Yes, some people do slip into REM much quicker. As I was saying, narcoleptics can get into REM in 15-25 minutes, sometimes less.
Also, you do need less sleep with age. Margaret Thatcher was born in '25, and was PM between '79 and '90, i.e., between roughly 54 and 65 years old. Admittedly still a bit young for 4 hours a night, but less spectacular than if someone half that age pulled that stunt anyway.
Sorry, then, I had confused you to something else. Just shows that I should have taken my own advice and gone to sleep instead of posting after midnight:P
Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly. It doesn't mean you can't get smaller doses of damage long before that. Keep doing it often enough, and it might just add up.
And the darndest thing is that your cells have Telomeres, i.e., maximum division counters. So even damage that can be repaired, only goes so far. E.g., old age and death by old age, are simply a matter of more and more of your cells reaching the limit, and thus more and more damage can't be repaired. So, anyway, that which doesn't kill you, usually shortens your life instead of making you stronger.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
And to answer to your objection from a different message too, yes, 1 or 2 nights you can recover from. (Though if done for work reason, it may still be interesting to remember the study where the students who were allowed to have a good 8 hour sleep solved a problem actually faster than those who pulled all nighters. You're a lot less smart when very tired.) After about 3 you start getting permanent brain damage.
I think the biggest thing you need sooner or later is REM sleep, not just a lie down. Lack of REM sleep (which, as we'll see is possible while technically still getting some sleep) can result in actual brain damage, or in the very long run even death. (Ironically, it's also produced _by_ certain kinds of brain damage.) Also, while we still lack the complete picture, it's proven that at least one type of memory isn't updated without REM.
REM sleep also doesn't come instantly. In most people you need at least 90 minutes from falling asleep to having your first REM period. Anything under about half an hour is a sign of narcolepsy. Your longest REM episodes happen after several hours.
On the average over a whole night, about a quarter of the time will be REM. It's safe to assume that in the long run those two hours or so of REM a day are what your body actually needs.
But again, you don't get them in one big chunk. You get them interleaved with periods of non-REM sleep. So what it boils down to is that to get your normal quota of REM sleep, you'll actually need those 8 hours a night. You might get by with just 7, but anything less (unless you're over 70) is putting stress on your brain in the long run. You might not outright die, but you won't be very smart or attentive after months of getting significantly less.
But if you know how to get that REM while awake instead, I'm listening.
Because otherwise, no, you can't get your daily sleep by laying down on the couch for half an hour. You need to actually sleep. Not even from having the occasional half an hour nap. You just don't reach REM that fast, unless you're narcoleptic.
Which also brings us to: if whatever project or job actually makes you ask yourself if you could get by with just a lie down now and then, well, ask yourself if it's worth the problems in the longer run. Again, even if you don't outright reach the death point, you _will_ lose neurons, and that tends to be fairly permanent. You might also get other problems too.
And if you're the employer, well, ask yourself if you want to be an evil fuck. We're not talking just greedy, or just pushing them a little harder, but actual long term damage. If actual harm to some people is a perfectly acceptable trade off for a few more bucks in your (or the company's) pocket, that's comfortably in the zone I'd call outright evil.
Europe hasn't launched a crusade for several centuries, but jihad is alive and kicking.
Bullshit. There hasn't been any Jihad proclaimed by any religious authority that would have the authority to do so.
The Jihad can only be proclaimed by the head of the global islamic nation (which title hasn't been claimed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire) or a grand ayatollah. None did.
A bunch of nutters proclaiming their own Jihad is exactly on par with a bunch of rednecks proclaiming their own Crusade. No, it ain't. Unless it's proclaimed by a Pope, it's not a Crusade. Ditto for the Jihad.
So at least do your homework before doing anti-Islam trolling.
Look, just to clarify one thing: I'm not saying that _everyone_ in the Wehrmacht was some kind of saint. Some were arseholes, a lot weren't. Some vented frustration on innocent civillians, a lot didn't. Some had probably figured out the "final solution", some had no idea, and most likely a lot chose not to think about that kind of stuff at all.
What annoys me about the GGP post is the implication that _necessarily_ if someone made a WW2 game from the perspective of a German soldier, it would _have_ to be about shooting russian peasants and rounding up jews. Something like that can only hold if you or him are willing to claim that every single German soldier that ever got recruited was involved in that "final solution", and that's simply not the case. There is plenty of room to make a FPS from the perspective of a German soldier who's simply freezing his balls off and shitting his pants on the Easter Front, under a screaming Katyusha missile barrage. (Think: the ancestor of the MLRS.) And if anything goes through his head, it'll more likely be just "I wish this was over and I could go home" rather than anything evil.
It was used as a sorta military force, yes. It was not subordinated to the army, or even the same minister. Until the very end, they were under Himmler's hierarchy, together with the criminal police, Gestapo, etc. I.e., as organization goes, it was a (weird) branch of the minister of the interior, i.e., _police_. Whereas the Wehrmacht was led by the OKH, and Himmler was nowhere in _that_ hierarchy. The SS had their own uniforms, their own ranks (e.g., a lieutenant would be called a "Leutnant" in the army, but "Untersturmführer" in the SS), etc.
Well, then to get back to that original point: what makes you think that playing as a Wehrmacht soldier in a WW2 game would be any different?
Virtually nobody wants to think of themselves as evil fucks, even _if_ they happened to be the ones who had a hint of what's happening. We've had millenia of inventing and perverting concepts like "honour" to rationalize killing someone else as "good". The humans natural instincts to not kill each other (see, mirror neurons) have been twisted against them jiu-jitsu style to rationalize doing just that. The human social urge to be liked by his tribe/group/community has been perverted into making him kill his neighbour, daughter (see, the atrocity known as honour killings), mother (see, the behaviour of some relatives in witch hunts), etc, and still think of himself as "good" or as doing something right and expected by said community.
So the individual German soldiers wouldn't think of themselves as doing evil either. If they had to rationalize it any deeper than "because they'll execute me if I desert", it would more likely be "because we're the world's last hope against godless Bolshevism. We must stop them or all civilized world will fall to it." That was the justification that the higher ups repeated left and right, including in the (in)famous Sportpalast speech.
Would it be morally wrong to play as a German soldier fighting to stop Bolshevism?
Well, that's funny, because that was exactly the justification given by the USA in Korea, Vietnam, or to bomb the allied Laos. We've had some 60 years of movies, novels, comics, and later computer games too, glorifying just that: fighting against the godless Bolshevism.
If someobody published a game where a good ol' American hero mows the russkies like Rambo to stop them from spreading Bolshevism, not many would have a problem with that. How many protested against Rambo II or the games based on Rambo II? So why would you or the OP have a problem with it if it's a German soldier doing just that?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to rationalize WW2 or present it as "good." I'm actually finding it just as wrong when cold-war era aggression is glorified too. Just saying that at the bottom of it, things would be less different than some seem to think. For whatever that's worth.
You might as well argue that no american soldier knows the CIA tortures prisoners.
Well, that's actually a perfect example, if you're willing to use your brain.
How do you know about those tortures? Well, because there's a free press and Internet and all sorts of channels outside the government control that told you about it.
In a totalitarian regime, with the press controlled by the government, yes, probably very few american soldiers would have had the faintest idea about what the CIA does. The american soldiers would have just seen their narrow slice of reality -- you know, some fighting, some patrolling occupied cities, some getting sniped, some of your pals being blown to bits by a roadside bomb -- and would have had no idea at all what happens to those arrested "terrorists", or in some cases that anyone was arrested at all.
The final solution was to big to keep hidden.
Except apparently it was secret enough that with all the partisans, and resistance, and spies, and captured german officers and all, the allies had no fucking clue about it either until they ran into an actual death camp. You'd think that something which is no secret at all (or so you claim) would leak sooner, no?
did not pretend that the german soldiers did not know what they were fighting for. Notice that most potrayals of symphatetic germans conveniently accepts "ich habe es nicht gewust" for fact. But it was the soldiers who rounded up the undesirables and put them on transport. Who took civilians hostage and executed them.
Actually, it wasn't that simple.
1. For a start you have to understand that what the bulshit Hollywood propaganda presents as a one "German army", was actually several branches, some of which weren't army at all. The SS for example was a paramilitary organization, _not_ a branch of the German army, and none too loved by the real army (the Wehrmacht.)
Second, even Hitler understood and accepted that not everyone has the stomach for his racial purity solutions.
The rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc, was done by volunteer groups -- the euphemistically called Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos (special units) -- recruited from the SS, SD, Gestapo (all under Himmler, btw) and local volunteers, _not_ from the army.
So, yes, most German soldiers didn't know jack squat about the extermination, and never rounded up anybody.
If you want to see an example of how the real army felt when ordered to do some atrocity: when a German sub was sunk by airplanes while trying to tow to safety the survivors of a ship it torpedoed, Hitler was furious and ordered that subs machinegun all such survivors in the future. Dönitz argued that doing anything of the kind would cause a massive morale drop, and basically pretty much refused to do it. Hitler actually backed out of that idea. Subs did stop trying to rescue survivors, though.
2. But to get back to the rounding up, you also have to understand another aspect: people are easier to round up when they don't know they're going to end up dead. After all, if you'll be killed anyway, what's your incentive to surrender to the guys with guns? At least running away or fighting back you still have a small chance to survive.
And you can see in the Warsaw uprising what happened when people realized that they're dead in the long run anyway.
So the "final solution" was actually kept somewhat secret, because, you know, the less people know about it, the less the risk that one of them will write to their former friend in Minsk to say stuff like "dude, hide before these guys come haul you to the gas chambers" and that guy tells _his_ friends about it, and it goes downhill from there. You have plenty of historical examples from elsewhere of exactly this kind of thing happening. E.g., the Gunpowder Plot in England failed when some conspirator tried to warn some other catholics to not be in the parliament on that day.
The people rounded up and the population in those cities, were routinely told they're being merely deported to some other province, and encouraged to take whatever they think they'll need in a new home. (Incidentally, that ended up as loot for the nazis.)
As I might have mentioned, I was talking about a more traditional MMO, which is a bit differently structured than EVE. (Not saying either it's better, mind you. Just that they're different games for different people.)
A zone in WoW (or EQ2, or WAR, or whatever) isn't just some terrain where you mine and occasionally fight each other. Zones must also include some _quests_ at the bare minimum. Zones which are/were just a big empty space, always tended to be mostly empty. E.g., Azhara has only a couple of quests, and really at any given time there are 1-2 players there tops.
So creating some zones which might, or might not, be made available later also means writing a lot of story and scripting quests... which might not be needed yet, or indeed might never get activated if you don't get enough players to require them.
Conversely, even if you do release them, how many quests _do_ you need for, say, levels 15 to 20? A bit of variety and choice is good, mind you, but past a point you're just creating more and more content which any given character won't need. If you end up with 20 zones with level 15-20 quests, the average character will just see one and then outlevel them all for good. Except a few of us terminal altoholics, nobody will make 20 characters just to see them all.
Even if they do make that many characters, you just created more work for yourself in balancing the quests and rewards against all other zones for the same level range. If one of those level 15-20 zones gives better rewards than the other 19, you just made those 19 obsolete for most people. (See: how many people still do Silithus instead of buggering off to Hellfire Peninsula?)
Basically I still maintain that for a traditional MMO it's a lot more work and _expense_ to adjust world size to player population, than spawning/merging shards is.
Again, if EVE's game type works that way, more power to it. For a game like WoW, it's a bit different, due to different game design.
Well, that's still shards. City sized intead of planet sized, but shards anyway. I was more under the impression that what these guys want is one huge non-instanced world with everyone in it.
Actually, while I'll agree with your main idea that it's undesirable, I just have to wonder about the 15 year olds quip.
From my limited experience -- and fully aware that the plural of anecdotes isn't data, but I have to start somewhere -- the vast majority of children I ended up grouped with were actually nice people and played the game well. Conversely, most of the more annoying trolls I've known, were middle-aged men. I guess mid-life crisis goes "I can still gank newbies" instead of "I can still get a car with a wing, and teenage hookers" in some people.
The thing that got me to start thinking about it all -- and bear in mind, I'm not saying it's the worst, just that it was a shock at the time -- was discovering that a (now ex) boss, a respected middle-aged, mid-level manager, was talking l33t in an MMO. I get a tell that, really, makes me wish I had a Rosetta stone to decrypt that garbled nonsense, and wonder who the fuck is that retarded kid? Lo and behold, it's the boss. I _know_ he can type very fast, so he doesn't even have the excuse of not having the time to type the "y" and "o" in "you."
Another midle-aged guy I know gets his jollies ganking newbies. That's his idea of showing how great he is, apparently.
One was literally the most retarded player I've ever grouped with. He managed to reach level 70 (at that time, the max) while still believing stuff like that if he takes a step back when an enemy slashes at him, the enemy will miss. 'Cause that sword doesn't reach to his new position, see. Geesh. Or he still thought that it's a good idea as a hunter to run backwards when he gets aggro, 'cause, see, he manages to squeeze in another ranged shot now and then that way. And generally, I mean, not just as in "hadn't figured out the game yet", but as in, "had the most ridiculous ideas and insisted that that's how the game works." He actually was proud of his "footwork", lemme tell you.
After a wipe or two I actually wished we had a 15 year old in his place. At least those tend to be good at figuring out a game.
One was not just a complete CS-head, but actually proud of his spewing the most offensive sexist remarks at anyone who had a female name in the game. There was stuff he was telling me (and you know you can't stop them from talking about CS even if you tried) that made _me_ cringe, and I'm a guy. And he's standing them beaming proud of how witty he was.
Etc.
So, 15 year olds? I can deal with 15 year olds. It's the older retards that I fear a lot more.
Actually, I see another even bigger problem, at least for more traditional (WoW-type) MMOs. How big should your world be?
Too little player density => people start complaining that it's pretty much a single-player game like Oblivion, except you occasionally see another player. Many games ended merging up shards more for that sensation of empty space than because of costs. (It's equally easy to just merge the physical servers inside a shard, to support a lower population per shard, if you're only concerned about hardware costs.)
Too many players on too little surface => lag (think: landing in Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house for Alliance), routinely having 5 players camping the same mob, and generally it just starts feeling cramped. Again, you have players starting to complain.
Basically if you want to be single-shard, you have to essentially guess how much population you'll get. Maybe just within the right order of magnitude, but guess nevertheless. It's not that trivial. On one side of the guessed-wrong spectrum you have WoW which got launched with only a handful of servers and had massive queues, on the other end of the spectrum you have more than one game who thought they'll be teh WoW-killer and then had to merge 4 servers in 1.
Merging or splitting shards is an easier way to deal with that problem than having to physically add or remove new areas, to fit the population.
Additionally, world size influences other things, like travel times, exploration, etc. There is an ideal apparent size where people don't feel like they're being packed like sardines and running around a back yard, but don't go "fuck it, I'm not spending another hour just running back to the quest giver" all the time either. It's easier to fine tune that if it's its own problem, orthogonal to everything else, than when it also has to fit the population numbers.
Basically if EVE's game type was well suited for that kind of one-shard world, more power to them, but for other types of MMOs it might actually be a bad idea.
Well, maybe, but it won't be cheap. I doubt that the guy running some amateur mod site is willing to fork over some thousands out of his own pocket to have someone take the drive apart and use an electron microscope or whatever on it.
Sort of, but not everyone, or not in the same way. For example, as early as the first online games (MUDs), Bartle wrote his classic paper in which he distinguished the following kinds of players and their interactions with the game and with each other:
- achievers, who love achieving stuff. They want to have the biggest score, the most virtual money, have the full top-tier equipment set, etc
- explorers, who are mostly interested interested in reverse engineering your game. They want to discover places, or to reverse engineer how your game works, or whatever other intellectual pursuits. Many actually don't care much about material achievements or titles, except in as much as they're needed to explore. Their "achievements" are all about knowledge gained, not stuff you could hang on the wall or sum up in points.
- socializers, who are pretty much just using your game as a chat room which incidentally happens to also have a game on the side. These people are there to make friends, organize some guild party, stuff like that. And chat lots. Although you could point out that these are their own kind of achievements, they're also not the kind that's easy to automatically measure and slap a title on.
- "killers", named so because their greatest reward is driving someone off the game, effectively perma-killing them off. They're the kind who'll try to harrass, annoy, give you grief, etc. Or what the rest of the world calls "griefers" or "trolls". Their favourite prey are the ones who take unwarranted hostility personally, i.e., the socializers. Although the "killers" title can be confusing, don't confuse them with PvP-ers. A lot of PvP-ers are actually just achievers (e.g., for the honour points), and a lot of killers actually are more creative with their harrassment than camping your corpse all day.
Anyway, again, it's the kind of thing which is hard to measure in achievements. And most killers don't care much about their character (including equipment, titles, etc) as such anyway, it's just a harrassment tool. Think of all the guys who didn't even bother getting another armour than the death shroud in UO, for example. Their achievement wasn't having the best looking outfit, but the fact that they could gank you repeatedly when you went mining. A lot bought disposable accounts who will get banned, but hopefully serve their purpose as harrassment tools in the meantime. What makes anyone think that on such a disposable account any titles achieved on a character matter at all?
1. It's not _my_ theory. The Peter principle is the observation and resulting book of Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. And, again, politicians are their own example in that book.
2. Well, that said, I don't see a problem.
The fact is that some people do get promoted to jobs they're incompetent for. The theory that it was because they did well in the previous job is really the simplest and requires the least suspension of disbelief. Contrasting theories, like, say, the Dilbert Principle, are both more complex and require one to believe that someone would deliberately sabotage their own organization by promoting those who are known to be incompetent for both their current and future job.
As someone who's been writing external trainers for games for years (though admittedly it was some years ago), I can assure you first hand that accessing a game's internal data structures is indeed very possible.
And even if I couldn't find that boolean, I'd at least try to hook the point where it tries to draw that icon.
The idea of using image recognition on the screen is so horribly inefficient a method... I suppose it could be used if absolutely nothing else works, but really that's about it.
They we're doing it for a gradiate thesis. At least Neuroph was built for a thesis. What conventional method for image recognition do you think would be faster?
I don't know what the GP had in mind, but for my take: How about _no_ image recognition in the first place?
If you need to see when a game icon is activated, how about just looking at the byte that stores the state for that icon?
1. Occam's Razor. If someone consistently acts stupid, talks stupid, etc, there are two possible explanations:
A: He's stupid.
B: He's a really really smart guy and a great actor, and pretends so well to be stupid that nobody can tell the difference.
I think you'll agree that the first is the simpler explanation.
2. The Peter Principle: everyone keeps getting promoted until they become incompetent for the job they just got promoted to. (E.g., because it needs different skills than the previous one.)
Politicians are actually one of the original examples in Peter's book. To get elected you need charisma, basically. But after you get elected, you need stuff like management skills, you need to know economics, etc. None of those played any role in convincing the people to elect you. So it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of elected politicians who genuinely don't have any more skills than talking convincingly out the arse and looking good in front of a camera. The skills they'd actually need to do a good job in the office, they simply don't have.
Worse yet, we elect those who can _lie_ convincingly or at least conveniently not mention half the truth. My standard example is the Phillips curve: all else being equal (and invariably out of your control), inflation and unemployment depend on each other. You push one down, the other goes up. Now think of all the politicians whose claim to deserving the office is, basically, "OMG, under the current government there is inflation! We'll reduce that!" or conversely for unemployment. But they never mention that their plan involves the other going _up_. If they told you that, that would be political suicide. So their getting elected depends on claiming to get one up, while strongly implying and getting you to assume (though not actually saying so) that the other will obviously stay put.
Or occasionally one promises to solve both. 'Cause, I suppose, if you're going to lie anyway, might as well go all the way.
Then we wonder how come they lie after they got elected, instead of actually doing what they promised. Duh. Because we tested their ability to lie, not the ability to do what they promised. We just promoted someone to a position for which they're unqualified and incompetent.
3. As a bonus: Hanlon's Razor. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't doubt that some of the above mentioned don't outright lie, but genuinely Peter's Principle applies. They don't understand economics well enough to know that they're promising an impossibility.
Actually, I'd say that's just the start of the problems. The next problem will be that half of anything you install nowadays, will want to preload itself or parts of itself in your tray, or install some services, or God knows what else.
And I'm not even talking proper spyware. E.g., even when I install OOo, the first thing I have to do is deactivate its preloading itself. 'Cause obviously they thought my RAM is there just so they can willy-wave about loading faster than MS Office, instead of fixing their brain-dead code to actually be fast. (Though apparently in the last release they actually did get around to optimizing a bit for a change.)
E.g., I install Sun's Java, 'course, it has to keep something in the tray just to make sure it can pester me to download the latest release I don't even want.
E.g., I install my old Audigy 4's software after moving it to another computer, and I promptly remember what I hated about its software in the first place. By default it installs a brain-dead bloated skinned second toolbar, so to speak, just in case I'm too stupid to launch its control pannels normally. And so it can get in my way when I accidentally move the mouse to its edge. It also installs stuff like its own CD/DVD detector (and launcher of the apropriate program for it), for no obvious reason, since Windows already does a perfectly good job there. It also blesses my computer with a bloated, slow loading splash screen, 'cause obviously doubling my computer's startup time is perfectly ok if it lets them shove in my face again that it runs an Audigy. Obviously my time and RAM are there just so they can advertise to me. Etc.
I'm not even singling out OOo or Java there, mind you. Lots of others do the same.
And then come the games, with their retarded DRM drivers and whatnot.
My point is that it used to be a time when you actually had to get virused or click on spyware to get half a gigabyte of your RAM full with crap. Increasingly in the last decade, you don't even need to do that. Just installing perfectly legit software can make your computer swap, if you're not savvy enough to find that crap in the registry and disable its auto-loading. Sometimes twice, because some are smart enough to re-enable themselves.
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Well, that's certainly a possibility too.
Yes, some people do slip into REM much quicker. As I was saying, narcoleptics can get into REM in 15-25 minutes, sometimes less.
Also, you do need less sleep with age. Margaret Thatcher was born in '25, and was PM between '79 and '90, i.e., between roughly 54 and 65 years old. Admittedly still a bit young for 4 hours a night, but less spectacular than if someone half that age pulled that stunt anyway.
Sorry, then, I had confused you to something else. Just shows that I should have taken my own advice and gone to sleep instead of posting after midnight :P
Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly. It doesn't mean you can't get smaller doses of damage long before that. Keep doing it often enough, and it might just add up.
And the darndest thing is that your cells have Telomeres, i.e., maximum division counters. So even damage that can be repaired, only goes so far. E.g., old age and death by old age, are simply a matter of more and more of your cells reaching the limit, and thus more and more damage can't be repaired. So, anyway, that which doesn't kill you, usually shortens your life instead of making you stronger.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
And to answer to your objection from a different message too, yes, 1 or 2 nights you can recover from. (Though if done for work reason, it may still be interesting to remember the study where the students who were allowed to have a good 8 hour sleep solved a problem actually faster than those who pulled all nighters. You're a lot less smart when very tired.) After about 3 you start getting permanent brain damage.
I think the biggest thing you need sooner or later is REM sleep, not just a lie down. Lack of REM sleep (which, as we'll see is possible while technically still getting some sleep) can result in actual brain damage, or in the very long run even death. (Ironically, it's also produced _by_ certain kinds of brain damage.) Also, while we still lack the complete picture, it's proven that at least one type of memory isn't updated without REM.
REM sleep also doesn't come instantly. In most people you need at least 90 minutes from falling asleep to having your first REM period. Anything under about half an hour is a sign of narcolepsy. Your longest REM episodes happen after several hours.
On the average over a whole night, about a quarter of the time will be REM. It's safe to assume that in the long run those two hours or so of REM a day are what your body actually needs.
But again, you don't get them in one big chunk. You get them interleaved with periods of non-REM sleep. So what it boils down to is that to get your normal quota of REM sleep, you'll actually need those 8 hours a night. You might get by with just 7, but anything less (unless you're over 70) is putting stress on your brain in the long run. You might not outright die, but you won't be very smart or attentive after months of getting significantly less.
But if you know how to get that REM while awake instead, I'm listening.
Because otherwise, no, you can't get your daily sleep by laying down on the couch for half an hour. You need to actually sleep. Not even from having the occasional half an hour nap. You just don't reach REM that fast, unless you're narcoleptic.
Which also brings us to: if whatever project or job actually makes you ask yourself if you could get by with just a lie down now and then, well, ask yourself if it's worth the problems in the longer run. Again, even if you don't outright reach the death point, you _will_ lose neurons, and that tends to be fairly permanent. You might also get other problems too.
And if you're the employer, well, ask yourself if you want to be an evil fuck. We're not talking just greedy, or just pushing them a little harder, but actual long term damage. If actual harm to some people is a perfectly acceptable trade off for a few more bucks in your (or the company's) pocket, that's comfortably in the zone I'd call outright evil.
Well, as somebody above pointed out, some employers would be shocked to learn that.
Last I've heard, pink is a lucky colour in China.
Bullshit. There hasn't been any Jihad proclaimed by any religious authority that would have the authority to do so.
The Jihad can only be proclaimed by the head of the global islamic nation (which title hasn't been claimed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire) or a grand ayatollah. None did.
A bunch of nutters proclaiming their own Jihad is exactly on par with a bunch of rednecks proclaiming their own Crusade. No, it ain't. Unless it's proclaimed by a Pope, it's not a Crusade. Ditto for the Jihad.
So at least do your homework before doing anti-Islam trolling.
Look, just to clarify one thing: I'm not saying that _everyone_ in the Wehrmacht was some kind of saint. Some were arseholes, a lot weren't. Some vented frustration on innocent civillians, a lot didn't. Some had probably figured out the "final solution", some had no idea, and most likely a lot chose not to think about that kind of stuff at all.
What annoys me about the GGP post is the implication that _necessarily_ if someone made a WW2 game from the perspective of a German soldier, it would _have_ to be about shooting russian peasants and rounding up jews. Something like that can only hold if you or him are willing to claim that every single German soldier that ever got recruited was involved in that "final solution", and that's simply not the case. There is plenty of room to make a FPS from the perspective of a German soldier who's simply freezing his balls off and shitting his pants on the Easter Front, under a screaming Katyusha missile barrage. (Think: the ancestor of the MLRS.) And if anything goes through his head, it'll more likely be just "I wish this was over and I could go home" rather than anything evil.
It was used as a sorta military force, yes. It was not subordinated to the army, or even the same minister. Until the very end, they were under Himmler's hierarchy, together with the criminal police, Gestapo, etc. I.e., as organization goes, it was a (weird) branch of the minister of the interior, i.e., _police_. Whereas the Wehrmacht was led by the OKH, and Himmler was nowhere in _that_ hierarchy. The SS had their own uniforms, their own ranks (e.g., a lieutenant would be called a "Leutnant" in the army, but "Untersturmführer" in the SS), etc.
Well, then to get back to that original point: what makes you think that playing as a Wehrmacht soldier in a WW2 game would be any different?
Virtually nobody wants to think of themselves as evil fucks, even _if_ they happened to be the ones who had a hint of what's happening. We've had millenia of inventing and perverting concepts like "honour" to rationalize killing someone else as "good". The humans natural instincts to not kill each other (see, mirror neurons) have been twisted against them jiu-jitsu style to rationalize doing just that. The human social urge to be liked by his tribe/group/community has been perverted into making him kill his neighbour, daughter (see, the atrocity known as honour killings), mother (see, the behaviour of some relatives in witch hunts), etc, and still think of himself as "good" or as doing something right and expected by said community.
So the individual German soldiers wouldn't think of themselves as doing evil either. If they had to rationalize it any deeper than "because they'll execute me if I desert", it would more likely be "because we're the world's last hope against godless Bolshevism. We must stop them or all civilized world will fall to it." That was the justification that the higher ups repeated left and right, including in the (in)famous Sportpalast speech.
Would it be morally wrong to play as a German soldier fighting to stop Bolshevism?
Well, that's funny, because that was exactly the justification given by the USA in Korea, Vietnam, or to bomb the allied Laos. We've had some 60 years of movies, novels, comics, and later computer games too, glorifying just that: fighting against the godless Bolshevism.
If someobody published a game where a good ol' American hero mows the russkies like Rambo to stop them from spreading Bolshevism, not many would have a problem with that. How many protested against Rambo II or the games based on Rambo II? So why would you or the OP have a problem with it if it's a German soldier doing just that?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to rationalize WW2 or present it as "good." I'm actually finding it just as wrong when cold-war era aggression is glorified too. Just saying that at the bottom of it, things would be less different than some seem to think. For whatever that's worth.
Well, that's actually a perfect example, if you're willing to use your brain.
How do you know about those tortures? Well, because there's a free press and Internet and all sorts of channels outside the government control that told you about it.
In a totalitarian regime, with the press controlled by the government, yes, probably very few american soldiers would have had the faintest idea about what the CIA does. The american soldiers would have just seen their narrow slice of reality -- you know, some fighting, some patrolling occupied cities, some getting sniped, some of your pals being blown to bits by a roadside bomb -- and would have had no idea at all what happens to those arrested "terrorists", or in some cases that anyone was arrested at all.
Except apparently it was secret enough that with all the partisans, and resistance, and spies, and captured german officers and all, the allies had no fucking clue about it either until they ran into an actual death camp. You'd think that something which is no secret at all (or so you claim) would leak sooner, no?
Actually, it wasn't that simple.
1. For a start you have to understand that what the bulshit Hollywood propaganda presents as a one "German army", was actually several branches, some of which weren't army at all. The SS for example was a paramilitary organization, _not_ a branch of the German army, and none too loved by the real army (the Wehrmacht.)
Second, even Hitler understood and accepted that not everyone has the stomach for his racial purity solutions.
The rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc, was done by volunteer groups -- the euphemistically called Einsatzgruppen or Sonderkommandos (special units) -- recruited from the SS, SD, Gestapo (all under Himmler, btw) and local volunteers, _not_ from the army.
So, yes, most German soldiers didn't know jack squat about the extermination, and never rounded up anybody.
If you want to see an example of how the real army felt when ordered to do some atrocity: when a German sub was sunk by airplanes while trying to tow to safety the survivors of a ship it torpedoed, Hitler was furious and ordered that subs machinegun all such survivors in the future. Dönitz argued that doing anything of the kind would cause a massive morale drop, and basically pretty much refused to do it. Hitler actually backed out of that idea. Subs did stop trying to rescue survivors, though.
2. But to get back to the rounding up, you also have to understand another aspect: people are easier to round up when they don't know they're going to end up dead. After all, if you'll be killed anyway, what's your incentive to surrender to the guys with guns? At least running away or fighting back you still have a small chance to survive.
And you can see in the Warsaw uprising what happened when people realized that they're dead in the long run anyway.
So the "final solution" was actually kept somewhat secret, because, you know, the less people know about it, the less the risk that one of them will write to their former friend in Minsk to say stuff like "dude, hide before these guys come haul you to the gas chambers" and that guy tells _his_ friends about it, and it goes downhill from there. You have plenty of historical examples from elsewhere of exactly this kind of thing happening. E.g., the Gunpowder Plot in England failed when some conspirator tried to warn some other catholics to not be in the parliament on that day.
The people rounded up and the population in those cities, were routinely told they're being merely deported to some other province, and encouraged to take whatever they think they'll need in a new home. (Incidentally, that ended up as loot for the nazis.)
As I might have mentioned, I was talking about a more traditional MMO, which is a bit differently structured than EVE. (Not saying either it's better, mind you. Just that they're different games for different people.)
A zone in WoW (or EQ2, or WAR, or whatever) isn't just some terrain where you mine and occasionally fight each other. Zones must also include some _quests_ at the bare minimum. Zones which are/were just a big empty space, always tended to be mostly empty. E.g., Azhara has only a couple of quests, and really at any given time there are 1-2 players there tops.
So creating some zones which might, or might not, be made available later also means writing a lot of story and scripting quests... which might not be needed yet, or indeed might never get activated if you don't get enough players to require them.
Conversely, even if you do release them, how many quests _do_ you need for, say, levels 15 to 20? A bit of variety and choice is good, mind you, but past a point you're just creating more and more content which any given character won't need. If you end up with 20 zones with level 15-20 quests, the average character will just see one and then outlevel them all for good. Except a few of us terminal altoholics, nobody will make 20 characters just to see them all.
Even if they do make that many characters, you just created more work for yourself in balancing the quests and rewards against all other zones for the same level range. If one of those level 15-20 zones gives better rewards than the other 19, you just made those 19 obsolete for most people. (See: how many people still do Silithus instead of buggering off to Hellfire Peninsula?)
Basically I still maintain that for a traditional MMO it's a lot more work and _expense_ to adjust world size to player population, than spawning/merging shards is.
Again, if EVE's game type works that way, more power to it. For a game like WoW, it's a bit different, due to different game design.
Well, that's still shards. City sized intead of planet sized, but shards anyway. I was more under the impression that what these guys want is one huge non-instanced world with everyone in it.
Actually, while I'll agree with your main idea that it's undesirable, I just have to wonder about the 15 year olds quip.
From my limited experience -- and fully aware that the plural of anecdotes isn't data, but I have to start somewhere -- the vast majority of children I ended up grouped with were actually nice people and played the game well. Conversely, most of the more annoying trolls I've known, were middle-aged men. I guess mid-life crisis goes "I can still gank newbies" instead of "I can still get a car with a wing, and teenage hookers" in some people.
The thing that got me to start thinking about it all -- and bear in mind, I'm not saying it's the worst, just that it was a shock at the time -- was discovering that a (now ex) boss, a respected middle-aged, mid-level manager, was talking l33t in an MMO. I get a tell that, really, makes me wish I had a Rosetta stone to decrypt that garbled nonsense, and wonder who the fuck is that retarded kid? Lo and behold, it's the boss. I _know_ he can type very fast, so he doesn't even have the excuse of not having the time to type the "y" and "o" in "you."
Another midle-aged guy I know gets his jollies ganking newbies. That's his idea of showing how great he is, apparently.
One was literally the most retarded player I've ever grouped with. He managed to reach level 70 (at that time, the max) while still believing stuff like that if he takes a step back when an enemy slashes at him, the enemy will miss. 'Cause that sword doesn't reach to his new position, see. Geesh. Or he still thought that it's a good idea as a hunter to run backwards when he gets aggro, 'cause, see, he manages to squeeze in another ranged shot now and then that way. And generally, I mean, not just as in "hadn't figured out the game yet", but as in, "had the most ridiculous ideas and insisted that that's how the game works." He actually was proud of his "footwork", lemme tell you.
After a wipe or two I actually wished we had a 15 year old in his place. At least those tend to be good at figuring out a game.
One was not just a complete CS-head, but actually proud of his spewing the most offensive sexist remarks at anyone who had a female name in the game. There was stuff he was telling me (and you know you can't stop them from talking about CS even if you tried) that made _me_ cringe, and I'm a guy. And he's standing them beaming proud of how witty he was.
Etc.
So, 15 year olds? I can deal with 15 year olds. It's the older retards that I fear a lot more.
Actually, I see another even bigger problem, at least for more traditional (WoW-type) MMOs. How big should your world be?
Too little player density => people start complaining that it's pretty much a single-player game like Oblivion, except you occasionally see another player. Many games ended merging up shards more for that sensation of empty space than because of costs. (It's equally easy to just merge the physical servers inside a shard, to support a lower population per shard, if you're only concerned about hardware costs.)
Too many players on too little surface => lag (think: landing in Ironforge, back when it had the only auction house for Alliance), routinely having 5 players camping the same mob, and generally it just starts feeling cramped. Again, you have players starting to complain.
Basically if you want to be single-shard, you have to essentially guess how much population you'll get. Maybe just within the right order of magnitude, but guess nevertheless. It's not that trivial. On one side of the guessed-wrong spectrum you have WoW which got launched with only a handful of servers and had massive queues, on the other end of the spectrum you have more than one game who thought they'll be teh WoW-killer and then had to merge 4 servers in 1.
Merging or splitting shards is an easier way to deal with that problem than having to physically add or remove new areas, to fit the population.
Additionally, world size influences other things, like travel times, exploration, etc. There is an ideal apparent size where people don't feel like they're being packed like sardines and running around a back yard, but don't go "fuck it, I'm not spending another hour just running back to the quest giver" all the time either. It's easier to fine tune that if it's its own problem, orthogonal to everything else, than when it also has to fit the population numbers.
Basically if EVE's game type was well suited for that kind of one-shard world, more power to them, but for other types of MMOs it might actually be a bad idea.
Well, maybe, but it won't be cheap. I doubt that the guy running some amateur mod site is willing to fork over some thousands out of his own pocket to have someone take the drive apart and use an electron microscope or whatever on it.
Sort of, but not everyone, or not in the same way. For example, as early as the first online games (MUDs), Bartle wrote his classic paper in which he distinguished the following kinds of players and their interactions with the game and with each other:
- achievers, who love achieving stuff. They want to have the biggest score, the most virtual money, have the full top-tier equipment set, etc
- explorers, who are mostly interested interested in reverse engineering your game. They want to discover places, or to reverse engineer how your game works, or whatever other intellectual pursuits. Many actually don't care much about material achievements or titles, except in as much as they're needed to explore. Their "achievements" are all about knowledge gained, not stuff you could hang on the wall or sum up in points.
- socializers, who are pretty much just using your game as a chat room which incidentally happens to also have a game on the side. These people are there to make friends, organize some guild party, stuff like that. And chat lots. Although you could point out that these are their own kind of achievements, they're also not the kind that's easy to automatically measure and slap a title on.
- "killers", named so because their greatest reward is driving someone off the game, effectively perma-killing them off. They're the kind who'll try to harrass, annoy, give you grief, etc. Or what the rest of the world calls "griefers" or "trolls". Their favourite prey are the ones who take unwarranted hostility personally, i.e., the socializers. Although the "killers" title can be confusing, don't confuse them with PvP-ers. A lot of PvP-ers are actually just achievers (e.g., for the honour points), and a lot of killers actually are more creative with their harrassment than camping your corpse all day.
Anyway, again, it's the kind of thing which is hard to measure in achievements. And most killers don't care much about their character (including equipment, titles, etc) as such anyway, it's just a harrassment tool. Think of all the guys who didn't even bother getting another armour than the death shroud in UO, for example. Their achievement wasn't having the best looking outfit, but the fact that they could gank you repeatedly when you went mining. A lot bought disposable accounts who will get banned, but hopefully serve their purpose as harrassment tools in the meantime. What makes anyone think that on such a disposable account any titles achieved on a character matter at all?
1. It's not _my_ theory. The Peter principle is the observation and resulting book of Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. And, again, politicians are their own example in that book.
2. Well, that said, I don't see a problem.
The fact is that some people do get promoted to jobs they're incompetent for. The theory that it was because they did well in the previous job is really the simplest and requires the least suspension of disbelief. Contrasting theories, like, say, the Dilbert Principle, are both more complex and require one to believe that someone would deliberately sabotage their own organization by promoting those who are known to be incompetent for both their current and future job.
I guess it would explain a few things. Thanks for that link.
As someone who's been writing external trainers for games for years (though admittedly it was some years ago), I can assure you first hand that accessing a game's internal data structures is indeed very possible.
And even if I couldn't find that boolean, I'd at least try to hook the point where it tries to draw that icon.
The idea of using image recognition on the screen is so horribly inefficient a method... I suppose it could be used if absolutely nothing else works, but really that's about it.
I don't know what the GP had in mind, but for my take: How about _no_ image recognition in the first place?
If you need to see when a game icon is activated, how about just looking at the byte that stores the state for that icon?
Actually, I'm very tempted to apply:
1. Occam's Razor. If someone consistently acts stupid, talks stupid, etc, there are two possible explanations:
A: He's stupid.
B: He's a really really smart guy and a great actor, and pretends so well to be stupid that nobody can tell the difference.
I think you'll agree that the first is the simpler explanation.
2. The Peter Principle: everyone keeps getting promoted until they become incompetent for the job they just got promoted to. (E.g., because it needs different skills than the previous one.)
Politicians are actually one of the original examples in Peter's book. To get elected you need charisma, basically. But after you get elected, you need stuff like management skills, you need to know economics, etc. None of those played any role in convincing the people to elect you. So it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of elected politicians who genuinely don't have any more skills than talking convincingly out the arse and looking good in front of a camera. The skills they'd actually need to do a good job in the office, they simply don't have.
Worse yet, we elect those who can _lie_ convincingly or at least conveniently not mention half the truth. My standard example is the Phillips curve: all else being equal (and invariably out of your control), inflation and unemployment depend on each other. You push one down, the other goes up. Now think of all the politicians whose claim to deserving the office is, basically, "OMG, under the current government there is inflation! We'll reduce that!" or conversely for unemployment. But they never mention that their plan involves the other going _up_. If they told you that, that would be political suicide. So their getting elected depends on claiming to get one up, while strongly implying and getting you to assume (though not actually saying so) that the other will obviously stay put.
Or occasionally one promises to solve both. 'Cause, I suppose, if you're going to lie anyway, might as well go all the way.
Then we wonder how come they lie after they got elected, instead of actually doing what they promised. Duh. Because we tested their ability to lie, not the ability to do what they promised. We just promoted someone to a position for which they're unqualified and incompetent.
3. As a bonus: Hanlon's Razor. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't doubt that some of the above mentioned don't outright lie, but genuinely Peter's Principle applies. They don't understand economics well enough to know that they're promising an impossibility.
Actually, I'd say that's just the start of the problems. The next problem will be that half of anything you install nowadays, will want to preload itself or parts of itself in your tray, or install some services, or God knows what else.
And I'm not even talking proper spyware. E.g., even when I install OOo, the first thing I have to do is deactivate its preloading itself. 'Cause obviously they thought my RAM is there just so they can willy-wave about loading faster than MS Office, instead of fixing their brain-dead code to actually be fast. (Though apparently in the last release they actually did get around to optimizing a bit for a change.)
E.g., I install Sun's Java, 'course, it has to keep something in the tray just to make sure it can pester me to download the latest release I don't even want.
E.g., I install my old Audigy 4's software after moving it to another computer, and I promptly remember what I hated about its software in the first place. By default it installs a brain-dead bloated skinned second toolbar, so to speak, just in case I'm too stupid to launch its control pannels normally. And so it can get in my way when I accidentally move the mouse to its edge. It also installs stuff like its own CD/DVD detector (and launcher of the apropriate program for it), for no obvious reason, since Windows already does a perfectly good job there. It also blesses my computer with a bloated, slow loading splash screen, 'cause obviously doubling my computer's startup time is perfectly ok if it lets them shove in my face again that it runs an Audigy. Obviously my time and RAM are there just so they can advertise to me. Etc.
I'm not even singling out OOo or Java there, mind you. Lots of others do the same.
And then come the games, with their retarded DRM drivers and whatnot.
My point is that it used to be a time when you actually had to get virused or click on spyware to get half a gigabyte of your RAM full with crap. Increasingly in the last decade, you don't even need to do that. Just installing perfectly legit software can make your computer swap, if you're not savvy enough to find that crap in the registry and disable its auto-loading. Sometimes twice, because some are smart enough to re-enable themselves.