"Did you note that you don't need to give an EXACT answer to qualify as human? Saying just "Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue" would have allowed you to pass the Turing Test."
Ummm... dude, how often do you get that philosophical in an _IM_ message?
What I was doing there was a whole disertation about why the question was stupid. Even there, I only added that paragraph after previewing my initial reply and thinking some more about it. If I had directly hit "Submit", that whole philosophical disertation about background noise wouldn't even be there.
It's definitely _not_ the kind of disertation that just pops up in a quick IM conversation. I can honestly say that if that was over some IM, I'd have just answered some variant of "fuck me if I know."
"BTW, using images would put it out of the scope of the original form of the Test"
Well, as I've said in another answer, we're not talking about scientifically taking a turing test. The whole "how I failed the turing test" title is nothing more than a wisecrack, as far as I can tell. It's a just an annoyed guy who's been harrassed by random IM messages, and basically the whole article is just a convoluted way of saying "geeze, some of these people on AIM are so stupid and gullible."
Anyway, if I was trying to determine if a guy on the net was a bot, damn right I wouldn't stick to the formal definition of the Turing test. Shymuffin32 wasn't really doing that, either, he/she just had to assess if someone really is human. By whatever means. I'm pretty sure he/she wasn't handed some rules in advance.
So if I was to really assess if someone is human, I'd use any means available. Pictures, short flash movies, games, long texts off some news site (e.g., send them a link to a The Register article and see what they think about that), etc. In fact, I would use pictures _of_ news articles from newspapers.
E.g., there was a recent one with two nearly-identical articles about the N.O. flood, except one called getting food from destroyed shops "looting" and had a picture of a black guy, while the other called it "people finding food and water" and had a picture of two white people. See if he even detects the racism implied there.
"Convincing someone you're human might just be harder than one might think - at least a bit more trouble than just answering a few questions."
Only if that someone is utterly retarded and asks completely retarded questions that don't even have a simple answer. That's the problem there. It's a question so stupid that even I couldn't think of something better to answer there. It's not "what music do you like?" or something else which can get a clear, to-the-point answer. It's "why do you like music?"
Well, try to answer that yourself. Why do you like music? What would you answer there?
Because I sure as heck can't think of any good answer there, generic or not. Screw trying to anwer that in 1 minute on IM. I'm sitting here for the last half an hour thinking about it and still have no bloody idea. Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue, and probably 4 out of 5 pyschologists or musicians would have no idea either.
So how would I say that in a way that sounds non-generic? "Hell if I know. I've never thought about it"? Nah, you've just ruled a variant of that as too generic. "Well, why do YOU like it, then?" Nope, sounds like the kind of rephrasing the question back at you that an Eliza program would do.
The only non-generic answer that comes to my mind there is along the lines of "WTF of a retarded question is that? Were you born that stupid, or worked hard to get there?"
By contrast, if shymuffin32 actually had more than a braincell, it would be easy to ask some questions that can get simple, to-the-point answers. In fact, screw questions and answers and try to just have an intelligent conversation.
Want more conclusive? Mix some images in it, which would still throw any AI off the track completely. E.g., point him at a picture of someone holding a siberian cat and see if he comments about the size. (It's one bloody huge breed of cats.) Point him at a drawing of one of the giant guns on rails Germany was planning to build in WW2. See what he thinks about the size of that one. (Tends to get answers between "bloody freaking hell" and "do you think Freud might have something to do with it?") Etc.
Well, actually, his problem in the article is completely different. It's _not_ that he's met people who type worse than bots.
It's that a group of people were told that he's a bot, and nothing (correctly and articulately written) could shake their belief in that. One of them even calls him "worse than eliza" when he tries to argue that he's human.
Some people found a list of bots online, and, you know, that makes it the absolute truth. Everyone on it _has_ to be a bot, because the list says so.
Another group found a list of celebrities, and again, took it as absolute truth. They didn't know _who_ this guy is, _what_ is he supposedly famous for, etc. But OMG, he must be a celebrity because the list says so, and that makes it sooo cooool to talk to him.
Basically it's _not_ the "some people are so stupid they could pass for bots" problem. (Which by itself is very true, but it's not really what TFA is about.) The problem, if you will, is simply "some people are gullible idiots." That's all.
It does leave me with me a bunch of other philosophical and etical questions though. If it's this possible to convince people that John Average is a bot (and in fact, it didn't even involve more "convincing" than writing it on some random list on the internet), what _else_ could you convince them? That John Average is a convicted fellon? A spammer? A paedophile?
And mind you, in this case he got a chance to even try to talk back and plead his case. I can easily think of cases where you don't get that chance. E.g., when a prospective employer googles for your name, you might not even know why you didn't get the job. What completely unrelated Marvin did they find on some bogus list on the Internet, and what image did they build for themseleves out of disparate bits taken out of context?
That said, the problem you mention is very true too. I know I've met people online before, especially in online games, who substantially lowered the bar for a Turing test. It was definitely more fun to talk/play with the bots instead, and you could get more intelligent conversation out of the bots too. Admittedly, online games are a completely different category than IM and chat rooms, but still... It's scary, you know.
1. Both the Dreamcast and the PS2 support mice and keyboards for FPS or RTS. In fact, with the PS2 you can just take any USB keyboard or mouse, plug it in, and play. (The Dreamcast needed a special connector on its keyboard and mouse.)
2. The world isn't made only of RTS and FPS, and frankly for everything else I actually prefer an analog gamepad or joystick. Even on the PC.
E.g., have you tried playing a space combat or flight sim with a keyboard and mouse? I still remember trying to dogfight X-Wings and TIE-Fighters with the mouse. Oooer, now that was a _painful_ exercise. The _only_ game in that genre I can think of that was actually enjoyable to play with a mouse was Freelancer.
Or for a lot of RPGs, using a gamepad to control the character is actually easier and more natural.
E.g., I actually own both the PC and PS2 versions of Summoner, and I'll use it as an example because the interface was very different in the two versions. For the PC port they actually went through the trouble of making it resemble a typical PC game interface, where you mouse-click on the ground to move there, or on an item to interact with it.
You know what? I honestly preferred the gamepad version and wished that the PC version offered that as an option. Not only it was more comfortable, but some levels like sneaking around through the palace were actually easier with a gamepad.
"Sorry but look at Enter The Matrix and all the other unfinished buggy pieces of shit on consoles. Your wrong. If someone is going to release a crap game it's going to happen if they can patch it later or not regardless. Give Enter The Matrix some slack though they only had 3 days to go from Alpha to Final due to their tight schedule to tie in with the movie."
Ok, so Enter The Matrix would be the third then.
That makes it, what? 3 buggy console games, versus literally a hundred more Dreamcast, Playstation and Playstation 2 games that I personally own and which run flawlessly.
By comparison, on PCs the ratio is exactly the other way around. I can think of maybe enough games to count on one hand's fingers that were reasonably finished as released, versus literally hundreds that were released with _major_ problems.
I'm sorry, the two situations aren't even comparable at all. They're not even in the same class.
We can talk for ever about how _theoretically_ Sony could shove buggy untested games out the door too, even if they can't be patched. In practice, it just hasn't happened yet. I'll take practice over theory there.
"To be honest the single player in Halo 2 wasn't as good as the original."
I'm not talking about "but gameplay isn't as good in the sequel" or "but the story wasn't too good" (and in Halo 2's case lacked an ending altogether) kind of defects, but outright bugs.
Yes, you can find both PC and console games where you don't like the gameplay, or where the story leaves you scratching your head and going "WTF???" (FF8 anyone?), or whatever. Yes, there are well designed games and badly designed ego-trips and tech-demos trying to masquerade as games on both.
I'm talking strictly about the quality of the implementation. A PC game can have the best story and design in the world, and still crash and be a buggy nightmare to play.
I'll even give you an example of a PC game I actually _loved_: Fallout 2. I loved the story, I loved the setting, I loved the game system, etc. Yet the implementation was an awfully buggy piece of crap that ruined my enjoyment all the time.
I've personally ran into more bugs that I care to list, and had to reload or do perverse tricks all the time to avoid the disappearing car bug alone. And then came the patch which made all the old saved games unusable.
And having written a walkthrough for it, I've had emails from people who got stuck in even more places and ways. One poor guy had somehow managed to finish the Temple Of Trials (newbie area) without getting the Vault 13 suit or the PIP. So basically he couldn't access the quest list, couldn't rest, couldn't skip some time in places where he needed to wait until morning/evening/whatever, etc. Other people got bitten by even worse bugs and just couldn't finish the game any more. Etc.
And it illustrates another problem about the PC "ship it now, patch it later" model: more often than not, it's never fully patched. After the last patch, the game was still a buggy barely-playable mess.
That's not even an isolated case, it's the typical story of buggy PC games. The advocates might preach some wonderland where only minor bugs exist, and some patch will swiftly come and fix them all. In practice most games are _still_ buggy long after the devs and publishers gave up on patching them. In some cases you're stuck with some patch that actually makes it _worse_. (E.g., the "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" whose lone patch broke the party AI, and made them all ignore your orders.)
Well, I _am_ a programmer, and I did program long enough in assembler to have some idea of the problems of porting stuff to completely different architectures like the Cell. Though I should also add that it's been some 7 years since I've had anything to do with programming _games_, so better take this stuff with a lot of salt.
Adding a proprietary content-delivery system does _nothing_ to make programming the Cell any easier. If you have trouble programming to a certain architecture, that's that. It doesn't matter if you ship your finished product via Steam, Fileplanet, DVD's, whatever. You have to get it to run on that architecture _before_ you have anything to ship. If you can't port it to the Cell to start with, you won't _have_ anything to ship, with or without Steam.
So taken strictly as a platform for delivering _finished_ content, it's like saying "But Intel could make much lower-power Pentium 4 CPUs if they sold it on eBay." That bogus.
But I think I can actually see what they're after. Don't think distribution, think the ability to patch. That's what they'd like on their console ports.
The _only_ thing such an auto-updater offers is the ability to publish some buggy unfinished untested POS and try to patch it later. Which, sorry, isn't what console gaming is all about.
So there you go. All his whining about how he'd like Steam and a HDD on every console is basically just saying, "but we just can't be arsed to have some proper QA, we just can't get it right for a console release, and we'd _really_ love to release it anyway and patch it later via Steam."
I.e., I don't think it's necessarily crocodile tears, but the whining and bitching of someone who's just locked in the "shove it out the door now, patch it later" metality of the PC gaming scene. Yeah, I can see how he'd feel more comfortable being able to pull the same crap on consoles. But as a consumer it isn't something I want to put up with.
"But what's your response to new content? What's going to happen to things like free levels and, for example, the free ninja gaiden update that was made available."
Sega managed to run new levels off a memory card just fine, for example in the Dreamcast version of Skies Or Arcadia.
"And honestly, what's wrong with FIXING something? I see no problem with updates."
I _do_ see a problem with shoving a broken, disfunctional product out the door. I very much like it that when I buy a game, it actually works. I _do_ see a problem with paying to be a beta-tester for EA's, Vivendi's, etc, buggy unfinished crap.
And especially I _do_ see a problem with patches that screw up my saved games directly (I can thing of a dozen games, starting with Fallout 2, where applying the patch forced me to restart the whole damn game from the start), or indirectly (yay, for some RPG patches where they randomly altered the game balance and made all my character's skills useless, _and_ made a bunch enemies immune to physical damage... when I'm playing a fighter. What am I supposed to use there? Bad language? Time to start a new character again.)
That's what I liked about console games so far: when I buy a game it's a _finished_ product. I can think of only exactly _two_ console games that ever needed a patch, out of the literally _hundreds_ I own. (And out of those two, one had a free replacement from the publisher, and the other "only" had multiplayer exploits, but was otherwise rock-solid and enjoyable as a single-player game.) The rest just worked.
That's it. When I buy a console game, I _know_ it will work. From day one. I can randomly pick any game off the PS2 aisle, take it home, pop it in, and _know_ that it'll never crash, never fall into the void, and generally just work.
You know why? Because the publisher knows it can't be patched, so they'll test the _hell_ out of it before release. And if they're running out of time or budget, they'll cancel a game, but never shove an unfinished piece of crap out the door.
Yes, no software is perfect, but there's a _massive_ difference between having some minor exploit in an obscure sidequest (like being able to claim your reward twice) in a console game, and the utterly broken stuff that gets shipped on the PC on account that it can be patched later.
That's what's wrong with "FIXING something" in the PC world. It's something that sounds _great_ in theory, but in practice it's what caused the deluge of unfinished buggy _crap_ shoved out the door untested. It just caused the "ah, it shows the starting menu, let's ship it. We can patch it later" mentality to run rampant.
It caused such crap as, say, the German version of Victoria which literally could only show the startup menu as released. _Literally_. If you actually tried starting a campaign, the game threw a script _syntax_ error. Yes, a _syntax_ error. Not something even remotely blamable on drivers or hardware. It had a typo in the scripts and couldn't run on _any_ hardware.
I was a fan of the Dreamcast myself, but its problems were deeper than that. In addition to what you've said, I'd add:
1. Yes, it eventually had some 250 games, but entire genres were missing for the first, what? Two years? E.g., being an RPG fan myself, I had to grudgingly admit to fellow RPG gamers "uh, yeah, well, if you want RPGs, you should probably get a PSX instead." (Evolution and Evolution 2 were cutesy hack-and-slashes, but no substitute for the real Japanese RPGs.)
And while we're at it, although I was one of the few people that actually enjoyed Sega GT, it was _not_ a substitute for Gran Turismo. Lacking any kind of TCS or ABS, the higher powered cars drove like on ice, ffs. I've actually tried to get people hooked on it, and invariably every single Gran Turismo fan was like "Gah, this is crap. As soon as I even touch the controller, the car goes like on ice."
2. The piracy argument is, sorry to say, bogus. Sega was actually selling more games per console sold than Sony did. We Dreamcast owners actually bought a lot of games each. That's why they turned to a pure game developper at the end. Their problem was not enough consoles sold, not piracy.
3. The GD-ROM did however bite Sega in the ass, but not because of piracy. The GD-ROM _sucked_ at launch, and the pressing of GDs themselves was very immature and poor quality. A lot of the games at launch came on unbalanced or too thick GDs, that the console had trouble reading. Having to turn the console upside down to have it read your GD was quite a common thread at launch.
And even later models, I can tell you first hand that the faintest fingerprint made the game no longer load. I've had games crash on me in the middle of it, not because the software was deffective, but because a tiny spec of dust made it no longer able to read a sector.
I don't know about you, but I can easily see how that kind of thing would turn a lot of buyers off.
4. Another major problem was that Sega basically didn't even try advertising. By the end they just cut the prices on a console already sold at a major loss, which helped sales, but depleted Sega's funds faster than they could afford to.
You know, no offense, I find the "buy Nintendo because it's priced reasonably" argument to be as bogus as "buy an XBox because it has a GF3" in it. We're not talking a lawnmower or a washing machine or whatever else that is fully self-contained and does something all by itself. We're talking a game console, which has one single use: to play games.
So here's a crazy idea: I'll buy a console for what games it has, not for the theoretical gigapixels per second (I don't play directly with the shader pipelines, I play with games that use those), nor because it's the cheapest (even something that costs only $100 is still just a wasted $100 if it doesn't also have games that interest me.)
_If_ the Revolution will have any games that interest me, sure, I'll buy one. But if not, not.
_If_ Sony's consoles again are the ones with 90% of the story driven RPGs, I'll go buy a Sony console again.
So far, I don't even like Nintendo's kinds of games, which were really the only ones that were exclusive to the N64 or GCN. Now I won't call them "bad" games or "kiddie" games, but they're just not in the genres I like. I know others like them. More power to them as far as I'm concerned. But I don't.
So unless Nintendo hires a new designer sometime soon, _I_ just can't see myself buying a Revolution, no matter at what price. On the other, hand, being a very happy and entertained owner of both the Playstation and PS2, I can easily see myself biting the bullet and forking over $500 for a PS3.
But again, I'll wait and see what games are available for them, and _then_ decide whether I buy either.
In other words, a select few game companies are really trolling for attention. They actually _like_ to generate a good scandal, because of the free publicity. You can get hours and hours and all TV channels, without paying a cent.
E.g., see the recent scandal about shooting cops in games, and how every channel conveniently had side-by-side screenshots and photos of dead police officer. Long before the game was even released. Sorry, that kind of thing almost screams "PR stunt".
That's what PR companies do: get something published as if it was news, rather than a paid ad. They won't run an ad campaign, say, telling you to buy a new suit, they conveninently slip some article or pseudo-interview to 1000 newspapers about how, you know, suits are way cool again and all self-respecting managers demand one. (That's an actual PR campaign revealed, that was linked to by Slashdot, btw.)
On the whole of the media, currently about 50% of articles are straight PR releases. Of course, that's an average on the whole. Some newspapers/stations have less, some have more. But on the whole, if you picked a random newspaper and a random article, chances are it would be a pseudo-article doctored to promote some point of view or product. I just have to wonder how many of those gaming scandals are among those.
Even when it's not directly _creating_ the scandal via a PR release, a lot of ads are basically just immature trolling. They single-out and highlight some aspect (violence, sex, bad language, whatever) of a game that's pretty much supposed to shock/disgust/whatever some people, and appeal to a few immature "rebels" in the process.
A lot of those ads actually deliberately create a false image of the game, in that quest to be shocking or match some clueless marketroids target demographic. In a lot of cases, seeing some of those ads it's not even hard to see why non-gamers are left with an impression that gaming is for losers or insane (violent/sex-crazed/etc) people or whatnot.
And then we act surprised when a lot of people actually _are_ reacting in the predictable way. Well, what did anyone expect?
So basically I'll condemn the crusaders more wholeheartedly, when the game companies themselves start acting more mature. I'll be more convinced it's the media picking on innocent little them, when they won't go to hell and back to riles the media.
" Except that Diablo is nothing more than a pretty roguelike. Gameplay from 10-15 years earlier!"
Yes, Blizzard rarely comes with _new_ gameplay, but when they make a clone it's high quality. Diablo and Diablo 2 had a:
- very good interface (it may seem like "bah, it's easy, you just click-click-click", but having played two dozen clones, it seems to be anything BUT easy. E.g., fuckups that required clicking _exactly_ at the feet of a quickly moving enemy, and ended up running around the enemy instead of attacking him, were the norm, not the exception.)
- very easy learning curve
- casual-gamer-friendly difficulty curve (half the games released are _still_ a nightmare for the non-l33t of us who just want a relaxing game in the evening, not an exercise in "bang! you're dead!" at every turn. Most importantly, it did _not_ assume that I'd spend hours running in circles for xp and loot to be able to survive the next level. By the time you finished one level, you'd actually be ready for the next one.)
- good balance (having played each of the 3 classes in Diablo, I can honestly say that neither of them had a substantially harder time than the others)
- very few pointless wastes of time (most of the time I was doing something, not running like an idiot between two cities to do some postal quest, nor combing every inch of a mountain to find some door, like in Morrowind.)
Etc. So while it might not have been _new_ gameplay, it nevertheless was _good_ gameplay.
Add to that the fact that, like all Blizzard releases, it had extremely few bugs. Blizzard did release some patches for minor issues, but mostly to fine-tune the balance in multiplayer. But I don't remember Diablo or Diablo 2 ever crashing to desktop, having my character fall into the void, or any of the other crap that was the norm in PC games.
So basically, yes, I think he does have a point: quality sells. It might be every publisher's wet dream that only marketting matters, and any crap shoved out the door sells just the same, but it's a pipe-dream. Quality always outsold crap, and Blizzard's games are among the prime examples of that.
It's not a MMO, but try Harvest Moon. It's just that. A game about planting cabbage in the garden, milking your cow(s), shearing your sheep, and brushing your pony.
Also, most MMOs have some crafting skills to make money. (And at least one, "A Tale In The Desert", is _all_ about crafting.) Most of my money in EQ 2 or WoW so far comes from gathering resources (e.g., digging for ore), crafting, and selling both finished products and raw materials I don't need. E.g., if you dug some rare bronze ore (yeah, I know, bronze is actually an alloy, but tell that to Sony;) in the newbie woods in EQ2, it sells for anything between 2 and 3 gold real quick.
"I don't completely agree with this, at least about the harmlessness of timewasters like fishing and gaming. Sometimes those timewasters get in the way of the real work (i.e. playing WoW instead of doing homework) and that is bad, and parents need to make sure their children are on the right track."
You are, of course, right there. But as you've said, it applies to all the timewastes, not just gaming. (E.g., I preferred playing with the cat instead of doing homework, if I had half a choice.) And, yeah, that's what parents are for.
I'm just saying that, to some extent, we all actually _need_ such time wastes. I'm not saying that it's good to end up doing those instead of going to work, or doing homework, or whatever. But at some point, after work, after homework, after the household chores, you're left with some hours that you have to fill somehow. And gaming isn't some biblical plague, it's just one of the many many things that people can use to that end. That's all I'm saying.
"Moreover, at least if you're tinkering with your car you learn more about the car and can possibly fix problems that you'd usually have a mechanic do."
I'll grant that, for a select few (very few) number of hobbies. Most don't fall in that category, though.
A lot of the skills waved around as "but it's a RL skill" or "but it's a money-making skill" are rarely actually used to make money. E.g., mom is quick to point out that she made 40 Euro with her digital photos, but tends to skip over the thousands invested in the same hobby. Between the camera (and it's a top end one), lenses, a 1000 Euro MVA TFT monitor (ok, so I paid for that one), a high end PC to run Photoshop on, and the Photoshop license itself, it was if anything a money-sink skill so far.
And even for fixing cars or computers,
1. Well, let's do some maths. Let's say you saved a whole 100$ per month by fixing your car. (Most people don't get that high, but let's be generous.) Well, it's sorta like this: if you spend more than 20 hours a month on your car, that puts you at less than 5$ per hour, "gained" from that skill. (And I know people who practically live in the garage.)
If you also include all the tools, spare parts, etc, involved, even less.
I.e., if you actually did that for the money, I'd have to say that it's a piss-poor way to achieve that. You could get a second job that pays _much_ better than that, pay a mechanic for the repairs, and still end up better off.
So I'm still thinking it's mostly entertainment, rather than "money-making/money-saving skill". Maybe a less expensive entertainment than others, but still, it's mostly something to keep yourself busy with.
2. You probably realize that we're past the point where that's actually _needed_. The whole mentality that it's that important to do something directly productive, is the residue of a culture based on an economy of scarcity.
For millenia, the economy was such that a lot of people actually starved to death. Taking one hobby instead of another could hit you in the bare necessities, and even make an actual difference for survival. E.g., going fishing instead of going to the pub, made an actual difference in feeding your family. In one of the cases even if you didn't starve over the winter, you might still be malnourished enough to be felled by the first disease. E.g., fixing your own wagon instead of paying someone to do it, same deal: those money came out of the funds you had for buying bare necessities.
Nowadays, we're living in a fundamentally different kind of economy. We're at the point where even "poverty" is a metric that's about keeping up with the Joneses, rather than being the point where you actually starve.
I'm willing to bet that most of your money is going not on bare necessities like food and the most minimal shelter. It's going on convenience stuff like getting a bigger TV or a bigger car, or outright conspicuous-consumption luxuries.
Basically where I'm getting is that even if you save
The current MMO rat race and grind to keep up sucks. The point wasn't just to rant about it. The point is: that's why even most of us actually playing MMOs wouldn't really be bothered by such a law. You asked why. Well, that's why. Now you know.
Yes, it's heavy-handed and all, but noone's violating any of your human rights. Your right to spend 16 hours a day in WoW isn't in the constitution.
Even by chinese law standards, it's a pretty mild one. In fact, it's not even a "law" as such, it's just an aggreement that the government bullied the publishers into signing. (And probably didn't even need to bully them too hard. It's something that actually works to their advantage.) It doesn't say that the secret police will come to your house and give you 20 to life in maximum security prisons, if you play too much WoW. It just says that after 3 hours your character's stats will start decaying.
How would such an oppressive law affect me? Well, not at all. Even as an addicted gamer, I'd go play some offline stuff, or chat on IRC/ICQ/whatever, or spend some time on my clan's/guild's/whatever board, or various other stuff. Heck, you don't even have to log out of that MMO: you can craft or hang around and chat to your guild mates and not be bothered about those decreased stats.
Heck, even those publishers have plenty of room to basically circumvent it, if they wanted to. They can just give you something to do that fits those decreased stats. E.g., treat it as a level drop, and allow you to get xp off lower level NPCs and quests.
The human brains just isn't supposed to sit idle. You can't just sit there with an empty mind, or you'd go insane with boredom.
So you start thinking about stuff. Some good, some bad. Invariably some bad. Humans just aren't built to be happy all the time. I'm talking biologically: your mood is, basically, like on a spring or rubberband that tends to bring it back to the centre.
So if you just sit there bored, you'll start thinking of various stuff, a lot of it bad stuff. Boredom itself being a bad stimulus, also doesn't help there.
Basically that's IMHO what gaming "saves" you from, or allows you to "escape" from. It's not that any of us have such an awful life we need to run away from. All that we're "escaping" from is merely the alternative of sitting there bored and remembering all the bad parts of our lives.
Again, not "bad parts" as in "boo hoo, I'm a failure and my life is in complete shambles", but rather mundane every-day stuff, not much different from anyone elses occasional stressful incidents. Just bad as in, well, you'd rather do something entertaining than sit there and think about that crap out of sheer boredom.
There are games which you can play on your reflexes alone. E.g., when I moved between UT to Quake 3 and then back to UT, I didn't lose my own reflexes in the process. You can be someone who just bought bought the game, and compete successfully with people who've played it for a year.
MMOs basically have this system where your character's "power" is simply a measure of how much time you've dumped into it. A character that's been played for 1000 hours is inherently more powerful than a character who's been played for 10 hours.
E.g., back when I've played COH, by the time I've reached level 35, some people I used to group with were just hitting level 20, while others were already level 50. E.g., in COH, two co-workers which started at the same time are respectively level 20 and 50. E.g., in WoW I had fun grouping with someone, but then she was level 30+ by the time I was level 15, on account of being a housewife with nothing better to do all day long.
I'm not even getting into the PvP aspect, but you just go out of sync with even people you liked cooperating with. You're not supposed to even be in the same area any more, because what's a "grey" enemy to one and gives no xp any more, is "red" for someone else and means instant one-hit death.
It's a race that only the most addicted, those who play 16 hours a day, can really keep up with. And it's turning off everyone else.
It's not that happy a situation for the game companies, either, because they have to provide enough content for the addicts. They have to have enough in that world so the 16-hour-a-day gamers don't plough through it all in a month and start whining that there's nothing left to do.
It's not even just the race itself, it's that when you have 50 levels and people playing 16 hours a day, you _have_ to stretch it all with those in mind. When you want those 50 levels to last for, oh, say at least 2 months for those, they'll take some 16 months for someone who only plays 2 hours a day. In the final levels they'll be faced with the discouraging task of needing another 2-3 weeks for the next level. Which feels very much like you stopped getting any rewards any more.
So here's a gamer's point of view. Could I live with a 3 hours a day per character time limit? Well, yes, in fact. It would keep the group within a more reasonable level range in the long run.
Also consider that what the Chinese did is just the heavy-handed typically-totalitarian version of what's already being done about it in the West. E.g., World Of Warcraft's "rested" bonus doesn't halve your stats, but halves your xp if you play more than 1-2 hours a day. People actually liked that kind of thing, judging by WoW's runaway popularity.
So while I don't support heavy-handed government intervention, I would like to see more done about the current MMO setup.
It doesn't even have to involve preventing people from playing. It can just as well be a re-thinking of how levels work.
Planetside, for example, did a wonderful job there: more levels give you more flexibility in your choice of equipment, but don't move you in a whole other range of power. It is certainly possible to either compete or cooperate with a level 25 (the max level there) when you're level 1. You can actually be a valuable member of that group, not just a useless newbie tagging along for the xp.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H.L. Mencken
What I'm trying to say is that usually when you feel a need to reach for the usual universal nerd explanations like "because they're all idiots" or "because they all have some major mental problem", that ought to be your clue that you're talking out the ass and most likely haven't even _begun_ to understand what's really going on.
It's getting kinda tiresome to read the same rehashed pseudo-psychological BS, like (rephrased for brevity sake):
- "but you only play a muscled barbarian because you're ashamed/insecure/affraid of your body"
I'll call bullshit on that. I'm a munchkin, I play whatever has the best bonuses for my intended class. Yes, I play a Barbarian as my monk, but I also play a Dwarf as my paladin, a nerdy Erudite as my mage, and a thoroughly effeminate High Elf as my priest. I'd play a fat pimple-faced couch-potato, if that gave me better bonuses.
And, you know, there are games where your appearance doesn't give you any bonuses. E.g., City Of Heroes. Virtually all my characters there are simply variants of a nerd in jeans, a sweater or t-shirt, glasses and (for males) an unkempt beard. One of them even wears a suit and tie, just for gag's sake. But generally, none are anything I couldn't look like IRL with _very_ minimal effort. (E.g., going to the shop and actually buying a suit like that.)
- "buy you're in online games only because noone knows you there, and can't give you a reality check."
Well how's this for a reality check: probably the majority of people play online with some RL friends or at least aquaintances. E.g., every co-worker that plays EQ2 are members of the same guild and we all know who's behind which character. E.g., that that barbarian female with big breasts is a (male) coleague I see every day at work. He even jokes about us letting him win the "lottery" for loot because he's a woman.
And generally, I've been on MUDs, I've been on MMOs, I've been in FPS clans, and before all that I was on FidoNet. Knowing each other and/or occasionally meeting for a pint at the pub is rather the expected norm, not the rare exception.
- "but you prefer online communication because you're affraid of dealing with people in person."
Nope, I just prefer talking to people I share some interests with. There used to be a time when I'd take any boring (for me) topic, like the weather or football, simply because that was what was available in the immediate geographic proximity. The Internet, and FidoNet before it, allow me to skip those boring talks, and find a pool of people whose topics I'm actually interested in.
E.g., if I'd rather talk about siberian cats or ancient Egyptian history than about the neighbour's kids, or the other neighbour's football obsession, on the Internet I can immediately find enough people interested in the same thing. I can join a board, an IRC channel, a newsgroup, or whatever else dedicated to siberian cats or ancient egyptian history.
MMOs and generally online games are just such a "filter". There's a topic which you already know that people there will be interested in: that game itself. E.g., if I'm on EQ 2, chances are both me and the other guys/gals there are interested in it. That's a common interest to talk about.
And incidentally, it's not that different from the RL filters. E.g., if you go to a Metallica concert, you chances are most people there are interested in that genre. The Internet just enlarges the pool you can choose from.
The thing is, people simply need to do something with their time. You can't just sit and look at the walls.
That's one thing that needs to be understood first. In the 1600's, you needed to spend 16 hours on the fields to even have enough to eat, then one or more of the following, depending on gender: hack your own firewood, patch your own roof, cook, spin and weave, patch clothes, spend hours washing clothes by hand, make your own soap, etc.
There wasn't that much of a need for daily entertainment, since you didn't actually have any time left to fill in an average day.
Since the 1900's, and especially since the mid-1900's, however, less and less of that is actually needed. You buy your clothes, not spin, weave and tailor your own crude shirts. You don't spend hours scrubbing the clothes by hand, you just chuck them in the washing machine. Heck, you don't even really need to cook if you don't want to.
There is a gradient that's very perceptible. When you listen to someone's stories along the lines of "back in my day, we had to walk to school 4 miles through snow, and we only got 6 hours of sleep after feeding the cows and chicken", they're probably not exaggerating. They actually had to. But we don't.
This, however, leaves us with more free time that we just have to fill with something. That's one thing that all those "back in my day we'd milk the cows instead of sitting on our arses and watching TV" nostalgics just don't seem to understand. Yes, they had to milk the cows and do all sorts of other tasks. I don't. It would cost me more to actually have a cow in my flat, than the milk is worth. This leaves me with time to fill with _something_ or I'd go nuts.
Some people fill it with hours after hours of tinkering on their car, some people fish, some people spend it at the pub, some people waste hours and money making digital photos, etc. And some of us use computer games. That's all.
Yes, some of them are waved around as inherently better ways, or more socially acceptable ways, to spend your time. But guess what? They're all nevertheless just ways to keep yourself busy. Don't kid yourself that going out fishing or spending hours on your car gets you some l33t survival skills or saves you this huge heap of money or whatever. They're skills that have exactly the same use as my button mashing skills: to keep you busy and entertained.
It's not decadence or some mental deffect or whatever other bullshit being waved around, it's just that humans weren't made to sit and stare at the walls. That's all.
The gradient is even more visible in countries that didn't get a head start, and had/have a faster evolution there. E.g., China. This just creates bigger generation conflicts between the granddad who still remembers manually planting rice in the swamp all day long, and the "lazy, addicted" grandson who just watches TV for hours.
And the result are such lame attempts to "protect" the youth from this newfangled waste of time. I don't think it's some evil Chinese government plot, but just a bunch of 80 year old nostalgics who just don't understand the issue.
Guess what? There's nothing to "protect" them from. They'll still have X hours a day to fill, and they won't go milk the cows like in the good ol' days in those hours. So they'll find some other entertainment, but still spend those hours on entertainment.
In other words, the ISO-standard Slashdot way out of "I was only trolling" or "you shouldn't have taken it seriously." (In this case accusing someone of murder _and_ fraud. Ha ha, humorous stuff.) And complete with the "get a life" part too.
*shrug* It would probably even work if it was at least new or original. That is, if it wasn't the standard "I can't argue the real point, so I'll insult you instead" kinda message that can be found in almost every thread on Slashdot.
The problem, even if I were to take it seriously, is:
"You need to get out and have some fun, not sit around trying to impress a completely apathetic couch potato with your l33t s0ph0m0ric deb4te 5killz... get a life. You are downright laffable as posted..."
You mean, like you're going out and having fun instead of sitting around and trolling Slashdot with conspiracy theories? Oh, wait, you aren't out having fun either.
So here's the idea: if you're gonna try to pull the ol' traditional "but I'm still superior and you suck for arguing with me" thing at the end, at least try to show at least _some_ intelligence in it. Saying basically "but you suck because you do the exact same thing I do" is outright pathetic.
Take your own advice: get a life. Go out and have fun. Might even beat having to act like a spoiled kindergarten retard on/. to get attention.
Heh. Dude, seriously, go look up "fallacy" in a dictionary. It has nothing to do with "phalus" or "phalic" (btw, that's how that's written, not "fallic", but I digress.)
It's also something that's a topic of formal logic, and dates back at least to Aristotle. So, yes, if you don't want to trust Wikipedia on what those fallacies mean, you have a lot more reputable sources at your disposal.
So the wisecrack about "Wiki posters' Freudian tendancies" is just more prime example of talking without having a clue what you're talking about.
"I'm sorry, what exactly was your point?"
That fiscal incentives and basic human behaviour are pointing in the exact other direction than these crackpot "doctors and pharma companies make money out of murdering people and keeping them ill" theories. I.e., that the very "facts" being thrown around as basis for those conspiracy-theory conclusions are false.
"Of all your bluster, I would choose this one statement to challenge. Show me - no, screw that, prove it to yourself, never mind me - that you're not brainwashed."
Guess I'm getting good at this paranoia stuff, because I've actually expected that to be the only phrase you'll choose to latch onto. That's just the kind of diversion I was expecting as an answer: quickly dodging any actual facts or legitimate questions as "[endless blather claiming science and moral equivalency nonsense]" and getting to the usual "ah-ha! so you are brainwashed!" part. (Here phrased as "Prove that you're not brainwashed", but not that far.)
That's usually the problem with paranoia, and why psychoanalysis isn't very good against it. Any attempt to point out the flaws in that conspiracy theory just gets you filed anyhwere between "so you're brainwashed too" and "so you're a conspirator too".
Anyway, even skipping the part about Burden Of Proof (you're the one who made some claims, including the brainwashing one, so it's up to _you_ to prove them), it would be a straw man anyway. You've latched to something which, other than an ad-hominem fallacy, bears no relevance to the real issue that these conspiracy theories invariably fail to prove their case by logic. That's the core issue there.
I expect a conclusion, especially a blanket damnation of a whole profession, be based on actual data and actual logic. Without fallacies this time, since those are textbook examples of _failing_ to use logic. Between two arguments, (A) one which can present its data and logic, and where you can verify either, and (B) one which fails to do either, I'll just choose to believe the first one. That's all.
The only mention of brainwashing there was basically as "you don't need to be brainwashed to want to see some actual data and logic supporting a conclusion." You want to tell me that the non-brainwashed way would be to give up logic or something?
Either way, regardless of whether I'm brainwashed or not, you still failed to support those damning conclusions you wave around. Do that, or don't, but I don't see the point in getting side-tracked into debating the "brainwashing" straw-man instead.
There are more logical ways of blocking the player's progress than invisible walls or, a stapple of Japanese console RPGs, having some fallen twig or small pile of sad that my character seemingly can't possibly step over.
Sometimes you arguably don't even need a barrier there to start with.
E.g., take EQ2. I want to get out of those newbie crafting-shops-inna-basement, so I start walking up those stairs... only to run into an invisible wall. I have to click on the stairs to get out.
Why is that barrier even necessary? Can't the game just change the map when I hit the middle of the stairs? FPS games have managed to do just that for a decade now: I hit a turn in a corridor, the next map loads, no barrier was needed. So why can't Sony do the same thing?
Either way, noone says that you shouldn't ever block the player, much less than that they should fall off the map. Just to keep the barriers visible, obvious and (my own pet peeve) _consistent_.
Decide in advance up to what angle can my character go up slopes, and stick to that on all maps. Because if in one place I can climb a nearly vertical rock cliff (e.g., the islands SW of Antonica in EQ2) and in the next map I'm blocked by a 45 degree slope, it becomes a case of invisible walls again. There is no logical and/or obvious answer why I can't climb this one, when I've just climed a much steeper one on my way here.
Dude, even as conspiracy theories go, I've read better. Yours is based on... what? That you basically postulate that (A) any doctor is a murderer and con artist, and that (B) anything said by a doctor must be some covert attempt by a world-wide conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Any actual facts to base those crackpot theories on? I'm not seing any, other than some vague allusions to "human nature" and "obvious (fiscally beneficial) reasons"... that you fail to actually mention.
You want to discuss financial benefits? How about the financial benefits of selling a cure. If anyone patented a medicine that just cures cancer, they'd have a monopoly on it for 20 years. They'd make a bloody fortune.
You want to actually discuss basic human behaviour? How about the fact that each year a _lot_ of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, pharma corp managers, etc, die of cancer, AIDS, CJ, and other incurable diseases? Some contracted in the course of treating their patients.
You want to tell me that _any_ conspiracy can make one just prefer to die in pain, over 3 years, rather than just cure themselves, if that was possible? We're talking _death_. There are no fiscal benefits that would make millions of people worldwide go "you know, rather than lose that kinda money I'll just die." How about their children or other relatives? You want to tell me that _all_ those mothers would rather watch their children suffer and _die_, than research a cure for it?
You want a world-wide medical conspiracy? How about countries which didn't (and some still don't) even have medical insurance as a private business? Or all those communist countries where everything was owned by the state and which had their own independent research? How come _those_ didn't research those "obvious" cures?
I know at least one crackpot easter-european dictator even funded research in some "water of life" (as in, "fountain of youth") bullshit, because he was getting old and affraid to die. _That_ is human nature for you. As I've said, noone wants to die. Yet you want me to believe that all those thousands of party officials in the USSR or China, which personally had some of those diseases, or whose relatives had them, they too preferred to die than interfere with the USA pharma companies' profits?
"it's not particularly paranoid unless you have undergone some sort of brainwashing"
Actually that _is_ one of the tell-tale symptoms of paranoia. If you think everyone who doesn't believe your crack-pot theories has been "brainwashed", there's your clue that you're hallucinating.
"He'll generate more support for the theory he's arguing against by arguing against it than currently exists, would be my guess, since he's clearly supporting an effort to eliminate such evidence - for obvious (fiscally beneficial) reasons."
Dude, let's get one thing straight: you haven't presented _any_ evidence, much less established anything as "obvious". You just threw some insults around ("murderer and con artist"), and committed more fallacies than I can be bothered to count. Including again and again, including in the quoted paragraph, a mixture of "appeal to motives", "argumentum ad lazarum" (the ones with the money must automatically be wrong), and "poisoning the well". Look them up on Wikipedia, I can't be arsed to link to them this time.
So _of_ _course_, between (A) a science presenting verifiable experiments to base its conclusions on, and (B) some crackpot who doesn't present _anything_ but basically a "they must be murderers and part of a world-wide conspiracy because they are a successful industry" tantrum, I'll choose to believe the side with the actual data every time.
Not because of being brainwashed, not because of supporting some conspiracy efforts, but simply because you haven't presented _anything_ to support your paranoid theories on. Show me some actual evidence of people being murdered by their doctors, and _then_ I might believe your claim that it's an industry of murderers. But otherwise it's your personal hallucinations about "human nature" versus a mountain of verifiable scientiffic data.
Well, DW is by and large a collection of jokes and parodies. E.g., yeah, Terry Pratchett pokes fun at quicksaving there, just like he pokes fun at murder mysteries, vampire novels, and just about everything else. The DW world itself is a disc on 4 elefants on a Turtle, and in Small Gods you have people fighting the Inquisition's dogma that the world is round.
Basically you're not really supposed to take DW seriously.
I guess the same applies to games. I can accept OOC stuff in a game that is a parody. (E.g., in "Bard's Tale" the hero's talking to the narrator, or poking fun at such stapples of the genre as finding a whole chest and 20 items inside a wolf.)
The problem is that a lot of games are supposed to be taken more seriously, and their explanations aren't a parody or funny. They're just some mumbo-jumbo that doesn't even make sense in-character.
Since you mention Anachronox, it isn't the most guilty there, as it doesn't really go into much depth or detail. The most anyone says in-character about those critters is that they pet them for good luck, rather than them being save points. Weird superstitions existed IRL too, so I can live with that.
What I had in mind was more along the lines of Chrono Cross, where they even squeezed in some Big Brother kinda organization watching over you through those save points, to justify them. The fact that it broke the story, if you think about it logically, doesn't help there either. At that point, the whole "alternate universes based on different outcomes to one event" theme just didn't make any sense any more.
Picture this: so yesterday I re-install Planetside and its Core Combat expansion pack. And, naturally, spend almost two hours after that downloading patches. But I figure, wth, that's pretty much normal and expected for a MMO these days.
And what am I treated to? Some _long_ advertising movies I can't even skip. The first for some other expansion pack, the second for the Battleframes (think: mechs) that were introduced some time later.
Yep, some idiot at Sony's marketting dept decided that obviously "gamer" means I want to watch their idiotic ad movies, instead of playing the game I've paid for.
And for the real slap in the face, re-read the first paragraph. I've spent almost two hours downloading WHAT? Ad movies. (And presumably also the new maps with billboards, so Sony can advertise in-game too.)
Dunno, I found it to be nothing short of a slap in the face.
See, what annoyed me the most about FFX wasn't the quantity of cut-scenes as such, but the frequency with which they interrupted me for one.
Now I can understand that FF games are also a tech demo for Square's game engines, in much the same way Id's games are tech demos for Id's 3D engines. So Square presumably wanted to show off what they can do with their character's animations.
But here's the major difference: Id's games are quite enjoyable as FPS games go anyway. FFX for me was just an annoying turn-off after another.
I'd go 5 steps in one direction, Tidus would stop to stretch and say something. Do some 5 steps more, whop-de-do it's another short cut scene. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's that kind of constant interruptions that annoyed me far more than the total time spent in cut scenese as such. I've played games which had more minutes total spent in cutscenes, and/or more percentage of the total time spent in cut scenes. (E.g., "Sword Of The Berserk" on the Dreamcast was literally 75% cut scenes. It had about an hour and a half worth of FMV for about half an hour of actual game.) But, you know, they let me play a whole level before giving me a long-ish FMV, rather than interrupt me every 5 to 30 seconds for yet another brief and pointless pause.
It's also a matter of what they're used _for_. I can understand using cut-scenes and/or FMV for stuff that delivers some cinematic storytelling, for major plot elements or twists.
E.g., since I've already mentioned "Sword Of The Berserk", I actually liked the cut scenes there. They told a story, and told it well. You could piece them together and actually get a pretty good movie. Any way I want to imagine delivering that story in-game, e.g., by running around and clicking on NPCs, it just wouldn't be the same thing.
By comparison, in FFX the vast majority of interruptions seemed to be there _purely_ to showcase the engine, and didn't really do much for the story or plot. Tidus stopping to stretch and yawn, or whatever, just wasn't _necessary_ there.
Slashdot Mirror
"Did you note that you don't need to give an EXACT answer to qualify as human? Saying just "Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue" would have allowed you to pass the Turing Test."
Ummm... dude, how often do you get that philosophical in an _IM_ message?
What I was doing there was a whole disertation about why the question was stupid. Even there, I only added that paragraph after previewing my initial reply and thinking some more about it. If I had directly hit "Submit", that whole philosophical disertation about background noise wouldn't even be there.
It's definitely _not_ the kind of disertation that just pops up in a quick IM conversation. I can honestly say that if that was over some IM, I'd have just answered some variant of "fuck me if I know."
"BTW, using images would put it out of the scope of the original form of the Test"
Well, as I've said in another answer, we're not talking about scientifically taking a turing test. The whole "how I failed the turing test" title is nothing more than a wisecrack, as far as I can tell. It's a just an annoyed guy who's been harrassed by random IM messages, and basically the whole article is just a convoluted way of saying "geeze, some of these people on AIM are so stupid and gullible."
Anyway, if I was trying to determine if a guy on the net was a bot, damn right I wouldn't stick to the formal definition of the Turing test. Shymuffin32 wasn't really doing that, either, he/she just had to assess if someone really is human. By whatever means. I'm pretty sure he/she wasn't handed some rules in advance.
So if I was to really assess if someone is human, I'd use any means available. Pictures, short flash movies, games, long texts off some news site (e.g., send them a link to a The Register article and see what they think about that), etc. In fact, I would use pictures _of_ news articles from newspapers.
E.g., there was a recent one with two nearly-identical articles about the N.O. flood, except one called getting food from destroyed shops "looting" and had a picture of a black guy, while the other called it "people finding food and water" and had a picture of two white people. See if he even detects the racism implied there.
"Convincing someone you're human might just be harder than one might think - at least a bit more trouble than just answering a few questions."
Only if that someone is utterly retarded and asks completely retarded questions that don't even have a simple answer. That's the problem there. It's a question so stupid that even I couldn't think of something better to answer there. It's not "what music do you like?" or something else which can get a clear, to-the-point answer. It's "why do you like music?"
Well, try to answer that yourself. Why do you like music? What would you answer there?
Because I sure as heck can't think of any good answer there, generic or not. Screw trying to anwer that in 1 minute on IM. I'm sitting here for the last half an hour thinking about it and still have no bloody idea. Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue, and probably 4 out of 5 pyschologists or musicians would have no idea either.
So how would I say that in a way that sounds non-generic? "Hell if I know. I've never thought about it"? Nah, you've just ruled a variant of that as too generic. "Well, why do YOU like it, then?" Nope, sounds like the kind of rephrasing the question back at you that an Eliza program would do.
The only non-generic answer that comes to my mind there is along the lines of "WTF of a retarded question is that? Were you born that stupid, or worked hard to get there?"
By contrast, if shymuffin32 actually had more than a braincell, it would be easy to ask some questions that can get simple, to-the-point answers. In fact, screw questions and answers and try to just have an intelligent conversation.
Want more conclusive? Mix some images in it, which would still throw any AI off the track completely. E.g., point him at a picture of someone holding a siberian cat and see if he comments about the size. (It's one bloody huge breed of cats.) Point him at a drawing of one of the giant guns on rails Germany was planning to build in WW2. See what he thinks about the size of that one. (Tends to get answers between "bloody freaking hell" and "do you think Freud might have something to do with it?") Etc.
Well, actually, his problem in the article is completely different. It's _not_ that he's met people who type worse than bots.
It's that a group of people were told that he's a bot, and nothing (correctly and articulately written) could shake their belief in that. One of them even calls him "worse than eliza" when he tries to argue that he's human.
Some people found a list of bots online, and, you know, that makes it the absolute truth. Everyone on it _has_ to be a bot, because the list says so.
Another group found a list of celebrities, and again, took it as absolute truth. They didn't know _who_ this guy is, _what_ is he supposedly famous for, etc. But OMG, he must be a celebrity because the list says so, and that makes it sooo cooool to talk to him.
Basically it's _not_ the "some people are so stupid they could pass for bots" problem. (Which by itself is very true, but it's not really what TFA is about.) The problem, if you will, is simply "some people are gullible idiots." That's all.
It does leave me with me a bunch of other philosophical and etical questions though. If it's this possible to convince people that John Average is a bot (and in fact, it didn't even involve more "convincing" than writing it on some random list on the internet), what _else_ could you convince them? That John Average is a convicted fellon? A spammer? A paedophile?
And mind you, in this case he got a chance to even try to talk back and plead his case. I can easily think of cases where you don't get that chance. E.g., when a prospective employer googles for your name, you might not even know why you didn't get the job. What completely unrelated Marvin did they find on some bogus list on the Internet, and what image did they build for themseleves out of disparate bits taken out of context?
That said, the problem you mention is very true too. I know I've met people online before, especially in online games, who substantially lowered the bar for a Turing test. It was definitely more fun to talk/play with the bots instead, and you could get more intelligent conversation out of the bots too. Admittedly, online games are a completely different category than IM and chat rooms, but still... It's scary, you know.
1. Both the Dreamcast and the PS2 support mice and keyboards for FPS or RTS. In fact, with the PS2 you can just take any USB keyboard or mouse, plug it in, and play. (The Dreamcast needed a special connector on its keyboard and mouse.)
2. The world isn't made only of RTS and FPS, and frankly for everything else I actually prefer an analog gamepad or joystick. Even on the PC.
E.g., have you tried playing a space combat or flight sim with a keyboard and mouse? I still remember trying to dogfight X-Wings and TIE-Fighters with the mouse. Oooer, now that was a _painful_ exercise. The _only_ game in that genre I can think of that was actually enjoyable to play with a mouse was Freelancer.
Or for a lot of RPGs, using a gamepad to control the character is actually easier and more natural.
E.g., I actually own both the PC and PS2 versions of Summoner, and I'll use it as an example because the interface was very different in the two versions. For the PC port they actually went through the trouble of making it resemble a typical PC game interface, where you mouse-click on the ground to move there, or on an item to interact with it.
You know what? I honestly preferred the gamepad version and wished that the PC version offered that as an option. Not only it was more comfortable, but some levels like sneaking around through the palace were actually easier with a gamepad.
"Sorry but look at Enter The Matrix and all the other unfinished buggy pieces of shit on consoles. Your wrong. If someone is going to release a crap game it's going to happen if they can patch it later or not regardless. Give Enter The Matrix some slack though they only had 3 days to go from Alpha to Final due to their tight schedule to tie in with the movie."
Ok, so Enter The Matrix would be the third then.
That makes it, what? 3 buggy console games, versus literally a hundred more Dreamcast, Playstation and Playstation 2 games that I personally own and which run flawlessly.
By comparison, on PCs the ratio is exactly the other way around. I can think of maybe enough games to count on one hand's fingers that were reasonably finished as released, versus literally hundreds that were released with _major_ problems.
I'm sorry, the two situations aren't even comparable at all. They're not even in the same class.
We can talk for ever about how _theoretically_ Sony could shove buggy untested games out the door too, even if they can't be patched. In practice, it just hasn't happened yet. I'll take practice over theory there.
"To be honest the single player in Halo 2 wasn't as good as the original."
I'm not talking about "but gameplay isn't as good in the sequel" or "but the story wasn't too good" (and in Halo 2's case lacked an ending altogether) kind of defects, but outright bugs.
Yes, you can find both PC and console games where you don't like the gameplay, or where the story leaves you scratching your head and going "WTF???" (FF8 anyone?), or whatever. Yes, there are well designed games and badly designed ego-trips and tech-demos trying to masquerade as games on both.
I'm talking strictly about the quality of the implementation. A PC game can have the best story and design in the world, and still crash and be a buggy nightmare to play.
I'll even give you an example of a PC game I actually _loved_: Fallout 2. I loved the story, I loved the setting, I loved the game system, etc. Yet the implementation was an awfully buggy piece of crap that ruined my enjoyment all the time.
I've personally ran into more bugs that I care to list, and had to reload or do perverse tricks all the time to avoid the disappearing car bug alone. And then came the patch which made all the old saved games unusable.
And having written a walkthrough for it, I've had emails from people who got stuck in even more places and ways. One poor guy had somehow managed to finish the Temple Of Trials (newbie area) without getting the Vault 13 suit or the PIP. So basically he couldn't access the quest list, couldn't rest, couldn't skip some time in places where he needed to wait until morning/evening/whatever, etc. Other people got bitten by even worse bugs and just couldn't finish the game any more. Etc.
And it illustrates another problem about the PC "ship it now, patch it later" model: more often than not, it's never fully patched. After the last patch, the game was still a buggy barely-playable mess.
That's not even an isolated case, it's the typical story of buggy PC games. The advocates might preach some wonderland where only minor bugs exist, and some patch will swiftly come and fix them all. In practice most games are _still_ buggy long after the devs and publishers gave up on patching them. In some cases you're stuck with some patch that actually makes it _worse_. (E.g., the "Vampire, The Masquerade: Redemption" whose lone patch broke the party AI, and made them all ignore your orders.)
Well, I _am_ a programmer, and I did program long enough in assembler to have some idea of the problems of porting stuff to completely different architectures like the Cell. Though I should also add that it's been some 7 years since I've had anything to do with programming _games_, so better take this stuff with a lot of salt.
Adding a proprietary content-delivery system does _nothing_ to make programming the Cell any easier. If you have trouble programming to a certain architecture, that's that. It doesn't matter if you ship your finished product via Steam, Fileplanet, DVD's, whatever. You have to get it to run on that architecture _before_ you have anything to ship. If you can't port it to the Cell to start with, you won't _have_ anything to ship, with or without Steam.
So taken strictly as a platform for delivering _finished_ content, it's like saying "But Intel could make much lower-power Pentium 4 CPUs if they sold it on eBay." That bogus.
But I think I can actually see what they're after. Don't think distribution, think the ability to patch. That's what they'd like on their console ports.
The _only_ thing such an auto-updater offers is the ability to publish some buggy unfinished untested POS and try to patch it later. Which, sorry, isn't what console gaming is all about.
So there you go. All his whining about how he'd like Steam and a HDD on every console is basically just saying, "but we just can't be arsed to have some proper QA, we just can't get it right for a console release, and we'd _really_ love to release it anyway and patch it later via Steam."
I.e., I don't think it's necessarily crocodile tears, but the whining and bitching of someone who's just locked in the "shove it out the door now, patch it later" metality of the PC gaming scene. Yeah, I can see how he'd feel more comfortable being able to pull the same crap on consoles. But as a consumer it isn't something I want to put up with.
"But what's your response to new content? What's going to happen to things like free levels and, for example, the free ninja gaiden update that was made available."
Sega managed to run new levels off a memory card just fine, for example in the Dreamcast version of Skies Or Arcadia.
"And honestly, what's wrong with FIXING something? I see no problem with updates."
I _do_ see a problem with shoving a broken, disfunctional product out the door. I very much like it that when I buy a game, it actually works. I _do_ see a problem with paying to be a beta-tester for EA's, Vivendi's, etc, buggy unfinished crap.
And especially I _do_ see a problem with patches that screw up my saved games directly (I can thing of a dozen games, starting with Fallout 2, where applying the patch forced me to restart the whole damn game from the start), or indirectly (yay, for some RPG patches where they randomly altered the game balance and made all my character's skills useless, _and_ made a bunch enemies immune to physical damage... when I'm playing a fighter. What am I supposed to use there? Bad language? Time to start a new character again.)
That's what I liked about console games so far: when I buy a game it's a _finished_ product. I can think of only exactly _two_ console games that ever needed a patch, out of the literally _hundreds_ I own. (And out of those two, one had a free replacement from the publisher, and the other "only" had multiplayer exploits, but was otherwise rock-solid and enjoyable as a single-player game.) The rest just worked.
That's it. When I buy a console game, I _know_ it will work. From day one. I can randomly pick any game off the PS2 aisle, take it home, pop it in, and _know_ that it'll never crash, never fall into the void, and generally just work.
You know why? Because the publisher knows it can't be patched, so they'll test the _hell_ out of it before release. And if they're running out of time or budget, they'll cancel a game, but never shove an unfinished piece of crap out the door.
Yes, no software is perfect, but there's a _massive_ difference between having some minor exploit in an obscure sidequest (like being able to claim your reward twice) in a console game, and the utterly broken stuff that gets shipped on the PC on account that it can be patched later.
That's what's wrong with "FIXING something" in the PC world. It's something that sounds _great_ in theory, but in practice it's what caused the deluge of unfinished buggy _crap_ shoved out the door untested. It just caused the "ah, it shows the starting menu, let's ship it. We can patch it later" mentality to run rampant.
It caused such crap as, say, the German version of Victoria which literally could only show the startup menu as released. _Literally_. If you actually tried starting a campaign, the game threw a script _syntax_ error. Yes, a _syntax_ error. Not something even remotely blamable on drivers or hardware. It had a typo in the scripts and couldn't run on _any_ hardware.
I was a fan of the Dreamcast myself, but its problems were deeper than that. In addition to what you've said, I'd add:
1. Yes, it eventually had some 250 games, but entire genres were missing for the first, what? Two years? E.g., being an RPG fan myself, I had to grudgingly admit to fellow RPG gamers "uh, yeah, well, if you want RPGs, you should probably get a PSX instead." (Evolution and Evolution 2 were cutesy hack-and-slashes, but no substitute for the real Japanese RPGs.)
And while we're at it, although I was one of the few people that actually enjoyed Sega GT, it was _not_ a substitute for Gran Turismo. Lacking any kind of TCS or ABS, the higher powered cars drove like on ice, ffs. I've actually tried to get people hooked on it, and invariably every single Gran Turismo fan was like "Gah, this is crap. As soon as I even touch the controller, the car goes like on ice."
2. The piracy argument is, sorry to say, bogus. Sega was actually selling more games per console sold than Sony did. We Dreamcast owners actually bought a lot of games each. That's why they turned to a pure game developper at the end. Their problem was not enough consoles sold, not piracy.
3. The GD-ROM did however bite Sega in the ass, but not because of piracy. The GD-ROM _sucked_ at launch, and the pressing of GDs themselves was very immature and poor quality. A lot of the games at launch came on unbalanced or too thick GDs, that the console had trouble reading. Having to turn the console upside down to have it read your GD was quite a common thread at launch.
And even later models, I can tell you first hand that the faintest fingerprint made the game no longer load. I've had games crash on me in the middle of it, not because the software was deffective, but because a tiny spec of dust made it no longer able to read a sector.
I don't know about you, but I can easily see how that kind of thing would turn a lot of buyers off.
4. Another major problem was that Sega basically didn't even try advertising. By the end they just cut the prices on a console already sold at a major loss, which helped sales, but depleted Sega's funds faster than they could afford to.
You know, no offense, I find the "buy Nintendo because it's priced reasonably" argument to be as bogus as "buy an XBox because it has a GF3" in it. We're not talking a lawnmower or a washing machine or whatever else that is fully self-contained and does something all by itself. We're talking a game console, which has one single use: to play games.
So here's a crazy idea: I'll buy a console for what games it has, not for the theoretical gigapixels per second (I don't play directly with the shader pipelines, I play with games that use those), nor because it's the cheapest (even something that costs only $100 is still just a wasted $100 if it doesn't also have games that interest me.)
_If_ the Revolution will have any games that interest me, sure, I'll buy one. But if not, not.
_If_ Sony's consoles again are the ones with 90% of the story driven RPGs, I'll go buy a Sony console again.
So far, I don't even like Nintendo's kinds of games, which were really the only ones that were exclusive to the N64 or GCN. Now I won't call them "bad" games or "kiddie" games, but they're just not in the genres I like. I know others like them. More power to them as far as I'm concerned. But I don't.
So unless Nintendo hires a new designer sometime soon, _I_ just can't see myself buying a Revolution, no matter at what price. On the other, hand, being a very happy and entertained owner of both the Playstation and PS2, I can easily see myself biting the bullet and forking over $500 for a PS3.
But again, I'll wait and see what games are available for them, and _then_ decide whether I buy either.
In other words, a select few game companies are really trolling for attention. They actually _like_ to generate a good scandal, because of the free publicity. You can get hours and hours and all TV channels, without paying a cent.
E.g., see the recent scandal about shooting cops in games, and how every channel conveniently had side-by-side screenshots and photos of dead police officer. Long before the game was even released. Sorry, that kind of thing almost screams "PR stunt".
That's what PR companies do: get something published as if it was news, rather than a paid ad. They won't run an ad campaign, say, telling you to buy a new suit, they conveninently slip some article or pseudo-interview to 1000 newspapers about how, you know, suits are way cool again and all self-respecting managers demand one. (That's an actual PR campaign revealed, that was linked to by Slashdot, btw.)
On the whole of the media, currently about 50% of articles are straight PR releases. Of course, that's an average on the whole. Some newspapers/stations have less, some have more. But on the whole, if you picked a random newspaper and a random article, chances are it would be a pseudo-article doctored to promote some point of view or product. I just have to wonder how many of those gaming scandals are among those.
Even when it's not directly _creating_ the scandal via a PR release, a lot of ads are basically just immature trolling. They single-out and highlight some aspect (violence, sex, bad language, whatever) of a game that's pretty much supposed to shock/disgust/whatever some people, and appeal to a few immature "rebels" in the process.
A lot of those ads actually deliberately create a false image of the game, in that quest to be shocking or match some clueless marketroids target demographic. In a lot of cases, seeing some of those ads it's not even hard to see why non-gamers are left with an impression that gaming is for losers or insane (violent/sex-crazed/etc) people or whatnot.
And then we act surprised when a lot of people actually _are_ reacting in the predictable way. Well, what did anyone expect?
So basically I'll condemn the crusaders more wholeheartedly, when the game companies themselves start acting more mature. I'll be more convinced it's the media picking on innocent little them, when they won't go to hell and back to riles the media.
" Except that Diablo is nothing more than a pretty roguelike. Gameplay from 10-15 years earlier!"
Yes, Blizzard rarely comes with _new_ gameplay, but when they make a clone it's high quality. Diablo and Diablo 2 had a:
- very good interface (it may seem like "bah, it's easy, you just click-click-click", but having played two dozen clones, it seems to be anything BUT easy. E.g., fuckups that required clicking _exactly_ at the feet of a quickly moving enemy, and ended up running around the enemy instead of attacking him, were the norm, not the exception.)
- very easy learning curve
- casual-gamer-friendly difficulty curve (half the games released are _still_ a nightmare for the non-l33t of us who just want a relaxing game in the evening, not an exercise in "bang! you're dead!" at every turn. Most importantly, it did _not_ assume that I'd spend hours running in circles for xp and loot to be able to survive the next level. By the time you finished one level, you'd actually be ready for the next one.)
- good balance (having played each of the 3 classes in Diablo, I can honestly say that neither of them had a substantially harder time than the others)
- very few pointless wastes of time (most of the time I was doing something, not running like an idiot between two cities to do some postal quest, nor combing every inch of a mountain to find some door, like in Morrowind.)
Etc. So while it might not have been _new_ gameplay, it nevertheless was _good_ gameplay.
Add to that the fact that, like all Blizzard releases, it had extremely few bugs. Blizzard did release some patches for minor issues, but mostly to fine-tune the balance in multiplayer. But I don't remember Diablo or Diablo 2 ever crashing to desktop, having my character fall into the void, or any of the other crap that was the norm in PC games.
So basically, yes, I think he does have a point: quality sells. It might be every publisher's wet dream that only marketting matters, and any crap shoved out the door sells just the same, but it's a pipe-dream. Quality always outsold crap, and Blizzard's games are among the prime examples of that.
It's not a MMO, but try Harvest Moon. It's just that. A game about planting cabbage in the garden, milking your cow(s), shearing your sheep, and brushing your pony.
Also, most MMOs have some crafting skills to make money. (And at least one, "A Tale In The Desert", is _all_ about crafting.) Most of my money in EQ 2 or WoW so far comes from gathering resources (e.g., digging for ore), crafting, and selling both finished products and raw materials I don't need. E.g., if you dug some rare bronze ore (yeah, I know, bronze is actually an alloy, but tell that to Sony;) in the newbie woods in EQ2, it sells for anything between 2 and 3 gold real quick.
"I don't completely agree with this, at least about the harmlessness of timewasters like fishing and gaming. Sometimes those timewasters get in the way of the real work (i.e. playing WoW instead of doing homework) and that is bad, and parents need to make sure their children are on the right track."
You are, of course, right there. But as you've said, it applies to all the timewastes, not just gaming. (E.g., I preferred playing with the cat instead of doing homework, if I had half a choice.) And, yeah, that's what parents are for.
I'm just saying that, to some extent, we all actually _need_ such time wastes. I'm not saying that it's good to end up doing those instead of going to work, or doing homework, or whatever. But at some point, after work, after homework, after the household chores, you're left with some hours that you have to fill somehow. And gaming isn't some biblical plague, it's just one of the many many things that people can use to that end. That's all I'm saying.
"Moreover, at least if you're tinkering with your car you learn more about the car and can possibly fix problems that you'd usually have a mechanic do."
I'll grant that, for a select few (very few) number of hobbies. Most don't fall in that category, though.
A lot of the skills waved around as "but it's a RL skill" or "but it's a money-making skill" are rarely actually used to make money. E.g., mom is quick to point out that she made 40 Euro with her digital photos, but tends to skip over the thousands invested in the same hobby. Between the camera (and it's a top end one), lenses, a 1000 Euro MVA TFT monitor (ok, so I paid for that one), a high end PC to run Photoshop on, and the Photoshop license itself, it was if anything a money-sink skill so far.
And even for fixing cars or computers,
1. Well, let's do some maths. Let's say you saved a whole 100$ per month by fixing your car. (Most people don't get that high, but let's be generous.) Well, it's sorta like this: if you spend more than 20 hours a month on your car, that puts you at less than 5$ per hour, "gained" from that skill. (And I know people who practically live in the garage.)
If you also include all the tools, spare parts, etc, involved, even less.
I.e., if you actually did that for the money, I'd have to say that it's a piss-poor way to achieve that. You could get a second job that pays _much_ better than that, pay a mechanic for the repairs, and still end up better off.
So I'm still thinking it's mostly entertainment, rather than "money-making/money-saving skill". Maybe a less expensive entertainment than others, but still, it's mostly something to keep yourself busy with.
2. You probably realize that we're past the point where that's actually _needed_. The whole mentality that it's that important to do something directly productive, is the residue of a culture based on an economy of scarcity.
For millenia, the economy was such that a lot of people actually starved to death. Taking one hobby instead of another could hit you in the bare necessities, and even make an actual difference for survival. E.g., going fishing instead of going to the pub, made an actual difference in feeding your family. In one of the cases even if you didn't starve over the winter, you might still be malnourished enough to be felled by the first disease. E.g., fixing your own wagon instead of paying someone to do it, same deal: those money came out of the funds you had for buying bare necessities.
Nowadays, we're living in a fundamentally different kind of economy. We're at the point where even "poverty" is a metric that's about keeping up with the Joneses, rather than being the point where you actually starve.
I'm willing to bet that most of your money is going not on bare necessities like food and the most minimal shelter. It's going on convenience stuff like getting a bigger TV or a bigger car, or outright conspicuous-consumption luxuries.
Basically where I'm getting is that even if you save
Actually, it does.
The current MMO rat race and grind to keep up sucks. The point wasn't just to rant about it. The point is: that's why even most of us actually playing MMOs wouldn't really be bothered by such a law. You asked why. Well, that's why. Now you know.
Yes, it's heavy-handed and all, but noone's violating any of your human rights. Your right to spend 16 hours a day in WoW isn't in the constitution.
Even by chinese law standards, it's a pretty mild one. In fact, it's not even a "law" as such, it's just an aggreement that the government bullied the publishers into signing. (And probably didn't even need to bully them too hard. It's something that actually works to their advantage.) It doesn't say that the secret police will come to your house and give you 20 to life in maximum security prisons, if you play too much WoW. It just says that after 3 hours your character's stats will start decaying.
How would such an oppressive law affect me? Well, not at all. Even as an addicted gamer, I'd go play some offline stuff, or chat on IRC/ICQ/whatever, or spend some time on my clan's/guild's/whatever board, or various other stuff. Heck, you don't even have to log out of that MMO: you can craft or hang around and chat to your guild mates and not be bothered about those decreased stats.
Heck, even those publishers have plenty of room to basically circumvent it, if they wanted to. They can just give you something to do that fits those decreased stats. E.g., treat it as a level drop, and allow you to get xp off lower level NPCs and quests.
So the major human-rights violation is...?
The human brains just isn't supposed to sit idle. You can't just sit there with an empty mind, or you'd go insane with boredom.
So you start thinking about stuff. Some good, some bad. Invariably some bad. Humans just aren't built to be happy all the time. I'm talking biologically: your mood is, basically, like on a spring or rubberband that tends to bring it back to the centre.
So if you just sit there bored, you'll start thinking of various stuff, a lot of it bad stuff. Boredom itself being a bad stimulus, also doesn't help there.
Basically that's IMHO what gaming "saves" you from, or allows you to "escape" from. It's not that any of us have such an awful life we need to run away from. All that we're "escaping" from is merely the alternative of sitting there bored and remembering all the bad parts of our lives.
Again, not "bad parts" as in "boo hoo, I'm a failure and my life is in complete shambles", but rather mundane every-day stuff, not much different from anyone elses occasional stressful incidents. Just bad as in, well, you'd rather do something entertaining than sit there and think about that crap out of sheer boredom.
There are games which you can play on your reflexes alone. E.g., when I moved between UT to Quake 3 and then back to UT, I didn't lose my own reflexes in the process. You can be someone who just bought bought the game, and compete successfully with people who've played it for a year.
MMOs basically have this system where your character's "power" is simply a measure of how much time you've dumped into it. A character that's been played for 1000 hours is inherently more powerful than a character who's been played for 10 hours.
E.g., back when I've played COH, by the time I've reached level 35, some people I used to group with were just hitting level 20, while others were already level 50. E.g., in COH, two co-workers which started at the same time are respectively level 20 and 50. E.g., in WoW I had fun grouping with someone, but then she was level 30+ by the time I was level 15, on account of being a housewife with nothing better to do all day long.
I'm not even getting into the PvP aspect, but you just go out of sync with even people you liked cooperating with. You're not supposed to even be in the same area any more, because what's a "grey" enemy to one and gives no xp any more, is "red" for someone else and means instant one-hit death.
It's a race that only the most addicted, those who play 16 hours a day, can really keep up with. And it's turning off everyone else.
It's not that happy a situation for the game companies, either, because they have to provide enough content for the addicts. They have to have enough in that world so the 16-hour-a-day gamers don't plough through it all in a month and start whining that there's nothing left to do.
It's not even just the race itself, it's that when you have 50 levels and people playing 16 hours a day, you _have_ to stretch it all with those in mind. When you want those 50 levels to last for, oh, say at least 2 months for those, they'll take some 16 months for someone who only plays 2 hours a day. In the final levels they'll be faced with the discouraging task of needing another 2-3 weeks for the next level. Which feels very much like you stopped getting any rewards any more.
So here's a gamer's point of view. Could I live with a 3 hours a day per character time limit? Well, yes, in fact. It would keep the group within a more reasonable level range in the long run.
Also consider that what the Chinese did is just the heavy-handed typically-totalitarian version of what's already being done about it in the West. E.g., World Of Warcraft's "rested" bonus doesn't halve your stats, but halves your xp if you play more than 1-2 hours a day. People actually liked that kind of thing, judging by WoW's runaway popularity.
So while I don't support heavy-handed government intervention, I would like to see more done about the current MMO setup.
It doesn't even have to involve preventing people from playing. It can just as well be a re-thinking of how levels work.
Planetside, for example, did a wonderful job there: more levels give you more flexibility in your choice of equipment, but don't move you in a whole other range of power. It is certainly possible to either compete or cooperate with a level 25 (the max level there) when you're level 1. You can actually be a valuable member of that group, not just a useless newbie tagging along for the xp.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." H.L. Mencken
What I'm trying to say is that usually when you feel a need to reach for the usual universal nerd explanations like "because they're all idiots" or "because they all have some major mental problem", that ought to be your clue that you're talking out the ass and most likely haven't even _begun_ to understand what's really going on.
It's getting kinda tiresome to read the same rehashed pseudo-psychological BS, like (rephrased for brevity sake):
- "but you only play a muscled barbarian because you're ashamed/insecure/affraid of your body"
I'll call bullshit on that. I'm a munchkin, I play whatever has the best bonuses for my intended class. Yes, I play a Barbarian as my monk, but I also play a Dwarf as my paladin, a nerdy Erudite as my mage, and a thoroughly effeminate High Elf as my priest. I'd play a fat pimple-faced couch-potato, if that gave me better bonuses.
And, you know, there are games where your appearance doesn't give you any bonuses. E.g., City Of Heroes. Virtually all my characters there are simply variants of a nerd in jeans, a sweater or t-shirt, glasses and (for males) an unkempt beard. One of them even wears a suit and tie, just for gag's sake. But generally, none are anything I couldn't look like IRL with _very_ minimal effort. (E.g., going to the shop and actually buying a suit like that.)
- "buy you're in online games only because noone knows you there, and can't give you a reality check."
Well how's this for a reality check: probably the majority of people play online with some RL friends or at least aquaintances. E.g., every co-worker that plays EQ2 are members of the same guild and we all know who's behind which character. E.g., that that barbarian female with big breasts is a (male) coleague I see every day at work. He even jokes about us letting him win the "lottery" for loot because he's a woman.
And generally, I've been on MUDs, I've been on MMOs, I've been in FPS clans, and before all that I was on FidoNet. Knowing each other and/or occasionally meeting for a pint at the pub is rather the expected norm, not the rare exception.
- "but you prefer online communication because you're affraid of dealing with people in person."
Nope, I just prefer talking to people I share some interests with. There used to be a time when I'd take any boring (for me) topic, like the weather or football, simply because that was what was available in the immediate geographic proximity. The Internet, and FidoNet before it, allow me to skip those boring talks, and find a pool of people whose topics I'm actually interested in.
E.g., if I'd rather talk about siberian cats or ancient Egyptian history than about the neighbour's kids, or the other neighbour's football obsession, on the Internet I can immediately find enough people interested in the same thing. I can join a board, an IRC channel, a newsgroup, or whatever else dedicated to siberian cats or ancient egyptian history.
MMOs and generally online games are just such a "filter". There's a topic which you already know that people there will be interested in: that game itself. E.g., if I'm on EQ 2, chances are both me and the other guys/gals there are interested in it. That's a common interest to talk about.
And incidentally, it's not that different from the RL filters. E.g., if you go to a Metallica concert, you chances are most people there are interested in that genre. The Internet just enlarges the pool you can choose from.
The thing is, people simply need to do something with their time. You can't just sit and look at the walls.
That's one thing that needs to be understood first. In the 1600's, you needed to spend 16 hours on the fields to even have enough to eat, then one or more of the following, depending on gender: hack your own firewood, patch your own roof, cook, spin and weave, patch clothes, spend hours washing clothes by hand, make your own soap, etc.
There wasn't that much of a need for daily entertainment, since you didn't actually have any time left to fill in an average day.
Since the 1900's, and especially since the mid-1900's, however, less and less of that is actually needed. You buy your clothes, not spin, weave and tailor your own crude shirts. You don't spend hours scrubbing the clothes by hand, you just chuck them in the washing machine. Heck, you don't even really need to cook if you don't want to.
There is a gradient that's very perceptible. When you listen to someone's stories along the lines of "back in my day, we had to walk to school 4 miles through snow, and we only got 6 hours of sleep after feeding the cows and chicken", they're probably not exaggerating. They actually had to. But we don't.
This, however, leaves us with more free time that we just have to fill with something. That's one thing that all those "back in my day we'd milk the cows instead of sitting on our arses and watching TV" nostalgics just don't seem to understand. Yes, they had to milk the cows and do all sorts of other tasks. I don't. It would cost me more to actually have a cow in my flat, than the milk is worth. This leaves me with time to fill with _something_ or I'd go nuts.
Some people fill it with hours after hours of tinkering on their car, some people fish, some people spend it at the pub, some people waste hours and money making digital photos, etc. And some of us use computer games. That's all.
Yes, some of them are waved around as inherently better ways, or more socially acceptable ways, to spend your time. But guess what? They're all nevertheless just ways to keep yourself busy. Don't kid yourself that going out fishing or spending hours on your car gets you some l33t survival skills or saves you this huge heap of money or whatever. They're skills that have exactly the same use as my button mashing skills: to keep you busy and entertained.
It's not decadence or some mental deffect or whatever other bullshit being waved around, it's just that humans weren't made to sit and stare at the walls. That's all.
The gradient is even more visible in countries that didn't get a head start, and had/have a faster evolution there. E.g., China. This just creates bigger generation conflicts between the granddad who still remembers manually planting rice in the swamp all day long, and the "lazy, addicted" grandson who just watches TV for hours.
And the result are such lame attempts to "protect" the youth from this newfangled waste of time. I don't think it's some evil Chinese government plot, but just a bunch of 80 year old nostalgics who just don't understand the issue.
Guess what? There's nothing to "protect" them from. They'll still have X hours a day to fill, and they won't go milk the cows like in the good ol' days in those hours. So they'll find some other entertainment, but still spend those hours on entertainment.
In other words, the ISO-standard Slashdot way out of "I was only trolling" or "you shouldn't have taken it seriously." (In this case accusing someone of murder _and_ fraud. Ha ha, humorous stuff.) And complete with the "get a life" part too.
... get a life. You are downright laffable as posted..."
/. to get attention.
*shrug* It would probably even work if it was at least new or original. That is, if it wasn't the standard "I can't argue the real point, so I'll insult you instead" kinda message that can be found in almost every thread on Slashdot.
The problem, even if I were to take it seriously, is:
"You need to get out and have some fun, not sit around trying to impress a completely apathetic couch potato with your l33t s0ph0m0ric deb4te 5killz
You mean, like you're going out and having fun instead of sitting around and trolling Slashdot with conspiracy theories? Oh, wait, you aren't out having fun either.
So here's the idea: if you're gonna try to pull the ol' traditional "but I'm still superior and you suck for arguing with me" thing at the end, at least try to show at least _some_ intelligence in it. Saying basically "but you suck because you do the exact same thing I do" is outright pathetic.
Take your own advice: get a life. Go out and have fun. Might even beat having to act like a spoiled kindergarten retard on
Heh. Dude, seriously, go look up "fallacy" in a dictionary. It has nothing to do with "phalus" or "phalic" (btw, that's how that's written, not "fallic", but I digress.)
It's also something that's a topic of formal logic, and dates back at least to Aristotle. So, yes, if you don't want to trust Wikipedia on what those fallacies mean, you have a lot more reputable sources at your disposal.
So the wisecrack about "Wiki posters' Freudian tendancies" is just more prime example of talking without having a clue what you're talking about.
"I'm sorry, what exactly was your point?"
That fiscal incentives and basic human behaviour are pointing in the exact other direction than these crackpot "doctors and pharma companies make money out of murdering people and keeping them ill" theories. I.e., that the very "facts" being thrown around as basis for those conspiracy-theory conclusions are false.
"Of all your bluster, I would choose this one statement to challenge. Show me - no, screw that, prove it to yourself, never mind me - that you're not brainwashed."
Guess I'm getting good at this paranoia stuff, because I've actually expected that to be the only phrase you'll choose to latch onto. That's just the kind of diversion I was expecting as an answer: quickly dodging any actual facts or legitimate questions as "[endless blather claiming science and moral equivalency nonsense]" and getting to the usual "ah-ha! so you are brainwashed!" part. (Here phrased as "Prove that you're not brainwashed", but not that far.)
That's usually the problem with paranoia, and why psychoanalysis isn't very good against it. Any attempt to point out the flaws in that conspiracy theory just gets you filed anyhwere between "so you're brainwashed too" and "so you're a conspirator too".
Anyway, even skipping the part about Burden Of Proof (you're the one who made some claims, including the brainwashing one, so it's up to _you_ to prove them), it would be a straw man anyway. You've latched to something which, other than an ad-hominem fallacy, bears no relevance to the real issue that these conspiracy theories invariably fail to prove their case by logic. That's the core issue there.
I expect a conclusion, especially a blanket damnation of a whole profession, be based on actual data and actual logic. Without fallacies this time, since those are textbook examples of _failing_ to use logic. Between two arguments, (A) one which can present its data and logic, and where you can verify either, and (B) one which fails to do either, I'll just choose to believe the first one. That's all.
The only mention of brainwashing there was basically as "you don't need to be brainwashed to want to see some actual data and logic supporting a conclusion." You want to tell me that the non-brainwashed way would be to give up logic or something?
Either way, regardless of whether I'm brainwashed or not, you still failed to support those damning conclusions you wave around. Do that, or don't, but I don't see the point in getting side-tracked into debating the "brainwashing" straw-man instead.
There are more logical ways of blocking the player's progress than invisible walls or, a stapple of Japanese console RPGs, having some fallen twig or small pile of sad that my character seemingly can't possibly step over.
Sometimes you arguably don't even need a barrier there to start with.
E.g., take EQ2. I want to get out of those newbie crafting-shops-inna-basement, so I start walking up those stairs... only to run into an invisible wall. I have to click on the stairs to get out.
Why is that barrier even necessary? Can't the game just change the map when I hit the middle of the stairs? FPS games have managed to do just that for a decade now: I hit a turn in a corridor, the next map loads, no barrier was needed. So why can't Sony do the same thing?
Either way, noone says that you shouldn't ever block the player, much less than that they should fall off the map. Just to keep the barriers visible, obvious and (my own pet peeve) _consistent_.
Decide in advance up to what angle can my character go up slopes, and stick to that on all maps. Because if in one place I can climb a nearly vertical rock cliff (e.g., the islands SW of Antonica in EQ2) and in the next map I'm blocked by a 45 degree slope, it becomes a case of invisible walls again. There is no logical and/or obvious answer why I can't climb this one, when I've just climed a much steeper one on my way here.
Dude, even as conspiracy theories go, I've read better. Yours is based on... what? That you basically postulate that (A) any doctor is a murderer and con artist, and that (B) anything said by a doctor must be some covert attempt by a world-wide conspiracy to cover up the truth.
Any actual facts to base those crackpot theories on? I'm not seing any, other than some vague allusions to "human nature" and "obvious (fiscally beneficial) reasons"... that you fail to actually mention.
You want to discuss financial benefits? How about the financial benefits of selling a cure. If anyone patented a medicine that just cures cancer, they'd have a monopoly on it for 20 years. They'd make a bloody fortune.
You want to actually discuss basic human behaviour? How about the fact that each year a _lot_ of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, pharma corp managers, etc, die of cancer, AIDS, CJ, and other incurable diseases? Some contracted in the course of treating their patients.
You want to tell me that _any_ conspiracy can make one just prefer to die in pain, over 3 years, rather than just cure themselves, if that was possible? We're talking _death_. There are no fiscal benefits that would make millions of people worldwide go "you know, rather than lose that kinda money I'll just die." How about their children or other relatives? You want to tell me that _all_ those mothers would rather watch their children suffer and _die_, than research a cure for it?
You want a world-wide medical conspiracy? How about countries which didn't (and some still don't) even have medical insurance as a private business? Or all those communist countries where everything was owned by the state and which had their own independent research? How come _those_ didn't research those "obvious" cures?
I know at least one crackpot easter-european dictator even funded research in some "water of life" (as in, "fountain of youth") bullshit, because he was getting old and affraid to die. _That_ is human nature for you. As I've said, noone wants to die. Yet you want me to believe that all those thousands of party officials in the USSR or China, which personally had some of those diseases, or whose relatives had them, they too preferred to die than interfere with the USA pharma companies' profits?
"it's not particularly paranoid unless you have undergone some sort of brainwashing"
Actually that _is_ one of the tell-tale symptoms of paranoia. If you think everyone who doesn't believe your crack-pot theories has been "brainwashed", there's your clue that you're hallucinating.
"He'll generate more support for the theory he's arguing against by arguing against it than currently exists, would be my guess, since he's clearly supporting an effort to eliminate such evidence - for obvious (fiscally beneficial) reasons."
Dude, let's get one thing straight: you haven't presented _any_ evidence, much less established anything as "obvious". You just threw some insults around ("murderer and con artist"), and committed more fallacies than I can be bothered to count. Including again and again, including in the quoted paragraph, a mixture of "appeal to motives", "argumentum ad lazarum" (the ones with the money must automatically be wrong), and "poisoning the well". Look them up on Wikipedia, I can't be arsed to link to them this time.
So _of_ _course_, between (A) a science presenting verifiable experiments to base its conclusions on, and (B) some crackpot who doesn't present _anything_ but basically a "they must be murderers and part of a world-wide conspiracy because they are a successful industry" tantrum, I'll choose to believe the side with the actual data every time.
Not because of being brainwashed, not because of supporting some conspiracy efforts, but simply because you haven't presented _anything_ to support your paranoid theories on. Show me some actual evidence of people being murdered by their doctors, and _then_ I might believe your claim that it's an industry of murderers. But otherwise it's your personal hallucinations about "human nature" versus a mountain of verifiable scientiffic data.
Well, DW is by and large a collection of jokes and parodies. E.g., yeah, Terry Pratchett pokes fun at quicksaving there, just like he pokes fun at murder mysteries, vampire novels, and just about everything else. The DW world itself is a disc on 4 elefants on a Turtle, and in Small Gods you have people fighting the Inquisition's dogma that the world is round.
Basically you're not really supposed to take DW seriously.
I guess the same applies to games. I can accept OOC stuff in a game that is a parody. (E.g., in "Bard's Tale" the hero's talking to the narrator, or poking fun at such stapples of the genre as finding a whole chest and 20 items inside a wolf.)
The problem is that a lot of games are supposed to be taken more seriously, and their explanations aren't a parody or funny. They're just some mumbo-jumbo that doesn't even make sense in-character.
Since you mention Anachronox, it isn't the most guilty there, as it doesn't really go into much depth or detail. The most anyone says in-character about those critters is that they pet them for good luck, rather than them being save points. Weird superstitions existed IRL too, so I can live with that.
What I had in mind was more along the lines of Chrono Cross, where they even squeezed in some Big Brother kinda organization watching over you through those save points, to justify them. The fact that it broke the story, if you think about it logically, doesn't help there either. At that point, the whole "alternate universes based on different outcomes to one event" theme just didn't make any sense any more.
Picture this: so yesterday I re-install Planetside and its Core Combat expansion pack. And, naturally, spend almost two hours after that downloading patches. But I figure, wth, that's pretty much normal and expected for a MMO these days.
And what am I treated to? Some _long_ advertising movies I can't even skip. The first for some other expansion pack, the second for the Battleframes (think: mechs) that were introduced some time later.
Yep, some idiot at Sony's marketting dept decided that obviously "gamer" means I want to watch their idiotic ad movies, instead of playing the game I've paid for.
And for the real slap in the face, re-read the first paragraph. I've spent almost two hours downloading WHAT? Ad movies. (And presumably also the new maps with billboards, so Sony can advertise in-game too.)
Dunno, I found it to be nothing short of a slap in the face.
See, what annoyed me the most about FFX wasn't the quantity of cut-scenes as such, but the frequency with which they interrupted me for one.
Now I can understand that FF games are also a tech demo for Square's game engines, in much the same way Id's games are tech demos for Id's 3D engines. So Square presumably wanted to show off what they can do with their character's animations.
But here's the major difference: Id's games are quite enjoyable as FPS games go anyway. FFX for me was just an annoying turn-off after another.
I'd go 5 steps in one direction, Tidus would stop to stretch and say something. Do some 5 steps more, whop-de-do it's another short cut scene. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's that kind of constant interruptions that annoyed me far more than the total time spent in cut scenese as such. I've played games which had more minutes total spent in cutscenes, and/or more percentage of the total time spent in cut scenes. (E.g., "Sword Of The Berserk" on the Dreamcast was literally 75% cut scenes. It had about an hour and a half worth of FMV for about half an hour of actual game.) But, you know, they let me play a whole level before giving me a long-ish FMV, rather than interrupt me every 5 to 30 seconds for yet another brief and pointless pause.
It's also a matter of what they're used _for_. I can understand using cut-scenes and/or FMV for stuff that delivers some cinematic storytelling, for major plot elements or twists.
E.g., since I've already mentioned "Sword Of The Berserk", I actually liked the cut scenes there. They told a story, and told it well. You could piece them together and actually get a pretty good movie. Any way I want to imagine delivering that story in-game, e.g., by running around and clicking on NPCs, it just wouldn't be the same thing.
By comparison, in FFX the vast majority of interruptions seemed to be there _purely_ to showcase the engine, and didn't really do much for the story or plot. Tidus stopping to stretch and yawn, or whatever, just wasn't _necessary_ there.