That's only proof if you actually know there's been a massacre there. Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire.
Before fire retardants (which I doubt that a thatched hut would use), fires were a major problem in most of the world. E.g., take the Great Fire Of London, and England was a pretty advanced country at that time. Is that one some atrocity? Nope, it's just a fire that ran out of control, and a bit of inept management.
Or you could use the same technique on New Orleans. Just show some satellite pics from before and after the flood. Lookit all that devastation. Whoever did that atrocity was very thorough.
Just as an extra random thought: evolution and natural selection never had to work their was to being a perfect defense. Yet with human hunters that's the only thing that would work.
E.g., the defense of rabbits isn't being too fast for any fox. Part of the defense is the natural balance of it all: if the population of rabbits declines too much, some foxes starve to death too, so the population of rabbits gets a chance to rebound. So some _will_ survive anyway, it just happens that on the average it will be the fitter ones.
When dealing with human hunters, that's just not the case. If the population of rabbits drops too much, humans will eat other stuff and continue hunting the rabbits anyway. That's how we drove the wooly mammoth, or the wolves and lynxes in most of Europe, extinct for example: even when the populations dropped dangerously low, these new two-legged predators just wouldn't follow the normal cycle, and continued hunting them just as fast and furious.
We didn't even have to hunt every last one, btw. Just push a species under a certain number or density, and from there it will die off anyway.
There also just isn't an obvious mechanism by which the fitter would have a significantly higher chance to survive. When a lioness chases some gazelles, it will generally settle for the slowest. Even being marginally fitter makes a huge difference in survivability. You don't have to outrun the lioness, you just have to outrun the slowest pack member. That's really what drives the survival of the fittest for a lot of species.
Another factor, and it works even for non-herd animals, is that you only need to be a less attractive target than some other species there. See how the european foxes in Australia preferred the native species, and only picked on the european rabbits when nothing else was available. So the rabbits most of the time could survive even while being the slowest in that group, because the fox would prefer a bilby instead.
With a human with a scoped rifle, it just doesn't work that way. Even being the fittest deer doesn't mean you won't get targetted just the same. In fact, for some species it will just make you a better trophy, so you'll be a more likely target.
Briefly, expecting survival of the fittest to work against humans... just won't work. Ever. Since the stone age we've been fitter than any species, and disproportionately more able to drive them extinct. If you go by survival of the fittest, then the only survivors will be the humans.
It would be so, if humans weren't destroying everyone's habitat.
The fact is, those animals evolved (via natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc) to live in, say, a jungle, not in a place where jungles are razed down and replaced with either a concrete nightmare or with farms to produce biodiesel/ethanol/whatever. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, and those animals just don't get that to adapt to the new environment.
Even something as apparently benign as putting a road through their habitat can screw those animals big time, because they just didn't evolve the sense to look out for cars coming at 100 mph. Sure, they _might_ evolve that sense in another 100-200 thousand years, but they might not survive that long.
And then there's stuff where humans deliberately mess with the balance there. E.g., some wise guy decided to introduce rabbits to Australia, but without predators they multiplied like rabbits (if you pardon the pun), and squeezed the native equivalent (the Bilby) into near-extinction. E.g., then some wise guy introduced foxes, but then these multiplied like rabbits too because the native fauna just hadn't evolved the instincts to run away from a predator. So whole species were nothing but fox chow suddenly. And the rabbits just proved a little extra meal, helping the foxes pretty much overrun Australia.
It's just not the environment in which those animals evolved. We're changing the rules and the game there, and the animals just don't have the time to evolve a defense. The half a century it took european foxes to spread across Australia is just a tiny blip at evolutionary time scales. It's not survival of the fittest, it's a massacre.
It's, if you will, like filling your room with chlorine gas and then saying "ah, wtf, you should have evolved to the new environment. If you didn't, hey, not everyone must survive." Evolution just doesn't work that way.
And then there are species which the humans actively hunted. It's damn hard to evolve a defense against a species with rifles in the first place, especially since it's not a modification of an existing threat. And we've had guns, for, what? Maybe half a millenium? (And guns which also have a decent range and/or accuracy, for at most two centuries.) Evolution just doesn't work that fast.
If you want a species where hunting them was senseless too, take the Dodo. It was a harmless bird whose meat tasted bad too. It was perfectly adapted for its original habitats, but wasn't prepared for massive deforestation and being hunted. Not only it was hunted to provision ships quickly anyway (bad tasting meat is better than no meat, after all) and by the refugees, there are reports of colonists killing them with sticks and stones just for fun. You know, the, "haw haw, lookit the dumb bird who's too stupid to run away" kind of fun. It went extinct pretty fast.
That's really the whole point of these preservation efforts. It's species which we already know will go extinct if noone protects them, because we changed the rules of the game too fast for them to evolve.
It's not really that simple. If you choose to publish something ammounting to "lawyer X is a bad lawyer, stay away from him", then you better have some damn solid evidence to base that on, or it's libel. Just saying "the algorithm did it" isn't an excuse. If you have a bad algorithm, then it would have been your responsibility to check it first. It's that simple, really.
An algorithm can be as bogus as you want it to. You can even code it to explicitly discriminate against someone, but even an impartially bogus algorithm is still bogus. E.g., try the following:
public class Numerology {
public static int grade(String name) {
int result = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < name.length(); i++) {
result += name.charAt(i);
}
return result % 5 + 1;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(args[0]);
} }
It says "Firethorn" scores only 1 on a 1 to 5 stars scale, so he must be a not too bright guy. Scrapping the bottom of the barrel, folks. Better stay away from whatever services he offers, or from taking him seriously on Slashdot. On the other hand "Moraelin" scores 4 out of 5, which isn't all that bad. (Don't take it personally, BTW, it's just an example of what a bogus algorithm can do.)
Now you may say, "wtf, who in their right mind hires an employee or a lawyer based on numerology?", but:
A) you'd be wrong. Some companies use just that to thin the pool of candidates, and
B) Much more importantly, the damage is done if I don't tell anyone what's really the algorithm there. I could put it up on some resume search site as the grade I'm assigning to each candidate. In effect, I'd be telling people "don't take this guy", but not giving them enough info as to what the criteria are, and if they even aggree with those criteria. They could imagine that it's some clever algorithm that searched the CV and the previous employers' opinions, when it's just a bogus piece of random crap.
Which, if I understand right, is basically what these guys are doing. They're giving grades to some people, but noone knows what the criteria are, what is the data, and what corrections to ask for if you don't aggree with that grade. But, hey, it's done by a computer, so it must be right. Or at least it must absolve them of all responsibility.
And I just don't see it that way. If you're choosing to grade people for your own use it's ok, you're only depriving yourself of a valuable employee or contractor. But the moment you post it online and attack their reputation with it, you damn better have all the facts available, be damn sure of your algorithm, and offer plenty of possibilities for them to challenge the inaccuracies in that data. If not, it's just high-tech libel, nothing more.
Since you compare it to those: Independent reviews tend to go on at length as to what problems they found to base that grade on. And in fact that's the actual information in that review, not the score. You can't base a purchase 100% on the score, unless you have absolutely no personality of your own, or you already know that your taste and preferences 100% match those of the reviewer. The way a sane person peruses them is to look at the pros and cons in a reviews, and draw their own conclusion, based on their own list of priorities.
E.g., even if a reviewer gave an LCD TV a lower score because, say, the screen is not glossy and shiny, I can think the exact opposite "well, actually I've had enough of mirror LCDs that reflect everything behind me. I'll get that one."
But if some reviewer chose to write nothing except the score, then, yes, they'd open themselves to exactly this kind of lawsuit.
Not in Second Life. Second Life is _based_ on converting its game currency to and from RL dollars, so harm can actually be measured in RL money. The issue isn't whether the virtual items are real, but whether they're worth RL dollars. And Linden Labs say they are, and happily lets you exchange RL money to and from their virtual currency. They also actually sell stuff like plots of land for RL dollars.
Note that I'm not arguing whether that equivalence to RL money is ridiculous or not. (Ok, so I do think it's ridiculous, but let's not go on that tangent.) I'm just saying that LL shouldn't get away with arguing two exact opposites. Either one or the other. You can't have _both_. If they say it _is_ worth RL dollars, then they should legally be held responsible when (going by that notion) they arbitrarily caused someone a loss.
That's the important part: not whether it's really real or not, but whether or not Linden Labs itself says it's worth real money. They do, so they damn better act that way.
I suspect that's one reason why most other games insist on forbidding any kind of sale, and insisting that all their virtual stuff is their property and you're only allowed to use it. Because when it gets officially convertible to real money, and _owned_ by you, then banning an account becomes directly equivalent monetary damages.
Think about it. For example, new plots of virtual land get auctioned starting at 1000$. Plots of old land that in the meantime are in the middle of a popular place, can go for a helluva lot more. Don't laugh, they have at least one person whose virtual estate is officially worth millions of dollars. And Linden Labs isn't just turning a blind eye, it's actively encouraging that idea that it's worth RL money (because that's the only thing that can convince one to give Linden Labs their RL money for that.)
So once they sided with that position, shouldn't they be held responsible to act accordingly?
So basically people buy the products _they_ want, rather than the products Katherine A. Burson wants. Well, gee, who woulda thunk it. Everyone should have been a clone of Kathy and had the exact same priorities she had...
Newsflash: there are more reasons to buy a product than "which one I'll be more productive with." Yeah, I know, mind boggles.
E.g., a lot of purchases are just to feel better about yourself. Consumerism, conspicuous consumption, whatever you want to call it. So people feel better about themselves if they buy the product with more features. Or in the case of conspicuous consumption: the one which is more expensive, and looks more expensive, and has an excuse to be more expensive.
Conspicuous consumption isn't about "which product does more photos per minute", it's about, "look what I can afford to buy!" Status symbols. Keeping up with the Joneses, if you will.
Did those people buy the wrong product? Not really. They bought the one which satisfies _that_ need they have.
I.e., again, it looks to me like people are damn good at buying what's good for _them_. It may look like a bad choice if you apply what looks to _you_ like the logical thing, but for them it's actually very logical to satisfy the need _they_ actually have.
Basically, same as you can't say "you should go to a movie instead of going to the toilet" (it's not the same need), you can't really say "you should buy the functional choice instead of the status symbol choice." It doesn't satisfy the same need.
That's the problem with nerds (or snotty elitists, or both) decreeing that everyone else is doing the wrong thing. Usually they don't even understand what's really happening there, and propose the right solution to the awfully wrong problem.
In this case, stuff like the need for status symbols is something where everyone has been beat upside the head with talks of it being wrong, wasteful, etc, so almost noone admits it... often even to themselves. It doesn't make it any less of a human need. Just like you can beat someone upside the head with the notion that sex is shameful and sinful, but that doesn't mean they won't ever get horny.
At any rate, that's why they look at things like feature lists and such: not because they actually have the skills or need for them, but as a lullaby for their conscience: for some pretext as to why it's ok to blow that money. The product with the better excuse wins. Big surprise there.
At any rate, once you understand that, the resulting action is actually a very logical and sound one: they buy the product which satisfies _that_ need, not the one matching the overt excuse. It's actually a pretty damn good choice.
And, yeah, unlike nerds ranting about how everyone else chose wrong, marketting tends to understand that need. So they go ahead and appeal to it. What looks to you like people being shafted by marketting is, at least partially, just telling you that the marketters understood something you don't.
That products get returned... again, it doesn't prove what you think it proves. There are things you just can't really know before you try, and some products _do_ simply have a crap interface. So they get returned.
But think of it this way: if you look at how much did each product sell, minus the returns/cancelled-accounts/etc, that 20 minute average actually tells you that those actually _are_ found satisfactory. The people who made bad choices, returned them almost immediately. The ones not returned did satisfy the buyer's need, at least to some extent.
Since we're talking MMOs, ditto. Sure, some people bought the wrong MMO, or the wrong genre altogether, but then those go and cancel their accounts. Plus for the last couple of years straight it's been trivial to download a trial, or get a trial code from someone else. So you don't even have to buy it first to see if you like it. At any rate, even assuming some who bought the wrong game, those cancelled their account in 20 minutes. Or let's say within the first month. The millions who stayed... well, that tells you that for some millions of people it wasn't a too bad choice after all.
No, seriously, there was a game-design-related story on Slashdot about how good game design and plot progression should take a hint from (multiple) female orgasms with peaks and lows and plateaus all over the place. Plus a hint that you might have noticed that if you ever ate pussy while kneeling on the floor. Whereas supposedly less good games follow a pattern more like the male orgasm, with a steady way up and then crashing back down fast.
I'm too lazy to search for that story right now. (Plus I'm not sure if I want to appear in the firewall logs as the guy who was searching for female orgasms. People tend to think about surfing for porn, and all that.) But, seriously, you can't make something like that up.
It's not just easter eggs, but a really odd and incoherent collection of stuff they found weird in games, or about games, or somewhat related to games... and some of it isn't even weird if you think about it.
E.g., they pick on the fact that the main character in Undying was designed to be appealing to a gay man. Well, having played the game, you wouldn't notice it, and certainly not think there's anything weird about that character. He's not camp or a cross-dresser, he's just a young and fit Irish soldier, fresh from the trenches. He'd probably look just as sexy to a woman too, and, honestly, there was no point where I thought "dude, this guy looks gay". If anything, it's a fit and macho kind of a character, not the effeminate kind. I can live with playing a character like that.
If I'm allowed the detour, though, reading the whole story just gives me one of the details that _do_ make me say, "thank goodness they asked a real novellist for help." I mean, I knew they had originally crammed all the worst cliches in a game until Clive Barker talked them out of it. Now I find out that the protagonist was supposed to be some _count_ too. How cliche is that in a supernatural theme?
E.g., under "The Art of Evil" they pick on... not something from an actual game, but on Sony's reaction to a player's distasteful fanfic about Dark Elves.
E.g., "Twisty History" has them pick on the fact that Sierra heavily photoshopped a castle, instead of using the real castle. Well, gee, ya think that games might not really match reality? I never would have guessed;) At any rate, unless you know what the real castle looks like, chances are you'd never suspect anything in the game.
E.g., "Strumpets of Silicon" picks on erotic clips or movies where some porn star dressed like Lara Croft. I'm kinda at a loss how that would count as weird, much less as weird in _gaming_.
E.g., "The Madness of Malkavians" is even weirder in itself, picking on something that's expected and a trait of that bloodline. Newsflash: Malkavians _are_ mad, and ghouls _do_ pick the traits of their master. It's like elves having long ears or dwarves being short: that's the whole idea. It would have been weird if you played a Malkavian and you were perfectly sane.
Plus, if they actually wanted to pick on something weird from that particular game, there's a scene where you talk with the news anchor on your TV set, and he tells you a joke.
E.g., "Plot, The Magic Dragons" sees them picking on the fact that an old PC RPG's has... quests. No, really, you end up doing quests for some dragons instead of instantly hacking and slashing them, and everything else that moves! How weird is that? Well, not at all. Just because PC RPGs for a long while meant just dumb hack and slash, doesn't make quests weird.
E.g., "The Mother / Whore Dichotomy" picks on the fact that Roberta Williams posed as Mother Goose on the cover of one game, and as one of the supposedly naked girls (you can't actually see anything naughty, if you ask me) in a jacuzi on the cover of Softporn Adventure.
First of all, it seems to me like it's a false dichotomy in the first place, as one can jolly well be both if she so chooses. (Even prostitutes and porn stars have kids, you know. Plus, where do you think pregnant porn comes from?)
Second, and more importantly, being seen from the collarbone upwards in a jacuzi doesn't make one a whore. Now if she had sex on camera or something, that might qualify as a "whore", but if showing a bit of skin makes one a whore, then you've just filed 99% of actresses and singers as "whores". It takes a mindset worst than even the biblethumping belt to go that far. And having worked on a softcore game doesn't make one a whore. It can mean anything ranging from "oh well, I'm not going to hand in my resignation just because the company makes a softcore game", to not giving a damn about it, to actually having some interest in softcore... which isn't horribly weird even among women. At any rate, it's ju
Well, ok, let's aggree then that the original use of the word "best" there was a rather poor choice of words. It ended up the most popular MMO. Does it sound better now?:)
You have to understand, though, that in the USSR the state controlled and owned everything. So it's only natural that all services were also owned and paid-for by the state.
If enough people wanted to dance, the state built some discos. If enough people wanted to drink, the state built bars and vodka distilleries. (Though they did try to curb alcohol consumption too.) If people wanted to go to the beach on vacation, the state built some hotels near a beach. If people wanted to see movies, the state built cinemas and TV stations, and paid some directors and actors to make movies. Etc.
The fact that you get those from some private companies, while they got them from state-owned companies, isn't necessarily some sinister conspiracy. It's just the way a state-owned economy is supposed to work: it essentially does the same things, but via companies owned by the state.
Some of them aren't even just part of some "keeping the population happy" plan. (Although even then, I see nothing fundamentally wrong with a government wanting to raise the standard of living of its citizens. You wouldn't mind it too much if your government cared about that, would you?)
They're also part of the idea that the "soviet socialist" economy, at least in Lenin's view, wasn't supposed to be _that_ different from a capitalist free-market society. They never got to the utopian part where everyone gets according to their needs, so it was still based on money, like in the west. The economy was still supposed to be match supply and demand, and it was still supposed to keep the money circulating, etc. The only difference was supposed to be that it's the state who does that matching (e.g., by building another car factory if demand for cars outstrips supply by too much), and in a carefully planned way.
Now that planning never actually worked too well, but that was at least the idea(l).
At any rate, they were still supposed to give people some stuff to spend their money on, and preferrably the same things a private company would have offered. (Or at least those things which weren't against the communist ideals.) So basically if they paid someone X rubles per month, they still had to offer the possibilities to spend that money on, and hopefully those would also be the things that people actually want. At least theoretically, anyway.
What I'm getting at is that it really made just as much sense for them to let people blow their coins on arcade games, as it made in the USA. From a simple economic point of view, if there's enough demand for X, it makes sense to take people's money by creating a supply. And it made just as much sense in the USSR as in the USA. Just because that money gets back into the state's pocket, doesn't mean that it doesn't want them back eventually.
Now, as I was saying, they weren't too good at that planning part, and the economy went increasingly off the intended track. But you don't have to assume conspiracies where it's just that, well, they just hadn't figured out a way for it to work without the money circulating like in any other market. For better or worse, they still had to play a pseudo-capitalism game.
Actually I'll go ahead and say just that: that people are damn good at picking what's good for _them_. It may not satisfy _your_ tastes, or _your_ criteria, but it doesn't make their choice wrong either.
In a sense, "best" doesn't even exist in a matter of taste. Some people like sweet wine, some people like dry wine, and some hate both. Is either of the choices "wrong"? Not really, each one just picks the wine he/she likes. Ditto for games, really. Some like The Sims, some like CounterStrike. Some like WoW, some like Everquest. Some like fantasy, some like SF. Neither is deluded into taking the "wrong" choice, each just picked the game that suits his/her individual tastes.
And I'll say that humans are damn good at that. Pretty much invariably when something appeals to only a minority, it failed to appeal to the rest, they didn't fail to pick the "best." They did pick the best... for themselves.
So strictly speaking "best" doesn't even exist in a matter of personally taste.
In another sense, though, I can look at which of them appealed to more people, and use that as a (somewhat warped) measure of "best". Unless one of them was deliberately aiming for a narrow niche (which isn't usually the case, unless they know in advance they can't compete with the big boys), one of them managed to know its potential market better, and to actually make a product that appeals to them more. I can respect that kind of achievement.
In yet another sense, not everything is just subjective taste. There are a few things that are fairly common to most of the population, and are objectively measurable.
E.g., (almost) noone actually wants bugs, so all else being equal it's fairly safe to say, basically, "less bugs == better". (Caveat: almost never is all else equal.) And having played more than half a dozen other MMOs before and after, I can honestly say that WoW was a refreshing change. It wasn't strictly speaking perfect, but it came damn close to that, compared to the previous norm of shoving MMOs out the door when they barely can run... for a while. And it was orders of magnitude better than some of the crappier ones, like AO.
It's been done before too. The first I know of was Tropico, which is just that: all those hundreds of people have friends, needs, a personality, political opinions, etc, and they go about their daily lives trying to satisfy those needs. There have been a few other such games since, too.
Just using a franchise for free mindshare doesn't guarantee a dud or "like Quake 5 being in 2-d", though.
Take for example World Of Warcraft: it has nothing to do with the gameplay of Warcraft 1 to 3, and pretty much just uses the same setting and franchise name. Ended up the best MMO by a damn huge margin nevertheless.
Or, you know, take any Mechwarrior game as an example. They took a turn-based tactics game played on a hex-board, and made a real-time FPS out of it. Even the weapons, if you look at the numbers in MW games, have really nothing to do with implementing the Battletech weapons with the same name. Didn't really end up bad games, though, and MW1 is still on my list of the best games of all time.
So it _could_ still be a good game. 'Course, it could also be crap, but let's wait and see.
As to why would they want to do that... maybe because they've done SC to death already. The changes between SC1 and SC4 have been really incremental, and more often in the graphics department than really being a new game. And some were fairly controversial if they made it a better game, or if they change the gameplay that much.
So, basically, you've already bought the same game already. Several times.
If it goes by the same formula again, there's not much obvious stuff which can be added this time, or not without doing more harm than good. (E.g., turning it into a micromanagement nightmare.) I mean, seriously, other than bumping the graphics resolution up some more, what would _you_ add in SC5?
It's not like RPGs, where you can just change the story for the next one, but leave the mechanics the same if they worked well. Here the mechanics _are_ the whole game. It's just a game of placing buildings and applying some formulas to them. And they already had several games to get the buildings and formulas right already. Just tweaking some reltionship to be juuust right in the 5'th decimal... doesn't really a new game make.
So what I'm getting to is: they have a choice between (A) selling a clone of one of their previous games, or (B) trying something new. They went with option B. And, honestly, I'd rather give them some brownie points for even trying, rather than damn them in advance. Sure, it may still end up a bad game, who knows? But, seriously, buying a SC4 clone in higher res doesn't sound too tempting to me.
Well, that's actually a valid point of view, and mostly true too. I think the "Everquest clone" applies to FFXI mostly.
Just to clarify my position in this thread: I'm just railing against the, basically, "if you don't like it, you're against innovation" and "but if it's different from the predecessors, then it's innovative, so it can't be a clone" fanboyisms. I've really had it up to here with that kind of thing. There are ways to be either pro- or anti-FF without resorting to the standard fallacies. But as long as you don't commit either, heck, I'm not going to tell you to like it or dislike it.
The GG[..]GP thought it's an Everquest clone. I don't necessarily think that's true on the whole (although there are some borrowed elements, intentionally or not), but I also don't think beating him upside the head with blatant fallacies and accusations of hypocrisy is the way to go about disproving those points. There are ways to say "well, at least they're trying something different" without inventing contradictions and hypocrisy accusations based on straw-men and twisting meanings.
That's, in a nutshell, the whole thing I was concerned with.
It depends on where you are. Here in Europe we have pretty damn clear privacy laws, and a habit of slapping corporations with massive fines for breaking the laws. Plus the usual legal concept that you can't let someone make a profit from breaking the laws, i.e., the punishment has to at the very least be bigger than the illicit gains.
Plus, we don't depend on random users suing, but have government and EU agencies for enforcing the consumer rights. They _can_ afford good lawyers.
So shareholders can't really demand that a company breaks the law, especially since they'd make no profit out of that.
However, that in turn amounts to having a political system which can't overtly bend over to the highest bidder. (Not that covert deals don't exist, mind you.) That's why you can count on the state's agencies to be on your side.
It starts with parliamentary systems where parties have to actually fight for the votes, and where usually no single party has 51% of the votes. So if one does something blatantly wrong, an alliance can re-form the other way at the drop of a hat, turning them from member of the winning alliance to opposition. It's not even ethics as such, it's that there are a lot of parties who can profit from someone else's unpopularity. So chances are even rumours of corruption and favoritism make a party drop someone like a hot potato, so they don't give the others ammo.
And the more fun part is the EU itself. There is no central government which can usurp the rights of the states, since we _are_ a bunch of sovereign countries in a fragile alliance. So they tend to keep an eye on each other. There is no "european" company, there are a bunch of French, German, British, etc, companies. And if, say, a german company were to break the trade laws, you have the French, Brits, Italians and everyone else who don't feel any duty to defend them. In fact, they go, "oi! if our companies aren't allowed to do that, then neither is yours, mate!"
We're not talking about story, plot, delivery, or mechanics. We're talking about FF XII being an "uninspired EverQuest clone". How can a game be simultaneously innovative, uninspired, and a clone?
1. False dichotomy all over again. The world isn't neatly divided into 100% clones and 100% innovative stuff. The devil is often in the details. One can innovate in detail X (and in a crap way at that), yet be a clone of something else in every other aspect. I.e., just because FF XII tried some new (and thoroughly crap) plot delivery, doesn't mean that the rest of the game can't feel like an Everquest clone.
Really, join an OCPD support group already, if your world is that devoid of shades and nuances.
2. That simultaneous stuff you rant against, are your own straw men. You created a straw man contradiction where none actually existed. Have a hard time addressing the real points without twisting the meaning into something that wasn't actually said?
The original poster never said that the game is simultaneously innovative and a clone. You seem to have inferred the "innovative" part yourself, presumably from its being different from the previous FF games. Because the original poster sure didn't say "it's innovative." And it's a bullshit inferrence in its own right. Something can differ from the previous model jolly well by copying something else.
E.g., if I were to start wearing a suit and tie tomorrow, it would be simultaneously (A) different from my previous attire, yet (B) a clone of someone else's suit.
That is all that was actually said: FF XI and FF XII differ from the previous games, by (A) copying Everquest mechanics (especially in FF XI), and (B) by some very uninspired plot delivery (in FF XII). In more words, but that's the summary of it. Exactly what's the contradiction there? 'Cause I don't see any.
At any rate, if such contradictions annoy you that much, then, you know, don't make them up. There, problem solved. And it sure beats watching you argue against your own bogus arguments.
Would you call your house an uninspired clone? If not, then you must be a fanboy. Right?
It looks like the whole point went right over your head, but I guess that wasn't entirely unexpected.
First of all, that house was just an example for a very specific sub-set of the problem: that just being different doesn't make it good. The point was _not_ about also being an uninspired clone at that point.
Basically, just more fallacious sophistry. Why am I not surprised?
Second, yes, even in that example, that house _could_ be uninspired (it's not exactly the best idea for a house), and it can be a clone (if it copies enough from another existing house.)
But, on the whole, you're just tiresome. Fallacies and bullshit sophistry are idiot loser tactics in their own right, but it's kinda expected that they at least be convincing or easy to swallow. Building a _second_ rant on nothing more than pretending to be unable to understand even simple English or follow even _elementary_ logic is... tiresome.
But then maybe I should just apply Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Maybe you _are_ too stupid to follow elementary logic, and no malice is involved.
We were talking about games designed for the kids, though, rather than what can kids get their hands on, or what kids prefer to play.
In a way, you illustrate just what I was talking about: kids often (maybe even most often) like non-kid games more than they like the kid games. GTA wasn't designed to be a kid game, it was just designed to be fun, and the result is that it ends up fun for kids too.
Now whether they should play violent games in the first place or not, that's a talk I won't get into this time. Mainly because it's irrelevant to what I'm trying to say this time. I'm sure the same principle could be applied to other kinds of games too: Just make it fun, and chances are kids will like it too.
That said, I do think the GP has a point too.
No doubt kids have tastes, peer pressure, etc, of their own, and can get their hands one way or another on other games too. But the fact is that _someone_ out there does buy those "kid games" which kids don't actually like. I don't think they get bought because the kid himself asked for a boring kiddy game, and much less that it was peer pressure from other kids. Kids can be a bit machiavellian at times, but not to the extent of "let's all pressure Billy into buying that game so he'll get bored out of his skull too." A game would have to be fun to start with to create that kind of peer pressure from other kids, and that's not the kind of games we're talking about.
So who buys those boring kid games? Well, my guess is: the parents. (Feel free to correct me if I'm guessing wrong.) They see some game with dolls and think "aawww, I bet little Suzie will love this one"... without actually asking little Suzie's opinion.
So the GP is essentially right IMHO: those "kid games" aren't made to appeal to the kid, they're made to appeal to the parents who already forgot what it's like to be a kid.
Oh please. Noone said "square never innovates" or complained about innovation as such. So get off that high horse already.
You're basically committing the classic fallacy of creating a false dichotomy: either you like FF8's uninspired ideas, or you're against innovation as a whole. Which is bogus even as bogus sophistry and fanboyism go.
Not only there's a lot of middle ground between the two, it deliberately ignores that innovation isn't even the only variable there. A game (or everything else) is judged on a whole more dimmensions than just innovation. Something can be highly innovative, yet be crap in a million other aspects: crap story, crap plot, crap delivery, crap mechanics, etc.
Or to turn that bogus dichotomy right back at you: hey, I'm building this house out of bundles of old newspapers, and painting it with human shit. It's so innovative, right? Hey, noone made one like that before. Do you want to live in it? No? Then you're against innovation, you horrible person.
_That_ is the whole point: just being original is _not_ mutually exclussive with being crap in every single other aspect.
The same applies to games. It's ok to innovate, but a game still has to have other qualities too to be worth playing. A crap system or a crap story still make a crap game, even if it's innovative. Crap is still crap even if it's brand-new original crap.
A bad story is a bad story even if it's new. Or do you want to tell me you'd find a story about a booger which fell in the toilet and got flushed the apex of entertainment just because it's new?
So, again: noone criticizes innovation. And noone says simply "I don't like FF XII because it's different." I realize that it makes your fanboy rant easier to over-simplify it like that, but it also makes it so disconnected from reality it's not even funny.
My dear Beavis, you seem to assume that there's no middle ground between (A) apathy, and (B) being spoon fed some nerd's bullshit utopias that never worked that way. Here's a thought for you: how about getting your politics and economy information from other places than video games? Dunno, buy/rent a book, go talk to an economist (you'd be surprised how economics make or break politics), study some history (you'd be surprised how it explains some stuff, for example the middle east), etc. Just a thought.
We have entirely too many idiots who base their bullshit utopias on novels instead of reality. We don't need more of them. Adding video games to the mix isn't even doing anyone any favour.
So, you know, it's time for me to sneer right back, if you need games to get you thinking.
Well, let's put it this way: it also tells you that people are looking for _entertainment_, not for a lopsided lecture in why you should vote for the republicans in the next elections.
I'll even go ahead and say that I'm one of those who _will_ choose to ignore the ideology bullshit, because the alternative would be to actually get annoyed that some idiot lectures me in his half-baked misunderstood ideology. And I'll even tell you why.
1. Because, as I was saying, I'm looking for some simple, sanitized entertainment. I use my brains enough at for other stuff, I have plenty of _real_ stuff to worry about, I don't want games too to be a stress factor and a guilt trip. When I play a game, I want my decisions to be simple no-RL-consequences stuff like "do I look for the princess in the blue castle or the red castle first", not stuff like "damn, should I vote for the left or the right in the next RL election."
And when I'm done with the game, I want to be done with it, to have no more worries following me to bed. Sure, I might still have to find that princess in another castle, or I might have chosen to join the evil empire instead of the rebels, but that's game-only stuff that doesn't carry any consequences or lessons to the real world. It's just a game, it's just a meaningless scenario invented just for that quest, it can be quickly forgotten when I turn the computer off. The _last_ thing I'd want when I turn the computer off is to be followed by some moralizing bullshit or guilt, like, "damn, the game just told me that I should be ashamed for working for this company/country/party and that people like me are to blame for the global warming."
2. There are already plenty of PR hacks and politicians and journos peddling their ideology to me. In fact, there are entirely too many.
I need some time off from all that lopsided reporting and outright PR bullshit. I _don't_ need yet another wannabe Goebbels trying to peddle his ideology to me even when I'm just playing a computer game. Fuck off already, really. If I wanted more dogma, I'd have bought a party's newspapers, not bought a computer game.
3. Just because every barber and taxi driver can talk at length about "what should the government" do, it doesn't mean that they actually have any fucking clue what they're talking about. Most of their "common sense" solutions wouldn't even work. Most are based on pure ignorance of how things really work, and/or on mis-conceptions and false assumptions. And the same applies to game designers. Unless you're an economist or have a degree in political science, don't kid yourself, chances are that you don't know jack about how it really works.
Real politics are a damn complex thing, and the economics that underpins some of those decisions and issues are even more complex and problematic. There is almost _never_ a free meal, and no real win-win scenario. To get X you pay with Y, and the best you can hope for is the least crappy compromise where the costs doesn't out-weigh the gains. There is no easy "just push this button to win" strategy, or someone would have done it already.
Some things can't even be solved at the same time (but politicians will promise to anyway), because they're interdependent and pushing one down will automatically cause the other to rise. E.g., inflation and unemployment.
Basically: stick to what you know, really. If you're a game designer, stick to making games, not to politics lectures. Unless you have a degree in either economics or politics, chances are you don't even know what you're talking about.
And _especially_ I don't want to see another retarded economic "solution" from someone who hasn't even heard of keynesian economics. (Which is how the economy of all countries has worked ever since the Great Depression, and why we don't have the crisis and bankruptcy cycles that were the _norm_ in the 19'th century.) Even you don't
On one hand, there will be more roleplaying. On the other, the roleplaying will be all angsty and goth.
Sad to say, I don't think any MMO will involve any serious quantity of roleplaying.
I've been on RP servers before, I've been on RP MUD's, and frankly, the only ones who kept it half-way in-character were the MUD's which started banning left and right (or executing offending characters in public places) for OOC stuff. Downside: most of those lost most players very fast, and became ghost towns where the grand event of the evening was meeting another player at all.
My latest experimental WoW char was started on an RP server. The first thing I was asked when joining a guild was my RL name. To this day I'm the _only_ one in the whole fucking guild who doesn't address the others by their RL names. Discussions on the guild channel or in groups typically involve RL events (e.g., john is going camping with his kids), talks about alts, and whether to buy Lord Of The Rings Online. Occasionally they talk about buying gold (for RL cash), and at least one talk was about who can masturbate more times in a day.
OK, maybe I've joined the wrong guild, but I do interact with people from other guilds quite often. (I whine about pickup groups as much as the next guy, but I'm always going to give them a try. Call me a masochist.) As far as I can tell, RP guild means they sometimes use brackets when they talk. E.g., while a non-RPer might say "I bought a new graphics card", a RPer will say "(I bought a new graphics card)". See, brackets mean OOC stuff. _Heavy_ RPers or heavy RP guilds say everything in brackets.
Just about the only actual public RP I've noticed was... erm... public foreplay, really. You can tell a roleplayer by their scantily clad female Blood Elf character. I wouldn't know if they just stop after the foreplay or move it to tells. I didn't inquire.
Ok, so Troll characters are also occasionally used by RP-ers, because you just need to talk like a rastafarian to sound like a Blizzard troll. Fairly straightforward to RP. So expect to hear stuff like, "I be buying da new graphics card, mon." That's role-players for you, I guess.
So, on a more serious note, I wouldn't set my hopes high that any setting will just magically turn people into role-players. Just because it's based on some RP setting, well, doesn't mean it'll be played by the same people who play the tabletop version. The bulk, if it actually gets any players at all, will be the same generic video game player type as in any other game.
Most of the WoD stuff is set in modern times, in modern cities. I don't see how a MMORPG can do that right. Let's say, for example, Chicago. Chicago is big. And we know what Chicago is supposed to be like, what the streets are, etc. And it is full of people. A tiny Chicago with a handful of NPCs is not going to work.
City Of Heroes is set in a city, and in fact the city is the _whole_ game world. It worked perfectly well so far.
And, yes, it has plenty of people, cars, trucks, etc, on the streets, and even a blimp in the sky in Atlas Park, and barges in the ports. It can be done. A modern graphics card is perfectly able to render 100 NPCs walking around.
They avoid the "this doesn't look like Chicago" question by, well, being a fictional city. I can't see why that wouldn't work in WoD too. The game doesn't have to be set in Chicago, it can be set in a quaint fictive town with 100,000 inhabitants, half of which are the players. Sure, it breaks the rules as to how many vampires should there be per thousand inhabitants, but I'm sure most people can live with that. Noone complained about having crime in a city with 2000 super-heroes active at any given time, after all.
I mean, think about it. Would it really stop you from playing the game if it was set in the fictive city of New Berkshire, instead of in Chicago?
City Of Heroes also _does_ use walls and areas of the city that are just on the city map, but not actually accessible. There are areas which were added later, too, but some still are only on the city map. And some areas were added that weren't part of the original map. Noone minded that so far.
Most of the stories on his blog, aren't even his stories in the first place. They're just copied verbatim from somewhere else and submitted as his own stories. And I don't just mean a summary and a link to the original story, or some personal comments and a link, but copy and paste.
So it's not just the shameless self-promotion and even the blatant plagiarism, it's also that he makes some ad impressions out of other people's content.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only proof if you actually know there's been a massacre there. Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire.
Before fire retardants (which I doubt that a thatched hut would use), fires were a major problem in most of the world. E.g., take the Great Fire Of London, and England was a pretty advanced country at that time. Is that one some atrocity? Nope, it's just a fire that ran out of control, and a bit of inept management.
Or you could use the same technique on New Orleans. Just show some satellite pics from before and after the flood. Lookit all that devastation. Whoever did that atrocity was very thorough.
Just as an extra random thought: evolution and natural selection never had to work their was to being a perfect defense. Yet with human hunters that's the only thing that would work.
E.g., the defense of rabbits isn't being too fast for any fox. Part of the defense is the natural balance of it all: if the population of rabbits declines too much, some foxes starve to death too, so the population of rabbits gets a chance to rebound. So some _will_ survive anyway, it just happens that on the average it will be the fitter ones.
When dealing with human hunters, that's just not the case. If the population of rabbits drops too much, humans will eat other stuff and continue hunting the rabbits anyway. That's how we drove the wooly mammoth, or the wolves and lynxes in most of Europe, extinct for example: even when the populations dropped dangerously low, these new two-legged predators just wouldn't follow the normal cycle, and continued hunting them just as fast and furious.
We didn't even have to hunt every last one, btw. Just push a species under a certain number or density, and from there it will die off anyway.
There also just isn't an obvious mechanism by which the fitter would have a significantly higher chance to survive. When a lioness chases some gazelles, it will generally settle for the slowest. Even being marginally fitter makes a huge difference in survivability. You don't have to outrun the lioness, you just have to outrun the slowest pack member. That's really what drives the survival of the fittest for a lot of species.
Another factor, and it works even for non-herd animals, is that you only need to be a less attractive target than some other species there. See how the european foxes in Australia preferred the native species, and only picked on the european rabbits when nothing else was available. So the rabbits most of the time could survive even while being the slowest in that group, because the fox would prefer a bilby instead.
With a human with a scoped rifle, it just doesn't work that way. Even being the fittest deer doesn't mean you won't get targetted just the same. In fact, for some species it will just make you a better trophy, so you'll be a more likely target.
Briefly, expecting survival of the fittest to work against humans... just won't work. Ever. Since the stone age we've been fitter than any species, and disproportionately more able to drive them extinct. If you go by survival of the fittest, then the only survivors will be the humans.
It would be so, if humans weren't destroying everyone's habitat.
The fact is, those animals evolved (via natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc) to live in, say, a jungle, not in a place where jungles are razed down and replaced with either a concrete nightmare or with farms to produce biodiesel/ethanol/whatever. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, and those animals just don't get that to adapt to the new environment.
Even something as apparently benign as putting a road through their habitat can screw those animals big time, because they just didn't evolve the sense to look out for cars coming at 100 mph. Sure, they _might_ evolve that sense in another 100-200 thousand years, but they might not survive that long.
And then there's stuff where humans deliberately mess with the balance there. E.g., some wise guy decided to introduce rabbits to Australia, but without predators they multiplied like rabbits (if you pardon the pun), and squeezed the native equivalent (the Bilby) into near-extinction. E.g., then some wise guy introduced foxes, but then these multiplied like rabbits too because the native fauna just hadn't evolved the instincts to run away from a predator. So whole species were nothing but fox chow suddenly. And the rabbits just proved a little extra meal, helping the foxes pretty much overrun Australia.
It's just not the environment in which those animals evolved. We're changing the rules and the game there, and the animals just don't have the time to evolve a defense. The half a century it took european foxes to spread across Australia is just a tiny blip at evolutionary time scales. It's not survival of the fittest, it's a massacre.
It's, if you will, like filling your room with chlorine gas and then saying "ah, wtf, you should have evolved to the new environment. If you didn't, hey, not everyone must survive." Evolution just doesn't work that way.
And then there are species which the humans actively hunted. It's damn hard to evolve a defense against a species with rifles in the first place, especially since it's not a modification of an existing threat. And we've had guns, for, what? Maybe half a millenium? (And guns which also have a decent range and/or accuracy, for at most two centuries.) Evolution just doesn't work that fast.
If you want a species where hunting them was senseless too, take the Dodo. It was a harmless bird whose meat tasted bad too. It was perfectly adapted for its original habitats, but wasn't prepared for massive deforestation and being hunted. Not only it was hunted to provision ships quickly anyway (bad tasting meat is better than no meat, after all) and by the refugees, there are reports of colonists killing them with sticks and stones just for fun. You know, the, "haw haw, lookit the dumb bird who's too stupid to run away" kind of fun. It went extinct pretty fast.
That's really the whole point of these preservation efforts. It's species which we already know will go extinct if noone protects them, because we changed the rules of the game too fast for them to evolve.
Erk, that should be:
System.out.println(grade(args[0]));
An algorithm can be as bogus as you want it to. You can even code it to explicitly discriminate against someone, but even an impartially bogus algorithm is still bogus. E.g., try the following: It says "Firethorn" scores only 1 on a 1 to 5 stars scale, so he must be a not too bright guy. Scrapping the bottom of the barrel, folks. Better stay away from whatever services he offers, or from taking him seriously on Slashdot. On the other hand "Moraelin" scores 4 out of 5, which isn't all that bad. (Don't take it personally, BTW, it's just an example of what a bogus algorithm can do.)
Now you may say, "wtf, who in their right mind hires an employee or a lawyer based on numerology?", but:
A) you'd be wrong. Some companies use just that to thin the pool of candidates, and
B) Much more importantly, the damage is done if I don't tell anyone what's really the algorithm there. I could put it up on some resume search site as the grade I'm assigning to each candidate. In effect, I'd be telling people "don't take this guy", but not giving them enough info as to what the criteria are, and if they even aggree with those criteria. They could imagine that it's some clever algorithm that searched the CV and the previous employers' opinions, when it's just a bogus piece of random crap.
Which, if I understand right, is basically what these guys are doing. They're giving grades to some people, but noone knows what the criteria are, what is the data, and what corrections to ask for if you don't aggree with that grade. But, hey, it's done by a computer, so it must be right. Or at least it must absolve them of all responsibility.
And I just don't see it that way. If you're choosing to grade people for your own use it's ok, you're only depriving yourself of a valuable employee or contractor. But the moment you post it online and attack their reputation with it, you damn better have all the facts available, be damn sure of your algorithm, and offer plenty of possibilities for them to challenge the inaccuracies in that data. If not, it's just high-tech libel, nothing more.
Since you compare it to those: Independent reviews tend to go on at length as to what problems they found to base that grade on. And in fact that's the actual information in that review, not the score. You can't base a purchase 100% on the score, unless you have absolutely no personality of your own, or you already know that your taste and preferences 100% match those of the reviewer. The way a sane person peruses them is to look at the pros and cons in a reviews, and draw their own conclusion, based on their own list of priorities.
E.g., even if a reviewer gave an LCD TV a lower score because, say, the screen is not glossy and shiny, I can think the exact opposite "well, actually I've had enough of mirror LCDs that reflect everything behind me. I'll get that one."
But if some reviewer chose to write nothing except the score, then, yes, they'd open themselves to exactly this kind of lawsuit.
Not in Second Life. Second Life is _based_ on converting its game currency to and from RL dollars, so harm can actually be measured in RL money. The issue isn't whether the virtual items are real, but whether they're worth RL dollars. And Linden Labs say they are, and happily lets you exchange RL money to and from their virtual currency. They also actually sell stuff like plots of land for RL dollars.
Note that I'm not arguing whether that equivalence to RL money is ridiculous or not. (Ok, so I do think it's ridiculous, but let's not go on that tangent.) I'm just saying that LL shouldn't get away with arguing two exact opposites. Either one or the other. You can't have _both_. If they say it _is_ worth RL dollars, then they should legally be held responsible when (going by that notion) they arbitrarily caused someone a loss.
That's the important part: not whether it's really real or not, but whether or not Linden Labs itself says it's worth real money. They do, so they damn better act that way.
I suspect that's one reason why most other games insist on forbidding any kind of sale, and insisting that all their virtual stuff is their property and you're only allowed to use it. Because when it gets officially convertible to real money, and _owned_ by you, then banning an account becomes directly equivalent monetary damages.
Think about it. For example, new plots of virtual land get auctioned starting at 1000$. Plots of old land that in the meantime are in the middle of a popular place, can go for a helluva lot more. Don't laugh, they have at least one person whose virtual estate is officially worth millions of dollars. And Linden Labs isn't just turning a blind eye, it's actively encouraging that idea that it's worth RL money (because that's the only thing that can convince one to give Linden Labs their RL money for that.)
So once they sided with that position, shouldn't they be held responsible to act accordingly?
So basically people buy the products _they_ want, rather than the products Katherine A. Burson wants. Well, gee, who woulda thunk it. Everyone should have been a clone of Kathy and had the exact same priorities she had...
Newsflash: there are more reasons to buy a product than "which one I'll be more productive with." Yeah, I know, mind boggles.
E.g., a lot of purchases are just to feel better about yourself. Consumerism, conspicuous consumption, whatever you want to call it. So people feel better about themselves if they buy the product with more features. Or in the case of conspicuous consumption: the one which is more expensive, and looks more expensive, and has an excuse to be more expensive.
Conspicuous consumption isn't about "which product does more photos per minute", it's about, "look what I can afford to buy!" Status symbols. Keeping up with the Joneses, if you will.
Did those people buy the wrong product? Not really. They bought the one which satisfies _that_ need they have.
I.e., again, it looks to me like people are damn good at buying what's good for _them_. It may look like a bad choice if you apply what looks to _you_ like the logical thing, but for them it's actually very logical to satisfy the need _they_ actually have.
Basically, same as you can't say "you should go to a movie instead of going to the toilet" (it's not the same need), you can't really say "you should buy the functional choice instead of the status symbol choice." It doesn't satisfy the same need.
That's the problem with nerds (or snotty elitists, or both) decreeing that everyone else is doing the wrong thing. Usually they don't even understand what's really happening there, and propose the right solution to the awfully wrong problem.
In this case, stuff like the need for status symbols is something where everyone has been beat upside the head with talks of it being wrong, wasteful, etc, so almost noone admits it... often even to themselves. It doesn't make it any less of a human need. Just like you can beat someone upside the head with the notion that sex is shameful and sinful, but that doesn't mean they won't ever get horny.
At any rate, that's why they look at things like feature lists and such: not because they actually have the skills or need for them, but as a lullaby for their conscience: for some pretext as to why it's ok to blow that money. The product with the better excuse wins. Big surprise there.
At any rate, once you understand that, the resulting action is actually a very logical and sound one: they buy the product which satisfies _that_ need, not the one matching the overt excuse. It's actually a pretty damn good choice.
And, yeah, unlike nerds ranting about how everyone else chose wrong, marketting tends to understand that need. So they go ahead and appeal to it. What looks to you like people being shafted by marketting is, at least partially, just telling you that the marketters understood something you don't.
That products get returned... again, it doesn't prove what you think it proves. There are things you just can't really know before you try, and some products _do_ simply have a crap interface. So they get returned.
But think of it this way: if you look at how much did each product sell, minus the returns/cancelled-accounts/etc, that 20 minute average actually tells you that those actually _are_ found satisfactory. The people who made bad choices, returned them almost immediately. The ones not returned did satisfy the buyer's need, at least to some extent.
Since we're talking MMOs, ditto. Sure, some people bought the wrong MMO, or the wrong genre altogether, but then those go and cancel their accounts. Plus for the last couple of years straight it's been trivial to download a trial, or get a trial code from someone else. So you don't even have to buy it first to see if you like it. At any rate, even assuming some who bought the wrong game, those cancelled their account in 20 minutes. Or let's say within the first month. The millions who stayed... well, that tells you that for some millions of people it wasn't a too bad choice after all.
No, seriously, there was a game-design-related story on Slashdot about how good game design and plot progression should take a hint from (multiple) female orgasms with peaks and lows and plateaus all over the place. Plus a hint that you might have noticed that if you ever ate pussy while kneeling on the floor. Whereas supposedly less good games follow a pattern more like the male orgasm, with a steady way up and then crashing back down fast.
I'm too lazy to search for that story right now. (Plus I'm not sure if I want to appear in the firewall logs as the guy who was searching for female orgasms. People tend to think about surfing for porn, and all that.) But, seriously, you can't make something like that up.
Actually, since the comparison was with female orgasms, it was more like about being the girl whose pussy is eaten out.
It's not just easter eggs, but a really odd and incoherent collection of stuff they found weird in games, or about games, or somewhat related to games... and some of it isn't even weird if you think about it.
;) At any rate, unless you know what the real castle looks like, chances are you'd never suspect anything in the game.
E.g., they pick on the fact that the main character in Undying was designed to be appealing to a gay man. Well, having played the game, you wouldn't notice it, and certainly not think there's anything weird about that character. He's not camp or a cross-dresser, he's just a young and fit Irish soldier, fresh from the trenches. He'd probably look just as sexy to a woman too, and, honestly, there was no point where I thought "dude, this guy looks gay". If anything, it's a fit and macho kind of a character, not the effeminate kind. I can live with playing a character like that.
If I'm allowed the detour, though, reading the whole story just gives me one of the details that _do_ make me say, "thank goodness they asked a real novellist for help." I mean, I knew they had originally crammed all the worst cliches in a game until Clive Barker talked them out of it. Now I find out that the protagonist was supposed to be some _count_ too. How cliche is that in a supernatural theme?
E.g., under "The Art of Evil" they pick on... not something from an actual game, but on Sony's reaction to a player's distasteful fanfic about Dark Elves.
E.g., "Twisty History" has them pick on the fact that Sierra heavily photoshopped a castle, instead of using the real castle. Well, gee, ya think that games might not really match reality? I never would have guessed
E.g., "Strumpets of Silicon" picks on erotic clips or movies where some porn star dressed like Lara Croft. I'm kinda at a loss how that would count as weird, much less as weird in _gaming_.
E.g., "The Madness of Malkavians" is even weirder in itself, picking on something that's expected and a trait of that bloodline. Newsflash: Malkavians _are_ mad, and ghouls _do_ pick the traits of their master. It's like elves having long ears or dwarves being short: that's the whole idea. It would have been weird if you played a Malkavian and you were perfectly sane.
Plus, if they actually wanted to pick on something weird from that particular game, there's a scene where you talk with the news anchor on your TV set, and he tells you a joke.
E.g., "Plot, The Magic Dragons" sees them picking on the fact that an old PC RPG's has... quests. No, really, you end up doing quests for some dragons instead of instantly hacking and slashing them, and everything else that moves! How weird is that? Well, not at all. Just because PC RPGs for a long while meant just dumb hack and slash, doesn't make quests weird.
E.g., "The Mother / Whore Dichotomy" picks on the fact that Roberta Williams posed as Mother Goose on the cover of one game, and as one of the supposedly naked girls (you can't actually see anything naughty, if you ask me) in a jacuzi on the cover of Softporn Adventure.
First of all, it seems to me like it's a false dichotomy in the first place, as one can jolly well be both if she so chooses. (Even prostitutes and porn stars have kids, you know. Plus, where do you think pregnant porn comes from?)
Second, and more importantly, being seen from the collarbone upwards in a jacuzi doesn't make one a whore. Now if she had sex on camera or something, that might qualify as a "whore", but if showing a bit of skin makes one a whore, then you've just filed 99% of actresses and singers as "whores". It takes a mindset worst than even the biblethumping belt to go that far. And having worked on a softcore game doesn't make one a whore. It can mean anything ranging from "oh well, I'm not going to hand in my resignation just because the company makes a softcore game", to not giving a damn about it, to actually having some interest in softcore... which isn't horribly weird even among women. At any rate, it's ju
Well, ok, let's aggree then that the original use of the word "best" there was a rather poor choice of words. It ended up the most popular MMO. Does it sound better now? :)
You have to understand, though, that in the USSR the state controlled and owned everything. So it's only natural that all services were also owned and paid-for by the state.
If enough people wanted to dance, the state built some discos. If enough people wanted to drink, the state built bars and vodka distilleries. (Though they did try to curb alcohol consumption too.) If people wanted to go to the beach on vacation, the state built some hotels near a beach. If people wanted to see movies, the state built cinemas and TV stations, and paid some directors and actors to make movies. Etc.
The fact that you get those from some private companies, while they got them from state-owned companies, isn't necessarily some sinister conspiracy. It's just the way a state-owned economy is supposed to work: it essentially does the same things, but via companies owned by the state.
Some of them aren't even just part of some "keeping the population happy" plan. (Although even then, I see nothing fundamentally wrong with a government wanting to raise the standard of living of its citizens. You wouldn't mind it too much if your government cared about that, would you?)
They're also part of the idea that the "soviet socialist" economy, at least in Lenin's view, wasn't supposed to be _that_ different from a capitalist free-market society. They never got to the utopian part where everyone gets according to their needs, so it was still based on money, like in the west. The economy was still supposed to be match supply and demand, and it was still supposed to keep the money circulating, etc. The only difference was supposed to be that it's the state who does that matching (e.g., by building another car factory if demand for cars outstrips supply by too much), and in a carefully planned way.
Now that planning never actually worked too well, but that was at least the idea(l).
At any rate, they were still supposed to give people some stuff to spend their money on, and preferrably the same things a private company would have offered. (Or at least those things which weren't against the communist ideals.) So basically if they paid someone X rubles per month, they still had to offer the possibilities to spend that money on, and hopefully those would also be the things that people actually want. At least theoretically, anyway.
What I'm getting at is that it really made just as much sense for them to let people blow their coins on arcade games, as it made in the USA. From a simple economic point of view, if there's enough demand for X, it makes sense to take people's money by creating a supply. And it made just as much sense in the USSR as in the USA. Just because that money gets back into the state's pocket, doesn't mean that it doesn't want them back eventually.
Now, as I was saying, they weren't too good at that planning part, and the economy went increasingly off the intended track. But you don't have to assume conspiracies where it's just that, well, they just hadn't figured out a way for it to work without the money circulating like in any other market. For better or worse, they still had to play a pseudo-capitalism game.
Actually I'll go ahead and say just that: that people are damn good at picking what's good for _them_. It may not satisfy _your_ tastes, or _your_ criteria, but it doesn't make their choice wrong either.
In a sense, "best" doesn't even exist in a matter of taste. Some people like sweet wine, some people like dry wine, and some hate both. Is either of the choices "wrong"? Not really, each one just picks the wine he/she likes. Ditto for games, really. Some like The Sims, some like CounterStrike. Some like WoW, some like Everquest. Some like fantasy, some like SF. Neither is deluded into taking the "wrong" choice, each just picked the game that suits his/her individual tastes.
And I'll say that humans are damn good at that. Pretty much invariably when something appeals to only a minority, it failed to appeal to the rest, they didn't fail to pick the "best." They did pick the best... for themselves.
So strictly speaking "best" doesn't even exist in a matter of personally taste.
In another sense, though, I can look at which of them appealed to more people, and use that as a (somewhat warped) measure of "best". Unless one of them was deliberately aiming for a narrow niche (which isn't usually the case, unless they know in advance they can't compete with the big boys), one of them managed to know its potential market better, and to actually make a product that appeals to them more. I can respect that kind of achievement.
In yet another sense, not everything is just subjective taste. There are a few things that are fairly common to most of the population, and are objectively measurable.
E.g., (almost) noone actually wants bugs, so all else being equal it's fairly safe to say, basically, "less bugs == better". (Caveat: almost never is all else equal.) And having played more than half a dozen other MMOs before and after, I can honestly say that WoW was a refreshing change. It wasn't strictly speaking perfect, but it came damn close to that, compared to the previous norm of shoving MMOs out the door when they barely can run... for a while. And it was orders of magnitude better than some of the crappier ones, like AO.
True, HOMM was actually nice.
It's been done before too. The first I know of was Tropico, which is just that: all those hundreds of people have friends, needs, a personality, political opinions, etc, and they go about their daily lives trying to satisfy those needs. There have been a few other such games since, too.
Just using a franchise for free mindshare doesn't guarantee a dud or "like Quake 5 being in 2-d", though.
Take for example World Of Warcraft: it has nothing to do with the gameplay of Warcraft 1 to 3, and pretty much just uses the same setting and franchise name. Ended up the best MMO by a damn huge margin nevertheless.
Or, you know, take any Mechwarrior game as an example. They took a turn-based tactics game played on a hex-board, and made a real-time FPS out of it. Even the weapons, if you look at the numbers in MW games, have really nothing to do with implementing the Battletech weapons with the same name. Didn't really end up bad games, though, and MW1 is still on my list of the best games of all time.
So it _could_ still be a good game. 'Course, it could also be crap, but let's wait and see.
As to why would they want to do that... maybe because they've done SC to death already. The changes between SC1 and SC4 have been really incremental, and more often in the graphics department than really being a new game. And some were fairly controversial if they made it a better game, or if they change the gameplay that much.
So, basically, you've already bought the same game already. Several times.
If it goes by the same formula again, there's not much obvious stuff which can be added this time, or not without doing more harm than good. (E.g., turning it into a micromanagement nightmare.) I mean, seriously, other than bumping the graphics resolution up some more, what would _you_ add in SC5?
It's not like RPGs, where you can just change the story for the next one, but leave the mechanics the same if they worked well. Here the mechanics _are_ the whole game. It's just a game of placing buildings and applying some formulas to them. And they already had several games to get the buildings and formulas right already. Just tweaking some reltionship to be juuust right in the 5'th decimal... doesn't really a new game make.
So what I'm getting to is: they have a choice between (A) selling a clone of one of their previous games, or (B) trying something new. They went with option B. And, honestly, I'd rather give them some brownie points for even trying, rather than damn them in advance. Sure, it may still end up a bad game, who knows? But, seriously, buying a SC4 clone in higher res doesn't sound too tempting to me.
Well, that's actually a valid point of view, and mostly true too. I think the "Everquest clone" applies to FFXI mostly.
Just to clarify my position in this thread: I'm just railing against the, basically, "if you don't like it, you're against innovation" and "but if it's different from the predecessors, then it's innovative, so it can't be a clone" fanboyisms. I've really had it up to here with that kind of thing. There are ways to be either pro- or anti-FF without resorting to the standard fallacies. But as long as you don't commit either, heck, I'm not going to tell you to like it or dislike it.
The GG[..]GP thought it's an Everquest clone. I don't necessarily think that's true on the whole (although there are some borrowed elements, intentionally or not), but I also don't think beating him upside the head with blatant fallacies and accusations of hypocrisy is the way to go about disproving those points. There are ways to say "well, at least they're trying something different" without inventing contradictions and hypocrisy accusations based on straw-men and twisting meanings.
That's, in a nutshell, the whole thing I was concerned with.
It depends on where you are. Here in Europe we have pretty damn clear privacy laws, and a habit of slapping corporations with massive fines for breaking the laws. Plus the usual legal concept that you can't let someone make a profit from breaking the laws, i.e., the punishment has to at the very least be bigger than the illicit gains.
Plus, we don't depend on random users suing, but have government and EU agencies for enforcing the consumer rights. They _can_ afford good lawyers.
So shareholders can't really demand that a company breaks the law, especially since they'd make no profit out of that.
However, that in turn amounts to having a political system which can't overtly bend over to the highest bidder. (Not that covert deals don't exist, mind you.) That's why you can count on the state's agencies to be on your side.
It starts with parliamentary systems where parties have to actually fight for the votes, and where usually no single party has 51% of the votes. So if one does something blatantly wrong, an alliance can re-form the other way at the drop of a hat, turning them from member of the winning alliance to opposition. It's not even ethics as such, it's that there are a lot of parties who can profit from someone else's unpopularity. So chances are even rumours of corruption and favoritism make a party drop someone like a hot potato, so they don't give the others ammo.
And the more fun part is the EU itself. There is no central government which can usurp the rights of the states, since we _are_ a bunch of sovereign countries in a fragile alliance. So they tend to keep an eye on each other. There is no "european" company, there are a bunch of French, German, British, etc, companies. And if, say, a german company were to break the trade laws, you have the French, Brits, Italians and everyone else who don't feel any duty to defend them. In fact, they go, "oi! if our companies aren't allowed to do that, then neither is yours, mate!"
1. False dichotomy all over again. The world isn't neatly divided into 100% clones and 100% innovative stuff. The devil is often in the details. One can innovate in detail X (and in a crap way at that), yet be a clone of something else in every other aspect. I.e., just because FF XII tried some new (and thoroughly crap) plot delivery, doesn't mean that the rest of the game can't feel like an Everquest clone.
Really, join an OCPD support group already, if your world is that devoid of shades and nuances.
2. That simultaneous stuff you rant against, are your own straw men. You created a straw man contradiction where none actually existed. Have a hard time addressing the real points without twisting the meaning into something that wasn't actually said?
The original poster never said that the game is simultaneously innovative and a clone. You seem to have inferred the "innovative" part yourself, presumably from its being different from the previous FF games. Because the original poster sure didn't say "it's innovative." And it's a bullshit inferrence in its own right. Something can differ from the previous model jolly well by copying something else.
E.g., if I were to start wearing a suit and tie tomorrow, it would be simultaneously (A) different from my previous attire, yet (B) a clone of someone else's suit.
That is all that was actually said: FF XI and FF XII differ from the previous games, by (A) copying Everquest mechanics (especially in FF XI), and (B) by some very uninspired plot delivery (in FF XII). In more words, but that's the summary of it. Exactly what's the contradiction there? 'Cause I don't see any.
At any rate, if such contradictions annoy you that much, then, you know, don't make them up. There, problem solved. And it sure beats watching you argue against your own bogus arguments.
It looks like the whole point went right over your head, but I guess that wasn't entirely unexpected.
First of all, that house was just an example for a very specific sub-set of the problem: that just being different doesn't make it good. The point was _not_ about also being an uninspired clone at that point.
Basically, just more fallacious sophistry. Why am I not surprised?
Second, yes, even in that example, that house _could_ be uninspired (it's not exactly the best idea for a house), and it can be a clone (if it copies enough from another existing house.)
But, on the whole, you're just tiresome. Fallacies and bullshit sophistry are idiot loser tactics in their own right, but it's kinda expected that they at least be convincing or easy to swallow. Building a _second_ rant on nothing more than pretending to be unable to understand even simple English or follow even _elementary_ logic is... tiresome.
But then maybe I should just apply Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Maybe you _are_ too stupid to follow elementary logic, and no malice is involved.
We were talking about games designed for the kids, though, rather than what can kids get their hands on, or what kids prefer to play.
In a way, you illustrate just what I was talking about: kids often (maybe even most often) like non-kid games more than they like the kid games. GTA wasn't designed to be a kid game, it was just designed to be fun, and the result is that it ends up fun for kids too.
Now whether they should play violent games in the first place or not, that's a talk I won't get into this time. Mainly because it's irrelevant to what I'm trying to say this time. I'm sure the same principle could be applied to other kinds of games too: Just make it fun, and chances are kids will like it too.
That said, I do think the GP has a point too.
No doubt kids have tastes, peer pressure, etc, of their own, and can get their hands one way or another on other games too. But the fact is that _someone_ out there does buy those "kid games" which kids don't actually like. I don't think they get bought because the kid himself asked for a boring kiddy game, and much less that it was peer pressure from other kids. Kids can be a bit machiavellian at times, but not to the extent of "let's all pressure Billy into buying that game so he'll get bored out of his skull too." A game would have to be fun to start with to create that kind of peer pressure from other kids, and that's not the kind of games we're talking about.
So who buys those boring kid games? Well, my guess is: the parents. (Feel free to correct me if I'm guessing wrong.) They see some game with dolls and think "aawww, I bet little Suzie will love this one"... without actually asking little Suzie's opinion.
So the GP is essentially right IMHO: those "kid games" aren't made to appeal to the kid, they're made to appeal to the parents who already forgot what it's like to be a kid.
Oh please. Noone said "square never innovates" or complained about innovation as such. So get off that high horse already.
You're basically committing the classic fallacy of creating a false dichotomy: either you like FF8's uninspired ideas, or you're against innovation as a whole. Which is bogus even as bogus sophistry and fanboyism go.
Not only there's a lot of middle ground between the two, it deliberately ignores that innovation isn't even the only variable there. A game (or everything else) is judged on a whole more dimmensions than just innovation. Something can be highly innovative, yet be crap in a million other aspects: crap story, crap plot, crap delivery, crap mechanics, etc.
Or to turn that bogus dichotomy right back at you: hey, I'm building this house out of bundles of old newspapers, and painting it with human shit. It's so innovative, right? Hey, noone made one like that before. Do you want to live in it? No? Then you're against innovation, you horrible person.
_That_ is the whole point: just being original is _not_ mutually exclussive with being crap in every single other aspect.
The same applies to games. It's ok to innovate, but a game still has to have other qualities too to be worth playing. A crap system or a crap story still make a crap game, even if it's innovative. Crap is still crap even if it's brand-new original crap.
A bad story is a bad story even if it's new. Or do you want to tell me you'd find a story about a booger which fell in the toilet and got flushed the apex of entertainment just because it's new?
So, again: noone criticizes innovation. And noone says simply "I don't like FF XII because it's different." I realize that it makes your fanboy rant easier to over-simplify it like that, but it also makes it so disconnected from reality it's not even funny.
My dear Beavis, you seem to assume that there's no middle ground between (A) apathy, and (B) being spoon fed some nerd's bullshit utopias that never worked that way. Here's a thought for you: how about getting your politics and economy information from other places than video games? Dunno, buy/rent a book, go talk to an economist (you'd be surprised how economics make or break politics), study some history (you'd be surprised how it explains some stuff, for example the middle east), etc. Just a thought.
We have entirely too many idiots who base their bullshit utopias on novels instead of reality. We don't need more of them. Adding video games to the mix isn't even doing anyone any favour.
So, you know, it's time for me to sneer right back, if you need games to get you thinking.
Well, let's put it this way: it also tells you that people are looking for _entertainment_, not for a lopsided lecture in why you should vote for the republicans in the next elections.
I'll even go ahead and say that I'm one of those who _will_ choose to ignore the ideology bullshit, because the alternative would be to actually get annoyed that some idiot lectures me in his half-baked misunderstood ideology. And I'll even tell you why.
1. Because, as I was saying, I'm looking for some simple, sanitized entertainment. I use my brains enough at for other stuff, I have plenty of _real_ stuff to worry about, I don't want games too to be a stress factor and a guilt trip. When I play a game, I want my decisions to be simple no-RL-consequences stuff like "do I look for the princess in the blue castle or the red castle first", not stuff like "damn, should I vote for the left or the right in the next RL election."
And when I'm done with the game, I want to be done with it, to have no more worries following me to bed. Sure, I might still have to find that princess in another castle, or I might have chosen to join the evil empire instead of the rebels, but that's game-only stuff that doesn't carry any consequences or lessons to the real world. It's just a game, it's just a meaningless scenario invented just for that quest, it can be quickly forgotten when I turn the computer off. The _last_ thing I'd want when I turn the computer off is to be followed by some moralizing bullshit or guilt, like, "damn, the game just told me that I should be ashamed for working for this company/country/party and that people like me are to blame for the global warming."
2. There are already plenty of PR hacks and politicians and journos peddling their ideology to me. In fact, there are entirely too many.
I need some time off from all that lopsided reporting and outright PR bullshit. I _don't_ need yet another wannabe Goebbels trying to peddle his ideology to me even when I'm just playing a computer game. Fuck off already, really. If I wanted more dogma, I'd have bought a party's newspapers, not bought a computer game.
3. Just because every barber and taxi driver can talk at length about "what should the government" do, it doesn't mean that they actually have any fucking clue what they're talking about. Most of their "common sense" solutions wouldn't even work. Most are based on pure ignorance of how things really work, and/or on mis-conceptions and false assumptions. And the same applies to game designers. Unless you're an economist or have a degree in political science, don't kid yourself, chances are that you don't know jack about how it really works.
Real politics are a damn complex thing, and the economics that underpins some of those decisions and issues are even more complex and problematic. There is almost _never_ a free meal, and no real win-win scenario. To get X you pay with Y, and the best you can hope for is the least crappy compromise where the costs doesn't out-weigh the gains. There is no easy "just push this button to win" strategy, or someone would have done it already.
Some things can't even be solved at the same time (but politicians will promise to anyway), because they're interdependent and pushing one down will automatically cause the other to rise. E.g., inflation and unemployment.
Basically: stick to what you know, really. If you're a game designer, stick to making games, not to politics lectures. Unless you have a degree in either economics or politics, chances are you don't even know what you're talking about.
And _especially_ I don't want to see another retarded economic "solution" from someone who hasn't even heard of keynesian economics. (Which is how the economy of all countries has worked ever since the Great Depression, and why we don't have the crisis and bankruptcy cycles that were the _norm_ in the 19'th century.) Even you don't
Sad to say, I don't think any MMO will involve any serious quantity of roleplaying.
I've been on RP servers before, I've been on RP MUD's, and frankly, the only ones who kept it half-way in-character were the MUD's which started banning left and right (or executing offending characters in public places) for OOC stuff. Downside: most of those lost most players very fast, and became ghost towns where the grand event of the evening was meeting another player at all.
My latest experimental WoW char was started on an RP server. The first thing I was asked when joining a guild was my RL name. To this day I'm the _only_ one in the whole fucking guild who doesn't address the others by their RL names. Discussions on the guild channel or in groups typically involve RL events (e.g., john is going camping with his kids), talks about alts, and whether to buy Lord Of The Rings Online. Occasionally they talk about buying gold (for RL cash), and at least one talk was about who can masturbate more times in a day.
OK, maybe I've joined the wrong guild, but I do interact with people from other guilds quite often. (I whine about pickup groups as much as the next guy, but I'm always going to give them a try. Call me a masochist.) As far as I can tell, RP guild means they sometimes use brackets when they talk. E.g., while a non-RPer might say "I bought a new graphics card", a RPer will say "(I bought a new graphics card)". See, brackets mean OOC stuff. _Heavy_ RPers or heavy RP guilds say everything in brackets.
Just about the only actual public RP I've noticed was... erm... public foreplay, really. You can tell a roleplayer by their scantily clad female Blood Elf character. I wouldn't know if they just stop after the foreplay or move it to tells. I didn't inquire.
Ok, so Troll characters are also occasionally used by RP-ers, because you just need to talk like a rastafarian to sound like a Blizzard troll. Fairly straightforward to RP. So expect to hear stuff like, "I be buying da new graphics card, mon." That's role-players for you, I guess.
So, on a more serious note, I wouldn't set my hopes high that any setting will just magically turn people into role-players. Just because it's based on some RP setting, well, doesn't mean it'll be played by the same people who play the tabletop version. The bulk, if it actually gets any players at all, will be the same generic video game player type as in any other game.
City Of Heroes is set in a city, and in fact the city is the _whole_ game world. It worked perfectly well so far.
And, yes, it has plenty of people, cars, trucks, etc, on the streets, and even a blimp in the sky in Atlas Park, and barges in the ports. It can be done. A modern graphics card is perfectly able to render 100 NPCs walking around.
They avoid the "this doesn't look like Chicago" question by, well, being a fictional city. I can't see why that wouldn't work in WoD too. The game doesn't have to be set in Chicago, it can be set in a quaint fictive town with 100,000 inhabitants, half of which are the players. Sure, it breaks the rules as to how many vampires should there be per thousand inhabitants, but I'm sure most people can live with that. Noone complained about having crime in a city with 2000 super-heroes active at any given time, after all.
I mean, think about it. Would it really stop you from playing the game if it was set in the fictive city of New Berkshire, instead of in Chicago?
City Of Heroes also _does_ use walls and areas of the city that are just on the city map, but not actually accessible. There are areas which were added later, too, but some still are only on the city map. And some areas were added that weren't part of the original map. Noone minded that so far.
It's not only that.
Most of the stories on his blog, aren't even his stories in the first place. They're just copied verbatim from somewhere else and submitted as his own stories. And I don't just mean a summary and a link to the original story, or some personal comments and a link, but copy and paste.
So it's not just the shameless self-promotion and even the blatant plagiarism, it's also that he makes some ad impressions out of other people's content.