50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
All that other stuff you said sounds like a fucking lot of money, way more that $100 per child. Also, the ability to address those problems has existed for decades or centuries, whereas the laptop is something only recently made available by a lot of specific efforts and general advances in technology. The average slashdot user probably has no ability or interest in improving water supplies in a random foreign country, but might take more of an interest in helping kids from the third-world if there's a geek angle to it.
Another user points out that books are expensive- one book per child might be less than $100, but how about 5 or 10? With a laptop, any number of books could be supplied to every student electronically.
At the very most, you could argue instead of buying all the laptops at once you could by a few thousand for a random selection of schools as a test (though there's probably something about the fact that by 'flooding the market' with them there would be no resale or trade in the laptops).
Seriously, we're going to be hearing from someone soon that fans of sports teams may not have an unbiased opinion or the home shopping network tends to put products they sell in the best possible light. This is obvious stuff. We're talking about miliary recruiters, they're salespeople... they're job is to get recruits. They're going to sell and spin.
So pointing out flaws in those sports fans irrational devotion, or being publicly critical (in say a slashdot post) of a product sold on tv is also an obvious behaviour. We're thinking slashdot posters... our job is to not take bs from advertisers or the government and point out flaws for the benefit of other readers. The one behaviour I don't completely understand is when people defend other people who make their money telling us all a bunch of crap, but do it for free. Is this sort of volunteer effort another item you can put on your resume or something?
Sure some games have some of these things, but it's rare when they do, and they rarely have them all. Why aren't games realistic? Because they're games. They're meant to be fun, and when compared to fantasy, reality frankly sucks.
This 'games are inherently unrealistic, don't change the status quo' argument comes up frequently on realism discussions on slashdot. I see every instance of unreality as an opportunity to create innovative new gameplay, to make the games more fun and interesting and dress it in the appearance of increased realism. It's not that a more realistic game is not fun, it's that it takes more effort and innovation to make them fun.
If you look at the evolution of action games and later FPSs the trend has been towards increasing realism, and also towards deeper, more interesting, and fun games. Part of this trend is an effect of bigger game budgets and increased computing power: realism is harder to design in and harder to render. New games also have the benefit of having the aggregate experience of all previous games before them (or at least the ones the designers have played)- you don't have to work out balancing issues from scratch, you can borrow them from older games and make incremental additions.
There are a few unrealistic conventions about games that should stay- for instance the ability to reload from an early save point (time travel effectively)- but that is understood to be outside the reality of the game. Also, it's nice not to physically feel pain the player-character is feeling. And also manipulation of the rate of passage of time- editing out of otherwise boring segments of inactivity or unnecessary additional time periods is a standard convention for games (and movies for that matter). Just think- if real life had unlimited saves and reloads, an off-switch for pain, and a fast-forward/scene-skip, what else would you need to make life fun all the time? (the ability to switch player models maybe...) Having all that are you really going to whine for the ability to sprint 10 miles without losing your breath or little red cross packages to instantly replenish health with?
A few years ago there were wild eyed visions of being able to store the entire world's library, every book ever written on a single portable piece of media, and I'm guessing we've surpassed that point by now.
But a couple of things happened: You can download the Gutenburg books and Wikipedia, but copyright extension will keep tens or hundreds of thousands of 'new' books off your ipod unless you pay for each and every one or a have a subscription scheme (and even then most of those huge number of books are not going to be available). So interpret TFA as not a literal prediction of what might be available but just a illustration of how big storage devices will get. Older slashdotters can probably remember being constantly reminded of how many pages of text could fit on a single floppy disk, today the more appropriate measure of size is video rather than text.
The second thing is that there has been a great increase in the amount of publicly available text on the internet in the form of blogs and similar. The same thing is just beginning to happen with video: the acquisition devices, editing tools, and online sites are just beginning to arrive. Creating and re-editing existing videos from the web will eventually be almost as easy as sending a text message or email or writing a blog entry, and the volume of video on the web will go up dramatically at that point.
The problems with education aren't going to be solved by money. We need to find a way to encourage the people who refuse to be educated to be educated.... I've got some ideas on how to try to educate those types of people but none of them involve throwing more money at the situation. You could pay the best teachers a million bucks a year and have them work one on one but they'll never get an education because they won't have any desire to be there to begin with.
I've got plenty of ideas too, but most of them do cost money. Money in and of itself does nothing, and I suppose some people do propose simply adding x percentage increase to all money spent to be used across the board which might be a literal example of 'throwing money at a problem'. But even more innovative proposals are going to cost money (and still those innovative ideas are going to be attacked by opponents who reduce them to 'throwing money at the problem'). If there's a message to be sent out, you have to pay for the delivery of that message. Probably there needs to be an organization behind the message, and you have to pay to make that organization operate- even if you have a lot of volunteers there's usually still a lot of costs involved. You could try to convince existing organizations to implement your plan at no cost to yourself, but you've just passed on the expense to someone else, and if they screw it up or make their own changes you don't have much say over it.
Getting back to space, I think there is no debate as soon as someone starts talking about spending less money on program x and more on completely unrelated program y: "Let's cut down those apple trees to make room for more orange groves, because oranges are way better than apples..." Inside congress there might be some kind of horse-trading going on occasionally, but I think it's easier just to set funding levels independently (though with an eye on the total deficit...). There's an argument to be had when one says spend less or more on manned vs. unmanned, or military aerospace vs. civilian aerospace and so on where there's some commonality- otherwise it's pretty much pointless.
There will never be perfect harmony and happiness because each human is an individual with their own desires and viewpoint.
I disagree with the grandparent post, but is this sort of strawman really necessary?
Nothing much was ever accomplished by anybody who sits around justifying the status quo- hell, if it even meant your own personal bottom line was in danger I bet you could think of why in the sum of things it's probably just an intractable problem, no bother trying to fix it.
I think what the grandparent was almost touching on is that if we had a more well-off well-educated population than what we have now we would probably be much more interested in the longer term investments of space exploitation.
So the take home message of all of this is not to quit your day job to do voice over work. Even if you are very talented, there just isn't much of a real career in it. If you are talented, I suspect it's not that hard of work (except for those 33-CD recorded books...), and is a nice extra bit of money to have when a job does come up.
The fact that Hollywood intentionally makes violent movies AND then tries to chop them up so that they get "ok for kids" ratings shows to me that their primary agenda is not profit (at least for the companies they work for), and thus they shouldn't be paid so much.
This is similar to the line of argument that groups all slashdot posters as a single monolithic group and then calls them hypocrites when they in fact act as individuals. Hollywood movies are not made in the autocratic way you imply. There are writers, directors, producers, and many more people all with differing visions about what a movie should be. Directors and writers of horror and action films typically would want to make their movies more violent because they are trying to appeal to the hardcore audience- and that's the movie they would want to see, if they didn't like the violence they would be making a different kind of movie. The studios cut stuff out of the completed movies because if they had personally been on stage to censor everything as it was shot the directors would probably quit due to the constant interference.
The reason the directors don't complain as much when scenes are deleted from the theatrical release is that the DVDs usually restore them, so their vision is (eventually) uncompromised.
Also for some reason Hollywood (not everyone else) seems a bit surprised when stuff like "Finding Nemo" becomes a hit. If Hollywood was really interested in profit and making money, they'd be making more movies genuinely suitable or even targeted at children and families, just like McDonalds targets children and families.
Can you cite an instance of this 'Hollywood surprise'? In this year in the genre of computer animated movies aimed at kids and families there was Cars, a new Ice Age, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Barnyard, Open Season, and maybe a few others. The first few were pretty big hits and the rest moderate hits, though I wonder with the cost of those movies whether many of them actually made money. They take a lot of time and money and effort to make them high quality (think 100s of animators), so the studios are probably making as many as they think the market can stand.
Sure many of us might barf at that sort of stuff, but it sells - the evidence is there. You don't have to enjoy something to know it sells.
Which of those movies in the chart would be enjoyed by the people who enjoyed any of the top boxoffice hits? Go see later (total takings) if there's a correlation.
You can make 5-10 Texas Chainsaw Massacres for the price of one Finding Nemo, and there's lots of room for cheap horror movies to make a tidy profit.
I'd rather have a good movie than a faithful one. Sure, after a certain amount of straying from the source it is probably smarter just to change the name to something new and avoid the criticism and confusion, but if the people that make the movie are any good then they should be trusted to take liberties with the material. If they aren't any good then don't have them make the movie.
I only scanned the parent post, so maybe there was something in there I missed or you're responding to a great-grandparent.
If you don't like it, just don't buy it
That's pretty much the point of the parent post. They don't like it, and explain why so that others may understand and perhaps come to the same conclusion.
so let me have the choice to buy Live Arcade games if I want. Everybody wins.
I missed the part where the parent said that the Live Arcade should be shut down. I think there's a common argument tactic to misinterpret criticism as saying that the thing criticised should cease to exist, if it doesn't cease to exist by sheer reason, then call in the government etc. to shut it down- then someone can come in and say self-righteously 'how dare you take away my freedom' and so on. Granted, if people do listen to the original argument and stopping buying something in large enough numbers so that it's not profitable, sure the minority that liked it did lose freedom, but it's also just how a marketplace works.
Let's stop all the regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on media companies and let them compete openly.
I think there are countries in Africa and South America with very little in the way of regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on any kind of company. Hell, they are the original 'small government' cheerleaders: in many places there's no government at all. But it you took say the state of California, which is very heavily taxed and regulated in comparison, probably all of their GNPs added together are smaller than California's. Where did they go wrong?
There is no such thing as a "humane" weapon, unless it's specifically designed not to kill. There's no difference between a.45 hollow point slug to the head or a fuel air explosive.
I think a weapon that requires a human user to make a decision whether or not to kill a single other human is more humane than a weapon that kills many people at a time or one that requires no human direction at all to result in a death.
There may be additional dimensions in that weapons that require a great deal of technical training to operate and require a high-tech industrial base to manufacture may generally be more humane than weapons that can be built and maintained and used easily and cheaply. Rich and highly technical societies may be more likely to act responsibly than a third world backwater with no money for WMDs but with lots of machetes lying around, but I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions both ways there.
Atom smasher- a physically realistic simulation of what happens when you take one particle and fire it at another at a good fraction of the speed of light. They could leave out a lot of really obscure stuff that would probably be hard to simulate anyway, maybe just go to energy levels used in accelerators say from 30-50 years ago.
Also add something like a virtual solar furnace/big bang that would allow you to start out with hydrogen and try to build increasingly heavier elements.
Chemical construction kit- grab a hold of atoms and molecules and try to jam them together to create bigger and more complex molecules. Lots of that would be very hard to simulate too, so it could be more of a cartoon rather than always 100% accurate.
For any of those you could still have a conventional game, but just switch things up by make the games mechanical physics accurate to increasingly microscopic scales- and the characters would shrink too, so the computational load would be be increased by having more fine-grained simulation but that would be offset by reducing the scope of the playable world.
Any piece of software now that is used by engineers or scientists to model various phenomena is going to be something a game could incorporate as computing power increases. Right now there's a lot of interesting simulation software that is only used by engineers and scientists, and they are expensive and very hard to use- but they should be something that in 5-10 years is just another effect to turn on in the Unreal 25 engine or whatever. A child could get an intuitive understanding of high-mach number air flows over various shapes if you put an easy to use interface on a CFD package.
I think games like that would give me and students a more intuitive feel for processes beyond ordinary experience, so that if and when we do learn the real math and underlying principles it will seem very natural.
I think what he wanted to do was generate some free promotion for himself, and he figured that school shootings would be a great way to get people to take a look at him. Instant noteriety.
I don't see a real name or picture of the author, and there's no banner ads on the site. He does ask nicely for paypal donations. And the promotion his hardly free, he did have to pay for the site and make the game- it seems crude but it looks like a lot of time and effort went into it (let me give you a hint- there's a reason why you can find a lot more free/shareware/opensource action or puzzle games than RPGs).
You need to address things that happen often and repeatedly, such as a drug or crime problem. You can't address something that rarely happens; it's like addressing "shark attacks" or "mountain lion maulings."
We should only make statements about problems and things that pass your high threshold for significance? What kind of bullshit is that? Everyone and their mother has already spouted off about drugs and crime, why not something that only happened once?
If the designer came out and said "I just thought it would be cool to shoot a bunch of kids at school" or "I just wanted to be famous and here's an easy way to do it" I'd respect that more than claiming it's only to promote dialogue.
Why?
The game is a poor murder simulator- there's really whiz-bang FPSs for that. And the guy hasn't revealed his real identity. The one thing he has done is promote dialogue, even if it's only at the slashdot level.
my primary thought was wondering if the author really believed that access to guns was the problem, since if you believe that, you're a bozo. Any asshole can steal a gun, and there are other weapons available...
I think that was a character in the game, maybe even a quote taken from a real person talking about the shooting, not the author of the game expressing his belief.
Let me say first that I support the 2nd amendent and all the others even if nobody in the government does these days. I think everyone who isn't a violent felon should be able to buy fully automatic assault rifles and armor piercing rounds and so forth. I'm kind of on the fence with respect to rockets and mortars though, but it's easy to see how they would come in handy if you had to defend your country and the regular army wasn't around (or the regular army happened to be the opposing force...).
But make no mistake that easy access to guns does get a lot of people killed. It's the price we pay, and we shouldn't delude ourselves about it. Guns have this great point-and-kill interface that other handheld weapons just don't seem to be able to match. Guns are the Apple Macintosh/iPod it-just-works simple-easy-done of killing: You can do the same thing in windows or linux but is your grandma going to be able to figure it out?
Restrictions on the manufacture/distribution/etc. of guns create speed-bumps: sure you can speed up to 60 mph in that parking lot if you want to after you brake for the speed bump, or you can jack up your car and just drive over without slowing down, but the average person won't. The average person probably won't go steal a gun when inconvenienced, and even if they did that would slow them down and maybe they'll get caught before they can accidently or purposely kill someone. And it's the average person I'm talking about who's killing or getting killed by the thousands due to accidents or murders that probably could have been avoided if the participants had to work a little harder to cause each other bodily harm.
But again, I really like those amendments to the constitution so I would greatly prefer finding some way we can avoid the thousands of unnecessary deaths per year without violating the spirit or letter of the amendments like with that 'this school is a gun-free zone' bullshit.
Why don't you just not buy it if you don't like it instead of whining about it on Slashdot? And guess what, if a lot of people agree with you and also don't buy it, then it won't be successful and publishers will go back to the old model! Amazing!
Dear Troll Sir,
In order to get lot of people to agree with each other they have to announce their positions in a public forum such as found on slashdot. History has shown this to be much more effective than psychic methods.
There's no question that there is art in games, a sort of art in designing/making games- but is a game as a whole really art?
I think there is a group of people that want games to be art so that it affords them protection from censorship. There is another group of people that want games to be a professional sporting thing so that it affords legitimization from another angle, but there are some conceptual difficulties reconciling those two things.
My opinion is that art is too limited a concept to be applied to games. Games can be bigger than art- they are more like real life in a way, where life contains both art and interaction and competitive activities and many other things that aren't art, but it would be stupid to try and argue if real life is art or not. Games are games.
Slashdot Mirror
50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
All that other stuff you said sounds like a fucking lot of money, way more that $100 per child. Also, the ability to address those problems has existed for decades or centuries, whereas the laptop is something only recently made available by a lot of specific efforts and general advances in technology. The average slashdot user probably has no ability or interest in improving water supplies in a random foreign country, but might take more of an interest in helping kids from the third-world if there's a geek angle to it.
Another user points out that books are expensive- one book per child might be less than $100, but how about 5 or 10? With a laptop, any number of books could be supplied to every student electronically.
At the very most, you could argue instead of buying all the laptops at once you could by a few thousand for a random selection of schools as a test (though there's probably something about the fact that by 'flooding the market' with them there would be no resale or trade in the laptops).
Seriously, we're going to be hearing from someone soon that fans of sports teams may not have an unbiased opinion or the home shopping network tends to put products they sell in the best possible light. This is obvious stuff. We're talking about miliary recruiters, they're salespeople... they're job is to get recruits. They're going to sell and spin.
So pointing out flaws in those sports fans irrational devotion, or being publicly critical (in say a slashdot post) of a product sold on tv is also an obvious behaviour. We're thinking slashdot posters... our job is to not take bs from advertisers or the government and point out flaws for the benefit of other readers. The one behaviour I don't completely understand is when people defend other people who make their money telling us all a bunch of crap, but do it for free. Is this sort of volunteer effort another item you can put on your resume or something?
Sure some games have some of these things, but it's rare when they do, and they rarely have them all. Why aren't games realistic? Because they're games. They're meant to be fun, and when compared to fantasy, reality frankly sucks.
This 'games are inherently unrealistic, don't change the status quo' argument comes up frequently on realism discussions on slashdot. I see every instance of unreality as an opportunity to create innovative new gameplay, to make the games more fun and interesting and dress it in the appearance of increased realism. It's not that a more realistic game is not fun, it's that it takes more effort and innovation to make them fun.
If you look at the evolution of action games and later FPSs the trend has been towards increasing realism, and also towards deeper, more interesting, and fun games. Part of this trend is an effect of bigger game budgets and increased computing power: realism is harder to design in and harder to render. New games also have the benefit of having the aggregate experience of all previous games before them (or at least the ones the designers have played)- you don't have to work out balancing issues from scratch, you can borrow them from older games and make incremental additions.
There are a few unrealistic conventions about games that should stay- for instance the ability to reload from an early save point (time travel effectively)- but that is understood to be outside the reality of the game. Also, it's nice not to physically feel pain the player-character is feeling. And also manipulation of the rate of passage of time- editing out of otherwise boring segments of inactivity or unnecessary additional time periods is a standard convention for games (and movies for that matter). Just think- if real life had unlimited saves and reloads, an off-switch for pain, and a fast-forward/scene-skip, what else would you need to make life fun all the time? (the ability to switch player models maybe...) Having all that are you really going to whine for the ability to sprint 10 miles without losing your breath or little red cross packages to instantly replenish health with?
A few years ago there were wild eyed visions of being able to store the entire world's library, every book ever written on a single portable piece of media, and I'm guessing we've surpassed that point by now.
But a couple of things happened: You can download the Gutenburg books and Wikipedia, but copyright extension will keep tens or hundreds of thousands of 'new' books off your ipod unless you pay for each and every one or a have a subscription scheme (and even then most of those huge number of books are not going to be available). So interpret TFA as not a literal prediction of what might be available but just a illustration of how big storage devices will get. Older slashdotters can probably remember being constantly reminded of how many pages of text could fit on a single floppy disk, today the more appropriate measure of size is video rather than text.
The second thing is that there has been a great increase in the amount of publicly available text on the internet in the form of blogs and similar. The same thing is just beginning to happen with video: the acquisition devices, editing tools, and online sites are just beginning to arrive. Creating and re-editing existing videos from the web will eventually be almost as easy as sending a text message or email or writing a blog entry, and the volume of video on the web will go up dramatically at that point.
The problems with education aren't going to be solved by money. We need to find a way to encourage the people who refuse to be educated to be educated. ...
I've got some ideas on how to try to educate those types of people but none of them involve throwing more money at the situation. You could pay the best teachers a million bucks a year and have them work one on one but they'll never get an education because they won't have any desire to be there to begin with.
I've got plenty of ideas too, but most of them do cost money. Money in and of itself does nothing, and I suppose some people do propose simply adding x percentage increase to all money spent to be used across the board which might be a literal example of 'throwing money at a problem'. But even more innovative proposals are going to cost money (and still those innovative ideas are going to be attacked by opponents who reduce them to 'throwing money at the problem'). If there's a message to be sent out, you have to pay for the delivery of that message. Probably there needs to be an organization behind the message, and you have to pay to make that organization operate- even if you have a lot of volunteers there's usually still a lot of costs involved. You could try to convince existing organizations to implement your plan at no cost to yourself, but you've just passed on the expense to someone else, and if they screw it up or make their own changes you don't have much say over it.
Getting back to space, I think there is no debate as soon as someone starts talking about spending less money on program x and more on completely unrelated program y: "Let's cut down those apple trees to make room for more orange groves, because oranges are way better than apples..." Inside congress there might be some kind of horse-trading going on occasionally, but I think it's easier just to set funding levels independently (though with an eye on the total deficit...). There's an argument to be had when one says spend less or more on manned vs. unmanned, or military aerospace vs. civilian aerospace and so on where there's some commonality- otherwise it's pretty much pointless.
There will never be perfect harmony and happiness because each human is an individual with their own desires and viewpoint.
I disagree with the grandparent post, but is this sort of strawman really necessary?
Nothing much was ever accomplished by anybody who sits around justifying the status quo- hell, if it even meant your own personal bottom line was in danger I bet you could think of why in the sum of things it's probably just an intractable problem, no bother trying to fix it.
I think what the grandparent was almost touching on is that if we had a more well-off well-educated population than what we have now we would probably be much more interested in the longer term investments of space exploitation.
That console has to be the one with the name being written incorrectly most of the time...
It's an easy way to separate the true fans from those not in the know. Remember the Intendo?
So the take home message of all of this is not to quit your day job to do voice over work. Even if you are very talented, there just isn't much of a real career in it. If you are talented, I suspect it's not that hard of work (except for those 33-CD recorded books...), and is a nice extra bit of money to have when a job does come up.
The fact that Hollywood intentionally makes violent movies AND then tries to chop them up so that they get "ok for kids" ratings shows to me that their primary agenda is not profit (at least for the companies they work for), and thus they shouldn't be paid so much.
= world-wide
This is similar to the line of argument that groups all slashdot posters as a single monolithic group and then calls them hypocrites when they in fact act as individuals. Hollywood movies are not made in the autocratic way you imply. There are writers, directors, producers, and many more people all with differing visions about what a movie should be. Directors and writers of horror and action films typically would want to make their movies more violent because they are trying to appeal to the hardcore audience- and that's the movie they would want to see, if they didn't like the violence they would be making a different kind of movie. The studios cut stuff out of the completed movies because if they had personally been on stage to censor everything as it was shot the directors would probably quit due to the constant interference.
The reason the directors don't complain as much when scenes are deleted from the theatrical release is that the DVDs usually restore them, so their vision is (eventually) uncompromised.
Also for some reason Hollywood (not everyone else) seems a bit surprised when stuff like "Finding Nemo" becomes a hit. If Hollywood was really interested in profit and making money, they'd be making more movies genuinely suitable or even targeted at children and families, just like McDonalds targets children and families.
Can you cite an instance of this 'Hollywood surprise'? In this year in the genre of computer animated movies aimed at kids and families there was Cars, a new Ice Age, Over the Hedge, Monster House, Barnyard, Open Season, and maybe a few others. The first few were pretty big hits and the rest moderate hits, though I wonder with the cost of those movies whether many of them actually made money. They take a lot of time and money and effort to make them high quality (think 100s of animators), so the studios are probably making as many as they think the market can stand.
Sure many of us might barf at that sort of stuff, but it sells - the evidence is there. You don't have to enjoy something to know it sells.
Just a look at:
http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross
and:
http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross?region
And then when you look at:
http://www.imdb.com/chart/
Which of those movies in the chart would be enjoyed by the people who enjoyed any of the top boxoffice hits? Go see later (total takings) if there's a correlation.
You can make 5-10 Texas Chainsaw Massacres for the price of one Finding Nemo, and there's lots of room for cheap horror movies to make a tidy profit.
I'd rather have a good movie than a faithful one. Sure, after a certain amount of straying from the source it is probably smarter just to change the name to something new and avoid the criticism and confusion, but if the people that make the movie are any good then they should be trusted to take liberties with the material. If they aren't any good then don't have them make the movie.
I only scanned the parent post, so maybe there was something in there I missed or you're responding to a great-grandparent.
If you don't like it, just don't buy it
That's pretty much the point of the parent post. They don't like it, and explain why so that others may understand and perhaps come to the same conclusion.
so let me have the choice to buy Live Arcade games if I want. Everybody wins.
I missed the part where the parent said that the Live Arcade should be shut down. I think there's a common argument tactic to misinterpret criticism as saying that the thing criticised should cease to exist, if it doesn't cease to exist by sheer reason, then call in the government etc. to shut it down- then someone can come in and say self-righteously 'how dare you take away my freedom' and so on. Granted, if people do listen to the original argument and stopping buying something in large enough numbers so that it's not profitable, sure the minority that liked it did lose freedom, but it's also just how a marketplace works.
Let's stop all the regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on media companies and let them compete openly.
I think there are countries in Africa and South America with very little in the way of regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on any kind of company. Hell, they are the original 'small government' cheerleaders: in many places there's no government at all. But it you took say the state of California, which is very heavily taxed and regulated in comparison, probably all of their GNPs added together are smaller than California's. Where did they go wrong?
There is no such thing as a "humane" weapon, unless it's specifically designed not to kill. There's no difference between a .45 hollow point slug to the head or a fuel air explosive.
I think a weapon that requires a human user to make a decision whether or not to kill a single other human is more humane than a weapon that kills many people at a time or one that requires no human direction at all to result in a death.
There may be additional dimensions in that weapons that require a great deal of technical training to operate and require a high-tech industrial base to manufacture may generally be more humane than weapons that can be built and maintained and used easily and cheaply. Rich and highly technical societies may be more likely to act responsibly than a third world backwater with no money for WMDs but with lots of machetes lying around, but I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions both ways there.
Atom smasher- a physically realistic simulation of what happens when you take one particle and fire it at another at a good fraction of the speed of light. They could leave out a lot of really obscure stuff that would probably be hard to simulate anyway, maybe just go to energy levels used in accelerators say from 30-50 years ago.
Also add something like a virtual solar furnace/big bang that would allow you to start out with hydrogen and try to build increasingly heavier elements.
Chemical construction kit- grab a hold of atoms and molecules and try to jam them together to create bigger and more complex molecules. Lots of that would be very hard to simulate too, so it could be more of a cartoon rather than always 100% accurate.
For any of those you could still have a conventional game, but just switch things up by make the games mechanical physics accurate to increasingly microscopic scales- and the characters would shrink too, so the computational load would be be increased by having more fine-grained simulation but that would be offset by reducing the scope of the playable world.
Any piece of software now that is used by engineers or scientists to model various phenomena is going to be something a game could incorporate as computing power increases. Right now there's a lot of interesting simulation software that is only used by engineers and scientists, and they are expensive and very hard to use- but they should be something that in 5-10 years is just another effect to turn on in the Unreal 25 engine or whatever. A child could get an intuitive understanding of high-mach number air flows over various shapes if you put an easy to use interface on a CFD package.
I think games like that would give me and students a more intuitive feel for processes beyond ordinary experience, so that if and when we do learn the real math and underlying principles it will seem very natural.
...then by the year 2057, the earth will be consumed by a mass of WOW subscribers expanding at the speed of light.
This from a community that is usually quite happy to defend Grand Theft Auto or whatever game the media is attacking at the moment.
This is the standard 'you big group of independent people with different all sorts of different viewpoints are hypocrites' attack.
There is no monolithic slashdot community that subscribes to a single set of values and beliefs.
Mass murder of children is NOT entertainment.
That's correct- it's not entertainment, and it's not supposed to be.
I think what he wanted to do was generate some free promotion for himself, and he figured that school shootings would be a great way to get people to take a look at him. Instant noteriety.
I don't see a real name or picture of the author, and there's no banner ads on the site. He does ask nicely for paypal donations. And the promotion his hardly free, he did have to pay for the site and make the game- it seems crude but it looks like a lot of time and effort went into it (let me give you a hint- there's a reason why you can find a lot more free/shareware/opensource action or puzzle games than RPGs).
You need to address things that happen often and repeatedly, such as a drug or crime problem. You can't address something that rarely happens; it's like addressing "shark attacks" or "mountain lion maulings."
We should only make statements about problems and things that pass your high threshold for significance? What kind of bullshit is that? Everyone and their mother has already spouted off about drugs and crime, why not something that only happened once?
If the designer came out and said "I just thought it would be cool to shoot a bunch of kids at school" or "I just wanted to be famous and here's an easy way to do it" I'd respect that more than claiming it's only to promote dialogue.
Why?
The game is a poor murder simulator- there's really whiz-bang FPSs for that. And the guy hasn't revealed his real identity. The one thing he has done is promote dialogue, even if it's only at the slashdot level.
my primary thought was wondering if the author really believed that access to guns was the problem, since if you believe that, you're a bozo. Any asshole can steal a gun, and there are other weapons available...
I think that was a character in the game, maybe even a quote taken from a real person talking about the shooting, not the author of the game expressing his belief.
Let me say first that I support the 2nd amendent and all the others even if nobody in the government does these days. I think everyone who isn't a violent felon should be able to buy fully automatic assault rifles and armor piercing rounds and so forth. I'm kind of on the fence with respect to rockets and mortars though, but it's easy to see how they would come in handy if you had to defend your country and the regular army wasn't around (or the regular army happened to be the opposing force...).
But make no mistake that easy access to guns does get a lot of people killed. It's the price we pay, and we shouldn't delude ourselves about it. Guns have this great point-and-kill interface that other handheld weapons just don't seem to be able to match. Guns are the Apple Macintosh/iPod it-just-works simple-easy-done of killing: You can do the same thing in windows or linux but is your grandma going to be able to figure it out?
Restrictions on the manufacture/distribution/etc. of guns create speed-bumps: sure you can speed up to 60 mph in that parking lot if you want to after you brake for the speed bump, or you can jack up your car and just drive over without slowing down, but the average person won't. The average person probably won't go steal a gun when inconvenienced, and even if they did that would slow them down and maybe they'll get caught before they can accidently or purposely kill someone. And it's the average person I'm talking about who's killing or getting killed by the thousands due to accidents or murders that probably could have been avoided if the participants had to work a little harder to cause each other bodily harm.
But again, I really like those amendments to the constitution so I would greatly prefer finding some way we can avoid the thousands of unnecessary deaths per year without violating the spirit or letter of the amendments like with that 'this school is a gun-free zone' bullshit.
That's why the GTA series hasn't suffered from consolitis, by and large
If by consolitis you don't mean having to buy a fucking ps2 style gamepad in order to fly a fucking plane or helicopter, then yes you are correct.
Why don't you just not buy it if you don't like it instead of whining about it on Slashdot? And guess what, if a lot of people agree with you and also don't buy it, then it won't be successful and publishers will go back to the old model! Amazing!
Dear Troll Sir,
In order to get lot of people to agree with each other they have to announce their positions in a public forum such as found on slashdot. History has shown this to be much more effective than psychic methods.
Thank you and good luck with future trolling,
patternjuggler
There's no question that there is art in games, a sort of art in designing/making games- but is a game as a whole really art?
I think there is a group of people that want games to be art so that it affords them protection from censorship. There is another group of people that want games to be a professional sporting thing so that it affords legitimization from another angle, but there are some conceptual difficulties reconciling those two things.
My opinion is that art is too limited a concept to be applied to games. Games can be bigger than art- they are more like real life in a way, where life contains both art and interaction and competitive activities and many other things that aren't art, but it would be stupid to try and argue if real life is art or not. Games are games.
Took a pass, got it, I must be tired...