It's even crappier. We already know know about the normal polygraphs that they don't really work. They just mention someone's reaction to stress, and from there it's a leap of faith that "lying emotional stress". The latter just isn't so.
1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?
As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever. It seems to store more like the description of a scene, and just ad-lib the details that it forgot. Over time you'd forget that, say, the guy was wearing a blue shirt, or maybe that detail never even made it into permanent memory in the first place. But if you try too hard to remember it, it will just give you some best guess. Like that he was wearing a black shirt.
2. We know that people can train to not feel much emotion about lying, and to psychopaths it even comes naturally. So even measuring their pulse and blood pressure and everything directly, you just can't tell that they're lying.
Basically we're relying there on the false idea that everyone was educated that it's not nice to lie, and everyone therefore has a hard time telling one and is feeling severely guilty about it. Which is false from start to finish. E.g., speaking of education, we know that some people's upbringing just taught them that it's perfectly _normal_ and indeed _logical_ to tell a lie, if the alternative is a savage beating by your father. They won't feel any guilt extrapolating from there to lying to save their arse from jail.
3. That emotional stress someone is feeling, can be for a bazillion other causes.
E.g., because the topic is painful to them for other reasons. A rape victim being the witness in someone else's rape trial might experience severe stress just thinking about it, whether they tell the truth or not. A PTSD sufferer will be in a disproportionate amount of stress when recounting the event that caused it, or anything that reminds them of it. So, you know, some grandpa who fought in Vietnam and still wakes up in cold sweat after dreaming of it, would register as shamelessly lying when they tell you about the atrocities of war. Etc.
E.g., particularly bad cases of repressed memories and/or the results of some particularly hard to justify cognitive dissonance, can cause a disproportionate emotional responses when you're forced to think or talk about something which challenges them. You see that not only in polygraph tests. A lot of people who are rabidly against something are really just against you challenging their already decided model of the world. The less of an actual justification they have to support that position, other than "but my daddy said so", actually the harder it can be to get them to think logically about it.
Etc.
Basically let's just say there are good reasons why that test can't be demanded in court.
So now we have something that promises to test one parameter from a distance, instead of several measured directly, and which must correlate in certain ways to be considered a "yep, he's lying" proof. It's basically adding one more indirection step to that already weak inference chain. But even if the correlation between skin pores and all those parameters were that infallible, you're back to "stress he's lying", which is already known to be false even measured up close with electrodes.
Just to go through that list and tell you from first hand experience how non-obvious that can be to some people:
1. RELY ON CRITICS
I've actually been in places where they treat you like an Enemy Of The People criticizing the Communist Party, if you dare question the tiniest detail of their masterpiece. Heck, half the industry still is in a mind that deleting posts and suspending accounts is the right way to deal with bug reports. Sony is still infamous for beaming into space the people protesting one of their most heavy-handed and ill-advised ban-sprees.
Others just let the fanboys run amok and call everyone names if they report a bug or make a sugestion.
Heck, I've worked in one place where even internal criticisms didn't make it past the designer's continent-sized ego.
2. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT
It should be obvious, but it isn't. I've seen for example FPS where the demos were recorded in god mode. That should have been obvious right there that even the devs can't play it on the normal difficulty setting. It's one of the things that should give one pause for thought, you know: if playing the game as you ship it isn't funny even for you, then why inflict it on the rest of the world like that?
3. MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS
Again, it should be obvious, but it isn't. E.g., one syndrome of many games is to rush to do an expansion pack, while the old crap is left as it is.
But more importantly, it really ties in with #1 and #2 above. What it says there is that long before the customers even see the product, they have internal teams trying to find out what sucks about it. In an industry which routinely ignores even the beta-testers' bug reports, that would explain why Blizzard's games are launched more finshed and polished than other games get after a dozen patches.
4. GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Basically what TFA there really says, is: if your co-workers or testers say "dude, that idea sucks", then listen to them. In fact, see #3, encourage them to be honest and think about which stuff sounds good and which doesn't.
As an example of where that obviously wasn't the case, take SWG's NGE. There's (among many other blunders) a quest for example whose reward is a scope for a sword. Worse yet, it's really a potion, because they don't have item slots and such, so you can't actually attach it to the sword. The very fact that someone just shrugged and coded it like that, tells me that any kind of internal review or criticism, is non-existent or doesn't work. In any normal place, one of the guys who has to script, review or test it, would go "excuse me? am I the only one who thinks it's freaking stupid?" That noone listened, or maybe even they felt so much like a cog with a quota that they didn't even bother reporting it, speaks volumes.
Similarly in EQ2 there still are such dumb quests in the game as killing bears and deer to see if they stole a book. I mean, FFS, what would they do with it and where would they keep it? And then you get to kill your faction's own foresters to see if they stole the book. And that's the good faction, btw. And later you have to beat up badgers until they tell you where a sage is. (And it's not a druid quest or anything.) You have stuff like giving yourself a quest to avenge a knight, then digging up his tomb and taking his shield as a reward. You have stuff like giving yourself quests, and then giving yourself some money and an item as a reward. How schizophrenic is that? Etc, etc, etc. That that kind of mass-produced drivel even made it into the game at all, much less survived there since launch, tells me that their internal review process doesn't work. Or maybe reviews only if you met your quota of lines of script/code.
And again, I've been in one place myself where ideas were a one way street, from the High Priest... err... designer to us peons, and it wasn't the peons' job to criticize them.
You'd be surprised how non-obvious it is to some people exactly wth Blizzard did right, even when it's spelled out for them.
E.g., Sony has been in a frenzy to copy the secret sauce of WoW into their own games for years, but it mostly resulted in blunders of epic proportions. Yes, eventually they got some things right-ish by sheer trial an error, but it's been a lot of trial an error, and a lot of changing people's characters and skills completely, for no good reason.
Just as one example, and I'll deliberately pick a mild one, because I'm not trying to start a flame war: the rested xp bonus in WoW. It's been discussed to death since WoW beta, and spelled out repeatedly why it's there and what effects it has, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer to copy it. Right? Well, Sony's first attempt was to go, basically, "oh, yeah? Well, we'll give ten times more in EQ2! And not make you go to an inn either!" So effectively, unless you were in a group all the time and/or playing 16 hours a day, the rested time would rise faster than you could possibly use it. Even as you'd run to the next mob in the middle of nowhere, you'd gain at least half of what you used on the last mob.
Now it's definitely not game-breaking. I did say I'd pick a mild one. And, hey, I'm not gonna say "no" to free xp. But it missed the point by a mile.
As a less mild example, Sony seems to have done a lot of over-simplification to their games (arguably even the much maligned and surrealistic SWG NGE) based on their and their fanboys' view that, surely, WoW only gets so many people because it's simplistic stuff for retards. Actually it's the contrary. WoW is a more complex game by far, and that makes it more interesting. It's intuitive and has a gentle learning curve, as it feeds you that complexity gently and gradually, but that's very different from being oversimplified. Essentially, Sony lobotomized their games, well at least SWG is as good as lobotomized, based on not understanding what they're trying to copy.
So, yes, bleeding obvious as that stuff might seem to _you_, I'd say it's good to see someone spell it out. Because some people seem that unable to comprehend it on their own.
I actually play both, so, well, I have a harder time believing that kind of a blanket extrapolation. It's not just me, I've grouped with hundreds of people from both the USA and EU servers, and not once have I heard someone complaining that the lack of ads kills their mood. Even on the boards, I haven't seen that complaint popping up before, though maybe I just missed one thread or another. More tellingly, you yourself don't link to a thread where people have complained about lack of ads, you link to various "oh well, I don't mind it" responses once NCSoft already announced ads.
I've seen _lots_ of complaints along the years since launch, ranging from legitimate gripes to the (mandatory lately) "but I have a good fallacy for why Stalkers should be 100% undetectable, have perma-Elude and an unblockable attack that kills any player in one hit." I've heard people being quite vocal about some of them. Again, both on the forum and in-game. Ads? I can't say I've had anyone going "man, this lack of ads is depressing already" in my groups.
I know people who've left because of one complaint or another, some of them in RL too. (I tried to proselytize a bit, what can I say?) Heck, one left because he got ganked by level 6 Hellions when he was sent to some mission there as a level 2. Maybe frivolous to you or me, but there you go. I know one who didn't like how the mouse worked. A couple went "well, I guess it's ok, but I like medieval stuff; modern cities are boring." Etc. I don't remember even one mentioning that the lack of ads ruined their mood.
Now I'm not saying that I speak for all players either, but, as tiny unrepresentative samples go, I don't think mine is any smaller than yours;)
At any rate, I find that "a significant number of CoH and CoV players have been ASKING for in-game ads from real-world companies" trips my suspension of disbelief majorly. Unless you measure "significant" as in, "one guy started a thread and half a dozen other guys dropped a comment too." 'Cause, you know, out of a hundred and fifty thousand players, that's _so_ significant a number of players;)
I'll take a wild guess that, much more likely, you probably have a bit of a spread there. _Some_ players maybe want advertising. Maybe. _Some_, like in any other game, are fanboys who live to serve their master, so of course they'd cheer even if NCSoft announced giving them a kick in the balls. Anything for the master. _Some_ of us will _tolerate_ it, but that's about it. I'm in that category myself. And I'm sure _some_ players will find it offensive.
Since you mention the forums, I find that, same as any other game forum, it's even used at all by a tiny minority of the players. And a tiny minority of those accounts for most posts.
And there's always some mandatory circle-jerk clique pretending to speak for everyone else, as if they were there in some elected position, and not via merely being the only ones who have time for prom-queen games of forum popularity. These are an even smaller minority.
Again, like in any other game, I'm not singling out COH/COV in any way. Equally on WoW a tiny minority of the players account for most posts. And Slashdot isn't really representing everyone who works in IT. And so on. Some have grown too big to be dominated by just one group, some not, but don't mistake "loudest minority" for "significant number of those people" on any of them.
But again, I can vouch for that first hand in COH's case. And if you'll peruse the same thread you linked, there are actually extremely few names in it. And a few people whose nickname repeats every 2 to 6 messages. Sorry, that's not a representative sample, it's an exercise in borderline group think.
So you have a rather tiny sample from which to extrapolate "what players want." All you have there is that a tiny minority wanted ads. They're not elected to speak for the rest of the players, so it's just their own opinion. We don't really know what everyone else wants. Whethe
Some games are parodies and not to be taken seriously in the first place. Sure, go ahead and spam them with "for a few ducats your member could be as big as the Spanish Armada" ads, for all I care.
Some games were not parodies in the first place, and it would trip suspension of disbelief majorly. A lot of MMOs and generally RPGs went through a lot of effort to write a convincing backstory for their world, with lore quests, and everything.
E.g., much as I thoroughly disliked that game anyway, "ye olde Coke" ads would look thoroughly out of place in EQ2. They'd look equally out of place in Oblivion, or Neverwinter Nights, or Lord Of The Rings Online. There are mountains of lore about those games' universes, and Coca Cola or McDonalds ads, or for that matter _any_ ads, just don't fit there.
Again, I see basically a split between games where ads could work, and games where ads wouldn't work.
And honestly, I don't see it as any better if suddenly all games become Knights Of Xentar, Superhero League Of Hoboken, and other such fine parodies.
There's nothing wrong with them as such, but I quite like some variety anyway. I don't see anything particularly thrilling about a future where whole settings and genres go the way of the dodo, or are turned into caricatures of their former self.
COH happens in a modern day metropolis. Ads and billboards aren't out of place. You kinda expect them there.
In fact, the game already _had_ billboards and posters from day 1, except they were mildly funny parodies instead of actual ads. For example stuff like ads for lawyers getting the villains out of jail after your superhero toon arrests them, or for some fictional in-game companies like Crey Industries, etc.
Replacing an ad for Crey with an ad for Microsoft, wouldn't seem out of place at all. (And doubly so for a lot of us nerds, since the Crey are a major supervillain group in the game;)
Or I wouldn't be even give it a second thought if there was a McDonald's in Galaxy City. I mean they already have fictional restaurants there, with funny names like "El Super Mexicano."
The same can't be said for a lot of other settings and genres, though. E.g., it would feel awfully weird to have billboards for IBM and Coca Cola along the road to Darnassus in WOW.
And that's really what I'm fearing. That it might re-sort genres and settings according to how fit they are for ads.
Remember that we already _had_ such an effect. Adventure games were still popular games, and that market was actually _growing_ when everyone dropped them like a hot potato in the 90's. Why? Because making a simplistic FPS was _much_ cheaper. Even if you sold less copies than an adventure, you'd still make more profit.
I can see "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place" repeating that history.
Adventures eventually made a comeback, because, basically, people eventually came to expect the same level of scripting and animations in a FPS as in an adventure. So the price difference vanished.
The same might never happen in the case of "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place." Already all else is equal. Only one of them can get more money. Short of advertisers pulling out, it stays that way.
So I fear that we _might_ slide towards every game happening in a city, or a race-track, or along of big billboard-overdosed highway. And that doesn't sound too great.
Not really. They had quite a bit of horsepower on their chips to add hardware acceleration to that processing. Now I'm not saying that they're necessarily a good company, or good drivers, and the latency is AFAIK more fit for games than for recording music in real time anyway. Just pointing out that the "The SB probably does it all in software anyway" assumption is false. Out of the games-oriented consumer-level cards, theirs actually do the least in software by far.
Unless you're talking about a different Hollywood, originality there had already died, IIRC, in the 50's, when they proclaimed the Monomyth as their One True Religion. Ok, One True Way To Write A Story.
It's not just that the general structure is set in stone, they've long been at the point where they prescribe in exactly which minute of the movie each twist will happen. If your movie is X minutes long, by jove, you have to have to reach the first milestone in that script in exactly minute Y.
Honestly, you could probably get away with bigger deviations from the Qur'an (and I chose that as an example, because you're not even supposed to translate it, lest that corrupts the meaning) than from the sacrosanct Monomyth.
So is _any_ movie original nowadays? Hollywood essentially has 1, maximum 2, sacred scripts per genre that the High Priests approved (all in turn based on the Monomyth), and each movie has to use exactly those. Fill in your own character names and locations, and you have a pre-made script for your movie. I don't know why they don't make a script generator with drop-down combo-boxes yet. I mean, that's the result anyway.
So from the other end of this, as a viewer, once you've figured out which of the sacred scripts they used, and such details as who's protagonist, who's antagonist, and who's the love interest, you can accurately know who'll die in what minute and roughly what twists will the plot have. Again, and in which minute they'll happen.
And I'm not just talking about that as a theoretical possibility or hyperbole, but speak very literally and from first-hand experience. By high school I only needed the first 10 minutes of almost any movie, to tell you what's going to happen until the end. And not as in "in retrospect I should have seen that coming", but as in, literally, I'd bet someone that I can tell them exactly what happens in the rest of the movie. I did it with Mom so often, that eventually she too got into that game. It was ages before I read about the Monomyth too, and it just finally told me a name for the phenomenon I was seeing.
And, I'm, you know, just an average Joe. I'm certainly not the biggest genius on the planet or anything. I can't be the only one who noticed that they're using the same scripts over and over again, only with the character and town names changed. Even if not everyone actually reverse-engineered it all the way back to the one script per genre they're using, I'd expect there must be enough people coming out of a cinema with the gut feeling that they've seen the same movie before. Repeatedly.
Is that originality? Sure, each movie was based on a different book, but it had been digested and shit into the same mold. Even if you'd find a writer who still can write a non-monomyth novel nowadays (in itself a challenge, after so many decades of courses, seminars and colleges teaching everyone how to write only clones of that script), a screenplay writer would slave over it and mangle it into fitting the sacrosanct pre-approved shape.
By Jove, a trilogy might just be the right thing. It worked so well before, after all. I can just see it.
And then they make 3 prequels telling the story of what the Atreides family was doing before they came to Arrakis, and what a whiny kid Paul was before he became Muad'Dib, right? Or maybe, about how the Harkonen weren't that bad guys, and the Atreides were't that good. And at the end they can have a lightsab... err, wait, wrong movie, this is the one with the voice amplifiers... right, at the end they can have screaming fits at each other while surfing on lava. It would be so awesome.
Oh, wait, they're not putting George Lucas in charge;)
Well, that was my problem with David Lynch's movie, basically. It's like an abbreviated summary of the book. Actually, probably a better way to explain it, would be Woody Allen quote: "Woody Allen I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." That's just about it.
If you had already read the book, I guess it wasn't a bad movie. It had just enough visual clues to let your memory do the rest. So you can look an go, "ooh, I know, this is the Gom Jabbar sequence", and you'd already know what led there, where it goes from there, and why is that important. While the movie would move to the next scene and give you yet another piece, and again, it would be mostly up to your memory to fill in the gap and put the new scene in context too.
I, however, must have been one of the few who saw the movie before reading the book. In fact, I got the book only because the movie didn't make that much sense at times, and certainly didn't leave me with the awe for Dune that everyone else semed to have. (I know, I know, I'll hand in my nerd card now;) It wasn't a _bad_ movie per se, but in retrospect it just wasn't Dune. It was a mildly SF-themed action movie, where some guys fought for some desert planet, for some resource those guys had. And not only it was just as superficial as any other action movie (it could have been "Rambo Does Iraq" just as well), but the plot seemed a little bit condensed and rushed through even by action movie standards. Everything that made it... well, made it _Dune_, was at best hinted at, and sometimes it came via short scenes that didn't seem to make that much sense or have much relevance for the rest of the movie.
Again, in retrospect I can see how you'd figure it out if you had read the book already, and only used the movie as a visual summary. Without that background, I wasn't impressed much.
Can someone else do better? Heck if I know, to be honest. One can only hope. It's certainly impossible to do justice to the whole Dune story, you're right in that aspect. But maybe he can make a movie that at least makes sense on its own.
Just a funny thought: there's a reason why it's called "police state", and not "army state".
The thing is, virtually no dictatorship on Earth used the army as police, or not for more than some quick squashing some rebellion. The rest of the time, they had the police keep the population under control.
E.g., the USSR and the Eastern Europe bloc, were _not_ policed by the army. From checking your drivers' license, to knocking your door down and dragging you to Siberia, they had the _police_ do it. Ok, so ironically they called it the "workers' and peasants' militia", but, really, it was a (very oppressive) police force by any other name and filled exactly the place and role of the tsar's old police force. And if you asked any army officer from that part of the world, they'd be very very quick to point out that they're a very different thing from the police.
Even during the madness of Stalin's mass deportations and executions, it wasn't the _army_ doing that. It was the NKVD, which was an entirely different organization and department. The only relationship they had to the army most of the time was that the MKVD commissars terrorized the army too, not only the civillians. Initially they also handled military counter-intelligence, but mostly because Stalin didn't trust the army enough to let them handle it, and in 1941 the army finally got its counter-intelligence back.
E.g., at the risk of Goodwinning it, in Nazi Germany, it wasn't the army acting as a police either. Yes, I know, in Hollywood movies you see the stereotype of Wehrmacht soldiers asking for your papers at every crossroad, and think that that's the definition of a police state. Well, no, that kind of roadblocks and soldiers asking for papers mostly happened when you tried to get into military installations or get too close to the front line.
Most citizens of the Third Reich didn't see the army acting as police either. They had the regular police and the secret state police (Gestapo) doing most of the internal policing. If someone kicked your door in for being a dissident, it _never_ was the Wehrmacht (equivalent of the US Army) doing it. It would be the police, the Gestapo, or in some cases one of the paramilitary organizations that the Nazis created. The SS, much as it tried hard to be and look like the elite branch of the Army, were really a parallel paramilitary organization.
Etc.
So basically if you're going to wait until you see something as unlikely as soldiers acting as police, to start asking your rights back... heh... you could just as well ask for Jesus to come back and have a sex change operation.
Now I'll refrain from commenting on whether you're turning into a police state or not yet. But I _am_ saying, that _if_ that ever happens, heh, you've chosen the awfully wrong symptoms to recognize it by.
How many gigabytes was it again, after which they try to demonize you as some great evil predator that ruins everyone else's Internet? I mean, yippee. You get 50 MB/s and you get disconnected if you use it for an hour.
Heh, well, yes, it was just the long and roundabout version of, "In the West you know where to find a party on a Saturday night, in Soviet Russia the Party knows where to find you.";)
I guess it just shows that explaining a joke makes it not funny any more;)
1. Actually, it's not just an Asian phenomenon. Western Europe too once had their own small villages, and their own village gossips, and their own self-elected pillars of the community making it their business to tell you how to think and what to do.
I guess the best way to explain it, is via Adlai Stevenson's "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." For millenia, even in Western Europe and even early USA it wasn't. From Socrates being executed for making himself unpopular, through the witch hunts of the middle ages (even the early Inquisition rules recognzed that some people will be denounced as heretics just because someone hated them enough), to well into the 18'th century, we had just that: it just wasn't safe to be unpopular. Whether you lived or died, depended on your standing in the community. And that sadly included letting some busybodies poke their nose into your life, or they could turn everyone else against you, and you could get hurt badly that way.
It was a long and painful transition to the point where we could start telling the busybodies and self-elected "pillars of the community" to just shut up and go fuck themselves with a cactus. You're now seeing the result of that transition in the west. But the initial state, if you went several hundreds of years in the past, would be no different in the western world either.
But the real point is, that when we finally had that oportunity to essentially go, "fuck off, my life is my own private business", we did it.
Or if you go to the east from there, by the time you get to, say, the Balkans, you'll see that that kind of gossip-driven-community persisted well into the 20'th century in some places. They too got rid of it as soon as they could.
So I'll go on a limb and guess that it's not some peculiar and random quirk of Western culture, but just a universal human trait. Humans will put up with someone else poking into their lives when they _have_ to, but as soon as they have the oportunity to get rid of that, they actually very much like to have a _private_ life instead.
And I'll guess that the Asians are nothing else than, you know, humans too. Sure, in some places in Asia they still are saddled with a culture where your life and worth depend on your "face" in the community. It may take a while to move away from there, but I'll guess that given enough time and the oportunty, they too will turn out to prefer the same things.
And I think we're already seeing them moving in that direction. From what I'm told, China is already gradually turning into a much more western-style society. They're just humans too.
2. Even in public, gossip-driven societies, people tend to have _some_ time to themselves. They might have to put up a "oh, I _love_ it when you poke your nose into my life" mask all day long, but then they have their evening with their family, or with their hobby, or whatever, and can just be themselves for a short while. Then they're ready for another round of that silly groupthink game.
And I'm guessing that if you took even that break away from them, if you put them in a situation where even their computer and their TV and their tires (see the other front page story) spied on them day and night, it might be a lot more stressful than you think. Even in Asia. In fact probably _especially_ in Asia, where "face" still means so much for a lot of people, and where your life could be completely and irreversibly ruined by some kinds of information being leaked.
1. people change their behaviour when they think they're watched. Doubly so when it's recorded and they're not even sure when it'll be used, how, and in which way it'll bite them in the arse.
My favourite example is about the USSR. Everyone knows the brutality of Stalin's NKVD and about the Gulag, but that got toned down a lot after Stalin. Mostly because it was cheaper and more effective to just give people the impression that everything they say or do goes into some dossier, and they have no idea when it'll be used against them or how. Maybe it'll be the GULAG, but maybe they'll never travel abroad again, or maybe their kid won't ever get a promotion because of what their father said, or God knows what else. Or maybe nothing will ever happen, but there's no way to know.
That uncertainty is actually scarier than immediate repression. It removes the feedback. With Stalin's NKVD, you could know pretty soon whether they have anything against you or not. With something that might, or might not happen, and might take a decade or two to, you just don't know.
The bigger effect is that it made people distrust each other, and thus unlikely to get organized. If comrade Piotr swears at the Party, how do you know if he isn't some agent provocateur trying to get you to say something you'll regret. And even if he isn't, do you want it on your record that you hang out with a disgruntled enemy of the people? Best avoid going drinking with Piotr in the future.
Of course, you could point out, that was only because Big Brother there had not only ears, but also an arm with a whip and an inclination to use it. Well one way or another disincentives exist just as well in a free society, and in the West we're all the more eager to accept them if they're wielded by the private industry instead of the state.
E.g., just like in Soviet Russia you might have feared that you'll never get a well paid job if you have on your record that you're a maladjusted malcontent, the exact same can happen in the west too, in a world where employers routinely google their employees. Even if your current boss doesn't mind it, how do you know if the next job interview doesn't get influenced by something you said or did?
E.g., to get to more mundane western worries, if you're, say, in a particularly bigotted town in the Bible Belt, do you want your next employer to know that you're surfing for gay porn? Most people even if they're not particularly secretive about either being gay or surfing for porn, don't wear "I download gay porn" on a badge at a job interview either.
This whole data collection, and the possibility that it'll get leaked, sold to the highest bidder, or just given as a "gift to the community" like the infamous AOL search data, is enough to make a lot of people think twice about what they do. Even if it's not antisocial per se. Better not trip someone's sensitivities the wrong way, and all that.
(And, yes, I know, maybe _you_ are brave and fearless and never give in, bla, bla, bla. The vast majority of others aren't. That's the problem.)
It can enforce a degree of conformism that's outright scary.
2. Data mining, especially the way Joe Sixpack doesn't even understand it, adds another layer of scariness to it all. You don't know over what inferences they'll get to you, or whether you'll be a bystander casualty of one.
Basically the same as you wouldn't go into a black or jewish boss's office carrying some white supremacist magazine under your arm. Chances are the "pays to read that kind of thing => probably is a racist" inference won't help your career much. So even the real bigoted guys still wouldn't do it.
Data mining promises to make the same kind of inferences from other more mundane things. That even much more innocent things could finger you as something you'd rather not proclaim yourself as, or even genuinely aren't.
E.g., what if some data mining survey says that employees drinking Coca Cola are twice as loyal to the
Last I've seen some numbers, it was closer to 50-50 between civillians and soldiers. That's including the 5 to 8 million USSR civillians killed in the Holocaust. Well, ok, maybe closer to 60-40, but still, the military deaths do come relatively close AFAIK. Still, I see your point.
But more importantly, you illustrate an aspect that I failed to: that it took some senseless mass murders of epic proportion to come even to 13.71% number. If that senseless extermination policy on one side and Stalin's own terror on the other, didn't exist, the casualties of modern war would look even more tame compared to tribal warfare. Without all that senseless genocide, i.e., what it would have been if it were just the war alone, the toll of that war would probably have been more like 6% for the USSR. By contrast, your average chance to die by arrow, spear or tomahawk in tribal warfare instead of old age in your tent, could be as high as 60%. That's ten times higher. Mind boggles.
But again, even including a mass-murder of such proportions that it scared the world, we still arrive at merely a 1/5 of your chance to die in a tribal conflict, for some tribes.
That's the point I was trying to make. That compared to the stone-age tribesmen, even the most brutal modern war we've had, is actually less of a massacre. Even the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, don't come even close to the percentage of people killed with stone axes and stone-tipped arrows in tribal conflicts. I find that a scary thought.
It's even worse. Massacring buffaloes, well, I guess some animal rights people would be appalled, but it's really no worse than a modern slaughterhouse. (Though, granted, it does disprove the myth of the enlightened herbivore living in harmony with nature.)
The worse thing is: we have plenty of proof that they massacred each other just as well.
E.g., there are remains of a village in Sand Canyon Pueblo which was, effectively, exterminated by some attackers in the 13'th century. (I.e., centuries before those guys saw a white man at all.) The attackers literally slaughtered everyone where they could catch them, smashed whatever they could smash, and burned the village down. It was never re-occupied.
While that's admittedly a rather extreme example, simple raids to steal each other's food and women were a lot more common. As little as 13% of the tribes could count as "peaceful", in that they only raided their neighbours no more than once a year. So they killed a few, had a few of their own killed, life went on.
Plus, here's an interesting thought for the noble savage proponents: if those tribes were so peaceful and living in harmony, how'd they get a warrior culture in the first place? You don't get a seafaring culture if you're on a mountain top, and you don't get a warrior culture if you're a peaceful confederation of tribes.
Or long before Stonehenge or any contact with the white man, in Nubia there's a 12,000 year old cemetery where half the people had died of violence. It would be another 8 millennia or so until their conquest by Egypt, or 7 until Egypt itself got united by force, so it's hard to blame it on learning violence from the Egyptians.
Just about the only "bright" side is that there's little evidence of neolithic slavery. They just killed male prisoners. If you were lucky, they'd kill you quickly and eat you. If not, they'd slowly torture you to death. (The Iroquois, for example, among many others, were pretty good at it.)
Women were usually bounty of war, though, so I guess by modern standards it would count as sexual slavery. That practice continued all through the bronze age and early iron age (i..e., as late as ancient Greece and early Rome), by which time though it was properly filed as slavery. (Though still considered perfectly normal and civilized warfare.) Of course, the places which had remained tribal and largely stone age, continued it well after the fall of Rome.
The history of Europe and Middle East is funny too in that aspect, in that we have the iron age catastrophe. We still don't know exactly what happened there, but whole cities were razed (and some never recovered or were abandoned and never rebuilt), whole populations displaced or enslaved, and generally it's destruction on an unprecedented scale. Europe rushed into the iron age arguably prematurely (bronze was still tougher than early iron) because, whatever happened there, thoroughly disrupted the tin trade, and created a bronze shortage.
And for a parting thought, here's a funny one: population losses in modern warfare are measured in single digit percent. The USA lost some 0.32% of its population in WW2, the UK 0.94%, Germany lost a whopping 10.47%, and the big hit was the USSR with a whole 13.71%. (And in the USSR, probably half of them were due to Stalin's catastrophic leadership, so they could have been avoided.) The average for all countries involved is 3.70%.
Well that's peanuts compared to tribal warfare. By tribal warfare standards, anywhere between 25% and 60% of the population would be killed in the nearly continuous raids and fighting. Roll that around in your head. You'd be anywhere between 2 and 5 times more likely to die in a war as a member of some "noble savage" tribe, than in the USSR during WW2.
Heck, even Leningrad in 3 years of siege, famine and bombing, lost about a third of its population. And we see that as a major tragedy. (And rightfully so.) Now think this: in many tribes you'd be more likely to be killed in tribal war, than if you happened to be in Leningrad in WW2. Now that's a scary thought.
Presumably because noone knows wtf ball lightning even is. The hypothesised explanations include such stuff as it being essentially a ball of burning silica, and a few other things which aren't even, strictly speaking, lightning. As in, an electrical discharge.
So basically we don't _have_ a model for that one at all, and that's a bit mandatory for a simulation.
To make things worse, ball lightning is (compared to regular one) a very rare and unpredictable phenomenon. You can pretty much rely on the next thunderstorm to provide you with a bunch of regular lightning to study. (Fly your kite in it, like Franklin, for example.) Ball lightning is harder to track down and study. You don't know when or where it will happen.
Well, I'd be more curious about how do they compress it.
Following the link in the summary seemed to suggest that they get some streams which are already highly compressed, and add their own compression on top. Which is kinda easy to believe, since I don't think they're getting a huge uncompressed stream from anyone.
In that case, here's the fun part: no matter with what they re-encode it, it will just add more artifacts on top of the existing ones.
Once you get a lossy compressed stream, you can't get back an 100% accurate original stream from it to start anew with. If it were possible to get the exact original image, it would be called "lossless" instead.
So let's say one pixel was originally, say, royal blue and ended up prussian blue instead, after the lossy compression. That's it. The original shade is gone for ever. If you re-encode that stream to another codec, you now start from prussian blue and mangle it some more from there. There is no way for the second encoding to know what the original colours were, only what they look like after decoding the original lossy compression.
IOW, if they received a highly-compressed MPEG-2 stream and re-encode it to H.264, the image isn't going to get any better. They'll just degrade it a little more.
So IMHO the right thing to do is to just freakin' leave it alone, if they get it in an already compressed format.
The 386 version of Windows _2.0_ could already multitask DOS programs well. You could stuff several DOS programs in windows and have them run pretty well side by side.
Which was what mattered at the time, really, since there weren't many Windows programs out yet.
At any rate, that's what I meant by "legacy applications." At that time, there wasn't much else to count as "legacy":P
(Windows 2.0 apps didn't count as "legacy" yet. They were quite the bleeding edge of technology, in fact.)
And it was more than OS/2, or GEM, or whatever could do yet. The only one that comes to mind which could do that too, was DesqView, but it was a DOS text-mode only thing.
E.g., when some people I knew switched the whole company from WordPerfect to MS Word, much against my zealotry at the time. The fact is, the first attempts at WP For Windows sucked hairy donkey balls. Word might not have been a shiny gold nugget, but compared to WP it was at least like polished lead compared to a turd.
E.g., Windows itself gained a lot of market share fast back in the day, because the 386 version was pretty much the only thing that combined (A) preemptive multitasking, at least for legacy apps, (B) a GUI, unpolished as that might have been, and (C) compatibility with those legacy apps. And maybe (D) a price you can actually afford, as opposed to buying an ultra-expensive, and just as proprietary, Unix for that PC. There have been other attempts at one of the three, but they typically missed the other two.
Yes, I know, _nowadays_ Linux exists which fits all the bills and is a viable choice and all. But back then the competition actually had worse products than MS, sad as that may sound. Who was better than Windows? GEM with its max 4 windows and no support for using memory over 640k? The text-mode-only task-switching of DesqView? (Even DesqView/X was too little, too late. Way too late.) OS/2? Heh. Trust me, I used all those, I even was an OS/2 fanboy at one point, but looking back, I can see how Windows won on its own merits back then.
The last genuine competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2, and even that was a sad story. For a start it was a story of corporate schizophrenia, where half of IBM didn't want to use or sell the OS that the other half created and/or endorsed. But it was also a story of IBM ignoring the users' grievances. Year after year people complained that a single mis-behaved or crashed application can lock up the common event queue, and thus the whole computer. And year after year IBM stuck to its guns that that's the right way to do things, and generally STFU you bloody user. It was a story of such fuck-ups as IBM launching a version of OS/2 with much fanfare, and then discovering that if you were upgrading from a previous version, it would fuck up the config so badly that your newly installed OS wouldn't boot. (Or not make it to the desktop.) It was a story of IBM developer suport being non-existent. Much as we laugh at "Uncle Fester" Balmer's developers dance on the stage, it was a whole other message than IBM's. IBM at felt a lot more like "fuck off and stop trying to steal the market for our own apps for OS/2." Etc. And IBM lost. Why? Because, bloody sad as it sounds, their stuff was actually worse than MS's.
E.g., I remember being one of the last Netscape fanboys in a world which was quickly going IE, and Netscape's Mozilla team had gone in dada land for years reinventing skinned widget libraries instead of making a browser. The fact that everyone kept pointing out was that IE was head and shoulders above the buggy (and rapidly getting outdated) mess that was Nescape 4.x. Both being free, people preferred the MS one as (subjectively) better.
Etc.
I can even tell you the mistake you're making. You're seeing just the years after they became a monopoly, and when they actually could push people to buy just for compatibility sake. But you forget their years of actually fighting uphill in those markets. Before you could have people telling each other "get Word already because we all have it", you first have to convince enough people to ditch WordStar and WordPerfect, _in_ _spite_ of the fact that everyone else has them.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't excuse MS's monopolistic tactics or anything. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying you first have to have enough of a foothold before you can apply them. MS's monopoly isn't based on just one thing, it's an interlocking porcupine of pieces which need each other. It only starts working at all after you have at least a few such pieces which are the de-facto standard. And there must have been _some_ merit involved in getting at least those ramm
Off topic, but, heh, yeah, I know that feeling all too well. I'm not Ethan, but same idea.
Actually this guy was worse, if that's even possible. At least Ethan's coworker seems to have more than a CS story. Mine had exactly one.
Every day he'd play on the same map. No idea why, maybe he just got his best scores there or something. Every day he'd sneak behind the same warehouse, climb on the same ladder, drop through the same vent, crawl through the same pipe, drop in the same room, and shoot the guy camping in the corner. (CS fans probably recognize the map by now.) And then relate that in detail the next day. Every bloody day.
What started as "hmm, really? pretty clever that", ended up a case where my brain wanted to crawl out an ear and run for the hills. I can't even put into words how boring it can be to hear the exact same story, in the exact same sequence, the two hundredth time, over several months. But what really makes me cringe is the thought that he was actually enacting that repetition several dozen times a day, each day.
Actually, that's a lie: there was a second story, that of how he defended on that map.
I actually watched him do that once after hours. (Ok, so sometimes I'm too stupid to say "no.") So he quickly buys a gun and run in front of a vent some 6 ft above the ground, and starts jumping up and down in front of it. After about a minute, some enemy drops from the vent on the roof into that duct, my co-worker shoots him. Reloads and keeps hopping there in place, like a kangaroo. Next round, the same thing. Next round, the same thing. Ad infinitum, almost literally.
Two whole hours, he jumped up and down in front of a square grate. That's it.
I actually stood there and watched it for two hours, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. It was so monotonous and mind-numbing, that I was starting to fear I'm losing neurons just watching it. But, you know, I couldn't believe that someone would actually keep doing it. I expected him to go "ah, fuck it, let's do something else" any moment now. No. Round after round he bought his gun and ammo, ran to that vent, and hopped like a deranged kangaroo in place in front of it.
The only thing I can compare it, is that Charly Chaplin movie where he's at an assembly line and twists two screws every couple of seconds.
I won't even try to speculate about what kind of mind would find that entertaining to do, for several hours a day, every day, for months.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even crappier. We already know know about the normal polygraphs that they don't really work. They just mention someone's reaction to stress, and from there it's a leap of faith that "lying emotional stress". The latter just isn't so.
1. As you mention, what do you do about people who genuinely believe something bogus?
As a milder example, human memory isn't photographic, ever. It seems to store more like the description of a scene, and just ad-lib the details that it forgot. Over time you'd forget that, say, the guy was wearing a blue shirt, or maybe that detail never even made it into permanent memory in the first place. But if you try too hard to remember it, it will just give you some best guess. Like that he was wearing a black shirt.
2. We know that people can train to not feel much emotion about lying, and to psychopaths it even comes naturally. So even measuring their pulse and blood pressure and everything directly, you just can't tell that they're lying.
Basically we're relying there on the false idea that everyone was educated that it's not nice to lie, and everyone therefore has a hard time telling one and is feeling severely guilty about it. Which is false from start to finish. E.g., speaking of education, we know that some people's upbringing just taught them that it's perfectly _normal_ and indeed _logical_ to tell a lie, if the alternative is a savage beating by your father. They won't feel any guilt extrapolating from there to lying to save their arse from jail.
3. That emotional stress someone is feeling, can be for a bazillion other causes.
E.g., because the topic is painful to them for other reasons. A rape victim being the witness in someone else's rape trial might experience severe stress just thinking about it, whether they tell the truth or not. A PTSD sufferer will be in a disproportionate amount of stress when recounting the event that caused it, or anything that reminds them of it. So, you know, some grandpa who fought in Vietnam and still wakes up in cold sweat after dreaming of it, would register as shamelessly lying when they tell you about the atrocities of war. Etc.
E.g., particularly bad cases of repressed memories and/or the results of some particularly hard to justify cognitive dissonance, can cause a disproportionate emotional responses when you're forced to think or talk about something which challenges them. You see that not only in polygraph tests. A lot of people who are rabidly against something are really just against you challenging their already decided model of the world. The less of an actual justification they have to support that position, other than "but my daddy said so", actually the harder it can be to get them to think logically about it.
Etc.
Basically let's just say there are good reasons why that test can't be demanded in court.
So now we have something that promises to test one parameter from a distance, instead of several measured directly, and which must correlate in certain ways to be considered a "yep, he's lying" proof. It's basically adding one more indirection step to that already weak inference chain. But even if the correlation between skin pores and all those parameters were that infallible, you're back to "stress he's lying", which is already known to be false even measured up close with electrodes.
Just to go through that list and tell you from first hand experience how non-obvious that can be to some people:
1. RELY ON CRITICS
I've actually been in places where they treat you like an Enemy Of The People criticizing the Communist Party, if you dare question the tiniest detail of their masterpiece. Heck, half the industry still is in a mind that deleting posts and suspending accounts is the right way to deal with bug reports. Sony is still infamous for beaming into space the people protesting one of their most heavy-handed and ill-advised ban-sprees.
Others just let the fanboys run amok and call everyone names if they report a bug or make a sugestion.
Heck, I've worked in one place where even internal criticisms didn't make it past the designer's continent-sized ego.
2. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT
It should be obvious, but it isn't. I've seen for example FPS where the demos were recorded in god mode. That should have been obvious right there that even the devs can't play it on the normal difficulty setting. It's one of the things that should give one pause for thought, you know: if playing the game as you ship it isn't funny even for you, then why inflict it on the rest of the world like that?
3. MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS
Again, it should be obvious, but it isn't. E.g., one syndrome of many games is to rush to do an expansion pack, while the old crap is left as it is.
But more importantly, it really ties in with #1 and #2 above. What it says there is that long before the customers even see the product, they have internal teams trying to find out what sucks about it. In an industry which routinely ignores even the beta-testers' bug reports, that would explain why Blizzard's games are launched more finshed and polished than other games get after a dozen patches.
4. GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Basically what TFA there really says, is: if your co-workers or testers say "dude, that idea sucks", then listen to them. In fact, see #3, encourage them to be honest and think about which stuff sounds good and which doesn't.
As an example of where that obviously wasn't the case, take SWG's NGE. There's (among many other blunders) a quest for example whose reward is a scope for a sword. Worse yet, it's really a potion, because they don't have item slots and such, so you can't actually attach it to the sword. The very fact that someone just shrugged and coded it like that, tells me that any kind of internal review or criticism, is non-existent or doesn't work. In any normal place, one of the guys who has to script, review or test it, would go "excuse me? am I the only one who thinks it's freaking stupid?" That noone listened, or maybe even they felt so much like a cog with a quota that they didn't even bother reporting it, speaks volumes.
Similarly in EQ2 there still are such dumb quests in the game as killing bears and deer to see if they stole a book. I mean, FFS, what would they do with it and where would they keep it? And then you get to kill your faction's own foresters to see if they stole the book. And that's the good faction, btw. And later you have to beat up badgers until they tell you where a sage is. (And it's not a druid quest or anything.) You have stuff like giving yourself a quest to avenge a knight, then digging up his tomb and taking his shield as a reward. You have stuff like giving yourself quests, and then giving yourself some money and an item as a reward. How schizophrenic is that? Etc, etc, etc. That that kind of mass-produced drivel even made it into the game at all, much less survived there since launch, tells me that their internal review process doesn't work. Or maybe reviews only if you met your quota of lines of script/code.
And again, I've been in one place myself where ideas were a one way street, from the High Priest... err... designer to us peons, and it wasn't the peons' job to criticize them.
5. DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CUSTOMERS
Again, this should sound obvious, but it's not.
You'd be surprised how non-obvious it is to some people exactly wth Blizzard did right, even when it's spelled out for them.
E.g., Sony has been in a frenzy to copy the secret sauce of WoW into their own games for years, but it mostly resulted in blunders of epic proportions. Yes, eventually they got some things right-ish by sheer trial an error, but it's been a lot of trial an error, and a lot of changing people's characters and skills completely, for no good reason.
Just as one example, and I'll deliberately pick a mild one, because I'm not trying to start a flame war: the rested xp bonus in WoW. It's been discussed to death since WoW beta, and spelled out repeatedly why it's there and what effects it has, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer to copy it. Right? Well, Sony's first attempt was to go, basically, "oh, yeah? Well, we'll give ten times more in EQ2! And not make you go to an inn either!" So effectively, unless you were in a group all the time and/or playing 16 hours a day, the rested time would rise faster than you could possibly use it. Even as you'd run to the next mob in the middle of nowhere, you'd gain at least half of what you used on the last mob.
Now it's definitely not game-breaking. I did say I'd pick a mild one. And, hey, I'm not gonna say "no" to free xp. But it missed the point by a mile.
As a less mild example, Sony seems to have done a lot of over-simplification to their games (arguably even the much maligned and surrealistic SWG NGE) based on their and their fanboys' view that, surely, WoW only gets so many people because it's simplistic stuff for retards. Actually it's the contrary. WoW is a more complex game by far, and that makes it more interesting. It's intuitive and has a gentle learning curve, as it feeds you that complexity gently and gradually, but that's very different from being oversimplified. Essentially, Sony lobotomized their games, well at least SWG is as good as lobotomized, based on not understanding what they're trying to copy.
So, yes, bleeding obvious as that stuff might seem to _you_, I'd say it's good to see someone spell it out. Because some people seem that unable to comprehend it on their own.
I actually play both, so, well, I have a harder time believing that kind of a blanket extrapolation. It's not just me, I've grouped with hundreds of people from both the USA and EU servers, and not once have I heard someone complaining that the lack of ads kills their mood. Even on the boards, I haven't seen that complaint popping up before, though maybe I just missed one thread or another. More tellingly, you yourself don't link to a thread where people have complained about lack of ads, you link to various "oh well, I don't mind it" responses once NCSoft already announced ads.
;)
;)
I've seen _lots_ of complaints along the years since launch, ranging from legitimate gripes to the (mandatory lately) "but I have a good fallacy for why Stalkers should be 100% undetectable, have perma-Elude and an unblockable attack that kills any player in one hit." I've heard people being quite vocal about some of them. Again, both on the forum and in-game. Ads? I can't say I've had anyone going "man, this lack of ads is depressing already" in my groups.
I know people who've left because of one complaint or another, some of them in RL too. (I tried to proselytize a bit, what can I say?) Heck, one left because he got ganked by level 6 Hellions when he was sent to some mission there as a level 2. Maybe frivolous to you or me, but there you go. I know one who didn't like how the mouse worked. A couple went "well, I guess it's ok, but I like medieval stuff; modern cities are boring." Etc. I don't remember even one mentioning that the lack of ads ruined their mood.
Now I'm not saying that I speak for all players either, but, as tiny unrepresentative samples go, I don't think mine is any smaller than yours
At any rate, I find that "a significant number of CoH and CoV players have been ASKING for in-game ads from real-world companies" trips my suspension of disbelief majorly. Unless you measure "significant" as in, "one guy started a thread and half a dozen other guys dropped a comment too." 'Cause, you know, out of a hundred and fifty thousand players, that's _so_ significant a number of players
I'll take a wild guess that, much more likely, you probably have a bit of a spread there. _Some_ players maybe want advertising. Maybe. _Some_, like in any other game, are fanboys who live to serve their master, so of course they'd cheer even if NCSoft announced giving them a kick in the balls. Anything for the master. _Some_ of us will _tolerate_ it, but that's about it. I'm in that category myself. And I'm sure _some_ players will find it offensive.
Since you mention the forums, I find that, same as any other game forum, it's even used at all by a tiny minority of the players. And a tiny minority of those accounts for most posts.
And there's always some mandatory circle-jerk clique pretending to speak for everyone else, as if they were there in some elected position, and not via merely being the only ones who have time for prom-queen games of forum popularity. These are an even smaller minority.
Again, like in any other game, I'm not singling out COH/COV in any way. Equally on WoW a tiny minority of the players account for most posts. And Slashdot isn't really representing everyone who works in IT. And so on. Some have grown too big to be dominated by just one group, some not, but don't mistake "loudest minority" for "significant number of those people" on any of them.
But again, I can vouch for that first hand in COH's case. And if you'll peruse the same thread you linked, there are actually extremely few names in it. And a few people whose nickname repeats every 2 to 6 messages. Sorry, that's not a representative sample, it's an exercise in borderline group think.
So you have a rather tiny sample from which to extrapolate "what players want." All you have there is that a tiny minority wanted ads. They're not elected to speak for the rest of the players, so it's just their own opinion. We don't really know what everyone else wants. Whethe
Again, it depends.
Some games are parodies and not to be taken seriously in the first place. Sure, go ahead and spam them with "for a few ducats your member could be as big as the Spanish Armada" ads, for all I care.
Some games were not parodies in the first place, and it would trip suspension of disbelief majorly. A lot of MMOs and generally RPGs went through a lot of effort to write a convincing backstory for their world, with lore quests, and everything.
E.g., much as I thoroughly disliked that game anyway, "ye olde Coke" ads would look thoroughly out of place in EQ2. They'd look equally out of place in Oblivion, or Neverwinter Nights, or Lord Of The Rings Online. There are mountains of lore about those games' universes, and Coca Cola or McDonalds ads, or for that matter _any_ ads, just don't fit there.
Again, I see basically a split between games where ads could work, and games where ads wouldn't work.
And honestly, I don't see it as any better if suddenly all games become Knights Of Xentar, Superhero League Of Hoboken, and other such fine parodies.
There's nothing wrong with them as such, but I quite like some variety anyway. I don't see anything particularly thrilling about a future where whole settings and genres go the way of the dodo, or are turned into caricatures of their former self.
Well, it depends.
COH happens in a modern day metropolis. Ads and billboards aren't out of place. You kinda expect them there.
In fact, the game already _had_ billboards and posters from day 1, except they were mildly funny parodies instead of actual ads. For example stuff like ads for lawyers getting the villains out of jail after your superhero toon arrests them, or for some fictional in-game companies like Crey Industries, etc.
Replacing an ad for Crey with an ad for Microsoft, wouldn't seem out of place at all. (And doubly so for a lot of us nerds, since the Crey are a major supervillain group in the game;)
Or I wouldn't be even give it a second thought if there was a McDonald's in Galaxy City. I mean they already have fictional restaurants there, with funny names like "El Super Mexicano."
The same can't be said for a lot of other settings and genres, though. E.g., it would feel awfully weird to have billboards for IBM and Coca Cola along the road to Darnassus in WOW.
And that's really what I'm fearing. That it might re-sort genres and settings according to how fit they are for ads.
Remember that we already _had_ such an effect. Adventure games were still popular games, and that market was actually _growing_ when everyone dropped them like a hot potato in the 90's. Why? Because making a simplistic FPS was _much_ cheaper. Even if you sold less copies than an adventure, you'd still make more profit.
I can see "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place" repeating that history.
Adventures eventually made a comeback, because, basically, people eventually came to expect the same level of scripting and animations in a FPS as in an adventure. So the price difference vanished.
The same might never happen in the case of "games fit for ads" vs "games where ads look out of place." Already all else is equal. Only one of them can get more money. Short of advertisers pulling out, it stays that way.
So I fear that we _might_ slide towards every game happening in a city, or a race-track, or along of big billboard-overdosed highway. And that doesn't sound too great.
Well, I guess it helps squeeze an extra fps out of some games.
Not really. They had quite a bit of horsepower on their chips to add hardware acceleration to that processing. Now I'm not saying that they're necessarily a good company, or good drivers, and the latency is AFAIK more fit for games than for recording music in real time anyway. Just pointing out that the "The SB probably does it all in software anyway" assumption is false. Out of the games-oriented consumer-level cards, theirs actually do the least in software by far.
Unless you're talking about a different Hollywood, originality there had already died, IIRC, in the 50's, when they proclaimed the Monomyth as their One True Religion. Ok, One True Way To Write A Story.
It's not just that the general structure is set in stone, they've long been at the point where they prescribe in exactly which minute of the movie each twist will happen. If your movie is X minutes long, by jove, you have to have to reach the first milestone in that script in exactly minute Y.
Honestly, you could probably get away with bigger deviations from the Qur'an (and I chose that as an example, because you're not even supposed to translate it, lest that corrupts the meaning) than from the sacrosanct Monomyth.
So is _any_ movie original nowadays? Hollywood essentially has 1, maximum 2, sacred scripts per genre that the High Priests approved (all in turn based on the Monomyth), and each movie has to use exactly those. Fill in your own character names and locations, and you have a pre-made script for your movie. I don't know why they don't make a script generator with drop-down combo-boxes yet. I mean, that's the result anyway.
So from the other end of this, as a viewer, once you've figured out which of the sacred scripts they used, and such details as who's protagonist, who's antagonist, and who's the love interest, you can accurately know who'll die in what minute and roughly what twists will the plot have. Again, and in which minute they'll happen.
And I'm not just talking about that as a theoretical possibility or hyperbole, but speak very literally and from first-hand experience. By high school I only needed the first 10 minutes of almost any movie, to tell you what's going to happen until the end. And not as in "in retrospect I should have seen that coming", but as in, literally, I'd bet someone that I can tell them exactly what happens in the rest of the movie. I did it with Mom so often, that eventually she too got into that game. It was ages before I read about the Monomyth too, and it just finally told me a name for the phenomenon I was seeing.
And, I'm, you know, just an average Joe. I'm certainly not the biggest genius on the planet or anything. I can't be the only one who noticed that they're using the same scripts over and over again, only with the character and town names changed. Even if not everyone actually reverse-engineered it all the way back to the one script per genre they're using, I'd expect there must be enough people coming out of a cinema with the gut feeling that they've seen the same movie before. Repeatedly.
Is that originality? Sure, each movie was based on a different book, but it had been digested and shit into the same mold. Even if you'd find a writer who still can write a non-monomyth novel nowadays (in itself a challenge, after so many decades of courses, seminars and colleges teaching everyone how to write only clones of that script), a screenplay writer would slave over it and mangle it into fitting the sacrosanct pre-approved shape.
By Jove, a trilogy might just be the right thing. It worked so well before, after all. I can just see it.
;)
And then they make 3 prequels telling the story of what the Atreides family was doing before they came to Arrakis, and what a whiny kid Paul was before he became Muad'Dib, right? Or maybe, about how the Harkonen weren't that bad guys, and the Atreides were't that good. And at the end they can have a lightsab... err, wait, wrong movie, this is the one with the voice amplifiers... right, at the end they can have screaming fits at each other while surfing on lava. It would be so awesome.
Oh, wait, they're not putting George Lucas in charge
Well, that was my problem with David Lynch's movie, basically. It's like an abbreviated summary of the book. Actually, probably a better way to explain it, would be Woody Allen quote: "Woody Allen I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." That's just about it.
If you had already read the book, I guess it wasn't a bad movie. It had just enough visual clues to let your memory do the rest. So you can look an go, "ooh, I know, this is the Gom Jabbar sequence", and you'd already know what led there, where it goes from there, and why is that important. While the movie would move to the next scene and give you yet another piece, and again, it would be mostly up to your memory to fill in the gap and put the new scene in context too.
I, however, must have been one of the few who saw the movie before reading the book. In fact, I got the book only because the movie didn't make that much sense at times, and certainly didn't leave me with the awe for Dune that everyone else semed to have. (I know, I know, I'll hand in my nerd card now;) It wasn't a _bad_ movie per se, but in retrospect it just wasn't Dune. It was a mildly SF-themed action movie, where some guys fought for some desert planet, for some resource those guys had. And not only it was just as superficial as any other action movie (it could have been "Rambo Does Iraq" just as well), but the plot seemed a little bit condensed and rushed through even by action movie standards. Everything that made it... well, made it _Dune_, was at best hinted at, and sometimes it came via short scenes that didn't seem to make that much sense or have much relevance for the rest of the movie.
Again, in retrospect I can see how you'd figure it out if you had read the book already, and only used the movie as a visual summary. Without that background, I wasn't impressed much.
Can someone else do better? Heck if I know, to be honest. One can only hope. It's certainly impossible to do justice to the whole Dune story, you're right in that aspect. But maybe he can make a movie that at least makes sense on its own.
Just a funny thought: there's a reason why it's called "police state", and not "army state".
The thing is, virtually no dictatorship on Earth used the army as police, or not for more than some quick squashing some rebellion. The rest of the time, they had the police keep the population under control.
E.g., the USSR and the Eastern Europe bloc, were _not_ policed by the army. From checking your drivers' license, to knocking your door down and dragging you to Siberia, they had the _police_ do it. Ok, so ironically they called it the "workers' and peasants' militia", but, really, it was a (very oppressive) police force by any other name and filled exactly the place and role of the tsar's old police force. And if you asked any army officer from that part of the world, they'd be very very quick to point out that they're a very different thing from the police.
Even during the madness of Stalin's mass deportations and executions, it wasn't the _army_ doing that. It was the NKVD, which was an entirely different organization and department. The only relationship they had to the army most of the time was that the MKVD commissars terrorized the army too, not only the civillians. Initially they also handled military counter-intelligence, but mostly because Stalin didn't trust the army enough to let them handle it, and in 1941 the army finally got its counter-intelligence back.
E.g., at the risk of Goodwinning it, in Nazi Germany, it wasn't the army acting as a police either. Yes, I know, in Hollywood movies you see the stereotype of Wehrmacht soldiers asking for your papers at every crossroad, and think that that's the definition of a police state. Well, no, that kind of roadblocks and soldiers asking for papers mostly happened when you tried to get into military installations or get too close to the front line.
Most citizens of the Third Reich didn't see the army acting as police either. They had the regular police and the secret state police (Gestapo) doing most of the internal policing. If someone kicked your door in for being a dissident, it _never_ was the Wehrmacht (equivalent of the US Army) doing it. It would be the police, the Gestapo, or in some cases one of the paramilitary organizations that the Nazis created. The SS, much as it tried hard to be and look like the elite branch of the Army, were really a parallel paramilitary organization.
Etc.
So basically if you're going to wait until you see something as unlikely as soldiers acting as police, to start asking your rights back... heh... you could just as well ask for Jesus to come back and have a sex change operation.
Now I'll refrain from commenting on whether you're turning into a police state or not yet. But I _am_ saying, that _if_ that ever happens, heh, you've chosen the awfully wrong symptoms to recognize it by.
How many gigabytes was it again, after which they try to demonize you as some great evil predator that ruins everyone else's Internet? I mean, yippee. You get 50 MB/s and you get disconnected if you use it for an hour.
Heh, well, yes, it was just the long and roundabout version of, "In the West you know where to find a party on a Saturday night, in Soviet Russia the Party knows where to find you." ;)
;)
I guess it just shows that explaining a joke makes it not funny any more
1. Actually, it's not just an Asian phenomenon. Western Europe too once had their own small villages, and their own village gossips, and their own self-elected pillars of the community making it their business to tell you how to think and what to do.
I guess the best way to explain it, is via Adlai Stevenson's "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." For millenia, even in Western Europe and even early USA it wasn't. From Socrates being executed for making himself unpopular, through the witch hunts of the middle ages (even the early Inquisition rules recognzed that some people will be denounced as heretics just because someone hated them enough), to well into the 18'th century, we had just that: it just wasn't safe to be unpopular. Whether you lived or died, depended on your standing in the community. And that sadly included letting some busybodies poke their nose into your life, or they could turn everyone else against you, and you could get hurt badly that way.
It was a long and painful transition to the point where we could start telling the busybodies and self-elected "pillars of the community" to just shut up and go fuck themselves with a cactus. You're now seeing the result of that transition in the west. But the initial state, if you went several hundreds of years in the past, would be no different in the western world either.
But the real point is, that when we finally had that oportunity to essentially go, "fuck off, my life is my own private business", we did it.
Or if you go to the east from there, by the time you get to, say, the Balkans, you'll see that that kind of gossip-driven-community persisted well into the 20'th century in some places. They too got rid of it as soon as they could.
So I'll go on a limb and guess that it's not some peculiar and random quirk of Western culture, but just a universal human trait. Humans will put up with someone else poking into their lives when they _have_ to, but as soon as they have the oportunity to get rid of that, they actually very much like to have a _private_ life instead.
And I'll guess that the Asians are nothing else than, you know, humans too. Sure, in some places in Asia they still are saddled with a culture where your life and worth depend on your "face" in the community. It may take a while to move away from there, but I'll guess that given enough time and the oportunty, they too will turn out to prefer the same things.
And I think we're already seeing them moving in that direction. From what I'm told, China is already gradually turning into a much more western-style society. They're just humans too.
2. Even in public, gossip-driven societies, people tend to have _some_ time to themselves. They might have to put up a "oh, I _love_ it when you poke your nose into my life" mask all day long, but then they have their evening with their family, or with their hobby, or whatever, and can just be themselves for a short while. Then they're ready for another round of that silly groupthink game.
And I'm guessing that if you took even that break away from them, if you put them in a situation where even their computer and their TV and their tires (see the other front page story) spied on them day and night, it might be a lot more stressful than you think. Even in Asia. In fact probably _especially_ in Asia, where "face" still means so much for a lot of people, and where your life could be completely and irreversibly ruined by some kinds of information being leaked.
Well, the big deal is that
1. people change their behaviour when they think they're watched. Doubly so when it's recorded and they're not even sure when it'll be used, how, and in which way it'll bite them in the arse.
My favourite example is about the USSR. Everyone knows the brutality of Stalin's NKVD and about the Gulag, but that got toned down a lot after Stalin. Mostly because it was cheaper and more effective to just give people the impression that everything they say or do goes into some dossier, and they have no idea when it'll be used against them or how. Maybe it'll be the GULAG, but maybe they'll never travel abroad again, or maybe their kid won't ever get a promotion because of what their father said, or God knows what else. Or maybe nothing will ever happen, but there's no way to know.
That uncertainty is actually scarier than immediate repression. It removes the feedback. With Stalin's NKVD, you could know pretty soon whether they have anything against you or not. With something that might, or might not happen, and might take a decade or two to, you just don't know.
The bigger effect is that it made people distrust each other, and thus unlikely to get organized. If comrade Piotr swears at the Party, how do you know if he isn't some agent provocateur trying to get you to say something you'll regret. And even if he isn't, do you want it on your record that you hang out with a disgruntled enemy of the people? Best avoid going drinking with Piotr in the future.
Of course, you could point out, that was only because Big Brother there had not only ears, but also an arm with a whip and an inclination to use it. Well one way or another disincentives exist just as well in a free society, and in the West we're all the more eager to accept them if they're wielded by the private industry instead of the state.
E.g., just like in Soviet Russia you might have feared that you'll never get a well paid job if you have on your record that you're a maladjusted malcontent, the exact same can happen in the west too, in a world where employers routinely google their employees. Even if your current boss doesn't mind it, how do you know if the next job interview doesn't get influenced by something you said or did?
E.g., to get to more mundane western worries, if you're, say, in a particularly bigotted town in the Bible Belt, do you want your next employer to know that you're surfing for gay porn? Most people even if they're not particularly secretive about either being gay or surfing for porn, don't wear "I download gay porn" on a badge at a job interview either.
This whole data collection, and the possibility that it'll get leaked, sold to the highest bidder, or just given as a "gift to the community" like the infamous AOL search data, is enough to make a lot of people think twice about what they do. Even if it's not antisocial per se. Better not trip someone's sensitivities the wrong way, and all that.
(And, yes, I know, maybe _you_ are brave and fearless and never give in, bla, bla, bla. The vast majority of others aren't. That's the problem.)
It can enforce a degree of conformism that's outright scary.
2. Data mining, especially the way Joe Sixpack doesn't even understand it, adds another layer of scariness to it all. You don't know over what inferences they'll get to you, or whether you'll be a bystander casualty of one.
Basically the same as you wouldn't go into a black or jewish boss's office carrying some white supremacist magazine under your arm. Chances are the "pays to read that kind of thing => probably is a racist" inference won't help your career much. So even the real bigoted guys still wouldn't do it.
Data mining promises to make the same kind of inferences from other more mundane things. That even much more innocent things could finger you as something you'd rather not proclaim yourself as, or even genuinely aren't.
E.g., what if some data mining survey says that employees drinking Coca Cola are twice as loyal to the
I thought it was 26 million _total_, including some 10 million soldiers?
Last I've seen some numbers, it was closer to 50-50 between civillians and soldiers. That's including the 5 to 8 million USSR civillians killed in the Holocaust. Well, ok, maybe closer to 60-40, but still, the military deaths do come relatively close AFAIK. Still, I see your point.
But more importantly, you illustrate an aspect that I failed to: that it took some senseless mass murders of epic proportion to come even to 13.71% number. If that senseless extermination policy on one side and Stalin's own terror on the other, didn't exist, the casualties of modern war would look even more tame compared to tribal warfare. Without all that senseless genocide, i.e., what it would have been if it were just the war alone, the toll of that war would probably have been more like 6% for the USSR. By contrast, your average chance to die by arrow, spear or tomahawk in tribal warfare instead of old age in your tent, could be as high as 60%. That's ten times higher. Mind boggles.
But again, even including a mass-murder of such proportions that it scared the world, we still arrive at merely a 1/5 of your chance to die in a tribal conflict, for some tribes.
That's the point I was trying to make. That compared to the stone-age tribesmen, even the most brutal modern war we've had, is actually less of a massacre. Even the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, or the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, don't come even close to the percentage of people killed with stone axes and stone-tipped arrows in tribal conflicts. I find that a scary thought.
It's even worse. Massacring buffaloes, well, I guess some animal rights people would be appalled, but it's really no worse than a modern slaughterhouse. (Though, granted, it does disprove the myth of the enlightened herbivore living in harmony with nature.)
The worse thing is: we have plenty of proof that they massacred each other just as well.
E.g., there are remains of a village in Sand Canyon Pueblo which was, effectively, exterminated by some attackers in the 13'th century. (I.e., centuries before those guys saw a white man at all.) The attackers literally slaughtered everyone where they could catch them, smashed whatever they could smash, and burned the village down. It was never re-occupied.
While that's admittedly a rather extreme example, simple raids to steal each other's food and women were a lot more common. As little as 13% of the tribes could count as "peaceful", in that they only raided their neighbours no more than once a year. So they killed a few, had a few of their own killed, life went on.
Plus, here's an interesting thought for the noble savage proponents: if those tribes were so peaceful and living in harmony, how'd they get a warrior culture in the first place? You don't get a seafaring culture if you're on a mountain top, and you don't get a warrior culture if you're a peaceful confederation of tribes.
Or long before Stonehenge or any contact with the white man, in Nubia there's a 12,000 year old cemetery where half the people had died of violence. It would be another 8 millennia or so until their conquest by Egypt, or 7 until Egypt itself got united by force, so it's hard to blame it on learning violence from the Egyptians.
Just about the only "bright" side is that there's little evidence of neolithic slavery. They just killed male prisoners. If you were lucky, they'd kill you quickly and eat you. If not, they'd slowly torture you to death. (The Iroquois, for example, among many others, were pretty good at it.)
Women were usually bounty of war, though, so I guess by modern standards it would count as sexual slavery. That practice continued all through the bronze age and early iron age (i..e., as late as ancient Greece and early Rome), by which time though it was properly filed as slavery. (Though still considered perfectly normal and civilized warfare.) Of course, the places which had remained tribal and largely stone age, continued it well after the fall of Rome.
The history of Europe and Middle East is funny too in that aspect, in that we have the iron age catastrophe. We still don't know exactly what happened there, but whole cities were razed (and some never recovered or were abandoned and never rebuilt), whole populations displaced or enslaved, and generally it's destruction on an unprecedented scale. Europe rushed into the iron age arguably prematurely (bronze was still tougher than early iron) because, whatever happened there, thoroughly disrupted the tin trade, and created a bronze shortage.
And for a parting thought, here's a funny one: population losses in modern warfare are measured in single digit percent. The USA lost some 0.32% of its population in WW2, the UK 0.94%, Germany lost a whopping 10.47%, and the big hit was the USSR with a whole 13.71%. (And in the USSR, probably half of them were due to Stalin's catastrophic leadership, so they could have been avoided.) The average for all countries involved is 3.70%.
Well that's peanuts compared to tribal warfare. By tribal warfare standards, anywhere between 25% and 60% of the population would be killed in the nearly continuous raids and fighting. Roll that around in your head. You'd be anywhere between 2 and 5 times more likely to die in a war as a member of some "noble savage" tribe, than in the USSR during WW2.
Heck, even Leningrad in 3 years of siege, famine and bombing, lost about a third of its population. And we see that as a major tragedy. (And rightfully so.) Now think this: in many tribes you'd be more likely to be killed in tribal war, than if you happened to be in Leningrad in WW2. Now that's a scary thought.
Presumably because noone knows wtf ball lightning even is. The hypothesised explanations include such stuff as it being essentially a ball of burning silica, and a few other things which aren't even, strictly speaking, lightning. As in, an electrical discharge.
So basically we don't _have_ a model for that one at all, and that's a bit mandatory for a simulation.
To make things worse, ball lightning is (compared to regular one) a very rare and unpredictable phenomenon. You can pretty much rely on the next thunderstorm to provide you with a bunch of regular lightning to study. (Fly your kite in it, like Franklin, for example.) Ball lightning is harder to track down and study. You don't know when or where it will happen.
Well, I'd be more curious about how do they compress it.
Following the link in the summary seemed to suggest that they get some streams which are already highly compressed, and add their own compression on top. Which is kinda easy to believe, since I don't think they're getting a huge uncompressed stream from anyone.
In that case, here's the fun part: no matter with what they re-encode it, it will just add more artifacts on top of the existing ones.
Once you get a lossy compressed stream, you can't get back an 100% accurate original stream from it to start anew with. If it were possible to get the exact original image, it would be called "lossless" instead.
So let's say one pixel was originally, say, royal blue and ended up prussian blue instead, after the lossy compression. That's it. The original shade is gone for ever. If you re-encode that stream to another codec, you now start from prussian blue and mangle it some more from there. There is no way for the second encoding to know what the original colours were, only what they look like after decoding the original lossy compression.
IOW, if they received a highly-compressed MPEG-2 stream and re-encode it to H.264, the image isn't going to get any better. They'll just degrade it a little more.
So IMHO the right thing to do is to just freakin' leave it alone, if they get it in an already compressed format.
The 386 version of Windows _2.0_ could already multitask DOS programs well. You could stuff several DOS programs in windows and have them run pretty well side by side.
:P
Which was what mattered at the time, really, since there weren't many Windows programs out yet.
At any rate, that's what I meant by "legacy applications." At that time, there wasn't much else to count as "legacy"
(Windows 2.0 apps didn't count as "legacy" yet. They were quite the bleeding edge of technology, in fact.)
And it was more than OS/2, or GEM, or whatever could do yet. The only one that comes to mind which could do that too, was DesqView, but it was a DOS text-mode only thing.
Actually, I have. Sad as that may sound.
E.g., when some people I knew switched the whole company from WordPerfect to MS Word, much against my zealotry at the time. The fact is, the first attempts at WP For Windows sucked hairy donkey balls. Word might not have been a shiny gold nugget, but compared to WP it was at least like polished lead compared to a turd.
E.g., Windows itself gained a lot of market share fast back in the day, because the 386 version was pretty much the only thing that combined (A) preemptive multitasking, at least for legacy apps, (B) a GUI, unpolished as that might have been, and (C) compatibility with those legacy apps. And maybe (D) a price you can actually afford, as opposed to buying an ultra-expensive, and just as proprietary, Unix for that PC. There have been other attempts at one of the three, but they typically missed the other two.
Yes, I know, _nowadays_ Linux exists which fits all the bills and is a viable choice and all. But back then the competition actually had worse products than MS, sad as that may sound. Who was better than Windows? GEM with its max 4 windows and no support for using memory over 640k? The text-mode-only task-switching of DesqView? (Even DesqView/X was too little, too late. Way too late.) OS/2? Heh. Trust me, I used all those, I even was an OS/2 fanboy at one point, but looking back, I can see how Windows won on its own merits back then.
The last genuine competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2, and even that was a sad story. For a start it was a story of corporate schizophrenia, where half of IBM didn't want to use or sell the OS that the other half created and/or endorsed. But it was also a story of IBM ignoring the users' grievances. Year after year people complained that a single mis-behaved or crashed application can lock up the common event queue, and thus the whole computer. And year after year IBM stuck to its guns that that's the right way to do things, and generally STFU you bloody user. It was a story of such fuck-ups as IBM launching a version of OS/2 with much fanfare, and then discovering that if you were upgrading from a previous version, it would fuck up the config so badly that your newly installed OS wouldn't boot. (Or not make it to the desktop.) It was a story of IBM developer suport being non-existent. Much as we laugh at "Uncle Fester" Balmer's developers dance on the stage, it was a whole other message than IBM's. IBM at felt a lot more like "fuck off and stop trying to steal the market for our own apps for OS/2." Etc. And IBM lost. Why? Because, bloody sad as it sounds, their stuff was actually worse than MS's.
E.g., I remember being one of the last Netscape fanboys in a world which was quickly going IE, and Netscape's Mozilla team had gone in dada land for years reinventing skinned widget libraries instead of making a browser. The fact that everyone kept pointing out was that IE was head and shoulders above the buggy (and rapidly getting outdated) mess that was Nescape 4.x. Both being free, people preferred the MS one as (subjectively) better.
Etc.
I can even tell you the mistake you're making. You're seeing just the years after they became a monopoly, and when they actually could push people to buy just for compatibility sake. But you forget their years of actually fighting uphill in those markets. Before you could have people telling each other "get Word already because we all have it", you first have to convince enough people to ditch WordStar and WordPerfect, _in_ _spite_ of the fact that everyone else has them.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't excuse MS's monopolistic tactics or anything. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying you first have to have enough of a foothold before you can apply them. MS's monopoly isn't based on just one thing, it's an interlocking porcupine of pieces which need each other. It only starts working at all after you have at least a few such pieces which are the de-facto standard. And there must have been _some_ merit involved in getting at least those ramm
I see your point about "Prison Tycoon", and it's a fine specimen indeed. Definitely worth thinking about.
;)
But, just to give a couple more examples of dumb or ridiculous Tycoon games, and how abused _that_ name has got over the years, picture:
- Rotlicht Tycoon. (Red Light Tycoon.) Yep, it's about running a brothel. I'm guessing you wouldn't buy that for your kids either
- Klo Tycoon. (Toilet Tycoon) Yep, you're running a public toilet in that one.
I swear I'm not making either of those up.
Off topic, but, heh, yeah, I know that feeling all too well. I'm not Ethan, but same idea.
Actually this guy was worse, if that's even possible. At least Ethan's coworker seems to have more than a CS story. Mine had exactly one.
Every day he'd play on the same map. No idea why, maybe he just got his best scores there or something. Every day he'd sneak behind the same warehouse, climb on the same ladder, drop through the same vent, crawl through the same pipe, drop in the same room, and shoot the guy camping in the corner. (CS fans probably recognize the map by now.) And then relate that in detail the next day. Every bloody day.
What started as "hmm, really? pretty clever that", ended up a case where my brain wanted to crawl out an ear and run for the hills. I can't even put into words how boring it can be to hear the exact same story, in the exact same sequence, the two hundredth time, over several months. But what really makes me cringe is the thought that he was actually enacting that repetition several dozen times a day, each day.
Actually, that's a lie: there was a second story, that of how he defended on that map.
I actually watched him do that once after hours. (Ok, so sometimes I'm too stupid to say "no.") So he quickly buys a gun and run in front of a vent some 6 ft above the ground, and starts jumping up and down in front of it. After about a minute, some enemy drops from the vent on the roof into that duct, my co-worker shoots him. Reloads and keeps hopping there in place, like a kangaroo. Next round, the same thing. Next round, the same thing. Ad infinitum, almost literally.
Two whole hours, he jumped up and down in front of a square grate. That's it.
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *BANG!*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
[...]
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *BANG!*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
I actually stood there and watched it for two hours, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. It was so monotonous and mind-numbing, that I was starting to fear I'm losing neurons just watching it. But, you know, I couldn't believe that someone would actually keep doing it. I expected him to go "ah, fuck it, let's do something else" any moment now. No. Round after round he bought his gun and ammo, ran to that vent, and hopped like a deranged kangaroo in place in front of it.
The only thing I can compare it, is that Charly Chaplin movie where he's at an assembly line and twists two screws every couple of seconds.
I won't even try to speculate about what kind of mind would find that entertaining to do, for several hours a day, every day, for months.