If you mean Dubya, I think the word you're looking for is "troglodyte" not "neanderthal". Neanderthals are about 6 million years more advanced on the evolution chain, smarter, and a whole other body shape. Think: literally pear shaped. As in, the rib cage actually flares at the lower end.
Actually, I'd worry more about the "Ragdoll" part in his choice of a cat. I had one.
Ragdolls are quite aptly named. It's the Garfield species. In fact like a stoned Garfield. It's the cat which doesn't even have much of an instinct to defend itself or run away when attacked, so it's advisable to only keep it indoors. And I haven't even heard of a Ragdoll with a hunting instinct.
Ragdolls are great if you want essentially a living teddy bear that you can hug and carry around as much as you want. (Most cats eventually get overstimulated and bugger off.) And it won't cause much chaos when you put it down and leave it unattended. In fact, it'll probably just go sleep on something soft, until it gets hungry and has to go eat.
It doesn't even explore much. In fact, I've sometimes heard of it being recommended to people with pollen allergies, because it won't bother much with going outside and coming back with pollen in its fur, even if it can.
It's _technically_ a cat in that it has most of the cat genes and anatomy, and meows. It's not a cat in the "miniature version of a ferocious predator" sense that most other species are.
It's definitely _not_ the kind of cat I'd have in mind if I want something hunted. It's the kind of cat I'd have in mind if I want, well, something mellow to hug and pet.
"Retarded" means "below normal development for its age". Given that, saying that 90% of uses of memes is retarded is a contradiction in terms. The majority of people cannot be retarded, you insensitive clod, not even in Soviet Russia, even if the overlords there arguably were.
I think I understand your point, but I don't really see a problem. I don't think you can make a case that the whole population just mindlessly parrots memes to impress, which is kinda needed for that 90% to translate into 90% of the population.
I do believe that, out in the real world, you'll find that the vast majority of people _don't_ in fact just spew random memes to sound smart. E.g., I've been in plenty of conversations and don't remember anyone going "first reply!" yet. And I've yet to hear anyone going "in Soviet Russia car buys you!" when someone talks about buying a car. Etc.
Let's face it, normal communication may contain clichés and standard phrases, but they're used to convey a very specific meaning, if that expression and meaning fits the conversation at hand. Not just so person X can get to spew supposed meme Y, whether it fits the context or not.
Using some blatantly clichéd expression just because one thinks it made someone else sound smart, is IMHO very much under the normal and expected mental development of anyone over the age of ten or so. We've all been at the stage of parroting the big words mommy uses without much understanding, but then we grew up and out of it. Well, ok, let's say 18, so we don't insult the high-school gangsta hip-hoppers. Yes, about 90% of such use counts as retarded in my book, in precisely the sense you write: it falls below what I would expect from the mental abilities and processes of an adult. And I don't think that the whole population does that.
Then again, after seeing too many marketing texts that use "leverage" instead of "use", and "synergy" without saying between what and what, etc, just because some drone thought it sounds smarter and more educated... I can see your point too. Hmm. Maybe I have too high expectations of an average person's mental development.
It's still not that radically new a concept IMHO. Most games are involve one or more of the following:
1. are made by gamers in the first place. The reason why so many people want to work in the game industry, even at ridiculously low wages, is that they are gamers in the first place. So not only you have one or more gamers involved before even writing the first line of code, you'll have actual gamers actually writing those lines of code, scripting the NPCs, drawing the cut scenes and textures, designing the levels, and writing the dialogue.
Sometimes it's even people who love the thing that the game is themed around. E.g., the way I hear it, Statesman (of City Of Heroes fame) is actually a genuine die-hard comic fan. And he plays video games.(E.g., supposedly he got the much maligned ED idea while playing a platformer on his GBA.) And he made a video game about comic-book superheroes. I'd say he was very qualified to give input in the conceptual design phase there.
(Though true enough, you often can tell when a company just gets into a genre none of them played or liked, by their building an awful game based on awfully wrong assumptions.)
2. involve some focus groups, other forms of dialogue with gamers, etc.
Heck, Sony for example seems to be pushing really hard to please female gamers and pulls stunts like having a player play Queen Antonia Bayle of Qeynos for the various events. (Sorta like Lord British's character in UO, but this time it's not the character of a dev, but of an actual girl who plays EQ2.) Plus, gives a lot of attention to female gamer guilds and the like. I'd be genuinely surprised if they don't get at least some occasions to voice their concerns and such.
3. involve experience, including player input, from previous games.
E.g., Statesman's new project is Champions Online, another superhero-themed MMO. I should think he took with him a lot of the experience of what worked and what didn't work for the players in COH, and a lot of player input received along the way.
E.g., Raph Koster IIRC worked on a MUD before joining UO, and then took his experience with both over to SWG. (Ok, ok, so I guess sometimes experience doesn't precluse fucking up;)
4. indiscriminate player input can actually be bad, if not verified by other means.
E.g., Blizzard makes the servers generate a _lot_ of statistics, so they can know exactly which class killed which other class too often, what spec did more damage to a given boss, etc. So they can actually use hard data to check if some class's complaints or wishes for more power are justified, or just whining. That long period of fine-tuning and tweaking they gave all their games after release, was essentially very much based on player input... just not (only) the post-on-a-board type. They looked at what those players actually do in the game.
I see your point, and I'll even agree with you there, but DVDs are simply one of the many distribution channels of that product. It's planned from the start that the movie will be released in cinemas, on DVDs, on Blue Ray, etc. It's still the same product.
In a sense, it's the same as releasing WoW in a version on 4 CDs and a version on 1 DVD. It's still the same game, only on a different physical medium.
IMHO the equivalent to how Sega does its ports would be maybe if there's at least a re-mastering involved for the new medium, possibly even re-filming a couple of scenes. Or turning a movie into a TV series, for example.
As I was saying, Lucas did it with some of his releases (see the "Han shot first" issue), but not many others. Well, I suppose you could count the "extended, director's cut" version some movies get as a re-release, but that's really borderline IMHO.
No, I genuinely mean retarded. It's not a case of "I don't like them", it's a case of "most of the time it doesn't even make sense, nor make them look as smart as they seem to think." Some 90% of the uses of memes don't actually even have any meaning, and certainly don't convey any information in the context they're used.
E.g., a decade later all the "first post" posts stopped being new, witty or funny, and basically just say "I'm a troll adding noise to the signal, and can't even think of anything original either." There are _very_ few instances where they're on topic. (E.g., maybe a discussion about such posts.) Far from being a claim to being witty or funny, it's basically a claim of being a dumb and unimaginative troll. Why _would_ someone who's not retarded actually want to make that claim in public?
E.g., in Soviet Russia. The original joke was something like, "in the USA you find a party on a Saturday night, in Soviet Russia the party finds you." It was a clever word-play on the two meanings of the word "party". That was actually the funny part: that switching the meanings too, not just the word around. Many years later, enter the common Slashdot troll. He got the word switching right, but not the part where it's actually a pun or otherwise witty or funny. So what are they trying to prove there? That they have about enough brain to switch words around, but not enough to do the joke right, or even understand what the joke was? I.e., about as much as a parrot?
And again, in which contexts is it even remotely relevant? I'll cut it a lot of slack in threads which actually do mention the USSR or Russia, like the orbital collision earlier, even if they manage to get it executed the usual way that misses the whole joke. But otherwise it's just some off-topic noise that's not even funny or witty. Yay, someone butted in a topic about server clusters, to post an "in Soviet Russia computers cluster you." That's so funny without the actual word-play, and he's so smart and witty. Not.
E.g., I won't complain about our AC friend for the "tl;dr" meme in this thread, and would probably even mod him funny myself, because it _is_ a thread about memes. Fair enough. He found an overused meme to post in a thread about overused memes. That's cool.
But it's also popping up all over the place, in all threads, and sometimes to messages 3-4 sentences long. What clever insight is it supposed to impart there? Because from where I stand, it just makes the claim, "hey, look at me! I'm not here to actually read! I'm here to skip directly to trolling! And I'm too stupid to understand that nobody asked _me_ to read it anyway, or to use the back button!" It's something that might make sense on something that you're _supposed_ to read, like a memo at work, but just proves lack of elementary intelligence on a forum where nobody gives a rat's arse about who reads exactly which message. That a completely random John Doe found a random message too long for his broken attention span, is simply a non-issue and non-information.
Even as a trolling devices go, it seems to me like a pretty retarded one. It doesn't even say much about the message or poster it's answering to, but just about the one who posted it. As such, it lacks even much of an annoyance value or baiting value. So some guy just confessed that he's here just to troll and/or can't read more than a paragraph. So what? Should I send him a coupon for ADHD treatement, or what?
Etc.
I'm not talking about a matter of subjective tastes, but about what I consider genuinely a failure of logic and/or intelligence.
So, your claim to glory is having found a foreigner that spells worse than you?
At least I have the excuse that my mother tongue is nothing like English, and I'm writing this in Opera without a spell checker. If a spelling nazi has found only two words to pick on, I'll take that as a major compliment. Thanks.
So what's _your_ achievement and claim to glory that you wished to share there? That you can spell in your native language? That even in that skill, you need to compare yourself to the inherent bottom of the barrel (something who isn't a native English speaker) to feel good about yourself?
Congrats. If you need that, then you're officially a worthless waste of sperm. In Bill Hicks's words, "you should have been a blowjob." Thanks for sharing your worthlesness with us all. I appreciate it, really.
1. I'm not proposing to disallow it. Plus it would be impossible to, anyway. But I can't help feeling like there is something broken about people whose mission in life is to spew trolling cliches or someone else's witticism _long_ after everyone else ceased finding it funny. As I was saying, I think they're the victims in that phenomenon.
2. There is a semantic difference. Pop culture phrases, sayings, etc, have specific meanings and only makes any sense if used in a context where that meaning fits.
To illustrate what I'm trying to say, let's think of the following purely hypothetical example:
Person A: "Cool, I got the phone number of that new girl in sales." Person B: "You shouldn't cry over spilled milk." Person A: "Huh? That makes no sense." Person B: "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
What's the wrongest with it isn't the use of the "you shouldn't cry over spilled milk" and "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" cliches, but that they don't fit in that context at all. Semantically they just don't belong there.
That's really my "problem" with some of the meme-spewing retards in the various forums. They aren't just using some phrase to convey a meaning, they're just looking to parrot something that sounded smart once, even if it doesn't even fit the message they're answering to.
... are the dolts who still repeat something that sounded cool or smart when it was new, but in the meantime it's just retarded and offtopic. It's the people who, many years later, still think there's something clever or even shocking about a rickrolling (it was at least a pun when someone turned "duckrolling" into "rickrolling", but I doubt that most of the retards still doing it these days even know that), or even about the ever popular goatse link (we've all seen it already, there's hardly any shock value left in it), or talking in wikipedia tags ("[citation needed]" was witty when someone first spouted it, but in the meantime it just says "I'm too retarded to talk in complete sentences _or_ come up with an original witticism of my own"), or pretty much 99% of the phrases being recirculated. There's nothing witty, original, funny or shocking about being the millionth mindless clone using someone else's joke or wisecrack any more, but some people just can't seem to recover anyway.
Like in the infecection analogy, the healthy minds have dealt with it and moved on. The ones with a broken immune system (except in this case it's the IQ;) are still stuck with it after years, and still icapable of doing much more than spew more copies of the virus.
Honestly, I find these even more pityful than a journalist writing about memes once and then moving on.
Reminds me of the XKCD strip about the quality of youtube comments.
So probably even if an intelligent question pops up, the easiest way -- and less of a PR problem to boot -- is to just give it 30 minutes until it's been completely buried in crap. With any luck, a fanboy posse will try to drive him away completely, or twist the whole thing into something so retarded to rally around, that you can safely answer to it without addressing the original question.
That's a bit of a black and white view. "X does it too" doesn't automatically make X equivalent, if the extent differs considerably. E.g., "Alice took a sick day too" doesn't make her equivalent to Wally who was sick half the year.
To go through your list:
[X] Hollywood does it
Hollywood makes plenty of new movies too, not just remakes and ports of the old ones. In fact, I don't think that remakes are that big a part of their income.
In fact, other than Lucas, I can't think of anyone whose main business for years was re-releasing the same 10 year old movies, to the extent that Sega did lately.
[X] The TV Networks do it
1. TV networks do show new stuff all the time. E.g., all the news and the sports, for some easy examples.
2. TV networks are hardly equivelent to a game development studio. They're far more akin to the retailer you buy Sega's games from, than to Sega itself.
3. TV networks have the saving grace that their stuff is perceived as being for free. So even old crap still feels like it costs nothing to watch. If anyone's business model was that you have to pay $60 per movie (which is what games are really like), or let's say per season of a series, you'd find that they depend a lot more on releasing new stuff.
So all things considered at best you make the point there that a whole different industry works differently.
The RIAA is still milking 30-year-old tunes
The RIAA, or more correctly the individual labels, get most of their income from new over-hyped albums, not from those 30 year old tunes. The fact that those are still available at discounted prices, doesn't mean that's all that any label does.
Book publishers do it
Book publishers release new books every day. Re-releasing old paperbacks at barely more than the cost of printing and distribution is hardly their main business model.
[X] Everyone trying to become the next facebook is doing it
1. I'm not sure how Facebook is even remotely comparable to a game development business.
2. Just like in the dot-com days, most startups in that line of business fail. They just burn through more and more venture capital, and never figure out how to make anyone pay for that mindless clone of another site... which also doesn't turn a profit. If any of them even tried to sell their service for the same price a game sells, they'd find their maket share drop to zero overnight.
So how's that a good idea for Sega? Should they too copy a failed business model and, umm, fail?
With Vista the only difference was that (A) MS tried to cut off their XP pipeline, and when that failed (B) it priced XP higher, so you had to pay extra to get that machine downgraded to XP. But in the end, you could and _still_ can buy a PC or laptop with XP on it. You just have to check some "yes, I want to pay extra for XP" option.
1. To be entirely fair, there's a reason why MS didn't give XP a new major version number. It was Windows 2000 with some tweaks and needed more memory, and a few new bugs and problems.
Sure, _now_ there are some things why I prefer XP over 2000, say, the no-execute bit, but those didn't exist at launch. It by and large was 2000 with a Fischer-Price theme and it started a bit faster, but used more memory. Otherwise it offered the same functionality and ran the same programs.
Even the GUI tweaks, most people still don't care much for them. I know I disabled them outright when I installed XP. But even if you don't... well, take an XP user and put him/her in front of a Windows 2000 machine, and they'll do just as fine. I haven't seen anyone, even the stereotypical grandma, going, "goddammit, I can't use this because the Start menu isn't bright blue."
So on the whole, would you say that's reason enough to blow a couple hundred dollars on a retail copy of XP? Why?
Memory was also a scarcer resource back then, so getting another 128 MB to get the same space for your programs in XP as in 2000 was genuinely an extra expense. Now I'm not saying you had to mortgage the house for it, but it still was some money spent to get back to square one.
Eventually it became largely a non-factor, but then you're just seeing changing market and hardware conditions, not a change in how people see XP. For Joe Average, they just became equivalent.
2. You're still missing an important distinction:
- XP just wasn't worth upgrading if you already had 2000. But it never was worth buying a copy of 2000 to downgrade from XP either. I haven't even heard of anyone downgrading their XP to 2000.
- A _lot_ of people paid extra money to downgrade their Vista computer to XP.
That should tell you right there and then that the situation isn't exactly equivalent. There's a huge difference between "meh, the new version does the same in more memory, it's not worth the money to upgrade" and "the old version was better enough to be worth paying money to downgrade." That Vista managed to peg itself in the latter category, now that's an achievement.
I can't even think of other MS products which failed that hard, except maybe Bob. There hasn't been a need to downgrade to Windows 3.0 if you had 3.1 or 3.11 for Workgroups, there was no need to downgrade to DOS 5 if you bought DOS 6, and even with ME everyone just gnashd their teeth and toughed it out until the next version was available. I don't remember a major surge of buying 98 SE to downgrade to from ME.
Maybe you should care about this, because they're also firing 20% of the R&D stuff "for arcade and consumer titles". But even that's a bit redundant, because most of their titles were developed for both. Most of Sega's own games were really arcade games.
So, sure, in the very short term they can probably live a year or two off just porting their existing arcade games to every platform out there. But in the long run I can't help feeling that Sega is making itself less and less relevant. They're hardly making games any more. They're making more and more ports and emulations of games they made 10 years ago, with the occasional rehash, remake or sequel thrown in.
How long _can_ they live off innovation and good ideas they had in the 90's?
At any rate, even without caring about Sega or its arcades per se, it's yet another step towards less original stuff in the games market. Yet another company is getting firmer and firmer set into making just ports and sequels. (Mind you, in Sega's case it had started going that way already, but this is another step down that road.) Now I'm not going to go in panic over it or anything, but it's hardly reason to be flippant about it either.
It's not the FSAA I'm talking about. I understand your point about FSAA, but now think the same on steroids, squared and applied generously to boot.
In COH it's called explicitly "depth of field effects" in the options, and really it makes distand objects look as if you're drunk. Not just "less clear", but as in actually like you're seeing unfocused and seeing a little bit double. I _can_ tell a difference between that one and the option called FSAA:P
And in HGL IIRC it's called something like "DirectX 10 smoke". Again, very different option from FSAA. The FSAA one is a dropdown, the blurr-everything one is a checbox.
Actually, it was supposed to be only satirical, rather than really raising any point. I don't actually think they should cut R&D, nor that most of the stuff on that list should be taken literally. E.g., I don't really think they just copied Mozilla's toolbar and tabs in IE7. I actually think they copied Opera's toolbar and tabs, but that wouldn't have been as funny;)
You're talking about FO3 where it was done right, and only for short times when the game actually needed it.
I'm talking about games where full time everything past 40-50 ft looks like it's smeared. Not just to simulate a head injury or concussion, but in every single frame. I'm sorry, my eyes don't work that way. Yes, when I focus on object X, object Y might be blurry, and viceversa. But those games don't actually know what I'm looking at, so they just blur everything. In effect it's a simulation of not being able to focus on distant objects at all. I.e., myopia.
Seriously, turn on depth-of-field in COH, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. It's not even remotely the same as the FO3 effects.
Spending money on R&D is not the same as "spending frivolously." The whole point of R&D is to experiment with new technologies, some of which pay off, some of which don't.
You know, I was thinking much along the same lines. Go to court and tell them, "yeah, some of the R&D won't pay off, but the ones whic do allowed us to make X, Y and Z, and earn royalties from licensing W to other." Then I remembered it's Microsoft. I can just see it,
"Your honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I draw your attention to exhibit 1: without an R&D budget we couldn't have made the Zune. Erm, ok, so its market segment imploded to nearly zero during the Christmas period, but we couldn't have made it without R&D."
"Then we have our continued investment in expanding and improving our search engine business, so maybe one day it won't get its arse handed to it by Google that hard. In fact, I can sense a Google-killer coming. Step 3 in that business plan is that either an advanced extraterestrial civilization hands over their search engine, or the whole Google has a heart attack when we're around so we can claim the kill. Then one day maybe we can sell advertisments too and actually make an income out of it. But let's not get that far ahead of us."
"We have invested heavily in developing a state of the art DRM that will allow us to own the digital media market... at a time where DRM is producing more and more of an allergic reaction in the market, and the major media labels are experimenting with dropping DRM entirely. We think that the incompatible DRM and the 'plays for sure' thing not actually playing even on previous versions of itself are what helped kill the Zune, come to think of it."
"We have invested millions in the newest version of Internet Explorer, so, umm, it could continue to slowly lose market share to Mozilla and Opera. But without R&D, we wouldn't have had the new stuff in it. Ok, so it's a toolbar and browser tabs. You don't think that Mozilla's toolbar and tabs copied themselves into our product, do you? That's what we need R&D for."
"Then it's our R&D which produced such technologies as.Net and C#. Ok, so it just made Vista more bloated and everyone uses Mono for it anyway, but we think we at least managed to piss off Sun a little. And don't pay attention to claims that it just ripped off Java. If you'll look at the next exhibit, a simple C# program and its Java equivalent... you'll notice two extra curly braces per class and a typo in a keyword... err... I mean a new highly-innovative keyword. Clearly such visionary changes wouldn't happen without billions invested in R&D."
"We have also improved our Games For Windows brand name, and strengthened recognition of that brand, via innovative improvements that our talented R&D teams have produced. For example in Fallout 3 it made the game randomly crash when starting or exitting, and needed an extra patch just to fix that. It also created a demand for hacks to remove it from the victim... err... customer's computers. I think I'm not exaggerating when I say that now everyone knows about Games For Windows. Our data mining the web with our search engine has shown that nowadays the phrase Games For Windows shows up ten times more often than a year ago, though most often after the word 'fuck' or before the word 'sucks', or within the same paragraph as the phrase, 'how do I uninstall it?' You can't buy brand recognition like that with marketing alone."
"Then thanks to years of R&D, we have produced Vista. Umm... Your honour, can you make them stop laughing so I can continue? Thanks... We call Vista a great success, because almost everyone who got it on their computer, then bought Windows XP at a premium just to get a usable computer. So we sold them two operating systems, whereas without Vista they'd have only bought one. Everyone else sued us instead. And some did both."
I mean, that add was like 30 seconds long if that and now I want to find somewhere dark to go and throw up in. The stationary cupboard maybe...
Sounds like a good plan. If you're using a cupboard, always make sure it's stationary. I tried to puke into a moving cupboard once, and... let's not get into details about the resulting mess;)
Black is sometimes very useful. You can spare a lot of work in places where you don't need any detail and safe a lot of valueable time which you could invest into other places. But only dark levels... of course this truly sucks.
Well, I was actually just aiming for "Funny", but I'm probably not that funny if I end up having to explain it.
Of course I'm not proposing to elaborately paint the parts of the texture which aren't even used, or which don't need any detail.
I _do_ find it kinda weird though that so many games, especially on the PC, seem to be (A) stuck with some black-and-brown palette from the 90's, and (B) have to make everything dark. It's like a quest for some devs to use all those amazing graphics possibilities juts to make more "realistic" black-on-black images.
I bought my first console very late. It was a Dreamcast. Let me tell you it was a shock to see the lush and bright scenery in those games, after coming from the everything-is-an-unlit-sewer games I had been playing on the PC. Mind you, a lot of PC games have discovered colours too in the meantime, but we're talking about ID and the successor of Doom 3 here. I can't resist taking a jab at whichever genius thought it's a great idea to make a game where half the time you can't see a fucking thing at all, because you can't use a flashlight and fight at the same time.
And the second jab was at the accursed depth-of-field effect. My first contact with it was when I applied one patch in COH and suddenly everything past 100 ft or so was blurry. As if my character had severe myopia, and couldn't _possibly_ focus on anything at a distance.
In the meantime the annoyance seems to have just spread. E.g., I've installed "Hellgate: London" a Vista computer at one point and turned all the graphics options to the max. (Hey, it's a GTX285. It can take it.) It actually made me squint. There was a road sign some 50 ft or so away, and I still remember that it was so blurry, it was practically smeared into the surrounding pixels. (The effect only seems to exist with DirectX 10, btw.)
I find it pretty damned sad. Here we have more than a decade of GPUs and increasingly sophisticated mapping and filtering possibilities, billions sunk into R&D both on the software and hardware size, etc... and they're used top make the game as blurry and smeared as something rendered in 320x240 on an old VGA card and upscaled badly on a 10 year old TFT.
A crucifix in a jar of piss is considered art. A TV displaying static in an empty room is considered art. Or I've personally seen such works of art in a private collection as 4 pieces of A4 paper, 2 crumpled and 2 folded, then straightened out and framed. That was art. I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
Or probably the best example here was a modern painting I've seen, which looked _exactly_ like a tetris game when you just lost. No seriously, it was essentially a square grid with 1 to 4 adjacent squares filled with one of 5 or 6 colours or so. Except I recon one of the rows should have been eliminated before because it was full. I wonder if it was an error of the artist or that was some thought-provoking part about the unfairness of life.
If _that_ is art, why isn't Tetris art? It can produce the same kind of an image. Why is it art if it's displayed in some snob's collection on canvas, but not when it's on the screen?
2. The general idea (or excuse) of art these days is that it's supposed to be "thought provoking" instead of anything else. (In fact, last I've heard about it at an arts college calling someone else's work "pretty" instead of "thought provoking" is the most grievous insult you can throw and not be sued for it. But use it only if you want to make an enemy.)
So then why aren't, say, the story arcs of City Of Heroes art? I know several did get me thinking about morality, or about doing what you think is right and discovering that you've been manipulated, and a few other things.
And I'm not even saying that City Of Heroes is the only game like that. Most games can provoke _some_ thought. E.g., KOTOR 2 did a good job of being pretty morally complex, and had more than a couple of situations worth thinking about. E.g., The Witcher got pretty philosophical at times, and it made a good point that sometimes there are no right sides to pick. E.g., Black And White, much as I otherwise thoroughly despised that game, did get me thinking a bit about divinity and such. Etc.
Heck, I once even wrote an essay about Chucky Egg as a metaphor for the struggle of the common worker against the oppressive corporate chickens. Ok, it was a big joke, but it did provoke that kind of thought at least. So even a simplistic one-screen platformer can technically be thought-provoking.
And again, if a crucifix in a jar of piss or a crumpled sheet of paper can use the "thought provoking" excuse, then virtually any game can. If you're the kind that's inclined to think of the deeper meanings and possible metaphors of that jar, I see no reason why you couldn't do the same about a Mario kart game. (See the XKCD strip where she gets all philosophical about choosing to not cross the finishing line. Ok, just to make him lose, but still, that's some thought provoked.)
Bah, only a pleb would think that black is black and can't be improved any more;)
Sure it'll be black, but will it be HD-rendered, bump-mapped, paralax-mapped, pixel-shaded, floating-point-colour black? I mean, just #000000 is soo last century. Nowadays only plebs and nostalgiacs would even look at that. Nowadays we want high-res high-polycount shiny objects with normals and displacements precisely calculated to accurately reflect and refract the surrounding, umm, black. We want black reflected on photo-realistic shimmering black water.
And pay attention to the high resolution part. Just filling a 256x256 texture with (0, 0, 0) doesn't cut it any more. If it's not at least 4096x4096 worth of pure black, you might as well make it text mode.
And will it have realistic depth-of-field effects? It's not a modern game if you can actually see clearly at more that 10 ft. You know it's really modern if you feel like a myopic guy who lost his glasses. In fact, like a myopic guy who just got beladonna drops in the eyes at the occulist, lost his glasses, and is returning home through a severe fog. If you wonder if your CRT suddenly lost the focusing coil, or if your 1600x1200 TFT is actually badly upscaling a 320x240 image, _that's_ a modern game. I mean, bah, black. What we need these days is _blurry_ black.
the attorney author comes from the DOJ's Cymbercrime division -- the DOJ may have one interpretation of the law but the courts might have another;
Actually, that's a point that's even in the summary. Guess who'll seize your computer and maybe arrest you, long before you get to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" to a jury? Right, the DOJ, according to _their_ interpretation of the law.
Yes, some years later you might even get your computer back, and/or be let to go free. Was it worth the inconvenience?
Now also take a guess how many blogs and newspapers and news sites will carry a story like "John Smith arrested for kiddie porn", and how long it'll be easy to find by Google. Do you think your neighbours will go by reasonable doubt before trying to run you out of town anyway? IIRC in England they tried to run a doctor out of town because her job title said "paeditrician" (i.e., child doctor) and apparently nobody knew it's not the same thing as "paedophile". I also recall cases where they glued posters on someone's house and tried to make their life hell because they found a completely different person by the same name accused of a sex crime.
And do you think many HR departments will even get to the part where they listen to how you was aquitted for reasonable doubt? Most companies out there aren't looking for a reason to hire you, they're looking for any pretext to drop your resume from the pile. There is advice and there are practices out there ranging from tarot and numerology, to "shuffle them and drop the bottom half", to the gravity well test (drop the pile in the stair well and eliminate the lower half of the mess.) _Anything_ that doesn't explicitly say "discriminates against minority Y" is good because it can't be acted in court. Dropping an accused paedophile to avoid the potential PR problem? I can see people jumping on such an oportunity.
Additionally I'd argue that even "beyond reasonable doubt" should be taken with a lot more skepticism IMHO. In most of the cases it'll only be a jurry of your peers only if you're a complete moron too. It won't be libertarian network admins listening to your case there. It'll be people who don't know their elbow from their arse about the technology involved, and in some cases who take pride in being computer-illiterate and go to great lengths to avoid looking like they understand _anything_ about computers. (It's actually fashionable to be computer illiterate lately.) It'll be people who don't know the difference between "we traced the kiddie porn downloads to his computer" and the fact that they only have the IP Address from the ISP. And again some who'll never admit understanding something as nerdy, that even if they did.
"Reasonable doubt" can end up meaning little more than "I like the DA more than his lawyer" or "the prosecution's expert witness looked smarter."
There _have_ been people who landed in jail for stuff where even the most elementary knowledge of statistics would have provided ample doubt, and/or where the prosecution's expert witness was demonstrably talking out the arse. E.g., I remember a case about a nurse in an emergency ward which got to actually go to jail because an above-average number of people died during her shift. There was no evidence whatsoever that she did anything wrong there, but "OMG, X people died during her shifts" was enough for the jury to send her to jail.
You'll be judged by people who are emotional like that. It doesn't take too many who get in a "OMG, paedophilia, die, die, die" tizzy to not even listen to your arguments that you actually just let your access point wide open to camouflage your P2P music downloads.
Of course, it can go the other way too, because judgments based on stupidity and ignorance are inherently random. But do you really want to bet your freedom on it?
And to come back on topic, especially if he's from the DOJ, he's probably seen more trials than you or I did. And I wouldn't be surprised if half of them were the "sentenced by a jury of emotional morons" kind. If he says that "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't mean as bulletproof as you think, he _might_ have some experience to base that on.
Moraelin you're being a fucktard, the guy asked you to disprove sexual selection and win an award for it.
Either disprove it and make your point or get the fuck out and don't come back.
I've made my case, I see neither him nor you addressing it. And if the bar for discussing it is having won an award, what's his or your award there? You know, speaking of fucktards.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean Dubya, I think the word you're looking for is "troglodyte" not "neanderthal". Neanderthals are about 6 million years more advanced on the evolution chain, smarter, and a whole other body shape. Think: literally pear shaped. As in, the rib cage actually flares at the lower end.
Actually, I'd worry more about the "Ragdoll" part in his choice of a cat. I had one.
Ragdolls are quite aptly named. It's the Garfield species. In fact like a stoned Garfield. It's the cat which doesn't even have much of an instinct to defend itself or run away when attacked, so it's advisable to only keep it indoors. And I haven't even heard of a Ragdoll with a hunting instinct.
Ragdolls are great if you want essentially a living teddy bear that you can hug and carry around as much as you want. (Most cats eventually get overstimulated and bugger off.) And it won't cause much chaos when you put it down and leave it unattended. In fact, it'll probably just go sleep on something soft, until it gets hungry and has to go eat.
It doesn't even explore much. In fact, I've sometimes heard of it being recommended to people with pollen allergies, because it won't bother much with going outside and coming back with pollen in its fur, even if it can.
It's _technically_ a cat in that it has most of the cat genes and anatomy, and meows. It's not a cat in the "miniature version of a ferocious predator" sense that most other species are.
It's definitely _not_ the kind of cat I'd have in mind if I want something hunted. It's the kind of cat I'd have in mind if I want, well, something mellow to hug and pet.
I think I understand your point, but I don't really see a problem. I don't think you can make a case that the whole population just mindlessly parrots memes to impress, which is kinda needed for that 90% to translate into 90% of the population.
I do believe that, out in the real world, you'll find that the vast majority of people _don't_ in fact just spew random memes to sound smart. E.g., I've been in plenty of conversations and don't remember anyone going "first reply!" yet. And I've yet to hear anyone going "in Soviet Russia car buys you!" when someone talks about buying a car. Etc.
Let's face it, normal communication may contain clichés and standard phrases, but they're used to convey a very specific meaning, if that expression and meaning fits the conversation at hand. Not just so person X can get to spew supposed meme Y, whether it fits the context or not.
Using some blatantly clichéd expression just because one thinks it made someone else sound smart, is IMHO very much under the normal and expected mental development of anyone over the age of ten or so. We've all been at the stage of parroting the big words mommy uses without much understanding, but then we grew up and out of it. Well, ok, let's say 18, so we don't insult the high-school gangsta hip-hoppers. Yes, about 90% of such use counts as retarded in my book, in precisely the sense you write: it falls below what I would expect from the mental abilities and processes of an adult. And I don't think that the whole population does that.
Then again, after seeing too many marketing texts that use "leverage" instead of "use", and "synergy" without saying between what and what, etc, just because some drone thought it sounds smarter and more educated... I can see your point too. Hmm. Maybe I have too high expectations of an average person's mental development.
It's still not that radically new a concept IMHO. Most games are involve one or more of the following:
1. are made by gamers in the first place. The reason why so many people want to work in the game industry, even at ridiculously low wages, is that they are gamers in the first place. So not only you have one or more gamers involved before even writing the first line of code, you'll have actual gamers actually writing those lines of code, scripting the NPCs, drawing the cut scenes and textures, designing the levels, and writing the dialogue.
Sometimes it's even people who love the thing that the game is themed around. E.g., the way I hear it, Statesman (of City Of Heroes fame) is actually a genuine die-hard comic fan. And he plays video games.(E.g., supposedly he got the much maligned ED idea while playing a platformer on his GBA.) And he made a video game about comic-book superheroes. I'd say he was very qualified to give input in the conceptual design phase there.
(Though true enough, you often can tell when a company just gets into a genre none of them played or liked, by their building an awful game based on awfully wrong assumptions.)
2. involve some focus groups, other forms of dialogue with gamers, etc.
Heck, Sony for example seems to be pushing really hard to please female gamers and pulls stunts like having a player play Queen Antonia Bayle of Qeynos for the various events. (Sorta like Lord British's character in UO, but this time it's not the character of a dev, but of an actual girl who plays EQ2.) Plus, gives a lot of attention to female gamer guilds and the like. I'd be genuinely surprised if they don't get at least some occasions to voice their concerns and such.
3. involve experience, including player input, from previous games.
E.g., Statesman's new project is Champions Online, another superhero-themed MMO. I should think he took with him a lot of the experience of what worked and what didn't work for the players in COH, and a lot of player input received along the way.
E.g., Raph Koster IIRC worked on a MUD before joining UO, and then took his experience with both over to SWG. (Ok, ok, so I guess sometimes experience doesn't precluse fucking up;)
4. indiscriminate player input can actually be bad, if not verified by other means.
E.g., Blizzard makes the servers generate a _lot_ of statistics, so they can know exactly which class killed which other class too often, what spec did more damage to a given boss, etc. So they can actually use hard data to check if some class's complaints or wishes for more power are justified, or just whining. That long period of fine-tuning and tweaking they gave all their games after release, was essentially very much based on player input... just not (only) the post-on-a-board type. They looked at what those players actually do in the game.
I see your point, and I'll even agree with you there, but DVDs are simply one of the many distribution channels of that product. It's planned from the start that the movie will be released in cinemas, on DVDs, on Blue Ray, etc. It's still the same product.
In a sense, it's the same as releasing WoW in a version on 4 CDs and a version on 1 DVD. It's still the same game, only on a different physical medium.
IMHO the equivalent to how Sega does its ports would be maybe if there's at least a re-mastering involved for the new medium, possibly even re-filming a couple of scenes. Or turning a movie into a TV series, for example.
As I was saying, Lucas did it with some of his releases (see the "Han shot first" issue), but not many others. Well, I suppose you could count the "extended, director's cut" version some movies get as a re-release, but that's really borderline IMHO.
No, I genuinely mean retarded. It's not a case of "I don't like them", it's a case of "most of the time it doesn't even make sense, nor make them look as smart as they seem to think." Some 90% of the uses of memes don't actually even have any meaning, and certainly don't convey any information in the context they're used.
E.g., a decade later all the "first post" posts stopped being new, witty or funny, and basically just say "I'm a troll adding noise to the signal, and can't even think of anything original either." There are _very_ few instances where they're on topic. (E.g., maybe a discussion about such posts.) Far from being a claim to being witty or funny, it's basically a claim of being a dumb and unimaginative troll. Why _would_ someone who's not retarded actually want to make that claim in public?
E.g., in Soviet Russia. The original joke was something like, "in the USA you find a party on a Saturday night, in Soviet Russia the party finds you." It was a clever word-play on the two meanings of the word "party". That was actually the funny part: that switching the meanings too, not just the word around. Many years later, enter the common Slashdot troll. He got the word switching right, but not the part where it's actually a pun or otherwise witty or funny. So what are they trying to prove there? That they have about enough brain to switch words around, but not enough to do the joke right, or even understand what the joke was? I.e., about as much as a parrot?
And again, in which contexts is it even remotely relevant? I'll cut it a lot of slack in threads which actually do mention the USSR or Russia, like the orbital collision earlier, even if they manage to get it executed the usual way that misses the whole joke. But otherwise it's just some off-topic noise that's not even funny or witty. Yay, someone butted in a topic about server clusters, to post an "in Soviet Russia computers cluster you." That's so funny without the actual word-play, and he's so smart and witty. Not.
E.g., I won't complain about our AC friend for the "tl;dr" meme in this thread, and would probably even mod him funny myself, because it _is_ a thread about memes. Fair enough. He found an overused meme to post in a thread about overused memes. That's cool.
But it's also popping up all over the place, in all threads, and sometimes to messages 3-4 sentences long. What clever insight is it supposed to impart there? Because from where I stand, it just makes the claim, "hey, look at me! I'm not here to actually read! I'm here to skip directly to trolling! And I'm too stupid to understand that nobody asked _me_ to read it anyway, or to use the back button!" It's something that might make sense on something that you're _supposed_ to read, like a memo at work, but just proves lack of elementary intelligence on a forum where nobody gives a rat's arse about who reads exactly which message. That a completely random John Doe found a random message too long for his broken attention span, is simply a non-issue and non-information.
Even as a trolling devices go, it seems to me like a pretty retarded one. It doesn't even say much about the message or poster it's answering to, but just about the one who posted it. As such, it lacks even much of an annoyance value or baiting value. So some guy just confessed that he's here just to troll and/or can't read more than a paragraph. So what? Should I send him a coupon for ADHD treatement, or what?
Etc.
I'm not talking about a matter of subjective tastes, but about what I consider genuinely a failure of logic and/or intelligence.
So, your claim to glory is having found a foreigner that spells worse than you?
At least I have the excuse that my mother tongue is nothing like English, and I'm writing this in Opera without a spell checker. If a spelling nazi has found only two words to pick on, I'll take that as a major compliment. Thanks.
So what's _your_ achievement and claim to glory that you wished to share there? That you can spell in your native language? That even in that skill, you need to compare yourself to the inherent bottom of the barrel (something who isn't a native English speaker) to feel good about yourself?
Congrats. If you need that, then you're officially a worthless waste of sperm. In Bill Hicks's words, "you should have been a blowjob." Thanks for sharing your worthlesness with us all. I appreciate it, really.
1. I'm not proposing to disallow it. Plus it would be impossible to, anyway. But I can't help feeling like there is something broken about people whose mission in life is to spew trolling cliches or someone else's witticism _long_ after everyone else ceased finding it funny. As I was saying, I think they're the victims in that phenomenon.
2. There is a semantic difference. Pop culture phrases, sayings, etc, have specific meanings and only makes any sense if used in a context where that meaning fits.
To illustrate what I'm trying to say, let's think of the following purely hypothetical example:
Person A: "Cool, I got the phone number of that new girl in sales."
Person B: "You shouldn't cry over spilled milk."
Person A: "Huh? That makes no sense."
Person B: "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
What's the wrongest with it isn't the use of the "you shouldn't cry over spilled milk" and "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" cliches, but that they don't fit in that context at all. Semantically they just don't belong there.
That's really my "problem" with some of the meme-spewing retards in the various forums. They aren't just using some phrase to convey a meaning, they're just looking to parrot something that sounded smart once, even if it doesn't even fit the message they're answering to.
... are the dolts who still repeat something that sounded cool or smart when it was new, but in the meantime it's just retarded and offtopic. It's the people who, many years later, still think there's something clever or even shocking about a rickrolling (it was at least a pun when someone turned "duckrolling" into "rickrolling", but I doubt that most of the retards still doing it these days even know that), or even about the ever popular goatse link (we've all seen it already, there's hardly any shock value left in it), or talking in wikipedia tags ("[citation needed]" was witty when someone first spouted it, but in the meantime it just says "I'm too retarded to talk in complete sentences _or_ come up with an original witticism of my own"), or pretty much 99% of the phrases being recirculated. There's nothing witty, original, funny or shocking about being the millionth mindless clone using someone else's joke or wisecrack any more, but some people just can't seem to recover anyway.
Like in the infecection analogy, the healthy minds have dealt with it and moved on. The ones with a broken immune system (except in this case it's the IQ;) are still stuck with it after years, and still icapable of doing much more than spew more copies of the virus.
Honestly, I find these even more pityful than a journalist writing about memes once and then moving on.
Reminds me of the XKCD strip about the quality of youtube comments.
So probably even if an intelligent question pops up, the easiest way -- and less of a PR problem to boot -- is to just give it 30 minutes until it's been completely buried in crap. With any luck, a fanboy posse will try to drive him away completely, or twist the whole thing into something so retarded to rally around, that you can safely answer to it without addressing the original question.
That's a bit of a black and white view. "X does it too" doesn't automatically make X equivalent, if the extent differs considerably. E.g., "Alice took a sick day too" doesn't make her equivalent to Wally who was sick half the year.
To go through your list:
Hollywood makes plenty of new movies too, not just remakes and ports of the old ones. In fact, I don't think that remakes are that big a part of their income.
In fact, other than Lucas, I can't think of anyone whose main business for years was re-releasing the same 10 year old movies, to the extent that Sega did lately.
1. TV networks do show new stuff all the time. E.g., all the news and the sports, for some easy examples.
2. TV networks are hardly equivelent to a game development studio. They're far more akin to the retailer you buy Sega's games from, than to Sega itself.
3. TV networks have the saving grace that their stuff is perceived as being for free. So even old crap still feels like it costs nothing to watch. If anyone's business model was that you have to pay $60 per movie (which is what games are really like), or let's say per season of a series, you'd find that they depend a lot more on releasing new stuff.
So all things considered at best you make the point there that a whole different industry works differently.
The RIAA, or more correctly the individual labels, get most of their income from new over-hyped albums, not from those 30 year old tunes. The fact that those are still available at discounted prices, doesn't mean that's all that any label does.
Book publishers release new books every day. Re-releasing old paperbacks at barely more than the cost of printing and distribution is hardly their main business model.
1. I'm not sure how Facebook is even remotely comparable to a game development business.
2. Just like in the dot-com days, most startups in that line of business fail. They just burn through more and more venture capital, and never figure out how to make anyone pay for that mindless clone of another site... which also doesn't turn a profit. If any of them even tried to sell their service for the same price a game sells, they'd find their maket share drop to zero overnight.
So how's that a good idea for Sega? Should they too copy a failed business model and, umm, fail?
With Vista the only difference was that (A) MS tried to cut off their XP pipeline, and when that failed (B) it priced XP higher, so you had to pay extra to get that machine downgraded to XP. But in the end, you could and _still_ can buy a PC or laptop with XP on it. You just have to check some "yes, I want to pay extra for XP" option.
1. To be entirely fair, there's a reason why MS didn't give XP a new major version number. It was Windows 2000 with some tweaks and needed more memory, and a few new bugs and problems.
Sure, _now_ there are some things why I prefer XP over 2000, say, the no-execute bit, but those didn't exist at launch. It by and large was 2000 with a Fischer-Price theme and it started a bit faster, but used more memory. Otherwise it offered the same functionality and ran the same programs.
Even the GUI tweaks, most people still don't care much for them. I know I disabled them outright when I installed XP. But even if you don't... well, take an XP user and put him/her in front of a Windows 2000 machine, and they'll do just as fine. I haven't seen anyone, even the stereotypical grandma, going, "goddammit, I can't use this because the Start menu isn't bright blue."
So on the whole, would you say that's reason enough to blow a couple hundred dollars on a retail copy of XP? Why?
Memory was also a scarcer resource back then, so getting another 128 MB to get the same space for your programs in XP as in 2000 was genuinely an extra expense. Now I'm not saying you had to mortgage the house for it, but it still was some money spent to get back to square one.
Eventually it became largely a non-factor, but then you're just seeing changing market and hardware conditions, not a change in how people see XP. For Joe Average, they just became equivalent.
2. You're still missing an important distinction:
- XP just wasn't worth upgrading if you already had 2000. But it never was worth buying a copy of 2000 to downgrade from XP either. I haven't even heard of anyone downgrading their XP to 2000.
- A _lot_ of people paid extra money to downgrade their Vista computer to XP.
That should tell you right there and then that the situation isn't exactly equivalent. There's a huge difference between "meh, the new version does the same in more memory, it's not worth the money to upgrade" and "the old version was better enough to be worth paying money to downgrade." That Vista managed to peg itself in the latter category, now that's an achievement.
I can't even think of other MS products which failed that hard, except maybe Bob. There hasn't been a need to downgrade to Windows 3.0 if you had 3.1 or 3.11 for Workgroups, there was no need to downgrade to DOS 5 if you bought DOS 6, and even with ME everyone just gnashd their teeth and toughed it out until the next version was available. I don't remember a major surge of buying 98 SE to downgrade to from ME.
Well, they were already a publisher too, which pretty much _is_ outsourcing. I guess they'll just stick to more of that from now on.
Maybe you should care about this, because they're also firing 20% of the R&D stuff "for arcade and consumer titles". But even that's a bit redundant, because most of their titles were developed for both. Most of Sega's own games were really arcade games.
So, sure, in the very short term they can probably live a year or two off just porting their existing arcade games to every platform out there. But in the long run I can't help feeling that Sega is making itself less and less relevant. They're hardly making games any more. They're making more and more ports and emulations of games they made 10 years ago, with the occasional rehash, remake or sequel thrown in.
How long _can_ they live off innovation and good ideas they had in the 90's?
At any rate, even without caring about Sega or its arcades per se, it's yet another step towards less original stuff in the games market. Yet another company is getting firmer and firmer set into making just ports and sequels. (Mind you, in Sega's case it had started going that way already, but this is another step down that road.) Now I'm not going to go in panic over it or anything, but it's hardly reason to be flippant about it either.
It's not the FSAA I'm talking about. I understand your point about FSAA, but now think the same on steroids, squared and applied generously to boot.
In COH it's called explicitly "depth of field effects" in the options, and really it makes distand objects look as if you're drunk. Not just "less clear", but as in actually like you're seeing unfocused and seeing a little bit double. I _can_ tell a difference between that one and the option called FSAA :P
And in HGL IIRC it's called something like "DirectX 10 smoke". Again, very different option from FSAA. The FSAA one is a dropdown, the blurr-everything one is a checbox.
Actually, it was supposed to be only satirical, rather than really raising any point. I don't actually think they should cut R&D, nor that most of the stuff on that list should be taken literally. E.g., I don't really think they just copied Mozilla's toolbar and tabs in IE7. I actually think they copied Opera's toolbar and tabs, but that wouldn't have been as funny ;)
Ok, ok, I'll get serious. Any day now ;)
You're talking about FO3 where it was done right, and only for short times when the game actually needed it.
I'm talking about games where full time everything past 40-50 ft looks like it's smeared. Not just to simulate a head injury or concussion, but in every single frame. I'm sorry, my eyes don't work that way. Yes, when I focus on object X, object Y might be blurry, and viceversa. But those games don't actually know what I'm looking at, so they just blur everything. In effect it's a simulation of not being able to focus on distant objects at all. I.e., myopia.
Seriously, turn on depth-of-field in COH, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. It's not even remotely the same as the FO3 effects.
You know, I was thinking much along the same lines. Go to court and tell them, "yeah, some of the R&D won't pay off, but the ones whic do allowed us to make X, Y and Z, and earn royalties from licensing W to other." Then I remembered it's Microsoft. I can just see it,
"Your honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I draw your attention to exhibit 1: without an R&D budget we couldn't have made the Zune. Erm, ok, so its market segment imploded to nearly zero during the Christmas period, but we couldn't have made it without R&D."
"Then we have our continued investment in expanding and improving our search engine business, so maybe one day it won't get its arse handed to it by Google that hard. In fact, I can sense a Google-killer coming. Step 3 in that business plan is that either an advanced extraterestrial civilization hands over their search engine, or the whole Google has a heart attack when we're around so we can claim the kill. Then one day maybe we can sell advertisments too and actually make an income out of it. But let's not get that far ahead of us."
"We have invested heavily in developing a state of the art DRM that will allow us to own the digital media market... at a time where DRM is producing more and more of an allergic reaction in the market, and the major media labels are experimenting with dropping DRM entirely. We think that the incompatible DRM and the 'plays for sure' thing not actually playing even on previous versions of itself are what helped kill the Zune, come to think of it."
"We have invested millions in the newest version of Internet Explorer, so, umm, it could continue to slowly lose market share to Mozilla and Opera. But without R&D, we wouldn't have had the new stuff in it. Ok, so it's a toolbar and browser tabs. You don't think that Mozilla's toolbar and tabs copied themselves into our product, do you? That's what we need R&D for."
"Then it's our R&D which produced such technologies as .Net and C#. Ok, so it just made Vista more bloated and everyone uses Mono for it anyway, but we think we at least managed to piss off Sun a little. And don't pay attention to claims that it just ripped off Java. If you'll look at the next exhibit, a simple C# program and its Java equivalent... you'll notice two extra curly braces per class and a typo in a keyword... err... I mean a new highly-innovative keyword. Clearly such visionary changes wouldn't happen without billions invested in R&D."
"We have also improved our Games For Windows brand name, and strengthened recognition of that brand, via innovative improvements that our talented R&D teams have produced. For example in Fallout 3 it made the game randomly crash when starting or exitting, and needed an extra patch just to fix that. It also created a demand for hacks to remove it from the victim... err... customer's computers. I think I'm not exaggerating when I say that now everyone knows about Games For Windows. Our data mining the web with our search engine has shown that nowadays the phrase Games For Windows shows up ten times more often than a year ago, though most often after the word 'fuck' or before the word 'sucks', or within the same paragraph as the phrase, 'how do I uninstall it?' You can't buy brand recognition like that with marketing alone."
"Then thanks to years of R&D, we have produced Vista. Umm... Your honour, can you make them stop laughing so I can continue? Thanks... We call Vista a great success, because almost everyone who got it on their computer, then bought Windows XP at a premium just to get a usable computer. So we sold them two operating systems, whereas without Vista they'd have only bought one. Everyone else sued us instead. And some did both."
"And speaking of Vista, our R&D has produced anot
Sounds like a good plan. If you're using a cupboard, always make sure it's stationary. I tried to puke into a moving cupboard once, and... let's not get into details about the resulting mess ;)
Well, I was actually just aiming for "Funny", but I'm probably not that funny if I end up having to explain it.
Of course I'm not proposing to elaborately paint the parts of the texture which aren't even used, or which don't need any detail.
I _do_ find it kinda weird though that so many games, especially on the PC, seem to be (A) stuck with some black-and-brown palette from the 90's, and (B) have to make everything dark. It's like a quest for some devs to use all those amazing graphics possibilities juts to make more "realistic" black-on-black images.
I bought my first console very late. It was a Dreamcast. Let me tell you it was a shock to see the lush and bright scenery in those games, after coming from the everything-is-an-unlit-sewer games I had been playing on the PC. Mind you, a lot of PC games have discovered colours too in the meantime, but we're talking about ID and the successor of Doom 3 here. I can't resist taking a jab at whichever genius thought it's a great idea to make a game where half the time you can't see a fucking thing at all, because you can't use a flashlight and fight at the same time.
And the second jab was at the accursed depth-of-field effect. My first contact with it was when I applied one patch in COH and suddenly everything past 100 ft or so was blurry. As if my character had severe myopia, and couldn't _possibly_ focus on anything at a distance.
In the meantime the annoyance seems to have just spread. E.g., I've installed "Hellgate: London" a Vista computer at one point and turned all the graphics options to the max. (Hey, it's a GTX285. It can take it.) It actually made me squint. There was a road sign some 50 ft or so away, and I still remember that it was so blurry, it was practically smeared into the surrounding pixels. (The effect only seems to exist with DirectX 10, btw.)
I find it pretty damned sad. Here we have more than a decade of GPUs and increasingly sophisticated mapping and filtering possibilities, billions sunk into R&D both on the software and hardware size, etc... and they're used top make the game as blurry and smeared as something rendered in 320x240 on an old VGA card and upscaled badly on a 10 year old TFT.
1. As opposed to what other art medium?
A crucifix in a jar of piss is considered art. A TV displaying static in an empty room is considered art. Or I've personally seen such works of art in a private collection as 4 pieces of A4 paper, 2 crumpled and 2 folded, then straightened out and framed. That was art. I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
Or probably the best example here was a modern painting I've seen, which looked _exactly_ like a tetris game when you just lost. No seriously, it was essentially a square grid with 1 to 4 adjacent squares filled with one of 5 or 6 colours or so. Except I recon one of the rows should have been eliminated before because it was full. I wonder if it was an error of the artist or that was some thought-provoking part about the unfairness of life.
If _that_ is art, why isn't Tetris art? It can produce the same kind of an image. Why is it art if it's displayed in some snob's collection on canvas, but not when it's on the screen?
2. The general idea (or excuse) of art these days is that it's supposed to be "thought provoking" instead of anything else. (In fact, last I've heard about it at an arts college calling someone else's work "pretty" instead of "thought provoking" is the most grievous insult you can throw and not be sued for it. But use it only if you want to make an enemy.)
So then why aren't, say, the story arcs of City Of Heroes art? I know several did get me thinking about morality, or about doing what you think is right and discovering that you've been manipulated, and a few other things.
And I'm not even saying that City Of Heroes is the only game like that. Most games can provoke _some_ thought. E.g., KOTOR 2 did a good job of being pretty morally complex, and had more than a couple of situations worth thinking about. E.g., The Witcher got pretty philosophical at times, and it made a good point that sometimes there are no right sides to pick. E.g., Black And White, much as I otherwise thoroughly despised that game, did get me thinking a bit about divinity and such. Etc.
Heck, I once even wrote an essay about Chucky Egg as a metaphor for the struggle of the common worker against the oppressive corporate chickens. Ok, it was a big joke, but it did provoke that kind of thought at least. So even a simplistic one-screen platformer can technically be thought-provoking.
And again, if a crucifix in a jar of piss or a crumpled sheet of paper can use the "thought provoking" excuse, then virtually any game can. If you're the kind that's inclined to think of the deeper meanings and possible metaphors of that jar, I see no reason why you couldn't do the same about a Mario kart game. (See the XKCD strip where she gets all philosophical about choosing to not cross the finishing line. Ok, just to make him lose, but still, that's some thought provoked.)
Bah, only a pleb would think that black is black and can't be improved any more ;)
Sure it'll be black, but will it be HD-rendered, bump-mapped, paralax-mapped, pixel-shaded, floating-point-colour black? I mean, just #000000 is soo last century. Nowadays only plebs and nostalgiacs would even look at that. Nowadays we want high-res high-polycount shiny objects with normals and displacements precisely calculated to accurately reflect and refract the surrounding, umm, black. We want black reflected on photo-realistic shimmering black water.
And pay attention to the high resolution part. Just filling a 256x256 texture with (0, 0, 0) doesn't cut it any more. If it's not at least 4096x4096 worth of pure black, you might as well make it text mode.
And will it have realistic depth-of-field effects? It's not a modern game if you can actually see clearly at more that 10 ft. You know it's really modern if you feel like a myopic guy who lost his glasses. In fact, like a myopic guy who just got beladonna drops in the eyes at the occulist, lost his glasses, and is returning home through a severe fog. If you wonder if your CRT suddenly lost the focusing coil, or if your 1600x1200 TFT is actually badly upscaling a 320x240 image, _that's_ a modern game. I mean, bah, black. What we need these days is _blurry_ black.
Actually, that's a point that's even in the summary. Guess who'll seize your computer and maybe arrest you, long before you get to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" to a jury? Right, the DOJ, according to _their_ interpretation of the law.
Yes, some years later you might even get your computer back, and/or be let to go free. Was it worth the inconvenience?
Now also take a guess how many blogs and newspapers and news sites will carry a story like "John Smith arrested for kiddie porn", and how long it'll be easy to find by Google. Do you think your neighbours will go by reasonable doubt before trying to run you out of town anyway? IIRC in England they tried to run a doctor out of town because her job title said "paeditrician" (i.e., child doctor) and apparently nobody knew it's not the same thing as "paedophile". I also recall cases where they glued posters on someone's house and tried to make their life hell because they found a completely different person by the same name accused of a sex crime.
And do you think many HR departments will even get to the part where they listen to how you was aquitted for reasonable doubt? Most companies out there aren't looking for a reason to hire you, they're looking for any pretext to drop your resume from the pile. There is advice and there are practices out there ranging from tarot and numerology, to "shuffle them and drop the bottom half", to the gravity well test (drop the pile in the stair well and eliminate the lower half of the mess.) _Anything_ that doesn't explicitly say "discriminates against minority Y" is good because it can't be acted in court. Dropping an accused paedophile to avoid the potential PR problem? I can see people jumping on such an oportunity.
Additionally I'd argue that even "beyond reasonable doubt" should be taken with a lot more skepticism IMHO. In most of the cases it'll only be a jurry of your peers only if you're a complete moron too. It won't be libertarian network admins listening to your case there. It'll be people who don't know their elbow from their arse about the technology involved, and in some cases who take pride in being computer-illiterate and go to great lengths to avoid looking like they understand _anything_ about computers. (It's actually fashionable to be computer illiterate lately.) It'll be people who don't know the difference between "we traced the kiddie porn downloads to his computer" and the fact that they only have the IP Address from the ISP. And again some who'll never admit understanding something as nerdy, that even if they did.
"Reasonable doubt" can end up meaning little more than "I like the DA more than his lawyer" or "the prosecution's expert witness looked smarter."
There _have_ been people who landed in jail for stuff where even the most elementary knowledge of statistics would have provided ample doubt, and/or where the prosecution's expert witness was demonstrably talking out the arse. E.g., I remember a case about a nurse in an emergency ward which got to actually go to jail because an above-average number of people died during her shift. There was no evidence whatsoever that she did anything wrong there, but "OMG, X people died during her shifts" was enough for the jury to send her to jail.
You'll be judged by people who are emotional like that. It doesn't take too many who get in a "OMG, paedophilia, die, die, die" tizzy to not even listen to your arguments that you actually just let your access point wide open to camouflage your P2P music downloads.
Of course, it can go the other way too, because judgments based on stupidity and ignorance are inherently random. But do you really want to bet your freedom on it?
And to come back on topic, especially if he's from the DOJ, he's probably seen more trials than you or I did. And I wouldn't be surprised if half of them were the "sentenced by a jury of emotional morons" kind. If he says that "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't mean as bulletproof as you think, he _might_ have some experience to base that on.
I've made my case, I see neither him nor you addressing it. And if the bar for discussing it is having won an award, what's his or your award there? You know, speaking of fucktards.