and lots of it, but the thing is that ppl (gamers at the very least) dont stayed awed by ANYTHING for very long, certainly not some cheesy violence.
When I bought SoF2, and started chopping open someone's head, I felt vaguely nauseous. 30min later I was dismembering without any compunction at all.
The same goes for Postal2, it has heaps of (novel) violence on Mon and Tue, but by then you'll have tapped *everything* and it gets boring. Any game which relies upon 1 aspect such as mediocre as violence and gore will not be well received since gamers are primarily after a cerebral experience.
We want be constantly thinking, even if its as simple a thought as "How do I kill all of these guys in the next room?".
Take Tetris, Minesweeper, "that Snake game", Chess, Go etc... all rely on 1 idea and all are still fun for a quick play. It's because your brain and not your reflexes are doing the work (although speed does come into it, but that means you have to think fast).
So no amount of violence could have made Postal2 fun. My most fun moment was when I poured petrol around a group of protestors and in a diagonal line through the middle, ensuring their destruction. I liked it not because they burnt etc, i liked it because I had checkmated all of them at once.
Lets say 0.0001% of ppl are freed from the matrix:
on
Matrix MMORPG
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Then out of the ~10000 ppl who buy subscriptions, only ONE will get cool kungfu powers and everyone else gets to play a game which is every bit as mundane as real life in the '90s! I bags being Mr. Anderson before Trinity finds him!
Incidentally, there won't be bullet time clashes either. =P
I was reading through these posts to see if someone else had slapped him down for his unrigorous logic. I'm glad to see not everyone else bought into his philosophy. It's not even interesting food for thought, like the matrix was.
I strongly disagree with any argument about what reality is when its based upon probablisitic calculations (esp. his, cos he hasn't made any!)
Very quickly: His argument at its heart is based upon Brandon Carters' Doomsday Theory (independantly thought of by Richard Gott). John Leslie published lots on it. Google it.
He misapplies risk analysis, simply: (Probablity of x) X ("Magnitude" of x) = ("Value" of x). He just uses P(x). Using the 'real' risk formula I disprove his conclusion (very quickly without all the rigour that should be mustered for a proper analysis...rather like his paper I guess =0).
Given that the idea that we are being simulated is extremely common and old (the oldest argument involved a demon etc... I believe) it seems reasonable that the original humans thought his argument up. If they did as he suggests and live only for today, then the likelihood of his future arising has decreasing probablity and one in which humanity faces disaster has increasing probablity (the last isn't a rigorous statement, but then again I'm not writing a paper from Oxford and I have to go to work soon! It should just be (not simulation future)). This calamity which has a large probability in that scenario also will have a large impact on humanity (say...non-existance for arguments sake with finite magnitude). One might then claim this has a large risk value. This is a bad thing =P. To decrease the risk of a nasty future we should act as though this isn't a simulation, this is the original humanity.
It's surprising that Oxford philosophers haven't figured out what the rest of humankind has: In any scenario where you are not sure of reality the only RATIONAL thing to do is assume that it is real, and go on about your life. I inlcude them all in my "insult" since they gave the guy a degree or a postdoc (I can't be bothered checking). Time for him to go and do some Epistomology 101.
I recently attended a seminar by a distinguished academic on useability and frustration in computer programs, who also works in the industry. (Name withheld)
He noted at some point that videogames moved fast in their evolution of control systems, then he said something like videogames cause violence in "real life". -Nothing to special here is there...
He then said that "If there weren't computer games there wouldn't be child pornography".
OK, the black holes (BH) produced would be tiny, well smaller than an atom.
The only way they can be made at this energy (1TeV) is if there are extra spatial dimensions which are very small, at least sub mm.
Gravity ~1/r^2 doesn't hold in this regime, it'll be something like 1/r^(n+2) where you have n extra staial dimensions.
We have no idea whether they'll be meta-stable and last "forever" (but be so small we won't worry about them cos the earth is likely to have already attracted a few), or meta-unstable and "immediately" decay into normal particles.
look at arxiv.org and search for "semi classical black holes" in hep-th and gr-qc if you want to know more. SLAC is another good resource.
The moral of the story is, these black holes are almost certainly likely to be harmless, and if there are extra dimensional aliens/demons they will be too busy worrying about being eaten by bacteria and other microbes too much to star in popular computer games =).
You can't click on "dir", there is no mouse (just like theres no spoon or any other cutlery in the matrix).
You can move a "cursor" with arrow keys over to dir but this is clunky and slow. On the xbox etc... its a time saver, on the PC its faster to type.
And theh interface is worse thhan DOS because you can't change directory, and you have to type in the full path when using an.exe for the first time.
They tried to make it realistic, and in doing so made it unfun, but they didnt make it realistic enough to be useable.
That moderation is a shame, cos I think that was quite clever. Do you think one of the powers the monsters can get will be "No sense of humour!"?
Anyways, anyone seen a price tag? I'd quite like to know how much games are "really" worth when you take the big name publishers out of the equation.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that Sam has 3 green lights on his forehead and a big green light on his back?
Situation: Sam hides in the shadows watching a guard...
Guard:"I thought I saw a guy running around and making noise but now all i see is 3 bright green lights in a dark corner that follow me around the room...musta been rats I guess"
IMO games need a lead criticiser (LC), someone who has played hundreds of games and then works with the game from the design document right thru to publishing and sharply raps with a claw hammer all those stupid ideas that somehow make their way into games, and should have veto on release.
Granted, not many games need this guy and I can think of a string of them just released which are great: GunMetal, Enclave, Red Faction2...
And then theres the other sort of games: Enter the Matrix and Wolverine etc, recently. A LC was needed to point out that in their current state, the games are a detriment to the franchise, not an asset. I'm not sure that the game publishers are getting this fact. Yes, I know these games were under the gun to be released with the movies, but "simple" things like controls systems being bodgy ruined them.
The LC needs to draw upon a vast knowledge of whats worked before and what hasn't and extrapolate correctly forward. They need to be smart enough to figure out what it is people (the market) expect for the next title in terms of quality and quantity. They need to know what the balance is between speed, quality and cost is that will satisfy the market, and convince the publisher and dev team of this.
Luckily for us, most of the time a dedicated LC is superflous, but something is going wrong that the beta testers arent "fixing", and i suspect thats because the problem lies in the early stages of development. An alternative title for LC is "design document beta reader" =)
...buy this game for the PC. Its quite awful in its current state. 3 patches in 3 days is telling you something about the state of development its in. Its a beta release, period. A quick review follws:
The fighting is AWESOME, motion capture has been put to very good use, and its always fun, fast and fluid. Running, dodges etc are also very cool.
Shooting is atrocious! Both in 3rd and 1st person, there can only be a few more painful games, with non-linear acceleration of the mouse and discretisation of movement.
Driving is worse. The physics is crap, and the AI worse (esp. for Niobe who insists on crashing into all those nasty stationary things like buildings. She CAN hit the broad side of a barn!)
The game has many "features" such as floating objects (this is the matrix after all) and invisible walls etc...
The movies are divx5, but encoded poorly (everyone I know does a better job). The acting is crap, the dialogue stilted, the camera work boring. This is not the matrix ppl. Nor does it have ANY of the qualities of the films. The special effects are non-existant. When humans leave the matrix via hardline, instead of fading out like in the movies, the picture goes black for a second, and then brightens again: voila, the person has gone! These are special effects bought from the $2 shop.
It was hard to follow the point of the campaign (ive only beaten it as ghost so far tho), and the frequent cutscenes don't really string it together. I've guessed whats going on in the game cos I've seen the movie.
Only 4 boss fights? And all beatable on the first attempt?
Crap DX7 graphics. Clipping and texturing problems all over the show. Shadows also buggy. There isn't much that isnt buggy. Low poly count. Lack-lustre textures. Poor, uninspired level design (apart from the chateau of the morovingian).
Several other things that aren't very complimentary. Oh yeah, crappy camera "AI". If it can get it wrong, it will.
Summary: A crap game with cool fighting. Don't buy it for more than US$15. Wait for the mod makers to take all those cool fighting animations and put them into a decent game. And Max Payne does better bullet time.
The flipside of the free accesss for readers is likely to be increased cost to authors, as people still have to be employed to find referees, make websites etc... and the money for that has to come from somewhere.
I look forward to an open acess physics journal to come online. At the moment we have arxiv.org but thats not published material, its a preprint archive (and doesn't count in the ratrace).
Slashdot Mirror
and lots of it, but the thing is that ppl (gamers at the very least) dont stayed awed by ANYTHING for very long, certainly not some cheesy violence. When I bought SoF2, and started chopping open someone's head, I felt vaguely nauseous. 30min later I was dismembering without any compunction at all. The same goes for Postal2, it has heaps of (novel) violence on Mon and Tue, but by then you'll have tapped *everything* and it gets boring. Any game which relies upon 1 aspect such as mediocre as violence and gore will not be well received since gamers are primarily after a cerebral experience. We want be constantly thinking, even if its as simple a thought as "How do I kill all of these guys in the next room?". Take Tetris, Minesweeper, "that Snake game", Chess, Go etc... all rely on 1 idea and all are still fun for a quick play. It's because your brain and not your reflexes are doing the work (although speed does come into it, but that means you have to think fast). So no amount of violence could have made Postal2 fun. My most fun moment was when I poured petrol around a group of protestors and in a diagonal line through the middle, ensuring their destruction. I liked it not because they burnt etc, i liked it because I had checkmated all of them at once.
Then out of the ~10000 ppl who buy subscriptions, only ONE will get cool kungfu powers and everyone else gets to play a game which is every bit as mundane as real life in the '90s! I bags being Mr. Anderson before Trinity finds him! Incidentally, there won't be bullet time clashes either. =P
I was reading through these posts to see if someone else had slapped him down for his unrigorous logic. I'm glad to see not everyone else bought into his philosophy. It's not even interesting food for thought, like the matrix was.
I strongly disagree with any argument about what reality is when its based upon probablisitic calculations (esp. his, cos he hasn't made any!)
Very quickly: His argument at its heart is based upon Brandon Carters' Doomsday Theory (independantly thought of by Richard Gott). John Leslie published lots on it. Google it.
He misapplies risk analysis, simply: (Probablity of x) X ("Magnitude" of x) = ("Value" of x).
He just uses P(x). Using the 'real' risk formula I disprove his conclusion (very quickly without all the rigour that should be mustered for a proper analysis...rather like his paper I guess =0).
Given that the idea that we are being simulated is extremely common and old (the oldest argument involved a demon etc... I believe) it seems reasonable that the original humans thought his argument up. If they did as he suggests and live only for today, then the likelihood of his future arising has decreasing probablity and one in which humanity faces disaster has increasing probablity (the last isn't a rigorous statement, but then again I'm not writing a paper from Oxford and I have to go to work soon! It should just be (not simulation future)). This calamity which has a large probability in that scenario also will have a large impact on humanity (say...non-existance for arguments sake with finite magnitude). One might then claim this has a large risk value. This is a bad thing =P. To decrease the risk of a nasty future we should act as though this isn't a simulation, this is the original humanity.
It's surprising that Oxford philosophers haven't figured out what the rest of humankind has: In any scenario where you are not sure of reality the only RATIONAL thing to do is assume that it is real, and go on about your life. I inlcude them all in my "insult" since they gave the guy a degree or a postdoc (I can't be bothered checking).
Time for him to go and do some Epistomology 101.
He noted at some point that videogames moved fast in their evolution of control systems, then he said something like videogames cause violence in "real life". -Nothing to special here is there...
He then said that "If there weren't computer games there wouldn't be child pornography".
I was as stunned as you probably are now. =0
OK, the black holes (BH) produced would be tiny, well smaller than an atom. The only way they can be made at this energy (1TeV) is if there are extra spatial dimensions which are very small, at least sub mm. Gravity ~1/r^2 doesn't hold in this regime, it'll be something like 1/r^(n+2) where you have n extra staial dimensions. We have no idea whether they'll be meta-stable and last "forever" (but be so small we won't worry about them cos the earth is likely to have already attracted a few), or meta-unstable and "immediately" decay into normal particles. look at arxiv.org and search for "semi classical black holes" in hep-th and gr-qc if you want to know more. SLAC is another good resource. The moral of the story is, these black holes are almost certainly likely to be harmless, and if there are extra dimensional aliens/demons they will be too busy worrying about being eaten by bacteria and other microbes too much to star in popular computer games =).
You can't click on "dir", there is no mouse (just like theres no spoon or any other cutlery in the matrix). You can move a "cursor" with arrow keys over to dir but this is clunky and slow. On the xbox etc... its a time saver, on the PC its faster to type. And theh interface is worse thhan DOS because you can't change directory, and you have to type in the full path when using an .exe for the first time.
They tried to make it realistic, and in doing so made it unfun, but they didnt make it realistic enough to be useable.
That moderation is a shame, cos I think that was quite clever. Do you think one of the powers the monsters can get will be "No sense of humour!"? Anyways, anyone seen a price tag? I'd quite like to know how much games are "really" worth when you take the big name publishers out of the equation.
Situation: Sam hides in the shadows watching a guard...
Guard:"I thought I saw a guy running around and making noise but now all i see is 3 bright green lights in a dark corner that follow me around the room...musta been rats I guess"
IMO games need a lead criticiser (LC), someone who has played hundreds of games and then works with the game from the design document right thru to publishing and sharply raps with a claw hammer all those stupid ideas that somehow make their way into games, and should have veto on release. Granted, not many games need this guy and I can think of a string of them just released which are great: GunMetal, Enclave, Red Faction2... And then theres the other sort of games: Enter the Matrix and Wolverine etc, recently. A LC was needed to point out that in their current state, the games are a detriment to the franchise, not an asset. I'm not sure that the game publishers are getting this fact. Yes, I know these games were under the gun to be released with the movies, but "simple" things like controls systems being bodgy ruined them. The LC needs to draw upon a vast knowledge of whats worked before and what hasn't and extrapolate correctly forward. They need to be smart enough to figure out what it is people (the market) expect for the next title in terms of quality and quantity. They need to know what the balance is between speed, quality and cost is that will satisfy the market, and convince the publisher and dev team of this. Luckily for us, most of the time a dedicated LC is superflous, but something is going wrong that the beta testers arent "fixing", and i suspect thats because the problem lies in the early stages of development. An alternative title for LC is "design document beta reader" =)
...buy this game for the PC. Its quite awful in its current state. 3 patches in 3 days is telling you something about the state of development its in. Its a beta release, period. A quick review follws:
System: ASUS-A7N8X deluxe, AMD2400+, 512M 400MhzDDR, GF4ti4200 etc...
The fighting is AWESOME, motion capture has been put to very good use, and its always fun, fast and fluid.
Running, dodges etc are also very cool.
Shooting is atrocious! Both in 3rd and 1st person, there can only be a few more painful games, with non-linear acceleration of the mouse and discretisation of movement.
Driving is worse. The physics is crap, and the AI worse (esp. for Niobe who insists on crashing into all those nasty stationary things like buildings. She CAN hit the broad side of a barn!)
The game has many "features" such as floating objects (this is the matrix after all) and invisible walls etc...
The movies are divx5, but encoded poorly (everyone I know does a better job). The acting is crap, the dialogue stilted, the camera work boring. This is not the matrix ppl. Nor does it have ANY of the qualities of the films. The special effects are non-existant. When humans leave the matrix via hardline, instead of fading out like in the movies, the picture goes black for a second, and then brightens again: voila, the person has gone! These are special effects bought from the $2 shop.
It was hard to follow the point of the campaign (ive only beaten it as ghost so far tho), and the frequent cutscenes don't really string it together. I've guessed whats going on in the game cos I've seen the movie.
Only 4 boss fights? And all beatable on the first attempt?
Crap DX7 graphics. Clipping and texturing problems all over the show. Shadows also buggy. There isn't much that isnt buggy. Low poly count. Lack-lustre textures. Poor, uninspired level design (apart from the chateau of the morovingian).
Several other things that aren't very complimentary. Oh yeah, crappy camera "AI". If it can get it wrong, it will.
Summary: A crap game with cool fighting. Don't buy it for more than US$15. Wait for the mod makers to take all those cool fighting animations and put them into a decent game. And Max Payne does better bullet time.
The flipside of the free accesss for readers is likely to be increased cost to authors, as people still have to be employed to find referees, make websites etc... and the money for that has to come from somewhere. I look forward to an open acess physics journal to come online. At the moment we have arxiv.org but thats not published material, its a preprint archive (and doesn't count in the ratrace).