...Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence.
GTA and Vice City have excellent storylines and great voice acting to string together the amusing gameplay. Without the memorable characters or the hilarious radio talk shows the game loses much of its charm.
Sure, you can still run around and kill hookers for hours on end, but that is the player's choice. Some kids torture insects all day, and parents don't go and blame the Orkin man. Kids are going to do what they find amusing, or what they have been told is amusing. I doubt that many kids' respect for "workin' girls" was tarnished due to the influences of Grand Theft Auto.
Any parent that complains about what their children are exposed to in M rated games needs to be asked why their children are allowed to play M rated games in the first place.
But parents couldn't be to blame could they? Shame on me for asking parents to involve themselves in the raising of their own children, that is the task of the government, and the media, and that homeless guy that sits outside the mall asking for nickles.
There is a picture of the prototype reader past the first link, and though it doesn't say how large it is, if one assumes that the postage stamp sized media fits snugly into the square area, then it looks to be about one inch wide by two inches long by.5 to.75 inches thick.
That is rather impressive for a prototype media reader. Hard Drives and CD-ROMs both started out quite large, but now are restricted more by the size and movement requirements of the media rather than the overhead of the reader itself.
The thought that the inaccessability of any medium will reduce pirating of the content is a fallacy that the music industry may never let go of. Analog aside, even if an expensive peripheral is required to access the data without the normal digital rights monkey business, all it takes is one person with a reader/decoder to scan the data, format it, and send it out into the wilds of the internet to procreate. Just look at cartridge ROMs
No one can claim that media has no influence on mood or attitude. Action and violence in media have been proven to have short term effects that cause some of the subjects to become more violent. However the 'rush' wears off after fifteen or twenty minutes, and there is actually a long term drop in violent tendancies in many subjects, possibly from the venting permitted by the media.
However this is not the violence that games are accused of. Games are accused of desensitizing youth and making them believe that violence is not only acceptable, but preferable to other means of resolution. Of making them think that the consequences of their actions will be small, beccause their game characters got away with it.
I do not know you, but in general I think that it may have been the combination of alcohol and Grand Theft Auto. You seem like a resonable and level headed guy, but being a bit inebriated might have allowed the 'instincts' you had developed from playing the game to surface.
Were your completely sober, you may have thought that in Grand Theft Auto, you could resolve this by knocking the guy out and stealing his car, and laughed to yourself at the absurdity. Some drinking might make you overlook the fact that that may work in the game, but would be a bad idea in real life.
While media can not affect most people's perceptions of reality, drugs can. And the latter can allow the former to blend with reality more readily.
However, I do not know you. You may not have even been drinking alcohol, thought form your description of events that seems unlikely. Some peopel are simply more impressionable than others, when it comes to that much gaming in a short period of time after little or no experience with modern games of that nature.
I can indeed see the difference between war and enjoying a murder. I do not see how that is relevant however, as your example was concerning credits. She was also armed, and had assaulted a man, though with some justification.
I agree that how a person plays a game can tell much about their personality, however that still does not allow one to accurately gauge how they would react in an actual situation.
The second time I played through Knights of the Old Republic, my character was evil. His goal was to cause misery and suffering, and cause people to fall to the dark side. My goal was to be consistent with this character, and to watch the story that the game designers had scripted for evil characters. I was a bit disappointed that the majority of being evil in that game consisted of mindless violence rather than causing mental anguish and pulling others to the dark path, but not because I wanted to watch them suffer, but rather because it would have been a more interesting story. The first time I played through with a somewhat selfish but overall good natured character.
So what does that tell you about me? Do you think I would turn an orphaned girls best friend against her via mind control, given the chance? Or conquer a galaxy and bring about a dark era that would last for centuries? No, all it tells you is that I enjoy a good story, even if the main character is evil. Does that make me a sick and twisted person in your opinion? That isn't flamebait, I am genuinely curious. I laid out that story with my motives, because I wanted your take on how it reflects upon me.
Personally I do not see much wrong in enjoying the deaths of imaginary people, regardless of motive. Using simulations in place of the real thing, wishing you were hurting actual people, would be cause for concern. And I suppose that a large percentage of those that enjoy being overly sadistic to innocent pretend victims would probably fall into that category. But reveling in one's ability to send rows of infantry to their certain doom, while certainly a bit pathetic, does not warrant my scorn.
You ask why we moved on from space invaders; personally I do not put much stock in eye candy. But improved graphics do add one major change to gameplay; refined visual information output. Generally after a playing a game for a while, any graphics that do not tell me something are tuned out, and those that do are simplified down to their base components.
Regarding the experiment you cited, I probably would have stopped when the person recieving the shocks asked me to. But I am sure that there are some that would enjoy the thought of inflicting pain on others, even though the other person was an actor and not actually recieving shocks.
Unlike a game, the experiment takes place in real life, and the subject actually believed pain was being inflicted. But unlike most situations in real life, the subject was given permission and authority to inflict pain on a stranger, and goaded on by the tester if they expressed concern for the person answering the questions. So while someone that revels in their sadism would be a possible danger to society, not every that continued the punishment for wrong questions would be a sadist.
The key factor of course, is motive. Does one kill that innocent cloud of polygons because you wish she were real and actually suffering, Or because you want yoru character to experience the consequences of such an action?
As to your Electro Shock game; again it would come down to motive. Does one play all the way through imagining a real victim on the other end of that shock, or because one is curious as to the specifics? What if the voice were designed to simulate Hitler or Stalin? Would someone who enjoyed torturing one of them be evil and sadistic?
Who decides who is acceptable to enjoy inflicting pain upon? I find torture of the guilty distasteful, but others would jump at the opportunity to perform 'justice'. Of course, the killing of the guilty is, from a Christian standpoint, far worse than any earthly torture, if the guilty has not yet been redeemed. But let's not get into that.
So you found yourself speeding. Millions speed every day without playing racing games. The question now would be: Did playing the game make you think that you could simply get out of a ticket or avoid a collision by hitting reset? Were the consequences of your actions not readily apparent once you realized what you were doing?
The problem with the movies you cited is that they are realistic, though only vaugely, since it would be impossible for Trovolta to be that popular based purely on personality and dancing ability. People drive fast, people wear cowboy hats, and people wear bellbottoms and dance to the hit soundtrack by the legendary Beegees, available now for three easy payments of $19.99 on two 8-Tracks or LPs, all without human injury.
The only consequence of wearing a cowboy hat is, at worst, a punch in the face from a Texan that thinks you are mocking him. Making a fool of yourself on the dance floor is marginally less dangerous. Even speeding, when not under the influence or during dangerous conditions, is relatively free of danger if you are at all a competent driver.
These things are non-violent, and apply directly to many people's lives.
Stealing cars to 80's new wave while wearing a bad suit, and subsequently getting gunned down by police, only to awaken in a hospital with no losses aside from your personal arsenal that you carry around in your back pocket is not realistic, does not apply directly to most people's lives, and doing so in real life has readily concievable consequences when you stop for two seconds to think about the situation.
I agree that media can influence or mood and opinions, however it cannot affect a normal person's perception of reality. An advertisement can make you think you want an expensive new car, and it can decieve you about the financing, but it can not make a rational person believe they can afford a fifty thousand dollar car when they are making less than a third of that annually.
In the same way, a game cannot make a rational person think that shooting at cars on a highway is a wise course of action. Games do not have flashing messages that say "Try this in real life kids, and you will not only get away with it, but become rich and famous!"
Furthermore, from what I can recall the shooters at Columbine went into the school that day knowing that they were going to die. They were not delusional about respawning with extra lives. They were obviously disturbed young men, but video games, at the most, kept them sequestered away during their free time, away from those that might observe their violent trends. And that is more a failing of the family than a fault of the fragging.
The most extreme defenders of the 'video games cause violence' theory are those that believe a perfectly normal and good natured young person can be corrupted simply by playing a violent video game. They see the kids that commited these crimes, from columbine to the recent highway shootings, as victims, and video games as the 'trigger' that set them off.
A comparison to another nation is indeed a valid point in favor of videogames as a cause of violence. The videogames are a constant, as is the majority of the human mind. If a child in Tokyo plays violent video games and is not at all violent, while a child in Idaho plays those same violent video games and goes on a killing spree, then it would seem to me that the environment or personality of the child is a more likely cause than the game.
As to your views on players being 'evil' in games; calling someone sick for choosing dialogue option 2 instead of 1 and then changing the "is_Alive" bit from 1 to 0 for a database entry represented by a humanoid coloud of polygons seems rather self-righteous.
There were also very few 'innocents' in Knights of the old republic. The primary component of the Dark side is selfishness; killing others to lessen risk for yourself, or for a monetary reward, or for the thrill. Yes, these are all evil and twisted paths of thought, but they are my characters, not mine. Accusing me of personfying myself in an evil video game character is rather hypcritical when you admit to playing the game yourself. It would be rediculous to accuse you of being a crazy person that belive himself to be a Jedi out to save the galaxy.
And what of the scripters that designed those numerous choices of light versus dark? Are they enablers for giving you access to those evil "is_Alive" bits? Perhaps they are the most evil of all, ensaring unqitting players into the folds of the dark side. Right...
I am not an evil or sadistic person. Honestly I have trouble killing things larger than dimes, even painlessly. But I have no problem fragging you online, or setting my character loose on an unsuspecting crowd, because they are abstractions; graphical representations of game data. They do not live, they do not think, they do not care. When the game is reset they are reborn, when the game is turned off they cease to exist.
The only thing that shows how people act in real life is life itself. Interactions between real people, not their respective visual abstractions. When you play chess with an englishman and take his queen, you are not making threats against the Crown of Britain. You are playing a game. Is the piece captured, imprisoned, killed? No, it is set on the side of the board, because it is a game, and there are rules, and removing pieces from the board is part of the game.
If you don't want to, you can avoid taking pieces; you will lose, but then that is your perogative. You can play the game how you choose, and the only thing it says about how you act in real life is how you play chess. Because it is only a game; nothing more, nothing less.
Not only does your Dark Helmet voice need work, but it was the President, played by Mel Brooks, who's luggage combination was the same as the lock on the atmospheric bubble. Shame, shame...
I doubt that the EDS has the memory for long-term storage of data. It is designed to collect data from the past x amount of time, overwriting old data, unless the airbag is deployed, in which case it will start saving data. It probably has a reserved section for data to be stored in after the airbag is deployed.
Regardless of the specifics, you would have to stop your car immediately after getting a ticket, have it towed someplace, and then let it sit there until your court day, because the data pertaining to your actual alleged offense would get overwritten.
Now, a car containing an EDS with expanded capabilities, like a button on the dash to backup the current data when you get pulled over, would be interesting, but the more user friendly black boxes become, the more hacker friendly they become as well. I doubt a court would allow a black box as evidence if the driver has any input to it, even if it is simply a hardwired 'save' command.
Bah, last post was apparently in HTML format and managed to make a single unreadable block of text. That will teach me not to preview...Anyway, reposted in plain text:
A long, long ways.
Computer games can run at 60+ frames per second because they are barely doing any work when compared to top of the line rendering engines.
Raytracing, dozens of texture passes, multiple realistic lightsources; and these are just for a two dimensional surface. Making realistic looking skin requires multiple translucent layers to simulate the complicated appearance of skin.
Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification.
That's 10E7 pixels, so to display it at 24 frames per second you would need to be pushing 24E8 pixels a second. 24,000,000,000.
Even if every pixel only took a single cycle (which it might, with the right hardware pipeline in the future), you would need 240 terahertz of power (plus overhead) to display it in real time, along with enough RAM to hold the model and texture data for everything that's going to be onscreen within the next minute or so.
Considering that they have around 2000 x 2.0 X 2 = 8 terahertz available to them, and it still takes ages to render each frame of the complicated battle scenes, I'd say we are going to hit the limit of Moore's law before we could reasonably get hte power to render cinematic scenes in real time. Perhaps with quantum processing we will be able to within the next 20 years or so.
A long, long ways.
Computer games can run at 60+ frames per second because they are barely doing any work when compared to top of the line rendering engines.
Raytracing, dozens of texture passes, multiple realistic lightsources; and these are just for a two dimensional surface. Making realistic looking skin requires multiple translucent layers to simulate the complicated appearance of skin.
Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification.
That's 10E7 pixels, so to display it at 24 frames per second you would need to be pushing 24E8 pixels a second. 24,000,000,000.
Even if every pixel only took a single cycle (which it might, with the right hardware pipeline in the future), you would need 240 terahertz of power (plus overhead) to display it in real time, along with enough RAM to hold the model and texture data for everything that's going to be onscreen within the next minute or so.
Considering that they have around 2000 x 2.0 X 2 = 8 terahertz available to them, and it still takes ages to render each frame of the complicated battle scenes, I'd say we are going to hit the limit of Moore's law before we could reasonably get hte power to render cinematic scenes in real time. Perhaps with quantum processing we will be able to within the next 20 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
...Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence.
GTA and Vice City have excellent storylines and great voice acting to string together the amusing gameplay. Without the memorable characters or the hilarious radio talk shows the game loses much of its charm.
Sure, you can still run around and kill hookers for hours on end, but that is the player's choice. Some kids torture insects all day, and parents don't go and blame the Orkin man. Kids are going to do what they find amusing, or what they have been told is amusing. I doubt that many kids' respect for "workin' girls" was tarnished due to the influences of Grand Theft Auto.
Any parent that complains about what their children are exposed to in M rated games needs to be asked why their children are allowed to play M rated games in the first place.
But parents couldn't be to blame could they? Shame on me for asking parents to involve themselves in the raising of their own children, that is the task of the government, and the media, and that homeless guy that sits outside the mall asking for nickles.
There is a picture of the prototype reader past the first link, and though it doesn't say how large it is, if one assumes that the postage stamp sized media fits snugly into the square area, then it looks to be about one inch wide by two inches long by .5 to .75 inches thick.
That is rather impressive for a prototype media reader. Hard Drives and CD-ROMs both started out quite large, but now are restricted more by the size and movement requirements of the media rather than the overhead of the reader itself.
The thought that the inaccessability of any medium will reduce pirating of the content is a fallacy that the music industry may never let go of. Analog aside, even if an expensive peripheral is required to access the data without the normal digital rights monkey business, all it takes is one person with a reader/decoder to scan the data, format it, and send it out into the wilds of the internet to procreate. Just look at cartridge ROMs
All it takes is blue spandex, a cape, and a wry grin given to an amazed coal worker.
No one can claim that media has no influence on mood or attitude. Action and violence in media have been proven to have short term effects that cause some of the subjects to become more violent. However the 'rush' wears off after fifteen or twenty minutes, and there is actually a long term drop in violent tendancies in many subjects, possibly from the venting permitted by the media.
However this is not the violence that games are accused of. Games are accused of desensitizing youth and making them believe that violence is not only acceptable, but preferable to other means of resolution. Of making them think that the consequences of their actions will be small, beccause their game characters got away with it.
I do not know you, but in general I think that it may have been the combination of alcohol and Grand Theft Auto. You seem like a resonable and level headed guy, but being a bit inebriated might have allowed the 'instincts' you had developed from playing the game to surface.
Were your completely sober, you may have thought that in Grand Theft Auto, you could resolve this by knocking the guy out and stealing his car, and laughed to yourself at the absurdity. Some drinking might make you overlook the fact that that may work in the game, but would be a bad idea in real life.
While media can not affect most people's perceptions of reality, drugs can. And the latter can allow the former to blend with reality more readily.
However, I do not know you. You may not have even been drinking alcohol, thought form your description of events that seems unlikely. Some peopel are simply more impressionable than others, when it comes to that much gaming in a short period of time after little or no experience with modern games of that nature.
But my money is on the booze.
Some excellent points.
I can indeed see the difference between war and enjoying a murder. I do not see how that is relevant however, as your example was concerning credits. She was also armed, and had assaulted a man, though with some justification.
I agree that how a person plays a game can tell much about their personality, however that still does not allow one to accurately gauge how they would react in an actual situation.
The second time I played through Knights of the Old Republic, my character was evil. His goal was to cause misery and suffering, and cause people to fall to the dark side. My goal was to be consistent with this character, and to watch the story that the game designers had scripted for evil characters. I was a bit disappointed that the majority of being evil in that game consisted of mindless violence rather than causing mental anguish and pulling others to the dark path, but not because I wanted to watch them suffer, but rather because it would have been a more interesting story. The first time I played through with a somewhat selfish but overall good natured character.
So what does that tell you about me? Do you think I would turn an orphaned girls best friend against her via mind control, given the chance? Or conquer a galaxy and bring about a dark era that would last for centuries? No, all it tells you is that I enjoy a good story, even if the main character is evil. Does that make me a sick and twisted person in your opinion? That isn't flamebait, I am genuinely curious. I laid out that story with my motives, because I wanted your take on how it reflects upon me.
Personally I do not see much wrong in enjoying the deaths of imaginary people, regardless of motive. Using simulations in place of the real thing, wishing you were hurting actual people, would be cause for concern. And I suppose that a large percentage of those that enjoy being overly sadistic to innocent pretend victims would probably fall into that category. But reveling in one's ability to send rows of infantry to their certain doom, while certainly a bit pathetic, does not warrant my scorn.
You ask why we moved on from space invaders; personally I do not put much stock in eye candy. But improved graphics do add one major change to gameplay; refined visual information output. Generally after a playing a game for a while, any graphics that do not tell me something are tuned out, and those that do are simplified down to their base components.
Regarding the experiment you cited, I probably would have stopped when the person recieving the shocks asked me to. But I am sure that there are some that would enjoy the thought of inflicting pain on others, even though the other person was an actor and not actually recieving shocks.
Unlike a game, the experiment takes place in real life, and the subject actually believed pain was being inflicted. But unlike most situations in real life, the subject was given permission and authority to inflict pain on a stranger, and goaded on by the tester if they expressed concern for the person answering the questions. So while someone that revels in their sadism would be a possible danger to society, not every that continued the punishment for wrong questions would be a sadist.
The key factor of course, is motive. Does one kill that innocent cloud of polygons because you wish she were real and actually suffering, Or because you want yoru character to experience the consequences of such an action?
As to your Electro Shock game; again it would come down to motive. Does one play all the way through imagining a real victim on the other end of that shock, or because one is curious as to the specifics? What if the voice were designed to simulate Hitler or Stalin? Would someone who enjoyed torturing one of them be evil and sadistic?
Who decides who is acceptable to enjoy inflicting pain upon? I find torture of the guilty distasteful, but others would jump at the opportunity to perform 'justice'. Of course, the killing of the guilty is, from a Christian standpoint, far worse than any earthly torture, if the guilty has not yet been redeemed. But let's not get into that.
So you found yourself speeding. Millions speed every day without playing racing games. The question now would be: Did playing the game make you think that you could simply get out of a ticket or avoid a collision by hitting reset? Were the consequences of your actions not readily apparent once you realized what you were doing?
The problem with the movies you cited is that they are realistic, though only vaugely, since it would be impossible for Trovolta to be that popular based purely on personality and dancing ability. People drive fast, people wear cowboy hats, and people wear bellbottoms and dance to the hit soundtrack by the legendary Beegees, available now for three easy payments of $19.99 on two 8-Tracks or LPs, all without human injury.
The only consequence of wearing a cowboy hat is, at worst, a punch in the face from a Texan that thinks you are mocking him. Making a fool of yourself on the dance floor is marginally less dangerous. Even speeding, when not under the influence or during dangerous conditions, is relatively free of danger if you are at all a competent driver.
These things are non-violent, and apply directly to many people's lives.
Stealing cars to 80's new wave while wearing a bad suit, and subsequently getting gunned down by police, only to awaken in a hospital with no losses aside from your personal arsenal that you carry around in your back pocket is not realistic, does not apply directly to most people's lives, and doing so in real life has readily concievable consequences when you stop for two seconds to think about the situation.
I agree that media can influence or mood and opinions, however it cannot affect a normal person's perception of reality. An advertisement can make you think you want an expensive new car, and it can decieve you about the financing, but it can not make a rational person believe they can afford a fifty thousand dollar car when they are making less than a third of that annually.
In the same way, a game cannot make a rational person think that shooting at cars on a highway is a wise course of action. Games do not have flashing messages that say "Try this in real life kids, and you will not only get away with it, but become rich and famous!"
Furthermore, from what I can recall the shooters at Columbine went into the school that day knowing that they were going to die. They were not delusional about respawning with extra lives. They were obviously disturbed young men, but video games, at the most, kept them sequestered away during their free time, away from those that might observe their violent trends. And that is more a failing of the family than a fault of the fragging.
The most extreme defenders of the 'video games cause violence' theory are those that believe a perfectly normal and good natured young person can be corrupted simply by playing a violent video game. They see the kids that commited these crimes, from columbine to the recent highway shootings, as victims, and video games as the 'trigger' that set them off.
A comparison to another nation is indeed a valid point in favor of videogames as a cause of violence. The videogames are a constant, as is the majority of the human mind. If a child in Tokyo plays violent video games and is not at all violent, while a child in Idaho plays those same violent video games and goes on a killing spree, then it would seem to me that the environment or personality of the child is a more likely cause than the game.
As to your views on players being 'evil' in games; calling someone sick for choosing dialogue option 2 instead of 1 and then changing the "is_Alive" bit from 1 to 0 for a database entry represented by a humanoid coloud of polygons seems rather self-righteous.
There were also very few 'innocents' in Knights of the old republic. The primary component of the Dark side is selfishness; killing others to lessen risk for yourself, or for a monetary reward, or for the thrill. Yes, these are all evil and twisted paths of thought, but they are my characters, not mine. Accusing me of personfying myself in an evil video game character is rather hypcritical when you admit to playing the game yourself. It would be rediculous to accuse you of being a crazy person that belive himself to be a Jedi out to save the galaxy.
And what of the scripters that designed those numerous choices of light versus dark? Are they enablers for giving you access to those evil "is_Alive" bits? Perhaps they are the most evil of all, ensaring unqitting players into the folds of the dark side. Right...
I am not an evil or sadistic person. Honestly I have trouble killing things larger than dimes, even painlessly. But I have no problem fragging you online, or setting my character loose on an unsuspecting crowd, because they are abstractions; graphical representations of game data. They do not live, they do not think, they do not care. When the game is reset they are reborn, when the game is turned off they cease to exist.
The only thing that shows how people act in real life is life itself. Interactions between real people, not their respective visual abstractions. When you play chess with an englishman and take his queen, you are not making threats against the Crown of Britain. You are playing a game. Is the piece captured, imprisoned, killed? No, it is set on the side of the board, because it is a game, and there are rules, and removing pieces from the board is part of the game.
If you don't want to, you can avoid taking pieces; you will lose, but then that is your perogative. You can play the game how you choose, and the only thing it says about how you act in real life is how you play chess. Because it is only a game; nothing more, nothing less.
Not only does your Dark Helmet voice need work, but it was the President, played by Mel Brooks, who's luggage combination was the same as the lock on the atmospheric bubble. Shame, shame...
I doubt that the EDS has the memory for long-term storage of data. It is designed to collect data from the past x amount of time, overwriting old data, unless the airbag is deployed, in which case it will start saving data. It probably has a reserved section for data to be stored in after the airbag is deployed.
Regardless of the specifics, you would have to stop your car immediately after getting a ticket, have it towed someplace, and then let it sit there until your court day, because the data pertaining to your actual alleged offense would get overwritten.
Now, a car containing an EDS with expanded capabilities, like a button on the dash to backup the current data when you get pulled over, would be interesting, but the more user friendly black boxes become, the more hacker friendly they become as well. I doubt a court would allow a black box as evidence if the driver has any input to it, even if it is simply a hardwired 'save' command.
Bah, last post was apparently in HTML format and managed to make a single unreadable block of text. That will teach me not to preview...Anyway, reposted in plain text:
A long, long ways.
Computer games can run at 60+ frames per second because they are barely doing any work when compared to top of the line rendering engines.
Raytracing, dozens of texture passes, multiple realistic lightsources; and these are just for a two dimensional surface. Making realistic looking skin requires multiple translucent layers to simulate the complicated appearance of skin.
Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification.
That's 10E7 pixels, so to display it at 24 frames per second you would need to be pushing 24E8 pixels a second. 24,000,000,000.
Even if every pixel only took a single cycle (which it might, with the right hardware pipeline in the future), you would need 240 terahertz of power (plus overhead) to display it in real time, along with enough RAM to hold the model and texture data for everything that's going to be onscreen within the next minute or so.
Considering that they have around 2000 x 2.0 X 2 = 8 terahertz available to them, and it still takes ages to render each frame of the complicated battle scenes, I'd say we are going to hit the limit of Moore's law before we could reasonably get hte power to render cinematic scenes in real time. Perhaps with quantum processing we will be able to within the next 20 years or so.
A long, long ways. Computer games can run at 60+ frames per second because they are barely doing any work when compared to top of the line rendering engines. Raytracing, dozens of texture passes, multiple realistic lightsources; and these are just for a two dimensional surface. Making realistic looking skin requires multiple translucent layers to simulate the complicated appearance of skin. Also, there is the size factor. Video games generally run at 1024x768 to 1600x1200. Movie quality shots are rendered at many times that resolution, which greatly increases the number of pixels that have to be rendered. Gollum may only be 800 pixels tall on your monitor, but he's probably rendered at least ten times as large; we'll say 10,000x 10,000 for calcualtion simplification. That's 10E7 pixels, so to display it at 24 frames per second you would need to be pushing 24E8 pixels a second. 24,000,000,000. Even if every pixel only took a single cycle (which it might, with the right hardware pipeline in the future), you would need 240 terahertz of power (plus overhead) to display it in real time, along with enough RAM to hold the model and texture data for everything that's going to be onscreen within the next minute or so. Considering that they have around 2000 x 2.0 X 2 = 8 terahertz available to them, and it still takes ages to render each frame of the complicated battle scenes, I'd say we are going to hit the limit of Moore's law before we could reasonably get hte power to render cinematic scenes in real time. Perhaps with quantum processing we will be able to within the next 20 years or so.