Somehow, I don't think that car speakers and highway noise are a viable solution for audio quality too.
I mean, you're driving. If you're being safe, your sound quality is going to be hampered by the fact that your stereo isn't louder than the sounds your car and the road are making.
In terms of the features offered, sure it is - I don't listen to the radio, I have little in Ogg format (And what I have, I've converted to mp3), and I don't need more than 20 GB of mp3s at a time.
As for size, it certainly helps. The stuff listed isn't that big, in the end. Could I fit a slightly larger mp3 player - sure. But I'd have a bitch of a time operating it. The few inches saved lets me reach in and tap a button.
To say nothing of the summer, when I'm not wearing a jacket. At that point, an mp3 player that fits in my breast pocket looks pretty damn good.
Well, OK, but in the context of the question, the person has already chosen one that doesn't have AAC support. Considering that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the major music stores actually distribute in anything other than mp3 and AAC, and that, frankly, there's not a lot of file trading going on in Ogg format, Ogg support is really more of a geek pride feature than a functional one.
Then I bought an iPod, because it was actually well designed - it had an interface that actually lends itself to playing music. I want an mp3 player that I can change the song on while driving - that is, one that's fast to use, and is forgiving of being put down halfway through a menu and picked up again five minutes later because the traffic got bad.
And, frankly, though I could carry an mp3 player larger than an iPod around, if I don't have to, I'm just as happy not to. I mean, yeah, a larger thing would fit in my pocket, but I'd just as soon also put in my gloves, hat, scarf, phone, pen, GBA, candy bar, and whatever the hell else I'm carrying on a given day.
You're still not understanding the point of academic critique - it's not criticism in the sense of an art review. We do not fill journals with reviews of TV shows. That would be silly, you're right.
We talk about shows in a very different way - we deal with their constructions of race, of gender, of class - with their politics, with many other things - not to tell if they're good or bad, but to determine what they do - how they function.
What we do is more similar to sociology, in a lot of ways, but with some very important methodological and philosophic differances. (Ultimately, sociology is interested in the aggregate of the behaviors and attitudes of a lot of indivudal people, whereas the humanities are interested in the behavior of the more general and totalized "humanity," "society," "culture" etc.)
You'd be wrong. Because what pure theorists do isn't the productive goal of any other field. Often (Have a look at any television criticism for this), in fact, what pure theorists do is directly contrary to the goals of the field they're trying to study.
I mean, there's just not a field outside of the critical theory-based fields that are interested in selfhood...
I'm pretty much willing to talk about the attitudes of the humanities with authority.
As for developers... it's not that they shouldn't read it. It's that they're not the intended audience, so if it's of no interest to them, it's not really a big deal.
You were right the first time. We don't care about how to write, design, or create a game.
Why? Because we're not trying to make a game.
We don't want to determine how a game evokes an emotional response, or the sociology of EverQuest. We certainly don't want to employ Heidegger to create social AI routines.
We are not developers. We are theorists. Our major interest is in dealing with the relationship between games and humanity at large - as a whole (as opposed to an individual human with a particular controller in his hands, or even as opposed to the sum of a bunch of humans with a bunch of controllers).
You're still not grasping the fundamental difference between the two.
We have no interest in designing better video games, by and large. Academic study took a turn away from those kinds of concerns in the 60s, and hasn't ever really gone back.
Put another way, there are two kinds of English Masters degrees - the MA and the MFA. The MFA is concerned with the productive aspects - with how to create a good poem, play, story, whatever.
The MA has no concern whatsoever with that. The MA does not want to write a poem - it wants to understand what a poem demonstrates about the changing conception of science in 19th century England.
To do this, it needs to have some vocabulary of the construction of the poem, but the vocabulary it develops for that end is going to be a completely different vocabulary from the one used to understand how to write the poem.
I can assure you, scholars have not given up trying to analyze movies and press.
We have largely given up the notion of "review," I'll admit - but popular culture studies remains big.
And, believe me, we're well aware of subjectivism - it's there for most things.
I doubt this is a novelty thing - we'll be around to study video games as long as they remain popular. And if they die off, some people will focus on them in 150 years when they do 20th and 21st century studies.
I don't think it should be a new field - I think that media studies people, who tend to either have their own department or to be in the English department - can handle this just fine.
But even still, there are going to be a few places that are going to just have such a concentration of people who do this that it makes sense to make a department. I'd be distressed if every university had a gaming department, but I'm glad a few do - especially while the field is small enough that distributing them over a lot of places would really inhibit its development by preventing the production of well-trained graduate students.
It's not as though we invite authors to talk about books, or filmmakers to talk about film.
Academics are not interested in documenting the process of production. We figure that the developers are plenty good at explaining their own process.
What we're interested in doing is trying to give an accounting of the medium as it functions - in this case, to create a vocabulary of terms for video games, much like the vocabulary Aristotle created for narrative. We're interested in what narrative means in interactive fiction, in what the aesthetic effects of it can be, in the function of the medium in practice (i.e. how does a video game elicit response, and what is the nature of that response).
These are, frankly, not questions developers think about. They certainly don't think about them in the language of academia. i.e. they may think practically about "What will a player do when this happens," but they will not think about whether or not the intermediation of the controller makes it so that the avatar is never "ready-to-hand" and is thus perpetually a thing in the Heideggarian sense.
This is not a bad thing. Heidegger probably isn't relevent to the production of games. But the production of games isn't really relevent to what we do either.
I don't care much about packaging - I have a small apartment, and packaging both makes the games bigger and makes it slower to get them out.
What I do wish they'd focus on is selling NES and SNES games with the little plastic bits to keep dust out of them. Half of the difficulty I have in maintaining my NES/SNES collection stems from the fact that keeping dust out of the games is a perpetually losing battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Look on the bright side, at least they're not putting in the Videodrome signal yet...
Yeah. Because that takes less time and effort...
Epecially considering the cost of a DVD-R...
Somehow, I don't think that car speakers and highway noise are a viable solution for audio quality too.
I mean, you're driving. If you're being safe, your sound quality is going to be hampered by the fact that your stereo isn't louder than the sounds your car and the road are making.
I find a tape adapter and the passenger seat works just fine.
In terms of the features offered, sure it is - I don't listen to the radio, I have little in Ogg format (And what I have, I've converted to mp3), and I don't need more than 20 GB of mp3s at a time.
As for size, it certainly helps. The stuff listed isn't that big, in the end. Could I fit a slightly larger mp3 player - sure. But I'd have a bitch of a time operating it. The few inches saved lets me reach in and tap a button.
To say nothing of the summer, when I'm not wearing a jacket. At that point, an mp3 player that fits in my breast pocket looks pretty damn good.
Well, OK, but in the context of the question, the person has already chosen one that doesn't have AAC support. Considering that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the major music stores actually distribute in anything other than mp3 and AAC, and that, frankly, there's not a lot of file trading going on in Ogg format, Ogg support is really more of a geek pride feature than a functional one.
Yeah, I looked at many of those players.
Then I bought an iPod, because it was actually well designed - it had an interface that actually lends itself to playing music. I want an mp3 player that I can change the song on while driving - that is, one that's fast to use, and is forgiving of being put down halfway through a menu and picked up again five minutes later because the traffic got bad.
And, frankly, though I could carry an mp3 player larger than an iPod around, if I don't have to, I'm just as happy not to. I mean, yeah, a larger thing would fit in my pocket, but I'd just as soon also put in my gloves, hat, scarf, phone, pen, GBA, candy bar, and whatever the hell else I'm carrying on a given day.
Why would you have an mp3 player that's not an iPod?
You're still not understanding the point of academic critique - it's not criticism in the sense of an art review. We do not fill journals with reviews of TV shows. That would be silly, you're right.
We talk about shows in a very different way - we deal with their constructions of race, of gender, of class - with their politics, with many other things - not to tell if they're good or bad, but to determine what they do - how they function.
What we do is more similar to sociology, in a lot of ways, but with some very important methodological and philosophic differances. (Ultimately, sociology is interested in the aggregate of the behaviors and attitudes of a lot of indivudal people, whereas the humanities are interested in the behavior of the more general and totalized "humanity," "society," "culture" etc.)
You'd be wrong. Because what pure theorists do isn't the productive goal of any other field. Often (Have a look at any television criticism for this), in fact, what pure theorists do is directly contrary to the goals of the field they're trying to study.
I mean, there's just not a field outside of the critical theory-based fields that are interested in selfhood...
Do you have similar opinions on pure mathematicians?
Largely, pure theory carries on the classical problems of philosophy - particularly political and social philosophy.
Do you ask that of people who are studying novels or poetry?
I'm pretty much willing to talk about the attitudes of the humanities with authority.
As for developers... it's not that they shouldn't read it. It's that they're not the intended audience, so if it's of no interest to them, it's not really a big deal.
Nah, not really. If I were, I'd have gone and learned to code.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm not glad there are people who are figuring out how to make fun games. I like playing them.
Just that, you know, I'm not interested in making them.
That is basically the social sciences approach, yeah.
In the humanities, it's even more extreme - we stopped thinking that completeness and objectivity were even goals to strive for.
You were right the first time. We don't care about how to write, design, or create a game.
Why? Because we're not trying to make a game.
We don't want to determine how a game evokes an emotional response, or the sociology of EverQuest. We certainly don't want to employ Heidegger to create social AI routines.
We are not developers. We are theorists. Our major interest is in dealing with the relationship between games and humanity at large - as a whole (as opposed to an individual human with a particular controller in his hands, or even as opposed to the sum of a bunch of humans with a bunch of controllers).
You're still not grasping the fundamental difference between the two.
We have no interest in designing better video games, by and large. Academic study took a turn away from those kinds of concerns in the 60s, and hasn't ever really gone back.
Put another way, there are two kinds of English Masters degrees - the MA and the MFA. The MFA is concerned with the productive aspects - with how to create a good poem, play, story, whatever.
The MA has no concern whatsoever with that. The MA does not want to write a poem - it wants to understand what a poem demonstrates about the changing conception of science in 19th century England.
To do this, it needs to have some vocabulary of the construction of the poem, but the vocabulary it develops for that end is going to be a completely different vocabulary from the one used to understand how to write the poem.
I can assure you, scholars have not given up trying to analyze movies and press.
We have largely given up the notion of "review," I'll admit - but popular culture studies remains big.
And, believe me, we're well aware of subjectivism - it's there for most things.
I doubt this is a novelty thing - we'll be around to study video games as long as they remain popular. And if they die off, some people will focus on them in 150 years when they do 20th and 21st century studies.
I don't think it should be a new field - I think that media studies people, who tend to either have their own department or to be in the English department - can handle this just fine.
But even still, there are going to be a few places that are going to just have such a concentration of people who do this that it makes sense to make a department. I'd be distressed if every university had a gaming department, but I'm glad a few do - especially while the field is small enough that distributing them over a lot of places would really inhibit its development by preventing the production of well-trained graduate students.
Why would we invite developers here?
It's not as though we invite authors to talk about books, or filmmakers to talk about film.
Academics are not interested in documenting the process of production. We figure that the developers are plenty good at explaining their own process.
What we're interested in doing is trying to give an accounting of the medium as it functions - in this case, to create a vocabulary of terms for video games, much like the vocabulary Aristotle created for narrative. We're interested in what narrative means in interactive fiction, in what the aesthetic effects of it can be, in the function of the medium in practice (i.e. how does a video game elicit response, and what is the nature of that response).
These are, frankly, not questions developers think about. They certainly don't think about them in the language of academia. i.e. they may think practically about "What will a player do when this happens," but they will not think about whether or not the intermediation of the controller makes it so that the avatar is never "ready-to-hand" and is thus perpetually a thing in the Heideggarian sense.
This is not a bad thing. Heidegger probably isn't relevent to the production of games. But the production of games isn't really relevent to what we do either.
I don't care much about packaging - I have a small apartment, and packaging both makes the games bigger and makes it slower to get them out.
What I do wish they'd focus on is selling NES and SNES games with the little plastic bits to keep dust out of them. Half of the difficulty I have in maintaining my NES/SNES collection stems from the fact that keeping dust out of the games is a perpetually losing battle.
Do I have two accounts?
I could have sworn I was the only person who'd ever played Willy Beamish, little yet who still had the case.
I'd just like to stress how amused I am at the wild swings in moderation on this post.
And the good performance of Macs is explained how, in that case?
And this is the fatal flaw in Linux. "adequate training and knowledge" is hard to get. Linux is hard to use and hard to set up.
So lots of people going to poorly configure.
Making Linux secure only in theory.