Well-written characters and dialog are just another opportunity to entertain the player.
To be vulgar, it's just another asset -- like models, textures, sound, animation, and effects. It would be foolish for a developer to discount the need for quality in any of those other sorts of assets, and it's foolish to write off dialog as something players won't be interested in.
Caveat 1: I'm distinguishing between dialog and plot, because plotting is like game design, in that it happens behind the scenes and is expressed through other assets. In other words, while "writing" in novels means a lot of things other than dialog, almost all of the writing that goes into games is dialog.
Caveat 2: I work at Double Fine Productions, which is run by Tim Shafer. Tim has a reputation as one of the better writers in the game industry, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd have the same appreciation for good game dialog if I hadn't worked on Psychonauts.
It amazes me that Clinton got impeached for telling some lies about a few off-side blowjobs and for getting a few laundry bills.
A few years later, a different president tells lies about so-called weapons of mass destruction, fabricates connections between Saddam and terror groups, and uses those lies as a means to justify a war that get tens of thousands of people killed. But y'all cool with that?
Judging on the 2006 elections, most Americans are not cool with that, as it's generally accepted that the mid-term election was a referendum on the war in Iraq. Bush's approval rating is, as I write this, hovering at its lowest level ever. But Americans only get the opportunity to elect their public servants every few years, so there's always going to be some lag time.
There are actual console developers with insight into the race between the PS3 and Wii, the problem is that anyone with an actual worthwhile knowledge is too busy actually making games.
So instead we get the worthless ramblings of the console dev world's deadweight:
As a game developer, it's profoundly disturbing how casually we treat games just a few years old. Hardware will continue to evolve and OSes will change; we really need a way to secure our ability to play old games.
Console games are semi-okay because you can at least keep the (static) hardware around, but PC games are in bad shape. PCs evolve gradually, and it only takes one small OS or video driver change to render a game unplayable. Because games are a commercial medium, games simply aren't supported once it's no longer financially beneficial.
As long as there are programmers out there willing to write emulators, I suppose we're okay... but it still makes me nervous.
As a educated, moral, atheistic person, you might actually enjoy picking up a good translation of the Torah or Tanakh.
I think I'll do that.
...despite the fact that Jewish writings are the most militant of the major faiths.
Wow, I had no idea. That's interesting given the absence of offensive wars launched by the Jewish people. Though again, religion probably has far less to do with the impulse toward war than ingrained cultural influences.
OTOH, Islam had a militarizing affect on the Arabian people that took its message. Without even looking at modern times, look at how Islam was adopted by the Arab people, a bunch of Nomadic Arabian tribes and spread to massive regions militarily. Before Islam, the Arab people were tribal nomads. After adopting Islam, they created a massive Caliphate that rivaled the Romans for militaristic activity.
I've got to do some more reading on this transition -- I hadn't known until recently that most Arab peoples subscribed to good old-fashioned Arabian mythology (genies, etc) before the rise of Islam. Though I have to wonder if the transformation of nomadic Arab societies into more organized ones (the Caliphate) might have simply been the result of natural population growth and the inevitable consolidation that occurs when populations are forced to merge.
A true system of morality, with abstract concepts of good and evil require that mankind be unique (not a slightly differently evolved Ape), and that there is a universal concept of right and wrong. Even if you don't attribute that to a specific deity and his instructions, the very nature of an abstract concept of right and wrong requires a universal concept of morality. That universal concept of morality is beyond science and reason, and that defies pure atheism.
I guess that, no, I don't believe there's any "universal" concept of morality, but that doesn't make a shared morality any less important. In fact, it's even more important, in that it needs to normalize certain standards across many different peoples and world views.
My feeling is this: We're on our own. Nature is fundamentally brutal, yet we've evolved to a point where we know that. We, humans, are walking contradictions -- we still have that entire brutal history encoded into us, but we also have a thread of cooperation that's enabled us to get as far as we have. So we struggle internally. We have moments of strength and of weakness. We need a shared moral system to guide us, and a society built upon that system to codify and enforce it. The shared moral system is pretty similar across most societies; we tend to get hung up and upset over the differences, and I suppose that's natural.
So maybe the only argument is about whether that system is arbitrary (and therefore subject to some chaos and gray area) or whether it's defined by some non-human entity and therefore universal. But then, I'm immediately tripped up by this: Whose universal is the right one? Hindus? Christians? Jews? Muslims? As an atheist, I simply see a list of slightly differing standards. They all think they're right. Unfortunately, it's not possible for them all to be right, so I'm impelled to see them as a set of variations on a theme. As such, I find myself reassured that civilized humans mostly agree on what's right and wrong. Again, the differences can cause major friction, and we'd be better off as a species if we could find some way to see past those differences more reliably.
Come on, people... -1 Flamebait? If you disagree with him (which I do), don't mod him down; post a well-argued reply (which I did). Modding down reasonable posts that you simply disagree with is intellectually lazy.
As an Atheist, do you not kill your neighbor and take his stuff because, A) fear of retribution by family members and/or the state, or B) it is wrong to take things from others.
If your answer is A, then you are in fact an amoral person that requires laws to govern behavior. If your answer is B), then you have borrowed a state of morality from the Christians that you appear to at least disagree with and in all likelihood despise given the tone of your most. Look to the animal kingdom, they will kill others and take their territory, mates, etc. There is no inherent morality in nature. If you are an atheist and a moral person, ask yourself why you are moral, and find a justification for that code of morality that doesn't depend on religious notions like faith, and you'll be disturbed by what you find. You will find that either you have borrowed a code of ethics from the followers of Abraham that is inherently divine, or you have developed a framework that provides for moral behavior but is essentially amoral, because there is no right and wrong, just a social contract enforced with arms.
I'm an atheist and a moral person, and when I ask myself why I'm moral (absent a faith-based origin), I'm not at all disturbed by what I find. The moral system I was raised on simply makes sense, and does indeed look like the last 6 Judeo-Christian Commandments. It doesn't need faith to back it up; it's got logic. Hell, the golden rule is practically the guiding algorithm behind civilized society. Were my parents, or their parents who taught them, simply borrowing a system of morality from Judeo-Christianism? I don't know. If so, that's fine. But I think the fundamental Western moral systems we live by function just fine when divorced from spiritual faith.
In essence, I would argue that the morals came first, and were then adopted by religion. Do you really think there was no version of the golden rule before Jesus? Do you really think the core set of the 10 Commandments never occurred to anyone before they were handed down? I simply don't think any religion can lay claim to our common moral system. The Code of Hammurabi, a legal system written in 1780 BC, has an awful lot in common with the 10 Commandments.
Now, I'm not a militant atheist. Part of the moral system I was raised on demands tolerance of others as long as they don't violate other elements of that system. (That, after all, is me treating others as I'd want to be treated.) However, I find myself aggravated by the (not uncommon) suggestion by those of faith that morality can not exist without faith. Bad people do bad things all the time. Many of those are people of faith. I don't need to remind you that more than a few wars have been waged in the name of religion.
However, I'm not going to go saying that those wars are a result of religion. Religion may have been the rationale, but they're a result of selfish, tribal human nature. And that's the same nature that our common moral system attempts to overcome.
I've never enjoyed a Final Fantasy game before, and I far prefer Western-style RPGs. However, I'm intrigued by the promise of an engaging political storyline. And the programmable AI sounds interesting.
Are those features executed well enough that the game is worth checking out? Even for someone who normally hates linear Japanese RPGs?
It's a thing of beauty -- perfect atmosphere, layout, puzzles, enemies, and environmental detail. As a game designer, this level has always humbled me.
MMOs: Star Wars Galaxies is in there, Dark Age of Camelot, the Everquest expansion pack (it was the only part of the series released after the 2000 cut off point), WoW of course. If there was another I've forgotten it, but I seem to remember seeing a 5th, could be wrong.
"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.
The willing suspension of disbelief is the viewer-side term for the phenomenon. What you're describing, the author-side element, is called verisimilitude. That is, the creator's ability to infuse a believability into their work, even if that work involves unrealistic elements.
EA did standardize. They bought Criterion and Renderware a year or two back. This more to license UE3 is very odd and doesn't say much for EA's attempt to keep Renderware current after they purchased it.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear that their acquisition of Renderware was not so they could use the engine, but rather to hinder the ability of other developers to easily create cross-platform titles. In other words, EA probably bought Renderware so they could kill it.
The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".
Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).
The metaphor I always heard was that if the Universe were 2D, it would be on the surface of a balloon. The balloon expands in 3D in such a way that everything in the Universe is growing apart from everything else, but there's no "edge".
So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.
If you are in the industry, answer me this: Why hasn't someone taken Master of Magic, updated the graphics, and re-released it?
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic was a decent attempt at cloning it, but surely whoever owns the copyright to the original could stand to make a few million dollars by JUST UPDATING THE GRAPHICS?
Same thing goes for X-com (or UFO: Enemy Unknown depending on your continent).
The only "true classic" PC game that this has happened to is Transport Tycoon (Locomotion) and it didn't really even need it; Chris Sawyer wrote it in assembly.
The problem is money. If you can gather enough market data to convince the suits that it would make money, and put together a pitch package that demonstrates your technical and artistic ability to do what you're saying you want to do, then you're set. But all of that stuff is pretty hard to do.
Because of the power of nostalgia, this is the sort of thing that might actually work as an open-source/community project. Get enough people together who loved MoM, keep it organized and disciplined, and you could probably make it work.
Indeed, although the innovative drug being tested, TGN1412, was a potent immune system stimulant that overrode the body's normal regulatory mechanisms, it was tested according to much the same standards that govern far more ordinary pharmaceuticals.
So sometimes the drug does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. That's gotta sting.
Well, maybe _you_ realize the value of being subtle and respecting the (potential) customer, but, well, look at internet advertising. (Which in all fairness you do mention.) There the fucktards won the game, so to speak.
Have the fucktards indeed won, though? Yeah, there are a lot of irritating ads, but hasn't Google done quite well with text-based minimally-invasive ads? (In other words, might it be too early to announce a winner?)
When I worked at Lionhead, I used to get this lecture every year or so. ...
It always was, always is, and probably always will be total bullshit.
Yet peter (and now warren) crank it out for one very good reason
THEY DONT WANT TO LOSE GOOD STAFF
Grats on Democracy, I enjoyed it.
However, that's not my read of the message here. I think they're saying that small developers who are reaching for the stars and trying to compete in the same budget space with big publishers are bound to fail. Some Spector quotes to this effect:
"You can't go make Bejeweled [a puzzle game] and then tell EA you want to make Madden," said Mr. Spector, referring to Electronic Arts' lucrative John Madden-inspired football game series, a perennial hit for the entertainment software giant.
Mr. Spector trumpeted a tried-and-true strategy for anyone looking to break into an established market. "Look where the big guys aren't," he said. "Embrace the chaos."
Really, this is like the big movie companies telling small indie movie producers that they don't have a shot in hell at getting a huge movie distribution deal. Duh. Of course the barriers to entry are monumental, but there are great indie films coming out all the time. Occasionally one will hit the radar of the big time and get picked up, but generally it is under recognized.
If this were a publisher speaking, I'd agree. However, it's developers, who're having their own tough times getting their games funded.
That's an example of a gifted programmer making a bad AI. A good AI isn't one that uses fancy algorithms under the hood. A good AI is one that (as you describe) makes effective use of the actions available to it. In my opinion, the mark of a good AI is that you don't know what it's going to do next. In so many games enemies just come at you with no variation. I'd rather have just a few that would take cover, try to draw me out, and sneak up behind me than have a horde of morons.
You know, that makes me think of Tremors. Yeah, the monster movie. That featured several excellent examples of tactic and counter-tactic between protagonists and antagonists. I think that's what we want in the long run -- we want antagonists that we can use a tactic to overcome, and as soon as that tactic becomes boring to execute, we want the antagonist to adapt and find a way around it, forcing us to use our creativity and ingenuity to in turn adapt to their adaptation.
Put another way, I've learned more about game AI from playing with my cat than from anywhere else. Why? Because my cat has zero tolerance for repetitive "AI" (in this case, a little jangly ball on a string, attached to a stick). If I just swing the thing around in front of my cat, I get zero response. Why? Because there's nothing fun about that. There's no challenge to catching prey that's right in front of my face. However, drag that jangly ball slowly along the floor and around the corner, now we're in business. But that doesn't stay interesting for long, either. I have to switch it out. Oh, look now it's hopping through the air. Now it's flying. Now it's crawling up the wall.
In short, though AI is usually considered an engineering problem, I think good AI is probably more of a design problem. The implementation involves a lot of engineering problems, but the stuff that keeps players engaged? Good old-fashioned balls to the wall design.
Slashdot Mirror
Well-written characters and dialog are just another opportunity to entertain the player.
To be vulgar, it's just another asset -- like models, textures, sound, animation, and effects. It would be foolish for a developer to discount the need for quality in any of those other sorts of assets, and it's foolish to write off dialog as something players won't be interested in.
Caveat 1: I'm distinguishing between dialog and plot, because plotting is like game design, in that it happens behind the scenes and is expressed through other assets. In other words, while "writing" in novels means a lot of things other than dialog, almost all of the writing that goes into games is dialog.
Caveat 2: I work at Double Fine Productions, which is run by Tim Shafer. Tim has a reputation as one of the better writers in the game industry, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd have the same appreciation for good game dialog if I hadn't worked on Psychonauts.
...Police Quest/SWAT...
Slow down there, cowboy. SWAT 3 and SWAT 4 were both mighty fine games.
Care to explain the 2004 elections?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_el
A few years later, a different president tells lies about so-called weapons of mass destruction, fabricates connections between Saddam and terror groups, and uses those lies as a means to justify a war that get tens of thousands of people killed. But y'all cool with that?
Judging on the 2006 elections, most Americans are not cool with that, as it's generally accepted that the mid-term election was a referendum on the war in Iraq. Bush's approval rating is, as I write this, hovering at its lowest level ever. But Americans only get the opportunity to elect their public servants every few years, so there's always going to be some lag time.I didn't get past a couple of missions before uninstalling it in disgust and never playing it again.
I think this may disqualify you from properly evaluating the entirety of the game, much less its sequel.
There are actual console developers with insight into the race between the PS3 and Wii, the problem is that anyone with an actual worthwhile knowledge is too busy actually making games.
...
:P
So instead we get the worthless ramblings of the console dev world's deadweight:
'game designers' aka level monkeys
producers
testers
Sure, because games without producers, testers, or designers always sell so well and are so much fun to play...
As a game developer, it's profoundly disturbing how casually we treat games just a few years old. Hardware will continue to evolve and OSes will change; we really need a way to secure our ability to play old games.
Console games are semi-okay because you can at least keep the (static) hardware around, but PC games are in bad shape. PCs evolve gradually, and it only takes one small OS or video driver change to render a game unplayable. Because games are a commercial medium, games simply aren't supported once it's no longer financially beneficial.
As long as there are programmers out there willing to write emulators, I suppose we're okay... but it still makes me nervous.
As a educated, moral, atheistic person, you might actually enjoy picking up a good translation of the Torah or Tanakh.
...despite the fact that Jewish writings are the most militant of the major faiths.
I think I'll do that.
Wow, I had no idea. That's interesting given the absence of offensive wars launched by the Jewish people. Though again, religion probably has far less to do with the impulse toward war than ingrained cultural influences.
OTOH, Islam had a militarizing affect on the Arabian people that took its message. Without even looking at modern times, look at how Islam was adopted by the Arab people, a bunch of Nomadic Arabian tribes and spread to massive regions militarily. Before Islam, the Arab people were tribal nomads. After adopting Islam, they created a massive Caliphate that rivaled the Romans for militaristic activity.
I've got to do some more reading on this transition -- I hadn't known until recently that most Arab peoples subscribed to good old-fashioned Arabian mythology (genies, etc) before the rise of Islam. Though I have to wonder if the transformation of nomadic Arab societies into more organized ones (the Caliphate) might have simply been the result of natural population growth and the inevitable consolidation that occurs when populations are forced to merge.
A true system of morality, with abstract concepts of good and evil require that mankind be unique (not a slightly differently evolved Ape), and that there is a universal concept of right and wrong. Even if you don't attribute that to a specific deity and his instructions, the very nature of an abstract concept of right and wrong requires a universal concept of morality. That universal concept of morality is beyond science and reason, and that defies pure atheism.
I guess that, no, I don't believe there's any "universal" concept of morality, but that doesn't make a shared morality any less important. In fact, it's even more important, in that it needs to normalize certain standards across many different peoples and world views.
My feeling is this: We're on our own. Nature is fundamentally brutal, yet we've evolved to a point where we know that. We, humans, are walking contradictions -- we still have that entire brutal history encoded into us, but we also have a thread of cooperation that's enabled us to get as far as we have. So we struggle internally. We have moments of strength and of weakness. We need a shared moral system to guide us, and a society built upon that system to codify and enforce it. The shared moral system is pretty similar across most societies; we tend to get hung up and upset over the differences, and I suppose that's natural.
So maybe the only argument is about whether that system is arbitrary (and therefore subject to some chaos and gray area) or whether it's defined by some non-human entity and therefore universal. But then, I'm immediately tripped up by this: Whose universal is the right one? Hindus? Christians? Jews? Muslims? As an atheist, I simply see a list of slightly differing standards. They all think they're right. Unfortunately, it's not possible for them all to be right, so I'm impelled to see them as a set of variations on a theme. As such, I find myself reassured that civilized humans mostly agree on what's right and wrong. Again, the differences can cause major friction, and we'd be better off as a species if we could find some way to see past those differences more reliably.
Come on, people... -1 Flamebait? If you disagree with him (which I do), don't mod him down; post a well-argued reply (which I did). Modding down reasonable posts that you simply disagree with is intellectually lazy.
As an Atheist, do you not kill your neighbor and take his stuff because, A) fear of retribution by family members and/or the state, or B) it is wrong to take things from others.
If your answer is A, then you are in fact an amoral person that requires laws to govern behavior. If your answer is B), then you have borrowed a state of morality from the Christians that you appear to at least disagree with and in all likelihood despise given the tone of your most. Look to the animal kingdom, they will kill others and take their territory, mates, etc. There is no inherent morality in nature. If you are an atheist and a moral person, ask yourself why you are moral, and find a justification for that code of morality that doesn't depend on religious notions like faith, and you'll be disturbed by what you find. You will find that either you have borrowed a code of ethics from the followers of Abraham that is inherently divine, or you have developed a framework that provides for moral behavior but is essentially amoral, because there is no right and wrong, just a social contract enforced with arms.
I'm an atheist and a moral person, and when I ask myself why I'm moral (absent a faith-based origin), I'm not at all disturbed by what I find. The moral system I was raised on simply makes sense, and does indeed look like the last 6 Judeo-Christian Commandments. It doesn't need faith to back it up; it's got logic. Hell, the golden rule is practically the guiding algorithm behind civilized society. Were my parents, or their parents who taught them, simply borrowing a system of morality from Judeo-Christianism? I don't know. If so, that's fine. But I think the fundamental Western moral systems we live by function just fine when divorced from spiritual faith.
In essence, I would argue that the morals came first, and were then adopted by religion. Do you really think there was no version of the golden rule before Jesus? Do you really think the core set of the 10 Commandments never occurred to anyone before they were handed down? I simply don't think any religion can lay claim to our common moral system. The Code of Hammurabi, a legal system written in 1780 BC, has an awful lot in common with the 10 Commandments.
Now, I'm not a militant atheist. Part of the moral system I was raised on demands tolerance of others as long as they don't violate other elements of that system. (That, after all, is me treating others as I'd want to be treated.) However, I find myself aggravated by the (not uncommon) suggestion by those of faith that morality can not exist without faith. Bad people do bad things all the time. Many of those are people of faith. I don't need to remind you that more than a few wars have been waged in the name of religion.
However, I'm not going to go saying that those wars are a result of religion. Religion may have been the rationale, but they're a result of selfish, tribal human nature. And that's the same nature that our common moral system attempts to overcome.
I've never enjoyed a Final Fantasy game before, and I far prefer Western-style RPGs. However, I'm intrigued by the promise of an engaging political storyline. And the programmable AI sounds interesting.
Are those features executed well enough that the game is worth checking out? Even for someone who normally hates linear Japanese RPGs?
"Shipping... And Receiving"
It's a thing of beauty -- perfect atmosphere, layout, puzzles, enemies, and environmental detail. As a game designer, this level has always humbled me.
I always thought Sports Night and West Wing were pretty well-written.
MMOs: Star Wars Galaxies is in there, Dark Age of Camelot, the Everquest expansion pack (it was the only part of the series released after the 2000 cut off point), WoW of course. If there was another I've forgotten it, but I seem to remember seeing a 5th, could be wrong.
The fifth MMO on the list is City of Heroes.
"Suspension of disbelief" is a skill exercised in creating a movie - specifically, it's the art of creating a movie that is unrealistic, but not so unrealistic that it triggers the "wait, this is a load of crap" instinct in the watchers. It's the difference between reasoned speculation and juvenile wish-fulfillment. It's the trick of creating a movie that "makes sense" even though it's fiction. It's okay to be unlikely but you have to avoid unreasonable or impossible or the intelligent parts of the audience are going to (rightly) say that your movie sucks.
The willing suspension of disbelief is the viewer-side term for the phenomenon. What you're describing, the author-side element, is called verisimilitude. That is, the creator's ability to infuse a believability into their work, even if that work involves unrealistic elements.
Erik Wolpaw also co-wrote Double Fine's Psychonauts, and won a Game Developers Choice Award for that effort.
EA did standardize. They bought Criterion and Renderware a year or two back. This more to license UE3 is very odd and doesn't say much for EA's attempt to keep Renderware current after they purchased it.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear that their acquisition of Renderware was not so they could use the engine, but rather to hinder the ability of other developers to easily create cross-platform titles. In other words, EA probably bought Renderware so they could kill it.
The balloon analogy is a good one, but note that (as far as I know) the Universe does not require a 4th dimension to be expanding into. Mathematically, a surface/space can be curved, without needing a higher dimension to be "curving in".
Okay, that broke my brain.
Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).
The metaphor I always heard was that if the Universe were 2D, it would be on the surface of a balloon. The balloon expands in 3D in such a way that everything in the Universe is growing apart from everything else, but there's no "edge".
So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.
If you are in the industry, answer me this: Why hasn't someone taken Master of Magic, updated the graphics, and re-released it?
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic was a decent attempt at cloning it, but surely whoever owns the copyright to the original could stand to make a few million dollars by JUST UPDATING THE GRAPHICS?
Same thing goes for X-com (or UFO: Enemy Unknown depending on your continent).
The only "true classic" PC game that this has happened to is Transport Tycoon (Locomotion) and it didn't really even need it; Chris Sawyer wrote it in assembly.
The problem is money. If you can gather enough market data to convince the suits that it would make money, and put together a pitch package that demonstrates your technical and artistic ability to do what you're saying you want to do, then you're set. But all of that stuff is pretty hard to do.
Because of the power of nostalgia, this is the sort of thing that might actually work as an open-source/community project. Get enough people together who loved MoM, keep it organized and disciplined, and you could probably make it work.
From TFA:
Indeed, although the innovative drug being tested, TGN1412, was a potent immune system stimulant that overrode the body's normal regulatory mechanisms, it was tested according to much the same standards that govern far more ordinary pharmaceuticals.
So sometimes the drug does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. That's gotta sting.
Well, maybe _you_ realize the value of being subtle and respecting the (potential) customer, but, well, look at internet advertising. (Which in all fairness you do mention.) There the fucktards won the game, so to speak.
Have the fucktards indeed won, though? Yeah, there are a lot of irritating ads, but hasn't Google done quite well with text-based minimally-invasive ads? (In other words, might it be too early to announce a winner?)
It always was, always is, and probably always will be total bullshit.
Yet peter (and now warren) crank it out for one very good reason
THEY DONT WANT TO LOSE GOOD STAFF
Grats on Democracy, I enjoyed it.
However, that's not my read of the message here. I think they're saying that small developers who are reaching for the stars and trying to compete in the same budget space with big publishers are bound to fail. Some Spector quotes to this effect:
Really, this is like the big movie companies telling small indie movie producers that they don't have a shot in hell at getting a huge movie distribution deal. Duh. Of course the barriers to entry are monumental, but there are great indie films coming out all the time. Occasionally one will hit the radar of the big time and get picked up, but generally it is under recognized.
If this were a publisher speaking, I'd agree. However, it's developers, who're having their own tough times getting their games funded.
That's an example of a gifted programmer making a bad AI. A good AI isn't one that uses fancy algorithms under the hood. A good AI is one that (as you describe) makes effective use of the actions available to it. In my opinion, the mark of a good AI is that you don't know what it's going to do next. In so many games enemies just come at you with no variation. I'd rather have just a few that would take cover, try to draw me out, and sneak up behind me than have a horde of morons.
You know, that makes me think of Tremors. Yeah, the monster movie. That featured several excellent examples of tactic and counter-tactic between protagonists and antagonists. I think that's what we want in the long run -- we want antagonists that we can use a tactic to overcome, and as soon as that tactic becomes boring to execute, we want the antagonist to adapt and find a way around it, forcing us to use our creativity and ingenuity to in turn adapt to their adaptation.
Put another way, I've learned more about game AI from playing with my cat than from anywhere else. Why? Because my cat has zero tolerance for repetitive "AI" (in this case, a little jangly ball on a string, attached to a stick). If I just swing the thing around in front of my cat, I get zero response. Why? Because there's nothing fun about that. There's no challenge to catching prey that's right in front of my face. However, drag that jangly ball slowly along the floor and around the corner, now we're in business. But that doesn't stay interesting for long, either. I have to switch it out. Oh, look now it's hopping through the air. Now it's flying. Now it's crawling up the wall.
In short, though AI is usually considered an engineering problem, I think good AI is probably more of a design problem. The implementation involves a lot of engineering problems, but the stuff that keeps players engaged? Good old-fashioned balls to the wall design.