You bring up an interesting point. Wouldn't it be cool if MS sold their Xbox Live service for PCs as well? I know there aren't many (any) games that could do that.. but.. maybe Halo? (Has that hit PCs yet?) That would be really fun, and maybe an incentive for game companies to do some decent ports of console games to PC, instead of the other way around..
Re:this is great -- is it?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How can you seriously complain about that? "I've got stacks of games collecting dust..".. I've got stacks of books collecting dust, but I don't consider that a flaw in the books themselves.
Games are just like any other narrative product, like movies or books, you can't just constantly use them and expect to stay entertained. They do, however, lend themselves to re-use, like movies or books, after you've given them time to slip from your mind.
I, for one, am kind of hesitant to say that this kind of automatic storytelling would be a good thing. The really good games, like really good stories, have very enveloping plots. I don't see how an 'automatic' story generator can consistently create an entertaining story line. It might be ok for individualized scenes, but the difficulty in tying all that together into an enjoyable plot seems astronomically difficult.
I've installed one of these and the software does help with the speed tremendously, but the 'special software' is just a caching/bursting hack that makes it save up content to transmit in bursts. I think the bursting is where satellite gets all it's speed, as the latency from earth to sat has to be ridiculous.
As far as the fingerprinting goes, there is a project that has going on for about a year now (that I know) to start fingerprinting music that gets played on radio stations. I used to work at the radio station at Texas Tech University (ktxt.net, Your Only Alternative!) and we were one of the first twenty five stations in the nation to get hooked up with a system to do our charting automatically (to CMJ) by this system (from Audible Magic - www.audiblemagic.com) that listened to what was basically an audio stream and identified the songs. During the testing period they would call when they heard a song that didn't get identified. The calls tapered off pretty quickly, and we play some fairly obscure stuff, so I'm guessing that the fingerprint database must be getting rather large.
I'm glad that they are making the fingerprint database available to the average joe!
Now I can start ripping all those compilation tapes my sister made.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up an interesting point. Wouldn't it be cool if MS sold their Xbox Live service for PCs as well? I know there aren't many (any) games that could do that.. but.. maybe Halo? (Has that hit PCs yet?) That would be really fun, and maybe an incentive for game companies to do some decent ports of console games to PC, instead of the other way around..
How can you seriously complain about that? .. I've got stacks of books collecting dust, but I don't consider that a flaw in the books themselves.
"I've got stacks of games collecting dust.."
Games are just like any other narrative product, like movies or books, you can't just constantly use them and expect to stay entertained. They do, however, lend themselves to re-use, like movies or books, after you've given them time to slip from your mind.
I, for one, am kind of hesitant to say that this kind of automatic storytelling would be a good thing. The really good games, like really good stories, have very enveloping plots. I don't see how an 'automatic' story generator can consistently create an entertaining story line. It might be ok for individualized scenes, but the difficulty in tying all that together into an enjoyable plot seems astronomically difficult.
I think the only infinite game is life.
I've installed one of these and the software does help with the speed tremendously, but the 'special software' is just a caching/bursting hack that makes it save up content to transmit in bursts. I think the bursting is where satellite gets all it's speed, as the latency from earth to sat has to be ridiculous.
As far as the fingerprinting goes, there is a project that has going on for about a year now (that I know) to start fingerprinting music that gets played on radio stations. I used to work at the radio station at Texas Tech University (ktxt.net, Your Only Alternative!) and we were one of the first twenty five stations in the nation to get hooked up with a system to do our charting automatically (to CMJ) by this system (from Audible Magic - www.audiblemagic.com) that listened to what was basically an audio stream and identified the songs. During the testing period they would call when they heard a song that didn't get identified. The calls tapered off pretty quickly, and we play some fairly obscure stuff, so I'm guessing that the fingerprint database must be getting rather large. I'm glad that they are making the fingerprint database available to the average joe!
Now I can start ripping all those compilation tapes my sister made.