind of by definition its a magic black box that might count your vote or not, you can't really tell.
Open Source doesn't solve the problem of voting machines, since you have no way to verify that the machine you are voting on is actually running the code its supposed to be running.
But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc.
Yeah, but those problems can not be applied on a global scale, are trivially to be understood by any voter and are trivially to detect, just stay at the voting place and look at the box. Also counting is done by multiple people, so deliberate miscounting is easy to detect as well. To sum it up, paper voting (the one with a pen, not the one with obscure lever machine) is *by far* the most secure voting mechanism we have and most importantly it is the *only* voting mechanism we have that can be verified by the common voter.
Electronic ballot machines were brought to eliminate these problems.
Electronic ballot machines don't solve any problems, they introduce a shitload of new ones and most importantly they introduce a system that is trivially be manipulated by third parties and impossible to understood by the common voter and thats where the crux is. A voting system has to be understood by the voter, if it can't, then you can throw you democracy right out of the window, since your whole democracy will depend on the trust of a tiny few people who control those machines.
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You didn't need a story line to go defeat Bowser in Mario.
Well, yeah, different games have different requirements. I certainly enjoyed the stories in Monkey Island, The Dig, The Longest Journey and a dozen of other games.
if you want a story, go read a book or a watch a movie, but a game is meant to be played.
Todays movies are really no better then todays games and even if their are, they still have the problem of just having 120minutes to get it done while games can have 20 hours, books simply lack the graphics and sound aspect, which I kind of like.
A top-down shooter requires good reflexes, but it has nowhere near as many seizure-inducing flashing going on as todays FPS games. There simply is a big difference between a 32x32 sprite going 'bum' and your whole screen going all blurry and shacky because a grenade exploded near by, not even counting the dozen of particle effect right near by.
Or maybe it's not nostalgia, and you're just really, really bad at picking out games.
Or maybe the games he liked are simply no longer being made. There are certainly a lot of genre and game concept that I haven't seen being used in a long long while. While other genres that I have goten already tired of long ago get new releases every month (FPS, ...).
Is that nostalgia, maybe a little, but that still wouldn't explain why I even enjoy old games that I never had contact with back in the day.
Much the same, crashes are arguably not important for a racing simulation.
Sorry, but that is quite seriously complete and utter bullshit. When you don't have crashes you have no penalty for driving into walls and other cars and when you don't have that penalty such crazy unrealistic driving becomes a valid practice to race around the track faster and to take over opponents, turning what might have been a reasonable simulation into a game of bumper cars. And no, they didn't fixed that, since I used that tactic throughout all of Grand Turismo games I have played, include 4 and it works just as well as ever.
Take GRID for example a game that might be quite a bit more arcady then GT, but actually does feature crashes, still not very realistic ones, but realstic enough that driving your car into a wall ends your race. Switching from GT to GRID required me to rethink my driving tactics pretty much completly because all that bullshit that GT trained me no longer worked, my car would be a wreak after the first turn with my GT driving behavior.
Not putting realistic crashes into the game does not mean it's a failure of RACING simulation, just that it's not accurate in the non-racing parts.
Crashes are a major part of racing, I have yet to see a single Formula 1 race where all cars end up over the finish line, it simply never happens, since vehicle are fragile in reality, not indestructible pieces of video game goo.
Many games try to claim they're not part of a genre.
They certainly are part of a genre, but a genre which pretty much died out years ago and was never existent on consoles to begin with, we used to call those games 'simulations'. You might remember the kind of 'games' that tries to make things primary real, not making them primary fun (i.e. no leveling up, no primary focus on graphic, no unlockables, etc.). Its pretty obvious why they try to distance themselves from the rest, since most of what qualifies as 'simulations' these days is really pretty laughable when it comes to 'simulation', just look at Grand Turismo, it has all the graphic superiority money can buy, but you can still drive into a wall at 300mph and not have a scratch on your car, even Pitfall2 on the C64 was more realistic then that when it comes to crashes.
One might of course still call the result a video game, but a simulation is still quite a different kind of genre that pretty much all other.
If people choose to live unhealthy lifestyles than I'm not going to get real worked up about it.
The problem is that they don't chose that lifestyle. They don't go out and consciously decide that they want to become fat and addicted to smokes, instead it happens as a combination of genes and their social surroundings. Evolution simply hasn't build humans to live in the conditions we currently live in and thats why people end up getting fat when there is more food around then they can eat. And well, the result of that are then higher tax and insurance costs and those become a problem for society.
The tricky part of course is to shape the whole environment in such a way that those problems no longer appear in the first place. Just blaming the fat people to do more exercise isn't going to do it on a large scale and just outlawing smokes and fat food isn't going to find many friends either, but on the other side just saying its personal choice isn't really helping either, since the problem of unhealthy lifestyle are what is causing problems for society as a whole.
Just because we don't know how to fix the problem, doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying and just blame it on the individual.
In the case of Fallout however you couldn't even blame them, since the game expects quite a bit of in-depth knowledge of role playing right before it even starts. One of the major annoyances for me with those RPGs is that the skill setting happens before the game even starts. How shall I know what good any of those dozens of attributes is when I haven't even set a single foot in the gaming world?
I agree that todays games have tons of faults, but some old school games really require a lot of familiarity with the genre before you can even start making a meaningful decision about what you want to do in the game and you aren't gaining that knowledge from just starting to play the game, since those games aren't really trying much to tutor you.
You are talking about a different market then I am. I am talking about the home computer (C64, Amiga, PC) era of the early 1990s and that was definitvly a very different kind of "business" then today.
Stop right there! This is just what I mean by selective memory. For every of these "classic" years, go and take a look at all the games released and then tell me how large the portion of truly memorable games is.
My point is that there actually were "classics". People still fondly remember a Monkey Island or a Another World, but will they care about GTAIV when they are already playing GTAX? Todays games simply have very little that makes them stand out and especially over time there simply is nothing that makes them stand really apart from the mass, since with sequels and clones its all just the same. A look at the top games from the Playstation3 or XBox360 is simply depression, because its just sequel over sequel. And even those highly original games like Braid, are often based very much in the past and tributes to past games instead of being completly self standing.
Also PSN and XBLA is still very much business driven, there are a handful of exceptions, but most stuff are really just remakes of past games or clones of other successful games in that place (see the tons of dual analogstick shooters).
There never was a period when graphics didn't matter, or a period when crap shovelware games didn't exist.
True, but there was a time when games had variety. The by far biggest annoyance of todays games is that they simply all play the same and even if a game comes up with a new idea, its instantly cloned in every other game, so that nothing stays unique for long. It simply doesn't matter if I play a Gears of War, a Uncharted or a GTAIV, its all the very same game mechanic and even a Metal Gear 4 isn't far away. And if that weren't enough, there are of course a ton of sequels, so you will already be quite familiar with any piece of story and characters that a game has to offer. Games these days simply get really boring really quickly. You still can waste time with them and have some fun, but noteworthy games that I will fondly remember in ten years down the line? Nope, most of them are pretty forgettable stuff that will be superseded by the improved sequel next year anyway.
It's really all rose-colored glasses and extremely selective memories.
There is always a little rose-tinting going on, but the games industry of the past was a very different then what it is today and that shows in the games. The uniqueness that you got back in the day, thanks to small teams and unique ideas, is pretty much gone in todays business driven world where each and every aspect of a game gets watered down so much that its near indistinguishable form the stuff you played last year.
those much older buildings haven't collapsed
Those other buildings weren't the WTC. It doesn't require much imagination no conclude that maybe the WTC wasn't build to be the strongest building in town, but to be the highest and that stability suffered from that goal.
And also, why the fuck would anybody place explosives in the building and risk being caught while doing that? Even if you assume conspiration, they already got two planes hitting the buildings, shouldn't that have been more then enough to get their agenda going? The problem with conspiration theorist is that they go all wildly speculative and nitpicky on topics they have no clue about. So something in the collapse didn't go as expected? Big woop, buildings are complex and the conditions here are rather special, so you really haven't much, if anything, to compare it to, 400 meter high buildings don't get hit by planes every day. I mean how do you expect it would have looked when they collapsed without a controlled demolition? Kind of pretty much exactly the same?
The problem is that a MMO is by definition a multiplayer game and simple tasks that work fine in a single player game really feel silly in a multiplayer one. When I have to get in line and wait for my turn to kill that very same boar that all those people before me already killed all my suspense of disbelieve goes right out the windows and I would very much welcome some added persistence even when it makes the overall game a little more complicated.
The real 3D is already there, you get a point cloud in the background that is a pretty good 3D model already, if only they would fill it and plaster the photos over it as textures. I don't really understand why they haven't already done it, since it doesn't sound like a very complicated task compared to getting the point cloud in the first place. Maybe real fully textured 3D will come in the next version.
It's clear you are highly confident that you are right so you will no doubt be surprised to learn that you are simply uneducated.
No, I am just being ignorant for solutions that are searching for a problem. Pen&paper works, is easy to understand and any piece of electronic equipment between me and the paper is just a useless piece of junk that shouldn't be there in the first place. Just because we can do electronic voting, doesn't mean we should.
The point cloud is definitively impressive, but the lack of textures 3D model feels weird, especially since it shouldn't be hard to create once you have the point cloud and the photos in the right spots.
The way in which the 2D pictures are blending into the 3D view currently feels weird, since the pictures are shown in their flat 2D form they are often heavily deformed to fit the perspective, which makes it hard to predict where the picture will end up being.
put it in the PC and rarely ever look at it again
A main reason for that is that most picture viewers suck quite a lot, they make photo viewing a chore instead of making it fun, since you either have to navigate manually from photo to photo or because you have to wait quite a while for the thumbnails to load, which then of course are not big enough to be of much use. When on the other side you have something like Surface or Photosynth where you can freely zoom in and out and navigate the photos in a quick and painless manner, things start to become fun and photobrowsing becomes more an activity like searching through a treasure trove then watching a boring slideshow. You of course still won't look at the photos every day, but with such software you can actually browse large collections of unsorted pictures and have fun doing so.
Because the only open voting system is the one that uses pen&paper, everything else is just a little less obscure then any random proprietary system, since you don't have any guarantee that the system you are voting on is actually the one they claim it is.
The crux with any kind of electronic voting system is that it can't be verified by the voter and if you can't do that, then it should have no place in a democracy. Now you can of course add a paper trail to any electronic voting machine, but if you have so little trust in electronic voting, then why even start it in the first place? Pen&paper works, is cheap and easy to understand by everybody.
Perspective tricks only work from a single perspective, the moment you see the object from more then one view point you no longer have an illusion, but only a weird formed object. So it shouldn't cause much trouble here, since the software works with multiple photos.
A story designed by committee could be rather crappy. However what could be useful is testing the game via a community a lot, so that you can catch all those places where item X combined with item Y would make sense, but wasn't handled by the author.
For me the main reason is that C and C++ allow you access to the "real thing", while other languages just wrapper things up and these wrapper have the tendency to be unmaintained, buggy, limited or simply being non-existent. So instead of writing tons of wrapper code and hunting bugs in wrapper code, I simply write it directly in C++.
Another advantage is that C++ is statically typed, never could see much of a real benefit of dynamic typing, since it just moves errors that your compiler would have found automatically down to runtime where you have to find them one by one, pretty annoying an time consuming.
That of course doesn't mean that C++ is perfect, it has tons of problems, but since none of the alternatives can do what C++ can do, there often isn't really much of a choice.
Neither Dreamfall nor TLJ is a MMO and TLJ is by a lot of people to considered one of the best video game stories ever right next to Planescape Tourment.
The problem with Dreamfall was that the story as a whole simply made very little sense, maybe things will be cleared up in Dreamfall:Chapters, but Dreamfall taken by itself is really weird. The Faith subplot itself gets resolved ok, but the whole April subplot feels very out of place, half the game you spend to find her and then you find her and nothing happens, the whole visit to Acadia doesn't really accomplishes a thing and is more a tour-guide through nice places that you already new from TLJ then something that makes much sense in terms of the story. And there are a ton of other subplots that don't go anywhere either.
Dreamfall is a fun ride while it lasts and I enjoyed it a lot, but when one looks back at the plot as a whole it just doesn't feel exactly very complete, it feels like half the game is missing.
That all ignores the fact that the interactivity of a game leads to a greater immersion, and a better experience than passively watching a movie or reading a book.
Depends, in by far the most games interaction is what ruins the immersion instead of creating it. Simple example: a character dies in a movie, you cry or feel sad, a character dies in a videogame, you feel annoyed and hit reload and try again. Not exactly very immersive. That is also why by far most games these days tell all their plot points in precreated cutscenes, sometimes these days you get a little bit of interaction like in Half Life 2, but its still a precreated cutscene.
Now there are of course exceptions, games are great at creating frustration and anger, but those are most often directed at the game mechanics. Games also can be good at giving a feeling of accomplishment, but then thats also not really the classic emotion that you want to evoke with storytelling.
There are of course also a few exceptions of the different kind that actually create emotions such as a movie or a book, adventure games being the most easy ones, since their storytelling isn't all that different from a movie or a book. And since they are basically one big long cutscene with a few puzzles mixed in, they have it relatively easy to avoid immersion-breaking save/reload cycles or other distracting events. The other exception is actually the interesting one: simulations. Some games give the player enough freedom and persistence to create feelings right out of the gameplay, with no predefined tricks. I consider Operation Flashpoint for example pretty much the thing about the war ever created, better then any movie or book I have watched or read. It does that because it gives you a realistic an intimidating feeling for the chaos and cruelty of war, the interaction part is important here because it makes the events feel authentic, the prescripting is kept at a minimum and pretty much all events play out dynamically and different each time, which removes the fakeness feeling that movies can invoke quite easily. Some RPGs also go into that direction, the freedom they give can be used by the player to create his own stories inside the gameworld, without being forced on a predefined path. Sadly however few games these days, especially on consoles, try actually give the player the freedom necessary to create emotions from gameplay alone, most fall back to simple predefined cutscenes, which while sometimes nice, are most often far to disconnected from the actually gameplay.
There is no reason a machine counted vote can't be just as verifiable as a human counted vote.
How is my grandma supposed to verify a voting machine? If the common voter can't verify a voting machine, then its not useful if you want a trustful voting process, since your whole democrazy will end up in the hands of a tiny few 'experts'. And heck, even a computer expert will have a very hard time proving that a machine is doing what it is supposed to do, even when he is allowed to disassemble every piece of it, its a pretty much a near impossible task. And well, disassembling each and every voting machine isn't even an option to begin with, most of them will simply run as blackboxes with nobody doing any verification at all.
Just because diebold built a "black box" doesn't mean it needs to be that way.
Computers are blackboxes kind of by definition, at least I have never seen a computer chip that isn't.
aving the code that runs in the machine open source means that anyone can verify the way in which the machine has processed the vote.
No, having it open source doesn't solve anything, people still have absolutely zero guarantee that the machine that they are voting on is actually running the code it is supposed to be and even if they had, they still have no guarantee that somebody hasn't rerouted the touchscreen or the display to misdirect your button presses to that other field.
The notion that people counting votes by hand is somehow always more accurate than a machine counted vote is ludicrous to me.
The point isn't perfect accuracy, but being temper proof. Sure a bit of random error will always happen in hand counting, but you have multiple people doing the counting, so the error rate will be pretty low and if in doubt you simply do another recount. With a machine you have no way to do a recount and a shitloads of way to temper with it without anybody noticing anything ever. You have no such problems with hand counting and that bit of random error is really no problem at all, compared to the gigantic temper potential that you get with a voting black box.
I wouldn't even trust myself to count votes accurately.
You don't have to, thats why there are multiple people doing the counting and people watching their backs while doing so.
The problem isn't that they were using machines
The problem was that there were using a machine. From a voting system used in a proper democracy I expect that it is verifiable by the voters themselves, pen&paper is exactly that, a machine doesn't even come close and never will, since kind of by definition its a magic black box that might count your vote or not, you can't really tell.
Open Source doesn't solve the problem of voting machines, since you have no way to verify that the machine you are voting on is actually running the code its supposed to be running.
But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc.
Yeah, but those problems can not be applied on a global scale, are trivially to be understood by any voter and are trivially to detect, just stay at the voting place and look at the box. Also counting is done by multiple people, so deliberate miscounting is easy to detect as well. To sum it up, paper voting (the one with a pen, not the one with obscure lever machine) is *by far* the most secure voting mechanism we have and most importantly it is the *only* voting mechanism we have that can be verified by the common voter.
Electronic ballot machines were brought to eliminate these problems.
Electronic ballot machines don't solve any problems, they introduce a shitload of new ones and most importantly they introduce a system that is trivially be manipulated by third parties and impossible to understood by the common voter and thats where the crux is. A voting system has to be understood by the voter, if it can't, then you can throw you democracy right out of the window, since your whole democracy will depend on the trust of a tiny few people who control those machines.