I was a bit unclear there. It's not simply the fact that less people play video games than watch TV or movies, but consider the core reasons why that is true. The vast majority of people can watch TV or a move just fine; it takes a significant disability to prevent someone from seeing a story in one of these media. Now, enjoying that movie (or TV show) is another issue entirely. But, if someone doesn't have fast enough reflexes, or doesn't have clever enough puzzle solving skills, he or she may not be able to play a particular game. These types of faults aren't something that generally hinders you in the rest of your life.
So, since game require some outside skill beyond basic visual and listening comprehension, it will necessarily have a smaller audience than other media. That means less people fighting to get it considered to be "art", compared to the people that will fight for film and even TV. (Although, we do tend to be pretty persistent, at least online.;)
Art can influence people, but it's rare that it induces people to a particular action unless they suffer from specific conditions. A painting I like to use as an example in this case is Goya's Tres de Mayo. This image shows more blood than you'll see in a typical computer game screenshot. Yet, I learned about this painting in my Spanish classes in school.
Take a look at the painting. Does it fill you with emotion? It does for me. Even if you don't know the history behind the image, the image quite obviously shows a lot of anguish and fear and death. It's not a comfortable painting to look at for a long time, for most people. But, does it induce you to an action? Do you want to support Napoleon's invasion of Spain? Shoot some Spanish rebels? Wear a bright white shirt to your own execution? Probably not.
If you're worried that the interactive nature of games is more harmful than other media, go ahead and read the majority of the peer-reviewed studies out there. For most people, this is not an issue.
Great, let's take Shakespeare. From the moment he set pen to page, he was considered an artistic genius, right?
Not quite. As other people pointed out, playwriting during Shakespeare's time was what second-rate writers did to pass the time. Real artists wrote poetry or essays, not common entertainment for the masses. It was only years later that anyone started to appreciate Shakespeare as anything more than the equivalent of today's TV.
There's also the problem that interactive entertainment, such as games, are more limited in audience. Just as Opera isn't for everyone, games aren't going to be grasped by everyone. People that aren't used to the medium (read: older people who didn't grow up with the medium) are going to have a much harder time understand it and why it has the potential for art.
So, we need some time before we can state this case unequivocally in one way or the other. Being a game developer and not interested in just producing mass entertainment, I'll politely disagree with you for now.;)
With roughly 250k subscribers, EvE is not one of the largest MMORPGs but certainly economically viable.
You misunderstand the point here. The original EverQuest (EQ1) had a brutal system where you could actually lose a level if you got killed too much. You could also lose all your gear if you didn't get back to the location of your death before the corpse disappeared. EQ1 had a peak of 440k subscribers, beating EVE quite a bit.
Then came along a game where you didn't lose xp, you couldn't lose equipment, and "death" was a few minute run back to your corpse plus a possible repair bill later. If you wanted to pay a more in repair, you didn't even have to run back to your corpse. That game has about 2,000,000+ subscribers in North America alone (and many more millions worldwide). Perhaps you've heard of this game: World of Warcraft. Death penalties are just one example where WoW made it impossible to really "lose". Add death penalties into WoW and it loses one big element people point at to show that the game is superior to others.
So, the point isn't that you can't possibly make a game that has a significant chance of loss for the players. The original EQ is still kicking. The point is that when a developer/publisher takes a look at design and then consider the subscription business model where "more people = more money", they're going to take the path that results in more possible players *every* time. Having that chance to lose big means that people eventually lose big, get pissed off, and quit your game. Worse, they'll probably bitch about it on a public forum and scare away other potential subscribers.
So, why does EVE have significant loss? It appeals to the current rabid playerbase that feel the need to post about EVE in every story that mentions MMOs.:P CCP also had an interesting situation where they didn't have to maximize revenue immediately. Note that EVE was originally considered a commercial failure, particularly for the publisher that originally put boxes in the stores. This would spell the death of most game companies. CCP was able to weather that (due to government funds, as I remember), and EVE was able to grow to it's current position over a long time. A publisher that invested heavily into a game today wouldn't put up with that BS; that's why the grandparent added the word "publishers" to that line. (Really, most developers like lots of money, too, which is why I don't think that addition is necessary.)
Anyway, this isn't to say that I don't agree with your assessment about the possible pros of serious loss; it's one of the things I still like about M59 because the victories and losses have serious consequences in the game But, people who want to make the big bucks are going to pick the design that gives them the most profit.
I think it takes away from the adventuring draw of the game....
I disagree. I think it adds to adventuring because it gives you multiple goals. Not only are you trying to maximize your current level of power, but you're also need to consider long-term effects for developing your family. It adds another level to the gameplay. Plus, it allows you to play alts without feeling like you're "wasting time" because all your characters can work to achieve common goals.
As with anything, of course, it can fall victim to poor implementation. And, if you do try it and don't like the system, I suspect there will be tons of other games that will offer you the tried-and-true adventure draw you prefer.;)
I'm a professional MMO developer. This idea isn't new, but the word "permadeath" sends most MMO players into a frothing frenzy. I think it would be interesting to do in a game.
I previously wrote up a concept similar to this where players would manage a family on my professional blog at http://www.psychochild.org/?p=198. I also had the concept of expansions "fast forwarding" the timeline and advancing the story; this allows the story and world to change based on player actions without having some of the problems associated with a fully dyanmic, persistent world. I'd like to do it someday.:)
I usually don't post that as a title, but the parent post should be modded up. I'm also a professional MMO developer, not posting as an AC. The whole "players want 'entertainment'" bit is something I'm filing away to explain to other people.
The poster is also exactly right about the whole "hero" thing. Most people have a tremendous capacity for self-delusion. Even if I have to stand in line behind all my friends to release Sharpbeak, the game is still rewarding me for a specific "heroic" action. Or, think of it this way: if you rescued a little girl from a burning building, would everyone say, "Big deal, thousands of people have saved thousands of victims from burning buildings before." The fact that the world goes back to a steady state in an MMO doesn't mean your actions are any less heroic. They're just not unique, and people are fine with that. And, especially with things like instancing, you don't even have to compete with other groups to accomplish your heroic goals.
From the grandparent post: "MMORPG are afraid to have people lose."
The parent poster is right, this is because people hate to lose. There's a thread about permadeath in another part of this discussion. Know why permadeath is never done? Because it's the *players* that scream loudest when this is brought up. They don't want to contemplate the thought of losing their hard-earned character, even if the game isn't designed like that. Most games are designed to have people invest a lot into a character. If someone tries to go against that particular bit of groupthink, then they're accused of "hating the players" or "caring more about experiments than fun".
The real reason why we see people clone DIKU MUDs/EQ/WoW is because the players are demanding that we make more of the same. There are some interesting alternative games out there, including Meridian 59 which I own, but people pass them by. M59 is a brutal PvP-focused game where you can lose just about everything you've worked for, and then some. And, because of that, it has a lot of trouble attracting and retaining players. The reality is that nobody is going to drop even $10 million (let alone the $50 million WoW cost) to build a game if nobody will play the game that cost a few hundred thousand to build. So, we keep seeing the same games that don't take risks and don't let players lose all they've worked for.
Anyone willing to invest in something different can contact me through my blog at http://www.psychochild.org/. I won't hold my breath.;)
Not sure this will help me, though. One bill collector with an obviously wrong number robo-calls my home number. Part of their canned speech is, "If this is not you, hang up now...." Yeah, but when the answering machine catches it (which it does for all alls to my landline), it can't actually hang up, can it? So, we kept on getting calls because I wasn't always quick enough to catch the call even I did hear the answering machine.
Hopefully there will be another way to opt out besides that stupidity.
The first step is to inform the people who have a stake in the outcome; that would be the gamers. Yeah, my pseudonym isn't going to convince any grey-haired politicians not to try to pass unconstitutional laws, but I figure the likelihood of me being called in front of a Senate committee vanishingly small. But, it may cause some people who still need to be informed to pay attention because they may remember my pseudonym and know I'm not just some random teenager mentally masturbating in a Slashdot comment.:)
My point about Manga is that the U.S. industry stagnated while the Japanese industry flourished. Manga is popular now, but mostly because the Japanese industry had so long to develop while the U.S. industry was limited to silly (male) teenage power fantasies as the primary source of stories. The Japanese industry was able to explore a lot of "forbidden" topics and their industry is much richer for that advantage. That's why Manga is such a dominant force.
Finally, how do we attain legitimacy? Lots of ways. The guaranteed way is to wait for all the old people that fear the new medium to die off; once we get a majority of politicians who grew up playing games then we won't have to worry so much. Another way is for game developers to take a more mature approach to the industry and create games for adults that don't rely on silly hyperviolence and/or cheap sexual titillation.
I am also an MMO developer, but I disagree: people still do trust the client on occasion. It's usually for one of three reasons:
1) Newbie developer mistake, and they didn't think to ask an experienced developer. 2) Those times when trusting the client makes sense (benefits outweigh negatives). 3) A buggy check on the server-side.
I will agree that developers are better about it now than back in the bad old days. The game I own and administrate, Meridian 59 (a one-time "dead" game that lives again) had an amusing situation where the "Hold" spell was just a command sent to the victim's client to disallow input. Yeah, that taught the original development team a quick lesson. More recently, there was a dupe bug where people hacked the client to offer the same object twice in the secure trading window, creating lovely dupes. After figuring out the problem, I put a check in (but didn't actually prevent the cheat for a few days, heh heh) and then banned people who abused the bug. The funny part is this bug was probably in the game since launch, but it took about a decade for a player to figure it out.
Last I checked, every magazine didn't have to have a government mandated approval that it does not contain pornography.
That's the problem with any of these laws that are declared unconstitutional, they don't try to restrict exposing minors to the "bad stuff", they require a whole medium to get government-mandated approval. Not getting approval means not able to be sold.
As an administrator of a small-scale non-pornographic internet-based game with offices outside the state of New York, I think it's silly to require me to submit to a rating board before I can offer my game in New York. Especially since it's been shown repeatedly that video games enjoy First Amendment protection on free speech.
It's really as simple as that. But, politicians score brownie points for trying to "protect the children" by passing these bad laws that waste taxpayer money, so it keeps happening.
Part of the problem is the same thing we've seen with comic books back when the CCA is formed: people are finding material that is obviously not for kids in a medium they automatically assume is for kids. Video games are considered a childish pursuit despite gamers' average age being 33. So, GTA4 is bad because it's a video game and obviously intended for little Billy to play. American Psycho is a violent book, but we know that we shouldn't ban books just because kids could get their hands on them. Note that older media is more respected, in general, so we rate movies but not plays, etc.
If you want to see possible futures for video games in the U.S., take a look at previous "harmful" media like comics and rock 'n' roll music. If the goverment continues to attempt to clamp down on it and eventually succeed (with laws or self-censorship), we'll see the American industry retard itself and fall behind while another country becomes dominant (hello, manga!) If the goverment accepts that video games have artistic value, the American industry will flourish and become a global force. Guess which one works out better for the U.S. in the long run?
And, yeah, I'm a computer game developer.:) So this topic has extra meaning to me.
When I was working at 3DO, we got back some songs from an outside shop for a game I was working on at the time. (It was a Might & Magic game that helped kill that franchise, sadly. The project was a trainwreck no matter how you slice it.)
The Director (the lead creative type) was a huge prankster. We had both worked on the Meridian 59 team before this project, so we were on good terms. He loaned me the soundtrack from The Matrix since it had just come out.
So, he sends out an email that they got back some songs, so if anyone wants to take a listen go ahead. I went and listen to the songs, and every single one of them was a synthesizer instrumental version or variation of "Rock is Dead" by Marilyn Manson (which is on the soundtrack I borrowed). Now, I thought this was a really elaborate practical joke, so I went to get a good laugh with him. The blank look on his face when I said, "Good joke, man," had me worried. So, I go load up the CD and the new music file and play them for him. He simply could not believe it, even after listening to it.
Basically, the outsourced music company had given the project to someone who slacked off and just handed in some BS. Well, that was their story, at least.
In the end, I ended up saving 3DO from a pretty major copyright infringement lawsuit; you know how friendly those RIAA people are about things like this. But, it didn't matter: the game still sucked horribly and I'm still ashamed to have worked on it.
I'm a professional game developer. I often tell people, "I tell my mother I'm a meth dealer instead of a game developer so that she'll have at least a bit of respect for me."
Sadly, that's not too far off the mark.
The one upside is that if you stick with it long enough, you can become a veteran of this industry much faster than in others. I've "only" been developing games professionally for about 10 years now, but I am one of the most experienced people, particularly in online game development. I'm no Richard Bartle or Jessica Mulligan, but my experience has allowed me to land some pretty nice consulting and contracting gigs.
It is possible to make good money in the game industry, but there's an attitude that you have to "pay your dues" before you get any real respect or authority by others in the industry. As someone else mentioned in this thread, the winners are often the people who go on to start their own companies and maintain some level of control. Working as a wage slave sucks in this industry, so either you have to be the top of your field in an industry full of scary-smart people, or you have to be the one calling the shots and not beholden to many other people. But, once you get to the point where you have respect and/or authority, it can be a really awesome job.
Really, it's like any other creative field. For every superstar, like J.K. Rowling for book authors, there are thousands of people languishing in obscurity and doing grunt jobs to keep the bills paid. Some of these people may even produce better work than the superstars, but part of standing out from the crowd is just dumb luck. You really have to love the art or you'll just get chewed up and spit out with hundreds of people eager to try to take your place. Unfortunately, in most of these industries the people in control of the finances realize the leverage they have over new entrants to the field and take advantage of them.
Sure thing on the quoting. If you are interested in discussing things outside of Slashdot, feel free to contact me at the email address above. (It uses Slashdot's obscuring process, so decipher it properly.:) I've helped edit a book and develop games professionally, so I'm interested in a fair system of IP laws that helps the little guy, too. Neither extreme (eternal copyrights or banishing them entirely) really helps.
That I don't understand, and would appreciate some clarity. How does longevity side with the copyrights of the original artist versus the public? What come to mind for me is the infrastructure for media distribution in the time of the Statute of Anne. 14 years at that time was considered plenty of time for a long time after to make a profit. Today, the avenues for product distribution are much greater in terms of both speed and control. This tells me that it would be both reasonable and necessary to make the term shorter.
Not really. While I can email a draft to a publisher faster than you could send a messenger to deliver one in ye olde tymes, that doesn't meant that the business side moves any faster. An editor can't necessarily read faster these days. Decisions to publish a book don't necessarily happen faster. Truckloads of books still take time to haul across long distances. Even if you distribute PDFs online, you may want to set up some system to take money people want to give you; systems where money exchanges are involved are by default non-trivial. So, faster and better distribution doesn't take a significant amount of time off the previously required time.
I do agree that the current apparent goal of "infinity minus one day" of copyrights is counter-productive, but I think too short a period will hurt the people that provide us with the wonderful cultural experiences that can be copyrighted. My main concern if the period is too short is that large companies will prefer to let copyrights run out instead of buying works from content creators. Last thing we need is to change the system to give even more benefits to the huge corporations.
One of the real strengths of Asheron's Call was that the developers have added regular content patches. Their goal was about once per month, so a patch every 5 weeks is about on target.
Because of this rather aggressive content patching schedule, AC is one of the more dynamic games on the market. The game has changed significantly over the years. Unfortunately, for some people that's not a good thing. But, some people regularly complain about the "static" nature of other games. AC has shown that a quality development team can produce regular content updates over a very long period of time.
Too bad AC2 got such a negative reception. On the other hand, it looks like Turbine learned from AC's constant patching and have been able to add content to their new games on a regular basis. From most reports I've heard, LotRO is a significantly improved game after a year of updates. Not quote one update per month, but still pretty impressive. I wish more games would do significant content updates to keep the game truly dynamic, but I know first-hand how hard that can be on some systems.
Some thoughts from a professional online game developer.
The wonderful thing about D&D, for me, is that you can adjust the rules to match your needs. Everybody I know has house rules on how to handle special cases, or what to ignore in order to make things run a bit smoother or how the group expects. Every group has a few "house rules" that make their particular games special.
Personally, I would rather have seen the alignments expand so that you could be Goodish/Evilish/Lawfulish/Chaoticish.
In our D&D games, we already have "goodish", etc. We just said you were "Lawful neutral (with good tendencies)" or "Neutral Good (with Lawful tendencies)" or whatever. Your "official" alignment om the first example was LN for spells, etc., but your decision making was usually tinged with what the alignment system considered "good" behaviors. It allowed for a bit more subtlety without completely throwing out the system.
The sad part about removing CG and LE is that these are, for me, some of the most interesting alignments to play. I like CG because I think that is the most heroic option: the ability to do good for people without having to be bound by rules that stop it. On the flip side, LE is fascinating. One of my favorite characters was LE; he believed that evil was going to take over and he wanted to be on top when the time came. A good role-playing challenge for me, since I don't fit that alignment at all, IMHO.
Anyway, we'll see how 4th addition goes. I'm a bit worried that with the online service that it'll be too restrictive and not allow a lot of house rules. At that point, if I'm playing someone else's rules and having to pay (subscribe?) for it, I might as well be playing an MMO instead of D&Ding with my friends.
As a game developer, I have an alternate solution: buy the game and steal the gas. Game developers, especially the indies, need the money more than the gasoline companies.:P
In the end, college is what you make of it. You can go to a great school and learn nothing, you can go to a terrible school and learn a lot if you really apply yourself. The important part is that you take your learning seriously and seek out your own opportunities.
As others have mentioned, eventually the school you attended will be meaningless. In the tech field, it doesn't matter is you graduated from a very top school if you don't keep your skills current. Getting a good internship at college will help you more than just about anything else in your career at the university. I didn't do an internship and I remember having a hard time finding a good company that would hire me, even during a tech boom.
In the end, it's most important to consider what your goals are. For example, I was glad that the CS department at my alma mater was under the college of Liberal Arts & Sciences. I got a well-rounded degree (and also got a degree in Spanish by sharing a lot of requirements). I'm now a professional game developer, and the well-rounded education helped me start my own business while being able to program a game server, write game design documents, and give presentations at conferences. However, someone could just as easily have focused almost entirely on the technical aspects and excel at just that narrow field. I'm happy where I am, though.:)
Some thoughts from someone who distantly remembers what it was like to be so young. (Ow, my hip....)
No problem. As I said, I happen to own the game now, so I have an excuse to be more aware of history.:)
However, M59 was still the first online RPG "on a wide scale" because it was available for sale as a box in retail outlets. Most other games before M59 were tied to proprietary networks like AOL, GEnie, etc. and were not sold at retail. UO was a larger game than M59 at peak; however, EQ and WoW are larger than UO was, but this doesn't invalidate UO's influence. M59's biggest problems were that it had terrible advertising back in the day; 3DO had no idea how to advertise the thing.
Blizzard have released many expansions without cost. The most recent patch, 2.4, added a whole new island with end-game content.
True, but Blizzard also makes more money off of subscriptions, so they can afford to add "free" content easier. If I run a game that has 200,000 subscribers (I wish...) and Blizzard has 2,000,000 subscribers (approximate North American subscriptions for Blizzard, but also for the sake of easy math), then Blizzard is making 1000x more income. To the individual players, however, they are paying the same amount of money. My game will have to find extra money from some source in order to provide more content; that money comes from expansion packs. And, as someone pointed out, it does take money to keep the service going. You'll notice that a game like Guild Wars doesn't charge a subscription fee, but they put out a lot of expansion packs to keep the income coming in.
Keep in mind that this difference in playerbases doesn't necessarily mean that one game is 'better' than the other. More people have seen (and probably bought copies of) Titanic than Blade Runner, but that doesn't mean that Titanic is a better movie; if you think it does, then you're on the wrong site and probably should go to a currently more popular site.
Okay, so I mostly remember it because I now own it.:) But, it did bridge the gap between text MUDs and modern graphical games more than UO did. M59 also set the standard for the monthly subscription model; of course, it got that from AOL going to that business model a bit before M59's launch.
And, actually, there was quite a row at a developer's conference when they advertised Richard Garriott as the "grandfather" of online games. Mark Jacobs, a person who has been releasing online games for quite a while before UO came out, was upset that many other people (besides himself) were being overlooked.
A bit of history for you whipper-snappers. Sadly, the computer game industry is pretty terrible at recording and sharing our history.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd disagree with the limited audience bit.
I was a bit unclear there. It's not simply the fact that less people play video games than watch TV or movies, but consider the core reasons why that is true. The vast majority of people can watch TV or a move just fine; it takes a significant disability to prevent someone from seeing a story in one of these media. Now, enjoying that movie (or TV show) is another issue entirely. But, if someone doesn't have fast enough reflexes, or doesn't have clever enough puzzle solving skills, he or she may not be able to play a particular game. These types of faults aren't something that generally hinders you in the rest of your life.
So, since game require some outside skill beyond basic visual and listening comprehension, it will necessarily have a smaller audience than other media. That means less people fighting to get it considered to be "art", compared to the people that will fight for film and even TV. (Although, we do tend to be pretty persistent, at least online. ;)
Art can influence people, but it's rare that it induces people to a particular action unless they suffer from specific conditions. A painting I like to use as an example in this case is Goya's Tres de Mayo . This image shows more blood than you'll see in a typical computer game screenshot. Yet, I learned about this painting in my Spanish classes in school.
Take a look at the painting. Does it fill you with emotion? It does for me. Even if you don't know the history behind the image, the image quite obviously shows a lot of anguish and fear and death. It's not a comfortable painting to look at for a long time, for most people. But, does it induce you to an action? Do you want to support Napoleon's invasion of Spain? Shoot some Spanish rebels? Wear a bright white shirt to your own execution? Probably not.
If you're worried that the interactive nature of games is more harmful than other media, go ahead and read the majority of the peer-reviewed studies out there. For most people, this is not an issue.
Great, let's take Shakespeare. From the moment he set pen to page, he was considered an artistic genius, right?
Not quite. As other people pointed out, playwriting during Shakespeare's time was what second-rate writers did to pass the time. Real artists wrote poetry or essays, not common entertainment for the masses. It was only years later that anyone started to appreciate Shakespeare as anything more than the equivalent of today's TV.
There's also the problem that interactive entertainment, such as games, are more limited in audience. Just as Opera isn't for everyone, games aren't going to be grasped by everyone. People that aren't used to the medium (read: older people who didn't grow up with the medium) are going to have a much harder time understand it and why it has the potential for art.
So, we need some time before we can state this case unequivocally in one way or the other. Being a game developer and not interested in just producing mass entertainment, I'll politely disagree with you for now. ;)
Have fun,
With roughly 250k subscribers, EvE is not one of the largest MMORPGs but certainly economically viable.
You misunderstand the point here. The original EverQuest (EQ1) had a brutal system where you could actually lose a level if you got killed too much. You could also lose all your gear if you didn't get back to the location of your death before the corpse disappeared. EQ1 had a peak of 440k subscribers, beating EVE quite a bit.
Then came along a game where you didn't lose xp, you couldn't lose equipment, and "death" was a few minute run back to your corpse plus a possible repair bill later. If you wanted to pay a more in repair, you didn't even have to run back to your corpse. That game has about 2,000,000+ subscribers in North America alone (and many more millions worldwide). Perhaps you've heard of this game: World of Warcraft. Death penalties are just one example where WoW made it impossible to really "lose". Add death penalties into WoW and it loses one big element people point at to show that the game is superior to others.
So, the point isn't that you can't possibly make a game that has a significant chance of loss for the players. The original EQ is still kicking. The point is that when a developer/publisher takes a look at design and then consider the subscription business model where "more people = more money", they're going to take the path that results in more possible players *every* time. Having that chance to lose big means that people eventually lose big, get pissed off, and quit your game. Worse, they'll probably bitch about it on a public forum and scare away other potential subscribers.
So, why does EVE have significant loss? It appeals to the current rabid playerbase that feel the need to post about EVE in every story that mentions MMOs. :P CCP also had an interesting situation where they didn't have to maximize revenue immediately. Note that EVE was originally considered a commercial failure, particularly for the publisher that originally put boxes in the stores. This would spell the death of most game companies. CCP was able to weather that (due to government funds, as I remember), and EVE was able to grow to it's current position over a long time. A publisher that invested heavily into a game today wouldn't put up with that BS; that's why the grandparent added the word "publishers" to that line. (Really, most developers like lots of money, too, which is why I don't think that addition is necessary.)
Anyway, this isn't to say that I don't agree with your assessment about the possible pros of serious loss; it's one of the things I still like about M59 because the victories and losses have serious consequences in the game But, people who want to make the big bucks are going to pick the design that gives them the most profit.
I think it takes away from the adventuring draw of the game....
I disagree. I think it adds to adventuring because it gives you multiple goals. Not only are you trying to maximize your current level of power, but you're also need to consider long-term effects for developing your family. It adds another level to the gameplay. Plus, it allows you to play alts without feeling like you're "wasting time" because all your characters can work to achieve common goals.
As with anything, of course, it can fall victim to poor implementation. And, if you do try it and don't like the system, I suspect there will be tons of other games that will offer you the tried-and-true adventure draw you prefer. ;)
Have fun,
I'm a professional MMO developer. This idea isn't new, but the word "permadeath" sends most MMO players into a frothing frenzy. I think it would be interesting to do in a game.
I previously wrote up a concept similar to this where players would manage a family on my professional blog at http://www.psychochild.org/?p=198. I also had the concept of expansions "fast forwarding" the timeline and advancing the story; this allows the story and world to change based on player actions without having some of the problems associated with a fully dyanmic, persistent world. I'd like to do it someday. :)
Some thoughts,
I usually don't post that as a title, but the parent post should be modded up. I'm also a professional MMO developer, not posting as an AC. The whole "players want 'entertainment'" bit is something I'm filing away to explain to other people.
The poster is also exactly right about the whole "hero" thing. Most people have a tremendous capacity for self-delusion. Even if I have to stand in line behind all my friends to release Sharpbeak, the game is still rewarding me for a specific "heroic" action. Or, think of it this way: if you rescued a little girl from a burning building, would everyone say, "Big deal, thousands of people have saved thousands of victims from burning buildings before." The fact that the world goes back to a steady state in an MMO doesn't mean your actions are any less heroic. They're just not unique, and people are fine with that. And, especially with things like instancing, you don't even have to compete with other groups to accomplish your heroic goals.
From the grandparent post:
"MMORPG are afraid to have people lose."
The parent poster is right, this is because people hate to lose. There's a thread about permadeath in another part of this discussion. Know why permadeath is never done? Because it's the *players* that scream loudest when this is brought up. They don't want to contemplate the thought of losing their hard-earned character, even if the game isn't designed like that. Most games are designed to have people invest a lot into a character. If someone tries to go against that particular bit of groupthink, then they're accused of "hating the players" or "caring more about experiments than fun".
The real reason why we see people clone DIKU MUDs/EQ/WoW is because the players are demanding that we make more of the same. There are some interesting alternative games out there, including Meridian 59 which I own, but people pass them by. M59 is a brutal PvP-focused game where you can lose just about everything you've worked for, and then some. And, because of that, it has a lot of trouble attracting and retaining players. The reality is that nobody is going to drop even $10 million (let alone the $50 million WoW cost) to build a game if nobody will play the game that cost a few hundred thousand to build. So, we keep seeing the same games that don't take risks and don't let players lose all they've worked for.
Anyone willing to invest in something different can contact me through my blog at http://www.psychochild.org/. I won't hold my breath. ;)
Some insight from another MMO developer,
Not sure this will help me, though. One bill collector with an obviously wrong number robo-calls my home number. Part of their canned speech is, "If this is not you, hang up now...." Yeah, but when the answering machine catches it (which it does for all alls to my landline), it can't actually hang up, can it? So, we kept on getting calls because I wasn't always quick enough to catch the call even I did hear the answering machine.
Hopefully there will be another way to opt out besides that stupidity.
The first step is to inform the people who have a stake in the outcome; that would be the gamers. Yeah, my pseudonym isn't going to convince any grey-haired politicians not to try to pass unconstitutional laws, but I figure the likelihood of me being called in front of a Senate committee vanishingly small. But, it may cause some people who still need to be informed to pay attention because they may remember my pseudonym and know I'm not just some random teenager mentally masturbating in a Slashdot comment. :)
My point about Manga is that the U.S. industry stagnated while the Japanese industry flourished. Manga is popular now, but mostly because the Japanese industry had so long to develop while the U.S. industry was limited to silly (male) teenage power fantasies as the primary source of stories. The Japanese industry was able to explore a lot of "forbidden" topics and their industry is much richer for that advantage. That's why Manga is such a dominant force.
Finally, how do we attain legitimacy? Lots of ways. The guaranteed way is to wait for all the old people that fear the new medium to die off; once we get a majority of politicians who grew up playing games then we won't have to worry so much. Another way is for game developers to take a more mature approach to the industry and create games for adults that don't rely on silly hyperviolence and/or cheap sexual titillation.
Have fun,
I am also an MMO developer, but I disagree: people still do trust the client on occasion. It's usually for one of three reasons:
1) Newbie developer mistake, and they didn't think to ask an experienced developer.
2) Those times when trusting the client makes sense (benefits outweigh negatives).
3) A buggy check on the server-side.
I will agree that developers are better about it now than back in the bad old days. The game I own and administrate, Meridian 59 (a one-time "dead" game that lives again) had an amusing situation where the "Hold" spell was just a command sent to the victim's client to disallow input. Yeah, that taught the original development team a quick lesson. More recently, there was a dupe bug where people hacked the client to offer the same object twice in the secure trading window, creating lovely dupes. After figuring out the problem, I put a check in (but didn't actually prevent the cheat for a few days, heh heh) and then banned people who abused the bug. The funny part is this bug was probably in the game since launch, but it took about a decade for a player to figure it out.
My thoughts,
It's one of those few times I wish I had mod points and could award multiple to an insightfully humorous post. :)
Last I checked, every magazine didn't have to have a government mandated approval that it does not contain pornography.
That's the problem with any of these laws that are declared unconstitutional, they don't try to restrict exposing minors to the "bad stuff", they require a whole medium to get government-mandated approval. Not getting approval means not able to be sold.
As an administrator of a small-scale non-pornographic internet-based game with offices outside the state of New York, I think it's silly to require me to submit to a rating board before I can offer my game in New York. Especially since it's been shown repeatedly that video games enjoy First Amendment protection on free speech.
It's really as simple as that. But, politicians score brownie points for trying to "protect the children" by passing these bad laws that waste taxpayer money, so it keeps happening.
This is an issue called legitimacy. Basically, books are legitimate works of art, but computer games are not (yet).
Part of the problem is the same thing we've seen with comic books back when the CCA is formed: people are finding material that is obviously not for kids in a medium they automatically assume is for kids. Video games are considered a childish pursuit despite gamers' average age being 33. So, GTA4 is bad because it's a video game and obviously intended for little Billy to play. American Psycho is a violent book, but we know that we shouldn't ban books just because kids could get their hands on them. Note that older media is more respected, in general, so we rate movies but not plays, etc.
If you want to see possible futures for video games in the U.S., take a look at previous "harmful" media like comics and rock 'n' roll music. If the goverment continues to attempt to clamp down on it and eventually succeed (with laws or self-censorship), we'll see the American industry retard itself and fall behind while another country becomes dominant (hello, manga!) If the goverment accepts that video games have artistic value, the American industry will flourish and become a global force. Guess which one works out better for the U.S. in the long run?
And, yeah, I'm a computer game developer. :) So this topic has extra meaning to me.
When I was working at 3DO, we got back some songs from an outside shop for a game I was working on at the time. (It was a Might & Magic game that helped kill that franchise, sadly. The project was a trainwreck no matter how you slice it.)
The Director (the lead creative type) was a huge prankster. We had both worked on the Meridian 59 team before this project, so we were on good terms. He loaned me the soundtrack from The Matrix since it had just come out.
So, he sends out an email that they got back some songs, so if anyone wants to take a listen go ahead. I went and listen to the songs, and every single one of them was a synthesizer instrumental version or variation of "Rock is Dead" by Marilyn Manson (which is on the soundtrack I borrowed). Now, I thought this was a really elaborate practical joke, so I went to get a good laugh with him. The blank look on his face when I said, "Good joke, man," had me worried. So, I go load up the CD and the new music file and play them for him. He simply could not believe it, even after listening to it.
Basically, the outsourced music company had given the project to someone who slacked off and just handed in some BS. Well, that was their story, at least.
In the end, I ended up saving 3DO from a pretty major copyright infringement lawsuit; you know how friendly those RIAA people are about things like this. But, it didn't matter: the game still sucked horribly and I'm still ashamed to have worked on it.
Ah, good times, good times.
I'm a professional game developer. I often tell people, "I tell my mother I'm a meth dealer instead of a game developer so that she'll have at least a bit of respect for me."
Sadly, that's not too far off the mark.
The one upside is that if you stick with it long enough, you can become a veteran of this industry much faster than in others. I've "only" been developing games professionally for about 10 years now, but I am one of the most experienced people, particularly in online game development. I'm no Richard Bartle or Jessica Mulligan, but my experience has allowed me to land some pretty nice consulting and contracting gigs.
It is possible to make good money in the game industry, but there's an attitude that you have to "pay your dues" before you get any real respect or authority by others in the industry. As someone else mentioned in this thread, the winners are often the people who go on to start their own companies and maintain some level of control. Working as a wage slave sucks in this industry, so either you have to be the top of your field in an industry full of scary-smart people, or you have to be the one calling the shots and not beholden to many other people. But, once you get to the point where you have respect and/or authority, it can be a really awesome job.
Really, it's like any other creative field. For every superstar, like J.K. Rowling for book authors, there are thousands of people languishing in obscurity and doing grunt jobs to keep the bills paid. Some of these people may even produce better work than the superstars, but part of standing out from the crowd is just dumb luck. You really have to love the art or you'll just get chewed up and spit out with hundreds of people eager to try to take your place. Unfortunately, in most of these industries the people in control of the finances realize the leverage they have over new entrants to the field and take advantage of them.
Sure thing on the quoting. If you are interested in discussing things outside of Slashdot, feel free to contact me at the email address above. (It uses Slashdot's obscuring process, so decipher it properly. :) I've helped edit a book and develop games professionally, so I'm interested in a fair system of IP laws that helps the little guy, too. Neither extreme (eternal copyrights or banishing them entirely) really helps.
Have fun!
That I don't understand, and would appreciate some clarity. How does longevity side with the copyrights of the original artist versus the public? What come to mind for me is the infrastructure for media distribution in the time of the Statute of Anne. 14 years at that time was considered plenty of time for a long time after to make a profit. Today, the avenues for product distribution are much greater in terms of both speed and control. This tells me that it would be both reasonable and necessary to make the term shorter.
Not really. While I can email a draft to a publisher faster than you could send a messenger to deliver one in ye olde tymes, that doesn't meant that the business side moves any faster. An editor can't necessarily read faster these days. Decisions to publish a book don't necessarily happen faster. Truckloads of books still take time to haul across long distances. Even if you distribute PDFs online, you may want to set up some system to take money people want to give you; systems where money exchanges are involved are by default non-trivial. So, faster and better distribution doesn't take a significant amount of time off the previously required time.
I do agree that the current apparent goal of "infinity minus one day" of copyrights is counter-productive, but I think too short a period will hurt the people that provide us with the wonderful cultural experiences that can be copyrighted. My main concern if the period is too short is that large companies will prefer to let copyrights run out instead of buying works from content creators. Last thing we need is to change the system to give even more benefits to the huge corporations.
One of the real strengths of Asheron's Call was that the developers have added regular content patches. Their goal was about once per month, so a patch every 5 weeks is about on target.
Because of this rather aggressive content patching schedule, AC is one of the more dynamic games on the market. The game has changed significantly over the years. Unfortunately, for some people that's not a good thing. But, some people regularly complain about the "static" nature of other games. AC has shown that a quality development team can produce regular content updates over a very long period of time.
Too bad AC2 got such a negative reception. On the other hand, it looks like Turbine learned from AC's constant patching and have been able to add content to their new games on a regular basis. From most reports I've heard, LotRO is a significantly improved game after a year of updates. Not quote one update per month, but still pretty impressive. I wish more games would do significant content updates to keep the game truly dynamic, but I know first-hand how hard that can be on some systems.
Some thoughts from a professional online game developer.
The wonderful thing about D&D, for me, is that you can adjust the rules to match your needs. Everybody I know has house rules on how to handle special cases, or what to ignore in order to make things run a bit smoother or how the group expects. Every group has a few "house rules" that make their particular games special.
Personally, I would rather have seen the alignments expand so that you could be Goodish/Evilish/Lawfulish/Chaoticish.
In our D&D games, we already have "goodish", etc. We just said you were "Lawful neutral (with good tendencies)" or "Neutral Good (with Lawful tendencies)" or whatever. Your "official" alignment om the first example was LN for spells, etc., but your decision making was usually tinged with what the alignment system considered "good" behaviors. It allowed for a bit more subtlety without completely throwing out the system.
The sad part about removing CG and LE is that these are, for me, some of the most interesting alignments to play. I like CG because I think that is the most heroic option: the ability to do good for people without having to be bound by rules that stop it. On the flip side, LE is fascinating. One of my favorite characters was LE; he believed that evil was going to take over and he wanted to be on top when the time came. A good role-playing challenge for me, since I don't fit that alignment at all, IMHO.
Anyway, we'll see how 4th addition goes. I'm a bit worried that with the online service that it'll be too restrictive and not allow a lot of house rules. At that point, if I'm playing someone else's rules and having to pay (subscribe?) for it, I might as well be playing an MMO instead of D&Ding with my friends.
My thoughts,
As a game developer, I have an alternate solution: buy the game and steal the gas. Game developers, especially the indies, need the money more than the gasoline companies. :P
You can also get a gun, buy hookers, and shoot at cops in real life.
There are some things better done in the privacy of your own home with a console/computer.
In the end, college is what you make of it. You can go to a great school and learn nothing, you can go to a terrible school and learn a lot if you really apply yourself. The important part is that you take your learning seriously and seek out your own opportunities.
:)
As others have mentioned, eventually the school you attended will be meaningless. In the tech field, it doesn't matter is you graduated from a very top school if you don't keep your skills current. Getting a good internship at college will help you more than just about anything else in your career at the university. I didn't do an internship and I remember having a hard time finding a good company that would hire me, even during a tech boom.
In the end, it's most important to consider what your goals are. For example, I was glad that the CS department at my alma mater was under the college of Liberal Arts & Sciences. I got a well-rounded degree (and also got a degree in Spanish by sharing a lot of requirements). I'm now a professional game developer, and the well-rounded education helped me start my own business while being able to program a game server, write game design documents, and give presentations at conferences. However, someone could just as easily have focused almost entirely on the technical aspects and excel at just that narrow field. I'm happy where I am, though.
Some thoughts from someone who distantly remembers what it was like to be so young. (Ow, my hip....)
No problem. As I said, I happen to own the game now, so I have an excuse to be more aware of history. :)
:)
However, M59 was still the first online RPG "on a wide scale" because it was available for sale as a box in retail outlets. Most other games before M59 were tied to proprietary networks like AOL, GEnie, etc. and were not sold at retail. UO was a larger game than M59 at peak; however, EQ and WoW are larger than UO was, but this doesn't invalidate UO's influence. M59's biggest problems were that it had terrible advertising back in the day; 3DO had no idea how to advertise the thing.
Some more history.
True, but Blizzard also makes more money off of subscriptions, so they can afford to add "free" content easier. If I run a game that has 200,000 subscribers (I wish...) and Blizzard has 2,000,000 subscribers (approximate North American subscriptions for Blizzard, but also for the sake of easy math), then Blizzard is making 1000x more income. To the individual players, however, they are paying the same amount of money. My game will have to find extra money from some source in order to provide more content; that money comes from expansion packs. And, as someone pointed out, it does take money to keep the service going. You'll notice that a game like Guild Wars doesn't charge a subscription fee, but they put out a lot of expansion packs to keep the income coming in.
Keep in mind that this difference in playerbases doesn't necessarily mean that one game is 'better' than the other. More people have seen (and probably bought copies of) Titanic than Blade Runner, but that doesn't mean that Titanic is a better movie; if you think it does, then you're on the wrong site and probably should go to a currently more popular site.
Poor, forgotten Meridian 59 .
:) But, it did bridge the gap between text MUDs and modern graphical games more than UO did. M59 also set the standard for the monthly subscription model; of course, it got that from AOL going to that business model a bit before M59's launch.
Okay, so I mostly remember it because I now own it.
And, actually, there was quite a row at a developer's conference when they advertised Richard Garriott as the "grandfather" of online games. Mark Jacobs, a person who has been releasing online games for quite a while before UO came out, was upset that many other people (besides himself) were being overlooked.
A bit of history for you whipper-snappers. Sadly, the computer game industry is pretty terrible at recording and sharing our history.