If you have something travelling at a velocity of 600 pixels/s on your screen (not uncommon for objects in FPS games) it is much easier to track it at 100 FPS (relative motion of 6 pixels per frame) than 30 FPS.
Except that most gamers aren't using monitors that run at 100Hz at their gaming resolution, so they're not going to see every frame, and aren't going to see 6 pixels per frame. Never mind that it is uncommon for objects to move 600 pixels/sec unless you are moving your view quickly, which most people will ignore outright except to scan for basic images in the mess that goes by.
Of course, as an added bonus, a pixel isn't a fixed unit for most games, so if you're playing games at 640x480 my whole assesment that your monitor isn't displaying 100Hz would be off, but my assesment that things won't be moving at 600pixels per second is even more accurate, unless you play with an extremely low fov (45).
The primary thing he missed (although he almost got it) was that the biggest factor is the difference between your highest and lowest framerate in a given time frame. If you're running fat & happy at 100 fps and then (as someone mentioned earlier) walk outside, so to speak, everything slows to a crawl as it loads textures and tries to render an image much more complex (or at least with a much larger visible range). Until the card catches up you could be running below 30 fps, or you could be running 45 fps and it just feels like a crawl because you were running over twice as many fps before that. Eventually your eyes will adjust to the lower framerate, as long as it's tolerable, and the card will be doing fewer calculations (as long as the game's coded well), so you'll have a fairly constant, and just as tolerable, 50-60 fps from that point on and not really have a problem with it.
In the end, each person's ability to perceive framerates is different. Some people can tolerate low refresh rates on their monitors, as well. The most important things are to keep v-synch on (to prevent visual artifacts caused by frames being split on the v-synch) and to cap your framerate at a slightly-above tolerable level. Ideally, your framerate should never cut in half, but then in online games that's almost impossible to guarantee, so you should shoot for a range that is tolerable for you. Try it out for yourself, though, cap your framerate at something lower than you would normally think of as acceptable and see if you have any problems with it while playing. Check your framerates at times when you do have problems with the way the game is playing. I normally cap my framerates around my refresh rate (rounded up generally to give it some space), unless I'm playing id games, which generally seem more susceptible to having the gameplay tied to the framerate (and in these cases I still try to limit it to prevent severe drops in framerate, I'd much rather be able to play comfortably the entire time than to make that one rocket jump that requires 200 fps).
This is the area where I feel cel shading is justified. Base your game on a comic or cartoon and the cel shading makes it much more likely that the graphics can represent the characters the same way they were represented in their original medium.
if they want it to be like a comic have the characters look like comic book characters.
Wouldn't it make more sense for the characters to look like the comic book characters in the actual comic the game is based on, rather than Japanese anime books?
A couple of images from the comics are available here: http://membres.lycos.fr/tristram/bd/xiii.ht ml
(note, just the first page I found that actually worked for me)
It would seem that they tried to do a fairly good job of capturing the look of the comic in this case.
I'd like to add, the last link looks at 70 games, from 7 systems (10 games per system), and the PC is found to be the least violent of the systems looked at (N64, GameBoy Color, GBA, PS1, PS2, DreamCast, and PC). The PC also had the best gender diversity and 'girl-friendly score', and the worst racial diversity. The 10 games chosen were the top 10 for each system from January to May 2001, with the GBA games being the top 10 from May to June 2001 (because it was released in May 2001).
A little searching found some of these titles: http://psx2.com/features/reports/may2001. shtml PS2: Red Faction, Crazy Taxi, Dark Cloud, ATV Off Road Fury, Madden 2001, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, Onimusha Warlords, Tekken Tag Tournament, Triple Play Baseball, and Midnight Club Street Racing.
PSX titles are listed further down the page, but they're intermingled with PS2 titles (top 30 PS2/PSX titles). Frankly, when I think of violent video games, Crazy Taxi, ATV ORF, Madden, Triple Play Baseball, and street racing don't come to mind (though I haven't played most of the titles).
Of course, the titles may change a bit if you average in the Jan-April numbers, which would take a bit more time than I've got at the moment;)
The biggest problem is that a scientific study has to not only start with a hypothesis, but also prove that hypothesis to be taken seriously. Therefore, if you have a true long term study and your hypothesis is that games reduce inhibitions, and you find that your hypothesis was wrong, you have to either start another study with the hypothesis that games do not reduce inhibitions or accept that your study failed and try something completely different.
With so many people focused on violence in games creating physical violence, how many people are currently starting long-term studies that start with the hypothesis that violence in games does not create physical violence (though, of course, as your examples illustrate, with observable results as part of the hypothesis)? How many people are even willing to do long term studies of this nature?
Finally, if you really believe that exposure to violence creates violent tendencies in children, is it ethical to test that theory? Is it even ethical in the first place to expose children to violent material, regardless of your theory?
I'd love to give you plenty of links, but my searches of google get extremely time-consuming to find anything more than anecdotal evidence or references (without links) to a small number of studies without many direct quotes of the results and explanations of the way the tests were conducted.
This item: http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-game s/2001/ in particular is referenced a number of times, stating that 79% of games rated E contain violent material, and that in half of them, violence was significant to the plot. The alternation of large colour photos of young children and actual text in the pdf document is especially educational, though in what way I have not figured out. Perhaps a study of who plays video games might help.
1) The government gives them our money. The government can only take and destroy wealth, it cannot create it.
This is true to some extent, but the California government (as California is where I attended school for the majority of the time) spends a very small amount on education, especially considering the amounts they spend on programs such as state-funded welfare programs and incarceration. To make matters worse, the amount generally does not increase anywhere near the rate of inflation.
2) $10K per student is, what, $250K-$300K per classroom. There is enough money, but it's being spent by people who couldn't be trusted with snake control in Ireland.
The school district I attended was considered to be quite well funded (for California), and had a total of $5,289 per student (this is for my high school district, I couldn't find stats for my grade school district in my short search) in 1996, which happens to be the year I graduated. This is in a district with 21,431 students. Of course, the specific school I attended, being a much newer school than any of the others in the district at that time, was much better equipped and staffed than any other in the district. Also, keep in mind that California requires that 10th grade English classes have no more than 20 students, which meant that in my senior year they had to hire something like 20 English teachers to handle a sophomore class double the size of the graduating class.
As another comparison, the Los Angeles Unified School District had 647,612 students and $5633/student.
The average in the country for school districts over 500 students is $5381/student, meaning that LA USD is above average in spending and the Grossmont USD is below average, yet most people would probably rather not send their child to a public school in Los Angeles. California does have the 2nd highest per teacher spending rate, which is in part due to the high cost of living and the strength of the teachers' unions in California (and they're all still under-paid, I'm sure), and has the 5th highest number of teachers per administrator, yet some districts still have as much as a 20% administration cost.
So, yes, sometimes the money is being spent by people that shouldn't be allowed to touch anyone else's money, but even in the cases where administration costs are extremely low, $5K/student only seems high when you don't figure in the fact that some of that spending has to go into construction of new schools, too (after all, in California, by law, you can only build a school big enough to serve the number of students that are within it's area in it's first graduating year, figure that out when the number of people in the graduating class of the 10th year of my school was 20x the number of the 1st graduating class).
I think it was Chris Rock that said 'just make bullets very expensive, if a bullet costs $5000 and someone gets shot 5 times, he probably deserved it'.
Of course, this is pretty similar to the whole gun control debate in the first place. If guns are illegal, they simply become more expensive for criminals, but they're still available to those that really want them, just like I could easily buy marijuana or cocaine if I wanted to, even though it's illegal here. In fact, when I was a teenager illegal drugs were easier to acquire than alcohol and cigarettes if you didn't know any adults that were willing to break the law by purchasing them for you.
I'd also like to see a serious independent study on the issue. I'd like to see how the brain reacts during and after playing the most violent games over an extended period. An increase in emotional release during gameplay is good; an extended tendancy toward release after play has ended and the real world has begun could be bad.
Numerous studies have been done over the years (it's not like this is a new issue at all). Each time someone decides to write an article on it, at best they look up the studies that support their position (because you can find studies on this that support almost any position if you look hard enough), and maybe even cite those studies.
However, most of the articles are written with no reference to past studies. Someone simply takes the existance of a particular game, or movie, or music, or even a book, in that person's possession, as evidence of a link between the item and the action. With Columbine it wasn't just Doom, it was also Marilyn Manson, KMFDM, and a number of other 'industrial' bands, and in Doom's case it wasn't just the game, but the books as well.
Society, currently, likes to find a reason why, and to find a way to prevent it from happening again, somewhere else. No one wants to come home and find out that someone else's kid shot up the high school and killed their son/daughter, or, perhaps worse, that their kid shot up the school and killed your neighbors' kids. They want something to blame, they want some way to keep it from happening, and, in many cases, they want to do it with as little future involvment as possible. It's far easier to remove objectionable material than to control it, in some minds, especially if the control falls on the parents, rather than the government.
Something else of note: the ease with which one can find studies not promoting the idea that violence in video games is linked to real world violence has decreased significantly since Columbine and 9/11. Previous to Columbine, the number of studies with an opposing opinion to this viewpoint far out numbered the number of studies linking violence in media to physical violence, yet with the focus on this link ever-increasing, unless you know pretty exact details on the study, finding them (especially online) has become increasingly harder to do. Never mind that when looking online, many of the links repeatedly refer to the same 5 or so studies over and over again.
Even more odd, the kernel in WinNT/2k/XP interfaces the file system through a driver, whether it's NTFS, FAT, FAT32, or whatever odd file system might have an NT driver available for it (ie the file systems originally supported on Alpha and PPC platforms, perhaps). So the idea of building a file system into the kernel seems pretty backwards from the current (and past) NT design standpoint.
Except that the GBA:SP often does outsell the PS2, and when it doesn't, it's not by much.
I think the bigger picture is that there aren't many games that are going to be able to cause a significant spike in PS2 sales any more, since so many people already have PS2s. On the other hand, a single (or in this case a couple of) good game can spike the sales on the GameCube, or even the XBox.
I'd expect to see a spike in the US sales of GBA-SPs next week, as we see the black and red consoles coming out, as well as FF:Tactics Advance. I plan on buying a black GBA-SP and the game myself at the end of next week, assuming I can find either one at that point.
Seriously though, you don't have a problem with blatant commercial advertising in schools?
No, I don't, given that I attended the majority of my school in the state that was (at the time) #50 in the country on per-student spending. Of course, the Simpsons quote shows what would definitely be out of line. I wouldn't accept McDonald's dictating the curriculum or the books used, either, any more than I like the fact that most (grade- and high-) schools use 1 publisher for all of their textbooks because they get a better deal that way.
Then again, the only cola I drink any more is Vanilla Coke, so I wonder if Pepsi got their money's worth (maybe they do after all, since I drink a lot of Mountain Dew).
The fact is that the schools not only need the money, but they believe that giving the kids the option of buying fast food is giving them what they want (and in many cases, it is). Maybe if they had open campus it would be a better situation, but you won't see the school I attended doing that any time soon, as they even limited the areas on campus that you were allowed to go to during lunch.
Of course, if Jack Daniels and Marlboro were getting in on it, I'd have a bit of a problem with that, too (though, frankly, I tended more towards off-brand alcohol and cigarettes in high school, for obvious reasons).
I think we've moved well beyond establishing that violent or extremely compelling video games are a danger to some individuals and the people around them: now is the time for research into potential solutions.
Potential solution: prevent that individual (rather than all individuals) from being exposed to anything that might cause them to become dangerous. The usual place for people who are this susceptible to outside influence is a padded room or an otherwise controlled environment.
In the case of age-appropriateness, parents should determine what is appropriate. If parents are incapable of raising their children, there are a lot of people out there that would like to raise children, but for one reason or another, can't have children of their own.
Maybe the development of decent games like Myst should be subsidized; maybe the distribution of violent games should be hindered for the public good?
As someone else stated, you want to subsidize a game that brought in huge profits for it's creators and publishers? That's usually the opposite of what the government tries to do when it subsidizes an industry.
As for hindering the distribution of violent games, why don't you start with things that have a higher level of distribution, first, and see how far you get? Why don't you go tell your local retailers that you don't want them selling M-rated games, R-rated movies, and stickered CDs to minors? Get your local citizens to do the same. If a particular area demands it, the retailers will comply. If they refuse, boycott them, even better, stand outside and tell people why you're boycotting them. If the retailer asks you to leave, apply for a permit to do so in the nearest possible place.
Individual communities have a great amount of control over what is sold within their communities, even if it does violate the individual's right to obtain the material (and since internet purchasing is possible, it doesn't restrict people quite as much). Asking your government to change things, though, is a waste of tax-payer's money. The retailers have shown in some cases that they are perfectly capable of policing themselves on these issues. I can go to Wal-Mart and buy a stickered album, an R-rated DVD, an M-rated game, a gun, and a box of bullets, and I'll only be asked for an ID on the DVD and the gun, and the stickered album will probably be censored (despite still having the sticker). In fact, Wal-Mart can't sell guns in California any more because they kept getting caught selling the guns without checking IDs.
Take a good look at the Columbine videos. Those Klebold and Harris learned how to handle those weapons from video games. They learned how to not be afraid of the weapons. They became desensitized to the weapons and the gore which they inflicted upon the students and teachers at Columbine
OK, so if video games are supposed to be so highly capable of desensitizing people, why are you advocating that people watch the videos from Columbine, which, as actual recordings of actual violence, should have a much more significant effect on me, or anyone else that views them?
The military says that they use video games for two reasons: 1) improve teamwork 2) expose them to situations which could be life-threatening and/or expensive if performed in a real training exercise (especially useful for vehicle simulations, like landing stalled and/or damaged aircraft)
Whether or not you choose to believe the military is a personal issue. As for desensitizing people, watch some real footage of boot camp or SEAL training. They're far more concerned that you can perform without thinking at all, and that if you are thinking, it's tactical in nature, and concern for your squad members' safety that you're thinking about. The easiest way to get someone to be ok with killing someone else is to put them or someone they're concerned about in danger, and once everyone believes that they're all responsible for the safety of everyone in their squad, it gives them a protective attitude. If someone doesn't learn that kind of attitude, they either wash out or get put into a position where they aren't directly responsible for the lives of others.
I don't think that public schools should be used in any way to encourage brand-loyalty or consumerism. Of course, I don't have a better solution for making school lunch taste better than the slop that it is. I packed a lunch way back when, avoiding hte problem entirely.
Actually, the irony is that of the 4 brands I mentioned, Pepsi and Little Debbie snack cakes are probably the only ones that I would consume today on a semi-regular basis. I *might* stop by a taco bell or a McDonald's if I was in an extreme hurry and it was the only thing in the area, and I'd have a pretty good idea of what I'd want to eat from each of those places. That being said, if it's even possible, the food sold under those 2 names in the school was worse than what is sold in the actual fast food places.
The more run-of-the-mill unbranded food at my high school was actually pretty decent, especially the sub sandwhiches, if you could get them. Of course, I only ate the cart food, I have no idea what the box lunches were like.
My last two years of high school I took the minimum 5 classes and got out at 1:30, so I didn't eat lunch at school most of the time, just waited until I got home.
The school made pretty good money from the branded food, though, even though the hamburgers and burritos were crap. Of course, since I lived in San Diego at the time, everyone knew you could get better Mexican food on almost any street corner than was available even in an actual Taco Bell.
In this country, your employer has already taken the tax off your pay cheque before it gets credited to your bank account.
They do that in the US, as well. You file a tax return because the amount taken was either too much or too little, and until you do some abstract math on the form you have little idea as to which it is. Of course, if you don't file and you do owe money, they figure it out eventually and start sending nasty letters.
Branded products in general should not be sold on school premises. Schools should not take money from corporations under any circumstances.
Yeah, because the government gives them enough money, riiiiight
When I was in high school (~7-10 years ago), we had Pepsi machines, and the school sold Taco Bell and McDonald's food on certain days of the week. Not to mention that Little Debbies snacks had the in-road on the grade schools.
It's important to make sure, though, that those 'plastic tubs' are proper containers for ESD-sensitive materials. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of fried parts.
Stats don't always mean what people think they mean, though.
9% of internet traffic is due to online gaming: ok, is this because the average game uses 5-10kb/sec UDP data without a constant stream? Windows Update runs at 500KB/sec on a good day on my computer, and can keep a pretty constant stream for 20 minutes or so if I just reinstalled the OS. If I watch the latest video trailer I'm going to get a stream at (hopefully) a pretty high data rate, too. If I'm downloading a patch for my online game I'm going to get a stream there, too, and it should be at least 15KB/sec, or I'm going to try to find another source. Not to mention the constantly increasing size of the average web page, and the constant traffic crippling clueless people's computers everywhere known as spyware. Oh, and whatever today's big port-scanning virus happens to be. Ask a few self-hosting people how many incoming hits they get on a few that are even a year old.
Speaking of all the whippersnappers who see online features as the be-all/end-all of gaming, I think it's notable that even though the Xbox has been trying so hard to ride on the coattails of online gaming with XBL, it hasn't put Microsoft into as many homes as they thought it would, and XBL subs have already pretty much topped off.
This is because XBL titles aren't any more impressive (in terms of number of must have titles) than PS2 Online titles. Top that off with a subscription cost, and you'll have some people like myself that won't buy into the online side of things until they have a number of titles (where number of titles is more than 1 or 2) to play online that will justify the subscription price.
They're going to start bundling a game with the initial Live subscription (and charging the extra $20 you would pay for that game as a budget title), but that's still only 1 title for anyone that has no online games. I may have a game or maybe even a couple of games that have downloadable content (or will have downloadable content in the future), but I don't have any that are playable online, and I don't see any that are screaming 'buy me now'. In fact, reading through this thread confirmed my doubts about one title that I was going to buy only because it had an online component: Capcom vs SNK 2 EO. My doubts were simply that lag and fighting games sounds like an evil combination, and I already know my connection's laggy, I've got TFC to confirm that.
I think, more than anything, they need to get developers on board and have games designed for consoles online from the start. Not to mention that you should be able to play with 1-4 players at your console against multiple players on the internet (and I think there are some games out there already that do this, but it's definitely not something that's been done much on PCs). We've seen a mess of LANed teams in team-based online PC FPS games over the years for good reason: a team that has a number of players in the same room (if not all of the players) or near enough to shout at each other without voice comm software has an advantage, even if it is slight. Voice comms over IP, after all, have lag too.
The last time prices dropped that much, profits soared. The only way you won't see them getting increased profits from selling CDs at a lower price is if they spend a boatload of money on everything but putting CDs on the shelves people want to buy.
heh, the store I buy most of my music from only has that little sticker on the edge of the jewel case. When you take the jewel case up to the front, they turn around and pull the CD out of a drawer behind the counter, pull the front of the case off (from the bottom, the sticker being on the top) and put the CD in the case. SO, if someone wants to listen to the CD, they just pull it out of the drawer and stick it in a CD player.
No, most startup bands rely on record sales to convince the record company that funding their tour would actually be profitable.
Most record companies don't hear about bands from their record sales. Someone hears them play, gets a demo or puts them in a cheap studio to put together a demo (if they really believe in the band), and puts it through to the right people at the record company. The record companies pay people to do this, as well as to check out bands on independant labels when they're touring in the area (I've met a number of these people at local shows, and I'm currently nowhere near LA. My uncle also did this for one of the major labels for a couple of years back in the early-to-mid-90's, as well as making sure stores had the current promotional materials for the label on display in proper areas to get the right amount of attention).
The reason Metallica and a few others are so heavily against P2P is because either they do (in the case of Metallica), or believe they do, make a very good amount of their money on album sales. Metallica had a fairly good deal when they got their first major label deal, because they had 2 solid albums available independantly. When they renegotiated in the early 90's, I'm sure the deal came through much sweeter after having a #1 album for quite a good stretch. If Metallica makes a lot of money touring (they used to piss it away quite nicely on each show), it's because of the large number of shows they do, not because they pull in an exceptional amount on each show (though this may have changed in the last 10 years as ticket prices have skyrocketed for any act that can get an arena or stadium show, locally a show at the sports arena runs ~$100 for cheap seats).
Mission: They wanted to "get back to their roots" but in the process turned their backs on the way they used to do things. In the end it sounds much more like "abrasive re-load" instead of "modern ride the lightning/master of puppets".
heh, I'd have been happy with a modern Kill 'Em All, production quality and all (which when I listen to it and the couple of songs and clips I've heard of St. Anger, Kill 'Em All actually sounds better produced for the most part). Wishing for another Master of Puppets is like wishing I was dating Natalie Portman. Slim chance, possible in some alternate dimension, but it certainly isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not as long as I'm me, and Metallica's the band they've been for the last 10 years or so.
Metallica (ok, Cliff Burton really) is the reason I became a musician, and now I can't even listen to what they're putting out.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have something travelling at a velocity of 600 pixels/s on your screen (not uncommon for objects in FPS games) it is much easier to track it at 100 FPS (relative motion of 6 pixels per frame) than 30 FPS.
Except that most gamers aren't using monitors that run at 100Hz at their gaming resolution, so they're not going to see every frame, and aren't going to see 6 pixels per frame. Never mind that it is uncommon for objects to move 600 pixels/sec unless you are moving your view quickly, which most people will ignore outright except to scan for basic images in the mess that goes by.
Of course, as an added bonus, a pixel isn't a fixed unit for most games, so if you're playing games at 640x480 my whole assesment that your monitor isn't displaying 100Hz would be off, but my assesment that things won't be moving at 600pixels per second is even more accurate, unless you play with an extremely low fov (45).
The primary thing he missed (although he almost got it) was that the biggest factor is the difference between your highest and lowest framerate in a given time frame. If you're running fat & happy at 100 fps and then (as someone mentioned earlier) walk outside, so to speak, everything slows to a crawl as it loads textures and tries to render an image much more complex (or at least with a much larger visible range). Until the card catches up you could be running below 30 fps, or you could be running 45 fps and it just feels like a crawl because you were running over twice as many fps before that. Eventually your eyes will adjust to the lower framerate, as long as it's tolerable, and the card will be doing fewer calculations (as long as the game's coded well), so you'll have a fairly constant, and just as tolerable, 50-60 fps from that point on and not really have a problem with it.
In the end, each person's ability to perceive framerates is different. Some people can tolerate low refresh rates on their monitors, as well. The most important things are to keep v-synch on (to prevent visual artifacts caused by frames being split on the v-synch) and to cap your framerate at a slightly-above tolerable level. Ideally, your framerate should never cut in half, but then in online games that's almost impossible to guarantee, so you should shoot for a range that is tolerable for you. Try it out for yourself, though, cap your framerate at something lower than you would normally think of as acceptable and see if you have any problems with it while playing. Check your framerates at times when you do have problems with the way the game is playing. I normally cap my framerates around my refresh rate (rounded up generally to give it some space), unless I'm playing id games, which generally seem more susceptible to having the gameplay tied to the framerate (and in these cases I still try to limit it to prevent severe drops in framerate, I'd much rather be able to play comfortably the entire time than to make that one rocket jump that requires 200 fps).
This is the area where I feel cel shading is justified. Base your game on a comic or cartoon and the cel shading makes it much more likely that the graphics can represent the characters the same way they were represented in their original medium.
if they want it to be like a comic have the characters look like comic book characters.
t ml
Wouldn't it make more sense for the characters to look like the comic book characters in the actual comic the game is based on, rather than Japanese anime books?
A couple of images from the comics are available here:
http://membres.lycos.fr/tristram/bd/xiii.h
(note, just the first page I found that actually worked for me)
It would seem that they tried to do a fairly good job of capturing the look of the comic in this case.
I'd like to add, the last link looks at 70 games, from 7 systems (10 games per system), and the PC is found to be the least violent of the systems looked at (N64, GameBoy Color, GBA, PS1, PS2, DreamCast, and PC). The PC also had the best gender diversity and 'girl-friendly score', and the worst racial diversity. The 10 games chosen were the top 10 for each system from January to May 2001, with the GBA games being the top 10 from May to June 2001 (because it was released in May 2001).
. shtml
;)
A little searching found some of these titles:
http://psx2.com/features/reports/may2001
PS2: Red Faction, Crazy Taxi, Dark Cloud, ATV Off Road Fury, Madden 2001, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, Onimusha Warlords, Tekken Tag Tournament, Triple Play Baseball, and Midnight Club Street Racing.
PSX titles are listed further down the page, but they're intermingled with PS2 titles (top 30 PS2/PSX titles). Frankly, when I think of violent video games, Crazy Taxi, ATV ORF, Madden, Triple Play Baseball, and street racing don't come to mind (though I haven't played most of the titles).
Of course, the titles may change a bit if you average in the Jan-April numbers, which would take a bit more time than I've got at the moment
The biggest problem is that a scientific study has to not only start with a hypothesis, but also prove that hypothesis to be taken seriously. Therefore, if you have a true long term study and your hypothesis is that games reduce inhibitions, and you find that your hypothesis was wrong, you have to either start another study with the hypothesis that games do not reduce inhibitions or accept that your study failed and try something completely different.
e s/2001/
With so many people focused on violence in games creating physical violence, how many people are currently starting long-term studies that start with the hypothesis that violence in games does not create physical violence (though, of course, as your examples illustrate, with observable results as part of the hypothesis)? How many people are even willing to do long term studies of this nature?
Finally, if you really believe that exposure to violence creates violent tendencies in children, is it ethical to test that theory? Is it even ethical in the first place to expose children to violent material, regardless of your theory?
I'd love to give you plenty of links, but my searches of google get extremely time-consuming to find anything more than anecdotal evidence or references (without links) to a small number of studies without many direct quotes of the results and explanations of the way the tests were conducted.
This item:
http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-gam
in particular is referenced a number of times, stating that 79% of games rated E contain violent material, and that in half of them, violence was significant to the plot. The alternation of large colour photos of young children and actual text in the pdf document is especially educational, though in what way I have not figured out. Perhaps a study of who plays video games might help.
1) The government gives them our money. The government can only take and destroy wealth, it cannot create it.
This is true to some extent, but the California government (as California is where I attended school for the majority of the time) spends a very small amount on education, especially considering the amounts they spend on programs such as state-funded welfare programs and incarceration. To make matters worse, the amount generally does not increase anywhere near the rate of inflation.
2) $10K per student is, what, $250K-$300K per classroom. There is enough money, but it's being spent by people who couldn't be trusted with snake control in Ireland.
The school district I attended was considered to be quite well funded (for California), and had a total of $5,289 per student (this is for my high school district, I couldn't find stats for my grade school district in my short search) in 1996, which happens to be the year I graduated. This is in a district with 21,431 students. Of course, the specific school I attended, being a much newer school than any of the others in the district at that time, was much better equipped and staffed than any other in the district. Also, keep in mind that California requires that 10th grade English classes have no more than 20 students, which meant that in my senior year they had to hire something like 20 English teachers to handle a sophomore class double the size of the graduating class.
As another comparison, the Los Angeles Unified School District had 647,612 students and $5633/student.
The average in the country for school districts over 500 students is $5381/student, meaning that LA USD is above average in spending and the Grossmont USD is below average, yet most people would probably rather not send their child to a public school in Los Angeles. California does have the 2nd highest per teacher spending rate, which is in part due to the high cost of living and the strength of the teachers' unions in California (and they're all still under-paid, I'm sure), and has the 5th highest number of teachers per administrator, yet some districts still have as much as a 20% administration cost.
So, yes, sometimes the money is being spent by people that shouldn't be allowed to touch anyone else's money, but even in the cases where administration costs are extremely low, $5K/student only seems high when you don't figure in the fact that some of that spending has to go into construction of new schools, too (after all, in California, by law, you can only build a school big enough to serve the number of students that are within it's area in it's first graduating year, figure that out when the number of people in the graduating class of the 10th year of my school was 20x the number of the 1st graduating class).
I think it was Chris Rock that said 'just make bullets very expensive, if a bullet costs $5000 and someone gets shot 5 times, he probably deserved it'.
Of course, this is pretty similar to the whole gun control debate in the first place. If guns are illegal, they simply become more expensive for criminals, but they're still available to those that really want them, just like I could easily buy marijuana or cocaine if I wanted to, even though it's illegal here. In fact, when I was a teenager illegal drugs were easier to acquire than alcohol and cigarettes if you didn't know any adults that were willing to break the law by purchasing them for you.
I'd also like to see a serious independent study on the issue. I'd like to see how the brain reacts during and after playing the most violent games over an extended period. An increase in emotional release during gameplay is good; an extended tendancy toward release after play has ended and the real world has begun could be bad.
Numerous studies have been done over the years (it's not like this is a new issue at all). Each time someone decides to write an article on it, at best they look up the studies that support their position (because you can find studies on this that support almost any position if you look hard enough), and maybe even cite those studies.
However, most of the articles are written with no reference to past studies. Someone simply takes the existance of a particular game, or movie, or music, or even a book, in that person's possession, as evidence of a link between the item and the action. With Columbine it wasn't just Doom, it was also Marilyn Manson, KMFDM, and a number of other 'industrial' bands, and in Doom's case it wasn't just the game, but the books as well.
Society, currently, likes to find a reason why, and to find a way to prevent it from happening again, somewhere else. No one wants to come home and find out that someone else's kid shot up the high school and killed their son/daughter, or, perhaps worse, that their kid shot up the school and killed your neighbors' kids. They want something to blame, they want some way to keep it from happening, and, in many cases, they want to do it with as little future involvment as possible. It's far easier to remove objectionable material than to control it, in some minds, especially if the control falls on the parents, rather than the government.
Something else of note: the ease with which one can find studies not promoting the idea that violence in video games is linked to real world violence has decreased significantly since Columbine and 9/11. Previous to Columbine, the number of studies with an opposing opinion to this viewpoint far out numbered the number of studies linking violence in media to physical violence, yet with the focus on this link ever-increasing, unless you know pretty exact details on the study, finding them (especially online) has become increasingly harder to do. Never mind that when looking online, many of the links repeatedly refer to the same 5 or so studies over and over again.
Even more odd, the kernel in WinNT/2k/XP interfaces the file system through a driver, whether it's NTFS, FAT, FAT32, or whatever odd file system might have an NT driver available for it (ie the file systems originally supported on Alpha and PPC platforms, perhaps). So the idea of building a file system into the kernel seems pretty backwards from the current (and past) NT design standpoint.
Except that the GBA:SP often does outsell the PS2, and when it doesn't, it's not by much.
I think the bigger picture is that there aren't many games that are going to be able to cause a significant spike in PS2 sales any more, since so many people already have PS2s. On the other hand, a single (or in this case a couple of) good game can spike the sales on the GameCube, or even the XBox.
I'd expect to see a spike in the US sales of GBA-SPs next week, as we see the black and red consoles coming out, as well as FF:Tactics Advance. I plan on buying a black GBA-SP and the game myself at the end of next week, assuming I can find either one at that point.
Seriously though, you don't have a problem with blatant commercial advertising in schools?
No, I don't, given that I attended the majority of my school in the state that was (at the time) #50 in the country on per-student spending. Of course, the Simpsons quote shows what would definitely be out of line. I wouldn't accept McDonald's dictating the curriculum or the books used, either, any more than I like the fact that most (grade- and high-) schools use 1 publisher for all of their textbooks because they get a better deal that way.
Then again, the only cola I drink any more is Vanilla Coke, so I wonder if Pepsi got their money's worth (maybe they do after all, since I drink a lot of Mountain Dew).
The fact is that the schools not only need the money, but they believe that giving the kids the option of buying fast food is giving them what they want (and in many cases, it is). Maybe if they had open campus it would be a better situation, but you won't see the school I attended doing that any time soon, as they even limited the areas on campus that you were allowed to go to during lunch.
Of course, if Jack Daniels and Marlboro were getting in on it, I'd have a bit of a problem with that, too (though, frankly, I tended more towards off-brand alcohol and cigarettes in high school, for obvious reasons).
I think we've moved well beyond establishing that violent or extremely compelling video games are a danger to some individuals and the people around them: now is the time for research into potential solutions.
Potential solution: prevent that individual (rather than all individuals) from being exposed to anything that might cause them to become dangerous. The usual place for people who are this susceptible to outside influence is a padded room or an otherwise controlled environment.
In the case of age-appropriateness, parents should determine what is appropriate. If parents are incapable of raising their children, there are a lot of people out there that would like to raise children, but for one reason or another, can't have children of their own.
Maybe the development of decent games like Myst should be subsidized; maybe the distribution of violent games should be hindered for the public good?
As someone else stated, you want to subsidize a game that brought in huge profits for it's creators and publishers? That's usually the opposite of what the government tries to do when it subsidizes an industry.
As for hindering the distribution of violent games, why don't you start with things that have a higher level of distribution, first, and see how far you get? Why don't you go tell your local retailers that you don't want them selling M-rated games, R-rated movies, and stickered CDs to minors? Get your local citizens to do the same. If a particular area demands it, the retailers will comply. If they refuse, boycott them, even better, stand outside and tell people why you're boycotting them. If the retailer asks you to leave, apply for a permit to do so in the nearest possible place.
Individual communities have a great amount of control over what is sold within their communities, even if it does violate the individual's right to obtain the material (and since internet purchasing is possible, it doesn't restrict people quite as much). Asking your government to change things, though, is a waste of tax-payer's money. The retailers have shown in some cases that they are perfectly capable of policing themselves on these issues. I can go to Wal-Mart and buy a stickered album, an R-rated DVD, an M-rated game, a gun, and a box of bullets, and I'll only be asked for an ID on the DVD and the gun, and the stickered album will probably be censored (despite still having the sticker). In fact, Wal-Mart can't sell guns in California any more because they kept getting caught selling the guns without checking IDs.
Take a good look at the Columbine videos. Those Klebold and Harris learned how to handle those weapons from video games. They learned how to not be afraid of the weapons. They became desensitized to the weapons and the gore which they inflicted upon the students and teachers at Columbine
OK, so if video games are supposed to be so highly capable of desensitizing people, why are you advocating that people watch the videos from Columbine, which, as actual recordings of actual violence, should have a much more significant effect on me, or anyone else that views them?
As far as video games in the military..
The military says that they use video games for two reasons:
1) improve teamwork
2) expose them to situations which could be life-threatening and/or expensive if performed in a real training exercise (especially useful for vehicle simulations, like landing stalled and/or damaged aircraft)
Whether or not you choose to believe the military is a personal issue. As for desensitizing people, watch some real footage of boot camp or SEAL training. They're far more concerned that you can perform without thinking at all, and that if you are thinking, it's tactical in nature, and concern for your squad members' safety that you're thinking about. The easiest way to get someone to be ok with killing someone else is to put them or someone they're concerned about in danger, and once everyone believes that they're all responsible for the safety of everyone in their squad, it gives them a protective attitude. If someone doesn't learn that kind of attitude, they either wash out or get put into a position where they aren't directly responsible for the lives of others.
I don't think that public schools should be used in any way to encourage brand-loyalty or consumerism. Of course, I don't have a better solution for making school lunch taste better than the slop that it is. I packed a lunch way back when, avoiding hte problem entirely.
Actually, the irony is that of the 4 brands I mentioned, Pepsi and Little Debbie snack cakes are probably the only ones that I would consume today on a semi-regular basis. I *might* stop by a taco bell or a McDonald's if I was in an extreme hurry and it was the only thing in the area, and I'd have a pretty good idea of what I'd want to eat from each of those places. That being said, if it's even possible, the food sold under those 2 names in the school was worse than what is sold in the actual fast food places.
The more run-of-the-mill unbranded food at my high school was actually pretty decent, especially the sub sandwhiches, if you could get them. Of course, I only ate the cart food, I have no idea what the box lunches were like.
My last two years of high school I took the minimum 5 classes and got out at 1:30, so I didn't eat lunch at school most of the time, just waited until I got home.
The school made pretty good money from the branded food, though, even though the hamburgers and burritos were crap. Of course, since I lived in San Diego at the time, everyone knew you could get better Mexican food on almost any street corner than was available even in an actual Taco Bell.
In this country, your employer has already taken the tax off your pay cheque before it gets credited to your bank account.
They do that in the US, as well. You file a tax return because the amount taken was either too much or too little, and until you do some abstract math on the form you have little idea as to which it is. Of course, if you don't file and you do owe money, they figure it out eventually and start sending nasty letters.
Branded products in general should not be sold on school premises. Schools should not take money from corporations under any circumstances.
Yeah, because the government gives them enough money, riiiiight
When I was in high school (~7-10 years ago), we had Pepsi machines, and the school sold Taco Bell and McDonald's food on certain days of the week. Not to mention that Little Debbies snacks had the in-road on the grade schools.
It's important to make sure, though, that those 'plastic tubs' are proper containers for ESD-sensitive materials. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of fried parts.
Stats don't always mean what people think they mean, though.
9% of internet traffic is due to online gaming:
ok, is this because the average game uses 5-10kb/sec UDP data without a constant stream? Windows Update runs at 500KB/sec on a good day on my computer, and can keep a pretty constant stream for 20 minutes or so if I just reinstalled the OS. If I watch the latest video trailer I'm going to get a stream at (hopefully) a pretty high data rate, too. If I'm downloading a patch for my online game I'm going to get a stream there, too, and it should be at least 15KB/sec, or I'm going to try to find another source. Not to mention the constantly increasing size of the average web page, and the constant traffic crippling clueless people's computers everywhere known as spyware. Oh, and whatever today's big port-scanning virus happens to be. Ask a few self-hosting people how many incoming hits they get on a few that are even a year old.
Speaking of all the whippersnappers who see online features as the be-all/end-all of gaming, I think it's notable that even though the Xbox has been trying so hard to ride on the coattails of online gaming with XBL, it hasn't put Microsoft into as many homes as they thought it would, and XBL subs have already pretty much topped off.
This is because XBL titles aren't any more impressive (in terms of number of must have titles) than PS2 Online titles. Top that off with a subscription cost, and you'll have some people like myself that won't buy into the online side of things until they have a number of titles (where number of titles is more than 1 or 2) to play online that will justify the subscription price.
They're going to start bundling a game with the initial Live subscription (and charging the extra $20 you would pay for that game as a budget title), but that's still only 1 title for anyone that has no online games. I may have a game or maybe even a couple of games that have downloadable content (or will have downloadable content in the future), but I don't have any that are playable online, and I don't see any that are screaming 'buy me now'. In fact, reading through this thread confirmed my doubts about one title that I was going to buy only because it had an online component: Capcom vs SNK 2 EO. My doubts were simply that lag and fighting games sounds like an evil combination, and I already know my connection's laggy, I've got TFC to confirm that.
I think, more than anything, they need to get developers on board and have games designed for consoles online from the start. Not to mention that you should be able to play with 1-4 players at your console against multiple players on the internet (and I think there are some games out there already that do this, but it's definitely not something that's been done much on PCs). We've seen a mess of LANed teams in team-based online PC FPS games over the years for good reason: a team that has a number of players in the same room (if not all of the players) or near enough to shout at each other without voice comm software has an advantage, even if it is slight. Voice comms over IP, after all, have lag too.
The last time prices dropped that much, profits soared. The only way you won't see them getting increased profits from selling CDs at a lower price is if they spend a boatload of money on everything but putting CDs on the shelves people want to buy.
heh, the store I buy most of my music from only has that little sticker on the edge of the jewel case. When you take the jewel case up to the front, they turn around and pull the CD out of a drawer behind the counter, pull the front of the case off (from the bottom, the sticker being on the top) and put the CD in the case. SO, if someone wants to listen to the CD, they just pull it out of the drawer and stick it in a CD player.
No, most startup bands rely on record sales to convince the record company that funding their tour would actually be profitable.
Most record companies don't hear about bands from their record sales. Someone hears them play, gets a demo or puts them in a cheap studio to put together a demo (if they really believe in the band), and puts it through to the right people at the record company. The record companies pay people to do this, as well as to check out bands on independant labels when they're touring in the area (I've met a number of these people at local shows, and I'm currently nowhere near LA. My uncle also did this for one of the major labels for a couple of years back in the early-to-mid-90's, as well as making sure stores had the current promotional materials for the label on display in proper areas to get the right amount of attention).
The reason Metallica and a few others are so heavily against P2P is because either they do (in the case of Metallica), or believe they do, make a very good amount of their money on album sales. Metallica had a fairly good deal when they got their first major label deal, because they had 2 solid albums available independantly. When they renegotiated in the early 90's, I'm sure the deal came through much sweeter after having a #1 album for quite a good stretch. If Metallica makes a lot of money touring (they used to piss it away quite nicely on each show), it's because of the large number of shows they do, not because they pull in an exceptional amount on each show (though this may have changed in the last 10 years as ticket prices have skyrocketed for any act that can get an arena or stadium show, locally a show at the sports arena runs ~$100 for cheap seats).
Mission: They wanted to "get back to their roots" but in the process turned their backs on the way they used to do things. In the end it sounds much more like "abrasive re-load" instead of "modern ride the lightning/master of puppets".
heh, I'd have been happy with a modern Kill 'Em All, production quality and all (which when I listen to it and the couple of songs and clips I've heard of St. Anger, Kill 'Em All actually sounds better produced for the most part). Wishing for another Master of Puppets is like wishing I was dating Natalie Portman. Slim chance, possible in some alternate dimension, but it certainly isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not as long as I'm me, and Metallica's the band they've been for the last 10 years or so.
Metallica (ok, Cliff Burton really) is the reason I became a musician, and now I can't even listen to what they're putting out.