1. Then what's her excuse when the player character is a woman too, not to mention that the paladin is a woman too? That she's just a bitch and wants to see one of the other two women die horribly? That fits soo good with the whole Fawkes the righteous good supermutant act. Not.
2. _If_ they wanted to do it gender-based, then how about letting me use the Lady Killer perk there? I mean, wtf, there's this perk which mysteriously makes women do my bidding in game, despite of the fact that it only produces the most horrible pick-up lines in recorded history. (I mean, for example, there's this perfectly stranger grandma, and I suddenly get the option to spew something that would fit at most if we were already past "third base", and mysteriously she gives me ammo for it instead of a slap.) Why not give me an option to use it on Fawkes then?
You haven't played until the end, eh?
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Fallout 3 DLC Detailed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So you haven't bothered playing the ending, then?
*SPOILERS INCOMING*
Because, yes, that's what makes him stand out like a sore thumb. He already showed you that he's immune to radiation, and ventured for you in that room in the bunker. But at the Project Purity end scene there is _no_ option to send _him_ into the irradiated room to press the four buttons to activate the installation. You get to choose whether you die or the paladin dies, but there is no freaking option to go, "Hey, Fawkes, you're immune to radiation, right? Can you go in there and press these four numbers for me, please?"
Now I understand the climactic choice and all, but the very presence of Fawkes there spoils it in a major way. Suddenly that choice and sacrifice makes no bloody sense. It's like deciding whether me or you rush some evil guys and take a bullet, while having Superman standing around obliviously watching the whole debate. It makes no sense.
The funny thing is that some of that has been done already by the modders. There is a suit which makes you slightly harder to see when crouched. There is one which gives you 25% chameleon _all_ the time.
Heck, transplanting the Stealth Boy enchantment to a suit of your choosing is such a trivial affair, I had made my very own long before the GECK was released. The FOMM/TESnip already had all you need for that. Turns out someone else already had made the 25% one, so mine was never released, though.
Raising the level to 30? That is one global variable. That was one of the first mods released.
So I'm not really thinking they intentionally cut anything out, because most of it is _trivial_ stuff. Well, there'll be new maps and stuff so obviously it's more than just the items, but the "Ivisible Girl" in your example just made no sense to remove from release because it doesn't save anything at all.
Sorry to piss on someone's cult of the hunter-gatherer utopia parrade, but it didn't work that way.
Pre-historic hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of thousands of species and, for example, all the mega-fauna in the Americas. There are whole species, e.g., the mammoth, for which you can trace its shrinking habitat historically and it looks damn suspiciously like the opposite of the pattern of human spread. Yes, there were environment factors too, which probably were already making it harder for them to thrive, but nevertheless, wherever the humans went, the mammoths soon went extinct.
That's just one species out of _thousands_.
Hunter-gatherers in North America used "buffalo jumps" to herd whole herds of buffalo off cliffs and then eat the resulting mess of meat. They only got all in touch with nature when that source of food started to not be enough.
(And even then, an animist's idea of harmony with nature is giving back to the _spirits_, not to nature itself. If you hunt bears, you give offerings and prayers to the great bear spirits, whose job is to make sure you get plenty of bears to hunt. It was a pretty damn human-centric view of the world. And if they get to be scarce, then you just need to pray more and appease the spirits better, not, say, give the bears a fucking chance to repopulate.)
Humans are a pretty scary predator. Most other predator have 1-2 species of prey they depend on, creating equilibrium cycles. When the rabbits depopulate, some of the foxes starve too and don't breed as much either, giving the rabbits a chance to rebound. And viceversa. Humans have no such balancing factors. If the population of dodos drops, the humans still survive on fruits and other animals, and keep on hunting the dodos into extinction. And sometimes keep on hunting them just for fun, trophies, proof of manhood, or whatever. The hunter-gatherers did exactly the same too. Why do you think they had those feather headdresses, or wolf skins, or whatnot? To show how great hunters they are, even if they didn't actually need to eat that animal.
So measuring the ecological impact just in carbon is misleading at best, and freaking stupid at worst. Hunter-gatherers caused mass extinctions.
No. People buy games for more than just their graphics. What you have to make is a good game which many companies are currently failing spectacularly at. Would you really buy an inferior game in the same genre just because it looks better? The competition is on quality which is more than graphics.
You'd be surprised how many people proclaim loudly that they care about gameplay more than graphics, then go and buy based on graphics anyway. Plus, there's got to be _some_ reason why everyone falls over themselves to provide lots of screenshots.
At any rate, it's a bit of a non-sequitur anyway. If you have great ideas and design skill, you'll have them on any platform. I don't think the guys at Blizzard lost half their IQ because their game isn't on a Wii, for example. And I don't think John Romero would become a great designer if anyone only gave him a Wii SDK. So the same companies which produce duds on the PC, will produce duds on the Wii too. Lack of ideas, lack of design skills, and lack of willingness to take risks by the publisher are what produces those epic failures, and giving the same people a Wii SDK won't make one iota of difference.
So far the only company which is Nintendo-only with their great ideas is Nintendo itself. And it's not the hardware that makes them possible, it's simply having the people who come up with those games.
And anyway, the Wii is pretty much 50% of the market so going exclusive (as opposed to everything-except-the-Wii) to it isn't exactly a big loss of marketshare but it saves you a massive amount of dev costs (which seems to be becoming important as more and more companies fold because of the dev costs of their HD games).
Last I heard, actually the PS2 is still in the lead as the most played console.
- PSP, ok, has marginally less RAM and video RAM, but has to run at a fraction of the resolution. And has the excuse that it's a _portable_ system, i.e., you don't expect the same games as on a home PC or console. You expect minigames to play on a bus or train.
- PCs with Intel GMA, you can't even freaking buy one with less than half a gig main RAM and 64 MB video RAM, except if someone robbed a museum and you found their fence. Heck, most new-ish chipsets allow for more shared RAM than the Wii has total, including main memory.
- heck, even the ancient Dreamcast had 8MB of video RAM, for the same 480 line resolution (if nothing else, it supported 640x480 non-interlaced on a VGA monitor)
Nintendo's little cheap box is good for one thing: minigames. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for them. They found a lucrative niche there, and obviously filled a need. Kudos and more power to them. But if you're going for AAA PC-like titles, that yesterday-gen hardware is going to be a pain in the arse.
_If_ you make graphics only for that console, you just shot yourself in the market share.
_Even_ _if_ you make the graphics only for the Wii, if you want your game to compete with more than minigames, you'll want the game to at least look competitive with what one can buy on other consoles in your chosen genre. You're moving outside the niche of the minigames nobody else did, at that point. If you want me to buy a complex RPG (or any other genre) on a Wii, well, you'll have to give me some reason why I wouldn't buy the better looking PS3 or XBox 360 games in that genre instead.
Nothing against the console as such, but I will be comparing the games when I decide which I buy. Precisely because I have nothing against either of the consoles a priori. I don't care if it's a PS3 or XBox 360 or Wii one, I'll just compare the games. Yours better not look much worse than the game from those other guys, if they're in the same genre and thus compete with each other for my cash.
You _will_ end up doing extra programming to swap graphics in and out, to make that comparison work in your favour.
Keep in mind, development costs on a AAA title for the Wii are half or less what they would be on a 360 or PS3.
Admittedly, it's been a decade since I had anything to do with the games industry, but I'm seriously drawing blanks there. Why would they cost less? Coding support for a mouse or gamepad isn't half the cost of any game I know of, so how's the wiimote going to cut half the costs?
Or are you just comparing the cost of doing a silly (if fun) minigame on the Wii to, say, a complex RPG on other consoles, and extrapolate from there? I mean, seriously, half the games on the Wii seem to be of the calibre of Link's Crossbow Training or similar complexity. Again, I'm not picking on the fun factor, just the complexity there. Other games have something like that as just one of the many minigames, or as just one of the many things you have to do.
I don't think the costs of writing a good story and scripting it are going to get any lower, just because it's on a Nintendo console, for example.
And considering how many games these days are cross-platform, or at least try to look as good as the competitive offerings on other platforms, I don't think Wii's crappier hardware is going to be much of a cost-saver for most devs. In practice, you'd end up having to redo the graphics or level or do perverse swapping tricks to fit (some of) them into its tiny memory. Either of those means actally extra development costs. Again, don't extrapolate what's needed for a minigame to mean you'd need the same pittance of graphics for a more complex game.
While I understand what you're saying, it's not a new thing, and is exactly what I meant by the game getting oversimplified at the endgame end. At any rate, the exact complaint and situation existed even way back before the Burning Crusade. In fact, as soon as raid instances got put in the game.
That's just how a tiered endgame grind works. That's what makes it tiered. To get into T2, your DPS/healing-per-sec/mitigation must be this high, and they won't be unless you farmed the T1 set. That's how the devs make sure you don't skip T1 entirely.
And yes, the classes got pretty oversimplified at that point too. If you were a DPS-er, you had to do one single thing, DPS. You needed 2 buttons total for that. If you were a priest, you had to heal. Period. As a Holy spec priest you could get through a whole raid instance while using a single button. And as any other spec you just wouldn't get in.
If anything, I find that the game offers slightly more options and flexibility these days. Mind you, that doesn't necessarily say much. Just that anything is more than zero;)
1. Actually, I'm not even going to argue with you there, because we're making completely different points.
You're saying that a game could be made for a gamepad. Well, probably.
Mine is merely to illustrate an (over-the-top) over-simplification and its effects it would have on a game. So my contrived example uses a gamepad with only 4 buttons for the skills and, let's say, the shoulder buttons to cycle through enemies and respectively friendlies (e.g., if you need to heal them.) Can you make WoW as fun on that limited number of actions? Nope, I should say.
That's really all my point.
2. If I'm to get into your example, too, though, you're talking about 12 buttons for actions. A WoW shaman can easily need more than _60_ buttons for all the spells and totems. Seriously. Plus, again, you need some way to cycle targets too.
Now I don't doubt that something could be worked out, e.g., using the D-pad as a multi-shift to select a toolbar, and the 4 buttons as actions. That would give us room for 20 spells. (4 per toolbar, and we have 5 toolbars at our disposal: D-Pad up, down, left, right, and untouched.)
But at that point we've complicated the interface for the average Joe. Now instead of simply pointing and clicking at an icon, he has to remember key combinations. Now maybe for you that's trivial, being an experienced gamer, but for a casual gamer it's more complicated.
At any rate, it takes it into the exact opposite direction from what I was trying to achieve with that example. I was getting at the effects of _simplifying_ it past a point, so I can't use that setup for my purposes:)
But basically, again, I'm not arguing about the feasibility of an MMO for consoles. Yes, it could be done. It's just not the point I was making.
Well, actually while it's not a "complex" game, it does kind of illustrate their point.
Think this: what if we took WoW and simplified it even _more_. Would it make it more fun, or, past a point, it actually turns it into a boring kiddie game? (At this point some guy who got bored of the endgame raids will want to butt in and say it was a boring game to start with. Bear with me for a bit, I'll get to that too.)
The easiest low-hangin-fruit example is SWG. Sony or the SWG team seem to have had an "OMG, Blizzard is making more money with simplistic games for retards" and proceeded to do the ill advised NGE. That's what the NGE did: over-simplified it. In a major way. Pet classes were gone. The complex and flexible skill system was gone and replaced by a linear level skill that was actually more simplistc than Blizzards (no talents, minimal skills, etc.) The races were simplified into all having the same stats and just different looks. The interface was over-simplified into a bad FPS interface. Etc. The game became a bad FPS with levels and, oh, maybe 10 skills/spells total you'd get by level 80. They actually lost most customers there. While some hung around begging for Sony to undo the stupidity (yeah, right), the number of active players at any given time had sunk like a lead duck. Heck, like a depleted uranium duck.
Or as an anecdote, there's this guy I know which plays a healer wherever he goes. That's the kind of character he likes to play. So he buys AOC at launch, and makes a healer. According to him, the fact that heals were PBAOE and he just needed to mash one button, actually made him cancel his subscription. He didn't even have to target a party member. Just mash the heal button. It got boring really fast.
Or let's get even further. There have been games so simplified that you could have played it with a gamepad. Needless to say, none got too many players, even if they survived.
Think of doing the same to WoW. Heck, I can't even imagine what 4 skills to map on a gamepad's buttons for any hybrid or pet class. If you're, say, a paladin, between healing, seals, auras, etc, you don't even have a button for each _type_ to cycle through them. Shaman? You'd have one button for each element, so no way you'd still have as many totems as today, and that doesn't even leave you with a button for attacking. Warlock or hunter? Lemme see, 1 button for sending in the pet, 1 button to heal the pet, that leaves you with 2 buttons for your spells. You don't even have enough for the "unholy trinity" of Corruption, Curse Of Agony, and Immolate, that warlocks use since the low levels. You don't have enough room as it is, never mind more complex strategies with spells like Fear, drains, or even to make soul shards.
Would it make it better if we simplified it some more like that? Like heck it would. IMHO it would become a major bore.
And to get back to WoW and people bored of endgame raids, what's the #1 complaint? That it gets boring. And it's not just the repetition, but also that each class is pushed into some narrow role where most of its skills become useless. There are classes which can get through a raid with 1-2 spells total, e.g., any healer. It's not very exciting in the long run.
So to get this long rant anywhere near a conclusion: IMHO the secret of WoW isn't just "keep it simple", but that they hit a sweet spot between simplicity and still allowing lots of stuff to do. I.e., pretty much what the summary was saying.
My activities are chosen largely because they offer a variety of different forms of recreation and produce a variety of stimuli and positive results - whether physical products, improved skills, improved health, artistic stimulus, or what-not.
Let me see, and my gaming directly or indirectly produced such skills as:
- programming. That's how I got into it in the first place.
- 3d modelling. I actually made a couple of meshes recently, for some (minor) mods.
- perception. Hey, at least one of those old adventure games actually had a clickable element that was exactly one pixel large.
- memory. Not everything is in the quest journal, and a lot of older games didn't have a quest log at all.
- leadership, perseverence, planning, discipline, and everything else that is needed to make a team work, even in a virtual environment. Don't laugh, I know someone who actually got hired as a manager based largely on his experience with organizing a big raiding guild in WoW. Apparently HR and his boss-to-be too thought that such skills translate into RL skills too.
- and I'm not even getting into more "in-game skills" which, as I was mentioning, are just about on par with the skills other people learn from their hobby... and will never ever use in any other contexts than that same hobby. Guess what? My skills at healing in a raid are just about on par with someone's skill with a compass: he too won't get any use out of it, outside of his hobby.
Artistic stimulus? Who defines what's art? Does the plot of Betrayal At Krondor -- which actually has been considered good enough by Raymond E Feist himself to make a novel out of it -- count as artistic stimulus enough? Does Undying, which actually had a novelist at the helm? To get back to MMOs, how about the story arcs of COH/COV? Or are we going to decide a priori that if the medium is gaming, somehow it can't be art?
You're taking the phrase "worth nothing" in a much too narrow and literal interpretation, as though cash is the only possible metric for deciding the value of things.
Because we're talking about it in the context of a thread where, basically, the cost in dollars of a MMO as hobbies go, was countered by "only if your time has no value." Ok, then I'm still waiting for him to tell me a value in comparable units then. But I'm probably reading too much into it, more likely it was -- as so usually happens on/. -- just someone parroting a popular meme, whether it applies or not.
If he had said simply "yeah, but I'm also getting other benefits from my time with my hobby", I wouldn't have minded it.
It's not about every minute of every day, it's well over an order of magnitude larger than that.
I wasn't aware you can get an order of magnitude more than every minute of every day, unless you have a time machine. But ok.
To put it in the required/. form: It's as though people are remarking on the pollution your VW Vanagon with loose engine seals spews out in its blue smoke, and you respond by trying to point out ways that they could reduce their year-old car's emissions.
No, that comparison isn't even bloody close. The point is that the same people acting all snotty that you wasted X, are wasting comparable amounts of X themselves. If you want a comparison where X is something else than time, it's like:
- hearing the guy who just blew some thousands on a bling status symbol, berate someone for "wasting" cents on a coca cola instead of drinking tap water
- hearing the guy driving a SUV complain about someone else's "gas guzzler" (there you have it, the mandatory car analogy)
- the guy with a swimming pool complaining about others wasting water
The fact is, that if you want to complain about someone else's wasting money, I want to see you manage that money better. Otherwise it's literally a case of
Here's a list of the hobbies I tend to engage in: exercising; gardening (mostly foodstuffs); cooking; writing software; making music; watching movies; reading; and the occasional video game - usually vocabulary-based ones, except for the Wii Fit or Wii Sports game at a friend's house. I would argue that most, if not all, of these hobbies provide something of value - health benefits, cost savings, building useful skills, broadening or informing one's perspective. Sitting around on your ass playing a MMO likely has a few benefits, but, barring those games being fundamentally different from when I was familiar with them, the benefits drop off quite quickly after the first few hours.
1. I think the keywords there, are "if not all." Unless you can tell me that _all_ your hobbies are chosen purely for utility value, then you too have some time simply "whittled away". Same as an MMO player, as falcon5768 was pointing out.
But, more importantly:
2. You still don't have a dollar value there, to make that silly "if your time is worth nothing" meme work in a topic about a $15 a month MMO subscription. Sure, you broadened your horizons, but what is the dollar value of that? Exactly how many more dollars will you be paid for those horizons, to make the comparison to MMO subscription costs?
Ok, you've learned some skills in walking in wilderness or in doing silly tricks with a Wii. How much will you be paid for those skills? Dollar value, please.
Cost savings? Exactly which of your hobbies save costs? Even the health ones, actually, according to recent health insurance data, it's the healthy, lean, non-smokers which cost the most money in treatments during their life time. Just because they live more and end up for 20 years on lots of expensive medicine at the end, while the obese smokers died earlier and cheaper. So in the long run, the dollar worth of that time is actually a negative one.
_That_ is the problem I have: that meme trying to shove some supposed "value of your time" in a discussion about _money_, _costs_, that kind of thing.
I could swallow other arguments about that time, like your health benefits above, but "if your time is worth nothing" is simply the awfully stupid thing there. Unless your whole day, from waking up to crashing back in bed, 7 days a week, 366 days a year, is spent doing _only_ paid stuff -- or heck, let's even include stuff which is arguably useful in some vague way, like in your argument above -- you too have some time which you whittled away, and its value was exactly zero. You too have time worth nothing.
3. If you still want to argue that, do you pick those pastimes to maximize utility per minute? Do you pick exactly which novel will broaden your horizons the most? Do you make an analysis of the benefits of 1 hour with the Wii vs 1 hour at the gym?
Because, if not, you too have more wasted time indirectly. If you need 6 hours with a Wii to get the same equivalent workout as 2 hours at the gym, then you effectively wasted 4 hours in achieving the same result. Same as buying a $20k car for $60k is a waste of $40k. You can do the same maths with time to achieve something, if your time is that valuable. So, really, if your time is worth that much as to judge other people's hobbies by it, why _do_ you waste it like that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we're coming back to the fact that the real purpose was to have fun, and the utility value is secondary at best.
Newsflash, buddy: the whole purpose of gaming is to waste some time in a pleasant way. Same as virtually any other hobby.
Yes, I know, people like to pretend that _their_ hobby is some great building skills... which they are only going to use the next time they do that hobby. Whether it's mountaineering, or going camping, or going out in the woods with a compass, or whatever, guess what? You're only going to use those skills at all the next time you go mountaineering, or camping, or going out in the woods with a compass. Chance to actually ever actually need to find your way in a city with a compass and/or by seeing which side of the tree has moss... zero. Actual RL value gotten out of it... zero. They too are just killing time in a more pleasant way than staring at the walls.
Or to quote Publilius Syrus: "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."
The whole "if your time has no value" only applies if you were, indeed, planning to sell it. Otherwise, without a purchaser actually paying for it, it has no value whatsoever. I.e., it applies if you were otherwise going to take a second job and get paid. (Self-employed crafting does count, but, again, if you were actually going to produce stuff you sell in that time.)
The same applies to installing Linux, OSS, and god knows where else that retarded meme pops up: only if you were going to otherwise get paid for doing something else in that time.
Were you? No? Then get a brain and find something more productive to do than repeating memes. It's only intelligence if you came up with it, not if you're the 1234567'th guy who parrots it verbatim.
Nice to see people still miss the point. Whether you care to admit it or not, it's not normal to wank off to pics of underaged people. I personally lost interest in that more or less immediately upon turning 18.
Well, I hope your interests don't include _any_ cartoons, because otherwise here's a fun fact: an adult's head's height fits about 3 times in the height of their torso. Most cartoons have oversized heads of half a torso or more. You know, so they have more space for faces and stuff. Unfortunately, those are pre-pubescent child proportions.
And I'm not even getting into the proportions of some anime or the gnomes on WoW, because then you get 2 year old proportions.
Here's another fun fact: did you know that the Japanese use big eyes to indicate a very young age? The representations of anyone mature (depending on the cartoon, meaning even anyone who's 19 years old) include much more normal eyes. Checked out the eyes on some hentai lately? Yeah, they use the child proportions again.
And it's not just anime, btw, the Japanese actually got the idea of oversized heads and eyes from Disney. Their traditional (as in, before WW2) drawings and paintings had much more realistic proportions.
So basically the problem is that if someone wants to pervert the law enough, almost _any_ cartoon ever made can be classified as depicting children.
Oh, but maybe you don't wank to cartoons? Well, that's ok too, because many (otherwise serious) cartoons and cut scenes include various romantic or outright erotic situations among the characters.
E.g., remember the brothel in FF7 and the mission to dress up Cloud for that guy? Checked the proportions of those characters lately?
The point isn't wanting to wank to images of underaged people, the point is that once you get into what something _looks_ like, it's a very slippery slope. I'd want that law a lot more clearly defined than what it _looks_ like. What criterions _are_ applied there? No seriously. They should include that in the law, because otherwise it's open to exactly the kind of weaseling that I've described above.
Frankly, were I a Tabula Rasa user I wouldn't touch this offer with a barge pole. They paid somewhere around $50 for a game, only to be used as its beta testers. Then to add insult to injury, they find that almost precisely one year after the release date (and perhaps only a matter of a few weeks or months after they shelled out their $50), the game would cease to work just three months after its first birthday.
1. As a former Tabula Rasa user, I can only say: that ideological point would maybe bother me, if TR had been actually worth playing. But, see, the whole reason they're throwing in the towel is that almost anyone who did touch it with a barge pole, cancelled their subscription _long_ before that 1.25 year was over.
It's hard to get worked up about the finer points of "OMG, their centralized servers can keep me from playing any more", when I wasn't planning to play it any more in the first place, or not without someone paying me to. It's about as hard as getting worked up about some law that forbids me from eating shit: I wasn't planning to anyway. So, from a pragmatic point of view, who cares?
2. That said, a gift is a gift. They're not trying to _sell_ COH to those people as a parting gift, they're giving them a free copy of COH and 3 months free play (as opposed to 1 if you buy it from the store.) Or, of course, one of the other 2 games, if that tempts you more.
I don't know, I could appreciate that for what it is: some free stuff. Sure, you could dissect it as some evil plot that maybe they just want you to subscribe after those 3 months, but then again nobody forces you to. In the meantime you do get the equivalent of the game's base cost and a 3 month game card, for free. What's so evil about that?
3. Again, as a former Tabula Rasa player, I can say that the problem wasn't as much lack of beta-testing, as just plain old bad design. The thing tried to reinvent MMOs by wiping the slate clean, and building it from scratch... i.e., ignoring everything that a decade of MMOs proved as working or non-working. The game mostly worked as intended at launch... except "as intended" didn't involve it actually being fun for most people. It wasn't a flawed implementation, as much as design which ignores what most people want in a game.
(Though tastes being subjective, I don't doubt that a very small niche actually liked it. The keywords and problem being: "very small.")
And how that came to pass:
4. It seems to me like some people are all too eager to give the publisher all the blame. You don't hear "the SWG team fucked up", you hear "Sony fucked up"... even if none of the other Sony games had the same problems. It seems to me like you're doing the same fallacy about NCSoft.
The truth is, they don't micro-manage those companies, and they don't all have the same problems. E.g., COH is nothing like Tabula Rasa, and its evolution and faults were nothing like those of Tabula Rasa.
It seems to me like NCSoft simply did the same mistake with "General British" as Sony did with Raph Koster or Eidos did with John Romero: let a superstar designer run amok and do whatever he wishes, simply because he's too great to be judged by mere mortals. I mean, OMG, British _invented_ the graphical MMORPG as we know it today. He must know what he's doing. So nobody took the time to dissect and maybe veto his design.
From another point of view, it might have even been a calculated risk. _If_ his clean-slate re-inventing MMOs worked, it could have made NCSoft billions. You can't blame them for at least giving that a try.
5. Or maybe "4.a.", the extreme costs of MMO development seem to scare most publishers. Oh, they all want to make one, but there's a lot of playing it safe and trusting the people who've done it before. Even teams which botched more than 1 MMO in a row, tend to get the contract because they're the guys who've made an MMO before.
Sorta like hiring Michael Brown, head of FEMA during the catastrophic handling of Katrin
In theory, it is easy to demonstrate. Suppose there are 2 blockbusters released in a category... and the average person buy 10 items in that category. So, 20% of the sales would go to the blockbusters... but 80% would go to the "long tail".
And that just illustrates the problem with thought experiments to "prove" anything. If you can make up the numbers or handwave in anecdotes and "common sense" in as "data", you can prove any bloody thing imaginable.
E.g., Aristotle "proved" that women have (as in, are born with) less teeth than men.
And that, in a nutshell, is why experimental validation is needed.
And I wish more people exercised some healthy scepticism when some bullshitter tries to sell the next snake oil. Because whether it's the Long Tail, or Web 2.0 (the original one, not the "lots of javascript and new tech" thing it's been hijacked into), the Dot-Con bubble rationalization, or whatever other bullshit of the century, that's been the recipe: handwave through some anecdotes, "common sense" and made up numbers instead of any hard data.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboy, I don't even like Apple, and the Cult Of Jobs makes me want to puke. But even I can see why the iPod ended up on top.
See, I actually wanted to buy an MP3 player waay back then, and honestly, the iPod was the only sane choice. I actually got a CD-based one instead, but if I had decided to go with a HD based one, it was iPod or nothing.
Let me tell you some of the other offerings were as big as a freaking brick, for a start. (I seem to remember an Archos like that, for example.) They looked like two 3" HDD's stacked on top of each other. It made my old high-school cassette player look positively sleek by comparison. And I'm not even talking about one of those newfangled small Walkmen, but about a big old thing.
Some had an interface that was plain old crap and unintuitive. E.g., it took Creative _years_ to fix their bloody interface into something actually usable.
A lot were actually more expensive than the iPod. Some could actually justify it by having included some extra features... that nobody wanted, or not at that price. Some were more expensive than a freaking laptop. For some, I'm not even sure WTF was their excuse. They seemed to be just bigger, uglier, clunkier and more expensive for it. That was a tendency that continued for _years_: trying to be the iPod killer by costing $1000 or close to that. Heh.
Etc.
The iPod may not have been the absolute best in any one given category. But on the whole it sucked the least. As debatable compromises went, Apple hit the sweet spot with their product. It was the compromise that looked the most palatable.
Basically, sure, you can blame it on fashion and (thus) ubiquity _now_, but think of it this way: it had to start from zero at some point. You can't use your market leader position until you actually win that position in the first place. And back then, IMHO Apple won it fair and square.
While I'm too lazy to research exactly who was a jainist there and who wasn't, I hope you realize that the ancient history of India is as full of warfare as the history of any other nation. You can't really find an island of tranquility there. You had city states and kingdoms which waged war upon other city states and kingdoms, regardless of how many relics pointing at jainism or buddhism you find there.
And war in the ancient times was... well, just as brutal as what you find in any other zone at the time. They took slaves, they killed enough civilians to make the others too scared shitless to revolt any time soon, etc. Not every monarch there was as enlightened as Ashoka, and even that one debatably only got enlightened after seeing the brutality that his army did.
Well, actually that's the whole point: humans can pervert anything, and can be manipulated do equally horrible things in the name of any good commandment.
Buddhism is actually no different. Yes, killing isn't allowed, but buddhists went to war and did various atrocities just as well. Japan has been and still is half-buddhist/half-shintoist all along, and I've already used them as an example. Yes, slavery is bad, but the peasants in Tibet... well, they were theoretically _serfs_ so that was ok, but were treated basically like in a chattel slavery system by any other name. It's funny what you can get away with, if you just use a different word.
But to not pick just on religion, heck, moralism, legalism and confucianism in China weren't even religions, they're philosophy schools really. But in the name of the first two, the first emperor Qin Shi Huang Di buried some hundreds of confucianist philosophers alive. And conversely, Confucianism, otherwise all about doing the right thing and knowing your place, was used at various points in history to incite against people who saw the world differently.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
There were plenty of Joe Secular who stuck to inflexible ideas of nation, race, etc. Believe it or not, most white supremacist arguments don't have anything to do with anything from the Bible, for example. There are plenty of secular guys who'll view you as brainwashed and just put up their mental defenses, if you even try to bring up scientific arguments that, say, blacks aren't some inferior race bent on enslaving us all. Or you'll find that no amout of logic will dislodge some people from their mysoginist view of women being inferior, or conversely you'll have a hard time dislodging a few women from their view than men are Satan clones. Etc.
As long as you can paint the world in an "us vs them" theme, with a clearly drawn line between "us" and "them", there'll always be people who are all too eager to fight for the "us" group. And people more than eager to get them frenzied by painting the "us" group as being under attack by the "them" group.
But the real problem is: you're confusing "secular" with "rational", making the whole argument circular, or one roundabout case of "begging the question."
The truth is, the average person is very capable of logic, but not very inclined to use it spontaneously. It doesn't matter if it's a secular or religious guy or gal. Most people start from "what I wish were true" or "what I want for christmas" and then work backwards to a suitable justification for that. That's where they appear illogical, incidentally. But the real thing I'm getting at: if you confront their argument with irefutable logic, most will just back up into painting _you_ as the stupid or ilogical one for disagreeing with their bogus excuse. Their logic must be good, because it leads to where they want to get, and if you don't get to the same conclusion, then there's something wrong with _your_ brain.
Religion is one easy application of it, since we all want to live for ever and/or to feel special. So people start from "I want to go to heaven and live for ever" and work their way backwards to building some axioms (e.g., "christianity is absolute truth") to reach that pre-determined condition.
But it's not limited to religion by any means. The same can apply to people justifying stuff like "why I should get a sports car" or "why everyone should program in my favourite pet language so I don't have to learn a new one" or "why someone else should make less money so I can make more" or whatever. In fact, the same _does_ apply every bloody day, to almost everyone around you.
"Women are ilogical" vs "men are idiots" rants are probably the easiest example of exactly this thing in action. Guy wants X, woman wants Y, they both built their bogus rationales as to why they deserve their prize, and why the other should get less to make that possible. If the woman points the flaw in the guy's justification for blowing their savings on X, what do you get? "Women are ilogical." Guy points out the flaw in the woman's rationale? "Guys are such idiots." Neither listens carefully to the other's logic and corrects the flaw in theirs.
But you can find the same in action in nerds-vs-beancounters holy wars, holy wars about programming languages, etc. It's the default modus operandi for most of us, most of the time. "Logic" is just a fancy word for a string of fallacies leading to whatever we wish it to lead to. And if anyone points out flaws in it, they're ilogical and must be ignored or shut up.
There you go. An all-secular example that happens jolly well between secular people.
Again, religion _is_ an easy case, because when that wishful thinking is something you _really_ want (e.g., eternal life), then that conclusion just becomes all the more imovable and they're all the more likely to try to stop you from poking holes in the bogus rationale leading to it. But again, it can and does happen, with just about everything else.
Well, the word "specific" must have confused me, especially in the context of a thread which once again degenerated into Islam-bashing and guilt by association fallacies. Sorry about the misunderstanding then.
There's a reason it's so easy to associate specific religions with specific stupid bloodthirsty acts, and that's that they were causal in the perpetration of those acts..
No, it's usually because people usually have no clue about what other religions did. So they have religion X for which they know evil acts A, B and C, and religion Y about which they don't know jack. So they do a jump to conclusions that religion Y was all saintly, harmonious and benevolent.
If you look at it deeper, yes, the GP is right, virtually _any_ religion that existed prior to the 20'th century at all, has been perverted into justifying some atrocities -- or at least turning a blind eye to them.
E.g., shintoism and generally the Japanese view of the world is all about purity, duty, respecting the spirits, avoiding murder and generally doing the right thing... but the mindset around it is what _caused_ such massacres of civillians as the Rape Of Nanjing or the Japanese atrocities against prisoners and civillians in WW2. The rationale was that since the enemy didn't do what the Japanese philosophy demands (e.g., fighting to the last breath, regardless of odds), they lost their right to be called humans, and can be treated like cattle. E.g., the fact that the Chinese soldiers discarded their uniforms and tried to hide among civillians, to escape the Japanese atrocities, was seen as such a breach of what a true human should do, that they and the whole city deserved nothing less than mass slaughter.
E.g., Tibetan buddhism is all enlightened and all about scoring karma points for your reincarnation... but has been a justification for the most abject slavery of most of their population. The justification being that if you were born a slave, well, you deserve that and it's your punishment for your evil deeds in a past life. So you had a religion which preached benevolence to your fellow man, and a theocratic caste treating their fellow man like shit in its name. Go figure that one out.
The religion may not have _demanded_ such massacres, and there may not have been a "pope" to decree it, but that particular view of the world was distorted into basically, "anyone who doesn't see the world exactly like us, deserves death." Go figure.
E.g., look at any "enlightened" and "noble savage" shamanistic or animistic cults, and you'll find a history of endemic warfare and slaughter, where generations after generations of young warriors are sent to rape and pillage under the shaman's blessing and guidance. In fact, the very first depictions of warfare we have on cave walls -- interestingly enough coinciding with the invention of missile weapons -- show groups of archers shooting at each other, each lead by some shaman with some holy symbol. That's how the history of human organized warfare _started_.
And I'm not even getting into ancient religions demanding a stream of human sacrifices and the like.
Look as far back as the first religious hymns we have, e.g., The Exaltation of Innana by her high priestess Enheduanna, and you'll find a disturbingly blood-thirsty girl praising her Goddess for turning major rivers red with the blood of her enemies -- soldiers and innocent bystanders alike -- and destroying their crops. That's early human religion for you.
So, pray tell, which religions do you have in mind, which _didn't_ facilitate a few choice atrocities? Again, only those which existed for any length of time, please, not late 20'th century new age cults or jokes like Pastafarianism.
I guess the followers of Objective C would be akin to the Ebionites then. An ancient cult which insisted that they know what the New Testament (Java in TFA) really should be like, to the point where they accuse the mainstream's apostles of apostasy. Everyone else calls them heretics. Chances are you weren're even aware of them or their beliefs until you stumble upon The Da Vinci Code. Or upon the code of a Mac-owning co-worker who ignores the sacred style guide and writes methods like "setValueForKey(Object value, String key)" (instead of first key and then value, like everyone else) and insists that it's the rest of you who've been doing it wrong all along.
The pictures on the walls were so pixelated we didn't know they were elves unless we read the description.
What, you had _pictures_ on the walls? You young 'uns don't know how good you had it. Back in my day we just had the description. And were grateful even for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, we're on Slashdot. Beggars can't be choosers, and all that ;)
Even if Fawkes is a she,
1. Then what's her excuse when the player character is a woman too, not to mention that the paladin is a woman too? That she's just a bitch and wants to see one of the other two women die horribly? That fits soo good with the whole Fawkes the righteous good supermutant act. Not.
2. _If_ they wanted to do it gender-based, then how about letting me use the Lady Killer perk there? I mean, wtf, there's this perk which mysteriously makes women do my bidding in game, despite of the fact that it only produces the most horrible pick-up lines in recorded history. (I mean, for example, there's this perfectly stranger grandma, and I suddenly get the option to spew something that would fit at most if we were already past "third base", and mysteriously she gives me ammo for it instead of a slap.) Why not give me an option to use it on Fawkes then?
So you haven't bothered playing the ending, then?
*SPOILERS INCOMING*
Because, yes, that's what makes him stand out like a sore thumb. He already showed you that he's immune to radiation, and ventured for you in that room in the bunker. But at the Project Purity end scene there is _no_ option to send _him_ into the irradiated room to press the four buttons to activate the installation. You get to choose whether you die or the paladin dies, but there is no freaking option to go, "Hey, Fawkes, you're immune to radiation, right? Can you go in there and press these four numbers for me, please?"
Now I understand the climactic choice and all, but the very presence of Fawkes there spoils it in a major way. Suddenly that choice and sacrifice makes no bloody sense. It's like deciding whether me or you rush some evil guys and take a bullet, while having Superman standing around obliviously watching the whole debate. It makes no sense.
The funny thing is that some of that has been done already by the modders. There is a suit which makes you slightly harder to see when crouched. There is one which gives you 25% chameleon _all_ the time.
Heck, transplanting the Stealth Boy enchantment to a suit of your choosing is such a trivial affair, I had made my very own long before the GECK was released. The FOMM/TESnip already had all you need for that. Turns out someone else already had made the 25% one, so mine was never released, though.
Raising the level to 30? That is one global variable. That was one of the first mods released.
So I'm not really thinking they intentionally cut anything out, because most of it is _trivial_ stuff. Well, there'll be new maps and stuff so obviously it's more than just the items, but the "Ivisible Girl" in your example just made no sense to remove from release because it doesn't save anything at all.
Sorry to piss on someone's cult of the hunter-gatherer utopia parrade, but it didn't work that way.
Pre-historic hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of thousands of species and, for example, all the mega-fauna in the Americas. There are whole species, e.g., the mammoth, for which you can trace its shrinking habitat historically and it looks damn suspiciously like the opposite of the pattern of human spread. Yes, there were environment factors too, which probably were already making it harder for them to thrive, but nevertheless, wherever the humans went, the mammoths soon went extinct.
That's just one species out of _thousands_.
Hunter-gatherers in North America used "buffalo jumps" to herd whole herds of buffalo off cliffs and then eat the resulting mess of meat. They only got all in touch with nature when that source of food started to not be enough.
(And even then, an animist's idea of harmony with nature is giving back to the _spirits_, not to nature itself. If you hunt bears, you give offerings and prayers to the great bear spirits, whose job is to make sure you get plenty of bears to hunt. It was a pretty damn human-centric view of the world. And if they get to be scarce, then you just need to pray more and appease the spirits better, not, say, give the bears a fucking chance to repopulate.)
Humans are a pretty scary predator. Most other predator have 1-2 species of prey they depend on, creating equilibrium cycles. When the rabbits depopulate, some of the foxes starve too and don't breed as much either, giving the rabbits a chance to rebound. And viceversa. Humans have no such balancing factors. If the population of dodos drops, the humans still survive on fruits and other animals, and keep on hunting the dodos into extinction. And sometimes keep on hunting them just for fun, trophies, proof of manhood, or whatever. The hunter-gatherers did exactly the same too. Why do you think they had those feather headdresses, or wolf skins, or whatnot? To show how great hunters they are, even if they didn't actually need to eat that animal.
So measuring the ecological impact just in carbon is misleading at best, and freaking stupid at worst. Hunter-gatherers caused mass extinctions.
You'd be surprised how many people proclaim loudly that they care about gameplay more than graphics, then go and buy based on graphics anyway. Plus, there's got to be _some_ reason why everyone falls over themselves to provide lots of screenshots.
At any rate, it's a bit of a non-sequitur anyway. If you have great ideas and design skill, you'll have them on any platform. I don't think the guys at Blizzard lost half their IQ because their game isn't on a Wii, for example. And I don't think John Romero would become a great designer if anyone only gave him a Wii SDK. So the same companies which produce duds on the PC, will produce duds on the Wii too. Lack of ideas, lack of design skills, and lack of willingness to take risks by the publisher are what produces those epic failures, and giving the same people a Wii SDK won't make one iota of difference.
So far the only company which is Nintendo-only with their great ideas is Nintendo itself. And it's not the hardware that makes them possible, it's simply having the people who come up with those games.
Last I heard, actually the PS2 is still in the lead as the most played console.
Except even a:
- PS2 has 4MB of video RAM, vs the Wii's 3MB
- PSP, ok, has marginally less RAM and video RAM, but has to run at a fraction of the resolution. And has the excuse that it's a _portable_ system, i.e., you don't expect the same games as on a home PC or console. You expect minigames to play on a bus or train.
- PCs with Intel GMA, you can't even freaking buy one with less than half a gig main RAM and 64 MB video RAM, except if someone robbed a museum and you found their fence. Heck, most new-ish chipsets allow for more shared RAM than the Wii has total, including main memory.
- heck, even the ancient Dreamcast had 8MB of video RAM, for the same 480 line resolution (if nothing else, it supported 640x480 non-interlaced on a VGA monitor)
Nintendo's little cheap box is good for one thing: minigames. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for them. They found a lucrative niche there, and obviously filled a need. Kudos and more power to them. But if you're going for AAA PC-like titles, that yesterday-gen hardware is going to be a pain in the arse.
_If_ you make graphics only for that console, you just shot yourself in the market share.
_Even_ _if_ you make the graphics only for the Wii, if you want your game to compete with more than minigames, you'll want the game to at least look competitive with what one can buy on other consoles in your chosen genre. You're moving outside the niche of the minigames nobody else did, at that point. If you want me to buy a complex RPG (or any other genre) on a Wii, well, you'll have to give me some reason why I wouldn't buy the better looking PS3 or XBox 360 games in that genre instead.
Nothing against the console as such, but I will be comparing the games when I decide which I buy. Precisely because I have nothing against either of the consoles a priori. I don't care if it's a PS3 or XBox 360 or Wii one, I'll just compare the games. Yours better not look much worse than the game from those other guys, if they're in the same genre and thus compete with each other for my cash.
You _will_ end up doing extra programming to swap graphics in and out, to make that comparison work in your favour.
Admittedly, it's been a decade since I had anything to do with the games industry, but I'm seriously drawing blanks there. Why would they cost less? Coding support for a mouse or gamepad isn't half the cost of any game I know of, so how's the wiimote going to cut half the costs?
Or are you just comparing the cost of doing a silly (if fun) minigame on the Wii to, say, a complex RPG on other consoles, and extrapolate from there? I mean, seriously, half the games on the Wii seem to be of the calibre of Link's Crossbow Training or similar complexity. Again, I'm not picking on the fun factor, just the complexity there. Other games have something like that as just one of the many minigames, or as just one of the many things you have to do.
I don't think the costs of writing a good story and scripting it are going to get any lower, just because it's on a Nintendo console, for example.
And considering how many games these days are cross-platform, or at least try to look as good as the competitive offerings on other platforms, I don't think Wii's crappier hardware is going to be much of a cost-saver for most devs. In practice, you'd end up having to redo the graphics or level or do perverse swapping tricks to fit (some of) them into its tiny memory. Either of those means actally extra development costs. Again, don't extrapolate what's needed for a minigame to mean you'd need the same pittance of graphics for a more complex game.
While I understand what you're saying, it's not a new thing, and is exactly what I meant by the game getting oversimplified at the endgame end. At any rate, the exact complaint and situation existed even way back before the Burning Crusade. In fact, as soon as raid instances got put in the game.
That's just how a tiered endgame grind works. That's what makes it tiered. To get into T2, your DPS/healing-per-sec/mitigation must be this high, and they won't be unless you farmed the T1 set. That's how the devs make sure you don't skip T1 entirely.
And yes, the classes got pretty oversimplified at that point too. If you were a DPS-er, you had to do one single thing, DPS. You needed 2 buttons total for that. If you were a priest, you had to heal. Period. As a Holy spec priest you could get through a whole raid instance while using a single button. And as any other spec you just wouldn't get in.
If anything, I find that the game offers slightly more options and flexibility these days. Mind you, that doesn't necessarily say much. Just that anything is more than zero ;)
1. Actually, I'm not even going to argue with you there, because we're making completely different points.
You're saying that a game could be made for a gamepad. Well, probably.
Mine is merely to illustrate an (over-the-top) over-simplification and its effects it would have on a game. So my contrived example uses a gamepad with only 4 buttons for the skills and, let's say, the shoulder buttons to cycle through enemies and respectively friendlies (e.g., if you need to heal them.) Can you make WoW as fun on that limited number of actions? Nope, I should say.
That's really all my point.
2. If I'm to get into your example, too, though, you're talking about 12 buttons for actions. A WoW shaman can easily need more than _60_ buttons for all the spells and totems. Seriously. Plus, again, you need some way to cycle targets too.
Now I don't doubt that something could be worked out, e.g., using the D-pad as a multi-shift to select a toolbar, and the 4 buttons as actions. That would give us room for 20 spells. (4 per toolbar, and we have 5 toolbars at our disposal: D-Pad up, down, left, right, and untouched.)
But at that point we've complicated the interface for the average Joe. Now instead of simply pointing and clicking at an icon, he has to remember key combinations. Now maybe for you that's trivial, being an experienced gamer, but for a casual gamer it's more complicated.
At any rate, it takes it into the exact opposite direction from what I was trying to achieve with that example. I was getting at the effects of _simplifying_ it past a point, so I can't use that setup for my purposes :)
But basically, again, I'm not arguing about the feasibility of an MMO for consoles. Yes, it could be done. It's just not the point I was making.
Well, actually while it's not a "complex" game, it does kind of illustrate their point.
Think this: what if we took WoW and simplified it even _more_. Would it make it more fun, or, past a point, it actually turns it into a boring kiddie game? (At this point some guy who got bored of the endgame raids will want to butt in and say it was a boring game to start with. Bear with me for a bit, I'll get to that too.)
The easiest low-hangin-fruit example is SWG. Sony or the SWG team seem to have had an "OMG, Blizzard is making more money with simplistic games for retards" and proceeded to do the ill advised NGE. That's what the NGE did: over-simplified it. In a major way. Pet classes were gone. The complex and flexible skill system was gone and replaced by a linear level skill that was actually more simplistc than Blizzards (no talents, minimal skills, etc.) The races were simplified into all having the same stats and just different looks. The interface was over-simplified into a bad FPS interface. Etc. The game became a bad FPS with levels and, oh, maybe 10 skills/spells total you'd get by level 80. They actually lost most customers there. While some hung around begging for Sony to undo the stupidity (yeah, right), the number of active players at any given time had sunk like a lead duck. Heck, like a depleted uranium duck.
Or as an anecdote, there's this guy I know which plays a healer wherever he goes. That's the kind of character he likes to play. So he buys AOC at launch, and makes a healer. According to him, the fact that heals were PBAOE and he just needed to mash one button, actually made him cancel his subscription. He didn't even have to target a party member. Just mash the heal button. It got boring really fast.
Or let's get even further. There have been games so simplified that you could have played it with a gamepad. Needless to say, none got too many players, even if they survived.
Think of doing the same to WoW. Heck, I can't even imagine what 4 skills to map on a gamepad's buttons for any hybrid or pet class. If you're, say, a paladin, between healing, seals, auras, etc, you don't even have a button for each _type_ to cycle through them. Shaman? You'd have one button for each element, so no way you'd still have as many totems as today, and that doesn't even leave you with a button for attacking. Warlock or hunter? Lemme see, 1 button for sending in the pet, 1 button to heal the pet, that leaves you with 2 buttons for your spells. You don't even have enough for the "unholy trinity" of Corruption, Curse Of Agony, and Immolate, that warlocks use since the low levels. You don't have enough room as it is, never mind more complex strategies with spells like Fear, drains, or even to make soul shards.
Would it make it better if we simplified it some more like that? Like heck it would. IMHO it would become a major bore.
And to get back to WoW and people bored of endgame raids, what's the #1 complaint? That it gets boring. And it's not just the repetition, but also that each class is pushed into some narrow role where most of its skills become useless. There are classes which can get through a raid with 1-2 spells total, e.g., any healer. It's not very exciting in the long run.
So to get this long rant anywhere near a conclusion: IMHO the secret of WoW isn't just "keep it simple", but that they hit a sweet spot between simplicity and still allowing lots of stuff to do. I.e., pretty much what the summary was saying.
Let me see, and my gaming directly or indirectly produced such skills as:
- programming. That's how I got into it in the first place.
- 3d modelling. I actually made a couple of meshes recently, for some (minor) mods.
- perception. Hey, at least one of those old adventure games actually had a clickable element that was exactly one pixel large.
- memory. Not everything is in the quest journal, and a lot of older games didn't have a quest log at all.
- leadership, perseverence, planning, discipline, and everything else that is needed to make a team work, even in a virtual environment. Don't laugh, I know someone who actually got hired as a manager based largely on his experience with organizing a big raiding guild in WoW. Apparently HR and his boss-to-be too thought that such skills translate into RL skills too.
- and I'm not even getting into more "in-game skills" which, as I was mentioning, are just about on par with the skills other people learn from their hobby... and will never ever use in any other contexts than that same hobby. Guess what? My skills at healing in a raid are just about on par with someone's skill with a compass: he too won't get any use out of it, outside of his hobby.
Artistic stimulus? Who defines what's art? Does the plot of Betrayal At Krondor -- which actually has been considered good enough by Raymond E Feist himself to make a novel out of it -- count as artistic stimulus enough? Does Undying, which actually had a novelist at the helm? To get back to MMOs, how about the story arcs of COH/COV? Or are we going to decide a priori that if the medium is gaming, somehow it can't be art?
Because we're talking about it in the context of a thread where, basically, the cost in dollars of a MMO as hobbies go, was countered by "only if your time has no value." Ok, then I'm still waiting for him to tell me a value in comparable units then. But I'm probably reading too much into it, more likely it was -- as so usually happens on /. -- just someone parroting a popular meme, whether it applies or not.
If he had said simply "yeah, but I'm also getting other benefits from my time with my hobby", I wouldn't have minded it.
I wasn't aware you can get an order of magnitude more than every minute of every day, unless you have a time machine. But ok.
No, that comparison isn't even bloody close. The point is that the same people acting all snotty that you wasted X, are wasting comparable amounts of X themselves. If you want a comparison where X is something else than time, it's like:
- hearing the guy who just blew some thousands on a bling status symbol, berate someone for "wasting" cents on a coca cola instead of drinking tap water
- hearing the guy driving a SUV complain about someone else's "gas guzzler" (there you have it, the mandatory car analogy)
- the guy with a swimming pool complaining about others wasting water
The fact is, that if you want to complain about someone else's wasting money, I want to see you manage that money better. Otherwise it's literally a case of
1. I think the keywords there, are "if not all." Unless you can tell me that _all_ your hobbies are chosen purely for utility value, then you too have some time simply "whittled away". Same as an MMO player, as falcon5768 was pointing out.
But, more importantly:
2. You still don't have a dollar value there, to make that silly "if your time is worth nothing" meme work in a topic about a $15 a month MMO subscription. Sure, you broadened your horizons, but what is the dollar value of that? Exactly how many more dollars will you be paid for those horizons, to make the comparison to MMO subscription costs?
Ok, you've learned some skills in walking in wilderness or in doing silly tricks with a Wii. How much will you be paid for those skills? Dollar value, please.
Cost savings? Exactly which of your hobbies save costs? Even the health ones, actually, according to recent health insurance data, it's the healthy, lean, non-smokers which cost the most money in treatments during their life time. Just because they live more and end up for 20 years on lots of expensive medicine at the end, while the obese smokers died earlier and cheaper. So in the long run, the dollar worth of that time is actually a negative one.
_That_ is the problem I have: that meme trying to shove some supposed "value of your time" in a discussion about _money_, _costs_, that kind of thing.
I could swallow other arguments about that time, like your health benefits above, but "if your time is worth nothing" is simply the awfully stupid thing there. Unless your whole day, from waking up to crashing back in bed, 7 days a week, 366 days a year, is spent doing _only_ paid stuff -- or heck, let's even include stuff which is arguably useful in some vague way, like in your argument above -- you too have some time which you whittled away, and its value was exactly zero. You too have time worth nothing.
3. If you still want to argue that, do you pick those pastimes to maximize utility per minute? Do you pick exactly which novel will broaden your horizons the most? Do you make an analysis of the benefits of 1 hour with the Wii vs 1 hour at the gym?
Because, if not, you too have more wasted time indirectly. If you need 6 hours with a Wii to get the same equivalent workout as 2 hours at the gym, then you effectively wasted 4 hours in achieving the same result. Same as buying a $20k car for $60k is a waste of $40k. You can do the same maths with time to achieve something, if your time is that valuable. So, really, if your time is worth that much as to judge other people's hobbies by it, why _do_ you waste it like that?
Or maybe, just maybe, we're coming back to the fact that the real purpose was to have fun, and the utility value is secondary at best.
Newsflash, buddy: the whole purpose of gaming is to waste some time in a pleasant way. Same as virtually any other hobby.
Yes, I know, people like to pretend that _their_ hobby is some great building skills... which they are only going to use the next time they do that hobby. Whether it's mountaineering, or going camping, or going out in the woods with a compass, or whatever, guess what? You're only going to use those skills at all the next time you go mountaineering, or camping, or going out in the woods with a compass. Chance to actually ever actually need to find your way in a city with a compass and/or by seeing which side of the tree has moss... zero. Actual RL value gotten out of it... zero. They too are just killing time in a more pleasant way than staring at the walls.
Or to quote Publilius Syrus: "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."
The whole "if your time has no value" only applies if you were, indeed, planning to sell it. Otherwise, without a purchaser actually paying for it, it has no value whatsoever. I.e., it applies if you were otherwise going to take a second job and get paid. (Self-employed crafting does count, but, again, if you were actually going to produce stuff you sell in that time.)
The same applies to installing Linux, OSS, and god knows where else that retarded meme pops up: only if you were going to otherwise get paid for doing something else in that time.
Were you? No? Then get a brain and find something more productive to do than repeating memes. It's only intelligence if you came up with it, not if you're the 1234567'th guy who parrots it verbatim.
Well, I hope your interests don't include _any_ cartoons, because otherwise here's a fun fact: an adult's head's height fits about 3 times in the height of their torso. Most cartoons have oversized heads of half a torso or more. You know, so they have more space for faces and stuff. Unfortunately, those are pre-pubescent child proportions.
And I'm not even getting into the proportions of some anime or the gnomes on WoW, because then you get 2 year old proportions.
Here's another fun fact: did you know that the Japanese use big eyes to indicate a very young age? The representations of anyone mature (depending on the cartoon, meaning even anyone who's 19 years old) include much more normal eyes. Checked out the eyes on some hentai lately? Yeah, they use the child proportions again.
And it's not just anime, btw, the Japanese actually got the idea of oversized heads and eyes from Disney. Their traditional (as in, before WW2) drawings and paintings had much more realistic proportions.
So basically the problem is that if someone wants to pervert the law enough, almost _any_ cartoon ever made can be classified as depicting children.
Oh, but maybe you don't wank to cartoons? Well, that's ok too, because many (otherwise serious) cartoons and cut scenes include various romantic or outright erotic situations among the characters.
E.g., remember the brothel in FF7 and the mission to dress up Cloud for that guy? Checked the proportions of those characters lately?
The point isn't wanting to wank to images of underaged people, the point is that once you get into what something _looks_ like, it's a very slippery slope. I'd want that law a lot more clearly defined than what it _looks_ like. What criterions _are_ applied there? No seriously. They should include that in the law, because otherwise it's open to exactly the kind of weaseling that I've described above.
1. As a former Tabula Rasa user, I can only say: that ideological point would maybe bother me, if TR had been actually worth playing. But, see, the whole reason they're throwing in the towel is that almost anyone who did touch it with a barge pole, cancelled their subscription _long_ before that 1.25 year was over.
It's hard to get worked up about the finer points of "OMG, their centralized servers can keep me from playing any more", when I wasn't planning to play it any more in the first place, or not without someone paying me to. It's about as hard as getting worked up about some law that forbids me from eating shit: I wasn't planning to anyway. So, from a pragmatic point of view, who cares?
2. That said, a gift is a gift. They're not trying to _sell_ COH to those people as a parting gift, they're giving them a free copy of COH and 3 months free play (as opposed to 1 if you buy it from the store.) Or, of course, one of the other 2 games, if that tempts you more.
I don't know, I could appreciate that for what it is: some free stuff. Sure, you could dissect it as some evil plot that maybe they just want you to subscribe after those 3 months, but then again nobody forces you to. In the meantime you do get the equivalent of the game's base cost and a 3 month game card, for free. What's so evil about that?
3. Again, as a former Tabula Rasa player, I can say that the problem wasn't as much lack of beta-testing, as just plain old bad design. The thing tried to reinvent MMOs by wiping the slate clean, and building it from scratch... i.e., ignoring everything that a decade of MMOs proved as working or non-working. The game mostly worked as intended at launch... except "as intended" didn't involve it actually being fun for most people. It wasn't a flawed implementation, as much as design which ignores what most people want in a game.
(Though tastes being subjective, I don't doubt that a very small niche actually liked it. The keywords and problem being: "very small.")
And how that came to pass:
4. It seems to me like some people are all too eager to give the publisher all the blame. You don't hear "the SWG team fucked up", you hear "Sony fucked up"... even if none of the other Sony games had the same problems. It seems to me like you're doing the same fallacy about NCSoft.
The truth is, they don't micro-manage those companies, and they don't all have the same problems. E.g., COH is nothing like Tabula Rasa, and its evolution and faults were nothing like those of Tabula Rasa.
It seems to me like NCSoft simply did the same mistake with "General British" as Sony did with Raph Koster or Eidos did with John Romero: let a superstar designer run amok and do whatever he wishes, simply because he's too great to be judged by mere mortals. I mean, OMG, British _invented_ the graphical MMORPG as we know it today. He must know what he's doing. So nobody took the time to dissect and maybe veto his design.
From another point of view, it might have even been a calculated risk. _If_ his clean-slate re-inventing MMOs worked, it could have made NCSoft billions. You can't blame them for at least giving that a try.
5. Or maybe "4.a.", the extreme costs of MMO development seem to scare most publishers. Oh, they all want to make one, but there's a lot of playing it safe and trusting the people who've done it before. Even teams which botched more than 1 MMO in a row, tend to get the contract because they're the guys who've made an MMO before.
Sorta like hiring Michael Brown, head of FEMA during the catastrophic handling of Katrin
And that just illustrates the problem with thought experiments to "prove" anything. If you can make up the numbers or handwave in anecdotes and "common sense" in as "data", you can prove any bloody thing imaginable.
E.g., Aristotle "proved" that women have (as in, are born with) less teeth than men.
And that, in a nutshell, is why experimental validation is needed.
And I wish more people exercised some healthy scepticism when some bullshitter tries to sell the next snake oil. Because whether it's the Long Tail, or Web 2.0 (the original one, not the "lots of javascript and new tech" thing it's been hijacked into), the Dot-Con bubble rationalization, or whatever other bullshit of the century, that's been the recipe: handwave through some anecdotes, "common sense" and made up numbers instead of any hard data.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboy, I don't even like Apple, and the Cult Of Jobs makes me want to puke. But even I can see why the iPod ended up on top.
See, I actually wanted to buy an MP3 player waay back then, and honestly, the iPod was the only sane choice. I actually got a CD-based one instead, but if I had decided to go with a HD based one, it was iPod or nothing.
Let me tell you some of the other offerings were as big as a freaking brick, for a start. (I seem to remember an Archos like that, for example.) They looked like two 3" HDD's stacked on top of each other. It made my old high-school cassette player look positively sleek by comparison. And I'm not even talking about one of those newfangled small Walkmen, but about a big old thing.
Some had an interface that was plain old crap and unintuitive. E.g., it took Creative _years_ to fix their bloody interface into something actually usable.
A lot were actually more expensive than the iPod. Some could actually justify it by having included some extra features... that nobody wanted, or not at that price. Some were more expensive than a freaking laptop. For some, I'm not even sure WTF was their excuse. They seemed to be just bigger, uglier, clunkier and more expensive for it. That was a tendency that continued for _years_: trying to be the iPod killer by costing $1000 or close to that. Heh.
Etc.
The iPod may not have been the absolute best in any one given category. But on the whole it sucked the least. As debatable compromises went, Apple hit the sweet spot with their product. It was the compromise that looked the most palatable.
Basically, sure, you can blame it on fashion and (thus) ubiquity _now_, but think of it this way: it had to start from zero at some point. You can't use your market leader position until you actually win that position in the first place. And back then, IMHO Apple won it fair and square.
While I'm too lazy to research exactly who was a jainist there and who wasn't, I hope you realize that the ancient history of India is as full of warfare as the history of any other nation. You can't really find an island of tranquility there. You had city states and kingdoms which waged war upon other city states and kingdoms, regardless of how many relics pointing at jainism or buddhism you find there.
And war in the ancient times was... well, just as brutal as what you find in any other zone at the time. They took slaves, they killed enough civilians to make the others too scared shitless to revolt any time soon, etc. Not every monarch there was as enlightened as Ashoka, and even that one debatably only got enlightened after seeing the brutality that his army did.
Well, actually that's the whole point: humans can pervert anything, and can be manipulated do equally horrible things in the name of any good commandment.
Buddhism is actually no different. Yes, killing isn't allowed, but buddhists went to war and did various atrocities just as well. Japan has been and still is half-buddhist/half-shintoist all along, and I've already used them as an example. Yes, slavery is bad, but the peasants in Tibet... well, they were theoretically _serfs_ so that was ok, but were treated basically like in a chattel slavery system by any other name. It's funny what you can get away with, if you just use a different word.
But to not pick just on religion, heck, moralism, legalism and confucianism in China weren't even religions, they're philosophy schools really. But in the name of the first two, the first emperor Qin Shi Huang Di buried some hundreds of confucianist philosophers alive. And conversely, Confucianism, otherwise all about doing the right thing and knowing your place, was used at various points in history to incite against people who saw the world differently.
There were plenty of Joe Secular who stuck to inflexible ideas of nation, race, etc. Believe it or not, most white supremacist arguments don't have anything to do with anything from the Bible, for example. There are plenty of secular guys who'll view you as brainwashed and just put up their mental defenses, if you even try to bring up scientific arguments that, say, blacks aren't some inferior race bent on enslaving us all. Or you'll find that no amout of logic will dislodge some people from their mysoginist view of women being inferior, or conversely you'll have a hard time dislodging a few women from their view than men are Satan clones. Etc.
As long as you can paint the world in an "us vs them" theme, with a clearly drawn line between "us" and "them", there'll always be people who are all too eager to fight for the "us" group. And people more than eager to get them frenzied by painting the "us" group as being under attack by the "them" group.
But the real problem is: you're confusing "secular" with "rational", making the whole argument circular, or one roundabout case of "begging the question."
The truth is, the average person is very capable of logic, but not very inclined to use it spontaneously. It doesn't matter if it's a secular or religious guy or gal. Most people start from "what I wish were true" or "what I want for christmas" and then work backwards to a suitable justification for that. That's where they appear illogical, incidentally. But the real thing I'm getting at: if you confront their argument with irefutable logic, most will just back up into painting _you_ as the stupid or ilogical one for disagreeing with their bogus excuse. Their logic must be good, because it leads to where they want to get, and if you don't get to the same conclusion, then there's something wrong with _your_ brain.
Religion is one easy application of it, since we all want to live for ever and/or to feel special. So people start from "I want to go to heaven and live for ever" and work their way backwards to building some axioms (e.g., "christianity is absolute truth") to reach that pre-determined condition.
But it's not limited to religion by any means. The same can apply to people justifying stuff like "why I should get a sports car" or "why everyone should program in my favourite pet language so I don't have to learn a new one" or "why someone else should make less money so I can make more" or whatever. In fact, the same _does_ apply every bloody day, to almost everyone around you.
"Women are ilogical" vs "men are idiots" rants are probably the easiest example of exactly this thing in action. Guy wants X, woman wants Y, they both built their bogus rationales as to why they deserve their prize, and why the other should get less to make that possible. If the woman points the flaw in the guy's justification for blowing their savings on X, what do you get? "Women are ilogical." Guy points out the flaw in the woman's rationale? "Guys are such idiots." Neither listens carefully to the other's logic and corrects the flaw in theirs.
But you can find the same in action in nerds-vs-beancounters holy wars, holy wars about programming languages, etc. It's the default modus operandi for most of us, most of the time. "Logic" is just a fancy word for a string of fallacies leading to whatever we wish it to lead to. And if anyone points out flaws in it, they're ilogical and must be ignored or shut up.
There you go. An all-secular example that happens jolly well between secular people.
Again, religion _is_ an easy case, because when that wishful thinking is something you _really_ want (e.g., eternal life), then that conclusion just becomes all the more imovable and they're all the more likely to try to stop you from poking holes in the bogus rationale leading to it. But again, it can and does happen, with just about everything else.
Well, the word "specific" must have confused me, especially in the context of a thread which once again degenerated into Islam-bashing and guilt by association fallacies. Sorry about the misunderstanding then.
No, it's usually because people usually have no clue about what other religions did. So they have religion X for which they know evil acts A, B and C, and religion Y about which they don't know jack. So they do a jump to conclusions that religion Y was all saintly, harmonious and benevolent.
If you look at it deeper, yes, the GP is right, virtually _any_ religion that existed prior to the 20'th century at all, has been perverted into justifying some atrocities -- or at least turning a blind eye to them.
E.g., taoism is all enlightened and all about harmony and doing the right thing... but caused one of the bloodiest revolts in recorded history.
E.g., shintoism and generally the Japanese view of the world is all about purity, duty, respecting the spirits, avoiding murder and generally doing the right thing... but the mindset around it is what _caused_ such massacres of civillians as the Rape Of Nanjing or the Japanese atrocities against prisoners and civillians in WW2. The rationale was that since the enemy didn't do what the Japanese philosophy demands (e.g., fighting to the last breath, regardless of odds), they lost their right to be called humans, and can be treated like cattle. E.g., the fact that the Chinese soldiers discarded their uniforms and tried to hide among civillians, to escape the Japanese atrocities, was seen as such a breach of what a true human should do, that they and the whole city deserved nothing less than mass slaughter.
E.g., Tibetan buddhism is all enlightened and all about scoring karma points for your reincarnation... but has been a justification for the most abject slavery of most of their population. The justification being that if you were born a slave, well, you deserve that and it's your punishment for your evil deeds in a past life. So you had a religion which preached benevolence to your fellow man, and a theocratic caste treating their fellow man like shit in its name. Go figure that one out.
The religion may not have _demanded_ such massacres, and there may not have been a "pope" to decree it, but that particular view of the world was distorted into basically, "anyone who doesn't see the world exactly like us, deserves death." Go figure.
E.g., look at any "enlightened" and "noble savage" shamanistic or animistic cults, and you'll find a history of endemic warfare and slaughter, where generations after generations of young warriors are sent to rape and pillage under the shaman's blessing and guidance. In fact, the very first depictions of warfare we have on cave walls -- interestingly enough coinciding with the invention of missile weapons -- show groups of archers shooting at each other, each lead by some shaman with some holy symbol. That's how the history of human organized warfare _started_.
And I'm not even getting into ancient religions demanding a stream of human sacrifices and the like.
Look as far back as the first religious hymns we have, e.g., The Exaltation of Innana by her high priestess Enheduanna, and you'll find a disturbingly blood-thirsty girl praising her Goddess for turning major rivers red with the blood of her enemies -- soldiers and innocent bystanders alike -- and destroying their crops. That's early human religion for you.
So, pray tell, which religions do you have in mind, which _didn't_ facilitate a few choice atrocities? Again, only those which existed for any length of time, please, not late 20'th century new age cults or jokes like Pastafarianism.
I guess the followers of Objective C would be akin to the Ebionites then. An ancient cult which insisted that they know what the New Testament (Java in TFA) really should be like, to the point where they accuse the mainstream's apostles of apostasy. Everyone else calls them heretics. Chances are you weren're even aware of them or their beliefs until you stumble upon The Da Vinci Code. Or upon the code of a Mac-owning co-worker who ignores the sacred style guide and writes methods like "setValueForKey(Object value, String key)" (instead of first key and then value, like everyone else) and insists that it's the rest of you who've been doing it wrong all along.
What, you had _pictures_ on the walls? You young 'uns don't know how good you had it. Back in my day we just had the description. And were grateful even for that.