I agree on the latter point (that entertainment plays a very minor role), and that the prosecutor most likely had no clue wtf he was talking about (or misspoke).
However, it still remains that the excuse is bs simply by the fact that what was said about the game was incorrect.
Then again, blaming Columbine on Doom seemed rather stupid when most people hadn't played Doom in several years, and much more 'realistic' games had come out since.
People believe whatever they want to believe for the most part, and the people that spend more time lobbying against games than actually putting the responsibility on the people that commit the crimes, and those that raise their children unsupervised, are still going to believe that they were 'shooting at tractor-trailers like they did in GTA', even though they didn't shoot anyone that was in a tractor-trailer either in real life or in the game. Never mind that if you did shoot someone in a car in real life, the car would either just get closer to exploding or would stop and spill out the dead body of the headshot driver. Oh, or the driver would stop the car and get out and run away, giving you the chance to shoot them outside their vehicle.
Obviously, there's a very large part (a few million people) that don't agree with you, whether it's because they're immoral people, or because they believe there's a difference between killing people in a console/PC game and killing real people.
I'm not raising children of my own, so any society organized around raising children has no place for me anyway. If I choose to raise children, I don't need society's 'help' to do so. Society's choice to allow or not allow entertainment for adults only affects my raising children in that I need to make sure they understand the real world before they have to partake in it. GTA's existance is not an attack on parents, it is entertainment for adults, some of whom may be parents.
If I own a gun, I lock it up. If I own porn, I generally try to keep it where my kids will not find it (or lock it up with the gun). If I own R-rated movies and M-rated games and feel my children are not ready for them, then I lock them up, and only view/play them when my children are not around or when they're in bed.
I couldn't touch my family's computer without asking first, and most of the time it was in a very visible part of the house. I grew up with very large stretches of my childhood marred by being restricted from watching television, and my parents were perfectly capable of preventing me from even watching it, let alone watching specific things, without having to resort to locking me in my bedroom (and come to think of it, when I was a teenager sending me to my room would've been a pretty sad joke, although I did only have a 15" TV until I was in my 20s).
I don't disagree with you there, but if the kids (or their lawyers) say they 'were just shooting at tractor-trailers like they did in GTA', then the kids were clearly misinformed about what could be done in GTA in the first place. They obviously did not shoot at tractor-trailers in GTA, and therefore were either not emulating what they did in GTA or lied (by saying they were shooting at tractor-trailers either in real life or in the game).
My guess is that someone thought it would look better to say they were shooting at the sides of tractor-trailers instead of shooting at cars, because you've got to admit that there's a much smaller likelihood of hurting anyone directly by shooting at the sides of tractor-trailers. Neither of the people that were shot appear to have actually been in tractor-trailers, either, from the accounts given in the two articles. Then again, they did manage to only hit two people while firing 'up to 25 shots', which means either their aim is atrocious or they weren't trying to shoot people (then again, with the average freeway speed in most areas being ~70-80 mph, it's not that amazing that they missed so many times even if they were trying to shoot people).
I, and everyone I knew, wrote crap like that every time we sat down to write an essay for English class. It's called 'snowballing'. You add a bunch of bs that sounds good to make it look bigger than it really is.
They're probably not in denial at all, they're just saying what people want them to say. They more than likely had to write an apology of some sort anyway, so they snowballed it because people would see 'Im sorry I shot you and that other guy' as insincere.
Oh come on, they would have had to be in denial to think that GTA wouldn't be played by a large number of kids -- even if it is 'targeted' at the 18-25 market.
If GTA is being played by a large number of kids, then someone has to ask why they're being allowed to play it. My parents would've been perfectly fine with me playing GTA, but that's because they knew I was raised to know right from wrong, and a game from real life. If I had had problems discerning the two selections, they would've done whatever they could to help me before letting an M-rated game or an R-rated movie anywhere near me.
The key is that the ages are suggested, and people are supposed to be able to make choices for themselves as to whether or not they or their children should be exposed to the material. If a 10 year old kid has enough money to buy GTA in the first place without his parents around, then you have to wonder why he has that much money in the first place, and how he got to the place he bought it. My parents certainly didn't let me go far enough away from the house when I was a kid to get to any place where I could buy something even if I had enough money to do so.
Now if a 16 year old with a regular part-time job doesn't know right from wrong and reality from a video game, how are they holding a job in the first place? and how did they manage not to kill anyone before they were 16?
Let's go back to blaming Ozzy, Metallica, and Marilyn Manson for our kids killing themselves. Never mind, I've got some Soul Calibur 2 to play, and I think my girlfriend's mother wants her to take her 9 year old brother to see Freddy vs Jason again.
The designers knew exactly who would be playing this game: children.
Bullshit. The majority of the people playing games today are over 18. The primary target audience for the console on which the GTA games were first released is the 18-25 market, and this is where it's had it's most success. Most of the multi-million selling games in the US have been targeted and sold to this market primarily, or an extremely broad market (ie The Sims).
Never mind, I must be a psycho, after all, I played Doom and Wolfenstein 3D when I was 12, and watched Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St. movies when I was the same age. Then again, my parents knew I wasn't going to do something stupid and blame it on the movies and games, too, or they wouldn't have rented those movies for me or bought those games in the first place.
In logic if Z causes Y !Z = !Y therefore if Y but !Z, then Z did not cause Y
Therefore, since there are no tractor-trailer rigs driving down the streets of GTA and the kids claimed that they were shooting at tractor-trailer rigs 'like they did in GTA', then the kids are full of shit (or whoever claims it), and the action they claimed caused it did not cause it.
Whether or not the game caused it can not be determined by a logic test, but whether or not what they said was the cause can be, because they made a statement that is provably false.
Y causes Z !Y = !Z X causes Z is not logical, because X was not introduced before hand.
Of course, when X = bad parenting, W = sheer willfull malice, and Z is the shooting X & W = Z is also false because it's perfectly possible for !X & W = Z
The malice is what caused the crime. Bad parenting enabled it at some point by giving them access to the gun without 'thou shalt not kill' morality (or any morality that says 'dont shoot at passing cars').
That's because California doesn't really need 49 other states to exist, and people in New York City just aren't aware that there's even a state called New York, let alone other states.
A lot of kids (even as old as 13) have a much harder time conceiving that guilt and other such feelings will fade, rather than the idea of 'the rest of my life' (which, for me at 13, was about 5 years, because I didn't believe I would live past 18 at the rate I was going).
Teenagers are quite often better writers than adults, because they have to do it on a daily basis. The most interesting writing your average adult does in a given week is a grocery list or some sort of report for work.
The smoking industry is (indirectly) the cause of the majority of medical expenses per year. However, both the fabric and smoking industries pay the same amount of taxes (at least before the suits). Is this responsible? I'm not sure where I fall on this because I'm still trying to figure out my stance.
Smokers pay a great deal in taxes to be smokers. The cost of a pack of cigarettes in New York or California is anywhere from 2-3 times the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Virginia, due almost entirely to state taxes on each pack (California makes far more money off the sale of a pack of cigarettes than the tobacco company that produces that pack of cigarettes).
I had sword fights with my friends when I was a kid because we all watched He-Man and Conan the Barbarian, but none of us went out and got a real sword or a kitchen knife to do it, we used plastic swords and cardboard tubes. We played with toy guns, not real guns. As we got older, we played multiplayer online games instead of running around the streets scaring the neighbors when we played laser tag at nite (in other news, a local kid got shot by a cop when he was playing laser tag, but that was years ago, someone decided we had to have bright colours on our guns because cops are too stupid to see the difference between a laser tag gun and a real gun).
Furthermore, although I made some bad choices when I was a teenager, I never blamed those choices on the music I listened to, the games I played, or the movies I watched. They were mine to make, and even in the case of GTA life imitates art, in that at the end of their shooting spree they did get busted and they are going to spend some time behind bars (well, juvenile detention, but then they are under age).
Children have minds, they can make decisions for themselves, especially in their teenage years. I swear I missed the mission in GTA that told me to go out and snipe the sides of tractor-trailer rigs, though, and I think that mission would've been pretty easy since the only rigs I remember seeing were stationary.
Ratings of movies and parental advisory stickers on music are not legally enforced, why should the ratings on games be?
Theaters, rental outlets, and retail stores all choose for themselves whether or not to enforce the ratings, and many do. Rental outlets include the option for parents to decide whether or not their children can rent movies and games of any rating without the parents having to be there. Some stores further choose not to stock certain games, movies, and music based on content and/or ratings. None of this, however, is backed by any legal enforcement of any sort in most states.
but it should be remembered that some of the support for such changes in Europe comes from US companies, and that US intitiatives such as DMCA help provide a precedent for similar moves elsewhere. It's a global world out there:-) . If the EU gets bogged down in this, it may come back to bite at people in the US.
It's not that it may come back to bite at people in the US, it's that it bites people in the US every day, because the laws being considered in the EU are not that different from the laws those of us in the US already have to live with.
If Slashdot's going to protest, it should place more prominance on repealing or fixing the existing laws in the US than on preventing the laws from being enacted in the EU.
While heroin is a great example of an addictive drug invoking it while having a discussion about psychological addiction isn't really all that terribly appropriate. Physical addiction and psychological addiction are two very different animals.
Check around a bit, I think you'll find that more studies are beginning to show little difference between psychological and physical addictions. In fact, the classification is often considered inappropriate. The reason is that what were previously thought of as psychological addictions have been found to be driven mostly by physical changes in the brain chemistry of the addicted person. For instance, cocaine was once thought to not be physically addictive, yet addicts have altered dopamine concentrations in their brain. With repeated use, higher levels of dopamine are required to function normally (note: this is the same as tolerance increases among addicts, but it's been found that at a certain point the level of dopamine that an addict requires to act like a normal person is higher than the body normally produces, so not only do they need more of the drug to get the same high, but they need the drug to be normal).
True addictions will alter the brain's chemistry in one way or another, even if it's within normal bounds (ie without chemicals being introduced into the body that change them directly). Someone that plays a lot of any computer game may have their brain's chemistry altered due to heightened alertness (extended boosts in adrenaline levels) or whatever state a game like EQ might put your mind in. Over extended periods of time the change in the levels of the chemicals in the brain due to the state in which you play the game may result in the brain adjusting to the heightened levels, and resulting in a very real physical withdrawal when not playing the game (as the brain's chemical levels return to a normal state which the brain is no longer wired to see as normal).
Personally, I find WASD better than ESDF for the simple reason that it's far easier to move my index finger from D to ECRFVTGB than to move my ring finger from S to WXQAZ. In all cases, I use my pinky finger to cover TAB, Caps Lock (usually for voice activation), Shift, Ctrl, and `/~, and my thumb for ALT and Space Bar.
I use the keyboard from YHN over only for things I rarely use (always rebind Y to say all and T to say team, for instance) because I use a split keyboard.
Not to mention: check it at 640x480, because that's the default pre-WinXP. Anyone that has a hard time reading text on the screen is not going to be using 1024x768 on a 15" monitor (or a 17" monitor for that matter).
In 1994 or so, "garage" games could still be popular. 10 talented guys working for 9 months could publish Doom or some other blockbuster title.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Doom took 10 guys to make. There are 12 guys working on Doom 3 (might even be less now), and most of that is for the artwork. The major engine work was done in a few months. Most of the actual development (as opposed to art and level design) since then has been optimization for graphics cards and drivers, many of which didn't even exist when the engine was written.
But since then, computers have gotten more and more storage space and output A/V quality. To make good use of all that power, you need large, high-quality artwork resources, and lots of them. (Look at how Everquest can't even run with 512 meg of RAM- yet it's graphics aren't top-quality). The cost to produce a game that can sit on a store shelf has ballooned to where it's comprable to Hollywood films.
The biggest problem in art a few years ago when it came to games was making things look good with low numbers of polygons. Many artists have maintained that it's easier to develop high-polygon models for current engines than it was for low-polygon models on past engines. The real killer is the detailed textures and the complex level design that is becoming more common. Furthermore, a game doesn't have to be huge to get someone recognition. A small developer trying to break into the industry may want to cut back on their ambition a bit and try to develop a good game first and foremost. If one title that took 6 months to build brings in enough money to build profit and fund the development of a good game that takes 9 months to build, then eventually you'll be the one with the huge budgets. The other problem is that the news tends to focus on the big-budget titles, which, sometimes more often than not, tend to be crap that just had too much tied to it. Enter the Matrix will probably never make it's money back, but look at what they did to make it in the first place. Do we really need a Hollywood film crew working on a game? No.
No single author or small team can produce a game that'll earn money on the console or PC market.
This is just false. Both the PC and console markets are full of small teams that are being funded by large publishers to develop games in 6-18 months. Some of the titles are budget titles, but just as often they're full-fledged titles. Nintendo doesn't pump out a lot of first party titles by having everyone work on 1 title, instead they have a large number of relatively small teams that each work on a single title. The development teams on Microsoft's 1st and 2nd party titles for the PC and XBox aren't always large teams, either. Most people are getting confused between publishers and developers here, I think. Even a multi-million dollar title isn't always developed by 60 people. Id might take 3 years to put out Doom 3 where some other team can put out a game with a similar level of content in 18 months, but that's because id has only 12 people working on the game and knows that those people will do the job well, and they can afford to do it (without someone like Eidos rushing the game out the door like the latest Tomb Raider, or like Activision did to Quake 2).
Now, there has been a divergent path for game developers which has become more prominent in the past year. Web-based (flash, java, or small downloads of native binraries) have become popular and somewhat profitable (often advertising-supported). That category is still open to bootstrap programmers.
Most of those areas, though, require fairly specialized development skills that don't port well to the other development platforms, and limited art budgets. The latter of those is the really big difference between the low-budget titles and the high-budget titles. Art is also what slows down (or stops cold) a lot of open-source game developers. The Doom 3 engine still looks like crap if you load up the textures from Quake, and a handful of coders got the Quake engine up to the level of loading and displaying Half-Life's resources in a fairly short timeframe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but HDTV isn't a worldwide standard so may not get supported widely. A bit like Europe's 100Hz format which has been available over here for a few years but still has to cope with 50Hz video because nothing actually outputs 100Hz outside a lab...
Japan, the US, Canada, and Australia support HDTV. The first two are the primary markets that current console manufacturers target the most heavily, and the translation to PAL is one of the things that currently keeps games from going to Europe anyway. In other words, what else is new? Most console games are currently developed in NTSC, which also isn't a standard in worldwide use.
Who knows, maybe they'll put in some decent conversion hardware and the developers won't have to do as much work to get the games working in Europe.
One thing I have been finding more signs of is rushed releases on consoles. If a console game has bugs, tough - there's nothing you can do to fix them. OK, the xbox has a hard disk but I'd rather games developers not get into the habit of relying on being able to fix bugs.
I agree on this point, though I have yet to encounter any problems with a console title.
Re:Why I Can't make a DOOM 3 clone
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Razor Blade Games?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been programming for many many years on many different platforms, I'm an expert in C and x86 assembly and I've done a lot of stuff with OpenGL and a good amount with DirectX not to mention being proficient in just about any area of programming you could think of. The problem is that a game engine like DOOM 3 is not a stand-alone work. It is rather the evolution of the first DOOM engine through all the iterations of Quake. I could write the first DOOM engine. I could probably even write something like Quake 2. But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years. They just keep making it a little better. I can't do that because I don't have years and years of succesful 3d projects to draw from and improve upon.
The Doom 3 engine isn't an example of code reuse, though it is an example of learning from past projects. It's also an example of most of the code being done by one person in a fairly short amount of time. Oh, and of the slow shift from C and x86 assembly to C++.
No small developer can jump 6 levels of technology to get to the current state-of-the-art and compete with large developing firms.
There's far more information available to developers today than when these people started. Furthermore, the Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 source is all available as well. Many people have already taken the Quake engine beyond Quake 2's capabilities from a graphics standpoint. Id isn't a large development team, either, they have more artists than developers by far, and if you want decent artists for your game the nearest community college can supply a never-ending group of people that will work for next to nothing.
Programming, like everything, is an iterative process; so as games get larger(code-size) and more complex with more and better technology packed into them, it will be harder and harder for small developers to break in the market. Most of them end up buying a decent 3d engine from someone else.
and being able to license technology allows small developers to break in more quickly, as well. Valve broke through by licensing id's technology and then rewriting a large amount of the code. Once they had their first game shipped, they started their own engine in-house, and licensed code for the physics engine. I'm sure if there's a Half-Life 3 some day, we'll see that Valve developed their own physics engine after Half-Life 2 shipped, as well.
And with faster graphics cards and games like Warcraft 3 and PlanetSide, all games are beginning to rely on evolved technology.
What's the evolved technology in WarCraft 3? I'm not even sure if PS has any evolved technology, either.
A small developer's game (whether its an FPS or an RTS or an MMORPG) can't compete with the beauty and speed of a large company's engine that has been revised and rewritten and composed of a multitude of high speed algorithms and computing tricks that have been drawn from a large code base. Which relegates us all to the realm of shareware...or, on the bright side, perhaps open source community projects.
Where do you think companies like id got their start? Unreal and Quake were both developed by companies that started in the shareware business. Blizzard started as a console developer, and is pretty much wholly owned by a much larger company. Valve was started by an ex-MS employee with a good amount of money in the bank. 3D Realms has been developing Duke Nukem Forever, well, forever, on money they earned as a shareware developer.
Design good games and worry about making it pretty with later iterations if you really have problems making Quake 3 or Doom 3 quality graphics on your first time out. Hell, I'll build Pong clones if that's what it takes to make sure my physics and graphics are accurate.
Remember cartridge games, like Nintendo used? The new relases could be $70!
The higher priced Nintendo cartridges had more complex cartridges that cost more to produce. The cost to produce a CD or DVD is significantly less than any of the Nintendo cartridges was, especially with inflation. CDs and DVDs can't store advanced graphics and sound hardware or battery-based storage. This is why expansion ports were placed on many of the early CD-based consoles and why memory cards have become standard on all optical media consoles.
If I remember correctly, Ikaruga was also done by a fairly small development team, and while it may be a short game, it's one that takes so long to master that most people don't even realize it.
I saw the new HalfLife 2 demo at E3 this year, and it was unbelieveable! However, this introduces two issues. First, just like the film industry, they MUST be fantastic to make serious profit, and get a large audience to throw down their dollars. Second, it takes huge teams of developers and artists years to complete a production such as half life 2. A product that no one or two man development teams have any chance of completing.
Although Valve had a good amount of money as a startup, they weren't one of those huge studios when they licensed the engine from id to make the first Half-Life, yet they generated a huge amount of hype around their game, and still delayed it a year before releasing what became the most-praised game of the year. Valve has one title under their belt (plus mods and expansions) and yet you already think of them as one of the big guys.
The hard part really is getting a publisher on board. If you can put together a good game, you can get it published. If you can do it on your own, without publisher money (like Valve and id both do), then you can be in control of your own destiny.
At the very worst, you can look at examples like Counterstrike and TFSoftware. Valve bought up the company in the latter case and the code in the former case. Developers in the PC space have been hiring up talent from the mod groups for quite a while, Valve wasn't the first to do it (though they've done it with the most direct profit). Many console developers are PC developers as well, and most of the publishers are doing both sides. At the very worst, we'll see developers making their name as PC mod-developers and then getting into PC development, and then maybe console development.
3. The consoles allow the giants to sell more games to people who don't understand computers.
Not everyone buying consoles don't understand computers. In fact, for many gamers it comes down to the simple fact that different game types play better on consoles than computers, and vice versa. I wouldn't play your average RTS on a console, and most FPS games don't work well on consoles, either. Star Wars: KOTOR is the first game that really brings PC-style RPGs to consoles without huge changes to the gameplay.
4. The giant can no longer afford to develop PC games because they need to put all their development into consoles.
For many of them most of the development process is cheaper for the PC, and the XBox, for one, offers some easy transition from console to PC (or from PC to console). The biggest effort on the computer is testing different configurations and making sure your control scheme works.
The end...PC gaming DOA.
People have been predicting this for a very long time. What usually happens is that PC gaming gets something new that can't easily be reproduced on the consoles for at least a few more years. In many cases, the consoles start catching up to PC gaming only because PC gaming loses a lot of it's originality, which is something we're seeing a lot of people crying about across the board, now.
What I generally dislike about consoles...
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
Many mice have been available for different consoles over the years, they simply aren't very popular. Personally, I'd much rather have a USB adapter for both my keyboard and my trackball than something developed for the console specifically (because I'm very picky about my keyboard and trackball, partially because I have to use them all day). The XBox offers the keyboard adapter, not sure about mice.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
Until people have the TVs, they're not going to bother with the higher resolution. On a computer monitor the higher resolutions make a big difference, whereas on a TV screen they mean almost nothing unless they're used to enhance FSAA.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
This is changing as well, though mostly with mod chips allowing people to add in various hacks and mods.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's....or EA's, or Blizzard's, or the old Won.net system, etc. GameSpy didn't make all their money from selling software, either.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
How about setting up a 32 player server for a console? We setup multiple 32 player Quake servers on a single P200. This is why Microsoft chose the model they did. It doesn't take much to run a handful of large servers on one box to host a large number of console players.
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
A lot of people do. Can't say I've had any problems with CDs, or any other disc format. Overall I've had 2 or 3 CDs get scratched in a way that affected playback, and they were all music CDs (I have about 2x as many music CDs as I do PC game CDs, and about 30x as many music CDs as I do games for the largest of my console game CD collections). Ever try to backup a computer game CD? For a while there it seemed that you needed a new trick with every new game that came along. At least with the consoles once you learn the trick it rarely changes (though with things like GD-ROMs and DVD it's certainly a bit more expensive to get the hardware).
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
I can buy a new console for less than the cost of a new graphics card. In fact, I bought my last 3 consoles with money saved from not upgr
The statement is accurate for the console manufacturer, though the game developer may be SOL. Since the console manufacturer takes a cut of every game sold for their console, they reap most of their profits on those game sales. Whether or not the developers make any money on it means very little to them, except in that they want developers to keep putting out titles for their console.
As the article states, the kids find a book which gives them wishes, and they become Final Fantasy characters in the FF setting. The kids in the suburb is basically a quick tutorial and intro sequence.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on the latter point (that entertainment plays a very minor role), and that the prosecutor most likely had no clue wtf he was talking about (or misspoke).
However, it still remains that the excuse is bs simply by the fact that what was said about the game was incorrect.
Then again, blaming Columbine on Doom seemed rather stupid when most people hadn't played Doom in several years, and much more 'realistic' games had come out since.
People believe whatever they want to believe for the most part, and the people that spend more time lobbying against games than actually putting the responsibility on the people that commit the crimes, and those that raise their children unsupervised, are still going to believe that they were 'shooting at tractor-trailers like they did in GTA', even though they didn't shoot anyone that was in a tractor-trailer either in real life or in the game. Never mind that if you did shoot someone in a car in real life, the car would either just get closer to exploding or would stop and spill out the dead body of the headshot driver. Oh, or the driver would stop the car and get out and run away, giving you the chance to shoot them outside their vehicle.
Obviously, there's a very large part (a few million people) that don't agree with you, whether it's because they're immoral people, or because they believe there's a difference between killing people in a console/PC game and killing real people.
I'm not raising children of my own, so any society organized around raising children has no place for me anyway. If I choose to raise children, I don't need society's 'help' to do so. Society's choice to allow or not allow entertainment for adults only affects my raising children in that I need to make sure they understand the real world before they have to partake in it. GTA's existance is not an attack on parents, it is entertainment for adults, some of whom may be parents.
If I own a gun, I lock it up. If I own porn, I generally try to keep it where my kids will not find it (or lock it up with the gun). If I own R-rated movies and M-rated games and feel my children are not ready for them, then I lock them up, and only view/play them when my children are not around or when they're in bed.
I couldn't touch my family's computer without asking first, and most of the time it was in a very visible part of the house. I grew up with very large stretches of my childhood marred by being restricted from watching television, and my parents were perfectly capable of preventing me from even watching it, let alone watching specific things, without having to resort to locking me in my bedroom (and come to think of it, when I was a teenager sending me to my room would've been a pretty sad joke, although I did only have a 15" TV until I was in my 20s).
I don't disagree with you there, but if the kids (or their lawyers) say they 'were just shooting at tractor-trailers like they did in GTA', then the kids were clearly misinformed about what could be done in GTA in the first place. They obviously did not shoot at tractor-trailers in GTA, and therefore were either not emulating what they did in GTA or lied (by saying they were shooting at tractor-trailers either in real life or in the game).
My guess is that someone thought it would look better to say they were shooting at the sides of tractor-trailers instead of shooting at cars, because you've got to admit that there's a much smaller likelihood of hurting anyone directly by shooting at the sides of tractor-trailers. Neither of the people that were shot appear to have actually been in tractor-trailers, either, from the accounts given in the two articles. Then again, they did manage to only hit two people while firing 'up to 25 shots', which means either their aim is atrocious or they weren't trying to shoot people (then again, with the average freeway speed in most areas being ~70-80 mph, it's not that amazing that they missed so many times even if they were trying to shoot people).
I, and everyone I knew, wrote crap like that every time we sat down to write an essay for English class. It's called 'snowballing'. You add a bunch of bs that sounds good to make it look bigger than it really is.
They're probably not in denial at all, they're just saying what people want them to say. They more than likely had to write an apology of some sort anyway, so they snowballed it because people would see 'Im sorry I shot you and that other guy' as insincere.
Oh come on, they would have had to be in denial to think that GTA wouldn't be played by a large number of kids -- even if it is 'targeted' at the 18-25 market.
If GTA is being played by a large number of kids, then someone has to ask why they're being allowed to play it. My parents would've been perfectly fine with me playing GTA, but that's because they knew I was raised to know right from wrong, and a game from real life. If I had had problems discerning the two selections, they would've done whatever they could to help me before letting an M-rated game or an R-rated movie anywhere near me.
The key is that the ages are suggested, and people are supposed to be able to make choices for themselves as to whether or not they or their children should be exposed to the material. If a 10 year old kid has enough money to buy GTA in the first place without his parents around, then you have to wonder why he has that much money in the first place, and how he got to the place he bought it. My parents certainly didn't let me go far enough away from the house when I was a kid to get to any place where I could buy something even if I had enough money to do so.
Now if a 16 year old with a regular part-time job doesn't know right from wrong and reality from a video game, how are they holding a job in the first place? and how did they manage not to kill anyone before they were 16?
Let's go back to blaming Ozzy, Metallica, and Marilyn Manson for our kids killing themselves. Never mind, I've got some Soul Calibur 2 to play, and I think my girlfriend's mother wants her to take her 9 year old brother to see Freddy vs Jason again.
The designers knew exactly who would be playing this game: children.
Bullshit. The majority of the people playing games today are over 18. The primary target audience for the console on which the GTA games were first released is the 18-25 market, and this is where it's had it's most success. Most of the multi-million selling games in the US have been targeted and sold to this market primarily, or an extremely broad market (ie The Sims).
Never mind, I must be a psycho, after all, I played Doom and Wolfenstein 3D when I was 12, and watched Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St. movies when I was the same age. Then again, my parents knew I wasn't going to do something stupid and blame it on the movies and games, too, or they wouldn't have rented those movies for me or bought those games in the first place.
In logic
if Z causes Y
!Z = !Y
therefore if Y but !Z, then Z did not cause Y
Therefore, since there are no tractor-trailer rigs driving down the streets of GTA and the kids claimed that they were shooting at tractor-trailer rigs 'like they did in GTA', then the kids are full of shit (or whoever claims it), and the action they claimed caused it did not cause it.
Whether or not the game caused it can not be determined by a logic test, but whether or not what they said was the cause can be, because they made a statement that is provably false.
Y causes Z
!Y = !Z
X causes Z
is not logical, because X was not introduced before hand.
Of course, when X = bad parenting, W = sheer willfull malice, and Z is the shooting
X & W = Z
is also false because it's perfectly possible for
!X & W = Z
The malice is what caused the crime. Bad parenting enabled it at some point by giving them access to the gun without 'thou shalt not kill' morality (or any morality that says 'dont shoot at passing cars').
That's because California doesn't really need 49 other states to exist, and people in New York City just aren't aware that there's even a state called New York, let alone other states.
A lot of kids (even as old as 13) have a much harder time conceiving that guilt and other such feelings will fade, rather than the idea of 'the rest of my life' (which, for me at 13, was about 5 years, because I didn't believe I would live past 18 at the rate I was going).
Teenagers are quite often better writers than adults, because they have to do it on a daily basis. The most interesting writing your average adult does in a given week is a grocery list or some sort of report for work.
The smoking industry is (indirectly) the cause of the majority of medical expenses per year. However, both the fabric and smoking industries pay the same amount of taxes (at least before the suits). Is this responsible? I'm not sure where I fall on this because I'm still trying to figure out my stance.
Smokers pay a great deal in taxes to be smokers. The cost of a pack of cigarettes in New York or California is anywhere from 2-3 times the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Virginia, due almost entirely to state taxes on each pack (California makes far more money off the sale of a pack of cigarettes than the tobacco company that produces that pack of cigarettes).
I had sword fights with my friends when I was a kid because we all watched He-Man and Conan the Barbarian, but none of us went out and got a real sword or a kitchen knife to do it, we used plastic swords and cardboard tubes. We played with toy guns, not real guns. As we got older, we played multiplayer online games instead of running around the streets scaring the neighbors when we played laser tag at nite (in other news, a local kid got shot by a cop when he was playing laser tag, but that was years ago, someone decided we had to have bright colours on our guns because cops are too stupid to see the difference between a laser tag gun and a real gun).
The game was not meant to be played by children.
Furthermore, although I made some bad choices when I was a teenager, I never blamed those choices on the music I listened to, the games I played, or the movies I watched. They were mine to make, and even in the case of GTA life imitates art, in that at the end of their shooting spree they did get busted and they are going to spend some time behind bars (well, juvenile detention, but then they are under age).
Children have minds, they can make decisions for themselves, especially in their teenage years. I swear I missed the mission in GTA that told me to go out and snipe the sides of tractor-trailer rigs, though, and I think that mission would've been pretty easy since the only rigs I remember seeing were stationary.
Ratings of movies and parental advisory stickers on music are not legally enforced, why should the ratings on games be?
Theaters, rental outlets, and retail stores all choose for themselves whether or not to enforce the ratings, and many do. Rental outlets include the option for parents to decide whether or not their children can rent movies and games of any rating without the parents having to be there. Some stores further choose not to stock certain games, movies, and music based on content and/or ratings. None of this, however, is backed by any legal enforcement of any sort in most states.
but it should be remembered that some of the support for such changes in Europe comes from US companies, and that US intitiatives such as DMCA help provide a precedent for similar moves elsewhere. It's a global world out there :-) . If the EU gets bogged down in this, it may come back to bite at people in the US.
It's not that it may come back to bite at people in the US, it's that it bites people in the US every day, because the laws being considered in the EU are not that different from the laws those of us in the US already have to live with.
If Slashdot's going to protest, it should place more prominance on repealing or fixing the existing laws in the US than on preventing the laws from being enacted in the EU.
While heroin is a great example of an addictive drug invoking it while having a discussion about psychological addiction isn't really all that terribly appropriate. Physical addiction and psychological addiction are two very different animals.
Check around a bit, I think you'll find that more studies are beginning to show little difference between psychological and physical addictions. In fact, the classification is often considered inappropriate. The reason is that what were previously thought of as psychological addictions have been found to be driven mostly by physical changes in the brain chemistry of the addicted person. For instance, cocaine was once thought to not be physically addictive, yet addicts have altered dopamine concentrations in their brain. With repeated use, higher levels of dopamine are required to function normally (note: this is the same as tolerance increases among addicts, but it's been found that at a certain point the level of dopamine that an addict requires to act like a normal person is higher than the body normally produces, so not only do they need more of the drug to get the same high, but they need the drug to be normal).
True addictions will alter the brain's chemistry in one way or another, even if it's within normal bounds (ie without chemicals being introduced into the body that change them directly). Someone that plays a lot of any computer game may have their brain's chemistry altered due to heightened alertness (extended boosts in adrenaline levels) or whatever state a game like EQ might put your mind in. Over extended periods of time the change in the levels of the chemicals in the brain due to the state in which you play the game may result in the brain adjusting to the heightened levels, and resulting in a very real physical withdrawal when not playing the game (as the brain's chemical levels return to a normal state which the brain is no longer wired to see as normal).
Personally, I find WASD better than ESDF for the simple reason that it's far easier to move my index finger from D to ECRFVTGB than to move my ring finger from S to WXQAZ. In all cases, I use my pinky finger to cover TAB, Caps Lock (usually for voice activation), Shift, Ctrl, and `/~, and my thumb for ALT and Space Bar.
I use the keyboard from YHN over only for things I rarely use (always rebind Y to say all and T to say team, for instance) because I use a split keyboard.
Not to mention: check it at 640x480, because that's the default pre-WinXP. Anyone that has a hard time reading text on the screen is not going to be using 1024x768 on a 15" monitor (or a 17" monitor for that matter).
In 1994 or so, "garage" games could still be popular. 10 talented guys working for 9 months could publish Doom or some other blockbuster title.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Doom took 10 guys to make. There are 12 guys working on Doom 3 (might even be less now), and most of that is for the artwork. The major engine work was done in a few months. Most of the actual development (as opposed to art and level design) since then has been optimization for graphics cards and drivers, many of which didn't even exist when the engine was written.
But since then, computers have gotten more and more storage space and output A/V quality. To make good use of all that power, you need large, high-quality artwork resources, and lots of them. (Look at how Everquest can't even run with 512 meg of RAM- yet it's graphics aren't top-quality). The cost to produce a game that can sit on a store shelf has ballooned to where it's comprable to Hollywood films.
The biggest problem in art a few years ago when it came to games was making things look good with low numbers of polygons. Many artists have maintained that it's easier to develop high-polygon models for current engines than it was for low-polygon models on past engines. The real killer is the detailed textures and the complex level design that is becoming more common. Furthermore, a game doesn't have to be huge to get someone recognition. A small developer trying to break into the industry may want to cut back on their ambition a bit and try to develop a good game first and foremost. If one title that took 6 months to build brings in enough money to build profit and fund the development of a good game that takes 9 months to build, then eventually you'll be the one with the huge budgets. The other problem is that the news tends to focus on the big-budget titles, which, sometimes more often than not, tend to be crap that just had too much tied to it. Enter the Matrix will probably never make it's money back, but look at what they did to make it in the first place. Do we really need a Hollywood film crew working on a game? No.
No single author or small team can produce a game that'll earn money on the console or PC market.
This is just false. Both the PC and console markets are full of small teams that are being funded by large publishers to develop games in 6-18 months. Some of the titles are budget titles, but just as often they're full-fledged titles. Nintendo doesn't pump out a lot of first party titles by having everyone work on 1 title, instead they have a large number of relatively small teams that each work on a single title. The development teams on Microsoft's 1st and 2nd party titles for the PC and XBox aren't always large teams, either. Most people are getting confused between publishers and developers here, I think. Even a multi-million dollar title isn't always developed by 60 people. Id might take 3 years to put out Doom 3 where some other team can put out a game with a similar level of content in 18 months, but that's because id has only 12 people working on the game and knows that those people will do the job well, and they can afford to do it (without someone like Eidos rushing the game out the door like the latest Tomb Raider, or like Activision did to Quake 2).
Now, there has been a divergent path for game developers which has become more prominent in the past year. Web-based (flash, java, or small downloads of native binraries) have become popular and somewhat profitable (often advertising-supported). That category is still open to bootstrap programmers.
Most of those areas, though, require fairly specialized development skills that don't port well to the other development platforms, and limited art budgets. The latter of those is the really big difference between the low-budget titles and the high-budget titles. Art is also what slows down (or stops cold) a lot of open-source game developers. The Doom 3 engine still looks like crap if you load up the textures from Quake, and a handful of coders got the Quake engine up to the level of loading and displaying Half-Life's resources in a fairly short timeframe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but HDTV isn't a worldwide standard so may not get supported widely. A bit like Europe's 100Hz format which has been available over here for a few years but still has to cope with 50Hz video because nothing actually outputs 100Hz outside a lab...
Japan, the US, Canada, and Australia support HDTV. The first two are the primary markets that current console manufacturers target the most heavily, and the translation to PAL is one of the things that currently keeps games from going to Europe anyway. In other words, what else is new? Most console games are currently developed in NTSC, which also isn't a standard in worldwide use.
Who knows, maybe they'll put in some decent conversion hardware and the developers won't have to do as much work to get the games working in Europe.
One thing I have been finding more signs of is rushed releases on consoles. If a console game has bugs, tough - there's nothing you can do to fix them. OK, the xbox has a hard disk but I'd rather games developers not get into the habit of relying on being able to fix bugs.
I agree on this point, though I have yet to encounter any problems with a console title.
I've been programming for many many years on many different platforms, I'm an expert in C and x86 assembly and I've done a lot of stuff with OpenGL and a good amount with DirectX not to mention being proficient in just about any area of programming you could think of. The problem is that a game engine like DOOM 3 is not a stand-alone work. It is rather the evolution of the first DOOM engine through all the iterations of Quake. I could write the first DOOM engine. I could probably even write something like Quake 2. But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years. They just keep making it a little better. I can't do that because I don't have years and years of succesful 3d projects to draw from and improve upon.
The Doom 3 engine isn't an example of code reuse, though it is an example of learning from past projects. It's also an example of most of the code being done by one person in a fairly short amount of time. Oh, and of the slow shift from C and x86 assembly to C++.
No small developer can jump 6 levels of technology to get to the current state-of-the-art and compete with large developing firms.
There's far more information available to developers today than when these people started. Furthermore, the Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 source is all available as well. Many people have already taken the Quake engine beyond Quake 2's capabilities from a graphics standpoint. Id isn't a large development team, either, they have more artists than developers by far, and if you want decent artists for your game the nearest community college can supply a never-ending group of people that will work for next to nothing.
Programming, like everything, is an iterative process; so as games get larger(code-size) and more complex with more and better technology packed into them, it will be harder and harder for small developers to break in the market. Most of them end up buying a decent 3d engine from someone else.
and being able to license technology allows small developers to break in more quickly, as well. Valve broke through by licensing id's technology and then rewriting a large amount of the code. Once they had their first game shipped, they started their own engine in-house, and licensed code for the physics engine. I'm sure if there's a Half-Life 3 some day, we'll see that Valve developed their own physics engine after Half-Life 2 shipped, as well.
And with faster graphics cards and games like Warcraft 3 and PlanetSide, all games are beginning to rely on evolved technology.
What's the evolved technology in WarCraft 3? I'm not even sure if PS has any evolved technology, either.
A small developer's game (whether its an FPS or an RTS or an MMORPG) can't compete with the beauty and speed of a large company's engine that has been revised and rewritten and composed of a multitude of high speed algorithms and computing tricks that have been drawn from a large code base. Which relegates us all to the realm of shareware...or, on the bright side, perhaps open source community projects.
Where do you think companies like id got their start? Unreal and Quake were both developed by companies that started in the shareware business. Blizzard started as a console developer, and is pretty much wholly owned by a much larger company. Valve was started by an ex-MS employee with a good amount of money in the bank. 3D Realms has been developing Duke Nukem Forever, well, forever, on money they earned as a shareware developer.
Design good games and worry about making it pretty with later iterations if you really have problems making Quake 3 or Doom 3 quality graphics on your first time out. Hell, I'll build Pong clones if that's what it takes to make sure my physics and graphics are accurate.
Remember cartridge games, like Nintendo used? The new relases could be $70!
The higher priced Nintendo cartridges had more complex cartridges that cost more to produce. The cost to produce a CD or DVD is significantly less than any of the Nintendo cartridges was, especially with inflation. CDs and DVDs can't store advanced graphics and sound hardware or battery-based storage. This is why expansion ports were placed on many of the early CD-based consoles and why memory cards have become standard on all optical media consoles.
If I remember correctly, Ikaruga was also done by a fairly small development team, and while it may be a short game, it's one that takes so long to master that most people don't even realize it.
I saw the new HalfLife 2 demo at E3 this year, and it was unbelieveable! However, this introduces two issues. First, just like the film industry, they MUST be fantastic to make serious profit, and get a large audience to throw down their dollars. Second, it takes huge teams of developers and artists years to complete a production such as half life 2. A product that no one or two man development teams have any chance of completing.
Although Valve had a good amount of money as a startup, they weren't one of those huge studios when they licensed the engine from id to make the first Half-Life, yet they generated a huge amount of hype around their game, and still delayed it a year before releasing what became the most-praised game of the year. Valve has one title under their belt (plus mods and expansions) and yet you already think of them as one of the big guys.
The hard part really is getting a publisher on board. If you can put together a good game, you can get it published. If you can do it on your own, without publisher money (like Valve and id both do), then you can be in control of your own destiny.
At the very worst, you can look at examples like Counterstrike and TFSoftware. Valve bought up the company in the latter case and the code in the former case. Developers in the PC space have been hiring up talent from the mod groups for quite a while, Valve wasn't the first to do it (though they've done it with the most direct profit). Many console developers are PC developers as well, and most of the publishers are doing both sides. At the very worst, we'll see developers making their name as PC mod-developers and then getting into PC development, and then maybe console development.
3. The consoles allow the giants to sell more games to people who don't understand computers.
...or EA's, or Blizzard's, or the old Won.net system, etc. GameSpy didn't make all their money from selling software, either.
Not everyone buying consoles don't understand computers. In fact, for many gamers it comes down to the simple fact that different game types play better on consoles than computers, and vice versa. I wouldn't play your average RTS on a console, and most FPS games don't work well on consoles, either. Star Wars: KOTOR is the first game that really brings PC-style RPGs to consoles without huge changes to the gameplay.
4. The giant can no longer afford to develop PC games because they need to put all their development into consoles.
For many of them most of the development process is cheaper for the PC, and the XBox, for one, offers some easy transition from console to PC (or from PC to console). The biggest effort on the computer is testing different configurations and making sure your control scheme works.
The end...PC gaming DOA.
People have been predicting this for a very long time. What usually happens is that PC gaming gets something new that can't easily be reproduced on the consoles for at least a few more years. In many cases, the consoles start catching up to PC gaming only because PC gaming loses a lot of it's originality, which is something we're seeing a lot of people crying about across the board, now.
What I generally dislike about consoles...
1. Doesn't allow mouse control.
Many mice have been available for different consoles over the years, they simply aren't very popular. Personally, I'd much rather have a USB adapter for both my keyboard and my trackball than something developed for the console specifically (because I'm very picky about my keyboard and trackball, partially because I have to use them all day). The XBox offers the keyboard adapter, not sure about mice.
2. Doesn't have high-resolution > 1024x768. And even if it did, that doesn't mean much to people who don't have HDTV.
Until people have the TVs, they're not going to bother with the higher resolution. On a computer monitor the higher resolutions make a big difference, whereas on a TV screen they mean almost nothing unless they're used to enhance FSAA.
3. You are locked into the game...no modding.
This is changing as well, though mostly with mod chips allowing people to add in various hacks and mods.
4. You can't always freely connect with other large groups over the net without using a system that was developed to monitor your gameplay...like Microsoft's.
5. How about setting up a 32 player server with a console?
How about setting up a 32 player server for a console? We setup multiple 32 player Quake servers on a single P200. This is why Microsoft chose the model they did. It doesn't take much to run a handful of large servers on one box to host a large number of console players.
6. Ever try to backup your console game CD?
A lot of people do. Can't say I've had any problems with CDs, or any other disc format. Overall I've had 2 or 3 CDs get scratched in a way that affected playback, and they were all music CDs (I have about 2x as many music CDs as I do PC game CDs, and about 30x as many music CDs as I do games for the largest of my console game CD collections). Ever try to backup a computer game CD? For a while there it seemed that you needed a new trick with every new game that came along. At least with the consoles once you learn the trick it rarely changes (though with things like GD-ROMs and DVD it's certainly a bit more expensive to get the hardware).
7. Can you upgrade you console system without throwing out the entire box?
I can buy a new console for less than the cost of a new graphics card. In fact, I bought my last 3 consoles with money saved from not upgr
The statement is accurate for the console manufacturer, though the game developer may be SOL. Since the console manufacturer takes a cut of every game sold for their console, they reap most of their profits on those game sales. Whether or not the developers make any money on it means very little to them, except in that they want developers to keep putting out titles for their console.
As the article states, the kids find a book which gives them wishes, and they become Final Fantasy characters in the FF setting. The kids in the suburb is basically a quick tutorial and intro sequence.