While I agree with point number 1, I don't agree that a canon will help. What I think the gaming industry needs is GAMERS. I suggest this because gamers will know the games you want to put in your canon (as a side effect of being a gamer) but more importantly, they'll love the games themselves. THIS is what is going to let them see what will be cool and what will not. Someone who doesn't love games isn't going to be able to see what's cool about, say, Alien Vs. Predator 2. He's not going to know the difference between that and, say, Serious Sam. All he's going to notice is that you run around shooting things, bah, humbug. Someone who loves gaming will delight in figuring out all the nuances of a game, and he'll know what's cool about it. A canon is useless to people who aren't gamers. You might as well cast pearls before swine.
I'd like to address your second point, "There is nothing new under the sun". It's hogwash. It gets repeated a lot because people think it's deep. It isn't. It's simply incorrect. New things are invented and new ideas are generated every day of the year, continuously, eternally. People think new thoughts all the time. Perhaps you'll say "no, they just rehash and improve old ones". Ok, I'll tell you what: go out and find me some examples of pre-twentieth century space shuttles, and we'll talk. By the way: "Chariots of the Gods" doesn't count as a counterexample.;)
It's a pleasure to meet you; you seem pretty ok. If your friends are like you (I assume they are) you must be a pretty cool bunch to hang with. I take back my comment about tweedy snobs; thanks for the counterexample.;)
To be fair, when I was in high school I did have two really wonderful literature teachers who were open minded and interesting. They were my English Lit and American lit teachers, and they were really cool. One of them also studied theology; he was a rabbi who was intimately familiar with christian mythology as well as jewish. He used to say that once an interperetation exists, it has to be treated as valid and examined to see what it offers. He was one of the best teachers I ever had, which might be why I was so disappointed when I got to college and encountered the people I mentioned.
Hmm... Examples of tweedy snobs. Well, I've been lucky in that since university, I haven't had to associate with any, so most of my face-to-face experience with them was in school, several years ago. I'd be hard-pressed to name names, if that's what you're looking for. But I can tell you what kind of crap I had to put up with. Every time you'd say something witty, one of these people would demand that you cite the source of the witty comment. It was like an attack; you would say something, and instantly, the person would respond with "who said that?" while affecting a faux-thoughtful look. If you wrote a short story (yes, I've taken courses outside of the comp.sci curriculum) they would attack it, looking for similarities to other stories, books, etc. Everything, to these people, was based on something else. They couldn't envision a reality in which people could invent their own ideas, despite the fact that any literary tradition by its mere existence implies that someone, somewhere, had the FIRST idea, so new ideas are therefore possible. I found them immensely annoying.
Or I could tell you about one or another of several professors I've had who would tell you what a story "meant" and expect you to memorize their interperetation of it. Or of people I've argued with online who attacked me for having a different interperetation of a story than their prof. Literally attacked me! One person characterized me as a redneck, sitting in my one-room schoolhouse, speaking in monosyllables to my equally dim teacher, while she told me what a good young'un I was. Irritating, elitist, snobbish bullshit. Annoying to listen to, annoying to respond to.
Nice comment attacking the intelligence of my friends, skating around the obvious fact that the people I was describing were people I loathed, not friends at all. MY friends are all techies, pal. I'd bet they're at least as smart as yours. But I'm not getting into THIS pissing match, so let's move along.
"Like What?" Like that huge book,"From Dawn to Decadence" in which the author basically looks down his nose at all of modern society, and tries to describe the past several hundred years of western civilization as a nasty decline into trailer park crassness. Ugh, what a boring fucking book. And, so full of shit, too! I was going to use it to hide backup disks, and I bored out the central compartment with no trouble, but then it sat on my bookshelf saying "Phil is boring, phil is boring, what a dull bastard" and I ended up chucking it. I keep my backup disks in a safe now.
As to your next ad-hominem comment (fair's fair, I don't like you tweedy guys, so you can make fun of me too) NO, I don't read fantasy novels. All that sword and sorcery shit leaves me colder than a polar bear swim. Actually, I was thinking about "Fight Club". Have you read it? The book, predictably, is better than the movie.
As for me proving myself wrong, you misunderstood my point entirely.
My POINT was, it has NOTHING to do with how many games you play. It has to do with the fact that you actually LIKE to PLAY GAMES, and so you'll have internalized almost everything about games automatically. You'll have an innate respect for the form, and you'll write games that YOU would want to play rather than what you think will sell. Because you, as a gamer, are writing games YOU would want to play, other gamers will want to play them too. They're PRE-TESTED. Get it?
By the way: if you were an RPG'er, and you wanted to incorporate an aspect of another game type, you wouldn't even know that aspect existed if you hadn't played that other game type. But you knew that.
Don't worry about the invective. This is Slashdot. It is to be expected. Now, I've made good arguments, and I've supported them. Tag, you're it.
Ok, ok... First of all, I'm not anti-intellectual. And, although I have enjoyed some of Stephen King's earlier books, I wasn't thinking about him when I mentioned outsiders. I was thinking about any of a few dozen younger people who've come up with a novel that's different and interesting, as opposed to the really long-winded boring stuff I'm noticing from the more academic set. And, I was arguing against crystallized, inflexible academia more than anything else. I think our college system has grown stale over the years, and talk about "canon" reminds me of some of the more stale of my college professors and the irritating people I used to meet who, every time I said something witty, would ask "who said that?". As if it would be impossible for anyone to have an independent thought...
Also, I'm not against good books. I love good books; I have a large collection of them (and no, Stephen King isn't on my shelves, although Fight Club is, for example). If, when people spoke of "canon", they described "a list of must-read books for people who enjoy literature" I think I'd react a little more warmly to it. But usually people treat it as a set of books someone must read if he is to be thought of as literary. I bristle at that whole attitude. It's phony. It's a bunch of academic kids role-playing: "Ok, I've read the canon so I'm literate." Hogwash. It's no better than an MCSE who reads a bunch of test-prep books and aces a cert exam. A piece of paper, no more.
I'll close with a thought: I don't see why anyone would attempt to apply a stale, crusty literary way of thinking to a fresh, interesting, young genre like videogames. The videogame industry doesn't need a "canon". It just needs gamers who care enough about the genre to write for it. They're the only people who have a chance at doing a good job.
Okay, let's forget about the inherent elitism involved in any sort of "canon" or "salon" or similar concept. Let's forget about the fact that the canon doesn't even make sense (why the hell should "any gamer or game developer" know these particular 300 games? particularly the board games, I mean, really, WTF do they have to do with anything?). Let's cut to the chase, and talk about game quality.
Do you really think reading a canon is going to prevent a person from writing a shitty back story for his game?
Writing is one of the things in life that is 100% talent-based, and completely egalitarian. Rich, poor, middle class, there's no telling where talent will appear. You can cultivate an existing talent, but you can't create talent where it doesn't exist. So I suggest that the quality of a videogame is based entirely on the talent of the person who wrote it. It's not based on any canon he read, it's not based on what school he went to, it's based on his raw talent and on who he is. I'm not saying people don't have influences, of course they do. But trying to look at this through a canon just misses the point. Fiddling around with these 300 games isn't going to do you any good.
People who genuinely consider themselves gamers have been into sci-fi and videogames since they were teenagers. They eat, breathe and sleep it, ok? All their lives, they've been imagining different worlds, futures, lives... Their imaginations are finely honed and very active. Someone who's never been into any of that isn't going to be able to just walk into it. It would be like a fat couch potato deciding to compete in a kickboxing circuit. It's a whole lifestyle thing. You can't simulate it, you can't just decide one day to fake it because there's money in it. It just doesn't work.
The reason why so many games suck, and maybe you'll agree with me, is that so many companies think this sort of thing can be built assembly-line style. They think that if they just mix and match elements from whatever games are selling the most copies, they'll have a hit. It's game development, hollywood style.
As far as people getting into the industry go, well, there are gamers and there are posers. People who get into the industry because they love games and gaming will probably do just fine, canon or no canon. People who get into game development because they smell money are lemmings. Their games are going to suck. And, no canon will help them.
Listen, the whole "literary canon" thing was created by a bunch of elitist, tweedy snobs in an attempt to legitimize their superiority. They claim that in order to be a "real" writer of literature, you have to have read a certain number of extremely boring books, and agreed with their snobby, boring interperetation of same. If you have ever suffered through a conversation with one of these people, you know that they basically sit around memorizing their professor's pet literary criticism instead of actually reading and enjoying the books themselves. And, most INTERESTING books are written by people who IGNORE the "canon". Outsiders, in other words, people who aren't involved with literary academia. I find the situation funny: the literary canon crowd write long, boring, self-congradulatory books that only other tweedy types read, while outsiders publish books that are interesting and relevant to the rest of us.
A real gamer doesn't sit around worrying about whether he's played the correct set of games to properly introduce himself to the genre. He's been in the genre since he was a kid. If he's into, say, first person shooters and strategy games, he probably has at least thirty of them in a CD holder somewhere. He understands first person shooters completely. He knows the genre like the back of his hand. He doesn't need some "canon" to help him. Fish already KNOW about water; they don't need swimming lessons.
Having said that, the people who might be interested in this ridiculous "canon" are people who want to be game developers but who DO NOT PLAY GAMES THEMSELVES. They're just like the posers and wannabes that flooded the dot-com boom back in the nineties, people who don't care about the art and who just want to cash in. "Hey, videogames are big now -- let's make some money, how hard could it be?" they say. They think, in some weird freshman lit major way, that "anyone can write about anything as long as they do a little research". So they try for something like this silly canon, thinking that all they have to do to create a great game is study all the games that have made lots of money, and make a new game JUST LIKE THOSE. And, their game tanks in the market because it's just another derivative piece of shit with no new ideas, and every real gamer sees it as such instantly.
I fucking HATE these people. They ruin everything they touch.
If you're not a gamer, don't bother trying to write a game for me. You'll fuck it up, it'll suck, and I'll hate you for it. Look at the wide range of games that suck, and I guarantee that behind every game that sucks is some noob who thought he could just waltz into a cushy game developer position after a weekend of playing DOOM.
I want to play games written by people who genuinely love games themselves, and who have been playing games since they were kids. I don't want to play games written by some corporate stiff who took a bunch of games listed in a "canon" home for the weekend and struggled through a level or two.
You're either a gamer or you're not. And that's all there is to it. It's not something you can fake.
But, if you're using a blog that way, why not just provide an email address for people to use to contact you, with you publishing valid messages to the blog and deleting spam? A "friends and family" blog isn't going to attract so many comments that this wouldn't work. You still don't have to open up your blog to the whole world. You're the boss, it's your blog -- moderate it. You know?
Yes, but you realize, of course, that we have forums like Slashdot where we can get all the replies we want (and some we don't). Every single web page and blog doesn't have to open itself wide to spammers, crackpots, and trolls, now, does it? It's just totally unnecessary. If you want replies, offer a "reply to" email address. Then post the replies that are non-offensive. This is how moderated groups used to work...
And, we also have plenty of open forums. Why do we need an infinite number of them? If the blog's audience goes away because they can't speak their peace, they're not on the blog to read what the blogger is saying, anyway.
I think a person has to decide just what the heck he's blogging FOR. If he's blogging because he wants to express his opinion, fine. All well and good. If he's blogging to raise awareness about an issue, fine too. If he makes a mistake, people can email him and he'll issue a correction -- there's no need for a forum.
On the other hand, I think that if a person is using his blog to become popular among web-people, and he's so afraid he'll lose his "readership" that he bows and scrapes and lets them post whatever they like, then he's already lost the game. If a person considers his blog to be a business, and his readers to be his customers, he's already a corporate zombie and is basically doomed. Does anyone still think "content is king"? I would have thought that the dot-bomb meltdown would have cured us of this kind of silliness by now.
You're blogging to publish your thoughts to the world, right? Weeelllll, if your users want to say something, let them get their own blog. There's no law that says you have to start your own mini-slashdot. Make your blog read-only and the spam problem goes away.
Doesn't it?
I think the whole "open forum" thing is overrated... Look at all the junk that gets published here, on Slashdot, one of the more serious of the open forums (yeah, I know how crazy THAT comment is, but it's true).
I never really got into the MMORPGs. I felt that there was way too much room for them to turn into a cliqueish repeat of high school, which for me was a terrible experience. Remember what it was like back in school? Groups of friends would form cliques, and shun everyone who wasn't "in". Outsiders would get picked on mercilessly, and frequently would be attacked, beaten, or humiliated. Anything you had that was interesting would be stolen from you immediately. Teachers either liked you or hated you, and if they didn't like you they picked on you. Life was a constant stream of abusive encounters, with the only bright light being the fact that one day, you would graduate. Do you know what graduation *really* means? It means adulthood, and the full protection of the law, and it means that people who pick on you go to jail or get sued. Being an adult is wonderful. Being a kid is not. Regression, thus, is pain.
MMORPGs regress you back to a dark period in your life in which people can pick on you all they want, and never suffer any serious consequences. They don't have to worry about law enforcement, they don't have to follow the rules, they can do whatever they want because "it's just a game". It's simply horrible. I can't imagine wanting to do this for free, much less PAY to do it. So I agree with you; I think MMORPGs are going to crash and burn. But my reason for thinking this is the innate cruelty of the online human being, who can be cruel without facing any consequences whatsoever.
If you think I'm off base here, just watch any Slashdot thread. See how many people viciously flame everyone they don't agree with. See how many trolls start fights for no reason. Spend some time on Usenet, and see how badly THOSE people behave.
When I game, I game to get AWAY from my daily life, I don't game to amplify the worst parts of it, you know?
Why play a game where gangs of bullies roam around looking for weaker people to prey on? Why play a game where another group of people pick on you just to annoy you and ruin the game? Why deliberately subject yourself to hassles and aggravation and abuse, cliques and popularity contests and all that rot? More to the point, why PAY to re-experience high school?
Multiplayer sounds great in principle, but until the game companies change the setup so that griefing and PK-ing are no longer an issue, they're not going to get any of MY money. And, don't give me any bullshit about "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen" because I'll just say, "fine, we'll all stay out of the kitchen then". Let's see if the game companies can survive with only PK-ers and griefers logging in. I suspect that isn't NEARLY enough of a target audience to keep the game companies afloat.
Bottom line: MMORPGs can only survive if some kind of protection for players is instituted, with rigid enforcement of anti-harassment and anti-PK rules. Further, you should be able to "ignore" another player at will, so that he simply disappears from your world for good (he can't see you, you can't see him). Barring this, I really don't think the genre is going to go anywhere.
Windows 2000, three years old: still buggy. Windows XP, a couple of years old: still buggy. Windows 95, 98, NT4: don't get me started.
And, now, there's a leaked patch of an O/S even MICROSOFT considers to be an "alpha" version?
Let me save you some time. Obtain a sledgehammer. Raise it over your head. Smack your CPU with it as hard as you can. Repeat. This will make your computer JUST AS USABLE as Longhorn will, and you won't have to worry about googling for a download.
I bought a GMC Sonoma back in '99 (it was the '99 model). The GMC Sonoma uses special GMC transmission fluid. NOBODY but GMC SELLS IT. And, worse, no one will put regular tranny fluid in my car, so I can't get it changed out. The guys at Valvoline told me that I should go to the GMC dealer, buy a few gallons of the stuff, and bring it back -- then they'd be delighted to put it in. Swell.
The truck is only a couple of years old, and all kinds of shit malfunction on it every day. Minor shit, nothing serious (the mechanicals seem to be pretty solid). For example, the radio will occasionally just decide not to play tapes. I found out that if I put the tape in, and when it starts to CLICK-CLICK-CLICK, smack the center console of the dash with the heel of my hand a couple of times, the tape will start to work again. Another thing -- the heater fan will occasionally just up and quit. It won't turn on again for days. The vacuum lines in the dash are fine; I can switch from heater to defog and such, no problem. But the fan won't come on. I found out by accident that if I release the parking brake suddenly enough, the fan will start working again. WTF???
Fuck, man, I need to get a new car one of these days... Next time I'm buying a Subaru.
I had the same experience, only with a longer period of time. I grew up about a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet away from an O+R easement with some huge, high-power powerlines running through it (they brought electricity down to NYC from upstate). The towers are a good two hundred feet tall, maybe taller, with several layers of high-power cables on them, spread out over about a hundred feet. I mean these towers are HUGE.
Anyway, growing up I never noticed anything weird. Our radio reception and TV reception was fine, cell phone reception is good nowadays, and my parents are currently using a satellite receiver without any problems. We never developed any weird side effects, either.
There WAS one benefit: when I was a kid, I'd wait for huge numbers of birds to gather on the tower, then I'd shoot a BB gun at one of the hollow steel arms of the tower, making a loud "BING!" sound. The birds would fly all over the place, freaking out in general, crapping all over the tower, etc. I'd go "Huh huh huh... THAT was COOL" and do it again. Hours of amusement!
Better - my ex girlfriend used to wear cotton housedresses with no underwear at all. They come right off with a flick of the wrist! Wonderful, wonderful things, those housedresses... I miss her; she lives out in Arizona, and I live in NY. Sigh... No more housedresses for the Philman...
I'd rather any girlfriend I had ran around butt nekkid. All those panties and bras just obstruct my view. Come on, baby, let those things bounce around free! They don't want to be cooped up in that there garmint! I want me some FREE-RANGE boobies, none of that veal-pen bra'd stuff. And everyone knows a wild, bushy forest beaver is much happier than a beat-down zoo beaver. Save the panty and bra money, babe, we'll use it to go to the shore...
I feel so sorry for that poor old lady, too -- she had burns on her genitals! Can you imagine how much that must have hurt? Let alone how much it must have hurt to treat the wounds (peeling off the damaged skin, the whirlpool treatments, etc). And, I think that the fact that all she asked for was her medical bills paid shows a remarkable amount of restraint. If this had happened to me, and some ridiculous stuffed suit had told ME they couldn't help me with the bills, I'd have gone ballistic. Fuck money -- I'd have wanted an eye for an eye (or, as the case may be, a scorched unmentionable for a scorched unmentionable). The suits would be running for their lives from my groin-directed wrath, and I'd be chasing them with a couple of super-sized boiling hot coffee containers.
Anyway, I'm glad the old lady sued them. I hope she's feeling better. I wince just thinking about it.
Well, of course, you're totally right. If our government can't even hide their dirty tricks, they won't be able to hide something this much bigger.
Of course, I think that if an alien race was advanced enough to figure out how to reach speeds close to the speed of light (or how to bend space in some way to get around the universe's speed limit) they'd be totally bored with us and ignore us completely. IF they DID come down to check us out, I seriously doubt they'd have ships so unreliable that they would crash into forests in Pennsylvania (so inconvenient!). And, if they did, they'd have a rescue effort going in no time.
But I suspect that there aren't any aliens visiting us at all. Any aliens that are out there are pretty far away, and probably don't even know we're alive. Look how excited our astronomers were when they discovered a planetary system by measuring gravitational lensing (or whatever) in some far-off star system. They can't even actually SEE the planet; they know it's there from measurements of light in its vicinity. I think that's pretty much all any aliens can see, too.
Hehehehe... I like Dennis Miller. He's funny as hell. And, quite often, hits the nail right on the head.
Check this out:
IF there's some alien race which is advanced enough to travel through enormous gulfs of space, and IF that race spent the astronomical amount of resources and time it would take to come visit us, well, right off the bat I've got a hard time picturing them suddenly smashing their super-advanced lander into a forest in Pennsylvania. But let's say they did. Let's say the little alien pilot was stoned on whatever passes for weed out there, and hit the B button instead of the A button, and crashed his ship.
Wouldn't a whole bunch of aliens be trying to retrieve him almost immediately? Our government takes every airplane crash really seriously, and tries to rescue anyone who goes missing. Wouldn't theirs? Wouldn't they go totally bananas if one of their ships crashed into the woods in the hyper-aggressive U.S. of all places? The nation whose people tend to have more guns than anyone else, anywhere, and who regularly hunt, skin, and eat whatever they find in their forests? Their leader would be like, "Holy Crap! Those idiot humans are going to EAT THEM! Get down there and get 'em back!"
Here's a funny thought: we've been broadcasting fifty years worth of movies about killing aliens, waging war, fighting off the monstrous beasts that populate our forests (mammoth grizzly bears, psychotic mountain lions, werewolves, giant dinosaurs, mutated beasts of a dozen varieties, etc). How would an alien know that was fiction? If I was an alien, and I crashed in Pennsylvania, I'd be scared shitless that some Predator would be hopping from treetop to treetop, about to blast me with his plasmacaster, hang me up and skin me. Or that a bunch of genetically engineered velociraptors were hunting around every tree and bush. Hell, maybe all the UFOs are actually cosmic cops, thinking our television broadcasts are some kind of 911 call. "Hello? Alien police? All these alien races are picking on us, help!" Funny...
Ain't it the truth? The fictional story is so delicious, so tempting, and the truth is so dull (nothing much happened, etc) that people stick with the fun story and drop the real one. But it generally seems to be that way; kinda like a peculiarity of our species.
Now, THAT is a great debunking! Truly a great article -- thanks! I found another one by googling for the Philadelphia Experiment, by a Navy historian (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq21-1.htm) which basically says the whole thing is fictional. Isn't it cool how the internet can at the same time perpetuate bizarre fallacies and their debunkings?
An A/C said: "You're new here at the crackpot game, aren't you? Google for "the Philadelphia Experiment" sometime. Of COURSE the MIBs can turn things invisible if they want to!"
I LOVE the story of the Philadelphia experiment. "They say" the ship disappeared, appeared magically in a seaport hundreds of miles away, then reappeared back in its own port, that people were melted into the walls of the ship, etc. It makes for a really cool movie. BUT, what probably really happened was, they were testing extremely strong radio waves in hopes of messing up attempts to detect the ship via RADAR, and accidentally microwaved the crew. Whoops! Kind of embarassing, better cover it up, spread around some unbelievable stories to distract people, etc.
No one knows what really happened, but I can guess: They turned on some kind of super radio transmitter, immediately microwaving a lot of their crew. The people who weren't in cooking range suffered weird side effects and hallucinations, the people who were in range got cooked. People on shore who were in range probably got dizzy, or maybe suffered a blackout, or god knows what-all. When their power system got fried, the whatever-it-was shut off, and whoever was left alive was like, "Oh, FUCK, that hurt. What the FUCK was THAT?" And, there ya go!;)
It's one of my favorite "It's not a conspiracy, it's stupidity" stories...
If only people would apply Occam's razor and just THINK about a few of these huge "UFO cover ups", they could relax.
Think about the whole Area 51 and Roswell thing for example. Ok, something weird crashed out of the sky, there were some bodies, and the government covered everything up. But it happened shortly after WWII, during a period where we were employing ex-Nazi rocket scientists to build us more advanced airplanes, didn't it? And, a more reasonable explanation of the Roswell crash would be that an experimental, top secret craft had a malfunction and bit the dust.
Consider that that whole Southwest is used for the testing of advanced aircraft. Groom Lake (in Nevada), another mecca for the tinfoil hat crowd, is an aircraft test facility. The stealth fighter, for example, was developed during the early 1970's, and was tested extensively there. OF COURSE there were lots of UFO sightings. They were testing their planes! Naturally SOMEONE would see them. We can't make 'em invisible (yet).
Now, fast forward to the Pennsylvania crash. SOMETHING crashed, and the government seems to want to keep it quiet. Does this mean there were little green men? Nope. It means that something failed on another one of the government's experimental toys (the operative word being "experimental"), a few unlucky test pilots probably bit the dust crashing it into a forest, and it's unfortunate and sad but NOT a sci-fi mystery.
We'll probably see whatever aircraft it is in twenty years or so when it's declassified and they use it to blow someone up in a future war. We'll go "Holy cow, that's a cool airplane, I wonder when they built that thing!" and check out the TechTV show about it after getting our anime fix...
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with point number 1, I don't agree that a canon will help. What I think the gaming industry needs is GAMERS. I suggest this because gamers will know the games you want to put in your canon (as a side effect of being a gamer) but more importantly, they'll love the games themselves. THIS is what is going to let them see what will be cool and what will not. Someone who doesn't love games isn't going to be able to see what's cool about, say, Alien Vs. Predator 2. He's not going to know the difference between that and, say, Serious Sam. All he's going to notice is that you run around shooting things, bah, humbug. Someone who loves gaming will delight in figuring out all the nuances of a game, and he'll know what's cool about it. A canon is useless to people who aren't gamers. You might as well cast pearls before swine.
;)
I'd like to address your second point, "There is nothing new under the sun". It's hogwash. It gets repeated a lot because people think it's deep. It isn't. It's simply incorrect. New things are invented and new ideas are generated every day of the year, continuously, eternally. People think new thoughts all the time. Perhaps you'll say "no, they just rehash and improve old ones". Ok, I'll tell you what: go out and find me some examples of pre-twentieth century space shuttles, and we'll talk. By the way: "Chariots of the Gods" doesn't count as a counterexample.
It's a pleasure to meet you; you seem pretty ok. If your friends are like you (I assume they are) you must be a pretty cool bunch to hang with. I take back my comment about tweedy snobs; thanks for the counterexample. ;)
To be fair, when I was in high school I did have two really wonderful literature teachers who were open minded and interesting. They were my English Lit and American lit teachers, and they were really cool. One of them also studied theology; he was a rabbi who was intimately familiar with christian mythology as well as jewish. He used to say that once an interperetation exists, it has to be treated as valid and examined to see what it offers. He was one of the best teachers I ever had, which might be why I was so disappointed when I got to college and encountered the people I mentioned.
Again, thanks for the counterexample.
Hmm... Examples of tweedy snobs. Well, I've been lucky in that since university, I haven't had to associate with any, so most of my face-to-face experience with them was in school, several years ago. I'd be hard-pressed to name names, if that's what you're looking for. But I can tell you what kind of crap I had to put up with. Every time you'd say something witty, one of these people would demand that you cite the source of the witty comment. It was like an attack; you would say something, and instantly, the person would respond with "who said that?" while affecting a faux-thoughtful look. If you wrote a short story (yes, I've taken courses outside of the comp.sci curriculum) they would attack it, looking for similarities to other stories, books, etc. Everything, to these people, was based on something else. They couldn't envision a reality in which people could invent their own ideas, despite the fact that any literary tradition by its mere existence implies that someone, somewhere, had the FIRST idea, so new ideas are therefore possible. I found them immensely annoying.
Or I could tell you about one or another of several professors I've had who would tell you what a story "meant" and expect you to memorize their interperetation of it. Or of people I've argued with online who attacked me for having a different interperetation of a story than their prof. Literally attacked me! One person characterized me as a redneck, sitting in my one-room schoolhouse, speaking in monosyllables to my equally dim teacher, while she told me what a good young'un I was. Irritating, elitist, snobbish bullshit. Annoying to listen to, annoying to respond to.
Nice comment attacking the intelligence of my friends, skating around the obvious fact that the people I was describing were people I loathed, not friends at all. MY friends are all techies, pal. I'd bet they're at least as smart as yours. But I'm not getting into THIS pissing match, so let's move along.
"Like What?" Like that huge book,"From Dawn to Decadence" in which the author basically looks down his nose at all of modern society, and tries to describe the past several hundred years of western civilization as a nasty decline into trailer park crassness. Ugh, what a boring fucking book. And, so full of shit, too! I was going to use it to hide backup disks, and I bored out the central compartment with no trouble, but then it sat on my bookshelf saying "Phil is boring, phil is boring, what a dull bastard" and I ended up chucking it. I keep my backup disks in a safe now.
As to your next ad-hominem comment (fair's fair, I don't like you tweedy guys, so you can make fun of me too) NO, I don't read fantasy novels. All that sword and sorcery shit leaves me colder than a polar bear swim. Actually, I was thinking about "Fight Club". Have you read it? The book, predictably, is better than the movie.
As for me proving myself wrong, you misunderstood my point entirely.
My POINT was, it has NOTHING to do with how many games you play. It has to do with the fact that you actually LIKE to PLAY GAMES, and so you'll have internalized almost everything about games automatically. You'll have an innate respect for the form, and you'll write games that YOU would want to play rather than what you think will sell. Because you, as a gamer, are writing games YOU would want to play, other gamers will want to play them too. They're PRE-TESTED. Get it?
By the way: if you were an RPG'er, and you wanted to incorporate an aspect of another game type, you wouldn't even know that aspect existed if you hadn't played that other game type. But you knew that.
Don't worry about the invective. This is Slashdot. It is to be expected. Now, I've made good arguments, and I've supported them. Tag, you're it.
Ok, ok... First of all, I'm not anti-intellectual. And, although I have enjoyed some of Stephen King's earlier books, I wasn't thinking about him when I mentioned outsiders. I was thinking about any of a few dozen younger people who've come up with a novel that's different and interesting, as opposed to the really long-winded boring stuff I'm noticing from the more academic set. And, I was arguing against crystallized, inflexible academia more than anything else. I think our college system has grown stale over the years, and talk about "canon" reminds me of some of the more stale of my college professors and the irritating people I used to meet who, every time I said something witty, would ask "who said that?". As if it would be impossible for anyone to have an independent thought...
Also, I'm not against good books. I love good books; I have a large collection of them (and no, Stephen King isn't on my shelves, although Fight Club is, for example). If, when people spoke of "canon", they described "a list of must-read books for people who enjoy literature" I think I'd react a little more warmly to it. But usually people treat it as a set of books someone must read if he is to be thought of as literary. I bristle at that whole attitude. It's phony. It's a bunch of academic kids role-playing: "Ok, I've read the canon so I'm literate." Hogwash. It's no better than an MCSE who reads a bunch of test-prep books and aces a cert exam. A piece of paper, no more.
I'll close with a thought: I don't see why anyone would attempt to apply a stale, crusty literary way of thinking to a fresh, interesting, young genre like videogames. The videogame industry doesn't need a "canon". It just needs gamers who care enough about the genre to write for it. They're the only people who have a chance at doing a good job.
Okay, let's forget about the inherent elitism involved in any sort of "canon" or "salon" or similar concept. Let's forget about the fact that the canon doesn't even make sense (why the hell should "any gamer or game developer" know these particular 300 games? particularly the board games, I mean, really, WTF do they have to do with anything?). Let's cut to the chase, and talk about game quality.
Do you really think reading a canon is going to prevent a person from writing a shitty back story for his game?
Writing is one of the things in life that is 100% talent-based, and completely egalitarian. Rich, poor, middle class, there's no telling where talent will appear. You can cultivate an existing talent, but you can't create talent where it doesn't exist. So I suggest that the quality of a videogame is based entirely on the talent of the person who wrote it. It's not based on any canon he read, it's not based on what school he went to, it's based on his raw talent and on who he is. I'm not saying people don't have influences, of course they do. But trying to look at this through a canon just misses the point. Fiddling around with these 300 games isn't going to do you any good.
People who genuinely consider themselves gamers have been into sci-fi and videogames since they were teenagers. They eat, breathe and sleep it, ok? All their lives, they've been imagining different worlds, futures, lives... Their imaginations are finely honed and very active. Someone who's never been into any of that isn't going to be able to just walk into it. It would be like a fat couch potato deciding to compete in a kickboxing circuit. It's a whole lifestyle thing. You can't simulate it, you can't just decide one day to fake it because there's money in it. It just doesn't work.
The reason why so many games suck, and maybe you'll agree with me, is that so many companies think this sort of thing can be built assembly-line style. They think that if they just mix and match elements from whatever games are selling the most copies, they'll have a hit. It's game development, hollywood style.
As far as people getting into the industry go, well, there are gamers and there are posers. People who get into the industry because they love games and gaming will probably do just fine, canon or no canon. People who get into game development because they smell money are lemmings. Their games are going to suck. And, no canon will help them.
Just my opinion.
Listen, the whole "literary canon" thing was created by a bunch of elitist, tweedy snobs in an attempt to legitimize their superiority. They claim that in order to be a "real" writer of literature, you have to have read a certain number of extremely boring books, and agreed with their snobby, boring interperetation of same. If you have ever suffered through a conversation with one of these people, you know that they basically sit around memorizing their professor's pet literary criticism instead of actually reading and enjoying the books themselves. And, most INTERESTING books are written by people who IGNORE the "canon". Outsiders, in other words, people who aren't involved with literary academia. I find the situation funny: the literary canon crowd write long, boring, self-congradulatory books that only other tweedy types read, while outsiders publish books that are interesting and relevant to the rest of us.
A real gamer doesn't sit around worrying about whether he's played the correct set of games to properly introduce himself to the genre. He's been in the genre since he was a kid. If he's into, say, first person shooters and strategy games, he probably has at least thirty of them in a CD holder somewhere. He understands first person shooters completely. He knows the genre like the back of his hand. He doesn't need some "canon" to help him. Fish already KNOW about water; they don't need swimming lessons.
Having said that, the people who might be interested in this ridiculous "canon" are people who want to be game developers but who DO NOT PLAY GAMES THEMSELVES. They're just like the posers and wannabes that flooded the dot-com boom back in the nineties, people who don't care about the art and who just want to cash in. "Hey, videogames are big now -- let's make some money, how hard could it be?" they say. They think, in some weird freshman lit major way, that "anyone can write about anything as long as they do a little research". So they try for something like this silly canon, thinking that all they have to do to create a great game is study all the games that have made lots of money, and make a new game JUST LIKE THOSE. And, their game tanks in the market because it's just another derivative piece of shit with no new ideas, and every real gamer sees it as such instantly.
I fucking HATE these people. They ruin everything they touch.
If you're not a gamer, don't bother trying to write a game for me. You'll fuck it up, it'll suck, and I'll hate you for it. Look at the wide range of games that suck, and I guarantee that behind every game that sucks is some noob who thought he could just waltz into a cushy game developer position after a weekend of playing DOOM.
I want to play games written by people who genuinely love games themselves, and who have been playing games since they were kids. I don't want to play games written by some corporate stiff who took a bunch of games listed in a "canon" home for the weekend and struggled through a level or two.
You're either a gamer or you're not. And that's all there is to it. It's not something you can fake.
But, if you're using a blog that way, why not just provide an email address for people to use to contact you, with you publishing valid messages to the blog and deleting spam? A "friends and family" blog isn't going to attract so many comments that this wouldn't work. You still don't have to open up your blog to the whole world. You're the boss, it's your blog -- moderate it. You know?
Yes, but you realize, of course, that we have forums like Slashdot where we can get all the replies we want (and some we don't). Every single web page and blog doesn't have to open itself wide to spammers, crackpots, and trolls, now, does it? It's just totally unnecessary. If you want replies, offer a "reply to" email address. Then post the replies that are non-offensive. This is how moderated groups used to work...
And, we also have plenty of open forums. Why do we need an infinite number of them? If the blog's audience goes away because they can't speak their peace, they're not on the blog to read what the blogger is saying, anyway.
;)
I think a person has to decide just what the heck he's blogging FOR. If he's blogging because he wants to express his opinion, fine. All well and good. If he's blogging to raise awareness about an issue, fine too. If he makes a mistake, people can email him and he'll issue a correction -- there's no need for a forum.
On the other hand, I think that if a person is using his blog to become popular among web-people, and he's so afraid he'll lose his "readership" that he bows and scrapes and lets them post whatever they like, then he's already lost the game. If a person considers his blog to be a business, and his readers to be his customers, he's already a corporate zombie and is basically doomed. Does anyone still think "content is king"? I would have thought that the dot-bomb meltdown would have cured us of this kind of silliness by now.
Just my opinion, no harm meant.
You're blogging to publish your thoughts to the world, right? Weeelllll, if your users want to say something, let them get their own blog. There's no law that says you have to start your own mini-slashdot. Make your blog read-only and the spam problem goes away.
Doesn't it?
I think the whole "open forum" thing is overrated... Look at all the junk that gets published here, on Slashdot, one of the more serious of the open forums (yeah, I know how crazy THAT comment is, but it's true).
That sounds cool. I'd enjoy a gaming environment like that; maybe I'll check it out. Thanks for the heads up!
I never really got into the MMORPGs. I felt that there was way too much room for them to turn into a cliqueish repeat of high school, which for me was a terrible experience. Remember what it was like back in school? Groups of friends would form cliques, and shun everyone who wasn't "in". Outsiders would get picked on mercilessly, and frequently would be attacked, beaten, or humiliated. Anything you had that was interesting would be stolen from you immediately. Teachers either liked you or hated you, and if they didn't like you they picked on you. Life was a constant stream of abusive encounters, with the only bright light being the fact that one day, you would graduate. Do you know what graduation *really* means? It means adulthood, and the full protection of the law, and it means that people who pick on you go to jail or get sued. Being an adult is wonderful. Being a kid is not. Regression, thus, is pain.
MMORPGs regress you back to a dark period in your life in which people can pick on you all they want, and never suffer any serious consequences. They don't have to worry about law enforcement, they don't have to follow the rules, they can do whatever they want because "it's just a game". It's simply horrible. I can't imagine wanting to do this for free, much less PAY to do it. So I agree with you; I think MMORPGs are going to crash and burn. But my reason for thinking this is the innate cruelty of the online human being, who can be cruel without facing any consequences whatsoever.
If you think I'm off base here, just watch any Slashdot thread. See how many people viciously flame everyone they don't agree with. See how many trolls start fights for no reason. Spend some time on Usenet, and see how badly THOSE people behave.
When I game, I game to get AWAY from my daily life, I don't game to amplify the worst parts of it, you know?
They're too much like High School.
Why play a game where gangs of bullies roam around looking for weaker people to prey on? Why play a game where another group of people pick on you just to annoy you and ruin the game? Why deliberately subject yourself to hassles and aggravation and abuse, cliques and popularity contests and all that rot? More to the point, why PAY to re-experience high school?
Multiplayer sounds great in principle, but until the game companies change the setup so that griefing and PK-ing are no longer an issue, they're not going to get any of MY money. And, don't give me any bullshit about "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen" because I'll just say, "fine, we'll all stay out of the kitchen then". Let's see if the game companies can survive with only PK-ers and griefers logging in. I suspect that isn't NEARLY enough of a target audience to keep the game companies afloat.
Bottom line: MMORPGs can only survive if some kind of protection for players is instituted, with rigid enforcement of anti-harassment and anti-PK rules. Further, you should be able to "ignore" another player at will, so that he simply disappears from your world for good (he can't see you, you can't see him). Barring this, I really don't think the genre is going to go anywhere.
Let's consider:
Windows 2000, three years old: still buggy.
Windows XP, a couple of years old: still buggy.
Windows 95, 98, NT4: don't get me started.
And, now, there's a leaked patch of an O/S even MICROSOFT considers to be an "alpha" version?
Let me save you some time. Obtain a sledgehammer. Raise it over your head. Smack your CPU with it as hard as you can. Repeat. This will make your computer JUST AS USABLE as Longhorn will, and you won't have to worry about googling for a download.
You can thank me later.
I bought a GMC Sonoma back in '99 (it was the '99 model). The GMC Sonoma uses special GMC transmission fluid. NOBODY but GMC SELLS IT. And, worse, no one will put regular tranny fluid in my car, so I can't get it changed out. The guys at Valvoline told me that I should go to the GMC dealer, buy a few gallons of the stuff, and bring it back -- then they'd be delighted to put it in. Swell.
The truck is only a couple of years old, and all kinds of shit malfunction on it every day. Minor shit, nothing serious (the mechanicals seem to be pretty solid). For example, the radio will occasionally just decide not to play tapes. I found out that if I put the tape in, and when it starts to CLICK-CLICK-CLICK, smack the center console of the dash with the heel of my hand a couple of times, the tape will start to work again. Another thing -- the heater fan will occasionally just up and quit. It won't turn on again for days. The vacuum lines in the dash are fine; I can switch from heater to defog and such, no problem. But the fan won't come on. I found out by accident that if I release the parking brake suddenly enough, the fan will start working again. WTF???
Fuck, man, I need to get a new car one of these days... Next time I'm buying a Subaru.
I had the same experience, only with a longer period of time. I grew up about a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet away from an O+R easement with some huge, high-power powerlines running through it (they brought electricity down to NYC from upstate). The towers are a good two hundred feet tall, maybe taller, with several layers of high-power cables on them, spread out over about a hundred feet. I mean these towers are HUGE.
Anyway, growing up I never noticed anything weird. Our radio reception and TV reception was fine, cell phone reception is good nowadays, and my parents are currently using a satellite receiver without any problems. We never developed any weird side effects, either.
There WAS one benefit: when I was a kid, I'd wait for huge numbers of birds to gather on the tower, then I'd shoot a BB gun at one of the hollow steel arms of the tower, making a loud "BING!" sound. The birds would fly all over the place, freaking out in general, crapping all over the tower, etc. I'd go "Huh huh huh... THAT was COOL" and do it again. Hours of amusement!
BING! HUH HUH HUH...
Better - my ex girlfriend used to wear cotton housedresses with no underwear at all. They come right off with a flick of the wrist! Wonderful, wonderful things, those housedresses... I miss her; she lives out in Arizona, and I live in NY. Sigh... No more housedresses for the Philman...
I'd rather any girlfriend I had ran around butt nekkid. All those panties and bras just obstruct my view. Come on, baby, let those things bounce around free! They don't want to be cooped up in that there garmint! I want me some FREE-RANGE boobies, none of that veal-pen bra'd stuff. And everyone knows a wild, bushy forest beaver is much happier than a beat-down zoo beaver. Save the panty and bra money, babe, we'll use it to go to the shore...
I feel so sorry for that poor old lady, too -- she had burns on her genitals! Can you imagine how much that must have hurt? Let alone how much it must have hurt to treat the wounds (peeling off the damaged skin, the whirlpool treatments, etc). And, I think that the fact that all she asked for was her medical bills paid shows a remarkable amount of restraint. If this had happened to me, and some ridiculous stuffed suit had told ME they couldn't help me with the bills, I'd have gone ballistic. Fuck money -- I'd have wanted an eye for an eye (or, as the case may be, a scorched unmentionable for a scorched unmentionable). The suits would be running for their lives from my groin-directed wrath, and I'd be chasing them with a couple of super-sized boiling hot coffee containers.
Anyway, I'm glad the old lady sued them. I hope she's feeling better. I wince just thinking about it.
Well, of course, you're totally right. If our government can't even hide their dirty tricks, they won't be able to hide something this much bigger.
Of course, I think that if an alien race was advanced enough to figure out how to reach speeds close to the speed of light (or how to bend space in some way to get around the universe's speed limit) they'd be totally bored with us and ignore us completely. IF they DID come down to check us out, I seriously doubt they'd have ships so unreliable that they would crash into forests in Pennsylvania (so inconvenient!). And, if they did, they'd have a rescue effort going in no time.
But I suspect that there aren't any aliens visiting us at all. Any aliens that are out there are pretty far away, and probably don't even know we're alive. Look how excited our astronomers were when they discovered a planetary system by measuring gravitational lensing (or whatever) in some far-off star system. They can't even actually SEE the planet; they know it's there from measurements of light in its vicinity. I think that's pretty much all any aliens can see, too.
Hehehehe... I like Dennis Miller. He's funny as hell. And, quite often, hits the nail right on the head.
Check this out:
IF there's some alien race which is advanced enough to travel through enormous gulfs of space, and IF that race spent the astronomical amount of resources and time it would take to come visit us, well, right off the bat I've got a hard time picturing them suddenly smashing their super-advanced lander into a forest in Pennsylvania. But let's say they did. Let's say the little alien pilot was stoned on whatever passes for weed out there, and hit the B button instead of the A button, and crashed his ship.
Wouldn't a whole bunch of aliens be trying to retrieve him almost immediately? Our government takes every airplane crash really seriously, and tries to rescue anyone who goes missing. Wouldn't theirs? Wouldn't they go totally bananas if one of their ships crashed into the woods in the hyper-aggressive U.S. of all places? The nation whose people tend to have more guns than anyone else, anywhere, and who regularly hunt, skin, and eat whatever they find in their forests? Their leader would be like, "Holy Crap! Those idiot humans are going to EAT THEM! Get down there and get 'em back!"
Here's a funny thought: we've been broadcasting fifty years worth of movies about killing aliens, waging war, fighting off the monstrous beasts that populate our forests (mammoth grizzly bears, psychotic mountain lions, werewolves, giant dinosaurs, mutated beasts of a dozen varieties, etc). How would an alien know that was fiction? If I was an alien, and I crashed in Pennsylvania, I'd be scared shitless that some Predator would be hopping from treetop to treetop, about to blast me with his plasmacaster, hang me up and skin me. Or that a bunch of genetically engineered velociraptors were hunting around every tree and bush. Hell, maybe all the UFOs are actually cosmic cops, thinking our television broadcasts are some kind of 911 call. "Hello? Alien police? All these alien races are picking on us, help!" Funny...
Ain't it the truth? The fictional story is so delicious, so tempting, and the truth is so dull (nothing much happened, etc) that people stick with the fun story and drop the real one. But it generally seems to be that way; kinda like a peculiarity of our species.
Now, THAT is a great debunking! Truly a great article -- thanks! I found another one by googling for the Philadelphia Experiment, by a Navy historian (http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq21-1.htm) which basically says the whole thing is fictional. Isn't it cool how the internet can at the same time perpetuate bizarre fallacies and their debunkings?
An A/C said: "You're new here at the crackpot game, aren't you? Google for "the Philadelphia Experiment" sometime. Of COURSE the MIBs can turn things invisible if they want to!"
;)
I LOVE the story of the Philadelphia experiment. "They say" the ship disappeared, appeared magically in a seaport hundreds of miles away, then reappeared back in its own port, that people were melted into the walls of the ship, etc. It makes for a really cool movie. BUT, what probably really happened was, they were testing extremely strong radio waves in hopes of messing up attempts to detect the ship via RADAR, and accidentally microwaved the crew. Whoops! Kind of embarassing, better cover it up, spread around some unbelievable stories to distract people, etc.
No one knows what really happened, but I can guess: They turned on some kind of super radio transmitter, immediately microwaving a lot of their crew. The people who weren't in cooking range suffered weird side effects and hallucinations, the people who were in range got cooked. People on shore who were in range probably got dizzy, or maybe suffered a blackout, or god knows what-all. When their power system got fried, the whatever-it-was shut off, and whoever was left alive was like, "Oh, FUCK, that hurt. What the FUCK was THAT?" And, there ya go!
It's one of my favorite "It's not a conspiracy, it's stupidity" stories...
If only people would apply Occam's razor and just THINK about a few of these huge "UFO cover ups", they could relax.
Think about the whole Area 51 and Roswell thing for example. Ok, something weird crashed out of the sky, there were some bodies, and the government covered everything up. But it happened shortly after WWII, during a period where we were employing ex-Nazi rocket scientists to build us more advanced airplanes, didn't it? And, a more reasonable explanation of the Roswell crash would be that an experimental, top secret craft had a malfunction and bit the dust.
Consider that that whole Southwest is used for the testing of advanced aircraft. Groom Lake (in Nevada), another mecca for the tinfoil hat crowd, is an aircraft test facility. The stealth fighter, for example, was developed during the early 1970's, and was tested extensively there. OF COURSE there were lots of UFO sightings. They were testing their planes! Naturally SOMEONE would see them. We can't make 'em invisible (yet).
Now, fast forward to the Pennsylvania crash. SOMETHING crashed, and the government seems to want to keep it quiet. Does this mean there were little green men? Nope. It means that something failed on another one of the government's experimental toys (the operative word being "experimental"), a few unlucky test pilots probably bit the dust crashing it into a forest, and it's unfortunate and sad but NOT a sci-fi mystery.
We'll probably see whatever aircraft it is in twenty years or so when it's declassified and they use it to blow someone up in a future war. We'll go "Holy cow, that's a cool airplane, I wonder when they built that thing!" and check out the TechTV show about it after getting our anime fix...