You wouldn't resort to violence because you dislike the words they said, you would resort to violence because of what you think they might do.
I think in any case where violence appeared to be caused by 'disliking words' (actually I'm not sure what that means, or if anyone has ever claimed that as a justification for violence before), there was some perception on the part of the person resorting to extreme measures that somehow the words were conveying information or communicating intent or attempting to incite in others or create an atmosphere or something else that might end up harming that person.
The perception may be based on faulty information, or be highly illogical or contain long unlikely chains of causality or otherwise be a very poor justification for action when examined, but I'm sure it's there. I guess you do fault them for not explaining their reasoning better, and being able to articulate reasoning probably correlates somewhat to being justified, and of course it's good to say in advance of action rather than after so that someone can point out faults in the argument prior to something irreversible being done (but if you are in position of weakness or time is critical that may not be possible)- maybe that is in fact what you are saying?
There is an inferiority complex among the group who refers to others as "the man". They assume that "the man" is pulling strings behind the scenes and that there is no way that they could ever hope to beat "the man" except through violence or hatred campaigns.
I saw a mildly humorous commercial for tacos or something the other day in which a character was refering to someone as 'the man'. He wasn't in the least advocating violence or 'hatred campaigns', and such advocacy wasn't even part of the joke. 'The man' is just a phrase, it usually refers to powerful rich white guys. At least for younger generations- maybe people who lived through the 60s or something have more negative connotations for people who use that phrase?
Just for a moment, clear your mind of all the hatred and pent up rage within your soul.
'rage within my soul'? Nice.
People are abusing themselves.
The hairy palms thing is a myth perpetuated by none other than The Man.
In both cases, the power ultimately rests with the people.
That's true in every system of government ever devised. A popular revolution could overturn any government currently in existence. Hypothetically though, someone with the power to choke people from a distance with their mind might give the will of the people a run for it's money though.
When you fight against "the man" you are really fighting against the people in this country. Keep that in mind.
Or maybe I'm trying to convince them not to vote for or give money to 'the man' anymore?
I know nothing whatsoever about the events you are talking about, but absolutist statements like the following kind of tick me off:
Please.... No matter how offensive something might be, no matter what they may have tried, nothing gives someone the right to resort to violence because they dislike what someone else said.
I dunno. What about verbally threatening someone? It's not really just the words, it's also the credibility, the capability to carry out the words- if someone threatens you and has the means to follow through then you or the local law enforcement (where applicable) may have the right to use violence or threaten violence themselves to end that threat. What if someone isn't threatening you with violence, but threatening your job? Your family? Your freedom? What if you don't have a legal system that allows you to sue to right some wrongdoing? Maybe, maybe not? Is there a kind of muliplication of factors, e.g. where the means are most definitely there, but the threat is weak, or when the threatened action is very strong, but the means are limited, where you still may be moved to action above some threshold?
Before getting excited about what is and isn't art, consider this- why do we need games to be considered art?
The simple answer is this society considers art to be legitimate, and therefore time spent enjoying art also is legitimate, therefore in order for playing games not to be frowned upon then games have to be considered art. (or, electronic games need to be considered professional sports, if you read the other 50% of the games.slashdot stories that all tie in to the desire to legitimize games)
I don't think that a need for legitimacy is a good enough reason. I like playing games- and I like them whether I or anyone else thinks they're art.
I think games can become legitimate and important on their own, without ever being considered either art. Games are a form of expression, but they should express more than what they currently do, and the things they express should be important. The best way is to probably A. have more people making games, making more voices to be heard and B. create a tradition among the most elite game developers for more fully expressing important ideas in their games.
If you just play out the game publisher's argument, you will see that they may be right. It does starve them of revenue. And that may, in turn, make them reluctant to spend money on risky titles or innovate.
And for completeness also consider the consumer. The ability to sell back a game bought at full price and purchase a used game at a reduced cost (and even sell that back) reduces the monetary risk of buying a bad game. If the free market of used games were to be regulated into non-existence, players may stay away from games more unfamiliar them (as likely as not the 'innovative' games).
I really enjoy print game magazines. I like the fast and simple interface of being able to flip through from start to finish- I see screenshots of all the games (some of them as big as a page), I get exposed to games I would just ignore when there's just a title and a tiny screenshot and maybe a line of text that I have to make a conscious decision to click on and wait for it to load in the case of a website. I think the graphic designers of magazine are usually better than for websites, which typically have horribly busy masses of different links and ads and crap all crammed into a tiny space (and then they choose a white on black font that makes your eyes hurt after a paragraph or two- but that same color screen works all right in a magazine because it isn't backlit).
That said, I don't subscribe to any game magazines even though I could easily afford to, I just like to pick them up for a dollar each when they're a few months old from Half-Price books or sometimes Value Village. People rarely sell their old game magazines it seems like, but in a big enough city you can usually find someplace that gets a trickle of them (but then people like me just buy all the game magazines at first sight).
I'd like it if people and institutions actually remembered what you did, instead of some meter being decremented for certain kinds actions. As in Civ, instead of some other civ simply not liking you for making war on them, it would be great if they constantly referred back to the 'rape of Moscow' or the 'massacre at so-and-so', more like you are actually creating history, creating a real story.
And there should be a model for the propagation of news- did anyone in the village actually see you setting the person on fire? Who did they tell next? Minor events wouldn't travel very far, so if you ruin your name in one place you should be able to start over somewhere else, unless you've committed so great a vile act that the news will eventually reach everywhere (but maybe you can beat the news by travelling fast).
And the inaccuracies should crop up, as in a game of telephone, so perhaps you will reported to be someone else entirely who did something you never came close to doing.
Dull orange stretched from horizon to horizon, shimmering in the blistering heat of the sun - that dun coloured orange sphere, disappearing over the horizon.
When I read this first sentence I get the distinct feeling there is something orange being described, and also a horizon is somehow in the mix.
An independent game developer with zero track record attacks one of the most thorny game development problems (the MMO) and fails. I think I'm going to die of not-surprise.
I'm on the same page as you- I almost thought it was an Onion article from the title.
a caught red handed child molester got a "get out of jail" card and is happily lurking around as we speak?... the guy walked!...
don't you think we could do more for "our children" if we could keep the people who actually commited the crime in jail?
I think there's something about having to be proven guilty in a court of law or some other principle at work. Take a few deep breaths and realize the outside world is not a candy coated padded playground daycare, there are probably more than a few accused child molestors walking around who got off on some technicalities like 'there's no evidence','the witness was lying','the police were sloppy and incompetent and broke the law','it's obvious they didn't actually do it', or 'they're Michael Jackson'.
If we converted to digital and left the poorest of our nation out in the cold, we'd devolve into some discussion [something contradictory to below]
But when we DO help them [something contradictory to above]
This particular posting doesn't out-and-out accuse We Slashdotters of hypocrisy, but that's the strong implication. How can anyone be so stupid to accuse a group of people of hypocrisy, especially a group claiming no political or ideological uniformity of its members?
Yes, there's probably a plausible explanation, but I don't really care. The 'you guys said one thing before and another thing later and the moderators agreed, you all are hypocrites' argument is retarded.
Am I the only one out there that sees the logical issues with this? They want no one to have intellectual property, BUT they want the right to privacy?
The solution is, is that their platform simply is: no intellectual property, EXCEPT the right to privacy. Their platform contains an exception. They don't like intellectual property as owned by corporations, they do like personal privacy. Is there another way to phrase this? A political platform consists of promoting things you think the law and government should be, and of putting a stop to things it shouldn't be, it's nice to make nice clean blanket laws and statements but you make exceptions as you see fit.
It seems like you're missing something very fundamental, just because something seems extreme to you doesn't mean that a further extreme or a completely different extreme can be substituted for it.
Cue a bunch of people saying how blogs are stupid and no one wants to read about boring details of other people's lives, jobs, hobbies, whatever.
Cue response which points out you shouldn't judge blogs by just browsing them at random like it was 1994 and you're surfing the internet by clicking on links on crappy geocities sites, you should look at ones that are popular and fit your tastes, and use google and blogsearch etc. to find them. Everything is crap if you don't have an easy way of discriminating from the good and the bad, etc.
it is amazing how many people here will talk about how the government "might" be doing all these things, and have not a single clue as to the real limitations and capabilities of the police. I mean shit, if they are capable of secretly spying on millions of us...
Sorry, I was making a joke there. Nobody really knew about the massive unwarranted domestic spying until a couple of weeks ago, so I was posting as if I hadn't learned about it yet.
you would think they would be smart enough to make sure that no camera was rolling while they violate someone's civil rights, ie: Rodney King, New Orleans, etc.
I'm sure the equivalent of the 'broadcast flag' for video cameras is just around the corner, but right now the ability to tap the internet and phone system is extremely trivial compared to remotely turning off self-contained recording devices. Extremely bright flashes or lasers that destroy CCDs (and probably eyeballs too) or EMP devices come to mind as a mechanism. There was something about a led/laser being able to disable still cameras, but I suspect it only works under very controlled conditions.
The fact that it is so easy to speculate on what the government may be doing in secret is a testament to the huge expansion in government secrecy and powers (congress and court approved or not) that seems to be accelerating recently. The more of our taxpayer money that disappears into black pits whose budgets themselves are secret the more the potential for the government to be intruding on our rights and freedoms and even doing things abroad that most moral Americans would not support.
No, it would seem to prove there are so few cases regarding civil rights abuses that someone had to make one up. Or at least it would lead a logical person to conclude this. I mean, if there are 10s of thousands of real stories, and no one hears about them, and we only hear about this one, and it is fake? Do the math.
Well, it is completely theoretically possible that the government is violating the amendment about unwarranted search and seizure for thousands or millions of people without any of them knowing about it. Not hearing any complaints doesn't mean that rights aren't being violated, not hearing any complaints doesn't mean the abuse is marginal and therefore harmless. Sure, the worst way to violate someone's right is to do it in a way that specifically and immediately hurts them - typically when a crime is committed the victim can show harm, but it is possible to have widespread and secret or subtle violations.
Not hearing about abuses is no excuse, especially if all you do is read slashdot. There are websites being taken down and censored right now because the our good old nanny government has decided it wants a registry with names and phone numbers every adult entertainer, and plenty of other stuff going on I probably don't know about because I don't pay that much attention to the news (mainly because it's all bad and getting worse, I'd trade creationism-free textbooks for all the erosion of liberty we're seeing right now).
However, the fact that so many people were neither surprised nor outraged that the original story might have happened in the US... just indifferent... was rather depressing.
I think the earliest boingboing article on the topic pointed out inconsistencies with the whole story, suggesting it was a hoax- a lot of people probably got that feeling. I never really quite believe in outrageous things until there is a little settling time to allow facts to be checked and people to be interviewed etc. If you wait longer for the politics and so on to die down, the FOIA requests to be processed, files to be declassified, people to be more candid in their interviews, you'll get a much more accurate picture (if anyone cares enough to do all that work that is).
You can get those 'Director's Label' DVDs, but there's a really marked decline in quality from the first batch (Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and another guy) to the second batch (some guys you've never heard of, with a couple of outstanding videos and lots of not so interesting ones). I think they need to cast a wider net and just compile good videos from any director, just have a common theme or time period to give them cohesion.
It's kind of sad that a really awesome video can't launch someone's career anymore, whether that is the career of a director or a band- though I guess it may be better that way because the music just has to stand on its own.
Probably any show that is so short you can't break it up and put advertisements in the breaks is going to be problematic to do on a network. Every time a music video ends, people probably start flipping channels in droves. There's a few games to play, 'stay tuned for the premiere of blah blah blah' or countdowns to number one videos, but that's about it.
But in reality, EA is another company deluded into finding a scapegoat for loss of sales instead of pointing directly to themselves. Like Hollywood, Television, and Music, video games are becoming more boring and derivative.
This looks like the autoreply for articles about the games, movies, and music business. The fourth derivative of profit over time flipped to a negative sign? Earnings are down a tenth of a percent? Trot out your list of grievances and post them to slashdot. Please try to post early, or think of a way to articulate the same sentiment in a novel way, or else dozens of other posters will have the exact same 'Why can't developers just make good games/I'm tired of FPSs' message and beat you to the mod points.
By entering the setting on my Live account, every FPS I play on the 360 will use that setting by default.
Why can't someone do this for PC games? I expected Steam to do it, but there it won't even remember your keyboard settings if you play the same game on a new computer. Every FPS has a bunch of basic controls in common, why can't they all use a standardized config file? I've been deterred from playing demos of some games because I know there's a pretty good chance it will take me longer to config the controls than it will to play the whole demo.
This is at least in part responsible for the drop in game sales this year. Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved - people saving up for new systems, developers moving their top dev teams to new platforms, etc. But just knowing my own personal habits as someone who used to spend thousands of dollars on games a year (I'm 33, I have disposable income), and knowing both the feelings of friends in the same boat as me along with what I read in various places on the net, I have to believe that there are a lot of people out there who are just dissatisfied with what they see as a boring, uninspired, utterly derivative crop of current games. We want something new, not the same thing as before but with better graphics.
The best way to look at this as not as if the quality of games has gone down from last year, the games are the same, there's lame games and sequels and licenses that come out every year- but for many reasons such as you point out the cream of the crop is just missing this year. Again, the industry didn't transform, audiences didn't finally get fed up, there's just no blockbusters.
It seems like a lot of the huge game developers now take many years to make their games
There's some insight here. Rockstar probably can't make a new GTA every year and have it meet expectations to always improve on the previous ones, they might as well take this year off and gear up for the next console generation (yeah they did The Warriors and the PSP GTA game, but I'm sure both of those together were a lot less effort than say San Andreas). Half-Life 2 took more than five years to come out. It's to be expected than a year here in there isn't going to have any huge breakout or highly-anticipated blockbuster games just by chance.
It's sort of like the film market, where there can be quite a lull for a while before many different studios release their brand new biggest titles that have taken tons of development time.
Right. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the Matrix movies are all over with for a while, there's nothing really big to take their place. Each Star Wars movie had years inbetween, and the matrix movies were made pretty close together but were in development for years since the first one came out. I'm not sure if there's anything else huge on the horizon, hopefully something will come out of left field and surprise everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
You wouldn't resort to violence because you dislike the words they said, you would resort to violence because of what you think they might do.
I think in any case where violence appeared to be caused by 'disliking words' (actually I'm not sure what that means, or if anyone has ever claimed that as a justification for violence before), there was some perception on the part of the person resorting to extreme measures that somehow the words were conveying information or communicating intent or attempting to incite in others or create an atmosphere or something else that might end up harming that person.
The perception may be based on faulty information, or be highly illogical or contain long unlikely chains of causality or otherwise be a very poor justification for action when examined, but I'm sure it's there. I guess you do fault them for not explaining their reasoning better, and being able to articulate reasoning probably correlates somewhat to being justified, and of course it's good to say in advance of action rather than after so that someone can point out faults in the argument prior to something irreversible being done (but if you are in position of weakness or time is critical that may not be possible)- maybe that is in fact what you are saying?
There is an inferiority complex among the group who refers to others as "the man". They assume that "the man" is pulling strings behind the scenes and that there is no way that they could ever hope to beat "the man" except through violence or hatred campaigns.
I saw a mildly humorous commercial for tacos or something the other day in which a character was refering to someone as 'the man'. He wasn't in the least advocating violence or 'hatred campaigns', and such advocacy wasn't even part of the joke. 'The man' is just a phrase, it usually refers to powerful rich white guys. At least for younger generations- maybe people who lived through the 60s or something have more negative connotations for people who use that phrase?
Just for a moment, clear your mind of all the hatred and pent up rage within your soul.
'rage within my soul'? Nice.
People are abusing themselves.
The hairy palms thing is a myth perpetuated by none other than The Man.
In both cases, the power ultimately rests with the people.
That's true in every system of government ever devised. A popular revolution could overturn any government currently in existence. Hypothetically though, someone with the power to choke people from a distance with their mind might give the will of the people a run for it's money though.
When you fight against "the man" you are really fighting against the people in this country. Keep that in mind.
Or maybe I'm trying to convince them not to vote for or give money to 'the man' anymore?
witness the success of the America's Army game.
Yeah, whatever happened to that game?
I know nothing whatsoever about the events you are talking about, but absolutist statements like the following kind of tick me off:
Please.... No matter how offensive something might be, no matter what they may have tried, nothing gives someone the right to resort to violence because they dislike what someone else said.
I dunno. What about verbally threatening someone? It's not really just the words, it's also the credibility, the capability to carry out the words- if someone threatens you and has the means to follow through then you or the local law enforcement (where applicable) may have the right to use violence or threaten violence themselves to end that threat. What if someone isn't threatening you with violence, but threatening your job? Your family? Your freedom? What if you don't have a legal system that allows you to sue to right some wrongdoing? Maybe, maybe not? Is there a kind of muliplication of factors, e.g. where the means are most definitely there, but the threat is weak, or when the threatened action is very strong, but the means are limited, where you still may be moved to action above some threshold?
Before getting excited about what is and isn't art, consider this- why do we need games to be considered art?
The simple answer is this society considers art to be legitimate, and therefore time spent enjoying art also is legitimate, therefore in order for playing games not to be frowned upon then games have to be considered art. (or, electronic games need to be considered professional sports, if you read the other 50% of the games.slashdot stories that all tie in to the desire to legitimize games)
I don't think that a need for legitimacy is a good enough reason. I like playing games- and I like them whether I or anyone else thinks they're art.
I think games can become legitimate and important on their own, without ever being considered either art. Games are a form of expression, but they should express more than what they currently do, and the things they express should be important. The best way is to probably A. have more people making games, making more voices to be heard and B. create a tradition among the most elite game developers for more fully expressing important ideas in their games.
If you just play out the game publisher's argument, you will see that they may be right. It does starve them of revenue. And that may, in turn, make them reluctant to spend money on risky titles or innovate.
And for completeness also consider the consumer. The ability to sell back a game bought at full price and purchase a used game at a reduced cost (and even sell that back) reduces the monetary risk of buying a bad game. If the free market of used games were to be regulated into non-existence, players may stay away from games more unfamiliar them (as likely as not the 'innovative' games).
Typical rant from someone who hates free markets and capitalism. Go regulate your planned economy somewhere else, asshole.
I really enjoy print game magazines. I like the fast and simple interface of being able to flip through from start to finish- I see screenshots of all the games (some of them as big as a page), I get exposed to games I would just ignore when there's just a title and a tiny screenshot and maybe a line of text that I have to make a conscious decision to click on and wait for it to load in the case of a website. I think the graphic designers of magazine are usually better than for websites, which typically have horribly busy masses of different links and ads and crap all crammed into a tiny space (and then they choose a white on black font that makes your eyes hurt after a paragraph or two- but that same color screen works all right in a magazine because it isn't backlit).
That said, I don't subscribe to any game magazines even though I could easily afford to, I just like to pick them up for a dollar each when they're a few months old from Half-Price books or sometimes Value Village. People rarely sell their old game magazines it seems like, but in a big enough city you can usually find someplace that gets a trickle of them (but then people like me just buy all the game magazines at first sight).
I'd like it if people and institutions actually remembered what you did, instead of some meter being decremented for certain kinds actions. As in Civ, instead of some other civ simply not liking you for making war on them, it would be great if they constantly referred back to the 'rape of Moscow' or the 'massacre at so-and-so', more like you are actually creating history, creating a real story.
And there should be a model for the propagation of news- did anyone in the village actually see you setting the person on fire? Who did they tell next? Minor events wouldn't travel very far, so if you ruin your name in one place you should be able to start over somewhere else, unless you've committed so great a vile act that the news will eventually reach everywhere (but maybe you can beat the news by travelling fast).
And the inaccuracies should crop up, as in a game of telephone, so perhaps you will reported to be someone else entirely who did something you never came close to doing.
I'm pretty sure that the engine for Thrill Kill was actually used later to make the first Wu Tang Clan fighting game.
How sure are you? The TFA seemed pretty confident when they made the same claim.
Which is the most appropriate coversheet?
When I read this first sentence I get the distinct feeling there is something orange being described, and also a horizon is somehow in the mix.
An independent game developer with zero track record attacks one of the most thorny game development problems (the MMO) and fails. I think I'm going to die of not-surprise.
I'm on the same page as you- I almost thought it was an Onion article from the title.
a caught red handed child molester got a "get out of jail" card and is happily lurking around as we speak? ... the guy walked!...
don't you think we could do more for "our children" if we could keep the people who actually commited the crime in jail?
I think there's something about having to be proven guilty in a court of law or some other principle at work. Take a few deep breaths and realize the outside world is not a candy coated padded playground daycare, there are probably more than a few accused child molestors walking around who got off on some technicalities like 'there's no evidence','the witness was lying','the police were sloppy and incompetent and broke the law','it's obvious they didn't actually do it', or 'they're Michael Jackson'.
If we converted to digital and left the poorest of our nation out in the cold, we'd devolve into some discussion [something contradictory to below]
But when we DO help them [something contradictory to above]
This particular posting doesn't out-and-out accuse We Slashdotters of hypocrisy, but that's the strong implication. How can anyone be so stupid to accuse a group of people of hypocrisy, especially a group claiming no political or ideological uniformity of its members?
Yes, there's probably a plausible explanation, but I don't really care. The 'you guys said one thing before and another thing later and the moderators agreed, you all are hypocrites' argument is retarded.
Am I the only one out there that sees the logical issues with this? They want no one to have intellectual property, BUT they want the right to privacy?
The solution is, is that their platform simply is: no intellectual property, EXCEPT the right to privacy. Their platform contains an exception. They don't like intellectual property as owned by corporations, they do like personal privacy. Is there another way to phrase this? A political platform consists of promoting things you think the law and government should be, and of putting a stop to things it shouldn't be, it's nice to make nice clean blanket laws and statements but you make exceptions as you see fit.
It seems like you're missing something very fundamental, just because something seems extreme to you doesn't mean that a further extreme or a completely different extreme can be substituted for it.
Cue a bunch of people saying how blogs are stupid and no one wants to read about boring details of other people's lives, jobs, hobbies, whatever.
Cue response which points out you shouldn't judge blogs by just browsing them at random like it was 1994 and you're surfing the internet by clicking on links on crappy geocities sites, you should look at ones that are popular and fit your tastes, and use google and blogsearch etc. to find them. Everything is crap if you don't have an easy way of discriminating from the good and the bad, etc.
it is amazing how many people here will talk about how the government "might" be doing all these things, and have not a single clue as to the real limitations and capabilities of the police. I mean shit, if they are capable of secretly spying on millions of us...
Sorry, I was making a joke there. Nobody really knew about the massive unwarranted domestic spying until a couple of weeks ago, so I was posting as if I hadn't learned about it yet.
you would think they would be smart enough to make sure that no camera was rolling while they violate someone's civil rights, ie: Rodney King, New Orleans, etc.
I'm sure the equivalent of the 'broadcast flag' for video cameras is just around the corner, but right now the ability to tap the internet and phone system is extremely trivial compared to remotely turning off self-contained recording devices. Extremely bright flashes or lasers that destroy CCDs (and probably eyeballs too) or EMP devices come to mind as a mechanism. There was something about a led/laser being able to disable still cameras, but I suspect it only works under very controlled conditions.
The fact that it is so easy to speculate on what the government may be doing in secret is a testament to the huge expansion in government secrecy and powers (congress and court approved or not) that seems to be accelerating recently. The more of our taxpayer money that disappears into black pits whose budgets themselves are secret the more the potential for the government to be intruding on our rights and freedoms and even doing things abroad that most moral Americans would not support.
No, it would seem to prove there are so few cases regarding civil rights abuses that someone had to make one up. Or at least it would lead a logical person to conclude this. I mean, if there are 10s of thousands of real stories, and no one hears about them, and we only hear about this one, and it is fake? Do the math.
Well, it is completely theoretically possible that the government is violating the amendment about unwarranted search and seizure for thousands or millions of people without any of them knowing about it. Not hearing any complaints doesn't mean that rights aren't being violated, not hearing any complaints doesn't mean the abuse is marginal and therefore harmless. Sure, the worst way to violate someone's right is to do it in a way that specifically and immediately hurts them - typically when a crime is committed the victim can show harm, but it is possible to have widespread and secret or subtle violations.
Not hearing about abuses is no excuse, especially if all you do is read slashdot. There are websites being taken down and censored right now because the our good old nanny government has decided it wants a registry with names and phone numbers every adult entertainer, and plenty of other stuff going on I probably don't know about because I don't pay that much attention to the news (mainly because it's all bad and getting worse, I'd trade creationism-free textbooks for all the erosion of liberty we're seeing right now).
However, the fact that so many people were neither surprised nor outraged that the original story might have happened in the US... just indifferent... was rather depressing.
I think the earliest boingboing article on the topic pointed out inconsistencies with the whole story, suggesting it was a hoax- a lot of people probably got that feeling. I never really quite believe in outrageous things until there is a little settling time to allow facts to be checked and people to be interviewed etc. If you wait longer for the politics and so on to die down, the FOIA requests to be processed, files to be declassified, people to be more candid in their interviews, you'll get a much more accurate picture (if anyone cares enough to do all that work that is).
Do people not watch music videos anymore?
You can get those 'Director's Label' DVDs, but there's a really marked decline in quality from the first batch (Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and another guy) to the second batch (some guys you've never heard of, with a couple of outstanding videos and lots of not so interesting ones). I think they need to cast a wider net and just compile good videos from any director, just have a common theme or time period to give them cohesion.
It's kind of sad that a really awesome video can't launch someone's career anymore, whether that is the career of a director or a band- though I guess it may be better that way because the music just has to stand on its own.
Probably any show that is so short you can't break it up and put advertisements in the breaks is going to be problematic to do on a network. Every time a music video ends, people probably start flipping channels in droves. There's a few games to play, 'stay tuned for the premiere of blah blah blah' or countdowns to number one videos, but that's about it.
But in reality, EA is another company deluded into finding a scapegoat for loss of sales instead of pointing directly to themselves. Like Hollywood, Television, and Music, video games are becoming more boring and derivative.
This looks like the autoreply for articles about the games, movies, and music business. The fourth derivative of profit over time flipped to a negative sign? Earnings are down a tenth of a percent? Trot out your list of grievances and post them to slashdot. Please try to post early, or think of a way to articulate the same sentiment in a novel way, or else dozens of other posters will have the exact same 'Why can't developers just make good games/I'm tired of FPSs' message and beat you to the mod points.
By entering the setting on my Live account, every FPS I play on the 360 will use that setting by default.
Why can't someone do this for PC games? I expected Steam to do it, but there it won't even remember your keyboard settings if you play the same game on a new computer. Every FPS has a bunch of basic controls in common, why can't they all use a standardized config file? I've been deterred from playing demos of some games because I know there's a pretty good chance it will take me longer to config the controls than it will to play the whole demo.
This is at least in part responsible for the drop in game sales this year. Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved - people saving up for new systems, developers moving their top dev teams to new platforms, etc. But just knowing my own personal habits as someone who used to spend thousands of dollars on games a year (I'm 33, I have disposable income), and knowing both the feelings of friends in the same boat as me along with what I read in various places on the net, I have to believe that there are a lot of people out there who are just dissatisfied with what they see as a boring, uninspired, utterly derivative crop of current games. We want something new, not the same thing as before but with better graphics.
The best way to look at this as not as if the quality of games has gone down from last year, the games are the same, there's lame games and sequels and licenses that come out every year- but for many reasons such as you point out the cream of the crop is just missing this year. Again, the industry didn't transform, audiences didn't finally get fed up, there's just no blockbusters.
It seems like a lot of the huge game developers now take many years to make their games
There's some insight here. Rockstar probably can't make a new GTA every year and have it meet expectations to always improve on the previous ones, they might as well take this year off and gear up for the next console generation (yeah they did The Warriors and the PSP GTA game, but I'm sure both of those together were a lot less effort than say San Andreas). Half-Life 2 took more than five years to come out. It's to be expected than a year here in there isn't going to have any huge breakout or highly-anticipated blockbuster games just by chance.
It's sort of like the film market, where there can be quite a lull for a while before many different studios release their brand new biggest titles that have taken tons of development time.
Right. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the Matrix movies are all over with for a while, there's nothing really big to take their place. Each Star Wars movie had years inbetween, and the matrix movies were made pretty close together but were in development for years since the first one came out. I'm not sure if there's anything else huge on the horizon, hopefully something will come out of left field and surprise everyone.