Let me tell you a story, which hopefully should be a metaphor for the problem we have here: let's say someone made a game where thrown weapons do damage purely based on their weight. Hey, the programmer was tired, and that looked like a reasonable shortcut to take. So soon every single player runs around throwing grand pianos, instead of using throwing knives. Every other thief and assassin in the game carries a piano by now, and every other PvP situation involves throwing grand pianos and anvils at each other.
Quite predictably, really: players do what works.
So what would _you_ do there?
A) Shrug and accept it as normal (maybe even put a piano vendor next to the thief instructor), or
B) keep it like that, but try to ban/suspend everyone who ever threw a piano, although that's what your game encouraged them to do to start with, or
C) fix the broken code, which is the _real_ problem there?
I'm willing to bet that you picked (C) there. Right? I mean, well, duh.
Well, then why are you seeing only the first two options for the gold farming problem? There _is_ a third option there: you can also change the code and/or game design.
To put it bluntly, each game gets the players and behaviour it deserves.
Or let me explain it less bluntly: humans do what works, or find another game more to their liking. E.g., if sniping is disproportionately more rewarding in a FPS, it gets players who like to snipe, or just get a sniper rifle just because that's what works. So soon you get everyone kneeling in a dark corner with an AWP. E.g., if in a game thrown damage is based purely on weight, you _will_ get people throwing anvils and grand pianos instead of knives.
So basically my take is that if _any_ problem becomes rampant in a game, be it griefing or gold farming or whatever, it can be tracked to the game itself making that viable.
You could, of course, then either shrug and accept the problem as "normal" or "unavoidable", or try to deterr people from doing what the game encouraged them to do in the first place. But both are addressing the symptoms, not the underlying disease and its causes.
Or you could acknowledge that there's probably something in your game design itself that makes it possible and/or rewarding. And try to address the real cause, not the effects.
There are plenty of examples already of "social" problems that were solved through code. E.g., EQ and AC made a fortune by solving -- in code -- the rampant griefing that plagued UO at the time. Origin invented a genre and ended up in third place, because others made the game itself better address the grievances of the players of that genre.
I do believe that the same can apply to gold farming or to any other in-game problem: they _could_ address the causes, rather than try to sweep the symptoms under the carpet.
"We need better games. Games like Zelda don't appeal to white people because Link is white, it's because the game is fun."
Yes, "fun" for _whom_? "Better" by _whose_ tastes?
I wish more people realized one thing: there is no one single game which appeals to everyone. There is _no_ single scale from "crap" to "greatest game ever" that applies to everyone, when we're talking a matter of personal taste. Every single game ever made will appeal to some, and look like utter crap to someone else.
E.g., you mention Zelda games, and seem to like them. Well, I bloody hate them. E.g., conversely The Sims is the best selling PC game ever, and personally I loved it, yet you find plenty of people who'll argue that it's crap and boring. Etc.
"We need better games" sounds good and fine, but "better" for whom and in which way? If you ask 10 different people, chances are you'll get 10 different answers. E.g., my "better games" idea would mean more story, my father's idea would be more along the lines of "make them shut up already with that story and dialogue crap, and let me get directly to the fighting. If I wanted to read text, I'd get a book."
And cultural differences matter a lot in such matters of taste. E.g., look at what games get published in Japan, and some of them wouldn't even have a market at all in the USA. E.g., look at how in, say, Germany, economic sims are a much more major genre than seems to be the case in the USA.
Which is the whole problem. It's not whether Link is white or black, it's that the only group we know how to make games _for_ are white male nerds. We have a horde of white male nerds making games for white male nerds. Whether it matches anyone else's taste, is purely coincidence, and more often than not doesn't happen.
Heh. Nope. The games industry actually couldn't care less about affirmative action or racism as such. They would just like to make games which _sell_ to more/other demographic groups. A larger market is better than being pegged in a niche, that's all.
This isn't unique to the game industry. E.g., TV stations too like to make different shows for different demographics. You have shows that are filmed explicitly with women in mind, shows that are aimed at minorities, etc.
The thing is, not everyone likes the same games, just like not everyone likes the same TV shows or the same books. And if you read/. at all, you probably couldn't have missed that _the_ number one argument given for P2P is basically "but what if I'm looking for other music than the girl-band/boy-band crap flooding MTV and the stores? On P2P I can find indie stuff that the local stores never even heard of."
And cultural differences can matter a lot in such matters of taste. E.g., you'd be surprised how much effort Hollywood puts into making sure their movies sell abroad too, to people whose cultures doesn't quite match the USA. E.g., you'd be surprised how vastly different the marketting of the exact same product can be for different countries and cultures.
The fact also is that people are good at designing/selecting stuff they understand and like themselves. I.e., if they basically make a game for themselves. You get a good RPG if it's designed by people who love RPGs, you get crap if people who don't even understand them try to clone last year's bestseller... without even understanding what made it a bestseller.
Having just one demographics group in control of an industry, is a sure way to make stuff that appeals _only_ to that demographic.
E.g., picture what would happen if 16 year old girls were in control of the music industry. Right. The _only_ music you'd ever hear or see on shelves would be aimed at 16 year old girls. Better start liking boy bands, because that's all you're gonna hear for a long time.
Well, the same has arguably already happened to the games industry. You get an industry controlled and populated by white male nerds, they make games which appeal to white male nerds.
Thing is, the industry started for example with a 50-50 gender distribution for gamers, back in the days of Pong and PacMan. Then it slowly slided to today's "chicks don't play games" point that you can see argued again and again on/. and other sites. (Which isn't strictly true as such, but still, there is on the whole a disparity in numbers.)
What happened is that in the meantime noone even knows _what_ kind of game to make for women, or _how_ to market a game to women. And much less wth kind of games would sell better to blacks, hispanics, etc.
It's not necessarily a matter of racism or sexism as such, but just that the games reflect the tastes of exactly one single group: white male nerds. It's just damn hard to fine-tune something for a market segment you're not in and don't even understand, other than broad-sweeping generalizations and second guesses.
E.g., without any prejudice or discrimination against soccer fans involved, if I were to make a game for those, seeing as I hate soccer, I wouldn't even know where to start, much less how to fine-tune it to appeal perfectly to them.
And again all that's happening is that, with production costs rising out of control, the producers would like to enlarge the market. They couldn't care less about women, blacks, whatever as such. They just want more of their money. That's all.
So the current fad is basically "hey, maybe we can let women make games for women. They know what they like, right?" (And ditto for blacks, hispanics, etc.)
And unlike him, I did play a lot of them, including, in no particular order: UO, AC, AO, Mimesis Online, COH and WOW.
"Games are designed to have time sinks in them and to keep you playing so you shell out that extra $15. Generally this involves a lot of boring stuff with some excitement sprinkled throughout."
First of all: No. It's only MMOs who are designed like that. Normal games are (or at least used to) be designed to be fun, not as 2 hours of actual content stretched over 10,000 hours of playing time.
I don't think that when they designed Pong, Missile Command or PacMan, or any of the other games that defined what gaming is, they thought, "nah, we'll make him run from Westfall to Redridge and back, before he's allowed to start the next round", or any of the other pure time-sinks that MMOs have. Some may have failed to be fun, but nevertheless they were designed with that goal, not as an exercise in time-sinks. And between those and the rise of the MMOs, it tended to stay that way.
So all you're telling me is that a MMO is designed to be anything _but_ a game.
Second: Yes, I can understand why Vivendi's and Blizzard's marketroids would want to stretch content over as many months as possible, at 15 dollars a month. That much is obvious.
The ones I don't understand, are the players who (A) pay 15$/month for something they'd rather skip, and (B) pay some more to get someone to skip it for them. Why? Why not just do something you actually like, instead of something you'd rather skip?
So, no, I don't think his comparison is bad at all, and I don't think different standards should apply to MMOs than to anything else. Whether it's a game, or a movie, or watching football on TV, or taking digital photos of squirrels in the park, the same applies: are _you_ having fun or not? If you wish you could skip it, then you're not.
Don't get me wrong, if you're at least having fun, ok, keep paying for it. But if you'd actually pay RL money to skip 90% of the game, then I'll have to say he's right: then why are you playing it in the first place?
Again, that applies to any hobby or kind of entertainment. If you ever find yourself thinking "damn, it's time to go photograph those f-ing squirrels again. I wish I could just pay someone else to go photograph squirrels for me", then digital photography isn't the hobby for you. If you find yourself thinking "damn, not another f-ing football match. Can't I pay someone to watch it for me and tell me the score?" then you'd do well to find another hobby than spectator sports. Etc.
Having played PSO on the Dreamcast, I can second that: Sega did an outstanding job there. Been saying it all along. So I'm not gonna disaggree with the general idea.
But you do illustrate a point that's starting to irk me about MMOs as a whole. And while Sega did it better than others, I would argue that they're still just doing it "less wrong":
"- it's extremely easy to amass more money than you'll ever spend."
Well, my point is: why not go the whole way, then, and elliminate money altogether?
The whole economic model of MMOs, including the sharp ramp in loot and prices at the high end is basically stuck in a SP RPG model. Everyone seems to assume that they _have_ to have gold pieces and an economy, but that's just begging the question.
So... WHY? That whole model was just a _prop_ in SP or PnP RPGs, not the alpha and the omega. And it _only_ worked as a balancing factor _because_ it was SP or PnP and you had no external source of money.
When you throw 3 million players into a game, it all falls apart. Gold _will_ flow from one end to another, and won't even just cause RL money to be paid, it will also end up unbalancing the game instead of balancing it. The more you use gold to balance the game, the more you create a disparity between the guy who bought gold on ebay and is strutting around in the best enchanted gear, and the one who didn't and can barely afford rags and a sword 10 levels lower.
As a way to balance the game, this prop just doesn't work and causes more problem than it solves.
So why do devs insist on using it? Why not elliminate money altogether and/or make the game be more skill-based than equipment based?
There are perfectly good games and systems that _don't_ need you to buy a new broadsword every 5 levels. E.g., CoH: you improve your attacks, not buy a new sword. (But unfortunately, they too had to shoehorn a dysfunctional kind of currency in, in another way.)
The same could work in WoW or any other game: make character development count for more, and the dps difference between a level 10 sword and a level 20 one be a lot less, and it will dramatically reduce the pressure to buy a new sword even for RL money if all else fails.
There are also games which already proved that they can work without gold or bought equipment. E.g., Planetside: what equipment you can get is determined by your certifications, and you get 1 certification point per level. So while equipment does matter a lot, it's tied into the character development, not bought for gold.
Again, the same could work in a lot of other games.
So basically that's my wish and pipe-dream: that instead of sticking to a dysfunctional prop, just because it's traditional, some game designer will sit and rethink the whole concept.
"Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon."
The problem you illustrate there is the whole disparity in what 1 gold is worth to a level 60 and what it's worth to a level 6. To the former (even if you weren't already maxxed and basically not needing gold any more) 1 gold won't even buy you a cape for your level, to the latter it buys you _all_ the best equipment and 5 bags.
And also the former can make 1 gold real quick, the latter gets 2 to 6 copper per killed NPC.
Or for a non-WoW example, consider this: in CoH a level 50 (max level there) can make 3 million in a single mission, and doesn't need it any more. But for a new player, 3 million will get you all the best equipment until level 30. Literally.
Think of it as a resource, not as money (ok, so money is a resource too.) You have Group A, which produces tons of a resource _and_ they have lower need/use out of a unit of it, and Group B which produces next to none _and_ they need it badly.
It just _begs_ for an "export" to take place. Group B _will_ get (or try to get) that resource from Group A. By whatever means it takes. (RL money, begging, virtual prostitution, sucking up to someone's ego, using your own high level alts if you have any, etc.)
E.g., replace "gold" with "oil", and Group A = Saudi Arabia, Group B = Japan (which produces as much oil in a year as they consume in a week), and you have a real-world equivalent to that situation.
And what I'd want to see is a game which fixes the economy, among others by eliminating this disparity, rather than complain that such transfers take place. Unless you stop the phenomenon that money (or any other resource) is abbundant and worthless at one end, but scarce and valuable at the other, a flow _will_ happen between the two. Complaining about it is like complaining that water flows downhill.
I'm not sure how it can be fixed though. Maybe elliminate money altogether? It's a less crazy idea than you'd think.
Planetside did just that: since you're a soldier, you are given your equipment, you don't buy it. Since you're a soldier, the flip side also applies: you're not allowed to even touch anything you're not certified for. So the balancing factor are your certifications, not gold pieces. It works flawlessly there, and certifications can't be sold on ebay.
I can see the same working in a lot of other games. E.g., take CoH. It doesn't even have equipment as such. The "equipment" are improvements to your super-powers: flying faster, punching harder, whatever. Why can't that be modelled without money? You could let players just select one such improvement at each level-up, and the game would remain largely the same.
The problem is the difference between raw data and useful information.
When you look through a list of restaurants (or the list of anything in the yellow pages), you're looking at something put together based on _semantics_. Some human put that list together and made sure the _meaning_ is what you'd expect there: you can actually drive to one of those locations and order food.
Search engines, on the other hand, just look at the words and have no bloody clue of semantics.
If someone ever put together a list of restaurants, it would just be a list of all people who ever said the word "restaurant". Including everyone who ever said "I hate chinese restaurants" or "I took my gf to a restaurant" or "I went to see a new apartment, but it was above a restaurant" or whatever. Needless to say, driving to most of those locations would be a bloody useless exercise.
Adding another 20 million people to that kind of indexing would just raise the noise-to-signal ratio, not actually produce anything useful.
Well, that's very insightful, but more or less that's the whole point: all these "my theory will save the world" theorists present their pet theory as something sure and guaranteed. You just need to sign here and transfer 20 billion USD here, and you're _guaranteed_ to get these unbelievably huge quantities of minerals practically for free. (Or whatever other miracle solution is being peddled.)
And if it was that clearly cut and obvious, someone would have already done it. The reverse side of that risk management that you mention (and is indeed very real), is that if such a venture was guaranteed to bring a 12% profit, chances are good they _will_ invest in it. Or if not them, someone else will.
Corporations may be weary in investing in fundamentally new stuff to try, but here we're talking mining and transport, really. They already can know _exactly_ how much it costs to transport a ton to moon or back, how much do they need to pay for machinery and buildings, can get a pretty accurate estimate of the probability to get a direct meteor hit per year (which translates into insurance rate), etc.
I.e., if a corporation wants to get exact numbers on that, I believe they can get very exact numbers.
"Hindsight is 20/20. Given hindsight, the "free" market failed to fund a lot of profitable ventures: the interstate rail and highway systems, the secondary education system, the power grid, the communications infrastructure."
The phone infrastructure, they did get into and, at least in the USA, it took legal action to break that monopoly. I also believe that most of the history of the railway system development was in fact a case of private companies at work. Electricity production and distribution, again, was a case of private enterprise. (Including such trivia as Edison selling light bulbs under the production cost, to create a market for them and demand for electricity.) Education too. I believe there are a ton of private schools, high schools, and universities which are basically run as private companies or foundations. Plus, companies routinely pay to educate/specialize their workers.
In a lot of those cases government intervention was needed to make the owner play fair (break a monopoly, nationalize a vital resource, etc) but they weren't really built by the government or anything.
Where it gets fuzzier are things which are basically for the good of society as a whole, rather than for a clear-cut ROI.
E.g., while private companies did lay railroad tracks for their own trains (and _only_ their own being allowed on those tracks), building highways and roads for everyone's trucks and cars wasn't really promising that much of a ROI.
E.g., while companies do routinely school their own employees, running a high-school doesn't guarantee they'll work for _you_ at the end or that you'll make much money out of running it. (Although examples do exist, such as the Waldorf Schools, started with funding from the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Company.)
Basically I'm not saying you're wrong as a whole. Quite the opposite. Companies do invest in things which look like they'll bring a guaranteed profit, and generally stay away from funding the common good of society.
But that applies IMHO to minerals from the moon too. We're not talking bringing minerals for the common good of society, we're talking that if it was indeed cheaper to bring minerals from there, someone would make a very direct profit for doing so. If there was a good economic case for that, I suspect someone will get into it.
"When/If the awful end comes, dont you think that if anyone will have seen it coming, it will be "an alarmist"?"
When/if the awful end comes, I expect a scientist to see it coming.
For starters, that's where the alarmist save-the-world crowd get (and then pervert) their ideas from. First comes the scientist who measures something, and only _then_ some doomsday prophet takes that and perverts it into a doomsday scare story to save the world from.
E.g., it wasn't the eco-scare folks who measured the 1 degree celsius rise in a whole century (which started the global warming madness), it was first measured and plotted by some meteorologsists. The eco-scare gang only then came and took over the idea.
So I'll just cut the middleman (especially the kind of middleman who doesn't even understand it, but is in it just to feel important by "saving the world") and get my facts directly from the scientists.
Same with a clock, really. If I think it's broken, I won't take my time from it at all. Not to see which time it is, not to see the time it isn't. I'll NTP to a reference atomic clock instead.
When/if the time comes, chances are about 11 out of 12, or about 92%, that the broken clock won't just show the wrong time, but the wrong hour altogether. Likewise when/if the awful end comes, probably the doomsday prophets will be in dada land, whining about some completely other topic.
E.g., if the awful end comes as a hydrogen-producing bacteria run amok and massive glaciation, the currently fashionable scare-story would be that sex causes cholesterol and everyone should stop doing it. Or that the sudden drop in temperature is really still global warming. Or whatever unrelated.
Science more or less just says what _is_. I.e., what happened or what can happen.
There's nothing inherently "scary" in it. It's just trying to understand how the universe works. The universe as such, isn't either "good" or "evil", "friendly" or "scary". It just "is".
It only starts to be "scary" when sensationalist journalists and wannabe messiahs take that science and repack it as yet another doomsday theory.
"Here's how (we think) something happened a billion years ago" doesn't quite sell newspapers, outside academic circles. Yeah, those cyanobacteria were mean mofos, but how does that affect me nowadays? "If this happens tomorrow, we're all DOOMED!" however seems to. It's suddenly presented as something that is, or can be, your problem.
So guess which of the two will journos spin the story as. Right.
And then come the wannabe messiahs. There are people who actually need a good doomsday theory, and need to imagine that they're fighting to save the world. Preferrably one by which everyone else is a morally bankrupt bastard, if they don't immediately change their lifestyle.
Some people just _need_ that warm fuzzy "I'm fighting to save the world" (and you all are morally bankrupt bastards contributing to the problem) feeling. Gives their lives some meaning, I guess.
So once some journo has spun a story into something scary enough, a group of these _will_ rally around it, proclaim it to be The Ultimate Truth, and put it on a banner for their next crusade.
And where I'm getting at with this long rant, is that it's not scientists that are waving around all these contradicting doomsday theories. (And much less as ultimate truths. Science has _no_ ultimate truth set in stone.) The ones you're seeing making the doomsday fuss are the journos and these wannabe messiah groups, not the scientists who are measuring oxygen concentration in rocks.
And yes, you have correctly noted that fashionable doomsday theories do conveniently omit any factors which might even things out.
"The point of my post was that the earth has limited resources and therefore cannot support the current or future world population at a standard of living that is acceptable."
Ok, I'll bite. _Which_ resources doesn't it have enough to sustain an 8 billion population? Because it produces currently a surplus of food, has enough uranium for centuries, has iron under almost literally every hill or mountain, and it can synthetize fuel and plastics from any other source of energy (e.g., nuclear.) So _what_ materials do you absolutely need to bring from the moon?
"For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources."
"Unthinkably large" sounds cool, but:
A) Exactly how much _is_ "unthinkably large"? More than the exact same money (including, salaries, supplies, shipping, etc) would get you from a mine on Earth? Enough to not be lost in the decimals, compared to what millions of people already extract on Earth?
B) What's the price per ton to transport it, and to transport supplies back? There's a good reason why you get raw materials or oil imported by train or ship, not by airplane: cost per ton transported.
"Of course, next you're gunna claim there are no resources on the moon and that the only way forward is to huddle in the dark as we use up all the resources on earth."
Actually, next I'm gonna claim you need to read a book on economics. Might be a fascinating read.
The question isn't just whether there are resources on the Moon worth getting, but whether it's cheaper to get them from there. That's how the economy still works here on Earth, I'm affraid.
There's a lot of "plan B"s out there, that are perfectly feasible, but aren't done because "plan A" is still cheaper. E.g., why the USA prefers to import oil than to extract its own. Or for that matter than to synthesize it from coal, or to switch to hydrogen cars and nuclear power to produce the hydrogen, or whatever.
If 20 billion USD was all it takes to bring a lot of cheap resources from the moon, that is, cheaper than you can get them on Earth, some corporation would already do that.
But maybe we'll do something else first. Yours is not the only solution, but just one possible "plan B" in a list of _thousands_. Humanity has a _lot_ of already existing options before huddling in the dark or mass-murder, and more are already being researched. (Of course, it makes a better doomsday whine if you ignore them.)
Which of them will be used next and when, will have to do with economics, not with what looks way cool to SF fanboys. _Maybe_ some day bringing iron ore from the moon will be cheaper than digging it from under a mountain on Earth. But maybe we'll just use plastics and composite materials produced with fusion power instead. Or maybe something else.
When one such "plan B" becomes cheaper, or the current "plan A" becomes too expensive, we will know it, and do it then. That's how the economy works.
"Or to put it less tactfully: poor people breed faster than rich people."
There is a transition point in any country, and yes even America and Western Europe had it, from (A) high mortality including infant mortality, must make 10 kids so maybe 2-3 survive, to (B) chances are good they'll all survive, so no point in breeding like rabbits anyway. That point is mainly a question of not even being "rich", but simply of access to sanitation and basic medical care.
And it takes a while for the "no point in breeding like rabbits" notion to sink in. At that transition point there's a generation or two which basically still doesn't know or get it. They still try to make as many kids as they can, so some will survive, but, surprise, this time most or all survive. So there's a temporary population boom. Then the idea sinks in and it's ok from there.
Most of the western world is already past that point. Other countries started much later, so they're still in the trailing edge of that population boom. That's all.
But even there the keywords are: trailing edge. As was mentioned, the global growth is already decreasing pretty quickly.
"Personally I don't think there's a choice. We must expand into space."
You want to do... what? Send all the poor into space colonies? Have you actually calculated how many millions it takes to put even 1 man on the moon? Now add the cost of building self-sustaining habitable space, shipping suplies and resources back and forth, etc.
Now multiply that by, say, 1 billion people, if the goal is to reduce population on earth by any signifficant amount.
Right. For a _tiny_ fraction of that cost you could just provide the most basic sanitation and medical care them, and not worry about overpopulation any more. Again, you don't need to make everyone rich.
And even if you wanted to make everyone "rich", there are better ways than blowing several million dollars _per_ _person_ to put them on Mars. And it's happening without government intervention anyway. That's what globalization does: all those jobs and factories in poor countries, a lot of which end up producing for local consumption anyway, _are_ raising their standard of living.
"You are either for the expansion of growth of the human population off the earth and into space or you are for mass murder and restricted personal liberty to control population growth here on earth."
Ah, right, was wondering where we'd get the mandatory appeal to humanity or some other tried-and tested fallacy. Would have been too good to actually have a coherent logical argument, instead of reaching for the fallacies, but I guess that was an unrealistic expectation.
No, I'm for using the money in a way that actually benefits us all, rather than on unrealistic SF stuff. Space colonization may give trekies and SW fans a hard-on, but right now it's simply not a realistic option.
"Of course, there's also the third option. The so called what, me worry? approach. Which is to just pop your hands over your ears and sing "lalalalalala" and hope the whole issue will go away."
Or here's a fourth: actually get a clue, use logic and facts, instead of going on a SF bullshit spree and emotional appeals to humanity.
Being good and experienced at programming doesn't just involve getting the code done and compiling. It also involves having some clue about stuff like security, good design, and generally knowing a lot more than just how to printf("hello world.")
The corporation I work for had at some point decided to replace an existing, working system with a monstrosity that had more buzzwords. So a team from a BIG corporation contracted the work, and took a couple of years at it, until finally the project was scrapped.
By the time it was scrapped, the code they had produced, although it did compile, had major problems, including fatal security issues. (And it also needed a cluster of two dozen servers to serve the same number of users as the old system did on 1 server. And took several hours to even start or stop. Literally.) Among other problems:
- they consistently assumed that the _only_ way to reach a page was to click on a link, so they didn't have to check rights again when rendering it. The user wouldn't have gotten the link to it, if he didn't already have the rights, right?
Wrong. By such trivial means as just editing the user id in the URL to 0, you could become super-user or change anyone else's password. (E.g., the super-user's.) And basically gain full admin rights to a corporate site.
- they failed _repeatedly_ to quote text displayed on the site. So you could simply type some JavaScript code in a text box, and have it execute (e.g., on mouse-over) in the browser of whoever views that post or offer. Again, one possible and demonstrated use was to steal or change someone's data, including an admin's.
- they failed _repeatedly_ to quote text used in SQL queries. So basically you just needed to input something like '" OR "1"="1' in the search field, and you'd get all the records on the system.
- they failed to even conside "non-repudiation". If a user cancelled their account, a cascaded delete would ensue, deleting _all_ the data about that user or from that user, including contracts. It was suddenly as if that user had never even existed, ordered or paid anything.
Etc.
We're talking about a B2B e-commerce site, with contracts worth millions, not about someone's blog about their cats. And it had gapping holes bigger than the goatse guy, for f**k's sake. As they wanted to ship it, it _literally_ allowed anyone to access any data and escalate their privileges to the max, in just a few kestrokes.
_That_ is a problem with making software with a team of incompetent monkeys. It's not just that they take longer to produce the code, or that it might need more debugging. It's that they just don't have the skill or knowledge to judge (or even consider) the implications of the choices they're doing at each step.
"I love it when people try shit like this with programmers. Thank Goddess for GUI automation tools! But mostly it's a helpful sign that you're not working for a good company, and should be looking."
Well, that _is_ why we had to do their programs, this this timekeeping monstrosity included. As I later found out, they used to be a software house. Only after they hired the "golden rule" boy, _all_ their designers and programmers quit en masse. Some 6 months later the "golden rule" boy still needed to sub-contract everything to others companies.
Obviously, his conclusion was that he wasn't oppressive enough, since that's about the time we were asked to do that timekeeping monstrosity for him.
"And that, OTOH, is a good sign. Sucky management is by no means unique to IT. Assholes are everywhere. A company that's willing to fire bad managers is at least not totally hopeless."
True, but still, the aforementioned farce had continued for about 1 year before they finally fired him. It's not just that he was mean to the employees and managed to not have many left, but he had alienated a lot of the company's partners and bled money hand-over-fist before someone finally stepped in and fired him.
So, well, while I won't lose any sleep over it, it still makes me idly wonder if in the end all that mattered were the lost profits. If he had managed to be a total asshole that nevertheless turned a profit, can it be that he'd still be there, ranting about how he's the man with the gold?
The reality is a bit more complex than that "oh, they'd be griping anyway" over-simplification. A lot of working places really _are_ bad at showing any appreciation, if they actually appreciate their employees.
Yes, the trade takes a long time to learn, and I can certainly realize that after over 20 years of programming computers. But that also means enough time to see such "employee appreciation" as:
- control-freak PHB's.
True story: I've worked a couple of years for someone who genuinely thought that he needs to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it makes Netscape load faster. I swear to God I'm not making it up.
True story: we had to make a nazi time-keeping program for another company. Think popping up every few minutes to ask you if you still work on the project. And if within 1 minute you didn't click on "Yes" (e.g., because you needed to go talk to another co-worker about that very project), it would close the project and mark you as idle.
- people who think that negative feedback and threats are the only thing that motivates their team, and god forbid ever telling someone "you've done a good job" would turn someone into a slacker.
I could give a personal example again, but a sadder one are the recent stories about a HP PHB making "it could be YOUR job that moves to India next" the corporate motivational motto. Yeah, that sooo makes people feel "appreciated." Not.
- Pushing people to do massive unpaid overtime. Often not even as a desperate crunch phase at the end, but actually planning from the start that you can use and abuse people for 84 hours a week.
E.g., see the famous EA employee's blog. E.g., see the fucktard, the name escapes me at the moment, who was complaining that the VC-appointed CEO ruined his company by letting programmers work only 40 hours a week.
True story: Dunno about you, but having someone (A) override my time estimates on the _explicit_ assumption that he can use me twice as many hours a week anyway, and (B) have him then tell me crap like "wth do you need free wekends for anyway? You'd just sit in front of a computer anyway" and then "ok, then I'll cut your salary if you only want to work 40 hours a week" (i.e., "only" the time in my contract)... doesn't exactly tell me "you're appreciated". (And, yes, I did quit after that.)
- Huge egos.
True story: the company with the nazi timekeeping program again. Among many other nasty experiences with the boss there when we delivered the program (such as demanding that we bring sleeping bags and noone leaves until we undo the changes that his representative had asked us to do), one thing that irked me was his repeating about twice per hour, "The golden rule is: whoever has the gold makes the rules. And that's me." So, hey, he's the guy with the gold, everyone must obey him like they're serfs. If he says bring a sleeping bag and sleep here on the floor tonight, you're supposed to say "yes, sir!" because he's the guy with the gold, you know.
(Tangent: I had assumed he was the company owner or something, the way he kept repeating that he's the one with the gold. Turned out he was just an employee, which they fired later for horrible job performance.)
- Seeing purchases and decisions made by blatantly disregarding the feedback of the programmers/IT workers who'll actually use that crap, and trusting the nice snake-oil salesman instead.
Yeah, it so says "appreciated" to see you're not even trusted to know the language you program in, the architecture you've designed, or the IDE you program in. Surely a high level manager coming from, say, the automotive industry knows better than you, and is more qualified than the programmers to decide such stuff.
Etc.
Basically, trust me, if the only reason to "gripe" you've seen so far is "but I wanna be senior developper at 20 years old", then you have a damn good job. Hang onto it at all cost. In the rest of the world, there are far worse gripes than that.
First of all, all I'm saying is basically "I'd find it funny if Nintendo, of all people, would file an anti-trust lawsuit." I'm not saying I'd (still) want to see them bankrupt, or that they're necessarily still assholes, just that... well, it would be "inconsistent", for lack of a better word.
Some people, e.g., Microsoft, are at least consistent in their insisting that any economic regulations should be abolished altogether, and one should be free to abuse the market as one sees fit. Look at every pro-MS paid-by-MS new economic theory, and they're very consistent in hammering on the same idea: "monopolies don't exist, there's no such thing as anti-competitive behaviour, having complete control of a market is just normal ideal capitalism, bla, bla, bla."
But _if_ a monopoly (be it MS or Nintendo) actually filed an anti-trust lawsuit against someone else... it would mean, what? "We believe that the economic laws should apply to everyone _except_ us"? I _hope_ even Nintendo won't sink _that_ low.
Second, you probably do realize that the second message is the perfect disproval of the first answer you wrote.
Yes, all companies are out there primarily to make money, and I don't expect anyone to be cuddly care-bears. Or not stay long in business if they are.
But there are varying degrees as to how nasty they are. There are people who at least play reasonably nice with their _partners_, and there are people who are like "we're the Big N, you'll lick our boots and sign yourself into slavery if you want to do any kind of business with us." You yourself give Iwata as an example of the first and Yamauchi as an example of the second, which just makes my point that this kind of distinction exists.
So, no, I'm not condemning anyone for trying to make a buck. But I am disgusted by those who aren't just complete assholes and bullies, but _knowingly_ break the laws too in pursuit of that money. And in that aspect, I am thoroughly disgusted when I think of (the old) Nintendo.
And I'm not necessarily singling them out. Yes, I'm disgusted by a dozen other companies as well, but this was a sub-tread about Nintendo. I think if I wented to rant and rave about, say, SCO in it, it would be off-topic.
Actually, we already _are_ using software agents to work a lot faster. Compilers, IDEs, frameworks, you name it. That's what they're there for.
Agents to help decision making? Well, that's what syntax highlighting, auto-completion, help files, and other tools in the IDE do for me. They let me decide faster what can I use there.
(Which also addresses the flood of "ugh! they're making Clippy!" posts. There are at least a dozen tools I use every day that aren't Clippy. Just because one tool is retarded, doesn't mean they all are.)
And they _do_ allow us to achieve deadlines that were unthinkable back in the days of coding in hex/octal and counting the bytes by hand.
The problem isn't the reliance on _good_ tools. The problem is, well, bad management. (Including buying the wrong tools, but that's a topic for itself.)
I really hope more managers will read threads like these, because there's one important message there: stressed people make more mistakes. And according to other studies, some of which were linked to by/. too, tired people make more mistakes too.
And between those two, you have the whole picture of what's wrong with 84 hour weeks and other PHB-style management techniques. It's not that programmers aren't soldiers. It's just that humans (programmers, soldiers, etc) are not machines. A computer can work on SETI packets 24x7 and do proportionally more work than 8x5. A human can't.
Since in programming most of the time is spent in debugging and maintenance, not in just typing code, past a point it's exactly that making more mistakes (which need to be debugged... again) and taking weird shortcuts (which will bog down maintenance) that's ending up costing more time than it saves.
Not that I'm setting my hopes too high, though. There are managers which do have a clue, and then there are the PHB's. Those who fall in the second category, well, I just can't see them getting a clue, even if it was written in big letters on a billboard in front of their office.
Well, I'm not saying that the should stop making Doom 3 and the like. It's just, you know, whishful thinking. As in, I wish someone figured out a way to make that learning curve more accessible for new gamers, that's all.
In other words, the _only_ thing that stopped them was losing that monopoly position, not growing a conscience or anything.
Nintendo kept their arrogant "we're the Big N, it's you who'll come crying back to us" until the very end of the N64 era. Even when Sony had already taken most of their market, Ninendo was still shooting off its mouth with crap along the lines of "we have all the games we need. It's Sony who'll go bankrupt for publishing so many games."
The only moment when Nintendo stopped acting like a bully was... when they no longer were in a position to do it. It's like saying "yeah, but he stopped punching people in the face after he ended up in a wheelchair" about the school bully.
I'm not gonna draw and quarter Nintendo for what happened in the past, but I hope you'll understand it if I'm still less than impressed about the new "good guys" face. They've stopped being nasty _only_ because they're no longer able to play nasty. (Or not without commiting corporate suicide in the process.) They didn't grow a concience, they were, simply put, declawed. That's all.
If they ever ended up at the top again, I _fully_ expect them to start acting like total assholes all over again.
Ah, well, I'm not saying Nintendo should go out of business or anything. You're, of course, right. Competition is great for us consumers, and I very much like it staying that way.
Just saying basically what you say, that they're certainly no saints. While nowadays they do have the positive effect of being _some_ extra competition in the market, they never really were the "good guys" in any form or shape.
As for "kid friendly"... Well, I think "kid friendly" can also simply mean that they publish a lot of games for children. As in, you know, if you had a little kid, it might be easier to get him/her started on some Nintendo games than on FFX or Kotor. Which is technically true.
Now I don't think that publishing games for kids means being angelic or anything. Nintendo hung onto the "kid-friendly" image and censored even the _word_ "blood" as long as they thought it's the PR image that sells more consoles. _But_ they had no problem doing a sharp 180 degree turn and raping a child-friendly franchise by turning it into a splatter- and cussing-fest, when it finally dawned upon them that the adults are a richer market and the "kids' console" image is costing them market share. Nothing says "it was just a PR image" like seeing them swing to the exact opposite extreme when it looks more profitable.
Let's face it, Nintendo applied the "we'll give consoles at a loss, and overcharge for games" model long before Sony or MS were anywhere near interested in consoles at all.
So Nintendo's case in an anti-trust lawsuit would be... what? "Your honour, they did the _exact_ same thing we did, but took a bigger loss"? I think the judge would have to call a recess just to stop laughing.
Plus, it's sorta ironic, that what goes around comes around. And I don't just mean dumping prices on hardware. Nintendo, for all its other merits, was a far nastier monopolist than MS when it was at the top.
Anyone else remember the exclusivity contracts they made developpers sign? No, I don't mean the _nice_ MS way of "we'll give you a big wad of cash if you give one exclusivity on this one game for a year." Nosiree, bob. Nintendo's version was more like signing yourself into exclusive serfdom, for life. Sorta "we're the Big N, we're King. If you want to be allowed to develop for our console, you worthless insignifficant peon, sign there that you're not allowed to _ever_ publish _any_ game for any other system."
Took some desperate lawsuits to get that crap declared illegal.
Remember the anti-competitive behaviour in Europe? Yeah, Nintendo got convicted and fined as a monopolist over here. Not only that, but they cheerfully continued doing it during the trial, on the explicit assumption that they'll make more money out of it than the EU can fine them. Much to their surprise, the EU had a nastier bite than Nintendo estimated. But still, it's the kind of "we know we're breaking the law, but you can't stop us" behaviour that we condemn Microsoft for.
So I find it sorta strange to see much the same gang on/. booing MS and cheering a far worse monopolist.
Either way, I'd find it bloody hillarious if Nintendo filed an anti-trust lawsuit. It would be like seeing Microsoft filing anti-trust against someone. _That_ surrealistic.
Yep, I wholeheartedly aggree with your whole message.
Once Linux started shipping on CD's, as opposed to the early stack-o-floppies installs, the first reaction was to install and activate everything they could possibly download and pack on that CD.
(And I suppose the fact that at the time the flamewar was "but my Linux system gives me more free stuff than your Windows comes with", also didn't help the cause. Everyone just _had_ to pack 5 web servers and 20 IRC clients on a CD, and offer to install them by default, just to brag about how much more stuff they include than MS does.)
I didn't use RH at the time, but I do still remember installing SuSE in 1999. (Although I did briefly have Linux installed too, the stack-o-floppies way, prior to 1999 I was by and large an OS/2 fanboy.)
Ooer. Now that offered to install everything and the kitchen sink by default, and pretty much everything depended on everything else. I _know_ at least Apache was installed and started by default, because some documentation module depended on it. But it's more like it offered to install and start by default some 2-3 web servers, _and_ MySQL and god knows what else.
By comparison, nowadays most distros got a bit more clue. And then there's Gentoo. I'm not the biggest fan of Gentoo generally, but there you only have the stuff you've emerged, and the stuff it had a dependency on. If you haven't explicitly emerged Apache or PHP or such, there's just no way you'll have a web server on that machine.
And, yeah, you're right about the heavyweight GUIs and desktop managers. Looking back in retrospect at the times when we used to brag "my Linux starts faster and uses less memory" with a straight face, I have to wonder where and what went wrong.
I still remember compiling and starting KDE 2.0 on my old 128 MB K6-III. I mean, gah, all my memory was used up with just that and X before I even started any programs. And it just went downhill from there. Nowadays Windows XP actually loads faster, used up less RAM and is more responsive than a KDE 3.x desktop, and that's just bloody sad.
Mind you, I too use a more lightweight desktop, which keeps things a lot snappier. I'm on XFCE at the moment, and for a long time I was a IceWM+DFM proponent. Gave me something pretty close to a Windows desktop (DFM managed the desktop nicely, IceWM took care of the task bar and menu) on a couple of megs RAM.
But still, as soon as I load a couple of programs, I get all the GNOME2 and KDE libraries in RAM anyway.
"Not everybody comes to computer gaming and starts trying to play Doom III right off the bat, and your entire tone has assumed that they do"
They can't, that is the whole point. It's one thing to arrive at Doom 3 via Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem, get used to full mouse-look in Bethesda's Terminator Future Shock (which invented full mouse-look), etc, and a whole other thing to even try starting from scratch.
The problem is that all those stepping stones we've had have all but disappeared. Even if you start on Mario Party, Katamari Damacy or The Sims, then what? There's no obvious easy path from there to, say, a modern FPS or MMO. Someone who wants to make the jump must basically just bite the bullet and spend some non-fun time trying to assimilate in two weeks what we've learned in two decades.
I know it took _years_ to get my father to even try a full 3D game. I still remember trying to get him started on Unreal. The whole jump-and-crawl-and-aim-in-3D confused him no end, and he decided he's better off without it.
"Also consider that the average hand-eye coordination of the general populace has probably increased dramatically over the last two decades. Even adults who don't play video games learn to operate with a mouse and keyboard; if not for work then as some small part of their own recreational time."
Both my parents work with a keyboard and mouse every day. I come from a family of professional nerds. But because you can click on a toolbar in a compiler, doesn't mean you're anywhere near natural at jump-puzzles and whatever.
And if you move into more complex stuff, like MMOs, it's not even the eye-hand coordination any more, it's a whole bunch of concepts that you're supposed to already know and reflexes you're supposed to already have.
"I'd be willing to bet those signs are so BIG AND FLASHY AND OVERWHELMING is because the games they're trying to sell are in a very competitive market, and they have to be in order to get anyone's attention."
There's nothing to bet about that, that's just a fact.
Still, what would _you_ propose then that a new gamer should do. Say I had never played a game before, and walked into a shop. I'm not even a kid. Then what? How would I be supposed to know "don't buy this one, go try to find an old copy of Wolfenstein 3D first, then one of Duke Nukem, then Terminator Future Shock, then [...] and only then you're ready to buy this"?
Ok, so it's not in the flashy signs, but then where _is_ that information? Is there some brochure at the counter that I've missed, or?
Because otherwise the whole assumption that people will just _know_ not to start directly with the flashy ones, is a dubious one at best. If that was the case, we wouldn't be complaining about "clueless n00bs" in virtually any online games.
That's what those "clueless n00bs" are: the evidence you keep screaming for. Those are people who just don't have even the basic notions that those games take for granted in their target demographic.
Yes, I am very much aware of the difference between learning the game and mastering it. Yes, I know what a "learning curve" means, thank you very much.
What I am talking about in some newer games is precisely the extra difficulty in even learning the basics, if you're not already a gamer. That's what I'm talking about.
Compare getting a non-gamer started on PacMan to getting the same person started on, say, City Of Heroes. It's not that they won't master COH, it's that it'll be a nightmare to even get started.
And, yes, I do know what a learning curve is, but the point you're missing is how steep it is. There's a difference between taking years to become world champion in Go, and being expected to be already at least 1 dan to even start playing your first game. Because many computer games expect just that of a new gamer nowadays.
If you'll re-read my original message, I'm saying precisely that the advantage we veteran gamers had was having that learning curve flattened over decades. We've moved gradually from stuff that required no buttons and only 1 axis, like Pong, to nowadays stuff that requires 20 buttons and a mouse. New gamers don't have that privilege. They're supposed to already know all that stuff -- or learn it very very quickly -- before they even get started on their very first game.
It's not as much a learning curve, it's a steep wall for some games.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me tell you a story, which hopefully should be a metaphor for the problem we have here: let's say someone made a game where thrown weapons do damage purely based on their weight. Hey, the programmer was tired, and that looked like a reasonable shortcut to take. So soon every single player runs around throwing grand pianos, instead of using throwing knives. Every other thief and assassin in the game carries a piano by now, and every other PvP situation involves throwing grand pianos and anvils at each other.
Quite predictably, really: players do what works.
So what would _you_ do there?
A) Shrug and accept it as normal (maybe even put a piano vendor next to the thief instructor), or
B) keep it like that, but try to ban/suspend everyone who ever threw a piano, although that's what your game encouraged them to do to start with, or
C) fix the broken code, which is the _real_ problem there?
I'm willing to bet that you picked (C) there. Right? I mean, well, duh.
Well, then why are you seeing only the first two options for the gold farming problem? There _is_ a third option there: you can also change the code and/or game design.
To put it bluntly, each game gets the players and behaviour it deserves.
Or let me explain it less bluntly: humans do what works, or find another game more to their liking. E.g., if sniping is disproportionately more rewarding in a FPS, it gets players who like to snipe, or just get a sniper rifle just because that's what works. So soon you get everyone kneeling in a dark corner with an AWP. E.g., if in a game thrown damage is based purely on weight, you _will_ get people throwing anvils and grand pianos instead of knives.
So basically my take is that if _any_ problem becomes rampant in a game, be it griefing or gold farming or whatever, it can be tracked to the game itself making that viable.
You could, of course, then either shrug and accept the problem as "normal" or "unavoidable", or try to deterr people from doing what the game encouraged them to do in the first place. But both are addressing the symptoms, not the underlying disease and its causes.
Or you could acknowledge that there's probably something in your game design itself that makes it possible and/or rewarding. And try to address the real cause, not the effects.
There are plenty of examples already of "social" problems that were solved through code. E.g., EQ and AC made a fortune by solving -- in code -- the rampant griefing that plagued UO at the time. Origin invented a genre and ended up in third place, because others made the game itself better address the grievances of the players of that genre.
I do believe that the same can apply to gold farming or to any other in-game problem: they _could_ address the causes, rather than try to sweep the symptoms under the carpet.
"We need better games. Games like Zelda don't appeal to white people because Link is white, it's because the game is fun."
Yes, "fun" for _whom_? "Better" by _whose_ tastes?
I wish more people realized one thing: there is no one single game which appeals to everyone. There is _no_ single scale from "crap" to "greatest game ever" that applies to everyone, when we're talking a matter of personal taste. Every single game ever made will appeal to some, and look like utter crap to someone else.
E.g., you mention Zelda games, and seem to like them. Well, I bloody hate them. E.g., conversely The Sims is the best selling PC game ever, and personally I loved it, yet you find plenty of people who'll argue that it's crap and boring. Etc.
"We need better games" sounds good and fine, but "better" for whom and in which way? If you ask 10 different people, chances are you'll get 10 different answers. E.g., my "better games" idea would mean more story, my father's idea would be more along the lines of "make them shut up already with that story and dialogue crap, and let me get directly to the fighting. If I wanted to read text, I'd get a book."
And cultural differences matter a lot in such matters of taste. E.g., look at what games get published in Japan, and some of them wouldn't even have a market at all in the USA. E.g., look at how in, say, Germany, economic sims are a much more major genre than seems to be the case in the USA.
Which is the whole problem. It's not whether Link is white or black, it's that the only group we know how to make games _for_ are white male nerds. We have a horde of white male nerds making games for white male nerds. Whether it matches anyone else's taste, is purely coincidence, and more often than not doesn't happen.
Heh. Nope. The games industry actually couldn't care less about affirmative action or racism as such. They would just like to make games which _sell_ to more/other demographic groups. A larger market is better than being pegged in a niche, that's all.
/. at all, you probably couldn't have missed that _the_ number one argument given for P2P is basically "but what if I'm looking for other music than the girl-band/boy-band crap flooding MTV and the stores? On P2P I can find indie stuff that the local stores never even heard of."
/. and other sites. (Which isn't strictly true as such, but still, there is on the whole a disparity in numbers.)
This isn't unique to the game industry. E.g., TV stations too like to make different shows for different demographics. You have shows that are filmed explicitly with women in mind, shows that are aimed at minorities, etc.
The thing is, not everyone likes the same games, just like not everyone likes the same TV shows or the same books. And if you read
And cultural differences can matter a lot in such matters of taste. E.g., you'd be surprised how much effort Hollywood puts into making sure their movies sell abroad too, to people whose cultures doesn't quite match the USA. E.g., you'd be surprised how vastly different the marketting of the exact same product can be for different countries and cultures.
The fact also is that people are good at designing/selecting stuff they understand and like themselves. I.e., if they basically make a game for themselves. You get a good RPG if it's designed by people who love RPGs, you get crap if people who don't even understand them try to clone last year's bestseller... without even understanding what made it a bestseller.
Having just one demographics group in control of an industry, is a sure way to make stuff that appeals _only_ to that demographic.
E.g., picture what would happen if 16 year old girls were in control of the music industry. Right. The _only_ music you'd ever hear or see on shelves would be aimed at 16 year old girls. Better start liking boy bands, because that's all you're gonna hear for a long time.
Well, the same has arguably already happened to the games industry. You get an industry controlled and populated by white male nerds, they make games which appeal to white male nerds.
Thing is, the industry started for example with a 50-50 gender distribution for gamers, back in the days of Pong and PacMan. Then it slowly slided to today's "chicks don't play games" point that you can see argued again and again on
What happened is that in the meantime noone even knows _what_ kind of game to make for women, or _how_ to market a game to women. And much less wth kind of games would sell better to blacks, hispanics, etc.
It's not necessarily a matter of racism or sexism as such, but just that the games reflect the tastes of exactly one single group: white male nerds. It's just damn hard to fine-tune something for a market segment you're not in and don't even understand, other than broad-sweeping generalizations and second guesses.
E.g., without any prejudice or discrimination against soccer fans involved, if I were to make a game for those, seeing as I hate soccer, I wouldn't even know where to start, much less how to fine-tune it to appeal perfectly to them.
And again all that's happening is that, with production costs rising out of control, the producers would like to enlarge the market. They couldn't care less about women, blacks, whatever as such. They just want more of their money. That's all.
So the current fad is basically "hey, maybe we can let women make games for women. They know what they like, right?" (And ditto for blacks, hispanics, etc.)
And unlike him, I did play a lot of them, including, in no particular order: UO, AC, AO, Mimesis Online, COH and WOW.
"Games are designed to have time sinks in them and to keep you playing so you shell out that extra $15. Generally this involves a lot of boring stuff with some excitement sprinkled throughout."
First of all: No. It's only MMOs who are designed like that. Normal games are (or at least used to) be designed to be fun, not as 2 hours of actual content stretched over 10,000 hours of playing time.
I don't think that when they designed Pong, Missile Command or PacMan, or any of the other games that defined what gaming is, they thought, "nah, we'll make him run from Westfall to Redridge and back, before he's allowed to start the next round", or any of the other pure time-sinks that MMOs have. Some may have failed to be fun, but nevertheless they were designed with that goal, not as an exercise in time-sinks. And between those and the rise of the MMOs, it tended to stay that way.
So all you're telling me is that a MMO is designed to be anything _but_ a game.
Second: Yes, I can understand why Vivendi's and Blizzard's marketroids would want to stretch content over as many months as possible, at 15 dollars a month. That much is obvious.
The ones I don't understand, are the players who (A) pay 15$/month for something they'd rather skip, and (B) pay some more to get someone to skip it for them. Why? Why not just do something you actually like, instead of something you'd rather skip?
So, no, I don't think his comparison is bad at all, and I don't think different standards should apply to MMOs than to anything else. Whether it's a game, or a movie, or watching football on TV, or taking digital photos of squirrels in the park, the same applies: are _you_ having fun or not? If you wish you could skip it, then you're not.
Don't get me wrong, if you're at least having fun, ok, keep paying for it. But if you'd actually pay RL money to skip 90% of the game, then I'll have to say he's right: then why are you playing it in the first place?
Again, that applies to any hobby or kind of entertainment. If you ever find yourself thinking "damn, it's time to go photograph those f-ing squirrels again. I wish I could just pay someone else to go photograph squirrels for me", then digital photography isn't the hobby for you. If you find yourself thinking "damn, not another f-ing football match. Can't I pay someone to watch it for me and tell me the score?" then you'd do well to find another hobby than spectator sports. Etc.
Having played PSO on the Dreamcast, I can second that: Sega did an outstanding job there. Been saying it all along. So I'm not gonna disaggree with the general idea.
But you do illustrate a point that's starting to irk me about MMOs as a whole. And while Sega did it better than others, I would argue that they're still just doing it "less wrong":
"- it's extremely easy to amass more money than you'll ever spend."
Well, my point is: why not go the whole way, then, and elliminate money altogether?
The whole economic model of MMOs, including the sharp ramp in loot and prices at the high end is basically stuck in a SP RPG model. Everyone seems to assume that they _have_ to have gold pieces and an economy, but that's just begging the question.
So... WHY? That whole model was just a _prop_ in SP or PnP RPGs, not the alpha and the omega. And it _only_ worked as a balancing factor _because_ it was SP or PnP and you had no external source of money.
When you throw 3 million players into a game, it all falls apart. Gold _will_ flow from one end to another, and won't even just cause RL money to be paid, it will also end up unbalancing the game instead of balancing it. The more you use gold to balance the game, the more you create a disparity between the guy who bought gold on ebay and is strutting around in the best enchanted gear, and the one who didn't and can barely afford rags and a sword 10 levels lower.
As a way to balance the game, this prop just doesn't work and causes more problem than it solves.
So why do devs insist on using it? Why not elliminate money altogether and/or make the game be more skill-based than equipment based?
There are perfectly good games and systems that _don't_ need you to buy a new broadsword every 5 levels. E.g., CoH: you improve your attacks, not buy a new sword. (But unfortunately, they too had to shoehorn a dysfunctional kind of currency in, in another way.)
The same could work in WoW or any other game: make character development count for more, and the dps difference between a level 10 sword and a level 20 one be a lot less, and it will dramatically reduce the pressure to buy a new sword even for RL money if all else fails.
There are also games which already proved that they can work without gold or bought equipment. E.g., Planetside: what equipment you can get is determined by your certifications, and you get 1 certification point per level. So while equipment does matter a lot, it's tied into the character development, not bought for gold.
Again, the same could work in a lot of other games.
So basically that's my wish and pipe-dream: that instead of sticking to a dysfunctional prop, just because it's traditional, some game designer will sit and rethink the whole concept.
"Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon."
The problem you illustrate there is the whole disparity in what 1 gold is worth to a level 60 and what it's worth to a level 6. To the former (even if you weren't already maxxed and basically not needing gold any more) 1 gold won't even buy you a cape for your level, to the latter it buys you _all_ the best equipment and 5 bags.
And also the former can make 1 gold real quick, the latter gets 2 to 6 copper per killed NPC.
Or for a non-WoW example, consider this: in CoH a level 50 (max level there) can make 3 million in a single mission, and doesn't need it any more. But for a new player, 3 million will get you all the best equipment until level 30. Literally.
Think of it as a resource, not as money (ok, so money is a resource too.) You have Group A, which produces tons of a resource _and_ they have lower need/use out of a unit of it, and Group B which produces next to none _and_ they need it badly.
It just _begs_ for an "export" to take place. Group B _will_ get (or try to get) that resource from Group A. By whatever means it takes. (RL money, begging, virtual prostitution, sucking up to someone's ego, using your own high level alts if you have any, etc.)
E.g., replace "gold" with "oil", and Group A = Saudi Arabia, Group B = Japan (which produces as much oil in a year as they consume in a week), and you have a real-world equivalent to that situation.
And what I'd want to see is a game which fixes the economy, among others by eliminating this disparity, rather than complain that such transfers take place. Unless you stop the phenomenon that money (or any other resource) is abbundant and worthless at one end, but scarce and valuable at the other, a flow _will_ happen between the two. Complaining about it is like complaining that water flows downhill.
I'm not sure how it can be fixed though. Maybe elliminate money altogether? It's a less crazy idea than you'd think.
Planetside did just that: since you're a soldier, you are given your equipment, you don't buy it. Since you're a soldier, the flip side also applies: you're not allowed to even touch anything you're not certified for. So the balancing factor are your certifications, not gold pieces. It works flawlessly there, and certifications can't be sold on ebay.
I can see the same working in a lot of other games. E.g., take CoH. It doesn't even have equipment as such. The "equipment" are improvements to your super-powers: flying faster, punching harder, whatever. Why can't that be modelled without money? You could let players just select one such improvement at each level-up, and the game would remain largely the same.
The problem is the difference between raw data and useful information.
When you look through a list of restaurants (or the list of anything in the yellow pages), you're looking at something put together based on _semantics_. Some human put that list together and made sure the _meaning_ is what you'd expect there: you can actually drive to one of those locations and order food.
Search engines, on the other hand, just look at the words and have no bloody clue of semantics.
If someone ever put together a list of restaurants, it would just be a list of all people who ever said the word "restaurant". Including everyone who ever said "I hate chinese restaurants" or "I took my gf to a restaurant" or "I went to see a new apartment, but it was above a restaurant" or whatever. Needless to say, driving to most of those locations would be a bloody useless exercise.
Adding another 20 million people to that kind of indexing would just raise the noise-to-signal ratio, not actually produce anything useful.
Well, that's very insightful, but more or less that's the whole point: all these "my theory will save the world" theorists present their pet theory as something sure and guaranteed. You just need to sign here and transfer 20 billion USD here, and you're _guaranteed_ to get these unbelievably huge quantities of minerals practically for free. (Or whatever other miracle solution is being peddled.)
And if it was that clearly cut and obvious, someone would have already done it. The reverse side of that risk management that you mention (and is indeed very real), is that if such a venture was guaranteed to bring a 12% profit, chances are good they _will_ invest in it. Or if not them, someone else will.
Corporations may be weary in investing in fundamentally new stuff to try, but here we're talking mining and transport, really. They already can know _exactly_ how much it costs to transport a ton to moon or back, how much do they need to pay for machinery and buildings, can get a pretty accurate estimate of the probability to get a direct meteor hit per year (which translates into insurance rate), etc.
I.e., if a corporation wants to get exact numbers on that, I believe they can get very exact numbers.
"Hindsight is 20/20. Given hindsight, the "free" market failed to fund a lot of profitable ventures: the interstate rail and highway systems, the secondary education system, the power grid, the communications infrastructure."
The phone infrastructure, they did get into and, at least in the USA, it took legal action to break that monopoly. I also believe that most of the history of the railway system development was in fact a case of private companies at work. Electricity production and distribution, again, was a case of private enterprise. (Including such trivia as Edison selling light bulbs under the production cost, to create a market for them and demand for electricity.) Education too. I believe there are a ton of private schools, high schools, and universities which are basically run as private companies or foundations. Plus, companies routinely pay to educate/specialize their workers.
In a lot of those cases government intervention was needed to make the owner play fair (break a monopoly, nationalize a vital resource, etc) but they weren't really built by the government or anything.
Where it gets fuzzier are things which are basically for the good of society as a whole, rather than for a clear-cut ROI.
E.g., while private companies did lay railroad tracks for their own trains (and _only_ their own being allowed on those tracks), building highways and roads for everyone's trucks and cars wasn't really promising that much of a ROI.
E.g., while companies do routinely school their own employees, running a high-school doesn't guarantee they'll work for _you_ at the end or that you'll make much money out of running it. (Although examples do exist, such as the Waldorf Schools, started with funding from the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Company.)
Basically I'm not saying you're wrong as a whole. Quite the opposite. Companies do invest in things which look like they'll bring a guaranteed profit, and generally stay away from funding the common good of society.
But that applies IMHO to minerals from the moon too. We're not talking bringing minerals for the common good of society, we're talking that if it was indeed cheaper to bring minerals from there, someone would make a very direct profit for doing so. If there was a good economic case for that, I suspect someone will get into it.
"When/If the awful end comes, dont you think that if anyone will have seen it coming, it will be "an alarmist"?"
When/if the awful end comes, I expect a scientist to see it coming.
For starters, that's where the alarmist save-the-world crowd get (and then pervert) their ideas from. First comes the scientist who measures something, and only _then_ some doomsday prophet takes that and perverts it into a doomsday scare story to save the world from.
E.g., it wasn't the eco-scare folks who measured the 1 degree celsius rise in a whole century (which started the global warming madness), it was first measured and plotted by some meteorologsists. The eco-scare gang only then came and took over the idea.
So I'll just cut the middleman (especially the kind of middleman who doesn't even understand it, but is in it just to feel important by "saving the world") and get my facts directly from the scientists.
Same with a clock, really. If I think it's broken, I won't take my time from it at all. Not to see which time it is, not to see the time it isn't. I'll NTP to a reference atomic clock instead.
When/if the time comes, chances are about 11 out of 12, or about 92%, that the broken clock won't just show the wrong time, but the wrong hour altogether. Likewise when/if the awful end comes, probably the doomsday prophets will be in dada land, whining about some completely other topic.
E.g., if the awful end comes as a hydrogen-producing bacteria run amok and massive glaciation, the currently fashionable scare-story would be that sex causes cholesterol and everyone should stop doing it. Or that the sudden drop in temperature is really still global warming. Or whatever unrelated.
Science more or less just says what _is_. I.e., what happened or what can happen.
There's nothing inherently "scary" in it. It's just trying to understand how the universe works. The universe as such, isn't either "good" or "evil", "friendly" or "scary". It just "is".
It only starts to be "scary" when sensationalist journalists and wannabe messiahs take that science and repack it as yet another doomsday theory.
"Here's how (we think) something happened a billion years ago" doesn't quite sell newspapers, outside academic circles. Yeah, those cyanobacteria were mean mofos, but how does that affect me nowadays? "If this happens tomorrow, we're all DOOMED!" however seems to. It's suddenly presented as something that is, or can be, your problem.
So guess which of the two will journos spin the story as. Right.
And then come the wannabe messiahs. There are people who actually need a good doomsday theory, and need to imagine that they're fighting to save the world. Preferrably one by which everyone else is a morally bankrupt bastard, if they don't immediately change their lifestyle.
Some people just _need_ that warm fuzzy "I'm fighting to save the world" (and you all are morally bankrupt bastards contributing to the problem) feeling. Gives their lives some meaning, I guess.
So once some journo has spun a story into something scary enough, a group of these _will_ rally around it, proclaim it to be The Ultimate Truth, and put it on a banner for their next crusade.
And where I'm getting at with this long rant, is that it's not scientists that are waving around all these contradicting doomsday theories. (And much less as ultimate truths. Science has _no_ ultimate truth set in stone.) The ones you're seeing making the doomsday fuss are the journos and these wannabe messiah groups, not the scientists who are measuring oxygen concentration in rocks.
And yes, you have correctly noted that fashionable doomsday theories do conveniently omit any factors which might even things out.
"Even a broken clock is right twice a day. ;)" ... but you still wouldn't use it for timekeeping. Much less plan your life around it.
"The point of my post was that the earth has limited resources and therefore cannot support the current or future world population at a standard of living that is acceptable."
Ok, I'll bite. _Which_ resources doesn't it have enough to sustain an 8 billion population? Because it produces currently a surplus of food, has enough uranium for centuries, has iron under almost literally every hill or mountain, and it can synthetize fuel and plastics from any other source of energy (e.g., nuclear.) So _what_ materials do you absolutely need to bring from the moon?
"For $20 billion the US could build a sustainable manned moon colony which could send down unthinkably large amounts of resources."
"Unthinkably large" sounds cool, but:
A) Exactly how much _is_ "unthinkably large"? More than the exact same money (including, salaries, supplies, shipping, etc) would get you from a mine on Earth? Enough to not be lost in the decimals, compared to what millions of people already extract on Earth?
B) What's the price per ton to transport it, and to transport supplies back? There's a good reason why you get raw materials or oil imported by train or ship, not by airplane: cost per ton transported.
"Of course, next you're gunna claim there are no resources on the moon and that the only way forward is to huddle in the dark as we use up all the resources on earth."
Actually, next I'm gonna claim you need to read a book on economics. Might be a fascinating read.
The question isn't just whether there are resources on the Moon worth getting, but whether it's cheaper to get them from there. That's how the economy still works here on Earth, I'm affraid.
There's a lot of "plan B"s out there, that are perfectly feasible, but aren't done because "plan A" is still cheaper. E.g., why the USA prefers to import oil than to extract its own. Or for that matter than to synthesize it from coal, or to switch to hydrogen cars and nuclear power to produce the hydrogen, or whatever.
If 20 billion USD was all it takes to bring a lot of cheap resources from the moon, that is, cheaper than you can get them on Earth, some corporation would already do that.
But maybe we'll do something else first. Yours is not the only solution, but just one possible "plan B" in a list of _thousands_. Humanity has a _lot_ of already existing options before huddling in the dark or mass-murder, and more are already being researched. (Of course, it makes a better doomsday whine if you ignore them.)
Which of them will be used next and when, will have to do with economics, not with what looks way cool to SF fanboys. _Maybe_ some day bringing iron ore from the moon will be cheaper than digging it from under a mountain on Earth. But maybe we'll just use plastics and composite materials produced with fusion power instead. Or maybe something else.
When one such "plan B" becomes cheaper, or the current "plan A" becomes too expensive, we will know it, and do it then. That's how the economy works.
"Or to put it less tactfully: poor people breed faster than rich people."
There is a transition point in any country, and yes even America and Western Europe had it, from (A) high mortality including infant mortality, must make 10 kids so maybe 2-3 survive, to (B) chances are good they'll all survive, so no point in breeding like rabbits anyway. That point is mainly a question of not even being "rich", but simply of access to sanitation and basic medical care.
And it takes a while for the "no point in breeding like rabbits" notion to sink in. At that transition point there's a generation or two which basically still doesn't know or get it. They still try to make as many kids as they can, so some will survive, but, surprise, this time most or all survive. So there's a temporary population boom. Then the idea sinks in and it's ok from there.
Most of the western world is already past that point. Other countries started much later, so they're still in the trailing edge of that population boom. That's all.
But even there the keywords are: trailing edge. As was mentioned, the global growth is already decreasing pretty quickly.
"Personally I don't think there's a choice. We must expand into space."
You want to do... what? Send all the poor into space colonies? Have you actually calculated how many millions it takes to put even 1 man on the moon? Now add the cost of building self-sustaining habitable space, shipping suplies and resources back and forth, etc.
Now multiply that by, say, 1 billion people, if the goal is to reduce population on earth by any signifficant amount.
Right. For a _tiny_ fraction of that cost you could just provide the most basic sanitation and medical care them, and not worry about overpopulation any more. Again, you don't need to make everyone rich.
And even if you wanted to make everyone "rich", there are better ways than blowing several million dollars _per_ _person_ to put them on Mars. And it's happening without government intervention anyway. That's what globalization does: all those jobs and factories in poor countries, a lot of which end up producing for local consumption anyway, _are_ raising their standard of living.
"You are either for the expansion of growth of the human population off the earth and into space or you are for mass murder and restricted personal liberty to control population growth here on earth."
Ah, right, was wondering where we'd get the mandatory appeal to humanity or some other tried-and tested fallacy. Would have been too good to actually have a coherent logical argument, instead of reaching for the fallacies, but I guess that was an unrealistic expectation.
No, I'm for using the money in a way that actually benefits us all, rather than on unrealistic SF stuff. Space colonization may give trekies and SW fans a hard-on, but right now it's simply not a realistic option.
"Of course, there's also the third option. The so called what, me worry? approach. Which is to just pop your hands over your ears and sing "lalalalalala" and hope the whole issue will go away."
Or here's a fourth: actually get a clue, use logic and facts, instead of going on a SF bullshit spree and emotional appeals to humanity.
Being good and experienced at programming doesn't just involve getting the code done and compiling. It also involves having some clue about stuff like security, good design, and generally knowing a lot more than just how to printf("hello world.")
The corporation I work for had at some point decided to replace an existing, working system with a monstrosity that had more buzzwords. So a team from a BIG corporation contracted the work, and took a couple of years at it, until finally the project was scrapped.
By the time it was scrapped, the code they had produced, although it did compile, had major problems, including fatal security issues. (And it also needed a cluster of two dozen servers to serve the same number of users as the old system did on 1 server. And took several hours to even start or stop. Literally.) Among other problems:
- they consistently assumed that the _only_ way to reach a page was to click on a link, so they didn't have to check rights again when rendering it. The user wouldn't have gotten the link to it, if he didn't already have the rights, right?
Wrong. By such trivial means as just editing the user id in the URL to 0, you could become super-user or change anyone else's password. (E.g., the super-user's.) And basically gain full admin rights to a corporate site.
- they failed _repeatedly_ to quote text displayed on the site. So you could simply type some JavaScript code in a text box, and have it execute (e.g., on mouse-over) in the browser of whoever views that post or offer. Again, one possible and demonstrated use was to steal or change someone's data, including an admin's.
- they failed _repeatedly_ to quote text used in SQL queries. So basically you just needed to input something like '" OR "1"="1' in the search field, and you'd get all the records on the system.
- they failed to even conside "non-repudiation". If a user cancelled their account, a cascaded delete would ensue, deleting _all_ the data about that user or from that user, including contracts. It was suddenly as if that user had never even existed, ordered or paid anything.
Etc.
We're talking about a B2B e-commerce site, with contracts worth millions, not about someone's blog about their cats. And it had gapping holes bigger than the goatse guy, for f**k's sake. As they wanted to ship it, it _literally_ allowed anyone to access any data and escalate their privileges to the max, in just a few kestrokes.
_That_ is a problem with making software with a team of incompetent monkeys. It's not just that they take longer to produce the code, or that it might need more debugging. It's that they just don't have the skill or knowledge to judge (or even consider) the implications of the choices they're doing at each step.
"I love it when people try shit like this with programmers. Thank Goddess for GUI automation tools! But mostly it's a helpful sign that you're not working for a good company, and should be looking."
Well, that _is_ why we had to do their programs, this this timekeeping monstrosity included. As I later found out, they used to be a software house. Only after they hired the "golden rule" boy, _all_ their designers and programmers quit en masse. Some 6 months later the "golden rule" boy still needed to sub-contract everything to others companies.
Obviously, his conclusion was that he wasn't oppressive enough, since that's about the time we were asked to do that timekeeping monstrosity for him.
"And that, OTOH, is a good sign. Sucky management is by no means unique to IT. Assholes are everywhere. A company that's willing to fire bad managers is at least not totally hopeless."
True, but still, the aforementioned farce had continued for about 1 year before they finally fired him. It's not just that he was mean to the employees and managed to not have many left, but he had alienated a lot of the company's partners and bled money hand-over-fist before someone finally stepped in and fired him.
So, well, while I won't lose any sleep over it, it still makes me idly wonder if in the end all that mattered were the lost profits. If he had managed to be a total asshole that nevertheless turned a profit, can it be that he'd still be there, ranting about how he's the man with the gold?
The reality is a bit more complex than that "oh, they'd be griping anyway" over-simplification. A lot of working places really _are_ bad at showing any appreciation, if they actually appreciate their employees.
Yes, the trade takes a long time to learn, and I can certainly realize that after over 20 years of programming computers. But that also means enough time to see such "employee appreciation" as:
- control-freak PHB's.
True story: I've worked a couple of years for someone who genuinely thought that he needs to keep clicking on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it makes Netscape load faster. I swear to God I'm not making it up.
True story: we had to make a nazi time-keeping program for another company. Think popping up every few minutes to ask you if you still work on the project. And if within 1 minute you didn't click on "Yes" (e.g., because you needed to go talk to another co-worker about that very project), it would close the project and mark you as idle.
- people who think that negative feedback and threats are the only thing that motivates their team, and god forbid ever telling someone "you've done a good job" would turn someone into a slacker.
I could give a personal example again, but a sadder one are the recent stories about a HP PHB making "it could be YOUR job that moves to India next" the corporate motivational motto. Yeah, that sooo makes people feel "appreciated." Not.
- Pushing people to do massive unpaid overtime. Often not even as a desperate crunch phase at the end, but actually planning from the start that you can use and abuse people for 84 hours a week.
E.g., see the famous EA employee's blog. E.g., see the fucktard, the name escapes me at the moment, who was complaining that the VC-appointed CEO ruined his company by letting programmers work only 40 hours a week.
True story: Dunno about you, but having someone (A) override my time estimates on the _explicit_ assumption that he can use me twice as many hours a week anyway, and (B) have him then tell me crap like "wth do you need free wekends for anyway? You'd just sit in front of a computer anyway" and then "ok, then I'll cut your salary if you only want to work 40 hours a week" (i.e., "only" the time in my contract)... doesn't exactly tell me "you're appreciated". (And, yes, I did quit after that.)
- Huge egos.
True story: the company with the nazi timekeeping program again. Among many other nasty experiences with the boss there when we delivered the program (such as demanding that we bring sleeping bags and noone leaves until we undo the changes that his representative had asked us to do), one thing that irked me was his repeating about twice per hour, "The golden rule is: whoever has the gold makes the rules. And that's me." So, hey, he's the guy with the gold, everyone must obey him like they're serfs. If he says bring a sleeping bag and sleep here on the floor tonight, you're supposed to say "yes, sir!" because he's the guy with the gold, you know.
(Tangent: I had assumed he was the company owner or something, the way he kept repeating that he's the one with the gold. Turned out he was just an employee, which they fired later for horrible job performance.)
- Seeing purchases and decisions made by blatantly disregarding the feedback of the programmers/IT workers who'll actually use that crap, and trusting the nice snake-oil salesman instead.
Yeah, it so says "appreciated" to see you're not even trusted to know the language you program in, the architecture you've designed, or the IDE you program in. Surely a high level manager coming from, say, the automotive industry knows better than you, and is more qualified than the programmers to decide such stuff.
Etc.
Basically, trust me, if the only reason to "gripe" you've seen so far is "but I wanna be senior developper at 20 years old", then you have a damn good job. Hang onto it at all cost. In the rest of the world, there are far worse gripes than that.
First of all, all I'm saying is basically "I'd find it funny if Nintendo, of all people, would file an anti-trust lawsuit." I'm not saying I'd (still) want to see them bankrupt, or that they're necessarily still assholes, just that... well, it would be "inconsistent", for lack of a better word.
Some people, e.g., Microsoft, are at least consistent in their insisting that any economic regulations should be abolished altogether, and one should be free to abuse the market as one sees fit. Look at every pro-MS paid-by-MS new economic theory, and they're very consistent in hammering on the same idea: "monopolies don't exist, there's no such thing as anti-competitive behaviour, having complete control of a market is just normal ideal capitalism, bla, bla, bla."
But _if_ a monopoly (be it MS or Nintendo) actually filed an anti-trust lawsuit against someone else... it would mean, what? "We believe that the economic laws should apply to everyone _except_ us"? I _hope_ even Nintendo won't sink _that_ low.
Second, you probably do realize that the second message is the perfect disproval of the first answer you wrote.
Yes, all companies are out there primarily to make money, and I don't expect anyone to be cuddly care-bears. Or not stay long in business if they are.
But there are varying degrees as to how nasty they are. There are people who at least play reasonably nice with their _partners_, and there are people who are like "we're the Big N, you'll lick our boots and sign yourself into slavery if you want to do any kind of business with us." You yourself give Iwata as an example of the first and Yamauchi as an example of the second, which just makes my point that this kind of distinction exists.
So, no, I'm not condemning anyone for trying to make a buck. But I am disgusted by those who aren't just complete assholes and bullies, but _knowingly_ break the laws too in pursuit of that money. And in that aspect, I am thoroughly disgusted when I think of (the old) Nintendo.
And I'm not necessarily singling them out. Yes, I'm disgusted by a dozen other companies as well, but this was a sub-tread about Nintendo. I think if I wented to rant and rave about, say, SCO in it, it would be off-topic.
Actually, we already _are_ using software agents to work a lot faster. Compilers, IDEs, frameworks, you name it. That's what they're there for.
/. too, tired people make more mistakes too.
Agents to help decision making? Well, that's what syntax highlighting, auto-completion, help files, and other tools in the IDE do for me. They let me decide faster what can I use there.
(Which also addresses the flood of "ugh! they're making Clippy!" posts. There are at least a dozen tools I use every day that aren't Clippy. Just because one tool is retarded, doesn't mean they all are.)
And they _do_ allow us to achieve deadlines that were unthinkable back in the days of coding in hex/octal and counting the bytes by hand.
The problem isn't the reliance on _good_ tools. The problem is, well, bad management. (Including buying the wrong tools, but that's a topic for itself.)
I really hope more managers will read threads like these, because there's one important message there: stressed people make more mistakes. And according to other studies, some of which were linked to by
And between those two, you have the whole picture of what's wrong with 84 hour weeks and other PHB-style management techniques. It's not that programmers aren't soldiers. It's just that humans (programmers, soldiers, etc) are not machines. A computer can work on SETI packets 24x7 and do proportionally more work than 8x5. A human can't.
Since in programming most of the time is spent in debugging and maintenance, not in just typing code, past a point it's exactly that making more mistakes (which need to be debugged... again) and taking weird shortcuts (which will bog down maintenance) that's ending up costing more time than it saves.
Not that I'm setting my hopes too high, though. There are managers which do have a clue, and then there are the PHB's. Those who fall in the second category, well, I just can't see them getting a clue, even if it was written in big letters on a billboard in front of their office.
Well, I'm not saying that the should stop making Doom 3 and the like. It's just, you know, whishful thinking. As in, I wish someone figured out a way to make that learning curve more accessible for new gamers, that's all.
In other words, the _only_ thing that stopped them was losing that monopoly position, not growing a conscience or anything.
Nintendo kept their arrogant "we're the Big N, it's you who'll come crying back to us" until the very end of the N64 era. Even when Sony had already taken most of their market, Ninendo was still shooting off its mouth with crap along the lines of "we have all the games we need. It's Sony who'll go bankrupt for publishing so many games."
The only moment when Nintendo stopped acting like a bully was... when they no longer were in a position to do it. It's like saying "yeah, but he stopped punching people in the face after he ended up in a wheelchair" about the school bully.
I'm not gonna draw and quarter Nintendo for what happened in the past, but I hope you'll understand it if I'm still less than impressed about the new "good guys" face. They've stopped being nasty _only_ because they're no longer able to play nasty. (Or not without commiting corporate suicide in the process.) They didn't grow a concience, they were, simply put, declawed. That's all.
If they ever ended up at the top again, I _fully_ expect them to start acting like total assholes all over again.
Ah, well, I'm not saying Nintendo should go out of business or anything. You're, of course, right. Competition is great for us consumers, and I very much like it staying that way.
Just saying basically what you say, that they're certainly no saints. While nowadays they do have the positive effect of being _some_ extra competition in the market, they never really were the "good guys" in any form or shape.
As for "kid friendly"... Well, I think "kid friendly" can also simply mean that they publish a lot of games for children. As in, you know, if you had a little kid, it might be easier to get him/her started on some Nintendo games than on FFX or Kotor. Which is technically true.
Now I don't think that publishing games for kids means being angelic or anything. Nintendo hung onto the "kid-friendly" image and censored even the _word_ "blood" as long as they thought it's the PR image that sells more consoles. _But_ they had no problem doing a sharp 180 degree turn and raping a child-friendly franchise by turning it into a splatter- and cussing-fest, when it finally dawned upon them that the adults are a richer market and the "kids' console" image is costing them market share. Nothing says "it was just a PR image" like seeing them swing to the exact opposite extreme when it looks more profitable.
Let's face it, Nintendo applied the "we'll give consoles at a loss, and overcharge for games" model long before Sony or MS were anywhere near interested in consoles at all.
/. booing MS and cheering a far worse monopolist.
So Nintendo's case in an anti-trust lawsuit would be... what? "Your honour, they did the _exact_ same thing we did, but took a bigger loss"? I think the judge would have to call a recess just to stop laughing.
Plus, it's sorta ironic, that what goes around comes around. And I don't just mean dumping prices on hardware. Nintendo, for all its other merits, was a far nastier monopolist than MS when it was at the top.
Anyone else remember the exclusivity contracts they made developpers sign? No, I don't mean the _nice_ MS way of "we'll give you a big wad of cash if you give one exclusivity on this one game for a year." Nosiree, bob. Nintendo's version was more like signing yourself into exclusive serfdom, for life. Sorta "we're the Big N, we're King. If you want to be allowed to develop for our console, you worthless insignifficant peon, sign there that you're not allowed to _ever_ publish _any_ game for any other system."
Took some desperate lawsuits to get that crap declared illegal.
Remember the anti-competitive behaviour in Europe? Yeah, Nintendo got convicted and fined as a monopolist over here. Not only that, but they cheerfully continued doing it during the trial, on the explicit assumption that they'll make more money out of it than the EU can fine them. Much to their surprise, the EU had a nastier bite than Nintendo estimated. But still, it's the kind of "we know we're breaking the law, but you can't stop us" behaviour that we condemn Microsoft for.
So I find it sorta strange to see much the same gang on
Either way, I'd find it bloody hillarious if Nintendo filed an anti-trust lawsuit. It would be like seeing Microsoft filing anti-trust against someone. _That_ surrealistic.
Yep, I wholeheartedly aggree with your whole message.
Once Linux started shipping on CD's, as opposed to the early stack-o-floppies installs, the first reaction was to install and activate everything they could possibly download and pack on that CD.
(And I suppose the fact that at the time the flamewar was "but my Linux system gives me more free stuff than your Windows comes with", also didn't help the cause. Everyone just _had_ to pack 5 web servers and 20 IRC clients on a CD, and offer to install them by default, just to brag about how much more stuff they include than MS does.)
I didn't use RH at the time, but I do still remember installing SuSE in 1999. (Although I did briefly have Linux installed too, the stack-o-floppies way, prior to 1999 I was by and large an OS/2 fanboy.)
Ooer. Now that offered to install everything and the kitchen sink by default, and pretty much everything depended on everything else. I _know_ at least Apache was installed and started by default, because some documentation module depended on it. But it's more like it offered to install and start by default some 2-3 web servers, _and_ MySQL and god knows what else.
By comparison, nowadays most distros got a bit more clue. And then there's Gentoo. I'm not the biggest fan of Gentoo generally, but there you only have the stuff you've emerged, and the stuff it had a dependency on. If you haven't explicitly emerged Apache or PHP or such, there's just no way you'll have a web server on that machine.
And, yeah, you're right about the heavyweight GUIs and desktop managers. Looking back in retrospect at the times when we used to brag "my Linux starts faster and uses less memory" with a straight face, I have to wonder where and what went wrong.
I still remember compiling and starting KDE 2.0 on my old 128 MB K6-III. I mean, gah, all my memory was used up with just that and X before I even started any programs. And it just went downhill from there. Nowadays Windows XP actually loads faster, used up less RAM and is more responsive than a KDE 3.x desktop, and that's just bloody sad.
Mind you, I too use a more lightweight desktop, which keeps things a lot snappier. I'm on XFCE at the moment, and for a long time I was a IceWM+DFM proponent. Gave me something pretty close to a Windows desktop (DFM managed the desktop nicely, IceWM took care of the task bar and menu) on a couple of megs RAM.
But still, as soon as I load a couple of programs, I get all the GNOME2 and KDE libraries in RAM anyway.
"Not everybody comes to computer gaming and starts trying to play Doom III right off the bat, and your entire tone has assumed that they do"
They can't, that is the whole point. It's one thing to arrive at Doom 3 via Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem, get used to full mouse-look in Bethesda's Terminator Future Shock (which invented full mouse-look), etc, and a whole other thing to even try starting from scratch.
The problem is that all those stepping stones we've had have all but disappeared. Even if you start on Mario Party, Katamari Damacy or The Sims, then what? There's no obvious easy path from there to, say, a modern FPS or MMO. Someone who wants to make the jump must basically just bite the bullet and spend some non-fun time trying to assimilate in two weeks what we've learned in two decades.
I know it took _years_ to get my father to even try a full 3D game. I still remember trying to get him started on Unreal. The whole jump-and-crawl-and-aim-in-3D confused him no end, and he decided he's better off without it.
"Also consider that the average hand-eye coordination of the general populace has probably increased dramatically over the last two decades. Even adults who don't play video games learn to operate with a mouse and keyboard; if not for work then as some small part of their own recreational time."
Both my parents work with a keyboard and mouse every day. I come from a family of professional nerds. But because you can click on a toolbar in a compiler, doesn't mean you're anywhere near natural at jump-puzzles and whatever.
And if you move into more complex stuff, like MMOs, it's not even the eye-hand coordination any more, it's a whole bunch of concepts that you're supposed to already know and reflexes you're supposed to already have.
"I'd be willing to bet those signs are so BIG AND FLASHY AND OVERWHELMING is because the games they're trying to sell are in a very competitive market, and they have to be in order to get anyone's attention."
There's nothing to bet about that, that's just a fact.
Still, what would _you_ propose then that a new gamer should do. Say I had never played a game before, and walked into a shop. I'm not even a kid. Then what? How would I be supposed to know "don't buy this one, go try to find an old copy of Wolfenstein 3D first, then one of Duke Nukem, then Terminator Future Shock, then [...] and only then you're ready to buy this"?
Ok, so it's not in the flashy signs, but then where _is_ that information? Is there some brochure at the counter that I've missed, or?
Because otherwise the whole assumption that people will just _know_ not to start directly with the flashy ones, is a dubious one at best. If that was the case, we wouldn't be complaining about "clueless n00bs" in virtually any online games.
That's what those "clueless n00bs" are: the evidence you keep screaming for. Those are people who just don't have even the basic notions that those games take for granted in their target demographic.
No, you're missing the point. By a mile.
Yes, I am very much aware of the difference between learning the game and mastering it. Yes, I know what a "learning curve" means, thank you very much.
What I am talking about in some newer games is precisely the extra difficulty in even learning the basics, if you're not already a gamer. That's what I'm talking about.
Compare getting a non-gamer started on PacMan to getting the same person started on, say, City Of Heroes. It's not that they won't master COH, it's that it'll be a nightmare to even get started.
And, yes, I do know what a learning curve is, but the point you're missing is how steep it is. There's a difference between taking years to become world champion in Go, and being expected to be already at least 1 dan to even start playing your first game. Because many computer games expect just that of a new gamer nowadays.
If you'll re-read my original message, I'm saying precisely that the advantage we veteran gamers had was having that learning curve flattened over decades. We've moved gradually from stuff that required no buttons and only 1 axis, like Pong, to nowadays stuff that requires 20 buttons and a mouse. New gamers don't have that privilege. They're supposed to already know all that stuff -- or learn it very very quickly -- before they even get started on their very first game.
It's not as much a learning curve, it's a steep wall for some games.