To a large extent it depends on the dedication of the developer. It's rare for a shareware company to turn a living-wage profit, the first year or two. However, if you recall the early 90s, Apogee(pre-Duke3D) and Epic(pre-Unreal) were both highly successful shareware developers. Nowadays we have a lot of "new kids:" Dexterity, GarageGames, Spiderweb and PopCap are some names that come to mind. All of them now turn profits, and they all got there in unique ways:
Dexterity builds games(mostly puzzle games) that are "perfectly sellable" with just enough limitations to encourage a purchase.
PopCap also does puzzle games, but offers two varieties: the browser-based demo, and the "deluxe" downloadable version, which gives them an edge on penetrating the market - with no demo to install, they can get more potential customers.
Spiderweb has a niche in classic RPG gaming, which has apparently proven very profitable.
GarageGames is made up of former Dynamix(Tribes developers, and did many titles since the mid-80s) employees, and is perhaps the most idealistic of the bunch. They play two roles - a developer/publisher of games, and a community-building institution for independent developers, by offering their Torque engine(originally the Tribes2 engine, but with continual improvements for the last few years) up for sale for the fantastic price of $100 and then providing a set of forums tailored for developers. They lost money on this venture initially, but are now able to boast of getting minimum wages:) Since they give developers a minimum of 65% royalties on their work when they publish with GG, I would say they're actually pretty successful for that.
Nowadays the market is pretty heavily saturated with puzzle games of the match-em-up or move-em-around categories, and simple clones of other games(classic arcade games and Solitare). That's not all that different from what you see in the AAA-end of the market, but what makes indie development attractive is that you can take more risks.
The real secret to success is to continually build the reputation of your company, offering several strong products and building word-of-mouth and community relations over a long period of time.
A retail title can get by with less advertising in proportion to development costs, because it's already getting the advertising of shelfspace at a retailer.
A shareware title, however, MUST gain "buzz factor" to really break out some good sales numbers. The usual sell-through rate of demo downloads to purchases is only 1 or 2%, and there isn't any one place for a developer to connect with the market, so good word-of-mouth is essential to success.
I have a small keychain light that uses an LED. It's like this one but probably a slightly different design. I've had it for about a year now, and it's gotten at least a week's worth of powerful light out by now, with no sign of quitting; though I admit I haven't abused the thing as much as that guy.
If you google around the web, you'll see that LEDs are poised to become the primary source of lighting in coming years; they already last longer and can produce powerful lighting more easily than bulbs, so all that's left is for the cost to come down.
My thought is, monitors out of LEDs can wait until they're already tested and used in the mass market for lighting. Until then they'll be a poor choice for pretty much anything below Jumbotron proportions, and there's still a good lifespan for LCD technology besides.
I'd like to add that I find the "lack of experience" argument for prohibiting someone to see or do things to be a poor one.
If you don't have experience with drinking beer at 21 or having sex at 18, it's probably about the same as if you didn't have experience with them at, say, 14. The only differences are physical and emotional development - that is a factor, but not to the extent where people have to wait until they're adults to enjoy these things.
What's troublesome about this is that all too often, people will get the desire to do these things when it's still illegal, because they really do feel ready for it(or they need to fit in...but that's a slightly different social problem). They won't have much guidance or authority to help them in their dangerous adventures, because of those laws. So the shielding works against the kids and often lands them in trouble.
The alternative would be to allow all of it, allowing a maximum of supervision and information to be made available so that teenagers make good choices(drink in moderation, have safe sex) rather than whatever suits them(go binge drinking, lose your virginity ASAP even when it means taking risks or raping your partner, etc.).
It's not that all teenagers are maniacs, but that they want to learn things about living.
The truth is, we DO have a large "game pond." It just doesn't show up in the sales figures. But every little Flash game, every little Java game, all the little shareware games, and finally the retail titles taking in the brunt of the cash, they all add up. I would say more games are made for computer platforms, or even just Win32 platforms, every year than all consoles combined. And this will always be so, since the general-purpose computer is the perfect place for a commercial developer to start off in.
If consoles are the Earth's surface, with all the most glorious creatures basking there in the sun, then computers are its oceans, holding and hiding innumerable quantities of life, from which the surface draws much of its energy.
Rather than later third-party greats. For example, no Megaman, no Strider; in fact, very few platform games other than Mario. I think this is in part because the system was released there in 1984, the sunset days of arcade ports being console gaming's bread and butter. Afterwards, the prevaling trend was towards more complex action games with some story, and RPGs. The RPGs are much better remembered today, of course. So American gamers have a different impression of the NES than the Japanese do of the Famicom, because they got it as many stronger action titles that weren't arcade ports came around. By the later 1980s, competition to the Famicom had already started appearing in Japan, and so a few of the very best titles(the DQ series, FF3, Mario 3, RCR) were remembered.
And my opinion is that the worst NES game is not Spelunker(which is OK as they go, based on all the emulated NES roms I've played, nearly the whole library), but Super Pitfall. I got it on the basis that "the other Pitfall games sounded cool" at maybe 10 years old. I'm kind of surprised that I still have it around. Basically, you walk around an enormous generic platform map with caves and lousy scrolling, falling into unseen pits and lava and deadly monsters with zero air control, and trying to avoid the monsters that are on ground level with poor control(you can shoot them, but you have limited ammo). There's a plot where you're supposed to rescue your friends or somesuch, but I never got far enough for it to matter.
Me and my roommate were playing it quite voraciously through the evening trying for the unlocks. I don't have much experience with previous Mario Karts, but the gameplay was very smooth and never felt like it was really tricking me.
In fact, it was all relatively easy. We got through 150cc All Cups(all 16 courses in semi-random order) and got to Mirror Mode(reversed courses, reversed controls) before deciding to quit for the evening. Cooperative mode is great - we won quite a bit more frequently when he drove and I assisted.
Don't judge it being exactly the same as other Mario Karts, though. I've played the others enough to know that there are changes here. It's a "Version 3.0," so you'll have to play it to know for sure.
While I must admit that I love all the open-sourced projects to improve on old commerical engines(Quake, Doom, etc.), their success seems limited at this point because of two key factors involved in a game's success:
1. Game content & design. This part is usually the tough one for an open-source game, since content has taken up a larger chunk of time for the developer year by year, and since people volunteering to make content want to make content they enjoy, there is a tremendous amount of friction involved from the start to find people who want to make what YOU want to make(hint: it's better to go the other way and make the team first, then discuss the game). In the case of modified engines, the use of old content holds back the game and intoduces lots of nagging compatibility issues.
2. Ease-of-use, ease-of-development. Since a game in open-source is make because a developer feels like it, he's probably going to stop as soon as he's satisfied, and because games are so varied, his work isn't guaranteed to be picked up like with other open-source projects - instead, you end up with hundreds upon hundreds of partially-done projects lying around. Of course, this isn't good enough for players - commercial games get to a finished, playable state, for the most part.
There is an intangible factor too: The game market is biased towards making sequels, as opposed to "version 2.0s." Truthfully, most game sequels(and remakes, etc.) really *are* version 2.0s, but the good ones change something enough(the story, some basic gameplay feature) so as to render it different, too, if only slightly.
I think the development paradigm will shift at some point, but not immediately.
Sensei's Library is an excellent starting place - it's a wiki filled with information and examples. And if you can't follow up on what I posted through Google, this is a good place to look too.
Playing the game is most necessary - computer programs(GNUGo and Igowin are both worth checking out) can challenge any new player these days, but humans will usually be more helpful to learn from because they play less predictably and if they're polite will review the game with you afterwards to help point out mistakes.
If you can join a local club, do so. While you can get an online game almost any time of day, it's far better to play with a real board and stones and people you can see.
Once you have a few months of experience you should be able to understand what's going on in a lot of higher-level games. They are excellent to learn from.
Go is infinitely cooler because you can see board positions develop as the game progresses, while in Chess everything zooms around the board until there's nothing left.
Clearly they're going to be losing a lot of money on this package deal; and being heavy-handed with relatively innocent hackers has, AFAIK, rarely done any good.
Upshot: Nokia stock falls following reports of huge losses on the N-Gage, Nintendo continues its handheld monopoly at least into the PSP's release. Not a bad thing in my opinion, since I've always liked what Nintendo does.
This is very true. I'm a freshman undergrad wanting to get in the game industry, specifically in design; the main problem I face in my own preferred subject of learning is that game design is not included in any art curriculum, and it is not explictly interconnected with programming, either. Both art and programming are processes to implement a design, but they aren't themselves the design, just as a movie script isn't the product of acting or directing talent.
So what I've pretty much decided on doing for college is to go half-and-half between something I can really like outside of video games(perhaps history), and a useful technical skill that might help within the industry(computer science).
There is no distinction made between "computer operation" and "computer programming."
They are different skills; one is to work with an environment programmers have made to accomplish a given range of tasks with maximum efficency; the other is to extend the possibilities available within the environment(or make a new environment...)
Despite what it looks like, the independents that survive are the ones most ahead of the game(no pun intended).
Like in any industry, it's the small developers that will take the biggest risks. Simultaneously, they also get the biggest rewards, perhaps not financially but from an "advancement in development" standpoint. The games have to attack with new ideas and excellent design; they do not have a mature strategy or infrastructure to back up anything less.
It's interesting to note that all the big companies around today were small once, too. Activision, EA, and the rest, all once made games, that had the same mark of youthful innovation on them. Now they are large publishers, and it's very different. But there's always room for the new guys in a field with as many possibilities as video games. The new guys just have to do worthy work, both in the games they make and their methods of selling them.
I read through all the high-scoring comments and they tend to agree on two points: that it was better to have the Redhat Linux name, and that Fedora is an inferior replacement. I'd like to take the opposing position here and see where you might argue it the other way.
Fedora = Not Recognizable As Redhat = Bad.
Wait. Who exactly is choosing to run Fedora? Individuals, and at least for the near future informed ones, too. New users should, hopefully, be told of the end of RHL and will probably make the change without difficulty, if given a good explanation. People that don't use Redhat directly (managers etc.) won't encounter any difficulty anymore between the similar names of the two Redhat-named distros. Fedora may also get "Redhat" added as a prefix, at least when referred to in a business setting, because it is still a RH product and the brand name will add a lot of weight. You don't have to call it just "Fedora" if you're trying to convince someone of it's legitimacy.
Fedora won't be as good waaaah
Perhaps. But then, Mozilla has turned out pretty well despite all the bumps it's had along the road(though the present situation isn't as pretty), and it was based on the same model: Open-source with financial support from a corporation. How it's doing right at this moment isn't as much of a concern as where it will be by the time Redhat ends support for its old distro. If development goes well, this won't be as much of a concern. The reports on update support from the posts I've read vary, but it certainly doesn't seem like you'll be left out in the cold with Fedora. Most of it depends on the management, though, and I think Redhat will make good decisions.
I used to encounter some wrist strain after long hours mousing around in CS or other FPS games...
Three things solved that:
1. I got a trackball(a very good one, the Kensington "Expert Mouse") and switch between the two devices regularly. Since I use a different hand for each one my strain is cut in half.
2. While I was at home my typical computing pose was to lie on my bed with the keyboard and mouse at the same level, which caused much elbow brusing after doing it for 8 hours or so. Now I'm at college and I actually sit in a chair like most people.
3. After starting on some regular weight training, I think I've built up my forearms/wrists enough so that mousing isn't difficult on them. I've heard studies say that it also improves the reflexes... (not sure about that one yet)
I also used to have some eyestrain, even with the monitor on 75hz. Now I have an LCD and I can stare at it all I like without ill effects. It's a huge benefit, and with this one at least, I've never encountered trouble with blurring while playing FPS games - by the time objects move fast enough to blur with this one, they're moving at only slightly below my own visual limits, so it's never been a problem.
...is to play every game made until you've mastered them all, or at least played them enough to appreciate their gameplay.
As a proto-game-designer, I embarked upon this semi-idiotic venture at some point when I was a kid of maybe four or five and every game was an enlightening experience. I'm in college now, and I have played nearly every game named here at some point, but I STILL haven't gotten them all. And as the era gets more recent, I know less about the games. I've only ever played a tiny fraction of all the games released in the last five years or so.
Fortunately, all this study has given me a lot of experience in sorting out some things:
Games are mostly evolutionary, in a tree-like fashion. Sometimes a game from eons ago went down a unique design path and nobody has returned to it yet, and other times it becomes wildly successful, in a third case it only becomes a success after another generation or two, and in the rarest cases the design will be REINVENTED years later by someone thinking they've come up with something new, and THEN it'll become successful. For some reason my mind fails me right now on examples of the last case, but the others you can probably find a few for yourself. There are small variations in design that go away or come back between generations, but for the most part you don't miss TOO much by not playing older games - until you find one you fall in love with.
Since games are evolutionary, judging their value is actually a fairly objective matter of comparing relative gameplay/interface features for a maximum of good features and a minimum of bad ones and then making sure the technical aspects are of sufficient quality so as not to bother the player. (What they add is a more subjective matter)
Games with storytelling and virtual worlds are to some extent prototype virtual realities - they give you an avatar to control, they give you a world to explore, but you are generally limited by the game aspects. However, since they also assist in structuring the world(giving the player goals, extending the exploration-value in a world that isn't actually very large...) they are fairly unique, being neither pure games nor pure VR. The game aspects are always a matter of giving patterns to solve or respond to ever more efficently(though they get considerably dressed up in video games), while the storytelling and exploration are without a doubt more artistic achievements.
Finally, like many on this thread I've concluded that a canon in the literary sense is an invalid method of teaching what a good game is. A far better approach would be a historical one, because showing what improvements occured over multiple generations of a particular game design would immediately teach people of ways in which games can improve(besides "more and better-looking than last year"), and improve their abilities to criticize new ones by applying this knowledge. Presenting individual ones as "masterpieces" tells nothing, because you won't know why the game got made the way it did and not in the millions of other ways it might have been made.
Certainly it's not the staple game of arcades and pubs that it used to be - video games have mostly taken over there since they can offer a wider range of gameplay - but in and of itself it's a unique game with lots of variations and evolutions in table design that's settling down to a comfortable niche in the world of coin-operated games.
You would think that with such massive profit margins available, there would already be an underground organization devoted to undercutting the publisher's prices through textbook imports.
Just imagine it: you could be part of the "Textbook Mafia."
I think the whole handheld-device range will eventually(over maybe 100 years) converge into a single simple-to-use device that is your computer, no distinction between laptop and desktop, which you can plug into terminals to get a larger screen and extra peripherals with. From there, specific uses like a phone or playing music are included in Swiss-Army-Knife fashion.
For right now, though, such a device is unfeasable with existing standards and technology, so instead we have the smart phone and pda. They'll both stick around regardless of sales, I think.
They make an excellent comparision not only to mass-media coverage of games, but also to most writing from within the industry. Pretty much all of the reviews are long, over a page, but they also get to go much deeper on the reviewer's thoughts about the game, which really gets back to the core of what "reviewing" and "criticism" in the artistic sense is all about - personal opinions and insightful commentary.
Many reviews treat art(in a variety of forms - music and movies get similar treatment to games at times) as a commodity, which means listing positive and negative aspects by a pre-made rubric and then coming up with a grade based on that. That works fine if you're trying to determine which toaster is the best, but some people want, for example, fast action games and other people want slower puzzle or strategy games, regardless of demographic, and so a "fits-all" rubric is clearly flawed from the start.
Just last night I was thinking about the how and why of what makes games useful for learning(not just the video kind, but in a natural sense; predators learning hunting skills for example). I came to the conclusion that it's because games can accelerate learning by a huge factor. The act of playing demands the repetition of various tasks with great frequency, and good games both allow for a wide range of challenge, and expand to allow players to include other methods of learning(memorization, critical thinking, analysis) in the pursuit of improving their play. While the games humans play don't always directly improve their abilities, they offer a chance to stimulate the mind/body by going through the process of learning. (Though many video games seem to do a good job at causing people to zombify themselves by being too easy...)
Given that, I don't think it's huge news that anyone can watch a lecture at twice the speed and get the same amount out of it. Talking is generally a pretty slow way to communicate.
The only real reason I wouldn't want the Internet as my information source is for the shrinking number of cases where the information is locked in some book, and not online. In the next few decades, new books, new editions of old books, and old books will all find their way online and make their physical versions artifacts of a previous age. This will accelerate as more people move away from CRTs - this Samsung flatpanel that I got to save space has also made it very tolerable to read blocks of text for hours at a time, though sometimes the fonts aren't great.
Paper printouts will continue to be useful for much longer, since paper is comparatively so easy to work with when organizing and sorting information. I suspect some sort of digital replacement for paper sheets will eventually come out, though; you store the "sheets" in a box and then when you need them you take them out and press a button to move a document or screenshot onto the pages. Then when you're done the only filing you'd have to do is on the computer.
Of course, people say that dead trees will be used forever, but why would they? Before paper, we used papyrus or parchment. Before that, we carved tablets of clay or stone. Right now paper is still the leading edge in "mobile, portable visual information" but that doesn't mean it won't be challenged, eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
To a large extent it depends on the dedication of the developer. It's rare for a shareware company to turn a living-wage profit, the first year or two. However, if you recall the early 90s, Apogee(pre-Duke3D) and Epic(pre-Unreal) were both highly successful shareware developers. Nowadays we have a lot of "new kids:" Dexterity, GarageGames, Spiderweb and PopCap are some names that come to mind. All of them now turn profits, and they all got there in unique ways:
:) Since they give developers a minimum of 65% royalties on their work when they publish with GG, I would say they're actually pretty successful for that.
Dexterity builds games(mostly puzzle games) that are "perfectly sellable" with just enough limitations to encourage a purchase.
PopCap also does puzzle games, but offers two varieties: the browser-based demo, and the "deluxe" downloadable version, which gives them an edge on penetrating the market - with no demo to install, they can get more potential customers.
Spiderweb has a niche in classic RPG gaming, which has apparently proven very profitable.
GarageGames is made up of former Dynamix(Tribes developers, and did many titles since the mid-80s) employees, and is perhaps the most idealistic of the bunch. They play two roles - a developer/publisher of games, and a community-building institution for independent developers, by offering their Torque engine(originally the Tribes2 engine, but with continual improvements for the last few years) up for sale for the fantastic price of $100 and then providing a set of forums tailored for developers. They lost money on this venture initially, but are now able to boast of getting minimum wages
Nowadays the market is pretty heavily saturated with puzzle games of the match-em-up or move-em-around categories, and simple clones of other games(classic arcade games and Solitare). That's not all that different from what you see in the AAA-end of the market, but what makes indie development attractive is that you can take more risks.
The real secret to success is to continually build the reputation of your company, offering several strong products and building word-of-mouth and community relations over a long period of time.
A retail title can get by with less advertising in proportion to development costs, because it's already getting the advertising of shelfspace at a retailer.
A shareware title, however, MUST gain "buzz factor" to really break out some good sales numbers. The usual sell-through rate of demo downloads to purchases is only 1 or 2%, and there isn't any one place for a developer to connect with the market, so good word-of-mouth is essential to success.
...that appears to have worked. People know about the game and the company now, even though it sounds like a dreadful idea to me.
If you google around the web, you'll see that LEDs are poised to become the primary source of lighting in coming years; they already last longer and can produce powerful lighting more easily than bulbs, so all that's left is for the cost to come down.
My thought is, monitors out of LEDs can wait until they're already tested and used in the mass market for lighting. Until then they'll be a poor choice for pretty much anything below Jumbotron proportions, and there's still a good lifespan for LCD technology besides.
But then, I'm thinking economically here.
I'd like to add that I find the "lack of experience" argument for prohibiting someone to see or do things to be a poor one.
If you don't have experience with drinking beer at 21 or having sex at 18, it's probably about the same as if you didn't have experience with them at, say, 14. The only differences are physical and emotional development - that is a factor, but not to the extent where people have to wait until they're adults to enjoy these things.
What's troublesome about this is that all too often, people will get the desire to do these things when it's still illegal, because they really do feel ready for it(or they need to fit in...but that's a slightly different social problem). They won't have much guidance or authority to help them in their dangerous adventures, because of those laws. So the shielding works against the kids and often lands them in trouble.
The alternative would be to allow all of it, allowing a maximum of supervision and information to be made available so that teenagers make good choices(drink in moderation, have safe sex) rather than whatever suits them(go binge drinking, lose your virginity ASAP even when it means taking risks or raping your partner, etc.).
It's not that all teenagers are maniacs, but that they want to learn things about living.
The truth is, we DO have a large "game pond." It just doesn't show up in the sales figures. But every little Flash game, every little Java game, all the little shareware games, and finally the retail titles taking in the brunt of the cash, they all add up. I would say more games are made for computer platforms, or even just Win32 platforms, every year than all consoles combined. And this will always be so, since the general-purpose computer is the perfect place for a commercial developer to start off in.
If consoles are the Earth's surface, with all the most glorious creatures basking there in the sun, then computers are its oceans, holding and hiding innumerable quantities of life, from which the surface draws much of its energy.
Rather than later third-party greats. For example, no Megaman, no Strider; in fact, very few platform games other than Mario. I think this is in part because the system was released there in 1984, the sunset days of arcade ports being console gaming's bread and butter. Afterwards, the prevaling trend was towards more complex action games with some story, and RPGs. The RPGs are much better remembered today, of course. So American gamers have a different impression of the NES than the Japanese do of the Famicom, because they got it as many stronger action titles that weren't arcade ports came around. By the later 1980s, competition to the Famicom had already started appearing in Japan, and so a few of the very best titles(the DQ series, FF3, Mario 3, RCR) were remembered.
And my opinion is that the worst NES game is not Spelunker(which is OK as they go, based on all the emulated NES roms I've played, nearly the whole library), but Super Pitfall. I got it on the basis that "the other Pitfall games sounded cool" at maybe 10 years old. I'm kind of surprised that I still have it around. Basically, you walk around an enormous generic platform map with caves and lousy scrolling, falling into unseen pits and lava and deadly monsters with zero air control, and trying to avoid the monsters that are on ground level with poor control(you can shoot them, but you have limited ammo). There's a plot where you're supposed to rescue your friends or somesuch, but I never got far enough for it to matter.
Me and my roommate were playing it quite voraciously through the evening trying for the unlocks. I don't have much experience with previous Mario Karts, but the gameplay was very smooth and never felt like it was really tricking me.
In fact, it was all relatively easy. We got through 150cc All Cups(all 16 courses in semi-random order) and got to Mirror Mode(reversed courses, reversed controls) before deciding to quit for the evening. Cooperative mode is great - we won quite a bit more frequently when he drove and I assisted.
Don't judge it being exactly the same as other Mario Karts, though. I've played the others enough to know that there are changes here. It's a "Version 3.0," so you'll have to play it to know for sure.
While I must admit that I love all the open-sourced projects to improve on old commerical engines(Quake, Doom, etc.), their success seems limited at this point because of two key factors involved in a game's success:
1. Game content & design. This part is usually the tough one for an open-source game, since content has taken up a larger chunk of time for the developer year by year, and since people volunteering to make content want to make content they enjoy, there is a tremendous amount of friction involved from the start to find people who want to make what YOU want to make(hint: it's better to go the other way and make the team first, then discuss the game). In the case of modified engines, the use of old content holds back the game and intoduces lots of nagging compatibility issues.
2. Ease-of-use, ease-of-development. Since a game in open-source is make because a developer feels like it, he's probably going to stop as soon as he's satisfied, and because games are so varied, his work isn't guaranteed to be picked up like with other open-source projects - instead, you end up with hundreds upon hundreds of partially-done projects lying around. Of course, this isn't good enough for players - commercial games get to a finished, playable state, for the most part.
There is an intangible factor too: The game market is biased towards making sequels, as opposed to "version 2.0s." Truthfully, most game sequels(and remakes, etc.) really *are* version 2.0s, but the good ones change something enough(the story, some basic gameplay feature) so as to render it different, too, if only slightly.
I think the development paradigm will shift at some point, but not immediately.
Playing the game is most necessary - computer programs(GNUGo and Igowin are both worth checking out) can challenge any new player these days, but humans will usually be more helpful to learn from because they play less predictably and if they're polite will review the game with you afterwards to help point out mistakes.
If you can join a local club, do so. While you can get an online game almost any time of day, it's far better to play with a real board and stones and people you can see.
Once you have a few months of experience you should be able to understand what's going on in a lot of higher-level games. They are excellent to learn from.
Go is infinitely cooler because you can see board positions develop as the game progresses, while in Chess everything zooms around the board until there's nothing left.
Clearly they're going to be losing a lot of money on this package deal; and being heavy-handed with relatively innocent hackers has, AFAIK, rarely done any good.
Upshot: Nokia stock falls following reports of huge losses on the N-Gage, Nintendo continues its handheld monopoly at least into the PSP's release. Not a bad thing in my opinion, since I've always liked what Nintendo does.
This is very true. I'm a freshman undergrad wanting to get in the game industry, specifically in design; the main problem I face in my own preferred subject of learning is that game design is not included in any art curriculum, and it is not explictly interconnected with programming, either. Both art and programming are processes to implement a design, but they aren't themselves the design, just as a movie script isn't the product of acting or directing talent.
So what I've pretty much decided on doing for college is to go half-and-half between something I can really like outside of video games(perhaps history), and a useful technical skill that might help within the industry(computer science).
Disney's first use of CG spliced into traditional features was for the magic carpet in Aladdin. That was 1993 IIRC.
There is no distinction made between "computer operation" and "computer programming."
They are different skills; one is to work with an environment programmers have made to accomplish a given range of tasks with maximum efficency; the other is to extend the possibilities available within the environment(or make a new environment...)
Despite what it looks like, the independents that survive are the ones most ahead of the game(no pun intended).
Like in any industry, it's the small developers that will take the biggest risks. Simultaneously, they also get the biggest rewards, perhaps not financially but from an "advancement in development" standpoint. The games have to attack with new ideas and excellent design; they do not have a mature strategy or infrastructure to back up anything less.
It's interesting to note that all the big companies around today were small once, too. Activision, EA, and the rest, all once made games, that had the same mark of youthful innovation on them. Now they are large publishers, and it's very different. But there's always room for the new guys in a field with as many possibilities as video games. The new guys just have to do worthy work, both in the games they make and their methods of selling them.
Fedora = Not Recognizable As Redhat = Bad.
Wait. Who exactly is choosing to run Fedora? Individuals, and at least for the near future informed ones, too. New users should, hopefully, be told of the end of RHL and will probably make the change without difficulty, if given a good explanation. People that don't use Redhat directly (managers etc.) won't encounter any difficulty anymore between the similar names of the two Redhat-named distros. Fedora may also get "Redhat" added as a prefix, at least when referred to in a business setting, because it is still a RH product and the brand name will add a lot of weight. You don't have to call it just "Fedora" if you're trying to convince someone of it's legitimacy.
Fedora won't be as good waaaah
Perhaps. But then, Mozilla has turned out pretty well despite all the bumps it's had along the road(though the present situation isn't as pretty), and it was based on the same model: Open-source with financial support from a corporation. How it's doing right at this moment isn't as much of a concern as where it will be by the time Redhat ends support for its old distro. If development goes well, this won't be as much of a concern. The reports on update support from the posts I've read vary, but it certainly doesn't seem like you'll be left out in the cold with Fedora. Most of it depends on the management, though, and I think Redhat will make good decisions.
I used to encounter some wrist strain after long hours mousing around in CS or other FPS games...
Three things solved that:
1. I got a trackball(a very good one, the Kensington "Expert Mouse") and switch between the two devices regularly. Since I use a different hand for each one my strain is cut in half.
2. While I was at home my typical computing pose was to lie on my bed with the keyboard and mouse at the same level, which caused much elbow brusing after doing it for 8 hours or so. Now I'm at college and I actually sit in a chair like most people.
3. After starting on some regular weight training, I think I've built up my forearms/wrists enough so that mousing isn't difficult on them. I've heard studies say that it also improves the reflexes... (not sure about that one yet)
I also used to have some eyestrain, even with the monitor on 75hz. Now I have an LCD and I can stare at it all I like without ill effects. It's a huge benefit, and with this one at least, I've never encountered trouble with blurring while playing FPS games - by the time objects move fast enough to blur with this one, they're moving at only slightly below my own visual limits, so it's never been a problem.
...is to play every game made until you've mastered them all, or at least played them enough to appreciate their gameplay.
As a proto-game-designer, I embarked upon this semi-idiotic venture at some point when I was a kid of maybe four or five and every game was an enlightening experience. I'm in college now, and I have played nearly every game named here at some point, but I STILL haven't gotten them all. And as the era gets more recent, I know less about the games. I've only ever played a tiny fraction of all the games released in the last five years or so.
Fortunately, all this study has given me a lot of experience in sorting out some things:
Games are mostly evolutionary, in a tree-like fashion. Sometimes a game from eons ago went down a unique design path and nobody has returned to it yet, and other times it becomes wildly successful, in a third case it only becomes a success after another generation or two, and in the rarest cases the design will be REINVENTED years later by someone thinking they've come up with something new, and THEN it'll become successful. For some reason my mind fails me right now on examples of the last case, but the others you can probably find a few for yourself. There are small variations in design that go away or come back between generations, but for the most part you don't miss TOO much by not playing older games - until you find one you fall in love with.
Since games are evolutionary, judging their value is actually a fairly objective matter of comparing relative gameplay/interface features for a maximum of good features and a minimum of bad ones and then making sure the technical aspects are of sufficient quality so as not to bother the player. (What they add is a more subjective matter)
Games with storytelling and virtual worlds are to some extent prototype virtual realities - they give you an avatar to control, they give you a world to explore, but you are generally limited by the game aspects. However, since they also assist in structuring the world(giving the player goals, extending the exploration-value in a world that isn't actually very large...) they are fairly unique, being neither pure games nor pure VR. The game aspects are always a matter of giving patterns to solve or respond to ever more efficently(though they get considerably dressed up in video games), while the storytelling and exploration are without a doubt more artistic achievements.
Finally, like many on this thread I've concluded that a canon in the literary sense is an invalid method of teaching what a good game is. A far better approach would be a historical one, because showing what improvements occured over multiple generations of a particular game design would immediately teach people of ways in which games can improve(besides "more and better-looking than last year"), and improve their abilities to criticize new ones by applying this knowledge. Presenting individual ones as "masterpieces" tells nothing, because you won't know why the game got made the way it did and not in the millions of other ways it might have been made.
Is an augmented reality display that'll show friendlies with green names over their heads, and enemies with red ones ^.^
Certainly it's not the staple game of arcades and pubs that it used to be - video games have mostly taken over there since they can offer a wider range of gameplay - but in and of itself it's a unique game with lots of variations and evolutions in table design that's settling down to a comfortable niche in the world of coin-operated games.
You would think that with such massive profit margins available, there would already be an underground organization devoted to undercutting the publisher's prices through textbook imports.
Just imagine it: you could be part of the "Textbook Mafia."
I think the whole handheld-device range will eventually(over maybe 100 years) converge into a single simple-to-use device that is your computer, no distinction between laptop and desktop, which you can plug into terminals to get a larger screen and extra peripherals with. From there, specific uses like a phone or playing music are included in Swiss-Army-Knife fashion.
For right now, though, such a device is unfeasable with existing standards and technology, so instead we have the smart phone and pda. They'll both stick around regardless of sales, I think.
They make an excellent comparision not only to mass-media coverage of games, but also to most writing from within the industry. Pretty much all of the reviews are long, over a page, but they also get to go much deeper on the reviewer's thoughts about the game, which really gets back to the core of what "reviewing" and "criticism" in the artistic sense is all about - personal opinions and insightful commentary.
Many reviews treat art(in a variety of forms - music and movies get similar treatment to games at times) as a commodity, which means listing positive and negative aspects by a pre-made rubric and then coming up with a grade based on that. That works fine if you're trying to determine which toaster is the best, but some people want, for example, fast action games and other people want slower puzzle or strategy games, regardless of demographic, and so a "fits-all" rubric is clearly flawed from the start.
Just last night I was thinking about the how and why of what makes games useful for learning(not just the video kind, but in a natural sense; predators learning hunting skills for example). I came to the conclusion that it's because games can accelerate learning by a huge factor. The act of playing demands the repetition of various tasks with great frequency, and good games both allow for a wide range of challenge, and expand to allow players to include other methods of learning(memorization, critical thinking, analysis) in the pursuit of improving their play. While the games humans play don't always directly improve their abilities, they offer a chance to stimulate the mind/body by going through the process of learning. (Though many video games seem to do a good job at causing people to zombify themselves by being too easy...)
Given that, I don't think it's huge news that anyone can watch a lecture at twice the speed and get the same amount out of it. Talking is generally a pretty slow way to communicate.
The only real reason I wouldn't want the Internet as my information source is for the shrinking number of cases where the information is locked in some book, and not online. In the next few decades, new books, new editions of old books, and old books will all find their way online and make their physical versions artifacts of a previous age. This will accelerate as more people move away from CRTs - this Samsung flatpanel that I got to save space has also made it very tolerable to read blocks of text for hours at a time, though sometimes the fonts aren't great.
Paper printouts will continue to be useful for much longer, since paper is comparatively so easy to work with when organizing and sorting information. I suspect some sort of digital replacement for paper sheets will eventually come out, though; you store the "sheets" in a box and then when you need them you take them out and press a button to move a document or screenshot onto the pages. Then when you're done the only filing you'd have to do is on the computer.
Of course, people say that dead trees will be used forever, but why would they? Before paper, we used papyrus or parchment. Before that, we carved tablets of clay or stone. Right now paper is still the leading edge in "mobile, portable visual information" but that doesn't mean it won't be challenged, eventually.