From reading the site (especially this page), it seems to work like this:
1. The receipt is optional. 2. The receipt lets voters check that their ballot was counted, a) overall, and/or b) with regard to a specific contest. 3. The receipt does not say who you voted for, nor is it possible to derive such information from the receipt.
The first point wouldn't solve the problem of "Want to go to Heaven? Then hand over that receipt," because you could still tell people they'll go to hell if they choose not to print the receipt.
However, there's no point in demanding the receipt, because it doesn't say how you voted, it only says whether your vote was counted as part of the results. Only the voter (and anyone he told) would know who he/she voted for.
Probably the REAL reason this hasn't caught on is because most people haven't heard about this (I didn't know about it, and I had searched for something like this!), and most of those who do hear something about it (like jesdynf here) assume that it is something much worse than it is.
So write your Congresspeople, let them know that this exists, and make sure they know it doesn't compromise voter privacy! If you don't get a response, write another letter. Keep writing until they pay attention! And tell your friends and family to do the same.
The only way government can represent the people is if the representatives know what the people want. So tell them.
Actually, the Revolution will be televised, but it won't be HD.
P.S. Thanks for selecting only a small, most-relevant portion of the lyrics, and cutting out all the rest, thus limiting our exposure to something which, aside from using the words "revolution" and "televised", is completely off-topic. I really appreciate it.
But your counter-argument is flawed: the vast majority of people are not filthy rich.
Imagine that 5% of the gaming market has HD TVs, with 95% having SD (we'll assume that everyone in the game market has some sort of TV, or they couldn't play games).
Even if the top 5% bought more games than the other 95%, they would have to buy 19 games for every 1 game the rest bought, in order to give Nintendo the same profits as the non-HD crowd.
Now consider that many a significant portion of the non-HD group has enough money to buy several games per year. They will, for the most part, therefore be more selective in what games they buy, getting mostly games they have heard good things about from other gamers.
If the 95% are buying several popular games per year per person/family, what other games will the 5% buy to fill up their quota, which is now 19 * "several" (maybe 2-5) per year per person, or 38-95 games per year? We can assume that they will buy the popular games as well, but will they buy crappy games too, just because they had the money to spend? Probably not. Will they buy multiple copies of the popular games? Almost certainly not.
So you see, the wealthy, HD-using minority just can't out-spend the non-HD-using majority, because there are only so many games to choose from, and the minority is vastly outnumbered.
Not to mention that, because the Revolution will not be HD, it will be affordable to more people (who wouldn't use HD even if it had it). Additionally, because the games will not be HD, they will be cheaper to develop, and thus presumably can be priced lower, making them affordable to more people.
So here's the equation:
SD games * huge game market - small development cost > HD games * tiny game market - large development cost
In words: Nintendo will (probably) make more money than they would by supporting HD.
In Ancient Athens (IIRC), people voted by putting colored pottery shards in a big pot (e.g. white shard for yes, red for no, or something like that). Then they'd count the shards and whichever side had the most shards won.
Not only was the ballot not secret (everyone could watch you while you put your shard in), there was rampant corruption like vote buying ("If you vote for me, I'll give you some money") and probably threats ("If you don't vote for me, I'll send some hired goons after your family").
At some other time/place in Ancient Greece (maybe in Sparta? Maybe Athens at a different time? I don't quite recall), the vote was done through a literal shouting match: everyone would gather together in an ampitheater, and at the appropriate time, each side's supporters would shout as loud as they could. Whichever side shouted loudest (according to some judges) won. You better hope you're not sitting next to someone who supports the other side and brought his dagger with him.
(Warning: daily recommended intake of Ancient Greece voting anecdotes has been exceeded. Proceed to lavatory and vomit.)
The solution to all this voting nonsense is, obviously, a giant robotic brain which will govern all humanity benevolently. We could call it Multivac! What could possibly go wrong?
P.S. Congrats to NYT for getting on the bandwagon only 7 months after the major national election where this issue was a problem, and a year after the rest of the media started talking about it.
Perhaps the NYT building is actually trapped in some sort of "temporal anomaly"? That would explain why they seem to be stuck in the past on certain other matters.
In some circles there is considered to be a significant distinction between gender and sex. While sex is always based on biology/anatomy (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.), gender is increasingly being considered more related to mentality/society (although historically, it has been just a synonym for sex). While a person may be anatomically a man (for example), they may have mental tendencies which are more commonly associated with women. (Some have hypothesized that this dichotomy between a person's sex and gender at least partially explains homosexuality, trans-sexualism, etc.)
In the case of games, the most likely choice of 'sex' or 'gender' to describe what game developers are targetting is indeed gender. GTA is targetting a 'masculine' gender (aggression, destroying your foes, etc. are considered masculine), but there are men who don't enjoy that type of game, as well as women who do enjoy it. As long as someone enjoys the game, it doesn't matter what sex they are.
On the other hand, a game which (somehow...) required the use or presence of only one sex of genitalia would be clearly targetted at a sex (not a gender), since members of the other sex would be unable to play, regardless of whether they think the game is interesting. (I'll leave the details of this amazing game to your imagination. But they probably already have it in Japan.)
By the way, I 'learned' all this gender crap in "English 106: Advanced Composition". I probably would have avoided it, but I was tricked by the course title: I thought it was going to be about writing, but it was actually just a secret code-word for Social Advocacy (i.e. being sensitive to those different from you, and pondering women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc.).
- In the first game, you'll learn all about controlling your creature and caring for villagers. - In the second game, you'll discover a rival god as well as a friendly ally, and you'll have to use your creature to defeat the rival while getting useless tips from your ally. At the end of the second game, the rival will take your creature away from you in some sort of cut-scene while you are alienated from the action, helpless to interfere. - In the third game, you spend a very long, very frustrating time trying to get your creature back from the rival, having absolutely no fun and considering abandoning it and the later game altogether. - In the fourth game, you and your rescued creature will return to the world from the first game, only to discover that it's being ravaged by an even more evil rival god. - In the fifth game, you will follow the super-rival to his home turf and try to defeat him, all the while your creature slowly becomes diametrically opposed to you in alignment due to a curse. Players will have no fun in this game either, and they probably should have stopped playing back at game 2.
I must say, I'm excited by the prospect. These are brilliant concepts! I've never seen anything like them!
(I shouldn't be telling you this, but they already have plans for an expansion pack to the fifth game: you and your creature, through some stupid plot device, end up on an island with lots of other stupid, wise-cracking creatures. You will engage in dozens of pointless mini-games and your creature's AI will be modified so it doesn't feel like the same creature anymore. You will spend the entire game wondering: why, oh why, didn't you actually abandon the series at game 2!? But on the plus side, your creature will gain some pointless accessory you can show off while playing the game's ill-conceived multiplayer mode.)
As annoying as this is, a lot of times customers change their requirements on you and you have to scrable. So even good planning isn't going to save you there.
It might not save you, but it can definitely help you. Though it may sound counter-intuitive, you can plan for changing requirements, and so alleviate some of the problems. You can keep the design flexible, for one thing (as much as possible, anyway). And if you have good "intuition", you can guess what the customer actually wants (instead of what they say they want), so that when they "change" the requirement (when they figure out that they didn't actually want what they said they wanted), you can be one step ahead. (Paul Graham writes about this sort of thing in his essays sometimes, and he's pretty darn smart.)
I don't think "crunch time"that is, the idea of a period of rapid development where you're doing focused work to get a project doneis bad in itself. It's quite exhilirating when it's your own motivation and enthusiasm for the project that cause the rapid development. It's hell when its forced upon you by the incompetence of someone else, and it wears you out.
I hope that some game companies start using a better model. Then maybe the games will be more fun (because the developers are having fun making it), and they will sell well, and other game companies will ask, "What's your secret?"
Sure, but what indie developer would want to use Java? I ask this only half-jokingly: Java is a creator-proclaimed language for the "average programmer"; they would need to allow a variety of languages so the innovators (who definitely won't be using Java; sorry Java fans, but it's true) won't be held back.
On another note: one of the Revolution's big features is its ability to emulate Nintendo's previous consoles, i.e. act as a variety of virtual machines. So the idea of a virtual machine for indie developers might not be far-fetched.
This would also allow them to limit the damage that a malicious or flaky indie game could do to the Revolution (I'm thinking: deleted save games, trojan-infected zombie consoles sending spam over the 'net...)
And even if it meant that the power given to the developer over the console is less than a big-time developer would get -- indie games won't need as much power anyway, because they probably won't have as high-quality content as the big developers would (quality as in number of polygons, texture resolution, etc.; not that the indie games would be crap).
Nintendo is big on making games that involve very little violence. You would think people might welcome this, but instead, Nintendo is slammed as the "Kiddie game" company.
Example: the most violent thing you could do in Animal Crossing was hit the animals on the head with your bug-catching net. After you did it a couple times, though, they'd start crying and run away.
Still, that'll teach that froggy bastard not to send me stupid stuff in the mail anymore. "I hope you like it, ribbit," indeed...
...and roar of the engines and zaps of laser guns in vacuum, and little things like that...
No, those are definitely suppposed to be coming from within the environment. The roar of the engines? It comes from the engines. The zaps of laser guns? They come from the laser guns.
Whether or not we (or anybody) should be able to laser guns in space, is beside the point. The audience is given enough information (in this case, sound) to make things interesting.
The days when game developers had to program for specific hardwares is long over (except, I'll note, in the console industry). Operating systems and libraries like OpenGL and SDL take care of most of that now. Or, at least, they could and should. Game developers should develop for a library (or libraries), not for a set of hardware. The library developers develop for an operating system (or several). The operating system developers are the ones who develop for hardware. It's all about abstraction layers.
As for the "problem" of varying performance between PCs: you plan. You sit down and you say "Ok, we're targeting a system with 500Mhz processor and 64MB RAM. First, we make it fun. If we have time later, we can add toggle-able eye candy (stencil shadows, particle effects, etc.) that take bigger hardware." And then you do what you said. Although, you'd probably be better off forgetting the "If we have time later" part, because a) you won't, and b) it doesn't matter anyway.
From what I can see, most developers don't do this. Most programmers get off on the latest techno-crap like "bump mapping" and "per-pixel shading" which aren't even worth the development time to implement. But the programmers think it's interesting, and the hype-machine convinces consumers that it matters, so they don't spend time on the stuff that actually matters.
In short, the fixed hardware on consoles is a crutch that forces developers to spend at least some of their time on stuff that matters. It enforces a limit that developers should be enforcing for themselves. If the developers had the will-power to keep themselves away from their shiny toys, that hardware limit wouldn't be needed.
Moving on, there's no reason a PC game has to be "installed" any more than a console game has to be installed, except that PC developers like to take advantage of the access speed of hard-drives (which consoles historically have not had). It's certainly possible to run a program off of a CD (even in Linux), and software could even be written to control it with a USB controller.
And, if you had a TV-out port and USB controllers, you could put your PC-console-thing down in the living room where you put your other consoles, and play it sitting on the couch. Most PC towers are quite large these days, but they don't have to be.
Like I said, a homebrew box is probably the most feasible plan; a pre-built Open Console just wouldn't survive in today's market. Maybe, just maybe, they could be sold online and create a niche market. Then it might have a chance for indie developers to make games on it, and slowly expand the market by word of mouth (if these indie developers can force themselves to make fun games instead of eye candy). But if it's Open, what's to stop some other company from saying "Look! We made one that's just like the old one, but with MORE MEGS!" All the weak-willed developers would develop for that console so they could make more eye candy (and making it impossible to play their games on the old console), and we'd have the PC market all over again.
But still... someone show me an Open Console priced and under $150 with a decent API, and I'd buy one myself just to make my own games on, even if no one else bought it.
I agree with you that there's not a snowflake's chance in hell that the Big 3 are going to take the risk involved to do this. For one thing, their shareholders would just shoot whatever CEO tried to do that, because it makes absolutely no business sense.
The numbers I've seen say the Rev is "2-3 times" more powerful than the GCN, while the Xbox 360 is "13-15 times" more powerful than the Xbox 1, and the PS3 is "35 times" more powerful than the PS2.
Looking at this page, it looks like Xbox's numbers are bigger than Gamecube's in every category. And while the PS2's are smaller, the reported 35-fold increase in performance would put them well above 2-3 times increase over GCN.
So, I hope you can understand how I came to the conclusion that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are more powerful. I'm not claiming that the numbers are what's important, only that (according to reports from the companies themselves), the Xbox360/PS3 have more "RAW CPU/GPU POWAH" than the Revolution.
You must have some insider info on Nintendo's console, then! From what I've read, Nintendo's console will, in terms of specs, be significantly less powerful than either PS3 or Xbox 360. Of course, Nintendo's counting on their console being superior in some way that turns out to be more important than pure processing power. (Maybe it will have a funnitude rating of 33!!!)
An Open Console would be really nice, but (like you pointed out) the only market-players with the means to mass-produce a new console have an economic motive not to do so. There have been hobbyist projects in the past to make small, Linux-based console systems, but none of them really took off, even among FOSS enthusiasts.
And of course, Joey Newshoes, age 13, doesn't want to build his own console just to play some crummy tetris clone. For an Open Console to become truly popular, it would have to a) be available in retail stores, and b) have a good selection of quality games. The latter might be possible as more commercial-quality games are being made/ported to Linux. The former is almost inconceivable, from an economic standpoint, because it would require a lot of resources to mass-produce the consoles, and a profit would have to be made without the licensing fees, which means trying to undercut the 3 major players on price.
Frankly, I think our best bet would be a regular Linux PC with a TV-out port and some USB controllers. Consoles all have standard hardware, but is variation in hardware a problem? With a couple abstraction layers between the hardware and the game, the difference between e.g. an AMD and an Intel approaches zero.
There will always be a difference in performance (e.g. 1Ghz vs 2Ghz), but games can have a low minimum requirements and scale up with additional hardware, if they are so programmed. The only problem I see with this in the Windows game market is that the developers are actually pushing for faster hardware, making the system requirements higher each year, so that consumers are pressured into upgrading. If anyone should be able to avoid that temptation, it's FOSS developers.
I don't think the audience for blogs is that much different that the audience for Slashdot. In fact, I don't think "most people" (i.e. Average Joe) would see the blogs, no matter how many you had.
I'd say the answer is less techno-savvy distribution. Letters to the editor. Flyers. Word of mouth.
The question I have is: how will we avoid the McCarthyist sentiment, i.e. "you are against DRM so you must be a pirate." Even if nobody says that to my face, I feel like it must cross their minds while I'm explaining to them why this is a problem.
(P.S. What if we can't read the Captcha? Does that mean I'm actually a script trapped in the body of a man? *tiny tears*)
I don't follow why a government-controlled rating board would rate games much differently than the ESRB does. Are you suggesting that they would be ultra-sensitive in their ratings to avoid complaints from parents (i.e. constituents)? I think it's a waste to ignore the perfectly-good rating system already available, but why would a new one be so different?
From a logical standpoint, I don't see anything truly objectionable with the idea of stopping sales of M-rated games to children (not to imply that you do). After some introspection, I think the reason I don't like it is because it's an attempt to regulate my favorite pastime.
And perhaps because I fear that they may be right, and that I may, because I was raised without the "protection" of such a law, be a homocidal maniac and not know it.
I guess I'll start worrying about that if I wake up one day and I can't remember what I did last night but there are a dozen dead bodies stuffed in my closet.
Which is his point... if the Revolution can actually load the game in, say, 1 second, hopefully you won't need to stare at company logos for 5 seconds.
The real reason they will probably be here to stay is that some companies think they will improve brand recognition by displaying their logo for a long time every time you play the game.
Well, I guess they are right, but not in the way they thought. The player recognizes the brand... as a bunch of rat-bastards who won't let you get to the damn game already!
That's the real reason to get this keyboard: everyone else would be too "weirded-out" to even touch it! No more worries about people with greasy fingers gunking up your keyboard. (Now if I could keep them away from my Donkey Konga bongos!)
On a more serious note, I actually popped out the keys and rearranged them to the Dvorak layout when I switched from Sholes (qwerty). Like you mentioned, the F and J keys wouldn't fit right anywhere else -- so I made little paper labels and taped them on the keys! (Too bad I couldn't use duct tape, that would have made it an even more elegant solution.)
Eventually I switched the keys back when I realized that (a) I never really looked at the keyboard since switching to Dvorak, (b) nobody else used my keyboard anyway, so they wouldn't need help typing with the Dvorak setting, and (c) I couldn't figure out how to type my root password when I hit a snag during boot up (before the dvorak keymap was loaded). Plus those nasty taped-on labels started to bother me.
My guess at the "revolution" is that Nintendo will be encouraging a shift away from the "Hollywoodisation" of the games market that we've been seeing. If you want to spend a couple billion dollars developing a game, knock yourself out, burn out your employees, price it at $60 per unit, etc. But, hopefully, you won't have to.
While I'd be piss-my-pants excited if they were going to make it easy for hobbyists like you and me to get their hands dirty (so to speak), I'm not holding my breath. More like, it will be a substantial reducement in the investment required, but it will still be an investment. You won't have to have a huge publishing company to get your game out there, but still have to spend perhaps a couple tens of thousands of dollars. This would require a new distribution method, though, since pressing, packaging, and shipping millions of units costs a lot of cash. With the Rev being online-capable, downloading from the 'net would be the obvious choice.
Now, the only way consumers would buy into this plan would be if these homebrew, non-production-quality games were either much cheaper than the big-budget games, or had absolutely incredible gameplay (or both). Nobody would buy a game which looks like crap (relatively speaking) unless it was cheap or they heard it was fun.
I hope we'll be seeing some more innovative games coming out, since the financial risk of a flop would not be so catastrophic. EA, for example, would never put the money into a game unless they knew for a fact that it would sell well, which means making it almost exactly like a game which has sold well in the past.
Well, they have to do that to compete with the PSP's karate-chop, er, disc-toss action. I imagine projectile discs will become a standard feature on new game systems. It really makes it more immersive when the game throws stuff at you when you lose.
Personally, I'm thrilled to think that this might be taken even further: could a brain learn to control an entire robotic body, based on the feedback it receives?
Could it be an abitrarily-shaped body (number of eyes, wings vs. arms, etc.), or is there something "built in" to our brains that it works only (or at least best) with the 4 limbs/1 head setup? (I realize not all life forms have this setup, but could a brain that has evolved to work with a certain setup learn to work with another setup?)
Aside from the possibility of all our sci-fi horror movies becoming reality, this is quite exciting! I for one would not welcome our new robotic spider-bodied overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
From reading the site (especially this page), it seems to work like this:
1. The receipt is optional.
2. The receipt lets voters check that their ballot was counted, a) overall, and/or b) with regard to a specific contest.
3. The receipt does not say who you voted for, nor is it possible to derive such information from the receipt.
The first point wouldn't solve the problem of "Want to go to Heaven? Then hand over that receipt," because you could still tell people they'll go to hell if they choose not to print the receipt.
However, there's no point in demanding the receipt, because it doesn't say how you voted, it only says whether your vote was counted as part of the results. Only the voter (and anyone he told) would know who he/she voted for.
Probably the REAL reason this hasn't caught on is because most people haven't heard about this (I didn't know about it, and I had searched for something like this!), and most of those who do hear something about it (like jesdynf here) assume that it is something much worse than it is.
So write your Congresspeople, let them know that this exists, and make sure they know it doesn't compromise voter privacy! If you don't get a response, write another letter. Keep writing until they pay attention! And tell your friends and family to do the same.
The only way government can represent the people is if the representatives know what the people want. So tell them.
Actually, the Revolution will be televised, but it won't be HD.
P.S. Thanks for selecting only a small, most-relevant portion of the lyrics, and cutting out all the rest, thus limiting our exposure to something which, aside from using the words "revolution" and "televised", is completely off-topic. I really appreciate it.
Imagine that 5% of the gaming market has HD TVs, with 95% having SD (we'll assume that everyone in the game market has some sort of TV, or they couldn't play games).
Even if the top 5% bought more games than the other 95%, they would have to buy 19 games for every 1 game the rest bought, in order to give Nintendo the same profits as the non-HD crowd.
Now consider that many a significant portion of the non-HD group has enough money to buy several games per year. They will, for the most part, therefore be more selective in what games they buy, getting mostly games they have heard good things about from other gamers.
If the 95% are buying several popular games per year per person/family, what other games will the 5% buy to fill up their quota, which is now 19 * "several" (maybe 2-5) per year per person, or 38-95 games per year? We can assume that they will buy the popular games as well, but will they buy crappy games too, just because they had the money to spend? Probably not. Will they buy multiple copies of the popular games? Almost certainly not.
So you see, the wealthy, HD-using minority just can't out-spend the non-HD-using majority, because there are only so many games to choose from, and the minority is vastly outnumbered.
Not to mention that, because the Revolution will not be HD, it will be affordable to more people (who wouldn't use HD even if it had it). Additionally, because the games will not be HD, they will be cheaper to develop, and thus presumably can be priced lower, making them affordable to more people.
So here's the equation:In words: Nintendo will (probably) make more money than they would by supporting HD.
I've heard rumors that they've gotten it up to nearly 1.7 teraflims per press release, with flamity not far behind!
In Ancient Athens (IIRC), people voted by putting colored pottery shards in a big pot (e.g. white shard for yes, red for no, or something like that). Then they'd count the shards and whichever side had the most shards won.
Not only was the ballot not secret (everyone could watch you while you put your shard in), there was rampant corruption like vote buying ("If you vote for me, I'll give you some money") and probably threats ("If you don't vote for me, I'll send some hired goons after your family").
At some other time/place in Ancient Greece (maybe in Sparta? Maybe Athens at a different time? I don't quite recall), the vote was done through a literal shouting match: everyone would gather together in an ampitheater, and at the appropriate time, each side's supporters would shout as loud as they could. Whichever side shouted loudest (according to some judges) won. You better hope you're not sitting next to someone who supports the other side and brought his dagger with him.
(Warning: daily recommended intake of Ancient Greece voting anecdotes has been exceeded. Proceed to lavatory and vomit.)
The solution to all this voting nonsense is, obviously, a giant robotic brain which will govern all humanity benevolently. We could call it Multivac! What could possibly go wrong?
P.S. Congrats to NYT for getting on the bandwagon only 7 months after the major national election where this issue was a problem, and a year after the rest of the media started talking about it.
Perhaps the NYT building is actually trapped in some sort of "temporal anomaly"? That would explain why they seem to be stuck in the past on certain other matters.
In some circles there is considered to be a significant distinction between gender and sex. While sex is always based on biology/anatomy (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.), gender is increasingly being considered more related to mentality/society (although historically, it has been just a synonym for sex). While a person may be anatomically a man (for example), they may have mental tendencies which are more commonly associated with women. (Some have hypothesized that this dichotomy between a person's sex and gender at least partially explains homosexuality, trans-sexualism, etc.)
In the case of games, the most likely choice of 'sex' or 'gender' to describe what game developers are targetting is indeed gender. GTA is targetting a 'masculine' gender (aggression, destroying your foes, etc. are considered masculine), but there are men who don't enjoy that type of game, as well as women who do enjoy it. As long as someone enjoys the game, it doesn't matter what sex they are.
On the other hand, a game which (somehow...) required the use or presence of only one sex of genitalia would be clearly targetted at a sex (not a gender), since members of the other sex would be unable to play, regardless of whether they think the game is interesting. (I'll leave the details of this amazing game to your imagination. But they probably already have it in Japan.)
By the way, I 'learned' all this gender crap in "English 106: Advanced Composition". I probably would have avoided it, but I was tricked by the course title: I thought it was going to be about writing, but it was actually just a secret code-word for Social Advocacy (i.e. being sensitive to those different from you, and pondering women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc.).
See, they've already got an idea all planned out:
- In the first game, you'll learn all about controlling your creature and caring for villagers.
- In the second game, you'll discover a rival god as well as a friendly ally, and you'll have to use your creature to defeat the rival while getting useless tips from your ally. At the end of the second game, the rival will take your creature away from you in some sort of cut-scene while you are alienated from the action, helpless to interfere.
- In the third game, you spend a very long, very frustrating time trying to get your creature back from the rival, having absolutely no fun and considering abandoning it and the later game altogether.
- In the fourth game, you and your rescued creature will return to the world from the first game, only to discover that it's being ravaged by an even more evil rival god.
- In the fifth game, you will follow the super-rival to his home turf and try to defeat him, all the while your creature slowly becomes diametrically opposed to you in alignment due to a curse. Players will have no fun in this game either, and they probably should have stopped playing back at game 2.
I must say, I'm excited by the prospect. These are brilliant concepts! I've never seen anything like them!
(I shouldn't be telling you this, but they already have plans for an expansion pack to the fifth game: you and your creature, through some stupid plot device, end up on an island with lots of other stupid, wise-cracking creatures. You will engage in dozens of pointless mini-games and your creature's AI will be modified so it doesn't feel like the same creature anymore. You will spend the entire game wondering: why, oh why, didn't you actually abandon the series at game 2!? But on the plus side, your creature will gain some pointless accessory you can show off while playing the game's ill-conceived multiplayer mode.)
Yeah, Microsoft can take a deep breath: I won't be needing one either. "Crisis" averted.
It might not save you, but it can definitely help you. Though it may sound counter-intuitive, you can plan for changing requirements, and so alleviate some of the problems. You can keep the design flexible, for one thing (as much as possible, anyway). And if you have good "intuition", you can guess what the customer actually wants (instead of what they say they want), so that when they "change" the requirement (when they figure out that they didn't actually want what they said they wanted), you can be one step ahead. (Paul Graham writes about this sort of thing in his essays sometimes, and he's pretty darn smart.)
I don't think "crunch time"that is, the idea of a period of rapid development where you're doing focused work to get a project doneis bad in itself. It's quite exhilirating when it's your own motivation and enthusiasm for the project that cause the rapid development. It's hell when its forced upon you by the incompetence of someone else, and it wears you out.
I hope that some game companies start using a better model. Then maybe the games will be more fun (because the developers are having fun making it), and they will sell well, and other game companies will ask, "What's your secret?"
And they'll reply with something witty.
Sure, but what indie developer would want to use Java? I ask this only half-jokingly: Java is a creator-proclaimed language for the "average programmer"; they would need to allow a variety of languages so the innovators (who definitely won't be using Java; sorry Java fans, but it's true) won't be held back.
On another note: one of the Revolution's big features is its ability to emulate Nintendo's previous consoles, i.e. act as a variety of virtual machines. So the idea of a virtual machine for indie developers might not be far-fetched.
This would also allow them to limit the damage that a malicious or flaky indie game could do to the Revolution (I'm thinking: deleted save games, trojan-infected zombie consoles sending spam over the 'net...)
And even if it meant that the power given to the developer over the console is less than a big-time developer would get -- indie games won't need as much power anyway, because they probably won't have as high-quality content as the big developers would (quality as in number of polygons, texture resolution, etc.; not that the indie games would be crap).
Example: the most violent thing you could do in Animal Crossing was hit the animals on the head with your bug-catching net. After you did it a couple times, though, they'd start crying and run away.
Still, that'll teach that froggy bastard not to send me stupid stuff in the mail anymore. "I hope you like it, ribbit," indeed...
No, those are definitely suppposed to be coming from within the environment. The roar of the engines? It comes from the engines. The zaps of laser guns? They come from the laser guns.
Whether or not we (or anybody) should be able to laser guns in space, is beside the point. The audience is given enough information (in this case, sound) to make things interesting.
Are you afraid you'll be considered less of a man (or woman as the case may be) because you buy Nintendogs?
Search your feelings... you know it to be soooo cute!
The days when game developers had to program for specific hardwares is long over (except, I'll note, in the console industry). Operating systems and libraries like OpenGL and SDL take care of most of that now. Or, at least, they could and should. Game developers should develop for a library (or libraries), not for a set of hardware. The library developers develop for an operating system (or several). The operating system developers are the ones who develop for hardware. It's all about abstraction layers.
As for the "problem" of varying performance between PCs: you plan. You sit down and you say "Ok, we're targeting a system with 500Mhz processor and 64MB RAM. First, we make it fun. If we have time later, we can add toggle-able eye candy (stencil shadows, particle effects, etc.) that take bigger hardware." And then you do what you said. Although, you'd probably be better off forgetting the "If we have time later" part, because a) you won't, and b) it doesn't matter anyway.
From what I can see, most developers don't do this. Most programmers get off on the latest techno-crap like "bump mapping" and "per-pixel shading" which aren't even worth the development time to implement. But the programmers think it's interesting, and the hype-machine convinces consumers that it matters, so they don't spend time on the stuff that actually matters.
In short, the fixed hardware on consoles is a crutch that forces developers to spend at least some of their time on stuff that matters. It enforces a limit that developers should be enforcing for themselves. If the developers had the will-power to keep themselves away from their shiny toys, that hardware limit wouldn't be needed.
Moving on, there's no reason a PC game has to be "installed" any more than a console game has to be installed, except that PC developers like to take advantage of the access speed of hard-drives (which consoles historically have not had). It's certainly possible to run a program off of a CD (even in Linux), and software could even be written to control it with a USB controller.
And, if you had a TV-out port and USB controllers, you could put your PC-console-thing down in the living room where you put your other consoles, and play it sitting on the couch. Most PC towers are quite large these days, but they don't have to be.
Like I said, a homebrew box is probably the most feasible plan; a pre-built Open Console just wouldn't survive in today's market. Maybe, just maybe, they could be sold online and create a niche market. Then it might have a chance for indie developers to make games on it, and slowly expand the market by word of mouth (if these indie developers can force themselves to make fun games instead of eye candy). But if it's Open, what's to stop some other company from saying "Look! We made one that's just like the old one, but with MORE MEGS!" All the weak-willed developers would develop for that console so they could make more eye candy (and making it impossible to play their games on the old console), and we'd have the PC market all over again.
But still... someone show me an Open Console priced and under $150 with a decent API, and I'd buy one myself just to make my own games on, even if no one else bought it.
I agree with you that there's not a snowflake's chance in hell that the Big 3 are going to take the risk involved to do this. For one thing, their shareholders would just shoot whatever CEO tried to do that, because it makes absolutely no business sense.
The numbers I've seen say the Rev is "2-3 times" more powerful than the GCN, while the Xbox 360 is "13-15 times" more powerful than the Xbox 1, and the PS3 is "35 times" more powerful than the PS2.
Looking at this page, it looks like Xbox's numbers are bigger than Gamecube's in every category. And while the PS2's are smaller, the reported 35-fold increase in performance would put them well above 2-3 times increase over GCN.
So, I hope you can understand how I came to the conclusion that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are more powerful. I'm not claiming that the numbers are what's important, only that (according to reports from the companies themselves), the Xbox360/PS3 have more "RAW CPU/GPU POWAH" than the Revolution.
You must have some insider info on Nintendo's console, then! From what I've read, Nintendo's console will, in terms of specs, be significantly less powerful than either PS3 or Xbox 360. Of course, Nintendo's counting on their console being superior in some way that turns out to be more important than pure processing power. (Maybe it will have a funnitude rating of 33!!!)
An Open Console would be really nice, but (like you pointed out) the only market-players with the means to mass-produce a new console have an economic motive not to do so. There have been hobbyist projects in the past to make small, Linux-based console systems, but none of them really took off, even among FOSS enthusiasts.
And of course, Joey Newshoes, age 13, doesn't want to build his own console just to play some crummy tetris clone. For an Open Console to become truly popular, it would have to a) be available in retail stores, and b) have a good selection of quality games. The latter might be possible as more commercial-quality games are being made/ported to Linux. The former is almost inconceivable, from an economic standpoint, because it would require a lot of resources to mass-produce the consoles, and a profit would have to be made without the licensing fees, which means trying to undercut the 3 major players on price.
Frankly, I think our best bet would be a regular Linux PC with a TV-out port and some USB controllers. Consoles all have standard hardware, but is variation in hardware a problem? With a couple abstraction layers between the hardware and the game, the difference between e.g. an AMD and an Intel approaches zero.
There will always be a difference in performance (e.g. 1Ghz vs 2Ghz), but games can have a low minimum requirements and scale up with additional hardware, if they are so programmed. The only problem I see with this in the Windows game market is that the developers are actually pushing for faster hardware, making the system requirements higher each year, so that consumers are pressured into upgrading. If anyone should be able to avoid that temptation, it's FOSS developers.
I don't think the audience for blogs is that much different that the audience for Slashdot. In fact, I don't think "most people" (i.e. Average Joe) would see the blogs, no matter how many you had.
I'd say the answer is less techno-savvy distribution. Letters to the editor. Flyers. Word of mouth.
The question I have is: how will we avoid the McCarthyist sentiment, i.e. "you are against DRM so you must be a pirate." Even if nobody says that to my face, I feel like it must cross their minds while I'm explaining to them why this is a problem.
(P.S. What if we can't read the Captcha? Does that mean I'm actually a script trapped in the body of a man? *tiny tears*)
I don't follow why a government-controlled rating board would rate games much differently than the ESRB does. Are you suggesting that they would be ultra-sensitive in their ratings to avoid complaints from parents (i.e. constituents)? I think it's a waste to ignore the perfectly-good rating system already available, but why would a new one be so different?
From a logical standpoint, I don't see anything truly objectionable with the idea of stopping sales of M-rated games to children (not to imply that you do). After some introspection, I think the reason I don't like it is because it's an attempt to regulate my favorite pastime.
And perhaps because I fear that they may be right, and that I may, because I was raised without the "protection" of such a law, be a homocidal maniac and not know it.
I guess I'll start worrying about that if I wake up one day and I can't remember what I did last night but there are a dozen dead bodies stuffed in my closet.
"WHAAAT?! They ended Voyager? But... Seven of Nine... *whimper*"
Which is his point... if the Revolution can actually load the game in, say, 1 second, hopefully you won't need to stare at company logos for 5 seconds.
The real reason they will probably be here to stay is that some companies think they will improve brand recognition by displaying their logo for a long time every time you play the game.
Well, I guess they are right, but not in the way they thought. The player recognizes the brand... as a bunch of rat-bastards who won't let you get to the damn game already!
That's the real reason to get this keyboard: everyone else would be too "weirded-out" to even touch it! No more worries about people with greasy fingers gunking up your keyboard. (Now if I could keep them away from my Donkey Konga bongos!)
On a more serious note, I actually popped out the keys and rearranged them to the Dvorak layout when I switched from Sholes (qwerty). Like you mentioned, the F and J keys wouldn't fit right anywhere else -- so I made little paper labels and taped them on the keys! (Too bad I couldn't use duct tape, that would have made it an even more elegant solution.)
Eventually I switched the keys back when I realized that (a) I never really looked at the keyboard since switching to Dvorak, (b) nobody else used my keyboard anyway, so they wouldn't need help typing with the Dvorak setting, and (c) I couldn't figure out how to type my root password when I hit a snag during boot up (before the dvorak keymap was loaded). Plus those nasty taped-on labels started to bother me.
I'd say that most anyone who goes to Quakecon would be considered a fairly 'hardcore' gamer, wouldn't you?
Except maybe that old lady who accidently wandered in looking for Knit-and-tell-old-storiescon.
My guess at the "revolution" is that Nintendo will be encouraging a shift away from the "Hollywoodisation" of the games market that we've been seeing. If you want to spend a couple billion dollars developing a game, knock yourself out, burn out your employees, price it at $60 per unit, etc. But, hopefully, you won't have to.
While I'd be piss-my-pants excited if they were going to make it easy for hobbyists like you and me to get their hands dirty (so to speak), I'm not holding my breath. More like, it will be a substantial reducement in the investment required, but it will still be an investment. You won't have to have a huge publishing company to get your game out there, but still have to spend perhaps a couple tens of thousands of dollars. This would require a new distribution method, though, since pressing, packaging, and shipping millions of units costs a lot of cash. With the Rev being online-capable, downloading from the 'net would be the obvious choice.
Now, the only way consumers would buy into this plan would be if these homebrew, non-production-quality games were either much cheaper than the big-budget games, or had absolutely incredible gameplay (or both). Nobody would buy a game which looks like crap (relatively speaking) unless it was cheap or they heard it was fun.
I hope we'll be seeing some more innovative games coming out, since the financial risk of a flop would not be so catastrophic. EA, for example, would never put the money into a game unless they knew for a fact that it would sell well, which means making it almost exactly like a game which has sold well in the past.
Well, they have to do that to compete with the PSP's karate-chop, er, disc-toss action. I imagine projectile discs will become a standard feature on new game systems. It really makes it more immersive when the game throws stuff at you when you lose.
Personally, I'm thrilled to think that this might be taken even further: could a brain learn to control an entire robotic body, based on the feedback it receives?
Could it be an abitrarily-shaped body (number of eyes, wings vs. arms, etc.), or is there something "built in" to our brains that it works only (or at least best) with the 4 limbs/1 head setup? (I realize not all life forms have this setup, but could a brain that has evolved to work with a certain setup learn to work with another setup?)
Aside from the possibility of all our sci-fi horror movies becoming reality, this is quite exciting! I for one would not welcome our new robotic spider-bodied overlords.