And technically, since we're talking science, that's enough disproof. The burden of proof lies on the one who claims to have a proof. Pointing out the holes in his proof is disproof enough. You don't have to prove the opposite, which sometimes is even impossible or unfeasible.
E.g., if I claim to have proof that extraterrestrials live among us in disguise, it's up to me to prove that, not up to you to prove that all 6 billion humans on Earth were born on Earth. The latter would be unreasonably hard a "proof" to do, and frankly it's not your burden to do. (Much as various nuts and fanatics like to pretend that it's your job to prove them wrong, and they're right if you don't.) But if you can find big enough holes in my data or methodology, that's actually disproof enough.
Ditto for games. It's very hard to prove, especially for someone who's already dead, that games absolutely didn't have an influence on him. You can't resurrect him and haul him to a shrink. Now picture doing that for a few hundreds of people. It's unreasonable, and, again, it's frankly not your burden of proof. The ones who claim that the link between games and violence exist, and even use it as a true premise to base further rationale on (e.g., that therefore this or that legislation is needed), those have to first prove it. If you can poke holes in their proof, that's disproof enough.
So to summarize it, the answer to your "let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite" is: he doesn't have to prove the opposite in the first place.
In the end, probably what we actually need is actually less people getting suck(er)ed into the game of accepting that they have to prove the opposite, and more people who just call BS until the ones making the claim presented a good enough proof. Once you accept the burden of proving the opposite, essentially you've accepted that unless you can do the unreasonable !X proof, the bullshitter is right. That's already playing their game. They just need to be slapped silly with the notion of who has to prove what, and that an unproven claim is null and void and not to be taken any more seriously than opinionated gossip overheard on a plane.
1. While I see your point about my poor choice of example, there _have_ been Islamist terror attacks and hijackings in Europe at least yearly, all the way back to the 50's-60's. The funny thing is, most of Europe is actually friendlier to muslims and arabs than the USA opinion seems to be lately.
Plus, the example about Israel still stands. While the daily attacks sure didn't help reduce the tensions between the arabs and the jews, I don't think Israel gave up that many of their own citizens' rights in the name of it.
2. The religious tensions between the protestant English and the catholic Irish were deep enough to warrant lots of people shooting each other, rather than thinking of each other as "fellow europeans."
From what I can see, most violence is sectarian anyway. There are more arabs bombed for being the wrong shade of Islam than christians or jews bombed by the Islamists, and violence between christian sects has a history going all the way back for some 2000 years.
Long before persecuting the protestants, there were repressions of such sects as the Cathars. Or there were conflicts and wars and propaganda wars against such early sects as Arianism, Pelagianism, etc. Pelagianists are apparently the "snakes" that St Patrick drove out of Ireland, btw. Or the Byzantines felt a need to differentiate between such views as "jesus had two natures, human and divine" (dyophysite), "nah, mate, it was just one" (monophysite), and "it was two but they're inseparable" (myaphysite), and conducted purges of whoever picked the wrong choice out of those 3. There were schisms and occasionally violence, over the translation of 1-2 words. (E.g., the Syriac church had a problem with calling Mary the "mother of god", or calling Jesus the "word of god".) The Pope and the Byzantine emperor excommunicated each other about a detail as silly as whether communion bread should be leavened or unleavened. Etc.
I think that (sadly) there are enough people for which "omg, he's of another religion" trumps "he's a fellow European."
I've also used such terms before as "cat lovers", "dog lovers", "FPS lovers" and a few others. I'll often even describe myself in terms of being a lover of this or that. I often joke about being in love with my computer.
It's only the gun crowd that instantly throws a fit if you as much as hint at them even liking guns, much less loving them. In fact, I've had people throw tantrums even at mentioning the NRA and owners of assault-rifles (converted to semi-automatic, to be sure) in a thread about what weapons would be available in a post-nuclear Fallout-type world. It seems to me weird to see the same people who obviously like guns, take it automatically as a grievous insult if you even hint at it. You don't see cat lovers throw a tantrum if you call them that.
It seems to me like if I really wanted that particular designation to be an insult by itself, I could have phrased it as an actual insult, no? From something moderately insulting like "gun fetishists" to something really insulting like calling that gun a penis size compensator. I didn't and I don't. Didn't seem to me like "gun loving" would offer much insult by itself.
Actually, we're getting offtopic, but the 9/11 hysteria is another... interesting thing.
See, the USA had _one_ such incident in _years_. If you look at the number of terrorist attacks in the USA, say, the year _before_ that, you'll notice there were exactly zero. In fact, I can't remember any major act of terrorism there before 9/11 all the way to the Unabomber.
After that, also zero. Now you could justify the ones after that as being because of increased security (theatre), but it's hard not to notice that there were exactly zero without that security theatre too, and before giving up any liberties.
So America agreed to have its liberties trampled over... a one-off (if spectacular) act of terrorism.
By comparison, the Brits didn't suspend their liberties over _decades_ of shelling and bombing by the IRA. (And those guys knew how to bomb. There were attacks with batteries of improvised mortars mounted in a van even on the PM's residence.) Admittedly, recently they seem to have imported the USA idea that they can turn more totalitarian over even more ridiculous "bombing attempts", like some guy loading a sack of nails in his car and setting it on fire. (It just burned, btw.)
Spain didn't suspend its liberties over some pretty spectacular bombings, some pretty recent. Japan didn't move towards totalitarianism after, say, the Tokyo poison gas attacks in the subway. Etc.
Heck, Israel is bombed _daily_ by various radical Islamist groups. If they had moved towards authoritarianism for each major incident as much as the USA did for 9/11, they'd be a complete dictatorship by now. AFAIK, they aren't.
But in the USA you (at least as in, "you the poster I answer to") seem to think that _one_ terror incident warrants re-electing a guy who's just about wiped his arse with the constitution in the name of that one attack. Interesting.
So, no, I had not forgotten. I was genuinely surprised that _that_ lame excuse worked. Again.
Do you think it would have been sensible, given the state of affairs, for the people to have mounted an armed revolt? The courts operated as they should, and several times halted the Bush administration where it overstepped. The military remained under civilian control. It's the end of Bush's term, and he surrendered his authority peacefully and with respect. And here you are, calling people who believe in the purpose of the Second Amendment hypocrites for not mounting a revolt against this tyranny. I'd say you're a sloppy debater, but since I wager you believe this claptrap, let's skip right to it: you're an idiot. You evidence no capability for critical thinking.
I'm not even asking for an outright rebellion. But it would be nice to see the same people who rant about protecting the constitution, actually give a damn about the constitution in the first place. Like not re-electing him in 2004, you know? Or actually having more important issues to care about and/or question about Obama than directly launching into "OMG, he's gonna make us turn guns in" strawmen. That that's their top concern about a president or government, tells me what their priorities are.
Yes, I know the dictum, "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." I'm not proposing that you skip the first 3. But I'd have thought that people who care that much about their democracy would go at least up to the second. And from what I see, the right used even the first box more to fling mud at anyone opposing Bush, than to actually defend liberty.
_That_ is what confuses me. You'd think that people who proclaim themselves so ready to even die for their rights, would actually give a flying fuck about those rights in the first place.
Hey, since supposedly you're the one with the critical thinking, why don't you enlighten me there?
And newspapers and churches only care about the first amendment. Or maybe you're stereotyping.
I'm not sure what American newspapers believe in any more... the right to redefine reality to whatever pleases their billionaire owner? I suppose first amendment _would_ describe that, if it weren't for the fact that they routinely participate in slinging mud at whoever says otherwise. I guess they don't care about free speech that much when it applies to someone else.
American Churches (and the bible-thumpers even more) seem to be all about free speech, as long as you don't talk about stuff like evolution, other religions, abortion, equality for homosexuals, and so on. Then they'd want the government to stop you. Funny how free speech doesn't seem to apply any more. Freedom of press either, if someone's press is, say, for homosexual rights.
(As a sidenote: Funny how many of the same people justify being right-wing as some way to stop government from interfering in everyone's life. But it's ok to want it to interfere with the guys you don't like. If it's about telling Johnny to pray in school, or Jane that she can't abort after she was raped, or Jack that he's an abomination for liking other guys... well, then by all means, the government should interfere more.)
So if you're so concerned about revolting against Bush, why didn't you? _You_ obviously thought Bush's evil didn't justify armed rebellion, since you didn't do it- why are you complaining that other people agree with you on the subject?
Because I'm not an American? If all the foreigners who don't like your government's policies came over to shoot at your government, I think the word you're looking for is "invasion" rather than "rebellion". And that went out of style a century ago, you know?
And in the end, isn't that why we're all disgusted at the Iraq fiasco? Well, other than it being based on lies. Invading to "bring democracy" to someone is, in the end, still an aggression and rarely ends up being about democracy.
At any rate, it's up to you to fix your own country. Or not. Won't stop me from chuckling at some of the right wing stuff I hear from that side of the pond, but in the end it's like watching a soap opera. I'm not going to attack the studio to fix the plot either.
And I'm certainly not proposing to forbid you to own an AK, or whatever else. I'm just amused at the argument about it being some kind of constitutional safeguard. At least "because I want guns" it's an honest answer. I can respect that. But what I see overused is convoluted lies about how it's what guards the rights and constitution... except those people sure don't seem to even hint at protecting any other right.
I didn't catch that, where is the gun turn-in done?
You know, that's one of the funny things I see when looking at America from some thousands of kilometres away.
So supposedly, the sacred right to bear arms is there to keep the government in line, in case it oversteps its constitutional bounds. Lemme see, the Bushies did:
- effectively suspending habeas corpus,
- used torture,
- starting a war of aggression, and justified it by
- outright lying about the evidence, (plus, see two paragraphs above, it turns out that all the "witnesses" they had, had been waterboarded until they said what the Bushies wanted to hear,)
- massive surveillace of its own citizens, down to data-mining grocery bills,
- politicizing every branch of the government they could lay their hands on,
- trying to keep official emails from the _legal_ mandated openness, by using private accounts for government business, or by just making excuses (apparently they didn't make backups, ya know)
- saying out loud that the constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't apply to them,
Etc.
Did I see the gun-loving right at least hinting about the possibility of a revolt over it? (Yes, at the end of the series of other boxes, but still.) Nah, they voted for him again.
But here comes a president which at least promises to undo some of that evil, and restore at least _some_ of those constitutional rights. (Whether he'll keep that promise, remains to be seen.) What does the gun-loving right immediately fear? "OMG, he might take our guns away."
It seems to me that the gun lovers care _only_ about exactly _one_ piece of the constitution: the second amendment. No more, no less. Wipe your ass with the rest constitution if you will, they sure won't mind it. So exactly how does that work as a constitutional safeguard, then?
Well, that's actually the funny part... Lord British was good at one thing: telling a story. Think about those single player Ultima games that you mentioned, and really that was what made them interesting. The game systems weren't particularly balanced (e.g., magic doing everything with one skill was there before too), and so on. They had the same problems that would plague UO later, but it didn't matter because it was single player.
So he takes basically the engine of U7, removes the story, and makes it an MMO. And proves to be pretty incompetent at handling a multi-player game.
The even funnier thing is: again, he ignored what was already known. He went basically "ooh, we can't have quests in a multi-player game, because once one guy saved the princess, the other thousands of players can't do that any more." And a whole industry was happy to quote and paraphrase that idea.
But the thing is: some MUDs already had quests, particularly LPMUDs. (E.g., DW MUD comes to mind.) And more than proved that humans can bend their mind around that. People quite easily can go "yay, I saved the princess" just as she's respawned at the balcony again and the next player in a 20 player line takes his turn at saving her. Or people can queue up to give a guy his long lost heirloom, as 20 other players queue up to give him the same heirloom, and another 20 are there to be given the quest to retrieve that heirloom.
Heck, I've been on _DIKU_ MUDs which had basic "go there, kill npc X, bring me his head" or "go kill 50 smurfs" quests. Especially in a world where whole zones were just hunting-grounds respawning on turbo (e.g., the cemeteries spawned endless zombies"), it would have been trivial to have some "go kill 15 skeletons", "go into the crypt and kill 15 zombies" and "go in the caves below the crypt and kill the lich" quest arcs. I mean, those guys respawned anyway and nobody wondered "why are they there if I just killed them?" Adding a quest to it wouldn't have made any difference to suspension of disbelief.
I'm not saying that just in retrospect after other MMOs proved it (you know, Columbus's egg and all that), but because it was already proven on MUDs. It just took MMOs many years to reinvent that.
So to get back on topic, UO could have had quests and a story, and thus could have actually made good use of Lord British's main strength as a designer. By ignoring everyone else, he shot himself in the foot IMHO.
3. There wasn't a "minority that actually likes UO." You're mistaking the vastly increased MMO market of now from what it was 11 years ago. ~12 million people didn't try UO and decide they didn't like it.
The "cold hard fact" is that UO was really, really popular at the time. It grew the MMO fanbase, and EQ grew it even more with a generic fantasy world and true 3D graphics.
The fact that it STILL has players is proof enough that it is fun.
The actual cold hard fact is that the Earth's population didn't increase 110 times in the last 10 years. Heck, not even in the last century.
There was exactly the same potential market for UO as for WoW or EQ. In fact, higher for UO, because it didn't require as much hardware. But more people preferred the more hardware-intensive EQ.
And yes, there were plenty of people who tried UO and found it crap. The reputation it had was that it was that place where you get ganked as soon as you poke your nose out of town, among other unflattering pieces of reputation. Or that it's the place that's as freaking unbalanced as to have 1 skill that can do everything (magic) and 1 skill (tinkering) that's useless for anything except trapping chests and hoping some newbie opens them. (NPCs never opened them.) You know, for the kind of ganker that doesn't even have the balls for a face to face fight with a newbie. Or that it's the kind of buggy untested place where you can pick up grass tiles, or where people can steal your furniture through the walls. Or where you can max your strength in a couple of hours by just dropping and picking a coin, so there's no sense of achievement in doing it any other way. Etc.
But at any rate, the market size is largely the same. If one MMO has X players and the other 100*X players, the latter simply fit their taste better. It's that simple.
And yes, it was the most popular as long as it was the only game in town. As soon as EQ and AC got launched, and they actually listened to what the players wanted, UO became the least popular of the 3.
4. You're wrong.:) I'm happy to argue with you about that, because you're the one making the incorrect assertions.
Ok, then here's one assertion for you to chew on: British's retarded insistence that everything should be solved by player justice. It's easy to disprove me: name _one_ MUD or MMO where that ever worked. Go on. Argue that one. Just one example where that ever worked.
On the contrary, even the most cursory read of Bartle's paper would have told anyone why that can't work. The kind of player who gets their jollies out of driving someone off the game, doesn't hunt its own kind. They need unwilling and hopefully easily annoyable victims, not other "killers". So the kind of griefer who could form a posse to drive someone off the game, won't form a posse to drive off another griefer.
Also because of how that works: there is nothing you can do to someone's character that will drive him off, if he regards that character as a disposable _tool_ for harassment. Trying to hunt that character down is, in fact, "feeding a troll". He gets some attention from lots of people.
So basically for British's idea to work, he needed some kind of "killers" that actually work and think like "achievers" or maybe "socializers". (By Bartle's classification.) It was predictable that it won't work at all.
That's just one example of the kind of ideas that UO just had to reinvent... badly, instead of looking at what's already known to work.
1. SWG before the NGE? Just because _you_ can't name one, doesn't mean they don't exist, ya know?
2. Also, in the meantime UO did fix a bunch of the stuff that wasn't funny. Most of it after Lord British gave up. So it's a bit misleading to showcase UO _now_ as a testament to Lord British's skills.
3. Well, tastes being a subjective thing, I don't doubt that there is a niche that still likes UO.
But to put things in perspectie:
- 110 times more people currently prefer to pay more for WoW than play UO
- EQ peaked at 5 times that
- SWG was well over 2 times that when Sony decided it needed a NGE to stem the playerbase decline
- TSO was at about 110k players when EA proclaimed it a flop
- ditto for Auto Assault IIRC
- Tabula Rasa was IIRC at about 3/4 that when NCSoft threw in the towel. So, you know, god knows that even with a buggy, unfinished, poorly-designed POS you can land in that kinda ballpark figure
So basically if you happen to be in the minority that actually likes UO, good for you. But the cold hard fact is that those "ravenous hordes" gave _far_ more players what they wanted in a game. For the average mainstream gamer, UO just wasn't that much fun, and while it's been fixed after British, not enough by half.
4. But, anyway, to get back on topic: yes, that's literally what I'm saying. That UO was launched full of piss-poorly thought-out ideas that were known not to work well.
And if you disagree with that, hey, argue with Origin about it. Because if they got fixed later, surely Origin and EA did consider them to be mistakes.
Actually, I haven't been in the beta for either, but the released product... well, it's probably misleading to say that HGL was better, but let's just say that Tabula Rasa was actually genuinely worse. In fact, since the OP mentioned SWG, I'll up the ante and say that NGE SWG was actually more fun than TR. Or more exactly, TR was actually less fun.
And I don't just mean the bugs and unfinished content, that everyone loves to hammer on, because those are _easy_ points to make. The problem is that even if you managed to avoid the bugs, the game just wasn't much fun to play. The design was flawed in a dozen different ways.
The problem was the whole "Tabula Rasa" concept. Lord British actually planned from the start to wipe the slate clean, and reinvent it all from scratch. I.e., work in a vacuum, and ignore a whole decade of proof of what works and what doesn't in a game.
In a way it was a continuation of how Ultima Online invented the graphical MMORPG, and ended up in third place as soon as there were two other competitors.
UO didn't _have_ to invent everything. There were already thousands of text-based MUDs, and whole discussions, correlations and theories (e.g., Bartle's) as to what works and how it works. You could tell from the start why a whole bunch of Lord British's ideas won't work, or won't make players happy, because the exact same had happened a thousand times before on MUDs.
But British basically chose to ignore all that. And to ignore the players complaining about it.
"Tabula Rasa" was basically the same failure mode repeated verbatim one more time. Now I'm all for innovation and trying new things, don't get me wrong. But it's not innovation if you repeat someone else's mistake. And it's not really "new things" just because British refuses to acknowledge the many people who tried the exact same things before.
1. Looking through Alternate again, I see a 17" TFT at 92 euro. Again, you'll probably want to do the VAT trick and all that. It'll fit under 600 per computer total.
It's only a TN, and only 1440x900 resolution, so you probably don't want to do graphics processing on it, but it'll play WoW all right.
2. And a second copy of an MMO won't really break the bank these days either.
You can get a copy of COH/COV for 2 Euro more than the price of a month, and it includes a "free" month. So essentially you're getting the game for 2 Euros.
WoW without any expansion packs costs the same (actually, 4 cents cheaper;), and again it does include a "free" month. Add some 15 Euro and you get the Burning Crusade too. It's manageable.
3. Also note that I didn't pick the cheapest computers there. If your finances are that tight, I see a 350 Euro one right on the front page of their list. It's only integrated graphics, but, again, it'll play WoW all right. Still 1 GB RAM, though, and a dual-core Intel.
On the second page, there's a HP at 279 Euro, but it's not in stock and it has no technical data, so personally I wouldn't order that one.
Page 4, there's a 319 Euro one, integrated graphics. (There's also the 299 version, but without OS, so let's ignore that one.)
And so on. You can probably save a bit there, if you want a better monitor instead.
4. That said, look, let's get it out of the way: I'm not saying that PCs are the cheapest version, nor even the "better" version. If you want the best bang per buck, sure, go with a console. By all means.
I'm just saying that family PC gaming is (A) _feasible_ too, even for people who aren't extremely rich, and most importantly (B) there's nothing antisocial or teenager-only about it. That's really all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying consoles (Wii included) don't have their advantages. In fact, I'm usually on the console side of PC-vs-Consoles flamewars. So I'm not going to argue with you much about the price, etc.
My main problem is merely with the false dichotomy of, basically, "Wiis are for the whole family, PCs only have Quake-like stuff for antisocial teenagers". It's just plain old not true. The average PC gamer is actually in the 30's nowadays, and even the retired senior citizen extreme is actually on the rise in, say, MMOs. And I fail to see how cooperative gaming, local network or MMO counts as antisocial. That is really my whole problem with the OP's point.
That said, actually you don't need that expensive a PC to play some games. WoW for example does run semi-acceptably even on an Eee laptop, and there are Youtube videos documenting it. (Only since you mention the Eee in your example.) Admittedly, you won't play Crysis Warhead on that, and even WoW will have some 8 frames per second, but it can be played on it if you must.
That said, though, you can buy a semi decent PC nowadays for a couple of hundred Euro, and it won't be as handicapped as the Eee. A cheap lowest-end integrated Intel chipset and a proper desktop CPU (as opposed to the underpowered Atom), will run WoW plenty fast. I know people who play it on such low end old computers. So maybe you won't buy 4 of them for your $1200 limit, but two or even three is definitely possible.
I'm looking on Alternate at the moment to check it -- and it's not even the cheapest internet store -- and I see some decent mini-tower systems for 399 Euro. (Google says that's 539.0091 U.S. dollars, but bear in mind that prices are _including_ a rather large VAT here, so maybe you can get the same cheaper in the USA.) I'm talking stuff like dual-core Athlon 64, a semi-decent ATI or NVidia graphics card, and 1 GB RAM. It's not just plenty enough for WoW, it could even run COH more than acceptably. You could certainly fit two of those under that $1200 limit.
Again, I'm not dissing consoles in any form or shape. Just saying that a family playing an MMO together is certainly feasible too nowadays. You no longer have to be a millionaire to afford a second computer.
PC games on the other hand, do exactly the opposite. They encourage seclusion and disconnection from others. The only interaction a PC gamer experiences is when he "frags" someone or "pwns" a "n00b". My mother (age 75) comes to play Wii Sports with my family. But would you drag your mother out for a round of Quake? How would you even hook up the keyboards to the TV? It just makes no sense. Adding motion controls to Quake isn't going to make it any less antisocial.
1. That's funny because my mom and dad are currently raiding together in WoW. Two different PCs in the same room. (Well, actually four PCs, but they're complete nerds like that.) You don't need a single TV to play together, you know.
Apparently they're getting along better than ever too. Now they actually have a common topic and interest again. So there you go, you can use PCs for the whole family too.
They also played together on other consoles than the Wii too before. There were and are plenty of N64, Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, etc, games that can be played together on a single screen. There's a reason why every single bloody non-portable console ever made had more than one controller socket. The Wii didn't invent that.
Heck, there were plenty of games played on a shared screen on personal computers too. E.g., about half the games on the old Spectrum supported two players on the same screen. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of PC games did too (e.g., I remember playing Golden Axe together with my brother or with a visiting friend, on the same screen and keyboard.)
You can play together on two PSP's via its built-in wireless network. I would imagine that the same applies to a DS, though sadly I don't own one to check out.
So let's let this bullshit meme die already. Just because you lack the imagination to gather your family around anything else than a Wii, doesn't make the Wii anything uniquely magical. It just means you lack an imagination.
Note that I have nothing against the Wii itself at this point. But it's just another of the _many_ things you can play together. Let's drop the falsehood that it's the _only_ thing for the whole family, and that PCs are somehow just for antisocial adolescents.
2. Also, Quake is at best strawman there. Not every PC game is Quake. There are PC games ranging from ultra-competitive twitch-games, to cooperative-only games. There are games ranging from from violent like Quake to:
- stuff like The Sims which is a glorified doll house, and sold to a lot of women. So, yes, you could probably drag your mom to play The Sims without turning her antisocial,
- stuff like Catz or Dogz which are a sort of a high-tech Tamagochi. Again, I could see anyone's mom spending at least a few minutes with a virtual kitten. (And if you think that's antisocial loner gaming, note that Nintendo too did release games like Nintendogs.)
- a plethora of Barbie games for little girls, plus a few other similar games without the franchise
- logic games like The Incredible Machines, or the Creatures series which combined caring for cutesy creatures with building elaborate... well, incredible machines, to keep them separated
Etc, etc, etc.
If you're going to address something as broad as PC gaming, then make sure you actually address PC gaming as a whole, not just some convenient niche that fits your preconceived point.
Duly noted, but, still, I'm guessing you wouldn't go on a stage and tell people to "stop watching boring anime", from some position of authority, based on just second hand hearsay. It's one thing to offer an opinion when asked, and even then presumably in the same circle from which you already have some idea about their subjective tastes. And it's another thing to go and proclaim what's wrong with someone who likes X, when you haven't even seen X. I'm guessing you don't do that, right?
Also, at the very least, what he there has is a biased sample.
It's like, dunno, going to a school with mostly girls (say, being the only guy who's taken women studies in university) and concluding from that sample that Backstreet Boys is the best band in the world, and everyone owns their albums. Similarly, I would guess that the opinions who hears at Nintendo are already biased that way. E.g., I can only guess that Miyamoto isn't a die-hard RPG fan, because he sure isn't making RPGs. I mean, his motto is "Games should be what we would want to play", so if he liked those, he'd make some, right?
But, again, my problem isn't even with drawing a conclusion from a biased sample. My problem is the willingness to tell everyone else what's wrong with them, if they don't match that sample. Telling someone that his subjective tastes are wrong is pretty darned presumptuous and disrespectful as it is. Doing it without even having any experience to base it on, just makes it stupid too.
Basically I'm guessing that you know your limits with that limited experience with anime, and don't go insult people who happen to have other tastes. Right? Well, then it's not even remotely the same as the problem I have with Yamauchi.
And finally, well, I'm not even convinced that it's just a biased sample. He was hyping his own products, and bashing the competition. I don't recall him having anything against RPGs when all the RPG developers were publishing on the NES and then SNES. Only when they jumped ship, _then_ he suddenly thinks RPGs are boring, and people should stop playing them, and RPG gamers are depressed loners in dark rooms. It's hard not to suspect a self-interest bias there.
Basically in the case about you and anime, I'm willing to assume an impartiality there, because (I assume) you're not selling or producing anime. You have no obvious reason to hype one series and bash another, and probably just relay what's being discussed in your group. But if I saw one anime producer bashing the series of a competitor, I'd have a serious dose of scepticism there.
The real problem there is that usually a mailing list does look like a single user, and then there's some list server which distributes it to everyone on his subscriber's list. There's not much a client can do to differentiate between an email sent to, say, "moraelin@company_name.com" versus "team42@company_name.com" versus "company_name_all@company_name.com". They all look like exactly one recipient to the client. (And at least the first two are very legitimate destinations too.)
Asking the client to know who it will be sent to, would require a way to ask a list server for the complete list of subscribers... and you can probably see how that would be a spammer gold mine. Not to mention a breach of privacy. (If I were on some bestiality mailing list, I wouldn't want everyone to be able to check if my email address is subscribed. And)
IMHO the right thing to do is to simply not have a mailing list with everyone in the company. It's a mail bomb waiting to happen.
There are extremely few things that absolutely need to be received by everyone, from CEO to janitor, across the globe. And you can go hierarchically if you ever actually have such an announcement to all. I.e., ask the department or team managers to forward that piece of information to their departments or teams. That's how the job pyramid was supposed to work in the first place.
First of all, this is a discussion, not an encyclopedia or college. There is no burden of proof, and no claim of accuracy whatsoever. It's on par with overhearing gossip in the airplane. Nobody involved has any kind of duty to document it for you. If you find it interesting enough, do your own research, if not, you know, STFU.
Second, [citation needed] is an _impolite_ thing to slap onto a conversation. It's one thing to say, for example, "I keep hearing that, but I haven't actually found that interview anywhere. Can you provide a link?" And a whole other thing to slap a "[citation needed]" as if you had some right or expectation to one.
Again, you have none. It's a forum gossip. Nobody owes you a damn thing. If you can't do your own research, ask nicely. You don't go to your mom and say "food needed" either, and you probably don't go "break needed" in a meeting either. Learn to communicate like a human, not in Wikipedia tags. Especially since again you're not on Wikipedia.
And if some people are too retarded to communicate, or to tell when they're on a forum from when they're trolling Wikipedia, well, it's their problem not mine. _I_ don't owe them anything whatsoever.
The other animals don't live long enough to reach it, simply put. They also don't get another ovulation every 4 weeks, so they don't run through eggs anywhere _near_ as fast as humans.
As I was saying, 99.9% of all the Homo Sapiens women who ever lived, never experienced menopause either. Overflowing that buffer is a very recent thing. Too recent to matter either way at evolution scales.
Menopause is actually a more complex thing, and actually had _zero_ impact on human evolution back when it mattered.
The problem is that all mammal females are born with a finite number of "eggs". Usually more than enough for an average life span. Again, it's actually controlled by evolution, or rather natural selection. If you have too few it's a handicap, so nature tends to select those with more. But here's the important part: enough for your expected life span. If a cat lives for, say, 3 years outside, there's no evolutionary pressure to have enough ovules for 30 years. If an ape lives for an average 20 years, there is no evolutionary pressure to pre-produce enough ovules for 300 years.
So basically all you really see there is that the life span of our ancestors was _much_ shorter, back when we evolved into humans.
As late as the Old Kingdom period in Egypt -- and that's already talking about 5000 years ago, out of 200,000 that Homo Sapiens existed for, or the _millions_ leading to Homo Sapiens -- if you got past the high infant mortality, the median age for death was in the mid-20's for women. (And mid-30's for men.)
And just to stress it, I'm not talking about "life expectancy at birth" (which would include the dead babies), but the actual second peak of the age-at-death curve. We have a ton of records (plaques, scrolls, etc) detailing when someone died, and if you plot X = age, Y = number of such records dead at that age, you get a scary spike in the first 3 years of age, then a second peak in the mid 20's for women, and mid-30's for men.
So that was the number of years that you needed ovules for. The average women got married at 12 and died at, say, 24. That's 12 years of being fertile. That's all the ovules it needed. Having enough of them until the age of 60 is already a _massive_ margin for the case she lived longer. It's having 4 times more than the average will ever need.
(Actually, even more. Ovulation is inhibited while you're pregnant or have someone sucking milk out of your breast, as a safety. So someone making an average of, say, a child every 2 years and nursing each for a year, would use up only a fraction of what a modern woman uses.)
At any rate, an ultra-tiny minority lived long enough to reach menopause. There was _no_ evolutionary pressure to push it until later.
What you see is a relatively modern age phenomenon. The life expectancy has risen so dramatically, that the women actually get to reach the end of that counter. What was once a 300% margin, now is actually less than enough.
In computer terms: it's a buffer overflow error. Literally.
But the same modern age all but stopped evolution. And nobody makes a child every 2 years any more. People stop at a much lower number, menopause or not. There is no natural selection to change that any more.
Miyamoto is a nice and humble guy, yes. On the other hand, some of the recent blanket patents have been filed by him, or maybe in his name.
In at least the patent aspect, nothing seems to have changed lately. Nintendo after Yamauchi still patents everything in sight, and every vague idea that they might sometimes use... or just wish to keep their competitors from using. The one in today's news wasn't filed under Yamauchi, was it?
So at the very least, this still is my answer the OP's "Imagine if having a first person viewpoint and shooting something out the center of it was patented". It's just the kind of thing that Nintendo would patent. If Wolfenstein 3D had been published through them instead of Apogee, yes, I'd imagine we'd have a patent -- or at least patent application -- on using a first person view-point in a game.
2. Do your own fucking research. It takes a whole 5 seconds to copy and paste that phrase into Google. Ah, wait, it's just another meme that lets retards pretend they're part of some big smart family by copy-and-pasting something. Carry on, then. No need to start using your own brain now, after all.
Nope, it's not even remotely the one I'm refering to. The quote about RPG gamers is from an 1999 interview.
But, yes, he did do a lot of stupid quotes in his time, including the one you linked to. Telling me that I play boring games, and that I should stop playing them for no other reason than that all the RPG developers left Nintendo... isn't exactly going to make me like him.
Especially because of this: he didn't play either kind of games, and took pride in not having played any game ever. So _how_ does he fucking know which are boring and which aren't? On what knowledge does he base his presuming to tell me what to play? Oh, wait, he's just telling me to buy his snake-oil and stop buying the competition's. And not even in nice terms.
I mean, picture me coming and saying something like, "I haven't played any MMO, and I'm proud I never blew my money on those, but I know that Vanguard rules and WoW is crap. Only depressed losers play WoW. Stop playing that boring game now." (Just hypothetically.) Wouldn't you say, "so how would you know, if you haven't played either?"
I mean it's like a nun telling you which sexual position feels better. Or like a vegan telling you which meat tastes better and which to buy. Or like the Amish telling you which brand of car is more fun to drive. I could go on, but you get the idea already. How would he flipping know?
But, as I was saying, he doesn't. He was just telling us to stop buying the competition's product and start buying more of his. Without even having used either. Just because one makes him money and the other doesn't.
Well, fascinating it is. I don't think many other companies outright insulted their customers (see such Yamauchi quotes as the one I quoted) _and_ business partners (see their attitude to the devs when some threatened to jump ship in the N64 days... which caused most to actually do jump ship) _and_ have a chairman who's publicly _proud_ to not be among the customers (Yamauchi actually took pride in never having played a single video game in his life), and, yes, get such adoring fans.
I mean, comparing to that, even the patents are nothing. Joe Average doesn't care about our ideological crusades about patents or IP. But call someone names, take pride in not being like him, and have him come back to you wagging his tail, now _that_ is something. I don't know how they do that, but hats off.
I don't think even comparing them to Apple does either of them justice. Apple and Steve Jobs actually flatter their customers, not insult them. They try to maintain the image that the Apple users are the smart, savvy, hip, cool, etc guys. Steve Jobs certainly takes pride in using his own products and in fact micro-managing the design until it exactly fits his personal taste. I remember keynotes where he stressed that some program was done for him, or beta-tested by him, or whatnot.
(And I'm not even an Apple fan, and hate the cult of personality around Steve Jobs. But credit where credit is due. He sure knows how to do a keynote and flatter his customers.)
Mind you, as I was saying, Nintendo does have some good and innovative designers, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, so maybe that's the explanation.
Maybe a more apt comparison is with the Penny Arade Will Wright's Pee comic strip.
Nintendo has always played the legal card to the maximum extent possible, going all the way back to the days of draconian contracts that forbade you from making a game for anyone else if Nintendo published one of your games. They tried to control even how much you can advertise. It got ruled invalid eventually, but in the meantime, yes, they did try to put anyone out of business who no loner toes the Nintendo line.
Or here in Europe they tried to strong-arm the retailers into what they can and can't sell, and basically used the European market as an experiment in whether they can make more money with only a handful of games and restricting access to anything else. They actually got slapped with an anti-trust for that, and were found guilty. Worse yet, it turned out that they knew they're in violation of the law, and had planned to violate it, thinking they can make more money than the fine can possibly be. (Wrong guess.)
To get back to patents and to more recent times, they also patented or filed for patent:
Some of those seem to even exist just to keep others from doing it. E.g., they filed for a patent for console online gaming, at a time where they were publicly bashing it and saying they have no intention to do that.
Frankly, I don't get the hardon some people seem to get about Nintendo. While they do have a couple of talented designers, the management has an uninterrupted history of being evil fucks that make MS look good by comparison. They tried every possible way to lock competitors out, and developers in, some of which MS so far never even dreamed about. E.g., I don't remember MS suing anyone for developing for the Mac too. They too broke anti-trust laws. Etc.
And at least the previous management had no problem with even insulting its customers, especially if, god forbid, they're asking for a genre Nintendo isn't currently selling. Yamauchi publicly called RPG gamers "depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games", for example.
The only thing that changed that was the GameCube being the second dud in a row, which prompted a mellowing out of attitude. If they ever get back in a positio
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And technically, since we're talking science, that's enough disproof. The burden of proof lies on the one who claims to have a proof. Pointing out the holes in his proof is disproof enough. You don't have to prove the opposite, which sometimes is even impossible or unfeasible.
E.g., if I claim to have proof that extraterrestrials live among us in disguise, it's up to me to prove that, not up to you to prove that all 6 billion humans on Earth were born on Earth. The latter would be unreasonably hard a "proof" to do, and frankly it's not your burden to do. (Much as various nuts and fanatics like to pretend that it's your job to prove them wrong, and they're right if you don't.) But if you can find big enough holes in my data or methodology, that's actually disproof enough.
Ditto for games. It's very hard to prove, especially for someone who's already dead, that games absolutely didn't have an influence on him. You can't resurrect him and haul him to a shrink. Now picture doing that for a few hundreds of people. It's unreasonable, and, again, it's frankly not your burden of proof. The ones who claim that the link between games and violence exist, and even use it as a true premise to base further rationale on (e.g., that therefore this or that legislation is needed), those have to first prove it. If you can poke holes in their proof, that's disproof enough.
So to summarize it, the answer to your "let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite" is: he doesn't have to prove the opposite in the first place.
In the end, probably what we actually need is actually less people getting suck(er)ed into the game of accepting that they have to prove the opposite, and more people who just call BS until the ones making the claim presented a good enough proof. Once you accept the burden of proving the opposite, essentially you've accepted that unless you can do the unreasonable !X proof, the bullshitter is right. That's already playing their game. They just need to be slapped silly with the notion of who has to prove what, and that an unproven claim is null and void and not to be taken any more seriously than opinionated gossip overheard on a plane.
1. While I see your point about my poor choice of example, there _have_ been Islamist terror attacks and hijackings in Europe at least yearly, all the way back to the 50's-60's. The funny thing is, most of Europe is actually friendlier to muslims and arabs than the USA opinion seems to be lately.
Plus, the example about Israel still stands. While the daily attacks sure didn't help reduce the tensions between the arabs and the jews, I don't think Israel gave up that many of their own citizens' rights in the name of it.
2. The religious tensions between the protestant English and the catholic Irish were deep enough to warrant lots of people shooting each other, rather than thinking of each other as "fellow europeans."
From what I can see, most violence is sectarian anyway. There are more arabs bombed for being the wrong shade of Islam than christians or jews bombed by the Islamists, and violence between christian sects has a history going all the way back for some 2000 years.
Long before persecuting the protestants, there were repressions of such sects as the Cathars. Or there were conflicts and wars and propaganda wars against such early sects as Arianism, Pelagianism, etc. Pelagianists are apparently the "snakes" that St Patrick drove out of Ireland, btw. Or the Byzantines felt a need to differentiate between such views as "jesus had two natures, human and divine" (dyophysite), "nah, mate, it was just one" (monophysite), and "it was two but they're inseparable" (myaphysite), and conducted purges of whoever picked the wrong choice out of those 3. There were schisms and occasionally violence, over the translation of 1-2 words. (E.g., the Syriac church had a problem with calling Mary the "mother of god", or calling Jesus the "word of god".) The Pope and the Byzantine emperor excommunicated each other about a detail as silly as whether communion bread should be leavened or unleavened. Etc.
I think that (sadly) there are enough people for which "omg, he's of another religion" trumps "he's a fellow European."
do you talk about "printing press lovers"
I've also used such terms before as "cat lovers", "dog lovers", "FPS lovers" and a few others. I'll often even describe myself in terms of being a lover of this or that. I often joke about being in love with my computer.
It's only the gun crowd that instantly throws a fit if you as much as hint at them even liking guns, much less loving them. In fact, I've had people throw tantrums even at mentioning the NRA and owners of assault-rifles (converted to semi-automatic, to be sure) in a thread about what weapons would be available in a post-nuclear Fallout-type world. It seems to me weird to see the same people who obviously like guns, take it automatically as a grievous insult if you even hint at it. You don't see cat lovers throw a tantrum if you call them that.
It seems to me like if I really wanted that particular designation to be an insult by itself, I could have phrased it as an actual insult, no? From something moderately insulting like "gun fetishists" to something really insulting like calling that gun a penis size compensator. I didn't and I don't. Didn't seem to me like "gun loving" would offer much insult by itself.
Actually, we're getting offtopic, but the 9/11 hysteria is another... interesting thing.
See, the USA had _one_ such incident in _years_. If you look at the number of terrorist attacks in the USA, say, the year _before_ that, you'll notice there were exactly zero. In fact, I can't remember any major act of terrorism there before 9/11 all the way to the Unabomber.
After that, also zero. Now you could justify the ones after that as being because of increased security (theatre), but it's hard not to notice that there were exactly zero without that security theatre too, and before giving up any liberties.
So America agreed to have its liberties trampled over... a one-off (if spectacular) act of terrorism.
By comparison, the Brits didn't suspend their liberties over _decades_ of shelling and bombing by the IRA. (And those guys knew how to bomb. There were attacks with batteries of improvised mortars mounted in a van even on the PM's residence.) Admittedly, recently they seem to have imported the USA idea that they can turn more totalitarian over even more ridiculous "bombing attempts", like some guy loading a sack of nails in his car and setting it on fire. (It just burned, btw.)
Spain didn't suspend its liberties over some pretty spectacular bombings, some pretty recent. Japan didn't move towards totalitarianism after, say, the Tokyo poison gas attacks in the subway. Etc.
Heck, Israel is bombed _daily_ by various radical Islamist groups. If they had moved towards authoritarianism for each major incident as much as the USA did for 9/11, they'd be a complete dictatorship by now. AFAIK, they aren't.
But in the USA you (at least as in, "you the poster I answer to") seem to think that _one_ terror incident warrants re-electing a guy who's just about wiped his arse with the constitution in the name of that one attack. Interesting.
So, no, I had not forgotten. I was genuinely surprised that _that_ lame excuse worked. Again.
I'm not even asking for an outright rebellion. But it would be nice to see the same people who rant about protecting the constitution, actually give a damn about the constitution in the first place. Like not re-electing him in 2004, you know? Or actually having more important issues to care about and/or question about Obama than directly launching into "OMG, he's gonna make us turn guns in" strawmen. That that's their top concern about a president or government, tells me what their priorities are.
Yes, I know the dictum, "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." I'm not proposing that you skip the first 3. But I'd have thought that people who care that much about their democracy would go at least up to the second. And from what I see, the right used even the first box more to fling mud at anyone opposing Bush, than to actually defend liberty.
_That_ is what confuses me. You'd think that people who proclaim themselves so ready to even die for their rights, would actually give a flying fuck about those rights in the first place.
Hey, since supposedly you're the one with the critical thinking, why don't you enlighten me there?
I'm not sure what American newspapers believe in any more... the right to redefine reality to whatever pleases their billionaire owner? I suppose first amendment _would_ describe that, if it weren't for the fact that they routinely participate in slinging mud at whoever says otherwise. I guess they don't care about free speech that much when it applies to someone else.
American Churches (and the bible-thumpers even more) seem to be all about free speech, as long as you don't talk about stuff like evolution, other religions, abortion, equality for homosexuals, and so on. Then they'd want the government to stop you. Funny how free speech doesn't seem to apply any more. Freedom of press either, if someone's press is, say, for homosexual rights.
(As a sidenote: Funny how many of the same people justify being right-wing as some way to stop government from interfering in everyone's life. But it's ok to want it to interfere with the guys you don't like. If it's about telling Johnny to pray in school, or Jane that she can't abort after she was raped, or Jack that he's an abomination for liking other guys... well, then by all means, the government should interfere more.)
Because I'm not an American? If all the foreigners who don't like your government's policies came over to shoot at your government, I think the word you're looking for is "invasion" rather than "rebellion". And that went out of style a century ago, you know?
And in the end, isn't that why we're all disgusted at the Iraq fiasco? Well, other than it being based on lies. Invading to "bring democracy" to someone is, in the end, still an aggression and rarely ends up being about democracy.
At any rate, it's up to you to fix your own country. Or not. Won't stop me from chuckling at some of the right wing stuff I hear from that side of the pond, but in the end it's like watching a soap opera. I'm not going to attack the studio to fix the plot either.
And I'm certainly not proposing to forbid you to own an AK, or whatever else. I'm just amused at the argument about it being some kind of constitutional safeguard. At least "because I want guns" it's an honest answer. I can respect that. But what I see overused is convoluted lies about how it's what guards the rights and constitution... except those people sure don't seem to even hint at protecting any other right.
You know, that's one of the funny things I see when looking at America from some thousands of kilometres away.
So supposedly, the sacred right to bear arms is there to keep the government in line, in case it oversteps its constitutional bounds. Lemme see, the Bushies did:
- effectively suspending habeas corpus,
- used torture,
- starting a war of aggression, and justified it by
- outright lying about the evidence, (plus, see two paragraphs above, it turns out that all the "witnesses" they had, had been waterboarded until they said what the Bushies wanted to hear,)
- massive surveillace of its own citizens, down to data-mining grocery bills,
- politicizing every branch of the government they could lay their hands on,
- trying to keep official emails from the _legal_ mandated openness, by using private accounts for government business, or by just making excuses (apparently they didn't make backups, ya know)
- saying out loud that the constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't apply to them,
Etc.
Did I see the gun-loving right at least hinting about the possibility of a revolt over it? (Yes, at the end of the series of other boxes, but still.) Nah, they voted for him again.
But here comes a president which at least promises to undo some of that evil, and restore at least _some_ of those constitutional rights. (Whether he'll keep that promise, remains to be seen.) What does the gun-loving right immediately fear? "OMG, he might take our guns away."
It seems to me that the gun lovers care _only_ about exactly _one_ piece of the constitution: the second amendment. No more, no less. Wipe your ass with the rest constitution if you will, they sure won't mind it. So exactly how does that work as a constitutional safeguard, then?
Well, that's actually the funny part... Lord British was good at one thing: telling a story. Think about those single player Ultima games that you mentioned, and really that was what made them interesting. The game systems weren't particularly balanced (e.g., magic doing everything with one skill was there before too), and so on. They had the same problems that would plague UO later, but it didn't matter because it was single player.
So he takes basically the engine of U7, removes the story, and makes it an MMO. And proves to be pretty incompetent at handling a multi-player game.
The even funnier thing is: again, he ignored what was already known. He went basically "ooh, we can't have quests in a multi-player game, because once one guy saved the princess, the other thousands of players can't do that any more." And a whole industry was happy to quote and paraphrase that idea.
But the thing is: some MUDs already had quests, particularly LPMUDs. (E.g., DW MUD comes to mind.) And more than proved that humans can bend their mind around that. People quite easily can go "yay, I saved the princess" just as she's respawned at the balcony again and the next player in a 20 player line takes his turn at saving her. Or people can queue up to give a guy his long lost heirloom, as 20 other players queue up to give him the same heirloom, and another 20 are there to be given the quest to retrieve that heirloom.
Heck, I've been on _DIKU_ MUDs which had basic "go there, kill npc X, bring me his head" or "go kill 50 smurfs" quests. Especially in a world where whole zones were just hunting-grounds respawning on turbo (e.g., the cemeteries spawned endless zombies"), it would have been trivial to have some "go kill 15 skeletons", "go into the crypt and kill 15 zombies" and "go in the caves below the crypt and kill the lich" quest arcs. I mean, those guys respawned anyway and nobody wondered "why are they there if I just killed them?" Adding a quest to it wouldn't have made any difference to suspension of disbelief.
I'm not saying that just in retrospect after other MMOs proved it (you know, Columbus's egg and all that), but because it was already proven on MUDs. It just took MMOs many years to reinvent that.
So to get back on topic, UO could have had quests and a story, and thus could have actually made good use of Lord British's main strength as a designer. By ignoring everyone else, he shot himself in the foot IMHO.
The actual cold hard fact is that the Earth's population didn't increase 110 times in the last 10 years. Heck, not even in the last century.
There was exactly the same potential market for UO as for WoW or EQ. In fact, higher for UO, because it didn't require as much hardware. But more people preferred the more hardware-intensive EQ.
And yes, there were plenty of people who tried UO and found it crap. The reputation it had was that it was that place where you get ganked as soon as you poke your nose out of town, among other unflattering pieces of reputation. Or that it's the place that's as freaking unbalanced as to have 1 skill that can do everything (magic) and 1 skill (tinkering) that's useless for anything except trapping chests and hoping some newbie opens them. (NPCs never opened them.) You know, for the kind of ganker that doesn't even have the balls for a face to face fight with a newbie. Or that it's the kind of buggy untested place where you can pick up grass tiles, or where people can steal your furniture through the walls. Or where you can max your strength in a couple of hours by just dropping and picking a coin, so there's no sense of achievement in doing it any other way. Etc.
But at any rate, the market size is largely the same. If one MMO has X players and the other 100*X players, the latter simply fit their taste better. It's that simple.
And yes, it was the most popular as long as it was the only game in town. As soon as EQ and AC got launched, and they actually listened to what the players wanted, UO became the least popular of the 3.
Ok, then here's one assertion for you to chew on: British's retarded insistence that everything should be solved by player justice. It's easy to disprove me: name _one_ MUD or MMO where that ever worked. Go on. Argue that one. Just one example where that ever worked.
On the contrary, even the most cursory read of Bartle's paper would have told anyone why that can't work. The kind of player who gets their jollies out of driving someone off the game, doesn't hunt its own kind. They need unwilling and hopefully easily annoyable victims, not other "killers". So the kind of griefer who could form a posse to drive someone off the game, won't form a posse to drive off another griefer.
Also because of how that works: there is nothing you can do to someone's character that will drive him off, if he regards that character as a disposable _tool_ for harassment. Trying to hunt that character down is, in fact, "feeding a troll". He gets some attention from lots of people.
So basically for British's idea to work, he needed some kind of "killers" that actually work and think like "achievers" or maybe "socializers". (By Bartle's classification.) It was predictable that it won't work at all.
That's just one example of the kind of ideas that UO just had to reinvent... badly, instead of looking at what's already known to work.
That's what I'm talking about.
1. SWG before the NGE? Just because _you_ can't name one, doesn't mean they don't exist, ya know?
2. Also, in the meantime UO did fix a bunch of the stuff that wasn't funny. Most of it after Lord British gave up. So it's a bit misleading to showcase UO _now_ as a testament to Lord British's skills.
3. Well, tastes being a subjective thing, I don't doubt that there is a niche that still likes UO.
But to put things in perspectie:
- 110 times more people currently prefer to pay more for WoW than play UO
- EQ peaked at 5 times that
- SWG was well over 2 times that when Sony decided it needed a NGE to stem the playerbase decline
- TSO was at about 110k players when EA proclaimed it a flop
- ditto for Auto Assault IIRC
- Tabula Rasa was IIRC at about 3/4 that when NCSoft threw in the towel. So, you know, god knows that even with a buggy, unfinished, poorly-designed POS you can land in that kinda ballpark figure
So basically if you happen to be in the minority that actually likes UO, good for you. But the cold hard fact is that those "ravenous hordes" gave _far_ more players what they wanted in a game. For the average mainstream gamer, UO just wasn't that much fun, and while it's been fixed after British, not enough by half.
4. But, anyway, to get back on topic: yes, that's literally what I'm saying. That UO was launched full of piss-poorly thought-out ideas that were known not to work well.
And if you disagree with that, hey, argue with Origin about it. Because if they got fixed later, surely Origin and EA did consider them to be mistakes.
Actually, I haven't been in the beta for either, but the released product... well, it's probably misleading to say that HGL was better, but let's just say that Tabula Rasa was actually genuinely worse. In fact, since the OP mentioned SWG, I'll up the ante and say that NGE SWG was actually more fun than TR. Or more exactly, TR was actually less fun.
And I don't just mean the bugs and unfinished content, that everyone loves to hammer on, because those are _easy_ points to make. The problem is that even if you managed to avoid the bugs, the game just wasn't much fun to play. The design was flawed in a dozen different ways.
The problem was the whole "Tabula Rasa" concept. Lord British actually planned from the start to wipe the slate clean, and reinvent it all from scratch. I.e., work in a vacuum, and ignore a whole decade of proof of what works and what doesn't in a game.
In a way it was a continuation of how Ultima Online invented the graphical MMORPG, and ended up in third place as soon as there were two other competitors.
UO didn't _have_ to invent everything. There were already thousands of text-based MUDs, and whole discussions, correlations and theories (e.g., Bartle's) as to what works and how it works. You could tell from the start why a whole bunch of Lord British's ideas won't work, or won't make players happy, because the exact same had happened a thousand times before on MUDs.
But British basically chose to ignore all that. And to ignore the players complaining about it.
"Tabula Rasa" was basically the same failure mode repeated verbatim one more time. Now I'm all for innovation and trying new things, don't get me wrong. But it's not innovation if you repeat someone else's mistake. And it's not really "new things" just because British refuses to acknowledge the many people who tried the exact same things before.
1. Looking through Alternate again, I see a 17" TFT at 92 euro. Again, you'll probably want to do the VAT trick and all that. It'll fit under 600 per computer total.
It's only a TN, and only 1440x900 resolution, so you probably don't want to do graphics processing on it, but it'll play WoW all right.
2. And a second copy of an MMO won't really break the bank these days either.
You can get a copy of COH/COV for 2 Euro more than the price of a month, and it includes a "free" month. So essentially you're getting the game for 2 Euros.
WoW without any expansion packs costs the same (actually, 4 cents cheaper;), and again it does include a "free" month. Add some 15 Euro and you get the Burning Crusade too. It's manageable.
3. Also note that I didn't pick the cheapest computers there. If your finances are that tight, I see a 350 Euro one right on the front page of their list. It's only integrated graphics, but, again, it'll play WoW all right. Still 1 GB RAM, though, and a dual-core Intel.
On the second page, there's a HP at 279 Euro, but it's not in stock and it has no technical data, so personally I wouldn't order that one.
Page 4, there's a 319 Euro one, integrated graphics. (There's also the 299 version, but without OS, so let's ignore that one.)
And so on. You can probably save a bit there, if you want a better monitor instead.
4. That said, look, let's get it out of the way: I'm not saying that PCs are the cheapest version, nor even the "better" version. If you want the best bang per buck, sure, go with a console. By all means.
I'm just saying that family PC gaming is (A) _feasible_ too, even for people who aren't extremely rich, and most importantly (B) there's nothing antisocial or teenager-only about it. That's really all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying consoles (Wii included) don't have their advantages. In fact, I'm usually on the console side of PC-vs-Consoles flamewars. So I'm not going to argue with you much about the price, etc.
My main problem is merely with the false dichotomy of, basically, "Wiis are for the whole family, PCs only have Quake-like stuff for antisocial teenagers". It's just plain old not true. The average PC gamer is actually in the 30's nowadays, and even the retired senior citizen extreme is actually on the rise in, say, MMOs. And I fail to see how cooperative gaming, local network or MMO counts as antisocial. That is really my whole problem with the OP's point.
That said, actually you don't need that expensive a PC to play some games. WoW for example does run semi-acceptably even on an Eee laptop, and there are Youtube videos documenting it. (Only since you mention the Eee in your example.) Admittedly, you won't play Crysis Warhead on that, and even WoW will have some 8 frames per second, but it can be played on it if you must.
That said, though, you can buy a semi decent PC nowadays for a couple of hundred Euro, and it won't be as handicapped as the Eee. A cheap lowest-end integrated Intel chipset and a proper desktop CPU (as opposed to the underpowered Atom), will run WoW plenty fast. I know people who play it on such low end old computers. So maybe you won't buy 4 of them for your $1200 limit, but two or even three is definitely possible.
I'm looking on Alternate at the moment to check it -- and it's not even the cheapest internet store -- and I see some decent mini-tower systems for 399 Euro. (Google says that's 539.0091 U.S. dollars, but bear in mind that prices are _including_ a rather large VAT here, so maybe you can get the same cheaper in the USA.) I'm talking stuff like dual-core Athlon 64, a semi-decent ATI or NVidia graphics card, and 1 GB RAM. It's not just plenty enough for WoW, it could even run COH more than acceptably. You could certainly fit two of those under that $1200 limit.
Again, I'm not dissing consoles in any form or shape. Just saying that a family playing an MMO together is certainly feasible too nowadays. You no longer have to be a millionaire to afford a second computer.
1. That's funny because my mom and dad are currently raiding together in WoW. Two different PCs in the same room. (Well, actually four PCs, but they're complete nerds like that.) You don't need a single TV to play together, you know.
Apparently they're getting along better than ever too. Now they actually have a common topic and interest again. So there you go, you can use PCs for the whole family too.
They also played together on other consoles than the Wii too before. There were and are plenty of N64, Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, etc, games that can be played together on a single screen. There's a reason why every single bloody non-portable console ever made had more than one controller socket. The Wii didn't invent that.
Heck, there were plenty of games played on a shared screen on personal computers too. E.g., about half the games on the old Spectrum supported two players on the same screen. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of PC games did too (e.g., I remember playing Golden Axe together with my brother or with a visiting friend, on the same screen and keyboard.)
You can play together on two PSP's via its built-in wireless network. I would imagine that the same applies to a DS, though sadly I don't own one to check out.
So let's let this bullshit meme die already. Just because you lack the imagination to gather your family around anything else than a Wii, doesn't make the Wii anything uniquely magical. It just means you lack an imagination.
Note that I have nothing against the Wii itself at this point. But it's just another of the _many_ things you can play together. Let's drop the falsehood that it's the _only_ thing for the whole family, and that PCs are somehow just for antisocial adolescents.
2. Also, Quake is at best strawman there. Not every PC game is Quake. There are PC games ranging from ultra-competitive twitch-games, to cooperative-only games. There are games ranging from from violent like Quake to:
- stuff like The Sims which is a glorified doll house, and sold to a lot of women. So, yes, you could probably drag your mom to play The Sims without turning her antisocial,
- stuff like Catz or Dogz which are a sort of a high-tech Tamagochi. Again, I could see anyone's mom spending at least a few minutes with a virtual kitten. (And if you think that's antisocial loner gaming, note that Nintendo too did release games like Nintendogs.)
- a plethora of Barbie games for little girls, plus a few other similar games without the franchise
- logic games like The Incredible Machines, or the Creatures series which combined caring for cutesy creatures with building elaborate... well, incredible machines, to keep them separated
Etc, etc, etc.
If you're going to address something as broad as PC gaming, then make sure you actually address PC gaming as a whole, not just some convenient niche that fits your preconceived point.
Duly noted, but, still, I'm guessing you wouldn't go on a stage and tell people to "stop watching boring anime", from some position of authority, based on just second hand hearsay. It's one thing to offer an opinion when asked, and even then presumably in the same circle from which you already have some idea about their subjective tastes. And it's another thing to go and proclaim what's wrong with someone who likes X, when you haven't even seen X. I'm guessing you don't do that, right?
Also, at the very least, what he there has is a biased sample.
It's like, dunno, going to a school with mostly girls (say, being the only guy who's taken women studies in university) and concluding from that sample that Backstreet Boys is the best band in the world, and everyone owns their albums. Similarly, I would guess that the opinions who hears at Nintendo are already biased that way. E.g., I can only guess that Miyamoto isn't a die-hard RPG fan, because he sure isn't making RPGs. I mean, his motto is "Games should be what we would want to play", so if he liked those, he'd make some, right?
But, again, my problem isn't even with drawing a conclusion from a biased sample. My problem is the willingness to tell everyone else what's wrong with them, if they don't match that sample. Telling someone that his subjective tastes are wrong is pretty darned presumptuous and disrespectful as it is. Doing it without even having any experience to base it on, just makes it stupid too.
Basically I'm guessing that you know your limits with that limited experience with anime, and don't go insult people who happen to have other tastes. Right? Well, then it's not even remotely the same as the problem I have with Yamauchi.
And finally, well, I'm not even convinced that it's just a biased sample. He was hyping his own products, and bashing the competition. I don't recall him having anything against RPGs when all the RPG developers were publishing on the NES and then SNES. Only when they jumped ship, _then_ he suddenly thinks RPGs are boring, and people should stop playing them, and RPG gamers are depressed loners in dark rooms. It's hard not to suspect a self-interest bias there.
Basically in the case about you and anime, I'm willing to assume an impartiality there, because (I assume) you're not selling or producing anime. You have no obvious reason to hype one series and bash another, and probably just relay what's being discussed in your group. But if I saw one anime producer bashing the series of a competitor, I'd have a serious dose of scepticism there.
The real problem there is that usually a mailing list does look like a single user, and then there's some list server which distributes it to everyone on his subscriber's list. There's not much a client can do to differentiate between an email sent to, say, "moraelin@company_name.com" versus "team42@company_name.com" versus "company_name_all@company_name.com". They all look like exactly one recipient to the client. (And at least the first two are very legitimate destinations too.)
Asking the client to know who it will be sent to, would require a way to ask a list server for the complete list of subscribers... and you can probably see how that would be a spammer gold mine. Not to mention a breach of privacy. (If I were on some bestiality mailing list, I wouldn't want everyone to be able to check if my email address is subscribed. And)
IMHO the right thing to do is to simply not have a mailing list with everyone in the company. It's a mail bomb waiting to happen.
There are extremely few things that absolutely need to be received by everyone, from CEO to janitor, across the globe. And you can go hierarchically if you ever actually have such an announcement to all. I.e., ask the department or team managers to forward that piece of information to their departments or teams. That's how the job pyramid was supposed to work in the first place.
First of all, this is a discussion, not an encyclopedia or college. There is no burden of proof, and no claim of accuracy whatsoever. It's on par with overhearing gossip in the airplane. Nobody involved has any kind of duty to document it for you. If you find it interesting enough, do your own research, if not, you know, STFU.
Second, [citation needed] is an _impolite_ thing to slap onto a conversation. It's one thing to say, for example, "I keep hearing that, but I haven't actually found that interview anywhere. Can you provide a link?" And a whole other thing to slap a "[citation needed]" as if you had some right or expectation to one.
Again, you have none. It's a forum gossip. Nobody owes you a damn thing. If you can't do your own research, ask nicely. You don't go to your mom and say "food needed" either, and you probably don't go "break needed" in a meeting either. Learn to communicate like a human, not in Wikipedia tags. Especially since again you're not on Wikipedia.
And if some people are too retarded to communicate, or to tell when they're on a forum from when they're trolling Wikipedia, well, it's their problem not mine. _I_ don't owe them anything whatsoever.
The other animals don't live long enough to reach it, simply put. They also don't get another ovulation every 4 weeks, so they don't run through eggs anywhere _near_ as fast as humans.
As I was saying, 99.9% of all the Homo Sapiens women who ever lived, never experienced menopause either. Overflowing that buffer is a very recent thing. Too recent to matter either way at evolution scales.
Menopause is actually a more complex thing, and actually had _zero_ impact on human evolution back when it mattered.
The problem is that all mammal females are born with a finite number of "eggs". Usually more than enough for an average life span. Again, it's actually controlled by evolution, or rather natural selection. If you have too few it's a handicap, so nature tends to select those with more. But here's the important part: enough for your expected life span. If a cat lives for, say, 3 years outside, there's no evolutionary pressure to have enough ovules for 30 years. If an ape lives for an average 20 years, there is no evolutionary pressure to pre-produce enough ovules for 300 years.
So basically all you really see there is that the life span of our ancestors was _much_ shorter, back when we evolved into humans.
As late as the Old Kingdom period in Egypt -- and that's already talking about 5000 years ago, out of 200,000 that Homo Sapiens existed for, or the _millions_ leading to Homo Sapiens -- if you got past the high infant mortality, the median age for death was in the mid-20's for women. (And mid-30's for men.)
And just to stress it, I'm not talking about "life expectancy at birth" (which would include the dead babies), but the actual second peak of the age-at-death curve. We have a ton of records (plaques, scrolls, etc) detailing when someone died, and if you plot X = age, Y = number of such records dead at that age, you get a scary spike in the first 3 years of age, then a second peak in the mid 20's for women, and mid-30's for men.
So that was the number of years that you needed ovules for. The average women got married at 12 and died at, say, 24. That's 12 years of being fertile. That's all the ovules it needed. Having enough of them until the age of 60 is already a _massive_ margin for the case she lived longer. It's having 4 times more than the average will ever need.
(Actually, even more. Ovulation is inhibited while you're pregnant or have someone sucking milk out of your breast, as a safety. So someone making an average of, say, a child every 2 years and nursing each for a year, would use up only a fraction of what a modern woman uses.)
At any rate, an ultra-tiny minority lived long enough to reach menopause. There was _no_ evolutionary pressure to push it until later.
What you see is a relatively modern age phenomenon. The life expectancy has risen so dramatically, that the women actually get to reach the end of that counter. What was once a 300% margin, now is actually less than enough.
In computer terms: it's a buffer overflow error. Literally.
But the same modern age all but stopped evolution. And nobody makes a child every 2 years any more. People stop at a much lower number, menopause or not. There is no natural selection to change that any more.
Miyamoto is a nice and humble guy, yes. On the other hand, some of the recent blanket patents have been filed by him, or maybe in his name.
In at least the patent aspect, nothing seems to have changed lately. Nintendo after Yamauchi still patents everything in sight, and every vague idea that they might sometimes use... or just wish to keep their competitors from using. The one in today's news wasn't filed under Yamauchi, was it?
So at the very least, this still is my answer the OP's "Imagine if having a first person viewpoint and shooting something out the center of it was patented". It's just the kind of thing that Nintendo would patent. If Wolfenstein 3D had been published through them instead of Apogee, yes, I'd imagine we'd have a patent -- or at least patent application -- on using a first person view-point in a game.
1. For example, Top 10 Tuesday: Wildest Statements Made by Industry Veterans. It's at number 4.
2. Do your own fucking research. It takes a whole 5 seconds to copy and paste that phrase into Google. Ah, wait, it's just another meme that lets retards pretend they're part of some big smart family by copy-and-pasting something. Carry on, then. No need to start using your own brain now, after all.
Nope, it's not even remotely the one I'm refering to. The quote about RPG gamers is from an 1999 interview.
But, yes, he did do a lot of stupid quotes in his time, including the one you linked to. Telling me that I play boring games, and that I should stop playing them for no other reason than that all the RPG developers left Nintendo... isn't exactly going to make me like him.
Especially because of this: he didn't play either kind of games, and took pride in not having played any game ever. So _how_ does he fucking know which are boring and which aren't? On what knowledge does he base his presuming to tell me what to play? Oh, wait, he's just telling me to buy his snake-oil and stop buying the competition's. And not even in nice terms.
I mean, picture me coming and saying something like, "I haven't played any MMO, and I'm proud I never blew my money on those, but I know that Vanguard rules and WoW is crap. Only depressed losers play WoW. Stop playing that boring game now." (Just hypothetically.) Wouldn't you say, "so how would you know, if you haven't played either?"
I mean it's like a nun telling you which sexual position feels better. Or like a vegan telling you which meat tastes better and which to buy. Or like the Amish telling you which brand of car is more fun to drive. I could go on, but you get the idea already. How would he flipping know?
But, as I was saying, he doesn't. He was just telling us to stop buying the competition's product and start buying more of his. Without even having used either. Just because one makes him money and the other doesn't.
Well, fascinating it is. I don't think many other companies outright insulted their customers (see such Yamauchi quotes as the one I quoted) _and_ business partners (see their attitude to the devs when some threatened to jump ship in the N64 days... which caused most to actually do jump ship) _and_ have a chairman who's publicly _proud_ to not be among the customers (Yamauchi actually took pride in never having played a single video game in his life), and, yes, get such adoring fans.
I mean, comparing to that, even the patents are nothing. Joe Average doesn't care about our ideological crusades about patents or IP. But call someone names, take pride in not being like him, and have him come back to you wagging his tail, now _that_ is something. I don't know how they do that, but hats off.
I don't think even comparing them to Apple does either of them justice. Apple and Steve Jobs actually flatter their customers, not insult them. They try to maintain the image that the Apple users are the smart, savvy, hip, cool, etc guys. Steve Jobs certainly takes pride in using his own products and in fact micro-managing the design until it exactly fits his personal taste. I remember keynotes where he stressed that some program was done for him, or beta-tested by him, or whatnot.
(And I'm not even an Apple fan, and hate the cult of personality around Steve Jobs. But credit where credit is due. He sure knows how to do a keynote and flatter his customers.)
Mind you, as I was saying, Nintendo does have some good and innovative designers, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, so maybe that's the explanation.
Maybe a more apt comparison is with the Penny Arade Will Wright's Pee comic strip.
Nintendo has always played the legal card to the maximum extent possible, going all the way back to the days of draconian contracts that forbade you from making a game for anyone else if Nintendo published one of your games. They tried to control even how much you can advertise. It got ruled invalid eventually, but in the meantime, yes, they did try to put anyone out of business who no loner toes the Nintendo line.
Or here in Europe they tried to strong-arm the retailers into what they can and can't sell, and basically used the European market as an experiment in whether they can make more money with only a handful of games and restricting access to anything else. They actually got slapped with an anti-trust for that, and were found guilty. Worse yet, it turned out that they knew they're in violation of the law, and had planned to violate it, thinking they can make more money than the fine can possibly be. (Wrong guess.)
To get back to patents and to more recent times, they also patented or filed for patent:
- the XBox Live, basically
- emulation of its own consoles, again, to try to keep other people from doing it (and, yes, they tried to bully emulator developpers before)
- weird stuff, like comparing each other's avatars online, never mind that people have been holding costume contests in COH since the fucking launch in 2004
- something as broad as making a stage magician kinda game/sim
- a "wearable" controller to digitize body motions, never mind that motion capture has been done before like that for ages
- a rechargeable game controller never mind that chargers like that existed for mice, headsets, and everything for freaking ages before that
- just about anything you can put a motion detector into, from bikes to teddy bears
- horror games, or at least stuff like hallucinations or hearing voices in games, never mind that neither is new, and an insanity sim had even been made to train police in how to deal with dementia people
Etc.
Some of those seem to even exist just to keep others from doing it. E.g., they filed for a patent for console online gaming, at a time where they were publicly bashing it and saying they have no intention to do that.
Frankly, I don't get the hardon some people seem to get about Nintendo. While they do have a couple of talented designers, the management has an uninterrupted history of being evil fucks that make MS look good by comparison. They tried every possible way to lock competitors out, and developers in, some of which MS so far never even dreamed about. E.g., I don't remember MS suing anyone for developing for the Mac too. They too broke anti-trust laws. Etc.
And at least the previous management had no problem with even insulting its customers, especially if, god forbid, they're asking for a genre Nintendo isn't currently selling. Yamauchi publicly called RPG gamers "depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games", for example.
The only thing that changed that was the GameCube being the second dud in a row, which prompted a mellowing out of attitude. If they ever get back in a positio