Hmm... Thanks for that link, that was most definitely worth a read. I didn't know about that theory, but yes, at least the dip downwards matches just what I was talking about.
Still, even then, now we're only starting on the slope downwards into that valley. We're barely at the peak where it starts sorta provoking some empathy (enough to deliver a story anyway) but not enough to be taken for real. And we have a helluva chasm in front of us, seein' as even the Final Fantasy movie, with its _insane_ polygon counts (by computer game standards) and physics/mimmics simulation still was in that valley of weirdness.
I.e., even without Moore's law slowing down (and it does), we're talking about another century or more worth of valley in front of us.
_If_ that theory is correct, then rying to push straight through it the hard way is IMHO suicide for the industry. There's IMHO no way to really survive that kind of an extended dip where your graphics actually turn off the customers. (Again, in EQ2's case, a lot of people actually were turned off or even driven away by those graphics.)
_If_ that's the case, we may well actually _need_ to go stillized or cartoonish to survive it. (After all, the same people who laughed at the Final Fantasy movie, had no problems swallowing Toy Story or the Lion King, which were equally computer-generated.)
"I wonder if some scientists might already be so invested in theories of dark matter that they will refuse to accept this position."
Einstein's relativity was also denounced as Bolshevism at the time, but it didn't stop it. So I wouldn't worry much. _If_ the theory does match the observed data, it will do just fine. If not, not.
I know it's a popular view that science is some closed caste, with its holy bible of sacred truths, and trying to silence everyone who thinks otherwise. There's a whole class of charlatans and quacks using that to peddle their "miracle" solution as some "scientific" thing that the establishment science tries to suppress. Unfortunately, that's no more than marketting run amok. Reality tends to be in the other direction.
Dark matter itself is in fact the perfect counter-example there. It's a relatively new thing and not even the most obvious deus-ex-machina to reach for. But if the results of that theory matched the measured data better than the old theory, here we are taking it for granted.
"This just further proves my point - they release the same old crap over and over again."
Well, I never said you didn't have a point there. Just that it's not the programmers who are to blame for it.
"As I said, do they really think I am that stupid?"
There's a lot of thinking just that in this industry, yes. Or at least wishing that if they tried really really hard to believe something, it would become true. There's a whole bunch of myths getting repeated over and over, in the hope that they'll become reality. Most of them, yes, revolving around the hope that the consumer is totally stupid.
Well, I haven't read the book, but I saw a movie with the exact same plot, so that's not what I was arguing there. I suppose it does make for a good movie or book plot, too.
What I'm saying is that as a RL solution it's just not economically practical to lift an airplane into orbit. One kind of orbit involves ludicrious speeds, the other kind is 35,000 km up there, and other kinds are at various places in between the two inconvenient extremes.
And speed/distance aren't just a matter of fuel usage there. Are you willing to submit untrained civilians to 10g accelerations to put an airplane in LEO, for example?
A RL solution would be at most sub-orbital, if at all, and it would fall back.
"Unlike every explosion to ever go off on a plane in flight the space plane does not fall out of the sky."
Funny thing is, actually it would.
You probably know this already, but just for the benefit of whoever doesn't: space isn't just this place where gravity ceases to exist, and objects just stay there. It's not like there's some "gravity ends here" border and if you've pushed past that, you're ok.
Staying in orbit is actually a matter of going fast enough around the Earth, so that centrifugal force equals your weight. (Or in more scientific terms, so that your weight is exactly the needed centripetal force to keep you going in a circle.) Geostationary satellites for example, well, that's why they stay up: because they're at a point and a speed where going around the Earth in 24 hours requires exactly as much centripetal acceleration as they get gravity from the Earth. Again, not because gravity doesn't exist, but precisely because it does.
But here we probably wouldn't be talking about a geostationary orbit, since that's roughly 35,000 km upwards above sea level. It's more distance upwards than you'd travel horizontally between Tokyo and NY. Or in other words, a fucking ludicrious waste of fuel.
Ok, so let's say their airplane got a _lot_ lower than that, e.g., only to LEO. That's "only" anywhere between 300 and 1500 km upwards. To stay up there you'd need a _lot_ more speed, though. In fact, enough speed to do a complete rotation around the world in between 1.5 and 2 hours. Again, we're talking a _lot_ of fuel to accelerate something airplane sized to _that_ kinda speed.
What I'm getting is that we're talking sub-orbital planes here, because going all the way into orbit is a purely SF idea anyway. The sub-orbital idea is to basically never really be in orbit anyway. Think more like a ballistic shot that goes really high up, but never has enough speed to actually stay up there. So if the engines die, it _will_ fall back.
The problem is that the more details you put into something, the more people notice when those details are wrong, and what other details are missing.
E.g., one of the common complaints about EQ2 is that the graphics are detailed but "sterile". And having played both EQ2 and WoW, I can tell you that EQ2 has much higher polygon counts than WoW, it has high resolution textures, it uses shaders for everything including details on your armour, and it attempts to model the physics even for your character's hair or the grass you run through. And yet it looks disturbingly unnatural. Something feels eerily wrong about that world, and I've found it a lot easier to suspend disbelief in WoW's cartoonish graphics than in that.
I was talking some time ago with someone who's tried some VR headset and some car sim, I don't remember the details, and apparently he's just got some bad case of nausea out of it. Because if you fool the eyes well enough, the brains start expecting other stimuli too. Like if you turn hard to the left, it expects to also feel a centrifugal force to the right. When that doesn't come, it's weird. It can actually cause nausea.
I suspect the same applies to Sony's virtual world. When you're led to expect a certain level of detail, you start noticing (even subconsciously) all the places where it's missing.
Anyway, between Sony's "quantifiable and readily obtainable" polygon count approach and Blizzard's using better artwork instead, Blizzard's approach won. So maybe that trade isn't that bad after all.
"I have noticed that the more realistic games look, the more the same as other crap games they tend to become. Game programmers must think we're really really stupid. They're repackaging the same old shit week after week and adding "better" graphics (where better is subjective)."
I think you're severely mistaken if you think anyone asked a programmer at all at most companies. (Well, other than at ID, but then their games are just tech demos anyway to sell their graphics engines.)
The days when one or two programmers could make a game just as good as anyone else's in their spare time, and proclaim it a big success if they sold 1000 copies and made $20,000 out of it are long gone. Nowadays, partially _because_ of the photorealism, game budgets are in the millions range, so you need a publisher.
And the publisher isn't evil or anything either, but they're risking millions on each game. And it's pretty much like a lottery there: most games actually don't make a profit. In fact, most games actually make a loss, and the publisher covers their losses from the profits from those that did sell well. (E.g., EA pretty much uses their sports games cash-cow to subsidize most of the other stuff they make.) And then some don't just make a loss, but are complete duds and sell 800 copies total, and noone is sure exactly why. And then some don't even get finished. (E.g., Jowood paid 5.5 million Euro to develop a game, and after many delays had to just scrap the project because the result was crap.)
Publishers go bankrupt, or get bought for pennies just for the brand name, all the time.
So the short story is that the publisher tries to minimize their risks. That tends to mean making more of whatever sold well last year.
1. The tactic to release most stuff for christmas isn't new, but in 2004 it got ridiculous and in 2005... well, let's just say there was almost nothing released the whole summer. (Followed by a rush to release unfinished stuff in September, presumably because everyone realized the case of all demand and no supply on the market.)
You know it's a bad year when Penny Arcade makes a strip about them buying Barbie Horse Adventures because nothing else got released in months. You know it's even worse when you actually take that as a hint to go to the shop and look for Barbie Horse Adventures. I swear to god, I actually did.
So, well, I'm not surprised a bunch of people have said they've played less in 2005, simply because there was a severe drought of stuff to play.
2. Additionally, one thing you need to understand is the way people answer in surveys. The answers invariably reflect the way people would like to be, or the way that would make them more socially acceptable, not the way they really are.
E.g., if a community publically values helping each other and stuff, people will invariably tell a surveyor "oh, yes, we help each other on the farm all the time and we even help each other build a house"... even when the last time that's actually happened was in the 50s. E.g., if a (ex-tribal) culture values being a warrior and a hunter, almost everyone will declare themselves one in a survey... even though almost all their food comes from agriculture, and most of the population has never even seen a weapon recently. E.g., at one point where meat prices went up, everyone declared in surveys that they eat less meat... even though the meat consumption has actually _doubled_.
All three above are actual cases studied by various anthropologists.
It's not even a case of consciously lying, it's just selective confirmation, because everyone wants to have some self-esteem. So they alter their perception of reality a little, remember the things they did right, or close enough, and quickly forget the things they did wrong.
What I'm getting at is that you should take such surveys with a grain of salt. With the anti-games campaign by the media and politics reaching such a climax, and games being presented as pure filth for degenerates... well, I can imagine a lot of people would like to look a bit less degenerate. So they'll adjust their answers accordingly.
I still remember a game for the Dreamcast, I think it was called Dragon's Blood. It might have had a different name in the USA.
What surprised me at the time was that I could hear the CD-ROM seeking all the time. As soon as I started moving around, the CD would seek like crazy. I can only guess it loaded data on the fly off the CD.
But here's the fun part: the game never missed a beat. It ran flawlessly at a clean 50 fps. (That's the TV refresh rate here in Europe.)
That's just the kind of thing that you can do with good hardware and software design.
On the hardware side, the whole system didn't crawl as soon as you access the CD, as is pretty much the norm on PCs. Loading and running the game just happened at the same time with no slowdown.
And on the software side, it tells me that they not only coded the game to be able to do that, but most likely also took the time to optimize the placement of the files in the resources, to minimize seek times. That's another thing that just doesn't seem to happen on the PC.
Giving the XBox a standard hard drive just allowed the exact same kind of crap. Throwing some files together haphazardly, and relying on the HDD to sort out the performance problem. I.e., what the HDD really brought you there probably isn't the faster load on 2nd try, but the dog slow load on the first try.
And how much can you cache anyway? You don't want a 5 GB game cached to a 10 GB HDD, because you only have enough place for two of them then, and that doesn't even leave any space for saved games. So sooner or later (e.g., when playing a bunch of maps online in random order), you'll have to reload one from DVD anyway. Welcome back to the slow moving blue bar.
Yes, in that history does show that once someone doesn't care (any more) about what happens to them (e.g., because they're going to die anyway), there's nothing you can do to keep them in line. Most you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., lock them away in a prison or kill them.
The same applies to games, and I wish more designers did learn that from history. (It would have prevented the UO fuckup, for a start.) Once someone doesn't give a damn about what happens to their character, nothing you can possibly do to their character will deter them. In-character justice just doesn't work on them. All you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., ban.
No, in that the setting is a bit different. We're not talking a case of "waah, I'm gonna die! The world is so cruel! I'm gonna have my revenge against this cruel world!" We're most likely talking about people who never gave a damn about their character, and much less about the minor bother of having to respawn. We're talking people who most likely just saw it as a case of "awesome! now I can kill newbies with this!"
There's a whole category of people who pays that monthly fee purely to annoy, troll, and cause as much distress as possible. Their supreme achievement is managing to drive someone completely off the game. I.e., griefers.
They also don't like taking risks, and their favourite kind of target is one which can't even possibly defend at all. E.g., one who's 20 levels lower and preferrably idle. And Blizzard just gave them the equivalent of nuke which does just that: run up to a bunch of newbies, and they're dead with no chance to defend. Far from making them desperate or depressed or anything even remotely similar to RL plagues, it probably just made their day.
It's not even something new. Bartle described that very same category back in the days of MUDs.
So, hey, there's an idea for designers: if learning from history is too much of a bother, at least learn from what was already discovered in other games. MUDs ran into most of the same problems ages ago.
Disclaimer: I'm actually a pretty satisfied XBox owner and, since we're in a Nintendo thread, I'm not a Nintendo fan. In fact Nintendo fans tend to mod me -1 Troll as soon as I even mention Nintendo. (I will however mention the Dreamcast, and I was a Sega fanboy all right, so I might still be a bit biased.)
Still, I must say I like my consoles small and lightweight.
I remember my Dreamcast (told you I'd mention it), because that's a console I used to haul around all the time. Small, lightweight and not in a thin fragile way either. I could stuff it, a controller and one or two games in a shoulder bag. (And not a huge one, either. I used to jokingly refer to it as my "purse".) If I travelled somewhere, I could just stuff it and a couple of games in the luggage, and not end up having to pull out half the clothes out either.
The XBox is just too big for that. Yes, I can carry 7 pounds, but I don't want to haul an extra 7 pounds with me on a trip. It also no longer fits in that bag any more. I'd have to get a bloody huge bag or a backpack to do that.
The XBox is ok as a stationary console that stays at home. Ok, maybe too loud for my taste (my main PC is a lot more silent by comparison), but at least I'm not complaining about weight or size when it just stays under the TV.
The Dreamcast however was transportable too. You couldn't play with it in the train, yes, but at least it could be hauled a hotel and used on the TV there in the evening. Even the PS2 is still OK, even if it's a bit larger. The Gamecube was even better in that aspect than them both. (Well, or it would have been if it actually had any games I'd wish to play. But if we're talking size and weight alone, I can only give a thumbs up to Nintendo there.) The XBox just isn't. Even omitting the fact that it has a hard drive and thus isn't quite shock-proof, I just don't feel like hauling an extra 7 pounds on a train or to the airport.
"Sounds like you're jealous of that other guy frankly. Anyone who goes on and on and on about how evil "consumerism" is would trade places in a second if they had the opportunity."
Heh. Jealous of him? Dude, I _pity_ him. I wish I could help him, but I'm not even sure how. Trade places? Why? I'm paid a lot more than I spend, I have all I need, and unlike him I have the time to enjoy it too. Why on Earth would I even consider trading places with some broken insecure slave like that?
Sound like you're just the kind that _has_ to convince himself that that everyone envies him, and that everyone else will be some pauper on "menial retirement savings" Truth is, if you're like that, you have my sincere pity.
Here's a hint for you: I'm actually only marginally less paid than that guy, but have about 4 times more free time to enjoy it. You're not talking to a 5 dollars an hour tech-support slave, or god knows what you've imagined that needs to envy a consumerism slave. You're talking to a highly paid senior developper contractor, currently passing for a J2EE expert.
That's another funny thing about it: while he was busy doing 12 hour days to impress his boss, I've been investing a tiny fraction of that extra free time in learning some markettable skills. It's not just that it got me a comparable salary and a far nicer workplace so far. It's also that between actually having those skills and the savings to bridge even extended periods of time, I don't need to be half as insecure about the job as he is.
Between all that financial black hole (if he ever ends up out of job, those monthly payments alone will _bury_ him, and he knows it) and not having learned anything new in 5 years straight, the guy is pretty damn insecure. He just _has_ to put out with any crap, work even weekends if needed to meet a ridiculous deadline, and brown-nose like there's no tomorrow. Because basically he has no way out of that trap.
Do you still think I'd trade places with that? I like to think you can't be _that_ stupid.
"You only live once... what are YOU waiting for?"
Yes, precisely _because_ I only live once, I'd rather live the way _I_ want, than being a pathetic slave to "keeping up with the Joneses." I'd rather have _fun_. Do the things _I_ want to do, and have the _time_ to do them. When I spend my money, it'll be for the things that _I_ fancy, for _my_ own pleasure, not to show off to the Joneses. Fuck the Joneses. I don't care about them. I care about myself.
That's all. It's really that simple.
"I'd rather live my life when I still can than mope around being a stick in the mud for 40 years,"
Bingo. Why don't you take your advice and do just that: live your life instead of wasting it between a crap job and a race to get deeper in debt?
"retire on my menial retirement savings I scraped together and then be a pain in the ass for my kids since I'm too old to have any fun anymore."
My "menial retirement savings" will actually be higher than his, by the looks of it so far, since he hasn't actually saved anything except for the bare minimum required by the social security for a pension. He'll have that pension, and that's it.
"Everyone cuts the schedule. If they didn't reduce the schedule from 8 to 6 days then they wouldn't be "productive". Get over yourself and learn to pad everything by the necessary 25% to 30% in time so that when they cut it out it's still attainable. But make sure it looks like a struggle doing it. If you get on schedule without massive OT then they cut goes from 25% to 35% to 45% and so on. One company I worked at they had a 75% fluff to every number just to survive all the management cuts that will come along during the budget reviews."
No, not everyone. Only PHBs act like that. If the company you work for has to do all that charade, and you _still_ end up with massive overtime, you've just told me you have a complete idiot for a boss. And let me get back to one particular management idiocy there:
"If they didn't reduce the schedule from 8 to 6 days then they wouldn't be "productive"."
No. Measuring productivity like that has got to count as not just clueless, downright surrelistic lack of clue. And let me give you just one reason why.
In this job everything can be done in 1001 ways, and about 900 of them are bad shortcuts. They involve write-only code, lack of testing, and generally just hoping that the quickest and dirtiest and most unmaintainable hack will just work on the first try. If you cut someone's time by 25% you've just told them to take such a bad shortcut.
The result isn't just bad unmaintainable code (which _will_ bite you in the ass when you want to make a v2.0), and not only just buggy, but it might blow the deadline even worse. Debugging bad code takes a lot longer, and debugging (in one form or another) is what you do some 90% of the time. A shortcut that's nearly impossible to debug, and nearly impossible to change into something else (e.g., when debugging says that your very choice of algorithm was wrong) will likely take longer to be ready.
Or it may never be ready. Someone I know is still stuck in a project that should have been finished in the last quarter of _2002_. But yeah, they were always under pressure, so they skipped testing almost completely until the end of 2004, they always fixed bugs via the quickest hack that can sorta work, never had time to figure out a _consistent_ way to implement that spec, or to get a good spec out of the client for that matter, and so on.
Having to add fluff to justify the deadline wrangling game, again, adds complexity and adds places where bad shortcuts will bite you in the ass.
So that kind of approach "productivity" just means making a bad product.
A product's architecture and the allocated time should involve understanding the pros and cons of each approach. That's what design is all about: making an informed choice, and knowing the price you pay for that choice. (And there will _always_ be a price to pay. In some cases it will just be much smaller than the gains.) Replacing it with a sad game in which management pats just themselves on the back for imposing an arbitrary 25% to 75% without even asking what's the effect, is pretty much _the_ nemesis of any kind of good design.
The fact that he does seem to understand already is that a bad job isn't worth hanging onto. Seems very mature to me for a start.
I see people every day who just can't get it that for _you_ the first and only priority is... _you_, and of course your family if you have one. The job or wage are just a means to an end, but no more. The question is what good does it do for _you_, not what you can do to fit in a bad job at all cost. If a job or a whole industry is actually making you unhappier, then it's time to look for a better job and maybe switch to another industry altogether.
Success isn't measured in how well you fit a stereotype and how much shit you're capable of taking for it. The only real success is the kind that improves your quality of life. And if taking job A instead of job B actually lowers it, maybe taking job A isn't really a "success".
Judging a job _only_ by the money ("I personally believe the time to leave that first tech job is when you can find another job that pays significantly more") is IMHO a case of literally not seeing the forest for the trees.
Money is a means, not an end. You can't eat money, you can't get much entertainment out of just looking at a bunch of 100$ bills, etc. The question is what you can do with them to improve your life quality, not the number alone, like some screwed-up game score.
And before you lash back with "well, duh, with more money you can buy more stuff and be happier", no, that's still not getting it.
Yeah, you can buy a bigger plasma TV or some high-end stereo or whatever, but if you end up in a job where an asshole demands your presence there 14 hours a day, and occasionally that you bring a sleeping bag and don't leave until he sees some program ready (yes, I've actually seen such an asshole)... you won't actually have the _time_ to actually _use_ those. You'll just have time to eat and flop into bed.
Additionally, let's talk about happiness on the whole. Even if money could buy some happiness, it's not a linear scale. Twice the money doesn't make you twice as happy. So you gain, what? Maybe 5% extra happiness in those 4-5 hours at home. If the price to pay is anywhere between 8 and 14 hours of pure hell at work, I'd say on the average you're actually worse off.
Guarding against the future? Hah. I'll tell you what's more likely to happen, because I personally know people who chose to work for an asshole for a lot more pay. You know how much they've saved for the future? Well, one was telling me at the end of last week that he's some $2000 in debt... right after salary day. (And that's not counting the debts for his car, the house, etc.)
Welcome to the deathtrap of consumerism. See, most people who try too hard to believe that success is measured in money alone, and that more money can literally buy happiness... end up literally trying to buy it. Or failing that, trying to convince themselves that theirs is the right way. ("Hey, look how much stuff I can buy with that money! Of course it's worth it! Why, that's what success is all about!")
The guy I was mentioning above, we're good friends, so I hear about it each time he gets a raise or a promotion. Also when he buys new stuff. Guess what? Each raise was followed by an even bigger increase in how much he spends. Each time he'll just get a bigger car, a bigger computer, then military-grade IR goggles for when he goes fishing, then now a bigger house in a whole other (more fashionable) town. (Just in case those 12 hours a day at the office weren't enough, now he'll also spend an extra 2 hours commuting.)
Those in turn just dig the trap deeper. Now with all those monthly payments and being in debt he _has_ to keep at it.
So what did he _really_ get out of it? Well, from where I stand, it looks like he's got $2000 debt, plus the loans for the car and house, and some 12 hours a day of high stress. Now with the extra commuting, he only gets to see his infant son briefly before going to sleep, and on weekends. Yeah, way to go.
My advice? Forget it. I've saved a lot more on a lesser wage. Not falling into the "money is everything, and consumerism is the way to show it off" trap tends to have that effect.
I've personally seen only one company before where the employees pulled a mass exodus like that, and let me tell you the boss was a _total_ asshole. He treated people like dirt. He just had to remind everyone that he's the boss and you're the peon, he pulled unreasonable demands like that everyone brings a sleeping bag and noone leaves until they're ready with some piece of software that the idiot fancied he wanted until tomorrow, he overrode any decision of those he delegated to do something, and berating was for him apparently like breathing.
It was one experience that made me feel a _lot_ better about my own employer at the time. I mean, geesh, whatever minor complaints I had, by comparison to that asshole... ooer, I was having a dream job.
And that's the thing that's IMHO necessary to really see an exodus like that.
Otherwise people leave, yes, but gradually. Just being in an useless project takes some time to sap your will to go on, and it takes different time for different people. People can go on for years just being comfortable in one place. And while there's a visible minority that just jumps from job to job for more pay with no regrets, a lot of us nerds prefer not taking a risk if we don't have to. A workplace that's not quite perfect can be preferrable to plunging into the unknows. So again, any turnaround for minor grievances and boredom will tend to be slow and gradual.
What we have here is basically a situation where everyone leaves as soon as the first one tells the others "hey guys, I got hired at Yahoo and guess what? They're hiring! Blow that joint and come over here." That tells me that they already wanted badly to leave, and probably just uncertainty kept them there.
The wake of a dot-com bust has left a lot of people just too affraid to leave even a bad job, and has given a lot of managers the idea that they can finally be the assholes they always wanted to be. And it even works for a while. But it just begs this kind of situation to happen: it only takes one "hey guys, this other company is hiring and they're not assholes" to just remove that barrier of fear, uncertainty and doubt keeping everyone in.
And much as I'd like to think that at least one manager has now learned a valuable lesson, he didn't. He'll blame it on Yahoo, he'll blame it on the employees, etc, and the go back to doing the same again.
Well, I still have my CoH account. Well, more like "again" than "still". I had went back in I4 to see what the new clothes are all about, and then after I5 to see the new powers. And yes, kudos to them for the character customization. Even more kudos for not being centered around PvP, while I'm at it.
Whether it's a more decent game than WoW, though... well, I suppose that's a matter of personal preferences. Personally... well, let's just say I see some reasons why far more people play WoW than CoH. Even without going into what I like and dislike about game balance and design, when I briefly tried it after I5, my screen would flash, flicker and the like, and movement seemed very jerky. It's also the only game I own which seems to run at 60Hz no matter what on a Nvidia card, and doesn't offer an in-game option to set it to a different refresh rate. So, if only for the sake of my eyes, there wasn't that much reason for me to stay there.
Still, to get back to the topic of buying clothes for the characters, I wouldn't have minded even more options in CoH too. Especially some weapon customization would have been very very nice.
That's what I find scary: the whole idea that we'd have to give 100 different modules their own port through the firewalls and let them cheerfully accept connections on our server and send data from our servers.
First of all, it would be a titanic amount of work to just review all the code and make sure it doesn't contain any back doors.
Second, ok, let's assume the code isn't malicious. What about buffer overflows? So now each time someone finds a gappin (security) hole in, say, libgoatse, they automatically know it works on all web sites that use libgoatse. You can even automatically scan for them, if it's a standardized way to ask for the source. I can see a blaster-style worm that just scans all ip addresses and just sends a malformed "send me the libgoatse sources" request to everyone.
I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting, but I wouldn't sleep easily at night knowing that there are some 100 modules in a dozen web apps that just talk freely to the outside world.
"So your idea of a revolutionary controller is a gamepad with enough buttons to play games from four other game systems? That's literally the stupidest thing I heard all week, and I hear lots of stupid things. Does that inspire confidence? If it does, I suggest you go and rethink your life."
You know, it was starting to look like I was actually getting an intelligent answer from a Nintendo fan, for a change. Or at least capable of following what's written there. And then the above comes. What's wrong with it?
A) Where did I write the stupidity you combat there? Nowhere. That's right. It's your own straw-man. And a very lame straw-man at that. It doesn't even try to look like even vaguely related to what I wrote. You just pull a completely unrelated stupidity out of the ass, that you can feel comfortable enough to attack.
B) It's back to acting like a bleating fanboy on a crusade against the heathens. No, dude, you need to rethink your life. If a stupid console -- _any_ console -- means that much to you that you need to take it personally, you're sad. Go out, meet people, get a life.
"So... There goes your argument."
Nope, there goes your sad straw-man.
"You know, you're the best writer of any trolls I've met."
And again, we're back to the good old mindless Nintendo fanboy on an offensive act. I was asked what I don't like about it. I wrote what. But you sad little fanboys just have to feel personally offended and trolled if anyone dares not like a console. If anyone dares not love a stupid controller or a game or anything even remotely related to Nintendo, it can't be that they genuinely don't like it, it _has_ to be some trolling, right? And you just _have_ to turn any such conversation in a lame shout-down-the-heathen act. You're officially sad. Grow up. Get a life.
While I don't like the idea of paying real money for in-game advantages, and in fact I could rant for hours about how it's wrong for a game to explicitly catter to the pay-to-cheat crowd... what's wrong with caring about what your character looks like?
I'm not Korean, but in WoW I wished my tailor character could dye clothes so they match. Just because I'm a munchkin doesn't mean I want to look like a clown. (And if I did, I'd want a _proper_ clown costume, with red nose, floppy shoes and all, not just a collection of mis-matched clothes.)
I know others who would have liked the same thing. And Gabe of Penny Arcade seems like a pretty hardcore gamer, yet he too recently complained on the site about having all those bonuses on a green hat, and how it doesn't fit his fire mage image.
Well, yes, that's in fact the whole point: you want it to be a fun experience. That includes such practical issues as its being comfortable and easy to use, for example.
Yep, even if it's a console. One of the things that keept getting mentioned by Nintendo fans about Mario 64 for example was that the controls were just right. One of the things criticized about the XBox was that the original controller was too big to be comfortable.
In games themselves, we've moved from joysticks to gamepads, because Nintendo's gamepad was more _practical_ (e.g., comfortable) than Atari's joysticks. And then we've moved to mice in FPS, because they were more _efficient_. Nintendo itself in the DS moved to a touch screen, among other things, because it was a more practical and efficient input for some games. (Trying to either draw or steer a FPS with a gamepad is a lot less fun.)
Other items also used for fun, e.g., your TV, also weren't entirely immune to efficiency and practicality issues. E.g., that's why they're all shipped with a remote control, have a digital tuner, memory, presets, auto-scan for channels, tele-text, etc.
So basically you can't really separate items like that. Even if something is supposed to be used for fun, you'll still want it to have a practical interface.
Well, we can discuss why I don't like the controller too, but all I wanted to say there was that it's a completely different issue from disliking innovation as a whole. So figured for a change I'd focus on one single idea instead of a hard-to-read mix of disparate issues.
But ok, here's why I don't like it:
1. It looks like it would be uncomfortable after a while.
Think lightguns, for example. They're great as a gimmick, but it's not the kind of thing you'd want to play with for hours. It's the kind of stuff you play for half an hour, or an hour, then plug in your regular controller and play something else. I know people who've played a FPS with a keyboard and mouse for 16 hours straight. I don't know anyone who can play a lightgun game for _half_ that time.
Being a weakling nerd has nothing to do with it, btw. Humans just weren't built for that. I've actually got a bodybuilder once to play a lightgun game. He too soon got sore muscles from holding his arm up.
So all things considered, I'd rather _not_ have to wave that thing around for hours to play a game.
Most of Nintendo's proposed accessories for this controller suffer from the same problem. E.g., take the racing wheel. A car's wheel also serves as something to rest your hands/arms on. Trying to just hold a loop in the air and steer with it would get very uncomfortable very fast.
2. Too few buttons for anything serious. Two buttons, A and B (the trigger included) just aren't enough for anything but the most over-simplified games. Even the GBA also has the shoulder triggers, by comparison.
E.g., let's take racing games. Let's say the trigger is the gas pedal, and "A" is the brake button. It just has no keys left for gear switching, hand-brake, or anything else. Reaching for the cross to do those things, not only is uncomfortable (and precludes stuff like changing gears _while_ braking), it just guarantees also moving the controller while you do that.
3. Lack of an obvious "centre" position, or of a way to reset it.
E.g., racing games again, as an easy example. (But the same would apply to a lot of other games, e.g., flight sims.) How do you know when it's centered? On a gamepad you can just let go of the stick, and it's automatically centered. I can actually think of one game where they didn't offer auto-centering: "Driving Emotion: Type S". (A Square game for the PS2, just so you don't think I'm picking only on Nintendo.) Review sites dubbed it "The real drunk driving simulator."
E.g., FPS. You can pick a mouse up and move it back to the centre, when you've pushed it too far to one side. Now imagine doing the same with such a gyroscope device instead of a mouse. How do you do that? So you want to circle-strafe around someone. You turn it to the right, right, right... then what? How far does your arm twist? How do you reset it without turning left?
Reserve a button for a "pick up the mouse" equivalent? Well, it only has two, so I'd rather not. Plus, there goes that intuitive use idea right out the window.
Or use it as a joystick instead, so you don't have to twist your arm? Well, we all knew how well joysticks worked in FPS.
4. Then there's the whole fact that it's been actually tried before. E.g., some of the Microsoft Sidewinder gamepads, yep, had just that: a motion sensor. If that worked as great for all sorts of games, as Nintendo claims, don't you think we'd have heard about it already? E.g., if a motion sensor was that great and intuitive for fps, don't you think by now you'd hear about whole clans of Sidewinder owners pwning everyone in sight?
Etc.
And yeah, yeah, it can be combined with other stuff to overcome those problems... basically bringing you back to square one. So you can stuff it into a normal Gamecube-like gamepad... getting a regular gamepad for your game. Or you can stick the analog stick part in it, nunchaku style... getting a regular gamepad split into two. Or you can stick it into a plastic loop... getting a racing wheel, if a very
I hope you do realize that you've just described about half the side-scrolling games from the 2D era, right?
Re:Different people have different tastes
on
Revisiting Sly Cooper
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"You try to find depth in something that shouldn't have any."
No offense, but that "shouldn't have any" is just your own judgment call, based on your own individual preferences, not some universal law of physics, nor God's commandment set in stone. If I like Genre A more than Genre B, honestly, who are you to tell me that a matter of personal taste is wrong, and that Genre A shouldn't even exist?
"Watch a movie. Read a book. These mediums WILL provide you with MUCH, MUCH more food for thought than a video game."
I do watch movies and read books too.
"Small question, would your ideal game be "press space button" - FMV - "press space button" - FMV ? Of course not. Or, I hope not."
The world isn't made only of extremes, you know. Between (A) that extreme you describe above, and (B) purely jumping around on colourful blocks with no story, Mario-style, there's a whole continuum of shades of grey. But if you need a point of reference in that continuum that I still don't consider silly, I can think of at least one game which was literally 75% cut-scenes and 25% actual game. I actually liked it.
"Background info : As a frenchman, I laugh at americans who fancy themselves as wine connoisseurs, and talk about "cheap ten-dollar bottles". We just drink the stuff, and a ten-euro bottle is something you bring when you're invited to a family dinner, ie, it's not shit. We don't find "fragrances of cherry", "hints of raspberry" in our wine. We look at the glass, the color is nice, it smells good, we drink. Here, the buffoons that could have been characterized in that wine taster movie about pinot noir (don't remember the name) are made fun of. Do you understand?"
Not sure even what your point is. I'm not an american, and I don't drink much alcohol, so I'm not going to feel insulted or anything.
If we're talking about americans, I'd tell you what I tell them too: don't get your education about other countries from movies. Just because some people act like pretentious snobs in a movie, doesn't mean a whole country is like that. I'm guessing the vast majority of americans too would laugh at anyone who takes that kind of connoisseur elitism too seriously. So maybe they're not that different from you, after all.
If we're still talking about games, and it's just a metaphor for that, I don't think anyone who's into story-driven games does it for any kind of elitism. We just like to watch a movie or be told a story, that's all. Just like you just drink the stuff, we just play the stuff. Just like you probably like some sorts of wines more than others, even without going into fancy elitism, e.g., might like sweet wine more than sour one or viceversa, so it is with games too. Some of us like kind A more than kind B. That's all.
Or maybe it just isn't more than some unrelated background info after all, and I'm just reading too much into it.
"Nintendo is doing the right thing with this move. If you think that the software is what matters, if the controller will have success if Revolution has titles that fully utilize it, Nintendo already own it."
I've taken the liberty of highlighting a word there. That's the whole crux of the problem. That little "if".
"How much will it cost? How much would your mother pay for hours of entertainment? A tip, that trip to Florida probably costed 5x more than a Revolution and its controller."
Again, it's begging the question if it will give her hours of entertainment, or just a sore arm after waving the thing around.
"nd that's what this controller can bring, fun while playing games to people who have never played a game! Just like you and me have played Air Guitar, having fantasies while moving your body without control, this controller allows your phisical to be an extension of your imagination.
There's no key placement to remember, no sequence, no joystick to control. Your movement is the control. Your motion is translated to whatever the game developer imaginated.
The possibilites are enormous! No longer we're stuck to up, down, left, right and 6 options. The controller allows new kinds of motion, of interaction with a virtual world.
The closer the software gets to your imagination, the better."
Now you're sounding like a broken marketting droid from the dot-com era.
No, the closer it gets to be intuitively controlled, the better. Thing is, however, (A) an intuitive controller, and (B) PR-stunt gadgets (badly) imitating reality or such fantasies... well, they're usuall exact opposites.
You may notice that the most effective and useful interfaces are those who _don't_.
E.g., the mouse is probably the most successful input device ever, but here's the thing: it's an abstract device. There is no RL equivalent of it, no "think of your airguitar fantasies!!" BS needed, it just works. Even without trying to mimmick natural movements or anything, anyone who's ever tried a mouse, needs only minimal instruction to use it. (I can tell you that I even got my computer-illiterate grandma to use one adequately well in less than a minute.) By comparison, the things that did try to imitate reality and human moves, like the touch screen or the power glove, failed miserably, because humans aren't built to hold an arm up for hours.
E.g., between the keyboard and handwriting recognition, it's the same issue: between writing something by hand (the thing that imitates reality and natural movements) and typing something on a keyboard, the keyboard is the faster and more comfortable option.
Etc.
And the same applies not only to input devices, btw. You may notice that we still use wheels on cars, not try to build mechanical legs. You may notice that our airplanes don't flap their wings like birds to. You may notice that boats have moved from oars (the solution that was inspired by flippers) to just using a propeller. Etc.
As I've said, imitating reality is that-a-way, building something efficient and useful is in the exact opposite direction.
So basically that's the thing: coming up with a PR stunt like this is _easy_, and it's easy to hype to hell and back. ("But it's natural!!!") Coming up with an innovation that's actually a better interface, that requires a lot more work, and a lot more imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Thanks for that link, that was most definitely worth a read. I didn't know about that theory, but yes, at least the dip downwards matches just what I was talking about.
Still, even then, now we're only starting on the slope downwards into that valley. We're barely at the peak where it starts sorta provoking some empathy (enough to deliver a story anyway) but not enough to be taken for real. And we have a helluva chasm in front of us, seein' as even the Final Fantasy movie, with its _insane_ polygon counts (by computer game standards) and physics/mimmics simulation still was in that valley of weirdness.
I.e., even without Moore's law slowing down (and it does), we're talking about another century or more worth of valley in front of us.
_If_ that theory is correct, then rying to push straight through it the hard way is IMHO suicide for the industry. There's IMHO no way to really survive that kind of an extended dip where your graphics actually turn off the customers. (Again, in EQ2's case, a lot of people actually were turned off or even driven away by those graphics.)
_If_ that's the case, we may well actually _need_ to go stillized or cartoonish to survive it. (After all, the same people who laughed at the Final Fantasy movie, had no problems swallowing Toy Story or the Lion King, which were equally computer-generated.)
"I wonder if some scientists might already be so invested in theories of dark matter that they will refuse to accept this position."
Einstein's relativity was also denounced as Bolshevism at the time, but it didn't stop it. So I wouldn't worry much. _If_ the theory does match the observed data, it will do just fine. If not, not.
I know it's a popular view that science is some closed caste, with its holy bible of sacred truths, and trying to silence everyone who thinks otherwise. There's a whole class of charlatans and quacks using that to peddle their "miracle" solution as some "scientific" thing that the establishment science tries to suppress. Unfortunately, that's no more than marketting run amok. Reality tends to be in the other direction.
Dark matter itself is in fact the perfect counter-example there. It's a relatively new thing and not even the most obvious deus-ex-machina to reach for. But if the results of that theory matched the measured data better than the old theory, here we are taking it for granted.
"This just further proves my point - they release the same old crap over and over again."
Well, I never said you didn't have a point there. Just that it's not the programmers who are to blame for it.
"As I said, do they really think I am that stupid?"
There's a lot of thinking just that in this industry, yes. Or at least wishing that if they tried really really hard to believe something, it would become true. There's a whole bunch of myths getting repeated over and over, in the hope that they'll become reality. Most of them, yes, revolving around the hope that the consumer is totally stupid.
Well, I haven't read the book, but I saw a movie with the exact same plot, so that's not what I was arguing there. I suppose it does make for a good movie or book plot, too.
What I'm saying is that as a RL solution it's just not economically practical to lift an airplane into orbit. One kind of orbit involves ludicrious speeds, the other kind is 35,000 km up there, and other kinds are at various places in between the two inconvenient extremes.
And speed/distance aren't just a matter of fuel usage there. Are you willing to submit untrained civilians to 10g accelerations to put an airplane in LEO, for example?
A RL solution would be at most sub-orbital, if at all, and it would fall back.
"Unlike every explosion to ever go off on a plane in flight the space plane does not fall out of the sky."
Funny thing is, actually it would.
You probably know this already, but just for the benefit of whoever doesn't: space isn't just this place where gravity ceases to exist, and objects just stay there. It's not like there's some "gravity ends here" border and if you've pushed past that, you're ok.
Staying in orbit is actually a matter of going fast enough around the Earth, so that centrifugal force equals your weight. (Or in more scientific terms, so that your weight is exactly the needed centripetal force to keep you going in a circle.) Geostationary satellites for example, well, that's why they stay up: because they're at a point and a speed where going around the Earth in 24 hours requires exactly as much centripetal acceleration as they get gravity from the Earth. Again, not because gravity doesn't exist, but precisely because it does.
But here we probably wouldn't be talking about a geostationary orbit, since that's roughly 35,000 km upwards above sea level. It's more distance upwards than you'd travel horizontally between Tokyo and NY. Or in other words, a fucking ludicrious waste of fuel.
Ok, so let's say their airplane got a _lot_ lower than that, e.g., only to LEO. That's "only" anywhere between 300 and 1500 km upwards. To stay up there you'd need a _lot_ more speed, though. In fact, enough speed to do a complete rotation around the world in between 1.5 and 2 hours. Again, we're talking a _lot_ of fuel to accelerate something airplane sized to _that_ kinda speed.
What I'm getting is that we're talking sub-orbital planes here, because going all the way into orbit is a purely SF idea anyway. The sub-orbital idea is to basically never really be in orbit anyway. Think more like a ballistic shot that goes really high up, but never has enough speed to actually stay up there. So if the engines die, it _will_ fall back.
The problem is that the more details you put into something, the more people notice when those details are wrong, and what other details are missing. E.g., one of the common complaints about EQ2 is that the graphics are detailed but "sterile". And having played both EQ2 and WoW, I can tell you that EQ2 has much higher polygon counts than WoW, it has high resolution textures, it uses shaders for everything including details on your armour, and it attempts to model the physics even for your character's hair or the grass you run through. And yet it looks disturbingly unnatural. Something feels eerily wrong about that world, and I've found it a lot easier to suspend disbelief in WoW's cartoonish graphics than in that. I was talking some time ago with someone who's tried some VR headset and some car sim, I don't remember the details, and apparently he's just got some bad case of nausea out of it. Because if you fool the eyes well enough, the brains start expecting other stimuli too. Like if you turn hard to the left, it expects to also feel a centrifugal force to the right. When that doesn't come, it's weird. It can actually cause nausea. I suspect the same applies to Sony's virtual world. When you're led to expect a certain level of detail, you start noticing (even subconsciously) all the places where it's missing. Anyway, between Sony's "quantifiable and readily obtainable" polygon count approach and Blizzard's using better artwork instead, Blizzard's approach won. So maybe that trade isn't that bad after all.
"I have noticed that the more realistic games look, the more the same as other crap games they tend to become. Game programmers must think we're really really stupid. They're repackaging the same old shit week after week and adding "better" graphics (where better is subjective)."
I think you're severely mistaken if you think anyone asked a programmer at all at most companies. (Well, other than at ID, but then their games are just tech demos anyway to sell their graphics engines.)
The days when one or two programmers could make a game just as good as anyone else's in their spare time, and proclaim it a big success if they sold 1000 copies and made $20,000 out of it are long gone. Nowadays, partially _because_ of the photorealism, game budgets are in the millions range, so you need a publisher.
And the publisher isn't evil or anything either, but they're risking millions on each game. And it's pretty much like a lottery there: most games actually don't make a profit. In fact, most games actually make a loss, and the publisher covers their losses from the profits from those that did sell well. (E.g., EA pretty much uses their sports games cash-cow to subsidize most of the other stuff they make.) And then some don't just make a loss, but are complete duds and sell 800 copies total, and noone is sure exactly why. And then some don't even get finished. (E.g., Jowood paid 5.5 million Euro to develop a game, and after many delays had to just scrap the project because the result was crap.)
Publishers go bankrupt, or get bought for pennies just for the brand name, all the time.
So the short story is that the publisher tries to minimize their risks. That tends to mean making more of whatever sold well last year.
1. The tactic to release most stuff for christmas isn't new, but in 2004 it got ridiculous and in 2005... well, let's just say there was almost nothing released the whole summer. (Followed by a rush to release unfinished stuff in September, presumably because everyone realized the case of all demand and no supply on the market.)
You know it's a bad year when Penny Arcade makes a strip about them buying Barbie Horse Adventures because nothing else got released in months. You know it's even worse when you actually take that as a hint to go to the shop and look for Barbie Horse Adventures. I swear to god, I actually did.
So, well, I'm not surprised a bunch of people have said they've played less in 2005, simply because there was a severe drought of stuff to play.
2. Additionally, one thing you need to understand is the way people answer in surveys. The answers invariably reflect the way people would like to be, or the way that would make them more socially acceptable, not the way they really are.
E.g., if a community publically values helping each other and stuff, people will invariably tell a surveyor "oh, yes, we help each other on the farm all the time and we even help each other build a house"... even when the last time that's actually happened was in the 50s. E.g., if a (ex-tribal) culture values being a warrior and a hunter, almost everyone will declare themselves one in a survey... even though almost all their food comes from agriculture, and most of the population has never even seen a weapon recently. E.g., at one point where meat prices went up, everyone declared in surveys that they eat less meat... even though the meat consumption has actually _doubled_.
All three above are actual cases studied by various anthropologists.
It's not even a case of consciously lying, it's just selective confirmation, because everyone wants to have some self-esteem. So they alter their perception of reality a little, remember the things they did right, or close enough, and quickly forget the things they did wrong.
What I'm getting at is that you should take such surveys with a grain of salt. With the anti-games campaign by the media and politics reaching such a climax, and games being presented as pure filth for degenerates... well, I can imagine a lot of people would like to look a bit less degenerate. So they'll adjust their answers accordingly.
I still remember a game for the Dreamcast, I think it was called Dragon's Blood. It might have had a different name in the USA.
What surprised me at the time was that I could hear the CD-ROM seeking all the time. As soon as I started moving around, the CD would seek like crazy. I can only guess it loaded data on the fly off the CD.
But here's the fun part: the game never missed a beat. It ran flawlessly at a clean 50 fps. (That's the TV refresh rate here in Europe.)
That's just the kind of thing that you can do with good hardware and software design.
On the hardware side, the whole system didn't crawl as soon as you access the CD, as is pretty much the norm on PCs. Loading and running the game just happened at the same time with no slowdown.
And on the software side, it tells me that they not only coded the game to be able to do that, but most likely also took the time to optimize the placement of the files in the resources, to minimize seek times. That's another thing that just doesn't seem to happen on the PC.
Giving the XBox a standard hard drive just allowed the exact same kind of crap. Throwing some files together haphazardly, and relying on the HDD to sort out the performance problem. I.e., what the HDD really brought you there probably isn't the faster load on 2nd try, but the dog slow load on the first try.
And how much can you cache anyway? You don't want a 5 GB game cached to a 10 GB HDD, because you only have enough place for two of them then, and that doesn't even leave any space for saved games. So sooner or later (e.g., when playing a bunch of maps online in random order), you'll have to reload one from DVD anyway. Welcome back to the slow moving blue bar.
Yes, in that history does show that once someone doesn't care (any more) about what happens to them (e.g., because they're going to die anyway), there's nothing you can do to keep them in line. Most you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., lock them away in a prison or kill them.
The same applies to games, and I wish more designers did learn that from history. (It would have prevented the UO fuckup, for a start.) Once someone doesn't give a damn about what happens to their character, nothing you can possibly do to their character will deter them. In-character justice just doesn't work on them. All you can do is take them out of the game: e.g., ban.
No, in that the setting is a bit different. We're not talking a case of "waah, I'm gonna die! The world is so cruel! I'm gonna have my revenge against this cruel world!" We're most likely talking about people who never gave a damn about their character, and much less about the minor bother of having to respawn. We're talking people who most likely just saw it as a case of "awesome! now I can kill newbies with this!"
There's a whole category of people who pays that monthly fee purely to annoy, troll, and cause as much distress as possible. Their supreme achievement is managing to drive someone completely off the game. I.e., griefers.
They also don't like taking risks, and their favourite kind of target is one which can't even possibly defend at all. E.g., one who's 20 levels lower and preferrably idle. And Blizzard just gave them the equivalent of nuke which does just that: run up to a bunch of newbies, and they're dead with no chance to defend. Far from making them desperate or depressed or anything even remotely similar to RL plagues, it probably just made their day.
It's not even something new. Bartle described that very same category back in the days of MUDs.
So, hey, there's an idea for designers: if learning from history is too much of a bother, at least learn from what was already discovered in other games. MUDs ran into most of the same problems ages ago.
Disclaimer: I'm actually a pretty satisfied XBox owner and, since we're in a Nintendo thread, I'm not a Nintendo fan. In fact Nintendo fans tend to mod me -1 Troll as soon as I even mention Nintendo. (I will however mention the Dreamcast, and I was a Sega fanboy all right, so I might still be a bit biased.)
Still, I must say I like my consoles small and lightweight.
I remember my Dreamcast (told you I'd mention it), because that's a console I used to haul around all the time. Small, lightweight and not in a thin fragile way either. I could stuff it, a controller and one or two games in a shoulder bag. (And not a huge one, either. I used to jokingly refer to it as my "purse".) If I travelled somewhere, I could just stuff it and a couple of games in the luggage, and not end up having to pull out half the clothes out either.
The XBox is just too big for that. Yes, I can carry 7 pounds, but I don't want to haul an extra 7 pounds with me on a trip. It also no longer fits in that bag any more. I'd have to get a bloody huge bag or a backpack to do that.
The XBox is ok as a stationary console that stays at home. Ok, maybe too loud for my taste (my main PC is a lot more silent by comparison), but at least I'm not complaining about weight or size when it just stays under the TV.
The Dreamcast however was transportable too. You couldn't play with it in the train, yes, but at least it could be hauled a hotel and used on the TV there in the evening. Even the PS2 is still OK, even if it's a bit larger. The Gamecube was even better in that aspect than them both. (Well, or it would have been if it actually had any games I'd wish to play. But if we're talking size and weight alone, I can only give a thumbs up to Nintendo there.) The XBox just isn't. Even omitting the fact that it has a hard drive and thus isn't quite shock-proof, I just don't feel like hauling an extra 7 pounds on a train or to the airport.
"Sounds like you're jealous of that other guy frankly. Anyone who goes on and on and on about how evil "consumerism" is would trade places in a second if they had the opportunity."
Heh. Jealous of him? Dude, I _pity_ him. I wish I could help him, but I'm not even sure how. Trade places? Why? I'm paid a lot more than I spend, I have all I need, and unlike him I have the time to enjoy it too. Why on Earth would I even consider trading places with some broken insecure slave like that?
Sound like you're just the kind that _has_ to convince himself that that everyone envies him, and that everyone else will be some pauper on "menial retirement savings" Truth is, if you're like that, you have my sincere pity.
Here's a hint for you: I'm actually only marginally less paid than that guy, but have about 4 times more free time to enjoy it. You're not talking to a 5 dollars an hour tech-support slave, or god knows what you've imagined that needs to envy a consumerism slave. You're talking to a highly paid senior developper contractor, currently passing for a J2EE expert.
That's another funny thing about it: while he was busy doing 12 hour days to impress his boss, I've been investing a tiny fraction of that extra free time in learning some markettable skills. It's not just that it got me a comparable salary and a far nicer workplace so far. It's also that between actually having those skills and the savings to bridge even extended periods of time, I don't need to be half as insecure about the job as he is.
Between all that financial black hole (if he ever ends up out of job, those monthly payments alone will _bury_ him, and he knows it) and not having learned anything new in 5 years straight, the guy is pretty damn insecure. He just _has_ to put out with any crap, work even weekends if needed to meet a ridiculous deadline, and brown-nose like there's no tomorrow. Because basically he has no way out of that trap.
Do you still think I'd trade places with that? I like to think you can't be _that_ stupid.
"You only live once... what are YOU waiting for?"
Yes, precisely _because_ I only live once, I'd rather live the way _I_ want, than being a pathetic slave to "keeping up with the Joneses." I'd rather have _fun_. Do the things _I_ want to do, and have the _time_ to do them. When I spend my money, it'll be for the things that _I_ fancy, for _my_ own pleasure, not to show off to the Joneses. Fuck the Joneses. I don't care about them. I care about myself.
That's all. It's really that simple.
"I'd rather live my life when I still can than mope around being a stick in the mud for 40 years,"
Bingo. Why don't you take your advice and do just that: live your life instead of wasting it between a crap job and a race to get deeper in debt?
"retire on my menial retirement savings I scraped together and then be a pain in the ass for my kids since I'm too old to have any fun anymore."
My "menial retirement savings" will actually be higher than his, by the looks of it so far, since he hasn't actually saved anything except for the bare minimum required by the social security for a pension. He'll have that pension, and that's it.
"Everyone cuts the schedule. If they didn't reduce the schedule from 8 to 6 days then they wouldn't be "productive". Get over yourself and learn to pad everything by the necessary 25% to 30% in time so that when they cut it out it's still attainable. But make sure it looks like a struggle doing it. If you get on schedule without massive OT then they cut goes from 25% to 35% to 45% and so on. One company I worked at they had a 75% fluff to every number just to survive all the management cuts that will come along during the budget reviews."
No, not everyone. Only PHBs act like that. If the company you work for has to do all that charade, and you _still_ end up with massive overtime, you've just told me you have a complete idiot for a boss. And let me get back to one particular management idiocy there:
"If they didn't reduce the schedule from 8 to 6 days then they wouldn't be "productive"."
No. Measuring productivity like that has got to count as not just clueless, downright surrelistic lack of clue. And let me give you just one reason why.
In this job everything can be done in 1001 ways, and about 900 of them are bad shortcuts. They involve write-only code, lack of testing, and generally just hoping that the quickest and dirtiest and most unmaintainable hack will just work on the first try. If you cut someone's time by 25% you've just told them to take such a bad shortcut.
The result isn't just bad unmaintainable code (which _will_ bite you in the ass when you want to make a v2.0), and not only just buggy, but it might blow the deadline even worse. Debugging bad code takes a lot longer, and debugging (in one form or another) is what you do some 90% of the time. A shortcut that's nearly impossible to debug, and nearly impossible to change into something else (e.g., when debugging says that your very choice of algorithm was wrong) will likely take longer to be ready.
Or it may never be ready. Someone I know is still stuck in a project that should have been finished in the last quarter of _2002_. But yeah, they were always under pressure, so they skipped testing almost completely until the end of 2004, they always fixed bugs via the quickest hack that can sorta work, never had time to figure out a _consistent_ way to implement that spec, or to get a good spec out of the client for that matter, and so on.
Having to add fluff to justify the deadline wrangling game, again, adds complexity and adds places where bad shortcuts will bite you in the ass.
So that kind of approach "productivity" just means making a bad product.
A product's architecture and the allocated time should involve understanding the pros and cons of each approach. That's what design is all about: making an informed choice, and knowing the price you pay for that choice. (And there will _always_ be a price to pay. In some cases it will just be much smaller than the gains.) Replacing it with a sad game in which management pats just themselves on the back for imposing an arbitrary 25% to 75% without even asking what's the effect, is pretty much _the_ nemesis of any kind of good design.
The fact that he does seem to understand already is that a bad job isn't worth hanging onto. Seems very mature to me for a start.
I see people every day who just can't get it that for _you_ the first and only priority is... _you_, and of course your family if you have one. The job or wage are just a means to an end, but no more. The question is what good does it do for _you_, not what you can do to fit in a bad job at all cost. If a job or a whole industry is actually making you unhappier, then it's time to look for a better job and maybe switch to another industry altogether.
Success isn't measured in how well you fit a stereotype and how much shit you're capable of taking for it. The only real success is the kind that improves your quality of life. And if taking job A instead of job B actually lowers it, maybe taking job A isn't really a "success".
Judging a job _only_ by the money ("I personally believe the time to leave that first tech job is when you can find another job that pays significantly more") is IMHO a case of literally not seeing the forest for the trees.
Money is a means, not an end. You can't eat money, you can't get much entertainment out of just looking at a bunch of 100$ bills, etc. The question is what you can do with them to improve your life quality, not the number alone, like some screwed-up game score.
And before you lash back with "well, duh, with more money you can buy more stuff and be happier", no, that's still not getting it.
Yeah, you can buy a bigger plasma TV or some high-end stereo or whatever, but if you end up in a job where an asshole demands your presence there 14 hours a day, and occasionally that you bring a sleeping bag and don't leave until he sees some program ready (yes, I've actually seen such an asshole)... you won't actually have the _time_ to actually _use_ those. You'll just have time to eat and flop into bed.
Additionally, let's talk about happiness on the whole. Even if money could buy some happiness, it's not a linear scale. Twice the money doesn't make you twice as happy. So you gain, what? Maybe 5% extra happiness in those 4-5 hours at home. If the price to pay is anywhere between 8 and 14 hours of pure hell at work, I'd say on the average you're actually worse off.
Guarding against the future? Hah. I'll tell you what's more likely to happen, because I personally know people who chose to work for an asshole for a lot more pay. You know how much they've saved for the future? Well, one was telling me at the end of last week that he's some $2000 in debt... right after salary day. (And that's not counting the debts for his car, the house, etc.)
Welcome to the deathtrap of consumerism. See, most people who try too hard to believe that success is measured in money alone, and that more money can literally buy happiness... end up literally trying to buy it. Or failing that, trying to convince themselves that theirs is the right way. ("Hey, look how much stuff I can buy with that money! Of course it's worth it! Why, that's what success is all about!")
The guy I was mentioning above, we're good friends, so I hear about it each time he gets a raise or a promotion. Also when he buys new stuff. Guess what? Each raise was followed by an even bigger increase in how much he spends. Each time he'll just get a bigger car, a bigger computer, then military-grade IR goggles for when he goes fishing, then now a bigger house in a whole other (more fashionable) town. (Just in case those 12 hours a day at the office weren't enough, now he'll also spend an extra 2 hours commuting.)
Those in turn just dig the trap deeper. Now with all those monthly payments and being in debt he _has_ to keep at it.
So what did he _really_ get out of it? Well, from where I stand, it looks like he's got $2000 debt, plus the loans for the car and house, and some 12 hours a day of high stress. Now with the extra commuting, he only gets to see his infant son briefly before going to sleep, and on weekends. Yeah, way to go.
My advice? Forget it. I've saved a lot more on a lesser wage. Not falling into the "money is everything, and consumerism is the way to show it off" trap tends to have that effect.
I've personally seen only one company before where the employees pulled a mass exodus like that, and let me tell you the boss was a _total_ asshole. He treated people like dirt. He just had to remind everyone that he's the boss and you're the peon, he pulled unreasonable demands like that everyone brings a sleeping bag and noone leaves until they're ready with some piece of software that the idiot fancied he wanted until tomorrow, he overrode any decision of those he delegated to do something, and berating was for him apparently like breathing.
It was one experience that made me feel a _lot_ better about my own employer at the time. I mean, geesh, whatever minor complaints I had, by comparison to that asshole... ooer, I was having a dream job.
And that's the thing that's IMHO necessary to really see an exodus like that.
Otherwise people leave, yes, but gradually. Just being in an useless project takes some time to sap your will to go on, and it takes different time for different people. People can go on for years just being comfortable in one place. And while there's a visible minority that just jumps from job to job for more pay with no regrets, a lot of us nerds prefer not taking a risk if we don't have to. A workplace that's not quite perfect can be preferrable to plunging into the unknows. So again, any turnaround for minor grievances and boredom will tend to be slow and gradual.
What we have here is basically a situation where everyone leaves as soon as the first one tells the others "hey guys, I got hired at Yahoo and guess what? They're hiring! Blow that joint and come over here." That tells me that they already wanted badly to leave, and probably just uncertainty kept them there.
The wake of a dot-com bust has left a lot of people just too affraid to leave even a bad job, and has given a lot of managers the idea that they can finally be the assholes they always wanted to be. And it even works for a while. But it just begs this kind of situation to happen: it only takes one "hey guys, this other company is hiring and they're not assholes" to just remove that barrier of fear, uncertainty and doubt keeping everyone in.
And much as I'd like to think that at least one manager has now learned a valuable lesson, he didn't. He'll blame it on Yahoo, he'll blame it on the employees, etc, and the go back to doing the same again.
Well, I still have my CoH account. Well, more like "again" than "still". I had went back in I4 to see what the new clothes are all about, and then after I5 to see the new powers. And yes, kudos to them for the character customization. Even more kudos for not being centered around PvP, while I'm at it.
Whether it's a more decent game than WoW, though... well, I suppose that's a matter of personal preferences. Personally... well, let's just say I see some reasons why far more people play WoW than CoH. Even without going into what I like and dislike about game balance and design, when I briefly tried it after I5, my screen would flash, flicker and the like, and movement seemed very jerky. It's also the only game I own which seems to run at 60Hz no matter what on a Nvidia card, and doesn't offer an in-game option to set it to a different refresh rate. So, if only for the sake of my eyes, there wasn't that much reason for me to stay there.
Still, to get back to the topic of buying clothes for the characters, I wouldn't have minded even more options in CoH too. Especially some weapon customization would have been very very nice.
That's what I find scary: the whole idea that we'd have to give 100 different modules their own port through the firewalls and let them cheerfully accept connections on our server and send data from our servers.
First of all, it would be a titanic amount of work to just review all the code and make sure it doesn't contain any back doors.
Second, ok, let's assume the code isn't malicious. What about buffer overflows? So now each time someone finds a gappin (security) hole in, say, libgoatse, they automatically know it works on all web sites that use libgoatse. You can even automatically scan for them, if it's a standardized way to ask for the source. I can see a blaster-style worm that just scans all ip addresses and just sends a malformed "send me the libgoatse sources" request to everyone.
I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting, but I wouldn't sleep easily at night knowing that there are some 100 modules in a dozen web apps that just talk freely to the outside world.
"So your idea of a revolutionary controller is a gamepad with enough buttons to play games from four other game systems? That's literally the stupidest thing I heard all week, and I hear lots of stupid things. Does that inspire confidence? If it does, I suggest you go and rethink your life."
You know, it was starting to look like I was actually getting an intelligent answer from a Nintendo fan, for a change. Or at least capable of following what's written there. And then the above comes. What's wrong with it?
A) Where did I write the stupidity you combat there? Nowhere. That's right. It's your own straw-man. And a very lame straw-man at that. It doesn't even try to look like even vaguely related to what I wrote. You just pull a completely unrelated stupidity out of the ass, that you can feel comfortable enough to attack.
B) It's back to acting like a bleating fanboy on a crusade against the heathens. No, dude, you need to rethink your life. If a stupid console -- _any_ console -- means that much to you that you need to take it personally, you're sad. Go out, meet people, get a life.
"So... There goes your argument."
Nope, there goes your sad straw-man.
"You know, you're the best writer of any trolls I've met."
And again, we're back to the good old mindless Nintendo fanboy on an offensive act. I was asked what I don't like about it. I wrote what. But you sad little fanboys just have to feel personally offended and trolled if anyone dares not like a console. If anyone dares not love a stupid controller or a game or anything even remotely related to Nintendo, it can't be that they genuinely don't like it, it _has_ to be some trolling, right? And you just _have_ to turn any such conversation in a lame shout-down-the-heathen act. You're officially sad. Grow up. Get a life.
While I don't like the idea of paying real money for in-game advantages, and in fact I could rant for hours about how it's wrong for a game to explicitly catter to the pay-to-cheat crowd... what's wrong with caring about what your character looks like?
I'm not Korean, but in WoW I wished my tailor character could dye clothes so they match. Just because I'm a munchkin doesn't mean I want to look like a clown. (And if I did, I'd want a _proper_ clown costume, with red nose, floppy shoes and all, not just a collection of mis-matched clothes.)
I know others who would have liked the same thing. And Gabe of Penny Arcade seems like a pretty hardcore gamer, yet he too recently complained on the site about having all those bonuses on a green hat, and how it doesn't fit his fire mage image.
Well, yes, that's in fact the whole point: you want it to be a fun experience. That includes such practical issues as its being comfortable and easy to use, for example.
Yep, even if it's a console. One of the things that keept getting mentioned by Nintendo fans about Mario 64 for example was that the controls were just right. One of the things criticized about the XBox was that the original controller was too big to be comfortable.
In games themselves, we've moved from joysticks to gamepads, because Nintendo's gamepad was more _practical_ (e.g., comfortable) than Atari's joysticks. And then we've moved to mice in FPS, because they were more _efficient_. Nintendo itself in the DS moved to a touch screen, among other things, because it was a more practical and efficient input for some games. (Trying to either draw or steer a FPS with a gamepad is a lot less fun.)
Other items also used for fun, e.g., your TV, also weren't entirely immune to efficiency and practicality issues. E.g., that's why they're all shipped with a remote control, have a digital tuner, memory, presets, auto-scan for channels, tele-text, etc.
So basically you can't really separate items like that. Even if something is supposed to be used for fun, you'll still want it to have a practical interface.
Well, we can discuss why I don't like the controller too, but all I wanted to say there was that it's a completely different issue from disliking innovation as a whole. So figured for a change I'd focus on one single idea instead of a hard-to-read mix of disparate issues.
But ok, here's why I don't like it:
1. It looks like it would be uncomfortable after a while.
Think lightguns, for example. They're great as a gimmick, but it's not the kind of thing you'd want to play with for hours. It's the kind of stuff you play for half an hour, or an hour, then plug in your regular controller and play something else. I know people who've played a FPS with a keyboard and mouse for 16 hours straight. I don't know anyone who can play a lightgun game for _half_ that time.
Being a weakling nerd has nothing to do with it, btw. Humans just weren't built for that. I've actually got a bodybuilder once to play a lightgun game. He too soon got sore muscles from holding his arm up.
So all things considered, I'd rather _not_ have to wave that thing around for hours to play a game.
Most of Nintendo's proposed accessories for this controller suffer from the same problem. E.g., take the racing wheel. A car's wheel also serves as something to rest your hands/arms on. Trying to just hold a loop in the air and steer with it would get very uncomfortable very fast.
2. Too few buttons for anything serious. Two buttons, A and B (the trigger included) just aren't enough for anything but the most over-simplified games. Even the GBA also has the shoulder triggers, by comparison.
E.g., let's take racing games. Let's say the trigger is the gas pedal, and "A" is the brake button. It just has no keys left for gear switching, hand-brake, or anything else. Reaching for the cross to do those things, not only is uncomfortable (and precludes stuff like changing gears _while_ braking), it just guarantees also moving the controller while you do that.
3. Lack of an obvious "centre" position, or of a way to reset it.
E.g., racing games again, as an easy example. (But the same would apply to a lot of other games, e.g., flight sims.) How do you know when it's centered? On a gamepad you can just let go of the stick, and it's automatically centered. I can actually think of one game where they didn't offer auto-centering: "Driving Emotion: Type S". (A Square game for the PS2, just so you don't think I'm picking only on Nintendo.) Review sites dubbed it "The real drunk driving simulator."
E.g., FPS. You can pick a mouse up and move it back to the centre, when you've pushed it too far to one side. Now imagine doing the same with such a gyroscope device instead of a mouse. How do you do that? So you want to circle-strafe around someone. You turn it to the right, right, right... then what? How far does your arm twist? How do you reset it without turning left?
Reserve a button for a "pick up the mouse" equivalent? Well, it only has two, so I'd rather not. Plus, there goes that intuitive use idea right out the window.
Or use it as a joystick instead, so you don't have to twist your arm? Well, we all knew how well joysticks worked in FPS.
4. Then there's the whole fact that it's been actually tried before. E.g., some of the Microsoft Sidewinder gamepads, yep, had just that: a motion sensor. If that worked as great for all sorts of games, as Nintendo claims, don't you think we'd have heard about it already? E.g., if a motion sensor was that great and intuitive for fps, don't you think by now you'd hear about whole clans of Sidewinder owners pwning everyone in sight?
Etc.
And yeah, yeah, it can be combined with other stuff to overcome those problems... basically bringing you back to square one. So you can stuff it into a normal Gamecube-like gamepad... getting a regular gamepad for your game. Or you can stick the analog stick part in it, nunchaku style... getting a regular gamepad split into two. Or you can stick it into a plastic loop... getting a racing wheel, if a very
I hope you do realize that you've just described about half the side-scrolling games from the 2D era, right?
"You try to find depth in something that shouldn't have any."
No offense, but that "shouldn't have any" is just your own judgment call, based on your own individual preferences, not some universal law of physics, nor God's commandment set in stone. If I like Genre A more than Genre B, honestly, who are you to tell me that a matter of personal taste is wrong, and that Genre A shouldn't even exist?
"Watch a movie. Read a book. These mediums WILL provide you with MUCH, MUCH more food for thought than a video game."
I do watch movies and read books too.
"Small question, would your ideal game be "press space button" - FMV - "press space button" - FMV ? Of course not. Or, I hope not."
The world isn't made only of extremes, you know. Between (A) that extreme you describe above, and (B) purely jumping around on colourful blocks with no story, Mario-style, there's a whole continuum of shades of grey. But if you need a point of reference in that continuum that I still don't consider silly, I can think of at least one game which was literally 75% cut-scenes and 25% actual game. I actually liked it.
"Background info : As a frenchman, I laugh at americans who fancy themselves as wine connoisseurs, and talk about "cheap ten-dollar bottles". We just drink the stuff, and a ten-euro bottle is something you bring when you're invited to a family dinner, ie, it's not shit. We don't find "fragrances of cherry", "hints of raspberry" in our wine. We look at the glass, the color is nice, it smells good, we drink. Here, the buffoons that could have been characterized in that wine taster movie about pinot noir (don't remember the name) are made fun of. Do you understand?"
Not sure even what your point is. I'm not an american, and I don't drink much alcohol, so I'm not going to feel insulted or anything.
If we're talking about americans, I'd tell you what I tell them too: don't get your education about other countries from movies. Just because some people act like pretentious snobs in a movie, doesn't mean a whole country is like that. I'm guessing the vast majority of americans too would laugh at anyone who takes that kind of connoisseur elitism too seriously. So maybe they're not that different from you, after all.
If we're still talking about games, and it's just a metaphor for that, I don't think anyone who's into story-driven games does it for any kind of elitism. We just like to watch a movie or be told a story, that's all. Just like you just drink the stuff, we just play the stuff. Just like you probably like some sorts of wines more than others, even without going into fancy elitism, e.g., might like sweet wine more than sour one or viceversa, so it is with games too. Some of us like kind A more than kind B. That's all.
Or maybe it just isn't more than some unrelated background info after all, and I'm just reading too much into it.
"Nintendo is doing the right thing with this move. If you think that the software is what matters, if the controller will have success if Revolution has titles that fully utilize it, Nintendo already own it."
I've taken the liberty of highlighting a word there. That's the whole crux of the problem. That little "if".
"How much will it cost? How much would your mother pay for hours of entertainment? A tip, that trip to Florida probably costed 5x more than a Revolution and its controller."
Again, it's begging the question if it will give her hours of entertainment, or just a sore arm after waving the thing around.
"nd that's what this controller can bring, fun while playing games to people who have never played a game! Just like you and me have played Air Guitar, having fantasies while moving your body without control, this controller allows your phisical to be an extension of your imagination.
There's no key placement to remember, no sequence, no joystick to control. Your movement is the control. Your motion is translated to whatever the game developer imaginated.
The possibilites are enormous! No longer we're stuck to up, down, left, right and 6 options. The controller allows new kinds of motion, of interaction with a virtual world.
The closer the software gets to your imagination, the better."
Now you're sounding like a broken marketting droid from the dot-com era.
No, the closer it gets to be intuitively controlled, the better. Thing is, however, (A) an intuitive controller, and (B) PR-stunt gadgets (badly) imitating reality or such fantasies... well, they're usuall exact opposites.
You may notice that the most effective and useful interfaces are those who _don't_.
E.g., the mouse is probably the most successful input device ever, but here's the thing: it's an abstract device. There is no RL equivalent of it, no "think of your airguitar fantasies!!" BS needed, it just works. Even without trying to mimmick natural movements or anything, anyone who's ever tried a mouse, needs only minimal instruction to use it. (I can tell you that I even got my computer-illiterate grandma to use one adequately well in less than a minute.) By comparison, the things that did try to imitate reality and human moves, like the touch screen or the power glove, failed miserably, because humans aren't built to hold an arm up for hours.
E.g., between the keyboard and handwriting recognition, it's the same issue: between writing something by hand (the thing that imitates reality and natural movements) and typing something on a keyboard, the keyboard is the faster and more comfortable option.
Etc.
And the same applies not only to input devices, btw. You may notice that we still use wheels on cars, not try to build mechanical legs. You may notice that our airplanes don't flap their wings like birds to. You may notice that boats have moved from oars (the solution that was inspired by flippers) to just using a propeller. Etc.
As I've said, imitating reality is that-a-way, building something efficient and useful is in the exact opposite direction.
So basically that's the thing: coming up with a PR stunt like this is _easy_, and it's easy to hype to hell and back. ("But it's natural!!!") Coming up with an innovation that's actually a better interface, that requires a lot more work, and a lot more imagination.