It seems to me like there are plenty of difference between some of the stuff that's lumped together there, as just one big "work = play" pot.
For example, lumping crafters in the same pot as gold farmers strikes me as outright stupid in its over-simplification. One is done for personal fun and achievement (yes, surprise, one of the four player categories identified by Bartle is "achiever"), the other is actual RL work done for no other reason than RL money. One is someone's idea of fun (warped as it may seem to you), the other is just someone's RL "job".
Surprise, some people do stuff for fun that involve investing time and effort. Some people go fishing IRL, others work on their car, others tend their own garden, or take their pet for a walk. Some of those may involve the same activities that other people call work, yet some people do it for fun. E.g., working on tuning your car is the same thing a mechanic calls "work". E.g., taking photos in the park with your cool new digital camera is the same thing a professional photographer calls "work". E.g., taking your pet for a walk, well, some people walk someone else's dog and get paid for it. For them it's "work". For others it's "fun." Maybe I actually enjoy spending some time with my pet. Do you have a problem with that?
It doesn't even stop there. Even if you move away from stuff easily associated with "work", "effort", "time-investment" or "producing something", most things people do for fun and relaxation _still_ are someone else's "work". Watching football? Well, some people get paid for that, you know. E.g., sports journalists. Watching the news? Well, you know, some people are paid to do that. E.g., secretaries and assistants. Reading a novel or watching a movie? Yep, some people would call that their "work" too. Anyone making a living as a critic or reviewer, for a start. Going swimming or dancing? Yep, you guessed, some people get paid for those too. Is there anything that _isn't_ "work" then? Not much left.
Making the mental bridging between virtual worlds and real worlds, "you're doing X in a game, X is a RL profession, ergo you're doing work" is even more shaky. I hate to break it to some people, but that kinda extrapolation makes most game genres be "work sims." Do you enjoy playing a round of Counter-Strike maybe? You know, that's what SWAT employees call "work". Do you enjoy a racing sim? Yep, some people call driving "work". Do you enjoy running around with armour and sword in a medieval game, engaging people in melee? For some millenia that's what mercenaries did. Do you enjoy a WW2 RTS/RTT game in the evening? (E.g., Silent Storm.) Yep, some officers did that as work, not for fun, IRL.
And even comparing it to other activities in the same MMORPG, what's the difference? Player X spent 4 hours grinding swords to level-up their crafting skill. Player Y spent the same 4 hours grinding NPCs to level-up his fighting level or skill. Player Z spent those 4 hours in the battlegrounds, grinding up his PvP rank. What's the fundamental difference there? What makes some of them OK and some of them "work"? From where I stand, all 3 invested the same time and effort.
From where I stand, actually the _only_ question is: did they have fun? That's all. If they did, sure, keep doing it. If they had fun, who has the right to tell them "no, see, _I_ define that as 'work', so you can't possibly have had fun"?
What makes people do all that? (Including the RL and the game stuff.) The simple fact that humans are not made to sit and watch the walls for hours, or not without going completely out of their minds with boredom. So we all find something to do with our time. And each is free to set their own goals, and have their own likes and dislikes when it comes to filling their free time. That's why it's called "free time."
In fact, if anyone really is looking for a line to draw between "fun in your free time" and "work", I'd propose the following definition: if you're free to choose how you spend it, and you do it because you
And now to address the crafting itself
on
Future Plans for SWG?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've split the message into two, because it's really two different issues, and I'd rather not mix them up. Plus, the crafting one is really of minor importance, compared to the constant (other) changes to everyone's characters.
The problem with crafting is this: over-simplifying it won't make it more attractive to those who weren't in that category, since it just replaces one boring grind with another equally boring grind. If anyone can make 10,000 swords a day by just clicking a "make sword" button, limited only by the quantity of ore on hand and the recipes, then you just replaced the old grind with a grind for ore and recipes. Hope you like it more when you run around looking for a tin vein, or when you get some equivalent of WoW's "collect 1000 heavy lether for the Thorium Brotherhood" grind for recipes. In the end, it just makes people do another boring grind in the same time, so it still won't be exciting to more players.
It can however piss off those who were into it in the first place, by breaking the economy. If the bottleneck is the ore, and making swords is easy, then ore prices go way up and sword prices go way down. Have you looked at the Auction House in WoW recently? At any tier, the materials sell for more than any item you could possibly make out of them. To pick a low level example so anyone can check it out without grinding to level 60, look at the materials for a low level sword: light leather, iron and stone. Now look them up at the Auction House, and look up the same sword there. Ah-ha, you could actually sell those materials for more than twice the price of the finished product.
So simplifying it didn't make it more exciting, it just made it stupid too: you're essentially throwing money out the window to pursue a crafting carreer.
It also just made farming profitable. _The_ way to make money in WoW is to farm raw materials and sell them. I fail to see this as an improvement to the game for the following reasons:
1. It's a thankless activity, other than the money itself. While a player _might_ take some pride in being the best swordsmith in town, virtually noone will feel a sense of accomplishment for farming skins and ore for 8 hours straight.
2. It's a slap in the face for those players who actually liked virtual crafting. (Call them "obsessive compulsive grinder" if you will, but you're still making them unhappy anyway.) Being told all the time "geeze, ditch smithing already and start farming if you want money for that mount" is basically denying them any sense of achievement for their virtual craftsmanship level. They're just keeping getting told that they're doing something stupid and actually counter-productive.
3. It presents a no-brainer income source for the gold farmers, and puts everyone else into direct competition with those. While you might not get annoyed that 5 other people are cooking at the same time in that room, a lot of people _will_ be annoyed when they have to compete with resources with some 5 bots farming fellcloth 24 hours a day, nuking every single NPC in sight. Heck, even without even wanting the resources, I know I've been annoyed before when I had to spend an hour killing 20 NPCs for a newbie quest because some level 60 mage was nuking them in wholesale for linen cloth.
So, at any rate, I'm predicting that the upcoming simplifying it even more in EQ2 will have the same effect. It won't make crafting more exciting. If you hate it now, I honestly think you'll still hate it just as much after the changes. Maybe it just can't be made exciting to more people. It might, however, bring in some of the annoying side effects that WoW already has.
"Let's be honest, there are very few games in which the actual crafting process appeals to anyone except the obsessive compulsive grinder, and EQ2 was (is) no exception."
As I was saying, I'm at the moment not discussing whether it actually is more fun or not, nor passing judgment about the mental illnesses (e.g., in your words, "obsessive compulsive grinder") of those who like X instead of Y. The argument about EQ2 crafting being somehow superior, however, did get posted all over the place, and even managed to get a nodding mention on Penny Arcade. That was pretty much _the_ ISO-standard EQ2 fan argument, so it was quite hard to miss it even if you wanted to.
At any rate, apparently some people liked that. Or maybe they just liked the fact that unlike the WoW economy here crafting actually wasn't just a money-sink and excuse to grind for materials/reputation/whatever. Or whatever, really. Some people liked it.
And changing it wantonly just adds another group of people who are disgruntled with the changes. It doesn't matter if in the grand scheme of things they're right or wrong, or how well someone can rationalize the changes. Changing an existing game with an established player base, always pisses off some of them. It's not even news: we all knew it at least since the Quake 2 and 3 changes, or the massive outcry against the lag compensation in Counter-Strike (much as it was actually the right thing to do) or really the changes in any other game. Doing it repeatedly back and forth, just pisses off more people and pisses them off harder.
That's all I wanted to say about Sony's changes: each wave of them just adds more people who liked the old way more. And there are a lot of such changes happening all the time. If it's not crafting, it's combat, or balance, or NPC strength at a given level (yay for the fun of having to switch from shield, to two hander, to shield again, to dual-wield), or everything else. And then it'll change again, just to also offend those who liked the new way.
That's the whole problem with the massive stream of changes: they keep pissing off more and more people. Whether Sony is right or wrong about the changes is pretty much irrelevant there, because Sony is still bleeding customers as a result.
"As I posted (pointlessly, to a thread from last Wednesday, where nobody will ever see it) this is the same forum where another game which makes you sit for half an hour or longer before you can start playing has people bending themselves into logical pretzels to defend this 'feature'. If SOE put a queue on any of its games it would have been flamed here and people would be screaming about class-action lawsuits because they were deprived of their game time."
See, it takes a nerd to take one detail out of context and pretend that it's the One True Criterion to choose a game or a company. Preferrably the one detail noone else gives a flying fuck about.
See, my good nerd, Real Life is more complex than taking one aspect out of context. In Real Life, decisions feature several criteria, and are almost never perfect. They're most often picking the least crappy compromise among a bunch of crappy compromises. Option A has the good parts A1 and A2, but the bad parts A3 and A4, while option B has some other good parts and bad parts. So choosing A or B is an exercise in prioritizing and choosing the one that sucks the least, so to speak.
_Noone_ says that waiting in a line in WoW or SWG or anything else is a fun passtime. That's not the argument. The question is merely whether if the game afterwards is worth the wait or not. That's all.
Why do people defend WoW even though it has queues? Certainly not because they like queues. Because WoW is a far far better game, that's why. In fact, that's how it got the queues in the first place: lots of people wanting to get in.
That's how RL choices and decisions go: the decision isn't "let's play WoW _because_ queues are fun", but rather "do I play WoW even though I'll wait in that sucky queue, or go play SWG without a queue?" (Or even many other players logged on, for that matter.) That's a RL kind of decision: are the good parts about WoW good enough to justify accepting the bad parts (e.g., the queue), or not? And the sad part is, even after you factor in the queues, on the whole it's _still_ a better game than the crap SOE has. Between (A) 1 hour in the queue and 3 hours in WoW, and (B) 4 hours in SWG or EQ2, on the whole option A is _still_ the more fun option.
Would adding queues to Sony's games make them any better? Well, nope, not really. It would just make a crap game be even less fun than it already is. It would just add another straw on the back of the camel for those still tollerating them. Would Sony get flamed for it? Most probably, since Blizzard got flamed too. Plus everyone who wasn't already allergic to queues is in WoW, not on Sony's games, so yes the reaction might be a bit more extreme.
Or to put it otherwise, if those were the only choices, would you rather wait in a line to eat a good meal at a good restaurant, _or_ go eat a rotten apple from the dumpster across the street? Hey, the dumpster doesn't have any waiting. Just go there, stick your hand in, and there you go. Still not interested, eh?
Would adding a queue to the dumpster make it any better? Nope, not really.
Well, maybe now you understand RL choices and decisions.
The fact is, it's not just SWG. If you look at EQ2, since last I've played last year, none of my characters even plays the same or has the same spells. No, seriously, I don't even mean tweaked or rebalanced. They're a completely different class, which just sorta reuses the name of the old one. And now they're busy nerfing crafting into oblivion too, in a desperate bid to become even more over-simplified than WoW.
That pretty much sums up the last year at SOE: making broad-sweeping changes to their games, and making sure the most characters are affected (and annoyed) by those changes. Preferrably taking some disparate element out of WoW, without even taking the time to understand it first, and then trying to shoehorn a grotesque carricature of it into their own games. It doesn't even matter if the change makes sense, or fits the rest of the game, or pisses off their existing customers. In fact, in most cases it's actually making the game worse, or flipping through seemingly random changes and rolling them back just to piss everyone off.
E.g., to pick on the small details too, at some point the "inventory overflow", an elegant solution to getting an extra quest reward when your inventory is already full, got ditched without an explanation, presumably in a bid to be more WoW-like. Then it got gradually rolled back.
E.g., while fans have been busy pimping EQ2 crafting as _the_ thing that's better than on WoW (true or not, that's what the fans said), Sony is now busy nerfing it into being even more over-simplified than WoW. Think, for example, making a newbie gun in WoW, because that's what Sony's crafting used to be like: refine the ore, make the barrel, make the bolts, then assemble the final gun. (Yes, EQ2 doesn't have guns, but that's the closest to illustrating EQ2 crafting. So bear with me.) The new Sony way is: just have a backpack full of ore, roots, wood, whatever, click on a button, get the full gun. Or worse yet, a spell scroll, without any explanation as to how that wood and ore got turned into paper and ink.
And if that didn't piss off crafters, let's have generic non-elite NPCs randomly dropping items with better stats at the same level than anything a crafter can make. (I can only assume someone told them about the end-game drops in WoW, but forgot to tell them about 90% of the story there.)
At any rate, the game is in a constant state of flux where everything you knew might change from one day to the next one. And then get changed again into something else. And again. The piece of rare armour or the rare weapon you've paid a mint for might get you killed in the next patch (as happened with a lot of people with two handers back when Sony decided to over-emphasize the value of shields in a patch), or the spell you've paid good money to upgrade might get taken out of the game completely. And then they'll change it again.
And what they don't seem to get is:
1. What's good about WoW is that it makes sense and is polished as a _whole_, not as one heap of disparate parts in which Sony can find a singular disparate gem that kept people there. Taking disparate parts of WoW, copying them _badly_, and sticking them (again: badly) in a game that's already a heap of disparate parts, well, won't make it any better. Throwing one more disparate item onto a heap will just make it a bigger heap, nothing more.
2. Blizzard _didn't_ piss off their customer with major changes all the time. Sure, there have been changes, but the changes to balance were relatively few and far in between, and AFAIK never to the extent of turning one class into something completely different. And, with some PvP-related exceptions, they have been mostly along the lines of upgrade than downgrade.
Making broad-sweeping changes every couple of weeks, and then changing it again, is just a way to piss off both those who liked the old way and those who liked the new way. Some of them twice. It's not gonna turn their games into a success, it will just accumulate more and more disgruntled players telling everyone else "EQ2 sucks" or "SWG sucks."
Frankly, probably the biggest and most unimaginative mistake of SWG was placing it in the timeline of the original EP4-6 trilogy where, yeah, there are virtually no Jedi left. Not only that limits the availability of _the_ most demanded class by the players, it also severely limits what you can do with the game universe and what story you can tell with it.
You'll notice that the most successful games set in a given universe step outside the timeline that confines them. KOTOR is one example, but maybe World Of Warcraft is a better one: it _doesn't_ happen during the Warcraft 3 battles, but some time later, when they can write a new story and invent their own story NPCs as the need.
Even in the movies business, you'll notice that (for whatever other faults they had), Lucas _didn't_ just pile more story into the same EP4-6 timeline, just for the sake of pimping Darth Vader in the same outfit some more. He took a step back in time where he could tell you a different bit of the story (and when, yes, 10,000 assclowns with lightsabers ran around). And (again, for whatever other fault the prequels may have had), chances are you were more interested in seeing a new story, and seeing for example WTF _were_ the Clown Wars... err... Clone Wars that Yoda mentioned, than if it were "Jolee Littlebottom the cantina dancer eventually gets to see Lord Vader during the same EP4-6 period."
That's good story telling and/or game design versus just merchandising. Any idiot can take a DIKU MUD and place Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, etc, in it, just for the sake of whoring the franchise. But again, that's merchandising, nothing more. But taking a step outside or sideways and telling your own story is what makes a good game or movie.
There are tens of thousands of years of Republic history to place your story in, most of which had plenty of Jedi. Or you could go into the future, after Luke rebuilt the Jedi academy and the Sith are again some secretive group lurking in the shadows. (It's not like people are gonna stop falling to the Dark Side any time soon.) Maybe a new war broke out, or maybe they're just plotting a new infiltration. Maybe a new wannabe Palpatine is looking for new Anakins to take over the world with. Maybe just a group of people are still nostalgic about the Empire and secretly plan to rebuild it. Or whatever.
See? It wasn't even that hard, and it allows you all the freedom you want.
And again, on the topic of 10,000 assclowns with lightsabers, that's what the vast majority of the galaxy's history was all about. They had a whole freaking council and academy on Coruscant. Being a Jedi wasn't about achievement, it wasn't about grinding through all the professions first (how many professions had Luke mastered anyway?), it was simply about being born that way. Even assuming that only one in a _billion_ was born sensitive enough to the Force, a planet like Earth would have some 6-7 of them. And we're talking about a whole galaxy to hand-pick them from.
Basically the problem isn't "earning" stuff, as long as it's kept within reasonable limits. I don't think anyone would consider, say, earning your Imp or Voidwalker as a Warlock in WoW to be repetitive or work. One is basically a "go there, get that book for me" quest (and not get killed first by the NPCs there) and the other is "go there, kill the npc, bring back her choker" quest. Straightforward, to the point, a little challenging, and no farming involved. And frankly, not only it's something "earned" to be proud of, but also adds a certain flavour: it gives you a quest to do and some insight in what your class is about, instead of just a new icon sprouting on your toolbar after grinding enough boars.
That's really what gets people addicted, not the later grind for resources. _This_ is what MMORPG gamers really want, and unsurprisingly most MMORPG players went to the game which gave them more of this in the beginning. You'll notice the majority isn't on the games which give you the repetitive grind and (near)impossibility to solo from the start. So that blaming it on MMORPG players and some meme is missing the point by a mile.
But unfortunately that only works that way at the lower levels.
The problem again isn't that MMORPG players start demanding something else, but that the MMORPG publisher only has so much funds for game content. And that content has to last you for about 6 months, which is what an average gamer needs to get past the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase. Some need less, some stay there for 5 years, but when you turn it all into a statistic, 6 months is sorta where the bathtub curve starts going up one way or the other. So the developper has to stretch that content somehow over 6 months.
And currently the formula is to give you more of it up-front when you join, so they get you addicted, and very very slowly give you less and less from there. Until at the end-game it has already crawled to a start and you need to farm one dungeon daily for months, just so you can enter the next one. At that point, any new content or rewards you're getting is in dilluted to homoepathic doses.
However at that point they're not counting on you actually having fun either. They just count that you're well into the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase and busy rationalizing it, so you don't need more than a vague shaddow of a carrot dangled in front of you to stay there. At that point, the rewards and earnings are so dilluted and improbable that they just serve to give you some material to rationalize about, not something that's what MMORPG players as a whole love.
So basically even at this point, blaming MMORPG players and their memes is IMHO missing the whole point by a mile. That isn't what the MMORPG players themselves been asking for, it's just the final act of a cruel scam they've been gradually guided into. And no matter how some may rationalize it as being the meat of the game (humans are damn good at rationalizing taking crap), here's the reality check: that's not what got them addicted to the game during the first 30-40 levels. And they're not in other games which gave them that "meat" up-front, from level 1, either. So don't tell me that their whole personality did an 180 degree turn when reaching level 60, and they suddenly started actually wanting to grind for weeks even for a token reward.
Yes, it should make everyone rethink their priorities, and in truth it _eventually_ does. That's why people do eventually leave.
"how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?"
Nintendogs was already mentioned, and it's not only selling like crazy, it's also helping sell the DS big time. I know people who had no intention of getting a portable console, but ended up buying one anyway because their kid wanted Nintendogs.
I'll add titles like Catz or Creatures. I don't know the exact sales numbers, but I'd assume it must have been enough to be worth making sequels and console ports. Creatures was up to number 3, last I checked, and it had spawned user mods and a free semi-online expansion. And, oh, you could train them. In fact, you pretty much had to.
And then there's The Sims Unleashed, and expansion pack which did amazingly well given that almost all it gave you was cats and dogs for The Sims. And yes, the dogs had to be trained.
So basically enough people _do_ want a virtual pet, but it still had to be fun. That's where Black And White fell short. For most of us was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.
"The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell."
Marketting it had in spades, and in a sense that's all it had. PM hypes any half-baked idea he ever has, and EA was more than happy to act as the amplifier for that hype.
His games since Populous weren't even that innovative. Training a creature had been done before (Creatures 1 to 3 already existed), creature fights had been done before (Pokemon), Movies style games are a dime a dozen (look for anything with "Tycoon" in the title), and good-vs-evil is a _stapple_ of RPGs and several other games. I mean, seriously, whop-de-fucking-do, a RPG where you get alignment and a good-or-evil choice at the end? It describes almost half the RPGs ever made. Vampire, KOTOR, you name it.
That wasn't as much innovation, as just hype.
But that's not the real problem. The real problem is just that: "But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. ". No, make that: falls very much short compared to what's already on the market.
See, making games isn't all about having a crazy idea, but also then actually making a game that's fun to play. Any gamer has some crazy idea of a game. Ask anyone. (And see if it doesn't involve good-vs-evil too.) What makes a great designer is then putting some good gameplay around it, giving it some interesting content, and polishing it all into a gem. _That's_ what game design is all about.
Now let's look at Lionhead's games.
Black And White was a micro-management nightmare, and an _intrusive_ nightmare at that. (You know it's bad when even the fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite-resources _exploit_ to keep the worshippers fed or to have enough wood. Or for fuck's sake, literally, the villagers wouldn't even reproduce unless you personally assign them to.) It also passes swift good-or-evil judgment on the _player_, based on some idiotic criteria that don't even follow your actions. (E.g., failing to save the villagers from someone else's attack, even if you did try to save them, makes you the spawn of satan. Sorry, that's just bullshit. Incompetent, maybe, but no way that counts as evil.) It also doesn't help that both sides are a grotesque carricature that boggles the mind. There is no good or evil in that game, there's just playing a micro-managing retard versus playing a self-destructive retard that's damaging his own power pool.
The execution also basically sucked. The game was launched missing features that were hyped to hell and back, the AI for the creature (i.e., the main hyped feature) was a sick joke, save and reload were broken by design (wtf is the point of save and reload if half the game, e.g., the creature's state, _isn't_ saved or restoreabl
"I'm calling shenannigans. What AV program removed mIRC? That sounds suspiciously like 'Microsoft AV deletes firefox!'"
Much as I'd like to credit MS with something of that calibre, it's actually the G Data antivirus that insisted that mIRC is a horrible risk.
At a wild guess, I don't think it really merits a comparison with MS deleting some competing product. Think Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I.e., I don't think G Data has some actual commercial interest in getting people off IRC. More like, well, that's what you get when you let a bunch of incompetent monkeys play with the signatures and heuristics rules files. But that's just a wild guess.
"Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned."
Well, we could mention it, in the form of "Well, and then there's Morrowind which sucks in every single aspect compared to these other games I've mentioned. In fact, it's the prime example of how _not_ to make a big game: having barely enough material for a small game, and dilluting it to cover a hundred square miles of computer-generated terrain and copy-and-pasted dungeons, and a gazillion NPCs, all saying the same generic things. And oh, if you can only afford one FMV sequence in the _main_ story line, don't use it for something that matters. Have a FMV of a statue which _doesn't_ move as the only animated or voiced part of the whole main quest. And tell the player that he's on a non-important, non-urgent quest, that doesn't really affect anyone anyway, much less save them."
Because that's what Morrowind was. A computer-generated island, filled with jaded non-descript NPCs saying the exact same things and giving you the same UPS quests. ("Find NPC X with only vague and occasionally wrong directions, give him item Y, return.") For something that claimed to be a step up from Daggerfall's random computer-generated UPS quests, it sure wasn't a big step up. A human doing a copy-and-paste job to get quantity instead of quality in there, sure doesn't produce a better experience.
And again, everyone said the same generic things. Since every single line of text could be said by a hundred different NPCs, every one of them was vague and generic enough so it can be said by everyone. Even NPCs which you'd expect to have a different opinion about something (e.g., a city guard and a thieves guild member should have more extremely different views about theft or about each other), still spewed the same jaded vague one-size-fits all text.
That might have been enough in the age of NES, but nowadays... compare it to a _good_ RPG like KOTOR, where NPCs all have their own personalities and a handful (the team members) even have their own story to discover and tie the knots of. In KOTOR even shopkeepers had their quirks, preferences, personalities and unique dialogue lines that reflected that. None of that was to be found anywhere in Morrowind.
But what really took the cake was the main quest. I had happily accepted the running around like an idiot, doing generic quests in generic dungeons for generic people, in the thought that it would all eventually come together and serve some epic purpose. (Lots of games start with the hero doing unimportant stuff, just to show that he's, you know, just an ordinary guy like you. Just following the already cliched Hero's Journey recipe, and all that.)
And what was it for? For something that even tried to look mundane, non-interesting and pointless. No, seriously. Both the NPCs and the books, and even the lone FMV sequence, did their best to hammer it into your head that... nah, it's not important. There's no real urgency, you know. It might be several thousand years before that final evil actually does anything, and even then maybe it will or maybe it won't. And if you fail? Don't worry, it's not like we're in a hurry or like you're that important. Someone else will drop by and save the world in all that time. Oh, you actually want to go and end it now? You sure you don't want to wait another 1000 years? You know, maybe some other idiot will do the job by then? Well, sure, knock yourself out. It's not like we give a damn.
It was as anti-climactic as it can possibly go. It was like watching a movie where the grand climax is the hero's going to the supermarket to buy a can of soda, except even less important than that in the grand scheme of things.
I could go on and on, but chances are I wrote too much text already and you've read all that already.
At any rate, that's why you don't hear people mentioning Morrowind in every single discussion about RPGs. Because in the end we all have better stuff to do than reminisce about how bad Morrowind was. We've all moved on to playing other games, and discussing more pleasant stuff, e.g., discussing games which were actually fun to play.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I read that tall tale. I can't exactly remember the games where I've read that (B&W has been mentioned already, but there were more than 1), but yes, there was this deja-vu sensation. I had read the exact same bullshit a couple dozen times before, for more than one game.
In fact, the first time I've heard that kind of a claims was in the early 80's, about some program in a book where a dot would randomly bounce around a box or maze until it found the way out. I don't even mean backtrack around a maze, like for example in the Linux screensaver. Just bounce around until it eventually find the exit. Apparently that counted as life-like AI. Adding a few more tweaks to that program (like weighting the probabilities for the direction to bounce in) apparently made it incredibly life-like AI. Needless to say, once you actually saw it in action, it still was just a stupid bouncing dot.
It never worked that way. It's usually either shameless PR bullshit, or some wishful-thinking designer letting his imagination run amok.
The problem is that it doesn't have to even be an outright lie. (Did I mention PR?) It's easy to script an NPC to do something like that on a one-off basis for a rigged demo. Whether it's a classic procedural script ("if x has broom, then call murder_script(x), else...") or an Prolog-style inference engine, it's still just a script. If you give an AI the exact rules to arrive at the "I must murder X" conclusion, it will predictably commit it, because you've just scripted to do that.
Or in B&Ws case it's easy to add a piece of script saying, basically, "if X is a football, and zone is flagged as a football field, then kick(X)". It doesn't make those villagers intelligent, it just runs a script.
It's in the end no different from writing a "Hello World" program in whatever language that AI takes. Except instead of 'printf("Hello world!");' it calls the function to attack that NPC. It's easy.
The problem is that it doesn't work that way in the actual game. And here's why: giving an inference engine 5 rules to come to a prescribed result in a prescribed situation is a whole different proposition from giving it 100,000 rules to act intelligently in any situation.
When you just need to trigger one prescribed action it's easy, and you're freed from concerning yourself with any other considerations or priorities. The NPC just has to murder the baker. That's it. That's all.
But when you put it in a game where 1000 other courses of action are possible, now you have to also choose which is the right one. When the player steals some NPCs broom, you don't want it to trigger a chain reaction where every NPC in town murders everyone else. (If nothing else, because it screws up all quests in that town.) So should the NPC murder major quest NPCs too, for example?
What about the rest of the daily schedule for that NPC? How far it will go in its quest for a broom? What else will it neglect? What side-effects will it trigger in other NPCs? Can you even predict all those and their effects on the game? What if noone else has a broom, because a bored player stole all the brooms in the game? Will the whole town be stuck running around scanning everyone else for a broom? Etc.
Make no mistake, the NPC cannot improvise, it can only execute the rules and scripts it was given. So if you want complete realism there, it balloons into a _monster_ of a giant script, covering all possible combinations of tens of thousands of possibilities.
_That's_ the real problem with making a realistic life-like AI. It all balloons into something that's many orders of magnitude more complex and more work than making one NPC do one action for a rigged demo.
And that's basically why we keep reading about how someone amazingly solved the token problem (making one NPC do one thing), but you don't see the final game actually solving the _real_ problem.
Yep, I've been hit before by the exact same scenario you describe, although probably with a different string.
So I'm playing WoW happily and suddenly I'm completely lagged (you know, those time-bubbles where you can run around, but not cast spells or receive any update from the server) and then disconnected. Better yet, when I try to reconnect, I can't.
Turns out that something in that stream of binary data between the WoW server and the WoW client looked to Norton suspiciously like some old SQL Server exploit. Never mind that it wasn't even talking to the right program, on the right port, or in the right direction. So it helpfully took me offline, for my own good.
Now as I've said, I have no clue exactly _what_ sequence of bytes triggered it there. Presumably something more SQL-like than this one. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone took the time to figure it out and broadcast it in a battleground match.
I don't know if it's the same string (probably not), but Norton was idiotic enough to forbid WoW from accessing the network any more after it detected something in the stream of data that looked like an SQL Server exploit. Or something like that, I don't remember the exact message, since I was busy swearing when that happened. The fact that it was a different program, on a different port, _and_ the direction in which the "exploit" was transmitted was all wrong... well, that didn't stop Norton from helpfully trying to protect me.
Also it didn't stop there, since thereafter their firewall was automatically configured to forbid access to the WoW client.
Frankly, by now I'm thinking most of these "security products" are:
1. unnecessary, if you have some clue, use a firewall, keep your system patched, and have enough brains to read pop-up messages before clicking "yes". None has yet detected a _real_ virus on my computers yet.
2. about as effective as a condom with a hole in it when you actually need them: they just give you a false sense of security while you're getting screwed. The one time when I did intentionally play with a virus, Norton _didn't_ detect it. (Yes, it was intentional. I actually planned to let a system get virused while I download Sygate Personal Firewall, then reformat and reinstall.)
Worse yet, there are plenty of viruses which disable them anyway. So if you did get a new virus (e.g., by not obeying point 1) before Symantec updates their signatures, chances are it will disable your antivirus anyway. So basically the only way to be sure you still have protection is... to not get virused in the first place, without its help. Does it sound superfluous yet?
Worse yet, these "security products" lately have more exploits of their own than Windows has, basically just creating extra oportunities to get pwn3d by a script-kiddie. I know of at least one virus which did already spread through an overflow in a security product.
3. Perhaps more importantly: good only for slowing the system down and creating annoying false positives.
E.g., the WoW disconnect described above. (Though it would also fit in the "creating a new exploit" category described above.)
E.g., I haven't had one yet which didn't pick on some innocent program on account that some bytes in it looked like they _could_ do something that _could_ be dangerous.
E.g., heck, forget disconnecting from IRC for keylogger commands. At least one was idiotic enough to insist on deleting mIRC (both installed _and_ the installer) off my computer, because they thought IRC was a risk. And yes, you've read that right. Not because of detecting some possible problem in code, not because of knowing of an exploit in that particular mIRC version, etc. Just because of a retarded biased judgment call that mIRC is dangerous, and they wanted to protect me from that. (As a side-note: then why not also delete IE, if they're at deleting programs just because they think they _could_ be dangerous? I dare say it's got a worse track record than mIRC.)
Etc.
4. and even more importantly, most are worse than a virus in and by themselves. I don't think a virus or trojan even exists yet that slows down a computer worse than most of these "security solutions." You'd have to get several layers of them before a modest computer starts to crawl the way it does with Norton or McAffee on it.
"Personally, I've always thought the same about alcohol."
Basically, yes, that's the idea. If alcohol "made" someone go punch the neighbour in the face or tell the boss a heartfelt "fuck you", chances are that's what they wanted to do when they were sober too.
And more importantly: they would have done it without alcohol or the internet too, if a time came when they thought they can get away with it. The history is full, for example, of times of anarchy when a whole bunch of people decided to go take vengeance on their neighbour because it looked like they can get away with it or find an excuse for it.
That's what I should have probably made clearer in the previous message: when someone starts being an asshole IRL too (or when sober too), chances are it didn't "seep" from their Internet behaviour into RL. Chances are they just don't care about the RL consequences either, or decided that those consequences are small enough to live with.
I've seen people go through such changes with no alcohol or Internet forums being involved. E.g., a timid "Nice Guy" (TM) geek gets promoted to management and starts acting like a flaming asshole. E.g., a nice manager during the dot-com bubble turns into a flaming asshole once he gets the idea "muahahaha, the bubble is over, I can finally wipe the floor with these guys and they won't quit during _this_ crappy period on the job market." Etc.
And my take is that they didn't just pick a bad influence on the Internet or at the pub or whatever. That's who they really were deep down inside all along. And what brought it to surface wasn't momentarily confusing RL with an online forum, but just deciding that the pretense isn't really needed any more IRL. They would have done it without the Internet just the same.
"Sometimes habits picked up online leak out into offline life. This can include troll-like behavior, but is certainly not limited to trolling."
I dare say that if someone's line of thinking is "muahahaha, I'm anonymous and have an audience, now I can act like a total fuckwad" (like in the PA comic), then that's their _real_ personality: a total fuckwad. It's not as much something they've picked online, it's something that they really were all along.
Maybe fear of repercursions kept them from doing that offline before, and forced them to act as if they're someone else. But in the end, it's not that going online made them develop a second personality. It just allowed them to drop the mask and act their real personality.
"A case in point: in many online forums, people express themselves in ways much more vulgar than they ever would in real life. People gradually adopt expressions like "bitch", "cunt", (and so on) which they would never say out loud.
Or, at least, these people think they would never say these phrases out loud. But quite a lot of the process of word choice is performed at an unconscious mind, so before you know it, you can end up with Senior White House Correspondents accidentally using expressions like sloppy seconds."
I'm not entirely sure what the point is there. They definitely didn't learn those words on the forums, unless they've lived under a rock since birth and never, for example, saw a Hollywood movie, heard a joke, went to high school, or generally interacted with humans. That correspondent probably heard that expression before IRL a thousand times.
It's not the first time I see that dopamine explanation being thrown around, and this isn't even the most scientific one. But then maybe it just had to be dumbed down for Joe Random to understand it.
But here's also the problem I have with the dopamine explanation waved around more and more these days: it is also dumbed down enough to paint a wrong picture to Joe Random and make it sound like it's drug addiction. In fact, like it's the poor man's marijuana substitute. Which makes for good lobbying and propaganda material. However, the problem with that picture is that reality is exactly the other way around.
Yes, among the many chemicals in your brain, your brain also releases one to signal "I'm happy". It's not a drug, it's not being rewarded with marijuana-like hit, nor whatever stupidities are thrown around. It's just the normal working of the brain and one of the many kinds of signals it uses. You get the same kind of signal when your program finally compiles, or when you get praised by your boss, or whatever. The busybody complaining about youth and their internet addiction gets the exact same chemical signal when his paper is published, or when he's found a good listener, or whatever else makes him happy. (Because again that's the natural "I'm happy" signal.) The bushman in south africa, who never heard of computers or Internet, gets the same signal when his arrow hits an antelope.
However, the brain also contains the opposite mechanism, to bring the chemical levels back towards zero. You're not made to stay perpetually happy. You may get a big signal when you're awarded a promotion or you've won the lottery, but immediately thereafter it starts to decay towards zero again. So you get to work at getting the next moment of happiness, or work even harder at maintaining the current one. Whatever it is that makes you happy, whether it's some social interaction or learning some new stuff or buying new stuff or playing a game, you'll have to do it again or some more.
It's not even limited to humans. Animals too are "wired" exactly the same, so they'll keep doing some things and avoid doing others. When your cat finds a nice raised spot to sleep in, rest assured that said cat gets the exact same "yay, I'm happy" signal. Or if you're into dogs, that dog gets the exact same sigal when he's got near the pack leader (i.e., you) and better yet gets some attention from the pack leader. It kept wolves from getting split up.
So what really remains is that:
1. people keep doing stuff they like. More precisely: _anything_ they like. There is no discrimination in that signal saying "oh, I'll fire for video games only". Hence painting it as a "video game addiction" or a "golf addiction" is subtly wrong. Unlike, say, alcohol addiction or heroin addiction, which can be satisfied by only one thing, here there is no such discrimination. You could do anything else pleasurable to the same effect. There is _nothing_ there that says it can be satisfied by video games only. Just because someone is stuck in a rut doing what they already know that makes them happy (and non-gamers have their own ruts there), doesn't make them addicted exclusively to that thing.
2. Whether it's one activity done for 6 hours a day, or 6 activities done for 1 hour each, it's still the same chemical mechanism involved. If you're gonna define it as drug addiction, then whether it's 6 hours gaming, or 2 hours gaming and 2 hours fishing and 2 hours taking photos in the park, it's still 6 hours of getting the exact same chemical hit. The human notion of "yeah, but the second is a balanced life" may be good and fine, but from purely the dopamine point of view it's still 6 hours of getting dopamine hits. Being balanced or unbalanced about the ways to get it doesn't mean you're not getting it just the same. So if your point is that a balanced life is better, you need a better explanation than the dopamine one. The supposed "dopamine addiction" does _not_ make any kind of point about a balanced life being any better, as far a
"People should spend less time online and more time reading". Or subtitute reading for "Playing Outside", "Hanging with their friends", "visiting grandma", etc. It's extremely common it seems for the older generation to complain about new things to do with your time that aren't what they used to do."
Indeed very much so. Grandma still reminisces about how she had to be sneaky about reading a book, because her parents kept trying to make her do something more productive.
In fact, here's one I found even funnier: one of our professors at college, an old man, read a text to us where someone was complaining about "youth nowadays" and how they dress all wrong, show no respect to their elders, have bad manners, and generally everything is going down in a hurry. You know what was funny? The text was written by some ancient Greek, before Christ.
I would say that nothing changed much in that aspect. If you went back in time all the way, you could probably find a couple of tribal elders complaining loudly about "youth nowadays" and all those new bad habbits. Like fire and cooked food. They must be addicted to that stuff. Or about how the youth wear their antelope skins all wrong.
Unfortunately, this happens every day even in major newspapers, not only on a community bulletin board. In fact, we're at the point where at least half the news you read are actually PR. In some cases, more.
PR is a very insidious thing. They don't release outright ads, which people are already deveolopping a resistance too. They release stuff looking like genuine news, or like genuine buyer reviews.
E.g., one such PR hack discussed on Slashdot was the _flood_ of news pieces saying that the suit is back, that all the cool companies require people to wear suit, and the IT cable-puller in jeans is sooo last century. (Yeah, pulling cables in a suit is soo much better.) Complete with interviews of hand-picked PHBs testifying about how their company is soo much more professional with everyone wearing a suit, and how they always look for a nice suit (as opposed to actual professional knowledge, which supposedly is aplenty nowadays and unnecessary for the job anyway) when interviewing someone.
It looked like news, and it had the insidious effect of actually _creating_ that fashion. It both offered every single SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) among PHBs a new fashion to be a victim of (hey, it says all the cool guys are requiring suits, and I want to be cool like them too), _and_ told you to go buy a suit already if you're looking for a job. You know, just to be on the safe side, if you're interviewed by a PHB.
The most insidious part was that _none_ of these releases even directly pointed at the company paying for the pollution campaign. The only subliminal link was the phrase "The suit is back", which was also the company's slogan in proper ads.
And, BTW, at this point I'm not discussing the merits of wearing or not wearing a suit, just explaining how PR works.
Or look at the recent attacks on Wikipedia. Regardless of what merits or faults Wikipedia has, I'll bet my soul it was a PR campaign. The attack errupted too suddenly all over the place, and spread way too fast, and died way too fast when the PR campaign stopped fuelling the flames. But more telltale is that it was followed immediately by news all over the place that someone is now making a better wikipedia, with proper reviews by experts, and just recently got the funding from interested parties. (Ah-ha. So around the time the attacks on Wikipedia started, perchance?) The whole attack and outrage and defacements were just to lead to that punchline: come to our commercial product instead, we need to show the VCs that we have page hits.
And make no mistake, a _lot_ of people fell for that campaign, including TV/radio hosts conducting Wikipedia defacements live just to show how unreliable the info there can be made by anyone. And even Penny Arcade, otherwise pretty impartial guys, just had to sport a strip attacking Wikipedia. That's the kind of effect and reach a PR campaign can have.
So to get back to Infinium, don't expect their PR pollution to be like "hey, click here and buy infinium stock, goddammit". It'll be far more subtle and more damaging. It'll be stuff like seemingly normal gamers like you ranting about how stupid it is to buy a game on DVD and get it scratched, and how it's about damn time someone started offering everything as downloaded rentals. (Which incidentally is what Infinium promissed to offer.) Or various other subtle stuff.
Chances are it won't even mention Infinium, other than rarely and only in some side-note or tangent. They won't give you an "Infinium is the best" answer to a question you didn't even ask. They'll challenge the very foundation and premises of your judgment of who's best and who sucks, then let you get to that conclusion yourself. (Note how in the other two examples they never explicitly told you "go buy a suit" or "use that site instead of wikipedia". They just gave you plenty of reasons, fake or not, for you to reach that conclusion on your own.)
So don't fool yourself: it _will_ slip through the forum admins with no problems.
"If you really feel that you need a book on design independent from programming"
Indeed I do, because the two are very separate facets of it. A game is _not_ just the code implementing it, and what made, say, KOTOR fun _isn't_ the clever lightsaber rendering code or the NPC dialogue code. The most important parts, the parts that the actual users saw, were the game design parts like the actual dialogues, not the implementation details behind them.
"(Though I question the concept of separating a tradesmaster from his trade. Would a building, no matter how beautiful, be designed by an architect lacking in engineering background?)"
I see no problem separating a tradesmaster from a completely _unrelated_ trade. The architect who designed a bank building is _not_ an expert on banking or economics. He may be a brilliant architect, he may have an engineering background, but chances are he's not also an expert on economics. The electrical engineer who designed the coils for a hydro power-plant, chances are he's _not_ an expert on anything else in that plant, and I certainly wouldn't entrust him with designing the dam too. The guy who designed an overhead projector, no matter how good he might be at optics or mechanical engineering, chances are he doesn't know jack squat about the management processes that will use that projector for a business presentation. Etc.
Same here. Just because someone may be a world-class guru in programming, doesn't mean jack squat about his knowing anything about game design. Maybe he does, maybe he does't. It's an unrelated skill.
One is a book for programmers, the other is a book for game _designers_. So the relevance of that comparison is...?
Even if you're of the arrogant school of thinking that programmers are the alpha and the omega, and everyone else is an idiot, the program code itself _isn't_ the alpha and the omega. A game isn't just a collection of clever rendering/AI/collision/whatever subroutines. And knowing how to write clever code doesn't make you a game designer, any more than knowing how to lay out a brochure makes you a marketting expert, or than knowing how to assemble a telescope makes you an astronomer.
At any rate, designing the game and programming game code are two very very different things. Some people may be able to do both -- though a lot less than people who _think_ they could do both -- but still, they're different activities. So exactly what is the relevance of programmers or game programming books there? No, seriously. It's like saying that we don't need a new chemistry book, because a better written gardener's handbook already exists. Yeah, and the relevance of that is...?
I'm not saying that this book is particularly useful. In fact, it sounds like a major waste of time. But I _am_ saying that it addresses a whole different subject and targets a whole different audience. That's all.
Baldur's Gate is... how many years old? I seem to remember it coming out sometime in the late 90's.
So, basically, sorry, I was talking about the trend in the 21'th century, rather than about how long games used to be in the 90s. If anything, that just illustrates the decline I'm talking about.
I can easily think of PC RPGs which took a lot less than 10 hours to finish. For example, take both Vampire titles. In fact, I dare say that that applies to any PC RPG that isn't a console port. (Not to mention that your average PC "RPG" game will actually be either a hack-and-slash action game or a mis-named RTS with some minimal stats thrown in.)
BTW, KOTOR I and II were ports of console games, so don't bother giving those as counter-examples.
But there's one aspect to it that's more important: the games industry itself is giving interviews and PR releases everywhere, saying that games should be shorter, and that somehow they're just doing what the gamers want. See, it's supposedly the gamers that want to pay 50$ for a 5 hour game. Yes, sir. Supposedly we gamers just don't have the attention span for those 30 hour games, and every single game most people didn't finish (because it was crap or became crap by the middle of it) is taken out of context and placed on a pedestal as prime example that gamers just want shorter games.
So even if a lot of RPGs still are longer than 10 hours, their numbers are slowly going downhill. That "short is good" myth is the image that the publishers themselves are aiming for, and they're circularly reinforcing that myth for each other.
There's a lot of wishful thinking in this industry. There are a lot of pseudo-truths or flawed truisms that publishers throw around, apparently in a hope that they'll become truth if one only repeats them often enough.
E.g., that quality doesn't matter, and gamers actually _want_ to buy a dysfunctional unfinished POS now and maybe get a patch later. (Surely buying a game that crashes at the main menu with a script _syntax_ error (a la the German version of Victoria) is ok, as long as some time in the future you'll get a patch that actually lets you start the game.) E.g., that people only buy for screenshots, ergo gameplay and story don't really matter. E.g., that shameless hype sells, but you don't need to even try actually having a quality product that lives up to that hype.
And one such hand-waved wishful thinking lately is that somehow gamers actually _want_ shorter games, and it's ok to charge 50$ for a 5 hour game. In fact, that it's outright perfect. It's just giving the gamers what they want, right?
And this statistic basically just says: no, it's not perfect and it's not what the gamers want. In fact, we're already at the point where about half the market thinks that what they're getting isn't worth the price.
That, in a nutshell, is the main merit of this statistic. It says it black-on-white that no, that's not what the gamers want. Not that I expect the publishers to get it, though. Being a jaded old cynic, I expect them to just issue even more PR "news" and interviews about how, really, deep in their hearts gamers do want short games. And keep hoping that they just need to repeat the falsehoods even more often to become truth.
I'd vote that insightful rather than funny, if I had any moderator points atm.
Such articles saying that PCs dominate the video game market are at best mis-leading. For example:
1. Yes, I'd be very interested what they play on those PCs. The fact is, for better or worse, the console market has massively higher sales in dollars. If half of those PCs are used to run Solitaire or some freeware puzzle game (I know that's what my mother plays most of the time), the picture for a publisher, i.e., for someone trying to _sell_ a game, could be very very different. Actually, as I've said, we already know that when you measure it in dollars it _is_ a very different picture.
2. For that matter, even if somebody wants to take that as "it means we _could_ sell games to 39% of the people, if we figured out what they want to play"... how many of those PCs are high-end enough for a new game? It's one thing to be able to play a 2D puzzle game, and it's a whole different proposition to get them to play EQ2 on that PC. (I know it often stutters on my 7800 GTX, Athlon 64 4000+ and 2 GB RAM system, so I shudder to even think how it would run on some grandpa's 5 year old Celeron with integrated graphics.) In practice, I suspect that at _least_ half those PCs can be safely considered non-existent for the purpose of running a new game.
3. It's not an "exclusive or" there. Numbers like ""39% of all households use PCs for playing video games - this group makes up the vast majority of the 48% of households that have any sort of video games hardware."" does _not_ mean that 39% use exclusively PCs and 9% use exclusively consoles. In practice, there is a massive overlap between the two categories. I know I have both.
So basically I'd take this as mostly just trivia. Yes, a lot of people have some kind of PC (even if an ancient Cyrix 300+) and play _some_ kind of game on them, but that doesn't mean by far that it's overtaking the profitable console game market.
"Slightly of TFA, but for some reason Logitech gave the Rumblepad 2 for the PC square moldings around the analog stick which makes pulling off circular motions a pain in the ass. Oddly, their controller for the PS2 does not have this."
Personally I find most of the PC gamepads to be a royal pain in the rear, and I've tried a lot of them. Getting an adapter to plug my PS2 controller in was the best money I've ever spent.
The problem with PC gamepads, as far as I can tell is that nobody just makes a damn gamepad for playing sake, but to look cook and funky and "innovative" in all the wrong ways. Even if the same company makes a sane clone of the original console controller for that console, on the PC version they just _have_ to screw up with some hare-brained attempt to look cooler than the other controllers out there. And considering how some of them worked, I can only guess they're also trying to achieve that with the cheapest crap possible, and not in a "best bang per buck" way either.
E.g., among the problems I've had with my stack of PC gamepads:
- at least one (an old Logitech, I believe) had the grips slanted as to form an angle, and the D-pad was slanted accordingly. So when my instincts told me I'm pushing forward -- i.e., towards the screen -- the damn thing would register it as pushing up-left. The only way to use it was to hold it twisted, so at least the left hand pointed at the screen, but the right hand was roughly parallel to the screen then. (Think somewhat like holding an old Sten SMG.) Of course, then during the game I'd gradually end up holding it naturally, and the pad was pointing in the wrong direction all over again.
- D-pads that are some funky floating hat, coolie hat, or generally anything _but_ a goddamn cross. Preferrably round and with no more than some vague "cool" wave-shaped indentations to give you a hint which way is up and which way is left. And preferrably with the sensitivity of the switches completely out of whack, so pressing up and even ever so slightly to the left gives you a clean up-left.
- Thumbsticks that, yes, plain old suck. Most of them can't even take a corner right, or require excessive force for that. Some can't even be centered right, or when they are, they eventually lose calibration. (E.g., yeah, my Rumblepad 2 would start pretending it's perpetually off-centre in one direction after 2 hours or so of gaming.) Or if they can, they have a problem with round motions. I don't know what crap components or designs they use for the PC gamepads, but 90% of analog thumbsticks out there just suck.
Basically, if any idiot marketer for Logitech or Thrustmaster reads this: people, a gamepad is a _functional_ piece of hardware. It's not supposed to look "cool", it's not supposed to be some designer home-decoration, it's just fucking supposed to get the job done in a way that requires the minimum of effort and attention. E.g., the cross D-Pad on a PS2 (or Dreamcast or whatever) controller works because it's that intuitive: if you want up, you press the up arm, if you want left, you press the left arm, and if you want both, you press both. Your hand pretty much self-centers on that, and the tactile feedback is hard to miss. A floating coolie hat misses all that.
The whole thing about mentoring reminds me of, "Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice." So, eh, let's hope the "graduation" doesn't go like in the Sith tradition;)
But seriously, it makes me wonder if one-on-one mentoring wouldn't go better in a more controlled two-player way than in an MMO. There are so many bad influences, and they're so contagious. Ranging from "let's go over the mountain and gank alliance newbies in Northshire" or "let's roll undead chars and camp the zones with newbie warlock quests" (I hope sincerely hope that's not the kind of insecurity and way to boost one's fragile ego you're trying to get your son to learn) to "r u a grl??? wanna cyber???" to... well, I know at least one middle aged manager who writes l33t in online games. Made me wonder how contagious that really is. To God knows what else.
Basically I'm probably gonna get flamed for it, but I _am_ saying that games and the people in those games _do_ influence people. Not in the way of turning someone into a crazed serial killer because they've played GTA, of course, but people do learn from each other and learn to imitate the ones they admire. Often meaning the biggest flaming retards. So same as your son can learn to smoke just to be like Tom down the street who is sooo cool and popular, he can also learn to try to be an even bigger asshole than LordNoobKillah in the online guild. Just a thought.
Basically if you would pay any attention to what friends your kid has IRL, or who's he hanging around with, I'd pay the same attention to the online entourage. Just because someone's character isn't "real" doesn't mean he can't give real advice or that someone can't follow it. And certain games and certain servers attract entirely too many assholes for me to be comfortable with the idea of letting a kid loose in there. At least until he's old enough and I'm positive that he's already been taught what's right and wrong and can make a sane judgment as to whose advice to follow.
For that matter, while games are good and fine, I hope mentoring includes time together outside games. Looking at the things I've learned from my father, even if they did involve a computer -- e.g., he encouraged me to learn assembly at the age of 14, and BASIC before that -- I can't help notice that none of that would have happened if we just fired up a MMO/MUD/BBS-game/whatever and went merrily killing NPCs. What he taught me was how to _make_ a game like those, which given the limitations of a ZX-81 with 1K RAM admittedly wasn't much, but still served to hammer in some notions of logic and analytical thinking, rather than just how to play them.
Just saying, you know... Gaming skills are good and fine, and I'll be the first to sing praises to them, but there are some other skills that ensure I'm overpaid as an EJB consultant at the moment.
Other skills and attitudes I've got from my mom and grandma, especially mom's sorta paladin-like lawful-good philosophy that, if nothing else, kept me well out of trouble so far. I can't help thinking that it's been far more useful teaching me that, than it would have been to teach me how to keep aggro while tanking Onyxia, or how to respec to Holy and chain-cast Flash Heal as a priest in an MC raid.
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It seems to me like there are plenty of difference between some of the stuff that's lumped together there, as just one big "work = play" pot.
For example, lumping crafters in the same pot as gold farmers strikes me as outright stupid in its over-simplification. One is done for personal fun and achievement (yes, surprise, one of the four player categories identified by Bartle is "achiever"), the other is actual RL work done for no other reason than RL money. One is someone's idea of fun (warped as it may seem to you), the other is just someone's RL "job".
Surprise, some people do stuff for fun that involve investing time and effort. Some people go fishing IRL, others work on their car, others tend their own garden, or take their pet for a walk. Some of those may involve the same activities that other people call work, yet some people do it for fun. E.g., working on tuning your car is the same thing a mechanic calls "work". E.g., taking photos in the park with your cool new digital camera is the same thing a professional photographer calls "work". E.g., taking your pet for a walk, well, some people walk someone else's dog and get paid for it. For them it's "work". For others it's "fun." Maybe I actually enjoy spending some time with my pet. Do you have a problem with that?
It doesn't even stop there. Even if you move away from stuff easily associated with "work", "effort", "time-investment" or "producing something", most things people do for fun and relaxation _still_ are someone else's "work". Watching football? Well, some people get paid for that, you know. E.g., sports journalists. Watching the news? Well, you know, some people are paid to do that. E.g., secretaries and assistants. Reading a novel or watching a movie? Yep, some people would call that their "work" too. Anyone making a living as a critic or reviewer, for a start. Going swimming or dancing? Yep, you guessed, some people get paid for those too. Is there anything that _isn't_ "work" then? Not much left.
Making the mental bridging between virtual worlds and real worlds, "you're doing X in a game, X is a RL profession, ergo you're doing work" is even more shaky. I hate to break it to some people, but that kinda extrapolation makes most game genres be "work sims." Do you enjoy playing a round of Counter-Strike maybe? You know, that's what SWAT employees call "work". Do you enjoy a racing sim? Yep, some people call driving "work". Do you enjoy running around with armour and sword in a medieval game, engaging people in melee? For some millenia that's what mercenaries did. Do you enjoy a WW2 RTS/RTT game in the evening? (E.g., Silent Storm.) Yep, some officers did that as work, not for fun, IRL.
And even comparing it to other activities in the same MMORPG, what's the difference? Player X spent 4 hours grinding swords to level-up their crafting skill. Player Y spent the same 4 hours grinding NPCs to level-up his fighting level or skill. Player Z spent those 4 hours in the battlegrounds, grinding up his PvP rank. What's the fundamental difference there? What makes some of them OK and some of them "work"? From where I stand, all 3 invested the same time and effort.
From where I stand, actually the _only_ question is: did they have fun? That's all. If they did, sure, keep doing it. If they had fun, who has the right to tell them "no, see, _I_ define that as 'work', so you can't possibly have had fun"?
What makes people do all that? (Including the RL and the game stuff.) The simple fact that humans are not made to sit and watch the walls for hours, or not without going completely out of their minds with boredom. So we all find something to do with our time. And each is free to set their own goals, and have their own likes and dislikes when it comes to filling their free time. That's why it's called "free time."
In fact, if anyone really is looking for a line to draw between "fun in your free time" and "work", I'd propose the following definition: if you're free to choose how you spend it, and you do it because you
I've split the message into two, because it's really two different issues, and I'd rather not mix them up. Plus, the crafting one is really of minor importance, compared to the constant (other) changes to everyone's characters.
The problem with crafting is this: over-simplifying it won't make it more attractive to those who weren't in that category, since it just replaces one boring grind with another equally boring grind. If anyone can make 10,000 swords a day by just clicking a "make sword" button, limited only by the quantity of ore on hand and the recipes, then you just replaced the old grind with a grind for ore and recipes. Hope you like it more when you run around looking for a tin vein, or when you get some equivalent of WoW's "collect 1000 heavy lether for the Thorium Brotherhood" grind for recipes. In the end, it just makes people do another boring grind in the same time, so it still won't be exciting to more players.
It can however piss off those who were into it in the first place, by breaking the economy. If the bottleneck is the ore, and making swords is easy, then ore prices go way up and sword prices go way down. Have you looked at the Auction House in WoW recently? At any tier, the materials sell for more than any item you could possibly make out of them. To pick a low level example so anyone can check it out without grinding to level 60, look at the materials for a low level sword: light leather, iron and stone. Now look them up at the Auction House, and look up the same sword there. Ah-ha, you could actually sell those materials for more than twice the price of the finished product.
So simplifying it didn't make it more exciting, it just made it stupid too: you're essentially throwing money out the window to pursue a crafting carreer.
It also just made farming profitable. _The_ way to make money in WoW is to farm raw materials and sell them. I fail to see this as an improvement to the game for the following reasons:
1. It's a thankless activity, other than the money itself. While a player _might_ take some pride in being the best swordsmith in town, virtually noone will feel a sense of accomplishment for farming skins and ore for 8 hours straight.
2. It's a slap in the face for those players who actually liked virtual crafting. (Call them "obsessive compulsive grinder" if you will, but you're still making them unhappy anyway.) Being told all the time "geeze, ditch smithing already and start farming if you want money for that mount" is basically denying them any sense of achievement for their virtual craftsmanship level. They're just keeping getting told that they're doing something stupid and actually counter-productive.
3. It presents a no-brainer income source for the gold farmers, and puts everyone else into direct competition with those. While you might not get annoyed that 5 other people are cooking at the same time in that room, a lot of people _will_ be annoyed when they have to compete with resources with some 5 bots farming fellcloth 24 hours a day, nuking every single NPC in sight. Heck, even without even wanting the resources, I know I've been annoyed before when I had to spend an hour killing 20 NPCs for a newbie quest because some level 60 mage was nuking them in wholesale for linen cloth.
So, at any rate, I'm predicting that the upcoming simplifying it even more in EQ2 will have the same effect. It won't make crafting more exciting. If you hate it now, I honestly think you'll still hate it just as much after the changes. Maybe it just can't be made exciting to more people. It might, however, bring in some of the annoying side effects that WoW already has.
"Let's be honest, there are very few games in which the actual crafting process appeals to anyone except the obsessive compulsive grinder, and EQ2 was (is) no exception."
As I was saying, I'm at the moment not discussing whether it actually is more fun or not, nor passing judgment about the mental illnesses (e.g., in your words, "obsessive compulsive grinder") of those who like X instead of Y. The argument about EQ2 crafting being somehow superior, however, did get posted all over the place, and even managed to get a nodding mention on Penny Arcade. That was pretty much _the_ ISO-standard EQ2 fan argument, so it was quite hard to miss it even if you wanted to.
At any rate, apparently some people liked that. Or maybe they just liked the fact that unlike the WoW economy here crafting actually wasn't just a money-sink and excuse to grind for materials/reputation/whatever. Or whatever, really. Some people liked it.
And changing it wantonly just adds another group of people who are disgruntled with the changes. It doesn't matter if in the grand scheme of things they're right or wrong, or how well someone can rationalize the changes. Changing an existing game with an established player base, always pisses off some of them. It's not even news: we all knew it at least since the Quake 2 and 3 changes, or the massive outcry against the lag compensation in Counter-Strike (much as it was actually the right thing to do) or really the changes in any other game. Doing it repeatedly back and forth, just pisses off more people and pisses them off harder.
That's all I wanted to say about Sony's changes: each wave of them just adds more people who liked the old way more. And there are a lot of such changes happening all the time. If it's not crafting, it's combat, or balance, or NPC strength at a given level (yay for the fun of having to switch from shield, to two hander, to shield again, to dual-wield), or everything else. And then it'll change again, just to also offend those who liked the new way.
That's the whole problem with the massive stream of changes: they keep pissing off more and more people. Whether Sony is right or wrong about the changes is pretty much irrelevant there, because Sony is still bleeding customers as a result.
"As I posted (pointlessly, to a thread from last Wednesday, where nobody will ever see it) this is the same forum where another game which makes you sit for half an hour or longer before you can start playing has people bending themselves into logical pretzels to defend this 'feature'. If SOE put a queue on any of its games it would have been flamed here and people would be screaming about class-action lawsuits because they were deprived of their game time."
See, it takes a nerd to take one detail out of context and pretend that it's the One True Criterion to choose a game or a company. Preferrably the one detail noone else gives a flying fuck about.
See, my good nerd, Real Life is more complex than taking one aspect out of context. In Real Life, decisions feature several criteria, and are almost never perfect. They're most often picking the least crappy compromise among a bunch of crappy compromises. Option A has the good parts A1 and A2, but the bad parts A3 and A4, while option B has some other good parts and bad parts. So choosing A or B is an exercise in prioritizing and choosing the one that sucks the least, so to speak.
_Noone_ says that waiting in a line in WoW or SWG or anything else is a fun passtime. That's not the argument. The question is merely whether if the game afterwards is worth the wait or not. That's all.
Why do people defend WoW even though it has queues? Certainly not because they like queues. Because WoW is a far far better game, that's why. In fact, that's how it got the queues in the first place: lots of people wanting to get in.
That's how RL choices and decisions go: the decision isn't "let's play WoW _because_ queues are fun", but rather "do I play WoW even though I'll wait in that sucky queue, or go play SWG without a queue?" (Or even many other players logged on, for that matter.) That's a RL kind of decision: are the good parts about WoW good enough to justify accepting the bad parts (e.g., the queue), or not? And the sad part is, even after you factor in the queues, on the whole it's _still_ a better game than the crap SOE has. Between (A) 1 hour in the queue and 3 hours in WoW, and (B) 4 hours in SWG or EQ2, on the whole option A is _still_ the more fun option.
Would adding queues to Sony's games make them any better? Well, nope, not really. It would just make a crap game be even less fun than it already is. It would just add another straw on the back of the camel for those still tollerating them. Would Sony get flamed for it? Most probably, since Blizzard got flamed too. Plus everyone who wasn't already allergic to queues is in WoW, not on Sony's games, so yes the reaction might be a bit more extreme.
Or to put it otherwise, if those were the only choices, would you rather wait in a line to eat a good meal at a good restaurant, _or_ go eat a rotten apple from the dumpster across the street? Hey, the dumpster doesn't have any waiting. Just go there, stick your hand in, and there you go. Still not interested, eh?
Would adding a queue to the dumpster make it any better? Nope, not really.
Well, maybe now you understand RL choices and decisions.
The fact is, it's not just SWG. If you look at EQ2, since last I've played last year, none of my characters even plays the same or has the same spells. No, seriously, I don't even mean tweaked or rebalanced. They're a completely different class, which just sorta reuses the name of the old one. And now they're busy nerfing crafting into oblivion too, in a desperate bid to become even more over-simplified than WoW.
That pretty much sums up the last year at SOE: making broad-sweeping changes to their games, and making sure the most characters are affected (and annoyed) by those changes. Preferrably taking some disparate element out of WoW, without even taking the time to understand it first, and then trying to shoehorn a grotesque carricature of it into their own games. It doesn't even matter if the change makes sense, or fits the rest of the game, or pisses off their existing customers. In fact, in most cases it's actually making the game worse, or flipping through seemingly random changes and rolling them back just to piss everyone off.
E.g., to pick on the small details too, at some point the "inventory overflow", an elegant solution to getting an extra quest reward when your inventory is already full, got ditched without an explanation, presumably in a bid to be more WoW-like. Then it got gradually rolled back.
E.g., while fans have been busy pimping EQ2 crafting as _the_ thing that's better than on WoW (true or not, that's what the fans said), Sony is now busy nerfing it into being even more over-simplified than WoW. Think, for example, making a newbie gun in WoW, because that's what Sony's crafting used to be like: refine the ore, make the barrel, make the bolts, then assemble the final gun. (Yes, EQ2 doesn't have guns, but that's the closest to illustrating EQ2 crafting. So bear with me.) The new Sony way is: just have a backpack full of ore, roots, wood, whatever, click on a button, get the full gun. Or worse yet, a spell scroll, without any explanation as to how that wood and ore got turned into paper and ink.
And if that didn't piss off crafters, let's have generic non-elite NPCs randomly dropping items with better stats at the same level than anything a crafter can make. (I can only assume someone told them about the end-game drops in WoW, but forgot to tell them about 90% of the story there.)
At any rate, the game is in a constant state of flux where everything you knew might change from one day to the next one. And then get changed again into something else. And again. The piece of rare armour or the rare weapon you've paid a mint for might get you killed in the next patch (as happened with a lot of people with two handers back when Sony decided to over-emphasize the value of shields in a patch), or the spell you've paid good money to upgrade might get taken out of the game completely. And then they'll change it again.
And what they don't seem to get is:
1. What's good about WoW is that it makes sense and is polished as a _whole_, not as one heap of disparate parts in which Sony can find a singular disparate gem that kept people there. Taking disparate parts of WoW, copying them _badly_, and sticking them (again: badly) in a game that's already a heap of disparate parts, well, won't make it any better. Throwing one more disparate item onto a heap will just make it a bigger heap, nothing more.
2. Blizzard _didn't_ piss off their customer with major changes all the time. Sure, there have been changes, but the changes to balance were relatively few and far in between, and AFAIK never to the extent of turning one class into something completely different. And, with some PvP-related exceptions, they have been mostly along the lines of upgrade than downgrade.
Making broad-sweeping changes every couple of weeks, and then changing it again, is just a way to piss off both those who liked the old way and those who liked the new way. Some of them twice. It's not gonna turn their games into a success, it will just accumulate more and more disgruntled players telling everyone else "EQ2 sucks" or "SWG sucks."
Frankly, probably the biggest and most unimaginative mistake of SWG was placing it in the timeline of the original EP4-6 trilogy where, yeah, there are virtually no Jedi left. Not only that limits the availability of _the_ most demanded class by the players, it also severely limits what you can do with the game universe and what story you can tell with it.
You'll notice that the most successful games set in a given universe step outside the timeline that confines them. KOTOR is one example, but maybe World Of Warcraft is a better one: it _doesn't_ happen during the Warcraft 3 battles, but some time later, when they can write a new story and invent their own story NPCs as the need.
Even in the movies business, you'll notice that (for whatever other faults they had), Lucas _didn't_ just pile more story into the same EP4-6 timeline, just for the sake of pimping Darth Vader in the same outfit some more. He took a step back in time where he could tell you a different bit of the story (and when, yes, 10,000 assclowns with lightsabers ran around). And (again, for whatever other fault the prequels may have had), chances are you were more interested in seeing a new story, and seeing for example WTF _were_ the Clown Wars... err... Clone Wars that Yoda mentioned, than if it were "Jolee Littlebottom the cantina dancer eventually gets to see Lord Vader during the same EP4-6 period."
That's good story telling and/or game design versus just merchandising. Any idiot can take a DIKU MUD and place Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, etc, in it, just for the sake of whoring the franchise. But again, that's merchandising, nothing more. But taking a step outside or sideways and telling your own story is what makes a good game or movie.
There are tens of thousands of years of Republic history to place your story in, most of which had plenty of Jedi. Or you could go into the future, after Luke rebuilt the Jedi academy and the Sith are again some secretive group lurking in the shadows. (It's not like people are gonna stop falling to the Dark Side any time soon.) Maybe a new war broke out, or maybe they're just plotting a new infiltration. Maybe a new wannabe Palpatine is looking for new Anakins to take over the world with. Maybe just a group of people are still nostalgic about the Empire and secretly plan to rebuild it. Or whatever.
See? It wasn't even that hard, and it allows you all the freedom you want.
And again, on the topic of 10,000 assclowns with lightsabers, that's what the vast majority of the galaxy's history was all about. They had a whole freaking council and academy on Coruscant. Being a Jedi wasn't about achievement, it wasn't about grinding through all the professions first (how many professions had Luke mastered anyway?), it was simply about being born that way. Even assuming that only one in a _billion_ was born sensitive enough to the Force, a planet like Earth would have some 6-7 of them. And we're talking about a whole galaxy to hand-pick them from.
Basically the problem isn't "earning" stuff, as long as it's kept within reasonable limits. I don't think anyone would consider, say, earning your Imp or Voidwalker as a Warlock in WoW to be repetitive or work. One is basically a "go there, get that book for me" quest (and not get killed first by the NPCs there) and the other is "go there, kill the npc, bring back her choker" quest. Straightforward, to the point, a little challenging, and no farming involved. And frankly, not only it's something "earned" to be proud of, but also adds a certain flavour: it gives you a quest to do and some insight in what your class is about, instead of just a new icon sprouting on your toolbar after grinding enough boars.
That's really what gets people addicted, not the later grind for resources. _This_ is what MMORPG gamers really want, and unsurprisingly most MMORPG players went to the game which gave them more of this in the beginning. You'll notice the majority isn't on the games which give you the repetitive grind and (near)impossibility to solo from the start. So that blaming it on MMORPG players and some meme is missing the point by a mile.
But unfortunately that only works that way at the lower levels.
The problem again isn't that MMORPG players start demanding something else, but that the MMORPG publisher only has so much funds for game content. And that content has to last you for about 6 months, which is what an average gamer needs to get past the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase. Some need less, some stay there for 5 years, but when you turn it all into a statistic, 6 months is sorta where the bathtub curve starts going up one way or the other. So the developper has to stretch that content somehow over 6 months.
And currently the formula is to give you more of it up-front when you join, so they get you addicted, and very very slowly give you less and less from there. Until at the end-game it has already crawled to a start and you need to farm one dungeon daily for months, just so you can enter the next one. At that point, any new content or rewards you're getting is in dilluted to homoepathic doses.
However at that point they're not counting on you actually having fun either. They just count that you're well into the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase and busy rationalizing it, so you don't need more than a vague shaddow of a carrot dangled in front of you to stay there. At that point, the rewards and earnings are so dilluted and improbable that they just serve to give you some material to rationalize about, not something that's what MMORPG players as a whole love.
So basically even at this point, blaming MMORPG players and their memes is IMHO missing the whole point by a mile. That isn't what the MMORPG players themselves been asking for, it's just the final act of a cruel scam they've been gradually guided into. And no matter how some may rationalize it as being the meat of the game (humans are damn good at rationalizing taking crap), here's the reality check: that's not what got them addicted to the game during the first 30-40 levels. And they're not in other games which gave them that "meat" up-front, from level 1, either. So don't tell me that their whole personality did an 180 degree turn when reaching level 60, and they suddenly started actually wanting to grind for weeks even for a token reward.
Yes, it should make everyone rethink their priorities, and in truth it _eventually_ does. That's why people do eventually leave.
"how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?"
Nintendogs was already mentioned, and it's not only selling like crazy, it's also helping sell the DS big time. I know people who had no intention of getting a portable console, but ended up buying one anyway because their kid wanted Nintendogs.
I'll add titles like Catz or Creatures. I don't know the exact sales numbers, but I'd assume it must have been enough to be worth making sequels and console ports. Creatures was up to number 3, last I checked, and it had spawned user mods and a free semi-online expansion. And, oh, you could train them. In fact, you pretty much had to.
And then there's The Sims Unleashed, and expansion pack which did amazingly well given that almost all it gave you was cats and dogs for The Sims. And yes, the dogs had to be trained.
So basically enough people _do_ want a virtual pet, but it still had to be fun. That's where Black And White fell short. For most of us was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.
"The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell."
Marketting it had in spades, and in a sense that's all it had. PM hypes any half-baked idea he ever has, and EA was more than happy to act as the amplifier for that hype.
His games since Populous weren't even that innovative. Training a creature had been done before (Creatures 1 to 3 already existed), creature fights had been done before (Pokemon), Movies style games are a dime a dozen (look for anything with "Tycoon" in the title), and good-vs-evil is a _stapple_ of RPGs and several other games. I mean, seriously, whop-de-fucking-do, a RPG where you get alignment and a good-or-evil choice at the end? It describes almost half the RPGs ever made. Vampire, KOTOR, you name it.
That wasn't as much innovation, as just hype.
But that's not the real problem. The real problem is just that: "But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. ". No, make that: falls very much short compared to what's already on the market.
See, making games isn't all about having a crazy idea, but also then actually making a game that's fun to play. Any gamer has some crazy idea of a game. Ask anyone. (And see if it doesn't involve good-vs-evil too.) What makes a great designer is then putting some good gameplay around it, giving it some interesting content, and polishing it all into a gem. _That's_ what game design is all about.
Now let's look at Lionhead's games.
Black And White was a micro-management nightmare, and an _intrusive_ nightmare at that. (You know it's bad when even the fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite-resources _exploit_ to keep the worshippers fed or to have enough wood. Or for fuck's sake, literally, the villagers wouldn't even reproduce unless you personally assign them to.) It also passes swift good-or-evil judgment on the _player_, based on some idiotic criteria that don't even follow your actions. (E.g., failing to save the villagers from someone else's attack, even if you did try to save them, makes you the spawn of satan. Sorry, that's just bullshit. Incompetent, maybe, but no way that counts as evil.) It also doesn't help that both sides are a grotesque carricature that boggles the mind. There is no good or evil in that game, there's just playing a micro-managing retard versus playing a self-destructive retard that's damaging his own power pool.
The execution also basically sucked. The game was launched missing features that were hyped to hell and back, the AI for the creature (i.e., the main hyped feature) was a sick joke, save and reload were broken by design (wtf is the point of save and reload if half the game, e.g., the creature's state, _isn't_ saved or restoreabl
"I'm calling shenannigans. What AV program removed mIRC? That sounds suspiciously like 'Microsoft AV deletes firefox!'"
Much as I'd like to credit MS with something of that calibre, it's actually the G Data antivirus that insisted that mIRC is a horrible risk.
At a wild guess, I don't think it really merits a comparison with MS deleting some competing product. Think Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I.e., I don't think G Data has some actual commercial interest in getting people off IRC. More like, well, that's what you get when you let a bunch of incompetent monkeys play with the signatures and heuristics rules files. But that's just a wild guess.
"Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned."
Well, we could mention it, in the form of "Well, and then there's Morrowind which sucks in every single aspect compared to these other games I've mentioned. In fact, it's the prime example of how _not_ to make a big game: having barely enough material for a small game, and dilluting it to cover a hundred square miles of computer-generated terrain and copy-and-pasted dungeons, and a gazillion NPCs, all saying the same generic things. And oh, if you can only afford one FMV sequence in the _main_ story line, don't use it for something that matters. Have a FMV of a statue which _doesn't_ move as the only animated or voiced part of the whole main quest. And tell the player that he's on a non-important, non-urgent quest, that doesn't really affect anyone anyway, much less save them."
Because that's what Morrowind was. A computer-generated island, filled with jaded non-descript NPCs saying the exact same things and giving you the same UPS quests. ("Find NPC X with only vague and occasionally wrong directions, give him item Y, return.") For something that claimed to be a step up from Daggerfall's random computer-generated UPS quests, it sure wasn't a big step up. A human doing a copy-and-paste job to get quantity instead of quality in there, sure doesn't produce a better experience.
And again, everyone said the same generic things. Since every single line of text could be said by a hundred different NPCs, every one of them was vague and generic enough so it can be said by everyone. Even NPCs which you'd expect to have a different opinion about something (e.g., a city guard and a thieves guild member should have more extremely different views about theft or about each other), still spewed the same jaded vague one-size-fits all text.
That might have been enough in the age of NES, but nowadays... compare it to a _good_ RPG like KOTOR, where NPCs all have their own personalities and a handful (the team members) even have their own story to discover and tie the knots of. In KOTOR even shopkeepers had their quirks, preferences, personalities and unique dialogue lines that reflected that. None of that was to be found anywhere in Morrowind.
But what really took the cake was the main quest. I had happily accepted the running around like an idiot, doing generic quests in generic dungeons for generic people, in the thought that it would all eventually come together and serve some epic purpose. (Lots of games start with the hero doing unimportant stuff, just to show that he's, you know, just an ordinary guy like you. Just following the already cliched Hero's Journey recipe, and all that.)
And what was it for? For something that even tried to look mundane, non-interesting and pointless. No, seriously. Both the NPCs and the books, and even the lone FMV sequence, did their best to hammer it into your head that... nah, it's not important. There's no real urgency, you know. It might be several thousand years before that final evil actually does anything, and even then maybe it will or maybe it won't. And if you fail? Don't worry, it's not like we're in a hurry or like you're that important. Someone else will drop by and save the world in all that time. Oh, you actually want to go and end it now? You sure you don't want to wait another 1000 years? You know, maybe some other idiot will do the job by then? Well, sure, knock yourself out. It's not like we give a damn.
It was as anti-climactic as it can possibly go. It was like watching a movie where the grand climax is the hero's going to the supermarket to buy a can of soda, except even less important than that in the grand scheme of things.
I could go on and on, but chances are I wrote too much text already and you've read all that already.
At any rate, that's why you don't hear people mentioning Morrowind in every single discussion about RPGs. Because in the end we all have better stuff to do than reminisce about how bad Morrowind was. We've all moved on to playing other games, and discussing more pleasant stuff, e.g., discussing games which were actually fun to play.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I read that tall tale. I can't exactly remember the games where I've read that (B&W has been mentioned already, but there were more than 1), but yes, there was this deja-vu sensation. I had read the exact same bullshit a couple dozen times before, for more than one game.
In fact, the first time I've heard that kind of a claims was in the early 80's, about some program in a book where a dot would randomly bounce around a box or maze until it found the way out. I don't even mean backtrack around a maze, like for example in the Linux screensaver. Just bounce around until it eventually find the exit. Apparently that counted as life-like AI. Adding a few more tweaks to that program (like weighting the probabilities for the direction to bounce in) apparently made it incredibly life-like AI. Needless to say, once you actually saw it in action, it still was just a stupid bouncing dot.
It never worked that way. It's usually either shameless PR bullshit, or some wishful-thinking designer letting his imagination run amok.
The problem is that it doesn't have to even be an outright lie. (Did I mention PR?) It's easy to script an NPC to do something like that on a one-off basis for a rigged demo. Whether it's a classic procedural script ("if x has broom, then call murder_script(x), else...") or an Prolog-style inference engine, it's still just a script. If you give an AI the exact rules to arrive at the "I must murder X" conclusion, it will predictably commit it, because you've just scripted to do that.
Or in B&Ws case it's easy to add a piece of script saying, basically, "if X is a football, and zone is flagged as a football field, then kick(X)". It doesn't make those villagers intelligent, it just runs a script.
It's in the end no different from writing a "Hello World" program in whatever language that AI takes. Except instead of 'printf("Hello world!");' it calls the function to attack that NPC. It's easy.
The problem is that it doesn't work that way in the actual game. And here's why: giving an inference engine 5 rules to come to a prescribed result in a prescribed situation is a whole different proposition from giving it 100,000 rules to act intelligently in any situation.
When you just need to trigger one prescribed action it's easy, and you're freed from concerning yourself with any other considerations or priorities. The NPC just has to murder the baker. That's it. That's all.
But when you put it in a game where 1000 other courses of action are possible, now you have to also choose which is the right one. When the player steals some NPCs broom, you don't want it to trigger a chain reaction where every NPC in town murders everyone else. (If nothing else, because it screws up all quests in that town.) So should the NPC murder major quest NPCs too, for example?
What about the rest of the daily schedule for that NPC? How far it will go in its quest for a broom? What else will it neglect? What side-effects will it trigger in other NPCs? Can you even predict all those and their effects on the game? What if noone else has a broom, because a bored player stole all the brooms in the game? Will the whole town be stuck running around scanning everyone else for a broom? Etc.
Make no mistake, the NPC cannot improvise, it can only execute the rules and scripts it was given. So if you want complete realism there, it balloons into a _monster_ of a giant script, covering all possible combinations of tens of thousands of possibilities.
_That's_ the real problem with making a realistic life-like AI. It all balloons into something that's many orders of magnitude more complex and more work than making one NPC do one action for a rigged demo.
And that's basically why we keep reading about how someone amazingly solved the token problem (making one NPC do one thing), but you don't see the final game actually solving the _real_ problem.
Yep, I've been hit before by the exact same scenario you describe, although probably with a different string.
So I'm playing WoW happily and suddenly I'm completely lagged (you know, those time-bubbles where you can run around, but not cast spells or receive any update from the server) and then disconnected. Better yet, when I try to reconnect, I can't.
Turns out that something in that stream of binary data between the WoW server and the WoW client looked to Norton suspiciously like some old SQL Server exploit. Never mind that it wasn't even talking to the right program, on the right port, or in the right direction. So it helpfully took me offline, for my own good.
Now as I've said, I have no clue exactly _what_ sequence of bytes triggered it there. Presumably something more SQL-like than this one. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone took the time to figure it out and broadcast it in a battleground match.
I don't know if it's the same string (probably not), but Norton was idiotic enough to forbid WoW from accessing the network any more after it detected something in the stream of data that looked like an SQL Server exploit. Or something like that, I don't remember the exact message, since I was busy swearing when that happened. The fact that it was a different program, on a different port, _and_ the direction in which the "exploit" was transmitted was all wrong... well, that didn't stop Norton from helpfully trying to protect me.
Also it didn't stop there, since thereafter their firewall was automatically configured to forbid access to the WoW client.
Frankly, by now I'm thinking most of these "security products" are:
1. unnecessary, if you have some clue, use a firewall, keep your system patched, and have enough brains to read pop-up messages before clicking "yes". None has yet detected a _real_ virus on my computers yet.
2. about as effective as a condom with a hole in it when you actually need them: they just give you a false sense of security while you're getting screwed. The one time when I did intentionally play with a virus, Norton _didn't_ detect it. (Yes, it was intentional. I actually planned to let a system get virused while I download Sygate Personal Firewall, then reformat and reinstall.)
Worse yet, there are plenty of viruses which disable them anyway. So if you did get a new virus (e.g., by not obeying point 1) before Symantec updates their signatures, chances are it will disable your antivirus anyway. So basically the only way to be sure you still have protection is... to not get virused in the first place, without its help. Does it sound superfluous yet?
Worse yet, these "security products" lately have more exploits of their own than Windows has, basically just creating extra oportunities to get pwn3d by a script-kiddie. I know of at least one virus which did already spread through an overflow in a security product.
3. Perhaps more importantly: good only for slowing the system down and creating annoying false positives.
E.g., the WoW disconnect described above. (Though it would also fit in the "creating a new exploit" category described above.)
E.g., I haven't had one yet which didn't pick on some innocent program on account that some bytes in it looked like they _could_ do something that _could_ be dangerous.
E.g., heck, forget disconnecting from IRC for keylogger commands. At least one was idiotic enough to insist on deleting mIRC (both installed _and_ the installer) off my computer, because they thought IRC was a risk. And yes, you've read that right. Not because of detecting some possible problem in code, not because of knowing of an exploit in that particular mIRC version, etc. Just because of a retarded biased judgment call that mIRC is dangerous, and they wanted to protect me from that. (As a side-note: then why not also delete IE, if they're at deleting programs just because they think they _could_ be dangerous? I dare say it's got a worse track record than mIRC.)
Etc.
4. and even more importantly, most are worse than a virus in and by themselves. I don't think a virus or trojan even exists yet that slows down a computer worse than most of these "security solutions." You'd have to get several layers of them before a modest computer starts to crawl the way it does with Norton or McAffee on it.
"Personally, I've always thought the same about alcohol."
Basically, yes, that's the idea. If alcohol "made" someone go punch the neighbour in the face or tell the boss a heartfelt "fuck you", chances are that's what they wanted to do when they were sober too.
And more importantly: they would have done it without alcohol or the internet too, if a time came when they thought they can get away with it. The history is full, for example, of times of anarchy when a whole bunch of people decided to go take vengeance on their neighbour because it looked like they can get away with it or find an excuse for it.
That's what I should have probably made clearer in the previous message: when someone starts being an asshole IRL too (or when sober too), chances are it didn't "seep" from their Internet behaviour into RL. Chances are they just don't care about the RL consequences either, or decided that those consequences are small enough to live with.
I've seen people go through such changes with no alcohol or Internet forums being involved. E.g., a timid "Nice Guy" (TM) geek gets promoted to management and starts acting like a flaming asshole. E.g., a nice manager during the dot-com bubble turns into a flaming asshole once he gets the idea "muahahaha, the bubble is over, I can finally wipe the floor with these guys and they won't quit during _this_ crappy period on the job market." Etc.
And my take is that they didn't just pick a bad influence on the Internet or at the pub or whatever. That's who they really were deep down inside all along. And what brought it to surface wasn't momentarily confusing RL with an online forum, but just deciding that the pretense isn't really needed any more IRL. They would have done it without the Internet just the same.
"Sometimes habits picked up online leak out into offline life. This can include troll-like behavior, but is certainly not limited to trolling."
I dare say that if someone's line of thinking is "muahahaha, I'm anonymous and have an audience, now I can act like a total fuckwad" (like in the PA comic), then that's their _real_ personality: a total fuckwad. It's not as much something they've picked online, it's something that they really were all along.
Maybe fear of repercursions kept them from doing that offline before, and forced them to act as if they're someone else. But in the end, it's not that going online made them develop a second personality. It just allowed them to drop the mask and act their real personality.
"A case in point: in many online forums, people express themselves in ways much more vulgar than they ever would in real life. People gradually adopt expressions like "bitch", "cunt", (and so on) which they would never say out loud.
Or, at least, these people think they would never say these phrases out loud. But quite a lot of the process of word choice is performed at an unconscious mind, so before you know it, you can end up with Senior White House Correspondents accidentally using expressions like sloppy seconds."
I'm not entirely sure what the point is there. They definitely didn't learn those words on the forums, unless they've lived under a rock since birth and never, for example, saw a Hollywood movie, heard a joke, went to high school, or generally interacted with humans. That correspondent probably heard that expression before IRL a thousand times.
It's not the first time I see that dopamine explanation being thrown around, and this isn't even the most scientific one. But then maybe it just had to be dumbed down for Joe Random to understand it.
But here's also the problem I have with the dopamine explanation waved around more and more these days: it is also dumbed down enough to paint a wrong picture to Joe Random and make it sound like it's drug addiction. In fact, like it's the poor man's marijuana substitute. Which makes for good lobbying and propaganda material. However, the problem with that picture is that reality is exactly the other way around.
Yes, among the many chemicals in your brain, your brain also releases one to signal "I'm happy". It's not a drug, it's not being rewarded with marijuana-like hit, nor whatever stupidities are thrown around. It's just the normal working of the brain and one of the many kinds of signals it uses. You get the same kind of signal when your program finally compiles, or when you get praised by your boss, or whatever. The busybody complaining about youth and their internet addiction gets the exact same chemical signal when his paper is published, or when he's found a good listener, or whatever else makes him happy. (Because again that's the natural "I'm happy" signal.) The bushman in south africa, who never heard of computers or Internet, gets the same signal when his arrow hits an antelope.
However, the brain also contains the opposite mechanism, to bring the chemical levels back towards zero. You're not made to stay perpetually happy. You may get a big signal when you're awarded a promotion or you've won the lottery, but immediately thereafter it starts to decay towards zero again. So you get to work at getting the next moment of happiness, or work even harder at maintaining the current one. Whatever it is that makes you happy, whether it's some social interaction or learning some new stuff or buying new stuff or playing a game, you'll have to do it again or some more.
It's not even limited to humans. Animals too are "wired" exactly the same, so they'll keep doing some things and avoid doing others. When your cat finds a nice raised spot to sleep in, rest assured that said cat gets the exact same "yay, I'm happy" signal. Or if you're into dogs, that dog gets the exact same sigal when he's got near the pack leader (i.e., you) and better yet gets some attention from the pack leader. It kept wolves from getting split up.
So what really remains is that:
1. people keep doing stuff they like. More precisely: _anything_ they like. There is no discrimination in that signal saying "oh, I'll fire for video games only". Hence painting it as a "video game addiction" or a "golf addiction" is subtly wrong. Unlike, say, alcohol addiction or heroin addiction, which can be satisfied by only one thing, here there is no such discrimination. You could do anything else pleasurable to the same effect. There is _nothing_ there that says it can be satisfied by video games only. Just because someone is stuck in a rut doing what they already know that makes them happy (and non-gamers have their own ruts there), doesn't make them addicted exclusively to that thing.
2. Whether it's one activity done for 6 hours a day, or 6 activities done for 1 hour each, it's still the same chemical mechanism involved. If you're gonna define it as drug addiction, then whether it's 6 hours gaming, or 2 hours gaming and 2 hours fishing and 2 hours taking photos in the park, it's still 6 hours of getting the exact same chemical hit. The human notion of "yeah, but the second is a balanced life" may be good and fine, but from purely the dopamine point of view it's still 6 hours of getting dopamine hits. Being balanced or unbalanced about the ways to get it doesn't mean you're not getting it just the same. So if your point is that a balanced life is better, you need a better explanation than the dopamine one. The supposed "dopamine addiction" does _not_ make any kind of point about a balanced life being any better, as far a
"People should spend less time online and more time reading". Or subtitute reading for "Playing Outside", "Hanging with their friends", "visiting grandma", etc. It's extremely common it seems for the older generation to complain about new things to do with your time that aren't what they used to do."
Indeed very much so. Grandma still reminisces about how she had to be sneaky about reading a book, because her parents kept trying to make her do something more productive.
In fact, here's one I found even funnier: one of our professors at college, an old man, read a text to us where someone was complaining about "youth nowadays" and how they dress all wrong, show no respect to their elders, have bad manners, and generally everything is going down in a hurry. You know what was funny? The text was written by some ancient Greek, before Christ.
I would say that nothing changed much in that aspect. If you went back in time all the way, you could probably find a couple of tribal elders complaining loudly about "youth nowadays" and all those new bad habbits. Like fire and cooked food. They must be addicted to that stuff. Or about how the youth wear their antelope skins all wrong.
Unfortunately, this happens every day even in major newspapers, not only on a community bulletin board. In fact, we're at the point where at least half the news you read are actually PR. In some cases, more.
PR is a very insidious thing. They don't release outright ads, which people are already deveolopping a resistance too. They release stuff looking like genuine news, or like genuine buyer reviews.
E.g., one such PR hack discussed on Slashdot was the _flood_ of news pieces saying that the suit is back, that all the cool companies require people to wear suit, and the IT cable-puller in jeans is sooo last century. (Yeah, pulling cables in a suit is soo much better.) Complete with interviews of hand-picked PHBs testifying about how their company is soo much more professional with everyone wearing a suit, and how they always look for a nice suit (as opposed to actual professional knowledge, which supposedly is aplenty nowadays and unnecessary for the job anyway) when interviewing someone.
It looked like news, and it had the insidious effect of actually _creating_ that fashion. It both offered every single SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim) among PHBs a new fashion to be a victim of (hey, it says all the cool guys are requiring suits, and I want to be cool like them too), _and_ told you to go buy a suit already if you're looking for a job. You know, just to be on the safe side, if you're interviewed by a PHB.
The most insidious part was that _none_ of these releases even directly pointed at the company paying for the pollution campaign. The only subliminal link was the phrase "The suit is back", which was also the company's slogan in proper ads.
And, BTW, at this point I'm not discussing the merits of wearing or not wearing a suit, just explaining how PR works.
Or look at the recent attacks on Wikipedia. Regardless of what merits or faults Wikipedia has, I'll bet my soul it was a PR campaign. The attack errupted too suddenly all over the place, and spread way too fast, and died way too fast when the PR campaign stopped fuelling the flames. But more telltale is that it was followed immediately by news all over the place that someone is now making a better wikipedia, with proper reviews by experts, and just recently got the funding from interested parties. (Ah-ha. So around the time the attacks on Wikipedia started, perchance?) The whole attack and outrage and defacements were just to lead to that punchline: come to our commercial product instead, we need to show the VCs that we have page hits.
And make no mistake, a _lot_ of people fell for that campaign, including TV/radio hosts conducting Wikipedia defacements live just to show how unreliable the info there can be made by anyone. And even Penny Arcade, otherwise pretty impartial guys, just had to sport a strip attacking Wikipedia. That's the kind of effect and reach a PR campaign can have.
So to get back to Infinium, don't expect their PR pollution to be like "hey, click here and buy infinium stock, goddammit". It'll be far more subtle and more damaging. It'll be stuff like seemingly normal gamers like you ranting about how stupid it is to buy a game on DVD and get it scratched, and how it's about damn time someone started offering everything as downloaded rentals. (Which incidentally is what Infinium promissed to offer.) Or various other subtle stuff.
Chances are it won't even mention Infinium, other than rarely and only in some side-note or tangent. They won't give you an "Infinium is the best" answer to a question you didn't even ask. They'll challenge the very foundation and premises of your judgment of who's best and who sucks, then let you get to that conclusion yourself. (Note how in the other two examples they never explicitly told you "go buy a suit" or "use that site instead of wikipedia". They just gave you plenty of reasons, fake or not, for you to reach that conclusion on your own.)
So don't fool yourself: it _will_ slip through the forum admins with no problems.
And unrelated, yes, I consid
"If you really feel that you need a book on design independent from programming"
Indeed I do, because the two are very separate facets of it. A game is _not_ just the code implementing it, and what made, say, KOTOR fun _isn't_ the clever lightsaber rendering code or the NPC dialogue code. The most important parts, the parts that the actual users saw, were the game design parts like the actual dialogues, not the implementation details behind them.
"(Though I question the concept of separating a tradesmaster from his trade. Would a building, no matter how beautiful, be designed by an architect lacking in engineering background?)"
I see no problem separating a tradesmaster from a completely _unrelated_ trade. The architect who designed a bank building is _not_ an expert on banking or economics. He may be a brilliant architect, he may have an engineering background, but chances are he's not also an expert on economics. The electrical engineer who designed the coils for a hydro power-plant, chances are he's _not_ an expert on anything else in that plant, and I certainly wouldn't entrust him with designing the dam too. The guy who designed an overhead projector, no matter how good he might be at optics or mechanical engineering, chances are he doesn't know jack squat about the management processes that will use that projector for a business presentation. Etc.
Same here. Just because someone may be a world-class guru in programming, doesn't mean jack squat about his knowing anything about game design. Maybe he does, maybe he does't. It's an unrelated skill.
One is a book for programmers, the other is a book for game _designers_. So the relevance of that comparison is...?
Even if you're of the arrogant school of thinking that programmers are the alpha and the omega, and everyone else is an idiot, the program code itself _isn't_ the alpha and the omega. A game isn't just a collection of clever rendering/AI/collision/whatever subroutines. And knowing how to write clever code doesn't make you a game designer, any more than knowing how to lay out a brochure makes you a marketting expert, or than knowing how to assemble a telescope makes you an astronomer.
At any rate, designing the game and programming game code are two very very different things. Some people may be able to do both -- though a lot less than people who _think_ they could do both -- but still, they're different activities. So exactly what is the relevance of programmers or game programming books there? No, seriously. It's like saying that we don't need a new chemistry book, because a better written gardener's handbook already exists. Yeah, and the relevance of that is...?
I'm not saying that this book is particularly useful. In fact, it sounds like a major waste of time. But I _am_ saying that it addresses a whole different subject and targets a whole different audience. That's all.
Baldur's Gate is... how many years old? I seem to remember it coming out sometime in the late 90's.
So, basically, sorry, I was talking about the trend in the 21'th century, rather than about how long games used to be in the 90s. If anything, that just illustrates the decline I'm talking about.
I can easily think of PC RPGs which took a lot less than 10 hours to finish. For example, take both Vampire titles. In fact, I dare say that that applies to any PC RPG that isn't a console port. (Not to mention that your average PC "RPG" game will actually be either a hack-and-slash action game or a mis-named RTS with some minimal stats thrown in.)
BTW, KOTOR I and II were ports of console games, so don't bother giving those as counter-examples.
But there's one aspect to it that's more important: the games industry itself is giving interviews and PR releases everywhere, saying that games should be shorter, and that somehow they're just doing what the gamers want. See, it's supposedly the gamers that want to pay 50$ for a 5 hour game. Yes, sir. Supposedly we gamers just don't have the attention span for those 30 hour games, and every single game most people didn't finish (because it was crap or became crap by the middle of it) is taken out of context and placed on a pedestal as prime example that gamers just want shorter games.
So even if a lot of RPGs still are longer than 10 hours, their numbers are slowly going downhill. That "short is good" myth is the image that the publishers themselves are aiming for, and they're circularly reinforcing that myth for each other.
There's a lot of wishful thinking in this industry. There are a lot of pseudo-truths or flawed truisms that publishers throw around, apparently in a hope that they'll become truth if one only repeats them often enough.
E.g., that quality doesn't matter, and gamers actually _want_ to buy a dysfunctional unfinished POS now and maybe get a patch later. (Surely buying a game that crashes at the main menu with a script _syntax_ error (a la the German version of Victoria) is ok, as long as some time in the future you'll get a patch that actually lets you start the game.) E.g., that people only buy for screenshots, ergo gameplay and story don't really matter. E.g., that shameless hype sells, but you don't need to even try actually having a quality product that lives up to that hype.
And one such hand-waved wishful thinking lately is that somehow gamers actually _want_ shorter games, and it's ok to charge 50$ for a 5 hour game. In fact, that it's outright perfect. It's just giving the gamers what they want, right?
And this statistic basically just says: no, it's not perfect and it's not what the gamers want. In fact, we're already at the point where about half the market thinks that what they're getting isn't worth the price.
That, in a nutshell, is the main merit of this statistic. It says it black-on-white that no, that's not what the gamers want. Not that I expect the publishers to get it, though. Being a jaded old cynic, I expect them to just issue even more PR "news" and interviews about how, really, deep in their hearts gamers do want short games. And keep hoping that they just need to repeat the falsehoods even more often to become truth.
I'd vote that insightful rather than funny, if I had any moderator points atm.
Such articles saying that PCs dominate the video game market are at best mis-leading. For example:
1. Yes, I'd be very interested what they play on those PCs. The fact is, for better or worse, the console market has massively higher sales in dollars. If half of those PCs are used to run Solitaire or some freeware puzzle game (I know that's what my mother plays most of the time), the picture for a publisher, i.e., for someone trying to _sell_ a game, could be very very different. Actually, as I've said, we already know that when you measure it in dollars it _is_ a very different picture.
2. For that matter, even if somebody wants to take that as "it means we _could_ sell games to 39% of the people, if we figured out what they want to play"... how many of those PCs are high-end enough for a new game? It's one thing to be able to play a 2D puzzle game, and it's a whole different proposition to get them to play EQ2 on that PC. (I know it often stutters on my 7800 GTX, Athlon 64 4000+ and 2 GB RAM system, so I shudder to even think how it would run on some grandpa's 5 year old Celeron with integrated graphics.) In practice, I suspect that at _least_ half those PCs can be safely considered non-existent for the purpose of running a new game.
3. It's not an "exclusive or" there. Numbers like ""39% of all households use PCs for playing video games - this group makes up the vast majority of the 48% of households that have any sort of video games hardware."" does _not_ mean that 39% use exclusively PCs and 9% use exclusively consoles. In practice, there is a massive overlap between the two categories. I know I have both.
So basically I'd take this as mostly just trivia. Yes, a lot of people have some kind of PC (even if an ancient Cyrix 300+) and play _some_ kind of game on them, but that doesn't mean by far that it's overtaking the profitable console game market.
"Slightly of TFA, but for some reason Logitech gave the Rumblepad 2 for the PC square moldings around the analog stick which makes pulling off circular motions a pain in the ass. Oddly, their controller for the PS2 does not have this."
Personally I find most of the PC gamepads to be a royal pain in the rear, and I've tried a lot of them. Getting an adapter to plug my PS2 controller in was the best money I've ever spent.
The problem with PC gamepads, as far as I can tell is that nobody just makes a damn gamepad for playing sake, but to look cook and funky and "innovative" in all the wrong ways. Even if the same company makes a sane clone of the original console controller for that console, on the PC version they just _have_ to screw up with some hare-brained attempt to look cooler than the other controllers out there. And considering how some of them worked, I can only guess they're also trying to achieve that with the cheapest crap possible, and not in a "best bang per buck" way either.
E.g., among the problems I've had with my stack of PC gamepads:
- at least one (an old Logitech, I believe) had the grips slanted as to form an angle, and the D-pad was slanted accordingly. So when my instincts told me I'm pushing forward -- i.e., towards the screen -- the damn thing would register it as pushing up-left. The only way to use it was to hold it twisted, so at least the left hand pointed at the screen, but the right hand was roughly parallel to the screen then. (Think somewhat like holding an old Sten SMG.) Of course, then during the game I'd gradually end up holding it naturally, and the pad was pointing in the wrong direction all over again.
- D-pads that are some funky floating hat, coolie hat, or generally anything _but_ a goddamn cross. Preferrably round and with no more than some vague "cool" wave-shaped indentations to give you a hint which way is up and which way is left. And preferrably with the sensitivity of the switches completely out of whack, so pressing up and even ever so slightly to the left gives you a clean up-left.
- Thumbsticks that, yes, plain old suck. Most of them can't even take a corner right, or require excessive force for that. Some can't even be centered right, or when they are, they eventually lose calibration. (E.g., yeah, my Rumblepad 2 would start pretending it's perpetually off-centre in one direction after 2 hours or so of gaming.) Or if they can, they have a problem with round motions. I don't know what crap components or designs they use for the PC gamepads, but 90% of analog thumbsticks out there just suck.
Basically, if any idiot marketer for Logitech or Thrustmaster reads this: people, a gamepad is a _functional_ piece of hardware. It's not supposed to look "cool", it's not supposed to be some designer home-decoration, it's just fucking supposed to get the job done in a way that requires the minimum of effort and attention. E.g., the cross D-Pad on a PS2 (or Dreamcast or whatever) controller works because it's that intuitive: if you want up, you press the up arm, if you want left, you press the left arm, and if you want both, you press both. Your hand pretty much self-centers on that, and the tactile feedback is hard to miss. A floating coolie hat misses all that.
The whole thing about mentoring reminds me of, "Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice." So, eh, let's hope the "graduation" doesn't go like in the Sith tradition ;)
But seriously, it makes me wonder if one-on-one mentoring wouldn't go better in a more controlled two-player way than in an MMO. There are so many bad influences, and they're so contagious. Ranging from "let's go over the mountain and gank alliance newbies in Northshire" or "let's roll undead chars and camp the zones with newbie warlock quests" (I hope sincerely hope that's not the kind of insecurity and way to boost one's fragile ego you're trying to get your son to learn) to "r u a grl??? wanna cyber???" to... well, I know at least one middle aged manager who writes l33t in online games. Made me wonder how contagious that really is. To God knows what else.
Basically I'm probably gonna get flamed for it, but I _am_ saying that games and the people in those games _do_ influence people. Not in the way of turning someone into a crazed serial killer because they've played GTA, of course, but people do learn from each other and learn to imitate the ones they admire. Often meaning the biggest flaming retards. So same as your son can learn to smoke just to be like Tom down the street who is sooo cool and popular, he can also learn to try to be an even bigger asshole than LordNoobKillah in the online guild. Just a thought.
Basically if you would pay any attention to what friends your kid has IRL, or who's he hanging around with, I'd pay the same attention to the online entourage. Just because someone's character isn't "real" doesn't mean he can't give real advice or that someone can't follow it. And certain games and certain servers attract entirely too many assholes for me to be comfortable with the idea of letting a kid loose in there. At least until he's old enough and I'm positive that he's already been taught what's right and wrong and can make a sane judgment as to whose advice to follow.
For that matter, while games are good and fine, I hope mentoring includes time together outside games. Looking at the things I've learned from my father, even if they did involve a computer -- e.g., he encouraged me to learn assembly at the age of 14, and BASIC before that -- I can't help notice that none of that would have happened if we just fired up a MMO/MUD/BBS-game/whatever and went merrily killing NPCs. What he taught me was how to _make_ a game like those, which given the limitations of a ZX-81 with 1K RAM admittedly wasn't much, but still served to hammer in some notions of logic and analytical thinking, rather than just how to play them.
Just saying, you know... Gaming skills are good and fine, and I'll be the first to sing praises to them, but there are some other skills that ensure I'm overpaid as an EJB consultant at the moment.
Other skills and attitudes I've got from my mom and grandma, especially mom's sorta paladin-like lawful-good philosophy that, if nothing else, kept me well out of trouble so far. I can't help thinking that it's been far more useful teaching me that, than it would have been to teach me how to keep aggro while tanking Onyxia, or how to respec to Holy and chain-cast Flash Heal as a priest in an MC raid.
Just some random musings, you know.