There is more besides "this person tells the story" and "this person listens to it". Traditional pen-and-paper role-playing games are inherently social occasions - everybody participates. The story as a whole is not told, it happens. The player shape the story, but the plot as a whole follows the GM's wishes. Roleplaying is fundamentally different from passive consumption - if you want games that spoon-feed you the story with no means of changing it you want an adventure or an interactive movie. Or go even further and read a book.
Player-affected plots are definitely doable in video games. While you obviously don't get nearly as much freedom as in a P&P session there are still many ways of making the world dynamic and interactive without sacrificing the notion of having an interesting story unfold. The usual solution is adding more content with multiple ways a particular scene can happen (usually depending on prior events and/or the character's stats), making scenes or even entire plot arcs depending on something and making character interaction less static. The aim is to make a video game that somewhat closely resembles the experience of playing pen and paper.
There are games that get it right. Fallout, for example, had both a nice story and a somewhat dynamic world. It allowed you to influence the story instead of passively consuming it. It made the way the game progessed dependant on what your character was capable of. Fallout was, by all means, a rather good adaptation of P&P gaming.
Very, very true. Add to that the fact that the interface was dumbed down to console standards (really, the PC version feels like a lame second-tier port). Morrowind's UI was very usable and did its job very well, especially the inventory screen. Oblivion's interface has been reduced to a bunch of lists - that kind of GUI is not really suitable to a role-playing game, at least in my opinion.
Well, Morrowind did it right, being essentially a sandbox game. Oblivion shows what happens when you get it wrong.
By the way, I'm waiting for Fallout 3 and Drakensang to come out. Especially Drakensang is promising, being based on The Dark Eye (essentially the German equivalent to Dungeons and Dragons and the basis of the Realms of Arkania series) and being written by people also working on the P&P sourcebooks. While they did screw up partially by making it yet another single-hero game (like most P&Ps TDE is best suited to partying and I expect ugly rule reworks just to make the single-hero concept work) I still expect it to tell a decent story.
Really, what the world needs is a decent P&P adaptation. No "one hero saves the world, sidekick optional" bullshit that requires your character to become a superhuman halfway through the game but a game where you control a party, you need all the members and even towards the end of the game getting a fireball to the face is dangerous.
Also, someone should really make a Shadowrun game for something newer than the SNES. The Mega CD game was never sold outside of Japan and the wannabe-pseudo-SR game they're currently working on has so little to do with Shadowrun that I refuse to acknowledge the connection. Really, if they took something from SR besides just the setting they could make a solid game. Maybe japanoid with fixed characters, but with squad-based action scenes and lots of footwork (and dialogs, etc.) beforehand. Dammit, I want a Shadowrun game where being unprepared can actually kill you. You know, like in Shadowrun. I could even tolerate the game using 4th ed. rules.
I was thinking more along the lines of "and when they have accumulated enough radiation it's HULK SMASH! time", but I agree that GITS is more interesting than super-strong fungus.
Could you please cut out that kingdomistic crap? The fact those fungi aren't sentient are no justification for harrassing our poor, evolution-impaired friends!
Seeing that you know so much about the Chernobyl area -- could you help me find this guy named Strelok? He should be around there somewhere. It appears that I have to kill him for some reason, but I can't really remember why...
Mostly true, but there is one argument to be made: Modern top-tier games are much more expensive than previously (which expensive GFX contribute to), making the big game companies less willing to try something radically different. OTOH, the really outstanding games often have graphics that aren't the apex of what's currently possible - think Katamari Damacy or WarioWare.
I think we just need more attention on small game designers - while Epic can make good games they're not going to put massive amounts of money into a game like those Introversion makes. Introversion is not going to create ultra-cinemastic games with top-tier voice acting and graphics. Both have their place.
Actually, my company Awesome Power Games is creating some very exciting (because they're unexciting) games.
Computer Linguistics Marathon Lecture is a breakthruogh game offering no less than ten hours of uninterrupted computer linguistics. Can you spot the mistake the lecturer made when descibing finite automata? Will your bladder hold? Can you sneak out to pee and possibly buy something to drink without the lecturer noticing? And while you decide whether you want cola or mineral water, will you miss something important?
Stay tuned for the sleep-inducing expansion pack Computer Linguistics Tutorium, where the tutor discusses the exercise sheet you didn't work on.
Another big hit will be Dintmeister*, a WWII war game where you play a British POW who is forced by the Nazis to remove dints from their cars. Witness the thrilling conclusion in March of 1944 when you notice that a tank can't be undinted without ordering in a spare armor plate. (Note: You can not heroically sabotage the German war effort by adding more dints because your character is kind of a coward.)
We're also planning on a MMO game called Waiting in Line, but we don't want to tell you too much yet.
* That reference is the most entertaining part of our entire lineup, we promise! We had to put it in or our lead programmer would have committed suicide our of sheer boredom. That's how good we are!
I just went from Mel's Hole to Charles Manson to Helter Skelter to Arthur Brown to Alice Cooper to Alice Cooper in Popular Culture. Once again I thank Wikipedia for enabling me to waste my time following a bizarre series of encyclopedia entries.
There's a Firefox extention mentioned in some post further up that randomly searches Google. The extension's project site mentions that newer versions of the extensions mine the search results for new terms to look for. That would be one way of generating pseudo-random sites.
Also, there's always StumbleUpon, which can be mined as well.
The problem is that they can either know where a quantum computer is located or how fast it is. They're still working on how to build a computer without having any idea how fast it is whatsoever.
Excessive use of smilies is a sign of low intelligence. According to the very nice charts I've got, every smiley used indicates a mental age 50% lower than previously esitmated. Thus, your mental age must be (26 / (2 * 2) =) 6.5 years, making you too young to play with the big business boys. Sorry. Come back in thirty years when you're old enough.
Note that CEOs have to be Lawful Evil; you might want to kick some puppies to get your alignment into place. You do get some rather nice feats, though - for example Outsourcing and Improved Outsourcing with level 9 or Sociopathy with level 15. You also get a +(Level) AC bonus on all saving throws against common sense.
Even better, they could leave a secret cache of their second-rate work and rough drafts to enrich their descendants
Roddenberry, anyone? I don't know whether he intended it, but apparently everything he ever scribbled on a piece of paper gets turned into a TV series, even his grocery lists...
But when you create something once, why should everyone else not be permitted to access it freely for eternity? It's one thing to ask for being paid for a couple decades and entirely another to declare that no one may ever access the work(s) without paying. Doesn't matter that the work was created 250 years ago, you still have to pay for it, thus much of the reuse that makes up for much of our culture doesn't happen.
Most of popular culture would not be possible if we had perpetual copyright sooner - for example about 50% of Disney's movie lineup. Or any movies about Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz. Or the Bible, for that matter. Or many tunes commonly heard as stereotypical BGM in movies (e.g. Ode to Joy). Probably no D&D either, given how much stuff was recycled there.
Between rounds of vanquishing technical staff, the rest of the game is spent in a virtual version of the player's ideal environment -- meetings -- where unlike in real life, players possess handy devices such as a Wand of Rebuttal Suppression, allowing the player to say any stupid thing without fear of being made to look the ass that he is. Or an Amulet of Unaccountability. Oh, wait, they already possess that one in real life.
I could swear I have already seen those in a D&D module...
Actually, HVD should come out soon, as well. The HVD Alliance has some pretty big names behind it (Alps, Fuji, Minolta Konica, LiteOn, EMTEC) and they have announced to launch HVCs (credit-card sized holo-storage) in Japan somewhere in the first half of 2007. I expect them to release somewhere in 2008, but it's definitely not going to be long until consumer-level holo-storage will become common.
It remains to be seen whether the announced price (~$1/30GB disk) will hold true; if it does HVC is going to be quite interesting.
Yeah, they're currently addressing that problem by rewriting Gecko in PHP (the UI will, however, continue being written in their flavor of eXtended ML). It will run on Mozilla's webservers and you will be able to run Firefox via any compatible web browser.
Apple, OTOH, will rewrite Safari, KHTML, Konqueror and most of KDE in Objective Ruby, which will run on their iNternet iServers, accessible via iTCP/iP (compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and up). Right after they switch their kernel to Hurd.
Yes, that's exactly how the future is going to be or my name is not Sir Reginold Frankbarrister O'Fritzebolt-Tooley the Thirteenth!
Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like?
I experience it. Firefox's popup blocker is mostly good but inferior to a properly configured regexp-based web filter. Ad popups still open as additional tabs, etc.
A regexp-based filter that also filters incoming and outgoing HTTP, headers, now that's a feature I'm missing. A Firefox extension or even a portable application that does that with a comprehensible interface would be extremely useful. The Proxomitron was and is a great program like that (and, in fact, IMO the most useful Win program ever) but it's win-only closed source and the author is dead...
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There is more besides "this person tells the story" and "this person listens to it". Traditional pen-and-paper role-playing games are inherently social occasions - everybody participates. The story as a whole is not told, it happens. The player shape the story, but the plot as a whole follows the GM's wishes. Roleplaying is fundamentally different from passive consumption - if you want games that spoon-feed you the story with no means of changing it you want an adventure or an interactive movie. Or go even further and read a book.
Player-affected plots are definitely doable in video games. While you obviously don't get nearly as much freedom as in a P&P session there are still many ways of making the world dynamic and interactive without sacrificing the notion of having an interesting story unfold. The usual solution is adding more content with multiple ways a particular scene can happen (usually depending on prior events and/or the character's stats), making scenes or even entire plot arcs depending on something and making character interaction less static. The aim is to make a video game that somewhat closely resembles the experience of playing pen and paper.
There are games that get it right. Fallout, for example, had both a nice story and a somewhat dynamic world. It allowed you to influence the story instead of passively consuming it. It made the way the game progessed dependant on what your character was capable of. Fallout was, by all means, a rather good adaptation of P&P gaming.
Very, very true. Add to that the fact that the interface was dumbed down to console standards (really, the PC version feels like a lame second-tier port). Morrowind's UI was very usable and did its job very well, especially the inventory screen. Oblivion's interface has been reduced to a bunch of lists - that kind of GUI is not really suitable to a role-playing game, at least in my opinion.
Well, Morrowind did it right, being essentially a sandbox game. Oblivion shows what happens when you get it wrong.
By the way, I'm waiting for Fallout 3 and Drakensang to come out. Especially Drakensang is promising, being based on The Dark Eye (essentially the German equivalent to Dungeons and Dragons and the basis of the Realms of Arkania series) and being written by people also working on the P&P sourcebooks. While they did screw up partially by making it yet another single-hero game (like most P&Ps TDE is best suited to partying and I expect ugly rule reworks just to make the single-hero concept work) I still expect it to tell a decent story.
Really, what the world needs is a decent P&P adaptation. No "one hero saves the world, sidekick optional" bullshit that requires your character to become a superhuman halfway through the game but a game where you control a party, you need all the members and even towards the end of the game getting a fireball to the face is dangerous.
Also, someone should really make a Shadowrun game for something newer than the SNES. The Mega CD game was never sold outside of Japan and the wannabe-pseudo-SR game they're currently working on has so little to do with Shadowrun that I refuse to acknowledge the connection. Really, if they took something from SR besides just the setting they could make a solid game. Maybe japanoid with fixed characters, but with squad-based action scenes and lots of footwork (and dialogs, etc.) beforehand. Dammit, I want a Shadowrun game where being unprepared can actually kill you. You know, like in Shadowrun. I could even tolerate the game using 4th ed. rules.
As a beneficial side effect, leaking door seals mean that all your produce stays fresh longer even when not stored in the microwave.
I learned everything I need to know about physics from Mark Erickson.
I was thinking more along the lines of "and when they have accumulated enough radiation it's HULK SMASH! time", but I agree that GITS is more interesting than super-strong fungus.
Could you please cut out that kingdomistic crap? The fact those fungi aren't sentient are no justification for harrassing our poor, evolution-impaired friends!
Seeing that you know so much about the Chernobyl area -- could you help me find this guy named Strelok? He should be around there somewhere. It appears that I have to kill him for some reason, but I can't really remember why...
Now you're afraid of some little Ewoks. What are those little critters gonna do, smash your AT-STs with logs? Sheesh!
Let's not forget: "Soul Calibur: Where's Voldo?"
Mostly true, but there is one argument to be made: Modern top-tier games are much more expensive than previously (which expensive GFX contribute to), making the big game companies less willing to try something radically different. OTOH, the really outstanding games often have graphics that aren't the apex of what's currently possible - think Katamari Damacy or WarioWare.
I think we just need more attention on small game designers - while Epic can make good games they're not going to put massive amounts of money into a game like those Introversion makes. Introversion is not going to create ultra-cinemastic games with top-tier voice acting and graphics. Both have their place.
Sure, most things which are mundane are also boring. But then there's sex.
Tell that to my girlfr-- I mean: Hear, hear!
Actually, my company Awesome Power Games is creating some very exciting (because they're unexciting) games.
Computer Linguistics Marathon Lecture is a breakthruogh game offering no less than ten hours of uninterrupted computer linguistics. Can you spot the mistake the lecturer made when descibing finite automata? Will your bladder hold? Can you sneak out to pee and possibly buy something to drink without the lecturer noticing? And while you decide whether you want cola or mineral water, will you miss something important?
Stay tuned for the sleep-inducing expansion pack Computer Linguistics Tutorium, where the tutor discusses the exercise sheet you didn't work on.
Another big hit will be Dintmeister*, a WWII war game where you play a British POW who is forced by the Nazis to remove dints from their cars. Witness the thrilling conclusion in March of 1944 when you notice that a tank can't be undinted without ordering in a spare armor plate. (Note: You can not heroically sabotage the German war effort by adding more dints because your character is kind of a coward.)
We're also planning on a MMO game called Waiting in Line, but we don't want to tell you too much yet.
* That reference is the most entertaining part of our entire lineup, we promise! We had to put it in or our lead programmer would have committed suicide our of sheer boredom. That's how good we are!
The wombat was infinitely deep, too. It also turned a sheep into Seal (due to bad grammar), who then went on to become a hit musician.
I just went from Mel's Hole to Charles Manson to Helter Skelter to Arthur Brown to Alice Cooper to Alice Cooper in Popular Culture. Once again I thank Wikipedia for enabling me to waste my time following a bizarre series of encyclopedia entries.
There's a Firefox extention mentioned in some post further up that randomly searches Google. The extension's project site mentions that newer versions of the extensions mine the search results for new terms to look for. That would be one way of generating pseudo-random sites.
Also, there's always StumbleUpon, which can be mined as well.
The problem is that they can either know where a quantum computer is located or how fast it is. They're still working on how to build a computer without having any idea how fast it is whatsoever.
Excessive use of smilies is a sign of low intelligence. According to the very nice charts I've got, every smiley used indicates a mental age 50% lower than previously esitmated. Thus, your mental age must be (26 / (2 * 2) =) 6.5 years, making you too young to play with the big business boys. Sorry. Come back in thirty years when you're old enough.
Note that CEOs have to be Lawful Evil; you might want to kick some puppies to get your alignment into place. You do get some rather nice feats, though - for example Outsourcing and Improved Outsourcing with level 9 or Sociopathy with level 15. You also get a +(Level) AC bonus on all saving throws against common sense.
Even better, they could leave a secret cache of their second-rate work and rough drafts to enrich their descendants
Roddenberry, anyone? I don't know whether he intended it, but apparently everything he ever scribbled on a piece of paper gets turned into a TV series, even his grocery lists...
But when you create something once, why should everyone else not be permitted to access it freely for eternity? It's one thing to ask for being paid for a couple decades and entirely another to declare that no one may ever access the work(s) without paying. Doesn't matter that the work was created 250 years ago, you still have to pay for it, thus much of the reuse that makes up for much of our culture doesn't happen.
Most of popular culture would not be possible if we had perpetual copyright sooner - for example about 50% of Disney's movie lineup. Or any movies about Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz. Or the Bible, for that matter. Or many tunes commonly heard as stereotypical BGM in movies (e.g. Ode to Joy). Probably no D&D either, given how much stuff was recycled there.
Between rounds of vanquishing technical staff, the rest of the game is spent in a virtual version of the player's ideal environment -- meetings -- where unlike in real life, players possess handy devices such as a Wand of Rebuttal Suppression, allowing the player to say any stupid thing without fear of being made to look the ass that he is. Or an Amulet of Unaccountability. Oh, wait, they already possess that one in real life.
I could swear I have already seen those in a D&D module...
Hey, I'm not complaining; this makes my upcoming IT Security assignment much easier. Once again reading Slashot pays.
Actually, HVD should come out soon, as well. The HVD Alliance has some pretty big names behind it (Alps, Fuji, Minolta Konica, LiteOn, EMTEC) and they have announced to launch HVCs (credit-card sized holo-storage) in Japan somewhere in the first half of 2007. I expect them to release somewhere in 2008, but it's definitely not going to be long until consumer-level holo-storage will become common.
It remains to be seen whether the announced price (~$1/30GB disk) will hold true; if it does HVC is going to be quite interesting.
Yeah, they're currently addressing that problem by rewriting Gecko in PHP (the UI will, however, continue being written in their flavor of eXtended ML). It will run on Mozilla's webservers and you will be able to run Firefox via any compatible web browser.
Apple, OTOH, will rewrite Safari, KHTML, Konqueror and most of KDE in Objective Ruby, which will run on their iNternet iServers, accessible via iTCP/iP (compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and up). Right after they switch their kernel to Hurd.
Yes, that's exactly how the future is going to be or my name is not Sir Reginold Frankbarrister O'Fritzebolt-Tooley the Thirteenth!
Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like?
I experience it. Firefox's popup blocker is mostly good but inferior to a properly configured regexp-based web filter. Ad popups still open as additional tabs, etc.
A regexp-based filter that also filters incoming and outgoing HTTP, headers, now that's a feature I'm missing. A Firefox extension or even a portable application that does that with a comprehensible interface would be extremely useful. The Proxomitron was and is a great program like that (and, in fact, IMO the most useful Win program ever) but it's win-only closed source and the author is dead...