Torment does right what so many other games do wrong when it comes to story. Cutscenes (or its precursor, story in a seperate manual) don't do it for me, because it seperates story from gameplay. I want story to be the game.
Perhaps what I'm looking for is not storytelling, which implies a passive audience, but storyexperiencing. I want to be part of it, and only a few games (including Torment and Star Control 2) got that right. With most other games, the story is just too much removed from the gameplay that I just don't care.
I think skipping Apple is more like failing to mention Buddhism or Christianity. It's got to be one of the biggest and most successful cults out there.
Programming language Ruby and its younger, sleeker sibling, Ruby on Rails
I stopped reading after this.
I stopped reading after that page. As a serious Ruby programmer, I don't recognise much in that description. I've certainly never heard of MINSWAN. I thought DRY was the main credo of the Ruby community. (Or is that the Rails community? I'm not cultish enough to tell them apart.)
That's an artificial and self-serving definition. Most religions, at one point or another, have had "secret" or esoteric status/doctrines/dogma/teachings/etc. The Christian church was, by neccessity, VERY secretive in its early years (adopting esoteric symbols like the fish in order to recognize one another while avoiding Roman scrutiny). Even "The Book of Acts" speaks of secret meetings held by the earliest members.
But that's all about secret membership, due to prosecution. That's very different from secret doctine, dogma or teachings. In the early days, many writings weren't very widely published simply because there was no officially recognised body of texts and teachings yet, but after the convention of Nicea, everything has been public. (Technically, at least. The medieval RC church fucked up big time in that department, although lack of printing press was probably nearly as big an obstacvle to laymen as language was.)
Be a King sounds interesting, but confusing. They call it a RTS, but the description makes it sound more like a Sim in the style of Settlers or Caesar or something.
I swear to god, teaching is the only profession where people seemingly earnestly make the argument that improving pay won't improve the pool of job candidates. In every other profession on the planet, people raise the pay to attract higher-quality candidates and use competition for jobs between the candidates to select the best ones from that pool of candidates.
Exactly. Teaching is a highly skilled job. It requires education, responsibility and rare talent. Every other job with those requirements is very well paid, so why not teaching?
Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money.
It could also attract better teachers who do it for the money. In fact, it will simply attract more teachers, and you can be more picky about who you actually put in front of the classroom.
I'm all for firing bad teachers and paying the good ones more.
An interesting comeback.:) But the people who aren't interested in a game are the ones that ignore it. Those who are interested in the game enough to want it comprise the pool of people that buy or pirate it.
Making that a single pool is an error. Not every pirate is a potential legitimate customer. There's a lot of different kinds of illegal downloaders:
People who try before they buy. They download to test if they're interested. If interested, they become customers.
People who have already bought the game, but it doesn't work for some reason, and the cracked version does. (This happens, and it's a really big mistake from game developers, because it pushes honest customers towards piracy.)
People who want the game, but prefer not to pay money for it. This is the group you're talking about. Many of these may be willing to pay money if they can't get it for free.
People who want the game, but not enough to pay money for it. They might pay for the game if it was cheaper, and maybe they pay full price for other games that they consider more valuable. They're not going to pay full price for this game, however. They might give it a try when it hits the bargain bin.
People who want a game for free, and if it's not this game, they'll just get another one. This group is not going to pay for any game as long as there are any games availlable for free.
Collectors. They download it just because they can. They might not even play the game, they just want to feel good about having gotten as much as possible for nothing.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some. In any case, there's a lot of different reasons for downloading, and not every download represents a lost sale. Only the third and maybe fourth category represent lost sales.
And the group that buy it has a fairly small overlap with the group that pirate it
Actually, a recent survey found that the people who download the most (games, music, movies), also spend the most money on games, music and movies. So many pirates are at the same time paying customers. Very well paying customers. Of course there are also a lot of freeloaders, but they're definitely not the only category of downloaders.
At any rate, if you check what I actually wrote, I said "stealing a game instead of paying for it." My line of reasoning is safe from comparisons with people who ignore a game.:)
It is. I'm just pointing out that your line of reasoning, while valid and relevant for some cases, is not so relevant for many other cases of illegal downloading.
Perhaps you can provide us with an example of someone getting sued by the RIAA for *theft* of a song. Just one example -- pick anything. Let us know when you've found it; but I'm not holding my breath.
Exactly. And the fact that it's the RIAA that does the suing rather than the state should also be a big hint that it's a different thing.
If you are really truly that utterly convinced that property right to a physical object is exactly the same as a monopoly on the right to copy information, and unwilling to look up the actual laws on that subject in whatever fucked up country you happen to live in, then I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you.
(Other than ridicule you, but you're doing a fine enough job of that yourself.)
Won't something like Metcalfe's law also apply to games. The more people that play the game the higher the worth of the game. So while losing customers to pirated versions is bad (but I'd argue not too common and entirely unstoppable by DRM), gaining non-customers to pirated versions is actually good (not very good as you don't get any money) as it adds value to your game.
And not just for games. Microsoft once admitted that they prefer people pirating Windows over them switching to Linux.
"There is never a legitimate justification for breaking/ignoring laws,"
Civle disobediance is a perfectly legitmate way to protest your government.
Exactly. Civil disobedience is an important tool for the public in order to force a restrictive society to change. History has many famous examples: the Boston Tea Party, Ghandi, Rosa Parks, you name it. I don't think fighting copyright is as worthy as some of those causes, but the owners of The Pirate Bay certainly seem to think it's a cause worth going to jail for.
You just implied it was OK and are now using your little escape hatch to back off your implied position.
It's impossible for you to back up this statement, but I'd love to see you try.
His monopoly to that information is a legal right, which you are violating.
Exactly. It's a right granted by law, and that right is a right to reproduction, not one of property. As such, it's not theft. It's a violation of copyright (which is a far more recent right than that of property).
You know, just like all the other legal granted rights you whine about being broken, such as a non-existent right to privacy in regards to information posted on the internet.
You're good at making stuff up, aren't you?
In other words, you are not just a shitbag, you are a cowardly shitbag who has no conviction in his words.
At least I've got facts on my side, unlike you.
You would make a good politician.
And you'd make a really bad one. No knowledge of facts or law, twisting words, making up irrelevant stuff, and flailing about blindly in any discussion.
Isn't the important aspect whether or not it results in financial harm to the person producing the product? In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
By that line of reasoning, there's also no difference between stealing a game and ignoring a game.
I never said it's okay. I'm just saying it's not theft. By making use of information, you're not denying it to the original owner. You're just violating his monopoly to that information.
Or to put it in words you understand: you don't know shit.
I realise I'm nearly a week late, but I noticed some mistakes in your post (although they in no way diminish the excellent point you're making):
AH's Civilization took all day, and when they came out with Advanced Civ, that pushed the playing time out to 2 days.
Really? In my experience, Advanced Civ is actually slightly faster to play than the original Civ. And there's more variety. It's pretty much an improvement on all points, but it still takes most of a day.
Then there was Squad Leader-- the rule book is 60 full sized pages, small print.
Why not mention Advanced Squad Leader, which comes in a binder with 200 pages, with more pages added by pretty much every expansion?
That has to be the most extreme game - rules wise - out there. Although Empires in Arms with its 200 hour grand campaign ranks pretty high up there too.
Yes, "hardcore" games are not likely to disappear completely. However, they are likely to get even more expensive.
Not more so than they already are. In fact, there's plenty of room for some to get cheaper.
Creating a game is expensive.
Correction: creating a game can be expensive. If you invest in lots of eye candy, for example. A lot of games are really over-produced and don't provide what the market is actually looking for. (Crysis, I'm looking at you.) But smart companies that know what gamers want, can make highly profitable games on a very decent budget. Stardock is only the most famous recent example, but there are others.
If you are creating a game that you already know is only going to appeal to a niche market then the only chance you have of making a profit is to price the game higher.
This is totally wrong. Your only chance is to nail that niche perfectly at the price that niche is willing to pay. Sometimes that means a game with little or no graphics at all for $10, sometimes it means a big, highly detailed wargame for $80.
Sure, casual games are going to face a lot more competition. However, casual games also tend to be less expensive to make and they have far larger potential audiences. In an industry that relies on hits to make a living it is going to be hard to ignore the casual gamer.
But that means you have to stand out in a much larger crowd. A hit is easier to make in a smaller market. Oh hell, it all just depends on how saturated the market is, whether you're making what that market wants, and how much it costs to make that.
The only way one type of game is less risky and more profitable than another is when one market is less saturated than another.
It's also not a universal truth in any way that casual games are cheaper to develop than hardcore games. There's still lots of quality strategy games that are developed by tiny teams. Sure, their market is smaller than that of casual games, but as long as there's a market at all, somebody will be making those games.
While it's true that electronic gaming has absolutely eclipsed more traditional methods of hard-core gaming, they haven't been killed entirely. In fact, I would wager that they're nearly as popular as they've ever been,
Nearly? Boardgames are more popular than ever. It's big business, and the really big hits turn their designers into millionaires. Sure, computer gaming may be even bigger than that, but that doesn't stop board gaming from being bloody big too.
I disregard all "death of gaming" stories as cheap sensationalism with no basis in reality. We're living in the golden age of gaming, and it's all still going up.
So some moron can make a completely idiotic post and just add "Go ahead burn my karma" and that suddenly makes it insightful? I mean, read the post without that last sentence. How is "God damn fuck" insightful?
I should just start adding "I know I'll be modded down for this, but . .." to all my posts and then they'll be modded up to 5, no matter how imbecilic they are.
That is exactly how the modding system works. Voice your expectation that you'll be modded down (implying that it'd be unfair if that happened), and everybody will try to compensate you for that injustice in advance.
Personally, I just try to meet those expectations when I get mod points, but apparently I'm a minority.
I wouldn't place the word "respect" in the same paragraph as him. This scale of abuse of power doesn't occur by accident.
You can still respect the skill of an evil mastermind who pulls something like this off. I definitely think his reputation for being evil in his business dealings is deserved, but I respect the skill and ruthlessness with which he did it. Or maybe "acknowledge" is indeed a better word.
Slashdot Mirror
Torment does right what so many other games do wrong when it comes to story. Cutscenes (or its precursor, story in a seperate manual) don't do it for me, because it seperates story from gameplay. I want story to be the game.
Perhaps what I'm looking for is not storytelling, which implies a passive audience, but storyexperiencing. I want to be part of it, and only a few games (including Torment and Star Control 2) got that right. With most other games, the story is just too much removed from the gameplay that I just don't care.
I think skipping Apple is more like failing to mention Buddhism or Christianity. It's got to be one of the biggest and most successful cults out there.
I stopped reading after this.
I stopped reading after that page. As a serious Ruby programmer, I don't recognise much in that description. I've certainly never heard of MINSWAN. I thought DRY was the main credo of the Ruby community. (Or is that the Rails community? I'm not cultish enough to tell them apart.)
That's an artificial and self-serving definition. Most religions, at one point or another, have had "secret" or esoteric status/doctrines/dogma/teachings/etc. The Christian church was, by neccessity, VERY secretive in its early years (adopting esoteric symbols like the fish in order to recognize one another while avoiding Roman scrutiny). Even "The Book of Acts" speaks of secret meetings held by the earliest members.
But that's all about secret membership, due to prosecution. That's very different from secret doctine, dogma or teachings. In the early days, many writings weren't very widely published simply because there was no officially recognised body of texts and teachings yet, but after the convention of Nicea, everything has been public. (Technically, at least. The medieval RC church fucked up big time in that department, although lack of printing press was probably nearly as big an obstacvle to laymen as language was.)
Be a King sounds interesting, but confusing. They call it a RTS, but the description makes it sound more like a Sim in the style of Settlers or Caesar or something.
When I hear RTS, I think Dune2 rip-off.
I swear to god, teaching is the only profession where people seemingly earnestly make the argument that improving pay won't improve the pool of job candidates. In every other profession on the planet, people raise the pay to attract higher-quality candidates and use competition for jobs between the candidates to select the best ones from that pool of candidates.
Exactly. Teaching is a highly skilled job. It requires education, responsibility and rare talent. Every other job with those requirements is very well paid, so why not teaching?
Raising teacher pay could attract worse teachers that do it for the money.
It could also attract better teachers who do it for the money. In fact, it will simply attract more teachers, and you can be more picky about who you actually put in front of the classroom.
I'm all for firing bad teachers and paying the good ones more.
An interesting comeback. :) But the people who aren't interested in a game are the ones that ignore it. Those who are interested in the game enough to want it comprise the pool of people that buy or pirate it.
Making that a single pool is an error. Not every pirate is a potential legitimate customer. There's a lot of different kinds of illegal downloaders:
People who have already bought the game, but it doesn't work for some reason, and the cracked version does. (This happens, and it's a really big mistake from game developers, because it pushes honest customers towards piracy.)
People who want the game, but prefer not to pay money for it. This is the group you're talking about. Many of these may be willing to pay money if they can't get it for free.
People who want the game, but not enough to pay money for it. They might pay for the game if it was cheaper, and maybe they pay full price for other games that they consider more valuable. They're not going to pay full price for this game, however. They might give it a try when it hits the bargain bin.
People who want a game for free, and if it's not this game, they'll just get another one. This group is not going to pay for any game as long as there are any games availlable for free.
Collectors. They download it just because they can. They might not even play the game, they just want to feel good about having gotten as much as possible for nothing.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some. In any case, there's a lot of different reasons for downloading, and not every download represents a lost sale. Only the third and maybe fourth category represent lost sales.
And the group that buy it has a fairly small overlap with the group that pirate it
Actually, a recent survey found that the people who download the most (games, music, movies), also spend the most money on games, music and movies. So many pirates are at the same time paying customers. Very well paying customers. Of course there are also a lot of freeloaders, but they're definitely not the only category of downloaders.
At any rate, if you check what I actually wrote, I said "stealing a game instead of paying for it." My line of reasoning is safe from comparisons with people who ignore a game. :)
It is. I'm just pointing out that your line of reasoning, while valid and relevant for some cases, is not so relevant for many other cases of illegal downloading.
How can you be stealing money when no money changes hands? Not all forms of financial damage are automatically theft.
Perhaps you can provide us with an example of someone getting sued by the RIAA for *theft* of a song. Just one example -- pick anything. Let us know when you've found it; but I'm not holding my breath.
Exactly. And the fact that it's the RIAA that does the suing rather than the state should also be a big hint that it's a different thing.
If you are really truly that utterly convinced that property right to a physical object is exactly the same as a monopoly on the right to copy information, and unwilling to look up the actual laws on that subject in whatever fucked up country you happen to live in, then I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you.
(Other than ridicule you, but you're doing a fine enough job of that yourself.)
Won't something like Metcalfe's law also apply to games. The more people that play the game the higher the worth of the game. So while losing customers to pirated versions is bad (but I'd argue not too common and entirely unstoppable by DRM), gaining non-customers to pirated versions is actually good (not very good as you don't get any money) as it adds value to your game.
And not just for games. Microsoft once admitted that they prefer people pirating Windows over them switching to Linux.
Not a thief. Copyright violator.
But thief sounds better. Pirate even more so.
"There is never a legitimate justification for breaking/ignoring laws,"
Civle disobediance is a perfectly legitmate way to protest your government.
Exactly. Civil disobedience is an important tool for the public in order to force a restrictive society to change. History has many famous examples: the Boston Tea Party, Ghandi, Rosa Parks, you name it. I don't think fighting copyright is as worthy as some of those causes, but the owners of The Pirate Bay certainly seem to think it's a cause worth going to jail for.
Try looking up the various laws of the various types of theft and then get back to me.
Do your own homework.
You just implied it was OK and are now using your little escape hatch to back off your implied position.
It's impossible for you to back up this statement, but I'd love to see you try.
His monopoly to that information is a legal right, which you are violating.
Exactly. It's a right granted by law, and that right is a right to reproduction, not one of property. As such, it's not theft. It's a violation of copyright (which is a far more recent right than that of property).
You know, just like all the other legal granted rights you whine about being broken, such as a non-existent right to privacy in regards to information posted on the internet.
You're good at making stuff up, aren't you?
In other words, you are not just a shitbag, you are a cowardly shitbag who has no conviction in his words.
At least I've got facts on my side, unlike you.
You would make a good politician.
And you'd make a really bad one. No knowledge of facts or law, twisting words, making up irrelevant stuff, and flailing about blindly in any discussion.
Isn't the important aspect whether or not it results in financial harm to the person producing the product? In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
By that line of reasoning, there's also no difference between stealing a game and ignoring a game.
I never said it's okay. I'm just saying it's not theft. By making use of information, you're not denying it to the original owner. You're just violating his monopoly to that information.
Or to put it in words you understand: you don't know shit.
There's a difference between physical objects and information.
I realise I'm nearly a week late, but I noticed some mistakes in your post (although they in no way diminish the excellent point you're making):
AH's Civilization took all day, and when they came out with Advanced Civ, that pushed the playing time out to 2 days.
Really? In my experience, Advanced Civ is actually slightly faster to play than the original Civ. And there's more variety. It's pretty much an improvement on all points, but it still takes most of a day.
Then there was Squad Leader-- the rule book is 60 full sized pages, small print.
Why not mention Advanced Squad Leader, which comes in a binder with 200 pages, with more pages added by pretty much every expansion?
That has to be the most extreme game - rules wise - out there. Although Empires in Arms with its 200 hour grand campaign ranks pretty high up there too.
Yes, "hardcore" games are not likely to disappear completely. However, they are likely to get even more expensive.
Not more so than they already are. In fact, there's plenty of room for some to get cheaper.
Creating a game is expensive.
Correction: creating a game can be expensive. If you invest in lots of eye candy, for example. A lot of games are really over-produced and don't provide what the market is actually looking for. (Crysis, I'm looking at you.) But smart companies that know what gamers want, can make highly profitable games on a very decent budget. Stardock is only the most famous recent example, but there are others.
If you are creating a game that you already know is only going to appeal to a niche market then the only chance you have of making a profit is to price the game higher.
This is totally wrong. Your only chance is to nail that niche perfectly at the price that niche is willing to pay. Sometimes that means a game with little or no graphics at all for $10, sometimes it means a big, highly detailed wargame for $80.
Sure, casual games are going to face a lot more competition. However, casual games also tend to be less expensive to make and they have far larger potential audiences. In an industry that relies on hits to make a living it is going to be hard to ignore the casual gamer.
But that means you have to stand out in a much larger crowd. A hit is easier to make in a smaller market. Oh hell, it all just depends on how saturated the market is, whether you're making what that market wants, and how much it costs to make that.
The only way one type of game is less risky and more profitable than another is when one market is less saturated than another.
It's also not a universal truth in any way that casual games are cheaper to develop than hardcore games. There's still lots of quality strategy games that are developed by tiny teams. Sure, their market is smaller than that of casual games, but as long as there's a market at all, somebody will be making those games.
While it's true that electronic gaming has absolutely eclipsed more traditional methods of hard-core gaming, they haven't been killed entirely. In fact, I would wager that they're nearly as popular as they've ever been,
Nearly? Boardgames are more popular than ever. It's big business, and the really big hits turn their designers into millionaires. Sure, computer gaming may be even bigger than that, but that doesn't stop board gaming from being bloody big too.
I disregard all "death of gaming" stories as cheap sensationalism with no basis in reality. We're living in the golden age of gaming, and it's all still going up.
So some moron can make a completely idiotic post and just add "Go ahead burn my karma" and that suddenly makes it insightful? I mean, read the post without that last sentence. How is "God damn fuck" insightful?
I should just start adding "I know I'll be modded down for this, but . . ." to all my posts and then they'll be modded up to 5, no matter how imbecilic they are.
That is exactly how the modding system works. Voice your expectation that you'll be modded down (implying that it'd be unfair if that happened), and everybody will try to compensate you for that injustice in advance.
Personally, I just try to meet those expectations when I get mod points, but apparently I'm a minority.
I wouldn't place the word "respect" in the same paragraph as him. This scale of abuse of power doesn't occur by accident.
You can still respect the skill of an evil mastermind who pulls something like this off. I definitely think his reputation for being evil in his business dealings is deserved, but I respect the skill and ruthlessness with which he did it. Or maybe "acknowledge" is indeed a better word.