As long as a patent examiner's job performance is based on how many applications they can process, the problems are not going to go away. Change the presumption of validity to "Not valid", and you're still going to have problems.
Living in Washington, D.C., I know quite a few people who work in the patent office. They are, generally, quite competent people. Many of them have fairly scientific minds and are technically savvy. And many of them like their jobs, and think it's quite neat that they get to learn about things on the forefront of technology.
However, they also know that they are judged by the Powers That Be not based on whether or not they make the "right" decision, but rather on whether or not they process enough applications when compared to the "average" examiner. If one decision requires relatively little paperwork, and the other requires a mountain of paperwork, taking up lots of time, followed by an inevitable challenge (or even lawsuit) by the aggrieved party, well, some examiners are simply going to start rubber-stamping everything in front of them. They're under enormous pressure to increase the rate at which they process applications, and the only way to do that is accept more, and reject less.
It becomes a vicious circle - examiners know they're judged based on whether or not they process enough applications. Therefore, some such examiners, in order to look "the best", are going to start blazing through applications, approving them all, to improve their numbers. This, of course, raises the "average", forcing everyone else to spend less time examining, and to make the easy decision.
Changing the presumption of validity would simply make the "easy" decision a "reject", and while I think it's better to reject them offhand (and have a review) than accept everything by default (leading to patent trolls and settlements rather than reexamination of a patent), it still doesn't solve the problem.
Patent examiners need to be reviewed based on the quality of their work, not just the speed by which they process it.
Imagine if Diebold, one of the major manufacturers of bank ATMs, hard-coded the passwords to every ATM as "12345678", or insisted to every bank that they couldn't get an ATM that gave people paper verification of their transactions, or that they couldn't guarantee to the bank that the internal records ATMs were reliable, and couldn't give any assurance that they were at all secure.
They'd never sell a single one. No bank would accept an ATM that couldn't accurately track the thousand or so transactions that they see each day, or that anyone could gain control of by typing in a few keys followed by "12345678".
And yet somehow (through much campaign cash, etc.) they managed to convince politicians that all that stuff would be too hard and unnecessary in voting machines, despite the technology already being available from the same company. That it's not hard to count accurately millions, even billions, of dollars in transactions each day, but that it's too hard to simply increase by one the count in the proper register to greater than a few percent accuracy. And despite numerous security incidents, they are still fighting tooth and nail these simple things.
I'm not convinced electronic voting is necessary...but I'm wary of any politician that keeps trying to tell me there's no need to increase the security of such systems. Unless they say they're OK with their own banks using that kind of security, voting shouldn't use it either.
The RCA console! Could that be the RCA Studio II? My family owned one of those, and amazingly enough, still have it. I think it still works, too, although it's not actually hooked up or anything.
It had no controllers, if I recall. Instead, the console on each side had a 10-digit keypad, similar to a telephone's. Without cartridges, you could play a car racing game, a bowling game, and an addition game.
We had a couple of cartridges for it, I recall...I know we had a baseball one, a Tennis/Squash (i.e. Pong) one, and a blackjack one. I know there was another, but I don't recall it.
This is definitely untrue, at least in the business world - if New Hampshire had been the state to pass some strange law that required new labels to be printed on objects if they are suspected carcinogens, many companies would have simply stopped shipping products to New Hampshire. California passes such a law, for example, and now tons of products out there carry the warning label stating that in California, "X" is true (and I'm on the east coast, and see them!).
It is also because of California, and no other state or federal law, that customers of large financial corporations, insurance companies, etc. are actually being [i]told[/i] when their financial data has been compromised. It went on for years without companies telling customers, because they didn't have to and bore no liability if someone was harmed with the information. California passes a law and now suddenly it's a common occurance (it's also forcing companies to take steps to prevent it to prevent the negative PR involved, which they had no incentive to do before). Legislation of this type has been stymied in Congress for years, despite being tremendously important in these days of identity theft.
No, California's gun control laws aren't going to affect other states, but to say that California's laws don't often affect the nation as a whole is untrue. Because of its sheer size and population, it does matter.
Perhaps it shows my age, but if I recall, it was the Saturday Supercade. I even have the theme music somewhere. (Yes it's supercade time, let's have some supercade fun fun fun!)
Starcade was a completely different show, which if I recall was more a game-show type.
One has been able to play the Settlers of Catan (a fun board game, albeit one that seems to fall by the wayside for many 'serious gamers' when they move to other German-style games) online for a while. BrettSpielWelt (BSW), http://www.brettspielwelt.de/ has a number of games of this sort - Catan, Puerto Rico, San Juan, Princes of Florence, as well as some abstracts, like Dvonn and Yinsh by Brum.
For those that really enjoy board games, it's a fun place (and there are many people that speak English there too).
My guess is that the answer to that question, with two possible outcomes, will not float around 50%, regardless of the number of people you ask.
In a random situation (say, flipping a coin) with two possible outcomes, yes, the result floats around 50%...but the examples listed so far are not random.
Movie reviewers review movies all the time that aren't the "types of movies they like". Some reviewers dislike heavy drama, or foreign film, or whatever. But they watch them, and they are somehow able to write a review that is at least somewhat objective. Once in a while maybe they'll be way off, but most of the time they get close. They can look at something and say "I may not like this type of movie a lot, but I know good when I see it."
I think if you hire the right people to do game reviews - not fanboys of a certain genre, or whatever, then you can get that. Maybe they like RPGs the most, but if they can't see that, say, StarCraft, is a "good game" despite not being an RPG, then they should not be doing reviews in the first place. But that might cost more money, and certainly would make it harder to say "They're paying us big bucks, write up a good review!
All this really comes down to the fact that game reviews and reviewers have not reached the level of "professionalism" that you would see in a movie, theater, or food review.
First of all, we have to note that video game reviews are not nearly as "technical" or "critical" as, say, movie or food reviews. Every movie reviewer has his or her specific biases, true, but you can also be well assured that most top critics (say, the Eberts of the world) are indeed watching the movie they are reviewing, take notes, and put some thought into what the good, and bad, of the movie they just saw was. And then they tell you. Now you know that a movie review is simply an opinion, but because most top reviewers give you both the "technical" things about the movie, as well as personal thoughts, you can often draw out the "technical" pluses and minuses (the plot is done well, etc.). Game reviewers usually can't play through a whole game - they play for a few hours, and then give their verdict. Which is why some games that we've seen lately have had a great first few hours, then suck - why not, if you know the reviewers will only see those.
In addition, movie reviewers we know will be reviewing the actual final movie. How often has a game gotten a score of 9.3/10, only to be absolutely terrible, and the reviewers defend themselves by saying "Oh, but they told us the one we played wasn't finished, and that the bugs would be fixed, and that the graphics would be better, in the final release!" All the time.
Game reviews are often sensationalist - a game is either a 8.5+, or like, 5.0 or below. There's no "Yeah, this game is good, but not great." If it's "good" it'll get that 8.whatever the publisher wants. Any respected movie critic recognizes that some things are just "Good" or "OK" and that's why you have ratings like "two stars". And that's neglecting the whole thing about games like Driv3r, where the company obviously paid off reviewers to give the game a good review.
And then there's the writing. Despite hearing that a place like IGN or Gamespy or various magazines have "editors" it sure doesn't seem like it. At least they could have run Word's horrible grammar and spell checker on their articles (sorry, you're using the passive voice!). Game reviews are usually very poorly written, even when coming from the "top" review sites out there. The Chicago Sun-Times doesn't expect Ebert's review to be crap...but IGN seems to have no trouble with it. (And let's not get into some sites' recent decision to just cut-and-paste reviews for a game multiple times when the game is on multiple consoles, instead of reviewing each on the merits).
So in review:
Major newspaper movie critic doesn't watch movie, writes review - fired.
Game reviewer plays 2 hours of game, writes review - praised by bosses!
Major newspaper movie critic writes crappy articles every time - fired.
Game reviewer writes gramatically terrible articles - published unedited!
Major newspaper movie critic gives every movie either 1 star or 4 stars - fired.
Game reviewer gives everything 8.5+ or 5- - great way to get payola from publishers!
Movie reviewer writes incorrect review, says movie company said movie would be edited before release - fired.
Game reviewer gives glowing review to buggy game, not mentioning any of them, says publisher told them the bugs would be fixed before release - No problem!
In movies, there's always critics giving a spectrum of ratings for movies, but there's no "controversy" because you can usually at least believe there's some professionalism behind the article, and can accept that everyone has some likes and dislikes. In games, it doesn't exist.
I think, if one wants to go for console RPGs, that I would cast a vote towards Beyond the Beyond.
Back before the PSX became the de facto standard for 'traditional' RPGs, all you really had was King's Field to sate any RPG desire. Then came...Beyond the Beyond! I know a ton of people that bought it (including my roommates and I back in our dorm) solely because it was the first traditional console RPG out for the PSX in the US.
Big mistake.
The story was incredibly uninteresting, the characters bland, the dialogue pure tripe, and the dungeons were huge, but every room looked the same. The graphics were listed as "3D!!!!" but in reality, battles were done by 2D sprites on a 3D plane - as the camera "moved around" the 3D plane, the sprite would of course not move until the camera moved 90 degrees, when a different sprite would be loaded and placed there for that character instead.
But the worst was the battles. The encounter rate was higher than I've ever seen in an RPG. In the giant mazelike dungeons, it wasn't uncommon for there to be battles every 3-4 steps you took. And in the battles, they had this system they called "Active Battling". In the instructions, it said something like, hit the button right when you're attacking, and you'll do more damage...or hit it when they're attacking you, and you might defend. At least, that's what it said. In reality, it seemed like mad (and tiring, if you didn't have a turbo controller) button mashing was the only thing that triggered it, and even then, it did so randomly, making the battles not only boring, but tiring, too!
Ugh. What a letdown. Whomever at Sony greenlighted that one should have been shot.
Note that it is probably not the professors that are at fault here. Professors get 'prestige' points from their higher-ups for publishing a textbook, but the actual monetary returns are quite small (you'd be shocked at how little a professor gets from the $120-$150 purchase price of most technical upper-division or graduate-level textbooks that probably took years for them to write).
It's more, I think, collusion between the university (and its bookstores) and the publishers themselves. The professor isn't the one that is saying there should be a new edition after only 2 years that changes almost nothing. It's the publisher that wants that, so they can prevent the sale of used books.
Here at our campus, in the course I TA, the book has a new version. The previous version has been available for only a year, and already, a new one. What's the difference? They swapped the position of chapters 8, and 9. Nothing else changed. Just the content of 9 became 8, and the content of 8 became 9. Presto! New version, sorry, students, you have to buy all-new copies. The department, which isn't bound by the contracts that publishers force the bookstores to go by, is saving money by giving the course staff the old textbooks (we're smart enough to just use chapter 9 in the old book when using 8 in the new one). The students don't have that option.
And of that $140 or so that is being charged for the book? Something like $2 goes to the professor that wrote it. The vast, vast majority goes to the university, and the publisher. And the students lose.
Books that are only ported to the ebook medium will just make people resent ebooks, not make them rush out and buy them. Maybe if you got a collection of a dozen or so top current authors and released their books only as ebooks, you could get somewhere, but I still doubt it.
What really needs to happen is for the price to be reasonable. I think people would generally be OK with spending $X (50-100) on an "ebook reader", much like they spend $X on a DVD player. It's equipment that allows use of media.
However, recently when I was on Amazon looking for a few books, two of them were also available in ebook form. For each case, the ebook was $2 more than the paperback book - like, the paperback, $5.95, the ebook, $7.95. Why would I ever pay MORE for the medium in which I don't actually GET a hard copy, and for which it's CHEAPER for them to produce? They can say "Yeah, but the ebook can be pirated so we have to charge more." Well, sorry, but then I won't buy it.
It's like the online music stores in which the RIAA wants you to pay $20 for a DRM-laced set of CD tracks when you can go to Best Buy and pick up the CD for $12 and be able to rip it DRM-free to your heart's content. ITMS is at least showing that if you sell the album for a price that is LESS than the physical media price, people will buy. If it's more, it makes sense to go with the physical media.
Actually, unlike in the United States (where overruling many fundamental Supreme Court decisions would require amending the Constitution), the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (similar to our Constitution) does grant the government/Parliament the ability to overrule the Supreme Court of Canada without meddling with the Charter itself, through the use of the "notwithstanding clause." In essence, it gives the option for the government to pretty much overrule any court ruling that it does not like or agree with, much more easily than it could amend the Charter.
It is rarely, if ever, used. In fact, one of the big issues in the recent Canadian election was whether or not the Conservatives (who ended up as the Opposition, I think) would have used the clause to overrule a number of recent judgments. While the leader of the party (Harper) wouldn't say yes or no, other party bigwigs seemed eager to talk about how quickly they'd move to strip away rights using the Clause. I think it was one of the things that cost them election momentum.
Legacy of the Ancients was a truly outstanding RPG. The music was catchy, and despite the fact that the world wasn't THAT large, and it really seemed quite simple, there was something about it that kept me coming back - and well after my C64 was no longer functioning, I found it on an emulator and played through it again.
I don't know why it was so compelling. There wasn't that much of a variety of monsters (especially in dungeons), and hell, many times it was hard to figure out what to do next...and combine that with the endless traps in the 3D dungeons and one wonders what was the point...but it was fun.
I love showing the game to friends that have not yet played it, and somewhere around mid-to-endgame of their first play, suddenly the light turns on, and they see things like "Oh, Mayor might help me, but it would REALLY help you, so I should take something better, and force YOU to spend your role on Mayor" and things like that. It's great when everyone starts to see the potential of how to screw your neighbor's coffee crop by Captaining at the right time.
A game with a ton of strategies, that allows for a lot of thought, yet that doesn't take too long to play.
And the fact that it's BrettSpielWelt-compatible doesn't hurt either:)
But note that it is not the motion picture industry itself that forbids those under 17 access to R-rated films, it is the theaters themselves that have made the agreement to do so. The ratings are just that, ratings.
I think the video game industry goes *farther* than the motion picture industry does - not only giving a rating, but explaining what in the game caused the rating (you'll see things that say "T - Some violence, light profanity" and such).
If *stores* decide, as theaters do, to get together and restrict the sales of M-rated games to minors (which I have no problems with), then that's fine.
The only way this whole "politicians pass laws on video games that they would never pass for movies" will pass is when they start realizing that video games and movies are, in essence, equivalent forms of entertainment. If you asked the same people trying to pass these laws if it's a good idea to require, say, Blockbuster (for rentals) or Best Buy (for sales) to take *all* R rated movies and put them in a separate section, they'd probably laugh and say "Of course not, that wouldn't be legal." Neither will this be.
While Mr. Rubin has a point to some degree, there are developers that have made sufficient names of themselves to be given press on the box/etc. of the game.
Look at any game by id Software. You'll see the "id" logo prominently on the box. There's no mistaking who made that game when you look at the box. Ditto anything by Blizzard. Squaresoft/Square-Enix. Valve. Bioware, to some extent. Sure, in all these cases the publisher will be listed too (there will certainly be an "Activision" somewhere on the box of a game by id) but the developer is given high billing.
Why? Because the publishers ARE trying to do the marketing, distributing, etc. and they know that there are fans that will look at a game by Blizzard, or id, or what have you, and buy it for that reason.
This is no different than in Hollywood. There are some directors/writers/etc. that are big enough names that people will go see their movies specifically because it's one of theirs. And, certainly, there are other directors/etc. that may make quality movies, but don't yet have that recognition. It doesn't mean they suck. In the game industry, there aren't necessarily INDIVIDUALS that are like this, but rather development groups.
If a developer continues to create innovative and popular games, they will get the recognition they deserve. Naughty Dog has done some good games, this is true, but when you think of big developers, they aren't one that comes to mind. If they succeed over time, it will come.
Excellent post. There are two issues here, of course - money and access.
When a newspaper or magazine does an article about Topic X, even if for some reason it really raked X over the coals, they know they have an almost indefinite source of advertising that they can draw from. Hell, it's why much of the time these days, "advertiser boycotts" don't work as well as they could. One drops out, another takes its place. In addition, since there are a zillion potential stories for a magazine, if one company doesn't like you, there are others you can interview, etc.
However, in the gaming realm, there are what, five, six, seven major publishing houses that are giving you most of your ads. Look through your average magazine and count the number of game ads that are for EA-published games. Or Activision. Or Sony. etc. Which means two things:
1. If these companies decide they don't want to advertise with you anymore, there's no one else to take their place.
2. If these companies decide they hate you, you don't get your interviews/previews/extra copies/what have you, and everyone else (that is still kissing butt) does.
Look at Deus Ex II - I remember when the demo came out and everyone was talking about the problems, the word from On High was "It's just the demo." I even remember a few articles at various places (Gamespy for one) talking about these problems...the performance (due to the lighting), the "dumbing down" of the interface, the loss of the broad XP system the original had, many other things. But then, the game comes out, and lo and behold, all these places give great reviews and barely gloss over the problems that *they themselves talked about not weeks before*. Or, if they do mention them, it doesn't seem to affect the score they give the game.
So everyone's happy except the gamer that goes out and buys the game. The site keeps getting ad money, the company got a good review.
It would be great to ask Mr. Spector questions like "Now that you've seen the reaction DX2 got, what would you have done differently?" or "Why did you focus so much on lighting effects few people care about (and that many turn off) and sacrifice the large, interactive areas that the original DX had?" and such. I just don't see that happening, though. After all, one bad question and suddenly your Thief 3 exclusive is in the competitor's magazine, and your boss is showing you the door.
There's also the fact that there was a point where if you had a 3D card, the developers pretty much KNEW which one you had. When GLquake came out, everyone pretty much had a 3dfx-brand card, if they had one at all. Then it's easy.
Now, everyone has something different, and all the cards have different capabilities. Worse yet, some manufacturers are shipping their newest computers with some of the oldest 3D cards (Sony, for example, ships some otherwise top-of-the-line systems with TNT2 cards). Some manufacturers (especially the video card Big Two) pack a lot of neat features into their cards that allow developers to push the limits, others don't.
As someone who has worked in gaming tech support, you have no idea how often you get a question like "I have this BRAND NEW SYSTEM and it came with a TNT2 and my game doesn't work." And you say "I'm sorry, sir, but the requirements listed on the box state you need an X card or better - it even names manufacturers and chipsets." And they say "But this computer is BRAND NEW, I'm never buying your games again!"
Before, a game could say "3d accellerator required" or something, and you'd get _fewer_ people buying it that didn't have one. Now, EVERYONE has a 3d card - but when the devs try to push the envelope, some cards get left behind.
I remember getting my first 3D card and going from playing, say, Quake, to playing GLQuake, and practically falling off my chair with how GL looked compared to software.
But did Call of Duty do that to me, compared to some FPS of two-three years ago? Not because of graphics.
But this happens all the time. You need a hook, to sell. Graphics aren't the big thing now. But back when the PlayStation came out, or when 3D cards were becoming more common in PCs, did you get something that advertised in big letters "3D!" on it. A developer would take anything, stick it in the box, and if it was 3D, it was 'cool' and people actually bought it, even if it was absolute crap. Games that were good, and 2D, didn't sell, and games that were lousy, but 3D, sold. Go back and read some game reviews from the period, and you see all sorts of reviews like "This was a great game, but with the '3D revolution' we're in now, it just doesn't cut it." Then a crappy 3D game gets a 8/10 because it's 3D. It's a hook. They're always looking for a hook.
Graphics aren't a hook anymore. How often now do you look at screenshots on a box and go "Wow"? Not nearly as often. So they find a different one. If I had to pick one, I'd say right now it's "Online play!" Games with online play mention it about 14 times all over the box. Great games get some crappy netcode slapped onto them just so they can be "online!" Otherwise good games get hurt in reviews, even if they're single-player titles, because they don't have online play.
What will the next hook be, when almost everything's online and "it's online!" is no longer something that reviewers will give bonus points for? That's the real question.
This happens to some degree now, but not with respect to cheating, but with respect to piracy.
Many online first-person-shooters that use CD keys (especially those that use id's engines) have the keyserver keep track of when a CD key is used for online play, and what IP address it's used from. If multiple people try to use the key at once, or there are distinct close-in-time geographical variations in the IP address, such things are noted. Too many violations for a given CD key, and the key is banned permanently - and they won't replace the key, you're out the $50.
Could this be extended to cheating? Sure, but cheating violations are something that I think would be a nightmare for the game company itself to keep track of, and a single false positive leading to a ban would be a logistical nightmare for the company (and once you get ONE proven false positive, every other cheater you've banned that professes their innocence, as they all do, are going to say theirs were false too). Even if you have something like PB integrated into the game, there have been cases in the past where it's come up with false positives due to various incompatibilities. They're usually fixed quickly, but they undermine the system in general. Things like this are more minor issues if you're only getting banned from that one server someone is playing on, but when you're talking being out the $50, you better be DAMNED sure that there isn't a chance they were legit.
It's easy to say that a CD key was in use by two IP addresses at once, and the odds of a false positive are low...but with cheating? I think it'd work, but it needs to be ironclad. If you're playing on the company's servers, or through a company system (see: Battle.net) then it's possible. But if it's like PC FPS games, played on random servers set up by random people, or even Xbox Live, where again, anyone can set up a server...it becomes much more of a challenge.
My gaming group was playing NS 2/2.1 over WON well after Steam came out (look up "unmitigated disaster" and I think Steam is in the dictionary) and we had a list of servers that we generally played on. It was also POSSIBLE to play 2.1 under Steam, but no one that I knew did. However, with this release, -every- server that we used to play on, has switched to the Steam version, essentially because despite the fact that the web page says it supports both WON and Steam, it seems to "default" to Steam. So while there may be some WON 3.0 servers out there, there don't seem to be very many.
So, alas, everyone has installed the POS that is Steam (I already had it installed but unused) and they got to feel the joy that I did when I installed - the crashes, the lockups, the "copying data over" then failing and having to redownload everything. Oh yes.
However, they say that it will now be under "My games" or whatever, and not under "3rd party games"...however, the NS 3.0 I installed is definitely under "3rd party games."
Even if they get a "fully compatible" WON version...now that large groups of people have defaulted to Steam, one wonders if the WON version will ever get as much play. (I know my Steam install, way back when, completely destroyed my vanilla HL installation despite me telling it to leave it alone).
A key point here is the interesting fact that everything you mention in your (excellent) post could be flipped on top of itself if we just cross the Altantic (something alluded to in your movie examples).
In Europe, for the most part, violence is completely taboo - movies, television, wherever, American movies often must be edited an incredible amount to reduce instances of graphic violence. Television shows rarely show the types of violence that are routine on CSI, NYPD Blue, or numerous other shows. Hell, in some countries, you even have police that can't carry firearms. Yet at the same time, sex is commonplace. In foreign versions of the reality show "Big Brother" it's not unusual for the station to show contestants having sex with each other, and it happens on television shows as well. Maybe not hardcore, but it's done. In fact, one recent story mentioned that a show (loosely translated as) "How to Have Sex" was recently reduced in airtime because people were getting BORED of it.
Interesting how desensitized Americans are to violence (when was the last time violence, really was SHOCKING to most people here?) while sex is abhorrent (reminds one of the Simpsons' when the town wanted to protest Michaelangelo's 'David' - saying it depicted parts of the body which, however practical and necessary, were EVIL), while in Europe, it's the opposite.
Sure, America started as a rather puritanical place, but Europe itself was pretty dominated by similar religions for a long time, yet seems to have gone the other direction...
As someone who has worked doing technical support for PC games (and still does), I can state that in my experience, the vast majority of problems that the "average" user experiences are things that are insanely annoying. I'd say a great percentage of problems are:
1. A person's video card drivers are hopelessly out of date and the old ones don't work with the game. It doesn't help that new drivers come out every few weeks - the average user NEVER thinks that they would need to go search for drivers all the time. After all, things like DirectX always come with their game CDs, so they don't have to "Go to some site" to get it. But drivers never are included on anything.
2. Newer games are actually being much more restrictive on what they support. Despite the existence of DirectX which was supposed to make it so you could have "almost any card", a lot of recent games support ATI, NVIDIA, and little else. I don't know how often I've seen someone say "I bought this computer a week ago and it won't run this game, and I have to buy a new piece of hardware?"
Add to these things the fact that a lot of games nowadays just don't work out of the box and need to be patched ad infinitum, CD keys which may be necessary but cause more trouble for average players than most people think, the dearth of true innovation lately, etc.
No wonder consoles continue to lead! Buy game, place game in console, turn on. No directories, configuration, anything.
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Living in Washington, D.C., I know quite a few people who work in the patent office. They are, generally, quite competent people. Many of them have fairly scientific minds and are technically savvy. And many of them like their jobs, and think it's quite neat that they get to learn about things on the forefront of technology.
However, they also know that they are judged by the Powers That Be not based on whether or not they make the "right" decision, but rather on whether or not they process enough applications when compared to the "average" examiner. If one decision requires relatively little paperwork, and the other requires a mountain of paperwork, taking up lots of time, followed by an inevitable challenge (or even lawsuit) by the aggrieved party, well, some examiners are simply going to start rubber-stamping everything in front of them. They're under enormous pressure to increase the rate at which they process applications, and the only way to do that is accept more, and reject less.
It becomes a vicious circle - examiners know they're judged based on whether or not they process enough applications. Therefore, some such examiners, in order to look "the best", are going to start blazing through applications, approving them all, to improve their numbers. This, of course, raises the "average", forcing everyone else to spend less time examining, and to make the easy decision.
Changing the presumption of validity would simply make the "easy" decision a "reject", and while I think it's better to reject them offhand (and have a review) than accept everything by default (leading to patent trolls and settlements rather than reexamination of a patent), it still doesn't solve the problem.
Patent examiners need to be reviewed based on the quality of their work, not just the speed by which they process it.
They'd never sell a single one. No bank would accept an ATM that couldn't accurately track the thousand or so transactions that they see each day, or that anyone could gain control of by typing in a few keys followed by "12345678".
And yet somehow (through much campaign cash, etc.) they managed to convince politicians that all that stuff would be too hard and unnecessary in voting machines, despite the technology already being available from the same company. That it's not hard to count accurately millions, even billions, of dollars in transactions each day, but that it's too hard to simply increase by one the count in the proper register to greater than a few percent accuracy. And despite numerous security incidents, they are still fighting tooth and nail these simple things.
I'm not convinced electronic voting is necessary...but I'm wary of any politician that keeps trying to tell me there's no need to increase the security of such systems. Unless they say they're OK with their own banks using that kind of security, voting shouldn't use it either.
The RCA console! Could that be the RCA Studio II? My family owned one of those, and amazingly enough, still have it. I think it still works, too, although it's not actually hooked up or anything. It had no controllers, if I recall. Instead, the console on each side had a 10-digit keypad, similar to a telephone's. Without cartridges, you could play a car racing game, a bowling game, and an addition game. We had a couple of cartridges for it, I recall...I know we had a baseball one, a Tennis/Squash (i.e. Pong) one, and a blackjack one. I know there was another, but I don't recall it.
It is also because of California, and no other state or federal law, that customers of large financial corporations, insurance companies, etc. are actually being [i]told[/i] when their financial data has been compromised. It went on for years without companies telling customers, because they didn't have to and bore no liability if someone was harmed with the information. California passes a law and now suddenly it's a common occurance (it's also forcing companies to take steps to prevent it to prevent the negative PR involved, which they had no incentive to do before). Legislation of this type has been stymied in Congress for years, despite being tremendously important in these days of identity theft.
No, California's gun control laws aren't going to affect other states, but to say that California's laws don't often affect the nation as a whole is untrue. Because of its sheer size and population, it does matter.
T.
Starcade was a completely different show, which if I recall was more a game-show type.
T.
For those that really enjoy board games, it's a fun place (and there are many people that speak English there too).
"Is two plus two equal to four?"
Answer #1 - Yes
Answer #2 - No
My guess is that the answer to that question, with two possible outcomes, will not float around 50%, regardless of the number of people you ask.
In a random situation (say, flipping a coin) with two possible outcomes, yes, the result floats around 50%...but the examples listed so far are not random.
T.
Movie reviewers review movies all the time that aren't the "types of movies they like". Some reviewers dislike heavy drama, or foreign film, or whatever. But they watch them, and they are somehow able to write a review that is at least somewhat objective. Once in a while maybe they'll be way off, but most of the time they get close. They can look at something and say "I may not like this type of movie a lot, but I know good when I see it."
I think if you hire the right people to do game reviews - not fanboys of a certain genre, or whatever, then you can get that. Maybe they like RPGs the most, but if they can't see that, say, StarCraft, is a "good game" despite not being an RPG, then they should not be doing reviews in the first place. But that might cost more money, and certainly would make it harder to say "They're paying us big bucks, write up a good review!
T.
First of all, we have to note that video game reviews are not nearly as "technical" or "critical" as, say, movie or food reviews. Every movie reviewer has his or her specific biases, true, but you can also be well assured that most top critics (say, the Eberts of the world) are indeed watching the movie they are reviewing, take notes, and put some thought into what the good, and bad, of the movie they just saw was. And then they tell you. Now you know that a movie review is simply an opinion, but because most top reviewers give you both the "technical" things about the movie, as well as personal thoughts, you can often draw out the "technical" pluses and minuses (the plot is done well, etc.). Game reviewers usually can't play through a whole game - they play for a few hours, and then give their verdict. Which is why some games that we've seen lately have had a great first few hours, then suck - why not, if you know the reviewers will only see those.
In addition, movie reviewers we know will be reviewing the actual final movie. How often has a game gotten a score of 9.3/10, only to be absolutely terrible, and the reviewers defend themselves by saying "Oh, but they told us the one we played wasn't finished, and that the bugs would be fixed, and that the graphics would be better, in the final release!" All the time.
Game reviews are often sensationalist - a game is either a 8.5+, or like, 5.0 or below. There's no "Yeah, this game is good, but not great." If it's "good" it'll get that 8.whatever the publisher wants. Any respected movie critic recognizes that some things are just "Good" or "OK" and that's why you have ratings like "two stars". And that's neglecting the whole thing about games like Driv3r, where the company obviously paid off reviewers to give the game a good review.
And then there's the writing. Despite hearing that a place like IGN or Gamespy or various magazines have "editors" it sure doesn't seem like it. At least they could have run Word's horrible grammar and spell checker on their articles (sorry, you're using the passive voice!). Game reviews are usually very poorly written, even when coming from the "top" review sites out there. The Chicago Sun-Times doesn't expect Ebert's review to be crap...but IGN seems to have no trouble with it. (And let's not get into some sites' recent decision to just cut-and-paste reviews for a game multiple times when the game is on multiple consoles, instead of reviewing each on the merits).
So in review: Major newspaper movie critic doesn't watch movie, writes review - fired. Game reviewer plays 2 hours of game, writes review - praised by bosses! Major newspaper movie critic writes crappy articles every time - fired. Game reviewer writes gramatically terrible articles - published unedited! Major newspaper movie critic gives every movie either 1 star or 4 stars - fired. Game reviewer gives everything 8.5+ or 5- - great way to get payola from publishers! Movie reviewer writes incorrect review, says movie company said movie would be edited before release - fired. Game reviewer gives glowing review to buggy game, not mentioning any of them, says publisher told them the bugs would be fixed before release - No problem!
In movies, there's always critics giving a spectrum of ratings for movies, but there's no "controversy" because you can usually at least believe there's some professionalism behind the article, and can accept that everyone has some likes and dislikes. In games, it doesn't exist.
Back before the PSX became the de facto standard for 'traditional' RPGs, all you really had was King's Field to sate any RPG desire. Then came...Beyond the Beyond! I know a ton of people that bought it (including my roommates and I back in our dorm) solely because it was the first traditional console RPG out for the PSX in the US.
Big mistake.
The story was incredibly uninteresting, the characters bland, the dialogue pure tripe, and the dungeons were huge, but every room looked the same. The graphics were listed as "3D!!!!" but in reality, battles were done by 2D sprites on a 3D plane - as the camera "moved around" the 3D plane, the sprite would of course not move until the camera moved 90 degrees, when a different sprite would be loaded and placed there for that character instead.
But the worst was the battles. The encounter rate was higher than I've ever seen in an RPG. In the giant mazelike dungeons, it wasn't uncommon for there to be battles every 3-4 steps you took. And in the battles, they had this system they called "Active Battling". In the instructions, it said something like, hit the button right when you're attacking, and you'll do more damage...or hit it when they're attacking you, and you might defend. At least, that's what it said. In reality, it seemed like mad (and tiring, if you didn't have a turbo controller) button mashing was the only thing that triggered it, and even then, it did so randomly, making the battles not only boring, but tiring, too!
Ugh. What a letdown. Whomever at Sony greenlighted that one should have been shot.
T.
It's more, I think, collusion between the university (and its bookstores) and the publishers themselves. The professor isn't the one that is saying there should be a new edition after only 2 years that changes almost nothing. It's the publisher that wants that, so they can prevent the sale of used books.
Here at our campus, in the course I TA, the book has a new version. The previous version has been available for only a year, and already, a new one. What's the difference? They swapped the position of chapters 8, and 9. Nothing else changed. Just the content of 9 became 8, and the content of 8 became 9. Presto! New version, sorry, students, you have to buy all-new copies. The department, which isn't bound by the contracts that publishers force the bookstores to go by, is saving money by giving the course staff the old textbooks (we're smart enough to just use chapter 9 in the old book when using 8 in the new one). The students don't have that option.
And of that $140 or so that is being charged for the book? Something like $2 goes to the professor that wrote it. The vast, vast majority goes to the university, and the publisher. And the students lose.
T.
What really needs to happen is for the price to be reasonable. I think people would generally be OK with spending $X (50-100) on an "ebook reader", much like they spend $X on a DVD player. It's equipment that allows use of media.
However, recently when I was on Amazon looking for a few books, two of them were also available in ebook form. For each case, the ebook was $2 more than the paperback book - like, the paperback, $5.95, the ebook, $7.95. Why would I ever pay MORE for the medium in which I don't actually GET a hard copy, and for which it's CHEAPER for them to produce? They can say "Yeah, but the ebook can be pirated so we have to charge more." Well, sorry, but then I won't buy it.
It's like the online music stores in which the RIAA wants you to pay $20 for a DRM-laced set of CD tracks when you can go to Best Buy and pick up the CD for $12 and be able to rip it DRM-free to your heart's content. ITMS is at least showing that if you sell the album for a price that is LESS than the physical media price, people will buy. If it's more, it makes sense to go with the physical media.
T.
It is rarely, if ever, used. In fact, one of the big issues in the recent Canadian election was whether or not the Conservatives (who ended up as the Opposition, I think) would have used the clause to overrule a number of recent judgments. While the leader of the party (Harper) wouldn't say yes or no, other party bigwigs seemed eager to talk about how quickly they'd move to strip away rights using the Clause. I think it was one of the things that cost them election momentum.
T.
I don't know why it was so compelling. There wasn't that much of a variety of monsters (especially in dungeons), and hell, many times it was hard to figure out what to do next...and combine that with the endless traps in the 3D dungeons and one wonders what was the point...but it was fun.
T.
I love showing the game to friends that have not yet played it, and somewhere around mid-to-endgame of their first play, suddenly the light turns on, and they see things like "Oh, Mayor might help me, but it would REALLY help you, so I should take something better, and force YOU to spend your role on Mayor" and things like that. It's great when everyone starts to see the potential of how to screw your neighbor's coffee crop by Captaining at the right time.
A game with a ton of strategies, that allows for a lot of thought, yet that doesn't take too long to play.
And the fact that it's BrettSpielWelt-compatible doesn't hurt either :)
T.
I think the video game industry goes *farther* than the motion picture industry does - not only giving a rating, but explaining what in the game caused the rating (you'll see things that say "T - Some violence, light profanity" and such).
If *stores* decide, as theaters do, to get together and restrict the sales of M-rated games to minors (which I have no problems with), then that's fine.
The only way this whole "politicians pass laws on video games that they would never pass for movies" will pass is when they start realizing that video games and movies are, in essence, equivalent forms of entertainment. If you asked the same people trying to pass these laws if it's a good idea to require, say, Blockbuster (for rentals) or Best Buy (for sales) to take *all* R rated movies and put them in a separate section, they'd probably laugh and say "Of course not, that wouldn't be legal." Neither will this be.
T.
Look at any game by id Software. You'll see the "id" logo prominently on the box. There's no mistaking who made that game when you look at the box. Ditto anything by Blizzard. Squaresoft/Square-Enix. Valve. Bioware, to some extent. Sure, in all these cases the publisher will be listed too (there will certainly be an "Activision" somewhere on the box of a game by id) but the developer is given high billing.
Why? Because the publishers ARE trying to do the marketing, distributing, etc. and they know that there are fans that will look at a game by Blizzard, or id, or what have you, and buy it for that reason.
This is no different than in Hollywood. There are some directors/writers/etc. that are big enough names that people will go see their movies specifically because it's one of theirs. And, certainly, there are other directors/etc. that may make quality movies, but don't yet have that recognition. It doesn't mean they suck. In the game industry, there aren't necessarily INDIVIDUALS that are like this, but rather development groups.
If a developer continues to create innovative and popular games, they will get the recognition they deserve. Naughty Dog has done some good games, this is true, but when you think of big developers, they aren't one that comes to mind. If they succeed over time, it will come.
When a newspaper or magazine does an article about Topic X, even if for some reason it really raked X over the coals, they know they have an almost indefinite source of advertising that they can draw from. Hell, it's why much of the time these days, "advertiser boycotts" don't work as well as they could. One drops out, another takes its place. In addition, since there are a zillion potential stories for a magazine, if one company doesn't like you, there are others you can interview, etc.
However, in the gaming realm, there are what, five, six, seven major publishing houses that are giving you most of your ads. Look through your average magazine and count the number of game ads that are for EA-published games. Or Activision. Or Sony. etc. Which means two things:
1. If these companies decide they don't want to advertise with you anymore, there's no one else to take their place.
2. If these companies decide they hate you, you don't get your interviews/previews/extra copies/what have you, and everyone else (that is still kissing butt) does.
Look at Deus Ex II - I remember when the demo came out and everyone was talking about the problems, the word from On High was "It's just the demo." I even remember a few articles at various places (Gamespy for one) talking about these problems...the performance (due to the lighting), the "dumbing down" of the interface, the loss of the broad XP system the original had, many other things. But then, the game comes out, and lo and behold, all these places give great reviews and barely gloss over the problems that *they themselves talked about not weeks before*. Or, if they do mention them, it doesn't seem to affect the score they give the game.
So everyone's happy except the gamer that goes out and buys the game. The site keeps getting ad money, the company got a good review.
It would be great to ask Mr. Spector questions like "Now that you've seen the reaction DX2 got, what would you have done differently?" or "Why did you focus so much on lighting effects few people care about (and that many turn off) and sacrifice the large, interactive areas that the original DX had?" and such. I just don't see that happening, though. After all, one bad question and suddenly your Thief 3 exclusive is in the competitor's magazine, and your boss is showing you the door.
Now, everyone has something different, and all the cards have different capabilities. Worse yet, some manufacturers are shipping their newest computers with some of the oldest 3D cards (Sony, for example, ships some otherwise top-of-the-line systems with TNT2 cards). Some manufacturers (especially the video card Big Two) pack a lot of neat features into their cards that allow developers to push the limits, others don't.
As someone who has worked in gaming tech support, you have no idea how often you get a question like "I have this BRAND NEW SYSTEM and it came with a TNT2 and my game doesn't work." And you say "I'm sorry, sir, but the requirements listed on the box state you need an X card or better - it even names manufacturers and chipsets." And they say "But this computer is BRAND NEW, I'm never buying your games again!"
Before, a game could say "3d accellerator required" or something, and you'd get _fewer_ people buying it that didn't have one. Now, EVERYONE has a 3d card - but when the devs try to push the envelope, some cards get left behind.
But did Call of Duty do that to me, compared to some FPS of two-three years ago? Not because of graphics.
But this happens all the time. You need a hook, to sell. Graphics aren't the big thing now. But back when the PlayStation came out, or when 3D cards were becoming more common in PCs, did you get something that advertised in big letters "3D!" on it. A developer would take anything, stick it in the box, and if it was 3D, it was 'cool' and people actually bought it, even if it was absolute crap. Games that were good, and 2D, didn't sell, and games that were lousy, but 3D, sold. Go back and read some game reviews from the period, and you see all sorts of reviews like "This was a great game, but with the '3D revolution' we're in now, it just doesn't cut it." Then a crappy 3D game gets a 8/10 because it's 3D. It's a hook. They're always looking for a hook.
Graphics aren't a hook anymore. How often now do you look at screenshots on a box and go "Wow"? Not nearly as often. So they find a different one. If I had to pick one, I'd say right now it's "Online play!" Games with online play mention it about 14 times all over the box. Great games get some crappy netcode slapped onto them just so they can be "online!" Otherwise good games get hurt in reviews, even if they're single-player titles, because they don't have online play.
What will the next hook be, when almost everything's online and "it's online!" is no longer something that reviewers will give bonus points for? That's the real question.
Could this be extended to cheating? Sure, but cheating violations are something that I think would be a nightmare for the game company itself to keep track of, and a single false positive leading to a ban would be a logistical nightmare for the company (and once you get ONE proven false positive, every other cheater you've banned that professes their innocence, as they all do, are going to say theirs were false too). Even if you have something like PB integrated into the game, there have been cases in the past where it's come up with false positives due to various incompatibilities. They're usually fixed quickly, but they undermine the system in general. Things like this are more minor issues if you're only getting banned from that one server someone is playing on, but when you're talking being out the $50, you better be DAMNED sure that there isn't a chance they were legit.
It's easy to say that a CD key was in use by two IP addresses at once, and the odds of a false positive are low...but with cheating? I think it'd work, but it needs to be ironclad. If you're playing on the company's servers, or through a company system (see: Battle.net) then it's possible. But if it's like PC FPS games, played on random servers set up by random people, or even Xbox Live, where again, anyone can set up a server...it becomes much more of a challenge.
So, alas, everyone has installed the POS that is Steam (I already had it installed but unused) and they got to feel the joy that I did when I installed - the crashes, the lockups, the "copying data over" then failing and having to redownload everything. Oh yes.
However, they say that it will now be under "My games" or whatever, and not under "3rd party games"...however, the NS 3.0 I installed is definitely under "3rd party games."
Even if they get a "fully compatible" WON version...now that large groups of people have defaulted to Steam, one wonders if the WON version will ever get as much play. (I know my Steam install, way back when, completely destroyed my vanilla HL installation despite me telling it to leave it alone).
In Europe, for the most part, violence is completely taboo - movies, television, wherever, American movies often must be edited an incredible amount to reduce instances of graphic violence. Television shows rarely show the types of violence that are routine on CSI, NYPD Blue, or numerous other shows. Hell, in some countries, you even have police that can't carry firearms. Yet at the same time, sex is commonplace. In foreign versions of the reality show "Big Brother" it's not unusual for the station to show contestants having sex with each other, and it happens on television shows as well. Maybe not hardcore, but it's done. In fact, one recent story mentioned that a show (loosely translated as) "How to Have Sex" was recently reduced in airtime because people were getting BORED of it.
Interesting how desensitized Americans are to violence (when was the last time violence, really was SHOCKING to most people here?) while sex is abhorrent (reminds one of the Simpsons' when the town wanted to protest Michaelangelo's 'David' - saying it depicted parts of the body which, however practical and necessary, were EVIL), while in Europe, it's the opposite.
Sure, America started as a rather puritanical place, but Europe itself was pretty dominated by similar religions for a long time, yet seems to have gone the other direction...
As someone who has worked doing technical support for PC games (and still does), I can state that in my experience, the vast majority of problems that the "average" user experiences are things that are insanely annoying. I'd say a great percentage of problems are: 1. A person's video card drivers are hopelessly out of date and the old ones don't work with the game. It doesn't help that new drivers come out every few weeks - the average user NEVER thinks that they would need to go search for drivers all the time. After all, things like DirectX always come with their game CDs, so they don't have to "Go to some site" to get it. But drivers never are included on anything. 2. Newer games are actually being much more restrictive on what they support. Despite the existence of DirectX which was supposed to make it so you could have "almost any card", a lot of recent games support ATI, NVIDIA, and little else. I don't know how often I've seen someone say "I bought this computer a week ago and it won't run this game, and I have to buy a new piece of hardware?" Add to these things the fact that a lot of games nowadays just don't work out of the box and need to be patched ad infinitum, CD keys which may be necessary but cause more trouble for average players than most people think, the dearth of true innovation lately, etc. No wonder consoles continue to lead! Buy game, place game in console, turn on. No directories, configuration, anything.