Not that it was a particularly magic period in music history by any strecth (even though i'm quite fond of grunge), but atleast composing and playing your own tunes was still marketeable. People took risks. Nowadays, i listen to radio, and in a same genre i have a hard time telling one band from another.
It could be just you getting old. You might be jaded or burnt-out, or in a nicer turn of speech your tastes have become more refined.
You could be lazy about finding new music, you expect music you like to be delivered to you over the airwaves (You could try KEXP). You say musicians aren't taking risks, but maybe you aren't either.
I'd guess the popular bands of right now compose and play their own music- I think you're referring to the state of things from the late 90's to a couple of years ago.
MMORPG developers all seem to suffer from the same delusion: their game is going to last forever. TV shows seem to be the same, but if they've been around for more than a couple of years usually they have the good grace to bring some kind of conclusion to the show- they may not tie up every plot thread, resolve every conflict (because who knows, maybe it will be brought back, or made into a movie) but there's a two part last episode to cap it all off.
MMORPG need to have a concept of an endgame, where something happens to bring an end to the game that is consisent with the virtual world. The obvious thing is to literally have the world end- there's a comet, an invasion of a far superior foe that spares no one, or something, but maybe there is one last thing to accomplish before it all crashes down (to keep players hooked before the servers go offline). Maybe 99% of all the players are killed permanently during the last pay period by calamity, the final players hole up in a mountain fortress and make a final stand, and die nobly rather than just logging out for the last time...
Or maybe it's all a stunt to reinvigorate the game and it turns some heroes actually did save the world. It costs a little more money for extra content, but they should just budget that or create that content when the game is first developed.
The idea is that instead of all your previous players just being disappointed and looking for the next interesting MMORPG before it too decays and withers, and then eventually getting burnt out by the whole concept, actually give them some kind of sense of closure (and hopefully accomplishment).
This reminds me of the one where Calvin asks why old movies are black & white, and his Dad says the whole world used to be black & white...
the current problem with Day of Defeat: Source is that the quality of the scenes rendered is far beyond what was capable in the time period where the game is set.
This whole idea is a conceptual nightmare. I guess games set in periods prior to the invention of film are going to need to have mods to transcribe them into series of still paintings, pencil sketches, or woodcuts or something. Let's have a game set in prehistoric times rendered entirely in cave art!
What these people are talking about is fucking with the Free Market and Property Rights. They might as well be communists and treated accordingly.
I usually go into EB looking for something cheap in the bargain bin, but while I'm there I'll scan the racks of new games and occasionally purchase one, thinking I'd rather be playing one good new game I know I'll like rather than getting 2-3 old games that might be not very fun and waiting months and months for that new game to get cheaper.
I'm thinking about buying a PS3 and playing a lot of used PS2 games I've missed out on, or screw the PS3 and just get PS2 maybe there'll be another price reduction after the PS3 comes out.
If there were no used games market I probably wouldn't be playing or buying any games at all.
As a long time player of SWG, I have seen the game go from something was that fun to play to something that is being dumbed down for mass appeal. I understand that they are trying to appeal to a greater market to attract more people. They (SOE and LucasArts) have decided that the opinion of people that have played a while is irrelevant.
Have you considered that if they are losing subscribers and failing to attract new ones in sufficient numbers, the people who have been playing the longest and keep playing may be exactly the wrong ones to go to for advice? It's the subscribers who leave, and the people who consider joining but don't are the ones who are going to have thoughts they want to hear about.
The fissure grows 8 meters wide in 3 weeks following an earthquake on Sept 14, and then increases at a rate of about 0.8 inches per year. Given the first metric is even possible, it's absurd to think that the the second rate will remain constant so projection to millions of years is invalid. It would be just as valid to conclude that the increase is decelerating and eventually close back up.
'millions of years' sounds vague enough to fit the evidence. You'll notice that when someone says 'a million years from now' they don't mean A.D. 1,002,005 - the missing zeros are an indication of a lack of precision.
I assume there are more inputs to the claim than a couple of observed rates- like corroboration with knowledge of plate movements there and in adjacent regions from other sources, e.g. given that the plate is moving, and there are no other causes to show that the movement will be opposed by other plates or whatever processes are thought to govern this, it seems pretty safe to say the plate will continue to move at some average rate (though speeding up and slowing down is certainly possible) in the same direction.
I think the kind of over-sexualized images you see in games has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards women
Actually, I think it has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards games and gamers. This story is about a third prong in the 'legitimize games' movement, the second one about making professional gaming more viable and the primary one about considering games to be art.
The main barrier to more realistic visual portrayals of women in games is graphical limitations. If you only have a handful of polygons or pixels to work with, then you've got to exaggerate features in order to show that a character is female at all. In real life, women without disproportionate bodily attributes can be very attractive, but the reasons are usually a combination of subtle things impossible to render with the level of detail currently possible- but that is getting less true with every new generation of consoles and graphics cards.
It's certainly not the player, because he doesn't care whether the game sells well or not. He only cares if it's fun.
Not true. The player cares because if they enjoy the game, then they will want to play more games like it. High sales usually translates to a high likelihood of sequels and similar games from other publishers.
The sooner we quit believing that one party or another is interested in freedom, the sooner we have a chance to preserve the dwindling amount of it we have left.
I agree in principle - but it's also kind of unproductive to take the 'long view' and always claim precedent for everything bad going on right now. We don't have time machines, we can't change history- you have to focus on the present and the people who are perpetrating bad things right now. As far as two party politics go, if the elected official does bad enough, then you vote them out, you don't play games with trying to predict the future with what the opposing candidate might do, you focus on punishing the people in office right now who are screwing up right now. If you keep punishing both parties that way long enough, if every official is only there for one term, maybe they'll learn better eventually, or a third party will pop up.
The other thing is the more examples from history you point out, the further back you go, the more someone is going to think that it all turned out mostly all right so there's nothing to get excited about (even though the reason things did turn out all right back then was because people did get excited and took up arms and fixed it).
Although I hate to experiment with privacy and freedom in this way, if it happens some interesting things might happen. I strongly oppose this and the overall trend towards the expansion of government powers.
People claim that the tracking and the law may be used as a smokescreen to persecute people arbitrarily. Since nearly everyone will be breaking the law at some point or another, law enforcement will have to filter out people they think are 'good' citizens because otherwise the burden on the justice system will be too great to handle everyone. I'm not sure this is true. If there was a database with the movements of everyone, and someone found themselves in court over an infraction, they could easily show that there are many other offenders out there that also have to be prosecuted, show bias from other prosecutions, and so on- all the data is out there and probably would be accessible to the defense. It's much easier to discriminate while enforcing a blanket law if the means of detection are also random and arbitrary (e.g. a cop riding around in a car only pulling over people within range).
The result may be one of two things- the first is the government would realize they can't give full due process to so many offenders and move to streamline the system.
Whenever anyone talks about making the government more efficient, you should suspect that the efficiency they're talking about is either one of taking away freedoms from ordinary individuals or of granting freedoms and immunities to large corporations- freedoms are kind of a big burden for the government to bear after all, it can operate with much more efficiency if it only has a handful of very wealthy 'citizens' it is granting rights to and representing the interests of rather than hundreds of millions of people. It's a human thing to do to make assumptions that will simplify the decision process- a congressperson can try to make out statistical mumbo-jumbo about the varied and subtle effects of a new law on the masses of diverse people or they can simply see that a handful of rich people or companies will add millions or billions to their profit margins as a result of a new law.
But the second result is that so many voters will be affected that they will move to get rid of stupid laws, or vastly decrease the negative effects of conviction. It's also possible the sort of crimes the government starts convicting of are made to be felonies, and then they can disenfranchise potential backlash voters very quickly- felons don't get to vote.
In the future, most of the people living in the country might be disenfranchised felons who can be easily stripped of remaining rights as the government sees fit.
One sure sign that the movement to add these tracking devices is a corrupt one is if there are any exceptions: rich people, government officials, or the police themselves will be able to disable or remove the devices legally?
He's saying games can be works of art visually, but that what has come so far isn't yet good enough. He doesn't talk about the possibility of 'gameplay' being an artform, but I would suspect he would claim that even if it was an artform it also does yet not match up to the art of other media.
Game mechanics and design are just as important if not more important than story, art or music.
True, but does that make it art? (I don't really want to get into defining art though...) Even if the act of designing a game is an artform, does it necessarily mean that the product of that art is also art? Craftsmanship is a perfectly acceptable term I think, even if it falls short of being art. Is chess or football art, were their designers artists?
Can playing a game be an art form? A skilled athlete or non-sport game player may sometimes be considered to have artistic qualities, perform moves that are artistic, but the real focus remains on the game, the mechanics, and winning.
To me, a lot of gameplay taps into something basically nonverbal and non-emotional- button pressing is sometimes a muscle memory thing, other games require the player to develop complex internalized models of what's going on in the game- but there's still no great human truths to be uncovered in that territory- great primate/mammalian truths perhaps, but lacking something somehow higher ellicited by words and images and sound- games can use words and images and sound to achieve that effect, but like Ebert says it hasn't been done as well as the greatest yet and when it does it's not because of the gameplay but because of the words/images/sounds that are already present in other media. It may be possible to encode complex and deeply meaningful messages into gameplay itself, but I don't think it has happened yet.
He goes on:
"video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
I interpret this as saying that games are too long. The ratio of time spent to great art experienced is too low compared to other things out there to be enjoyed. Games may be fun, which makes up for the lower art density for most of us, but apparently not Ebert.
I think you can follow this thought further- how can one really hold up a game, or part of a game, as an example of art when the barrier to experiencing that art is so high? There is some correlation between difficulty in reading books and playing games- there's a certain amount of work required to experience them fully unlike passive works like film that propels itself forward whether the viewer is engaged in it or not. Very difficult books, with complex use of language invented and only used by the author are hard to read, analogous to hard games. Books and movies have built-in cheating methods- you can flip ahead a few pages, or even to the end of the books and fast-forward a movie.
Video games are problematic to use as references. If I were to write a paper citing the nth mission of some game, there is no way for someone to go experience that level without playing the entire game to that point or investing time in finding cheat codes, or getting someone to give them a saved game for that point. There needs to be a uniform way of experiencing any part of any game without having played any of it before hand.
How do I 'quote' a game? Screenshots and videos don't really do it, because the gameplay is removed- there needs to be a way to generate a fair use demo of any part of a game and distribute it along with another work making use of that 'quote'.
There's a renaissance for text and images on the i
This is just like when Burger King and Safeway canceled their aid after learning that food was being distributed for free to New Orleans residents in the wake of the disaster.
Seriously though, the city probably has the right to just take the building from BellSouth anyway- if you can kick people off their land to build a mall or a stadium no one is going to raise an eyebrow if you eminent domain a building to help maintain law and order in the city. It is just better PR if everyone is happy about it.
This is pretty bad, although the reputation of the New Orleans police was tarnished a bit in the disaster. Can you imagine the shitstorm if the building was going to go to firefighters and BellSouth reneged on that?
It's one of those contradictions of our business system- in a capitalist system resources are allocated through the market which kind of aggregates and handles the whims and desires and needs of the consumers and producers involved effectively, but then you have centrally planning as operated in say the Soviet Union where a rigid hierarchy decides how to move resources around, although there are still external market forces from competing capitalist societies, other central planned but independent countries, and what not. The thing is, companies in capitalist system internally operate with central planning, which is fine on a certain scale but the larger they get the larger the amount of resources in the nominally capitalist system are being allocated in non-capitalist ways, and I think everyone suffers from a less effective market as a result.
1. No leveling. What? Did Captain Kirk constantly go on away missions to zap thousands of space rats with his phaser just so he could travel to a more dangerous planet? Hell no!
Mostly agree there. I'd say put in a very short training portion of the game, over in a few hours, where one zips through their career prior to being a captain of a ship in a few hours. You'd have to follow orders, perform a few menial tasks (and some exciting ones too), but then you get your own ship. Maybe not the finest ship in the fleet, but something. After that, there could be ranks gained, but perhaps there could be a system where there is no treadmill, but a way for everyone to have interesting and unique path to higher rank, not just 'I patrolled the frontier for 20 hours zapping pirates and am now awarded an automatic promotion'.
5. Make it so the players crew the ships. Not some NPCs.
I don't really understand the MMO obsession with creating worlds entirely manned by real players. AI sucks, I know, but usually the result of 'live people for everthing' is:
A. A depiction of a society (or an interstellar fleet in this case) where there are no crappy jobs, so the society is not at all realistic. This is usually worse for licenses, because in the movie or book or whatever there were a handful of heroes adventuring in world with a backdrop of more average people doing mundane things- the people that the heroes are trying to saving because they can't save themselves. But then in the online version there are no innocents or average citizens, but teaming hordes of hero characters running around.
B. Players are required to fulfill those crappy job roles. Sucks for obvious reasons.
4. Make it open ended and that you always have the choice of which planet to go to.
Perhaps there's another early phase where your assignment/orders prevent you from leaving a limited set of star systems, but later you gain the ability to have a more open-ended assignment. Maybe there would be crisis points where ships are ordered to defend fronts, attack the borg, or whatever, and disobeying orders would penalize the player somehow (but not too harshly).
Speaking of the borg, I thought their whole thing was a kind of monolithic single-mindedness, not at all what you would get with bunch of online players all wanting to go off in different directions and assimilate who they want to assimilate.
My impression is that Slashdot editors are pushing the Xbox 360 fever to incredible hights. Every time I visit Slashdot, there is a story on the 360.
I mostly agree- though new console releases aren't that common (I don't remember this much pointless coverage of DS or PSP releases). The only effect of increased hype will be to make the system release more likely to be seen as a failure even if it does moderately well, and that perceived failure will later manifest itself as real failure. The hype dries up soon after the system comes out, and fence-sitting slashdot readers no longer see stories about the system every day or every few hours anymore, so they feel more justified in not purchasing one and that indeed it was all just hype.
The key to making this a successful sport that supports lots of professionals is viewers- if you can't fill a stadium or arena or have millions watching on tv then there isn't going to be a lot of money in it. Watching someone sitting in front of a computer doesn't make for a good viewing experience (millions of shitty webcam photos to prove that, even when there is cleavage involved), and the games themselves aren't yet so visually stimulating that watching but not playing is all that worthwhile for extended periods of time.
It will be sort of interesting to watch where this goes, but it's hard to imagine the benefit to the casual gamers from having more professional players out there. At best there will just be a pro-gaming world perhaps living in a separate bubble adjacent to the normal gaming market- there will be mods and maps made specifically for tournament play, or even entire games, where single player and internet play would be afterthoughts or not included at all. At worst the pro gaming would distort or damage the normal games market and the types of games that are released because everything would be oriented to making the big money off of pro gaming.
If "acting" is what's important, then why are all actresses (even the B-list ones), with a few minor exceptions, ridiculously hot? I mean, is it a coincidence? Something genetic (genes for hotness and acting related)? I'd buy the idea that hotter girls (and guys, it's the same there) are more self-confident, giving them a slight acting boost. But really, it's pretty clear that hot girl actresses don't need to act well in order to be famous.
The short answer is is that there are a lot of attractive people in the world, probably tens of millions, while the number of people on the A-list or B-list is a tiny fraction of that- so you can be selective with regard to acting ability while still maintaining attractiveness, because attractive people are usually the people who pursue movie careers because they or their friends and family see they are just as attractive as people on tv and are then pushed in that direction.
I think you'll find that a lot of the A and B-list actors are attractive, but attractive in unique and interesting ways- they have facial features, speaking styles, facial and bodily mannerisms that set them apart- the first is more genetics (surgery usually produces bland and generic 'good looks') but the last two I attribute to 'acting' (even if the actor is just being themselves). For audiences it's the difference between wanting to spend two hours watching a hot but annoying bimbo versus a girl who looks good but also seems like a real person they can connect with emotionally.
> An actor's performance is cruical to the success of the movie.
I hate to break this to you, but no it isn't. It's based off of who has more charisma on the screen, and in most cases, who has the hottest babes.
This is total bullshit. I have mod points to mod you down with, but since that doesn't do anything for the other modders I'll respond and hope they read this and mod you down for me.
Movies are all about people, or things anthropomorphized to be like people. The people have to move around and say things (the actor's performance), and do it decently, otherwise the movie is going to be incredibly boring or stupid. It's important to have at least one or two attractive people in the lead roles, but everyone else you want to look convincing in their roles.
If the movie is entirely filled with fresh-faced pretty 20-somethings it's not going to be a very good movie, because it's probably a movie about partying in Cancun or starring the winners of American Idol- and both of those movies made basically nothing at the box office. Real movies are going have cops with weathered faces, overweight and/or goofy looking comedians, and so on. Audiences connect with actors who have interesting and unique looks a lot better than they connect with a platinum blonde girl with fake tits in a bikini starring in a beer ad. The more generically good-looking an actor is, the better their performance has to be to convince the audience they aren't an arrogant asshole or an annoying bimbo.
> Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun? I suppose if the same game featured a young white inner-city youth roaming the mean streets, or a latino kid, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?
I like the way that you use selective political-correctness to try and accuse them of being racist, yet you completely disregard the fact that they also said man.
I suppose if the same game featured a woman, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?
Both of you are wrong, there's no racism or sexism, the original story was simply following a generalization with an example, not adding qualifications to the generalization. They said not to buy games overly inspired by the setting of GTA rather than the components that make it truly extraordinary (great car driving physics + incredibly detailed seamless world, IMHO). There are a large number of games coming out that involve black gang culture, in part inspired by GTA:SA and also motivated by rap star interest in games, and no doubt a lot of them are critically flawed and not worth playing.
I get annoyed by people using the term 'political correctness' as if we were still living in the 1990s- the term first saw widespread use back then, but if you think about it it is a thing that exists wherever there is politics- there is no specific viewpoint or ideology that defines political correctness, it is decided mostly by the people who wield the most political power at the given moment, or at least the most vocal of them. These days, being politically correct means you have to equate opposing certain policies of a country with opposing the country, its people, institutions, traditions, religions etc. to the point of wanting them destroyed.
Instead of buying one $50 game, buy 5-10 $5-10 games. You know, games that are a year old, on clearance, etc... Sometimes you find a good game that you otherwise would have overlooked.
There are still a lot of games not even worth $5-$10, I've found many times I'll put down a game after only playing a few levels. It's odd, because if I had paid more money I probably would have felt more compelled to give the game a chance and would have put more effort into getting past a difficult section or more willing to put up with minor flaws- I want to get my money's worth.
We went to metacritic, used the advanced search, and printed off a list of the top 25 FPS for Xbox, stopped by Gamestop at lunch and he picked up 3 highly rated games.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this post, where we learn whether a guy just wasted $150 on a load of crap games, or that a particular website is decent for this reviewing and recommending sort of thing.
It's a pretty smart move, I think, and doesn't leave a lot of people (like an entire continent) feel left out.
I wish more companies would take the simultaneous release route for books, movies, and games, and every other product that is typically and annoyingly released one continent/country/whatever at a time. If we truly are going to achieve a globalized economy then companies have to take the attitude of the entire world as one giant market: sell products for the same price everywhere, make them available everywhere (at the same time), and not create artificial barriers to trade like regional encoding, and not coerce the governments or resellers into restricting customers from buying their product from anywhere in the world to be delivered anywhere else.
It introduces a lot more risk to have to supply and advertise to one huge market, and have to deal with remaining 'natural' barriers to trade like differing languages. But truly global companies should be able to handle it if they want to compete in that arena.
What the industry really needs is a way to keep development costs down
I suggest that games be made shorter. Quality over quantity, let online play, mod-makers, or cheap unlockables extend the life of the game beyond 5-10 hours, or sell expansion packs/sequels only after making a profit from the earlier game. That assumes more levels and art and so on actually costs a lot more- if a game is half as long but only 10% cheaper to produce then that's a poor tradeoff.
The hard part will be keeping it fresh and lively, and not stagnating into a series of endless sequels with better graphics.
I haven't ever heard a convincing argument as to why sequels with better graphics can't be fresh and lively. Over the life of a console it's true games don't innovate that much, but I think there are many franchises that go in new directions after a console update, and also experiment with games in the same franchise but with different gameplay styles.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that it was a particularly magic period in music history by any strecth (even though i'm quite fond of grunge), but atleast composing and playing your own tunes was still marketeable. People took risks. Nowadays, i listen to radio, and in a same genre i have a hard time telling one band from another.
It could be just you getting old. You might be jaded or burnt-out, or in a nicer turn of speech your tastes have become more refined.
You could be lazy about finding new music, you expect music you like to be delivered to you over the airwaves (You could try KEXP). You say musicians aren't taking risks, but maybe you aren't either.
I'd guess the popular bands of right now compose and play their own music- I think you're referring to the state of things from the late 90's to a couple of years ago.
MMORPG developers all seem to suffer from the same delusion: their game is going to last forever. TV shows seem to be the same, but if they've been around for more than a couple of years usually they have the good grace to bring some kind of conclusion to the show- they may not tie up every plot thread, resolve every conflict (because who knows, maybe it will be brought back, or made into a movie) but there's a two part last episode to cap it all off.
MMORPG need to have a concept of an endgame, where something happens to bring an end to the game that is consisent with the virtual world. The obvious thing is to literally have the world end- there's a comet, an invasion of a far superior foe that spares no one, or something, but maybe there is one last thing to accomplish before it all crashes down (to keep players hooked before the servers go offline). Maybe 99% of all the players are killed permanently during the last pay period by calamity, the final players hole up in a mountain fortress and make a final stand, and die nobly rather than just logging out for the last time...
Or maybe it's all a stunt to reinvigorate the game and it turns some heroes actually did save the world. It costs a little more money for extra content, but they should just budget that or create that content when the game is first developed.
The idea is that instead of all your previous players just being disappointed and looking for the next interesting MMORPG before it too decays and withers, and then eventually getting burnt out by the whole concept, actually give them some kind of sense of closure (and hopefully accomplishment).
Unfortunately for this story, 'probes' turns out to be a verb rather than a noun. Wonder what Cassini or the Mars rovers are up to...
This reminds me of the one where Calvin asks why old movies are black & white, and his Dad says the whole world used to be black & white...
the current problem with Day of Defeat: Source is that the quality of the scenes rendered is far beyond what was capable in the time period where the game is set.
This whole idea is a conceptual nightmare. I guess games set in periods prior to the invention of film are going to need to have mods to transcribe them into series of still paintings, pencil sketches, or woodcuts or something. Let's have a game set in prehistoric times rendered entirely in cave art!
What these people are talking about is fucking with the Free Market and Property Rights. They might as well be communists and treated accordingly.
I usually go into EB looking for something cheap in the bargain bin, but while I'm there I'll scan the racks of new games and occasionally purchase one, thinking I'd rather be playing one good new game I know I'll like rather than getting 2-3 old games that might be not very fun and waiting months and months for that new game to get cheaper.
I'm thinking about buying a PS3 and playing a lot of used PS2 games I've missed out on, or screw the PS3 and just get PS2 maybe there'll be another price reduction after the PS3 comes out.
If there were no used games market I probably wouldn't be playing or buying any games at all.
As a long time player of SWG, I have seen the game go from something was that fun to play to something that is being dumbed down for mass appeal. I understand that they are trying to appeal to a greater market to attract more people. They (SOE and LucasArts) have decided that the opinion of people that have played a while is irrelevant.
Have you considered that if they are losing subscribers and failing to attract new ones in sufficient numbers, the people who have been playing the longest and keep playing may be exactly the wrong ones to go to for advice? It's the subscribers who leave, and the people who consider joining but don't are the ones who are going to have thoughts they want to hear about.
The fissure grows 8 meters wide in 3 weeks following an earthquake on Sept 14, and then increases at a rate of about 0.8 inches per year. Given the first metric is even possible, it's absurd to think that the the second rate will remain constant so projection to millions of years is invalid. It would be just as valid to conclude that the increase is decelerating and eventually close back up.
'millions of years' sounds vague enough to fit the evidence. You'll notice that when someone says 'a million years from now' they don't mean A.D. 1,002,005 - the missing zeros are an indication of a lack of precision.
I assume there are more inputs to the claim than a couple of observed rates- like corroboration with knowledge of plate movements there and in adjacent regions from other sources, e.g. given that the plate is moving, and there are no other causes to show that the movement will be opposed by other plates or whatever processes are thought to govern this, it seems pretty safe to say the plate will continue to move at some average rate (though speeding up and slowing down is certainly possible) in the same direction.
I think the kind of over-sexualized images you see in games has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards women
Actually, I think it has a negative effect on society's attitudes towards games and gamers. This story is about a third prong in the 'legitimize games' movement, the second one about making professional gaming more viable and the primary one about considering games to be art.
The main barrier to more realistic visual portrayals of women in games is graphical limitations. If you only have a handful of polygons or pixels to work with, then you've got to exaggerate features in order to show that a character is female at all. In real life, women without disproportionate bodily attributes can be very attractive, but the reasons are usually a combination of subtle things impossible to render with the level of detail currently possible- but that is getting less true with every new generation of consoles and graphics cards.
It's certainly not the player, because he doesn't care whether the game sells well or not. He only cares if it's fun.
Not true. The player cares because if they enjoy the game, then they will want to play more games like it. High sales usually translates to a high likelihood of sequels and similar games from other publishers.
The sooner we quit believing that one party or another is interested in freedom, the sooner we have a chance to preserve the dwindling amount of it we have left.
I agree in principle - but it's also kind of unproductive to take the 'long view' and always claim precedent for everything bad going on right now. We don't have time machines, we can't change history- you have to focus on the present and the people who are perpetrating bad things right now. As far as two party politics go, if the elected official does bad enough, then you vote them out, you don't play games with trying to predict the future with what the opposing candidate might do, you focus on punishing the people in office right now who are screwing up right now. If you keep punishing both parties that way long enough, if every official is only there for one term, maybe they'll learn better eventually, or a third party will pop up.
The other thing is the more examples from history you point out, the further back you go, the more someone is going to think that it all turned out mostly all right so there's nothing to get excited about (even though the reason things did turn out all right back then was because people did get excited and took up arms and fixed it).
Although I hate to experiment with privacy and freedom in this way, if it happens some interesting things might happen. I strongly oppose this and the overall trend towards the expansion of government powers.
People claim that the tracking and the law may be used as a smokescreen to persecute people arbitrarily. Since nearly everyone will be breaking the law at some point or another, law enforcement will have to filter out people they think are 'good' citizens because otherwise the burden on the justice system will be too great to handle everyone. I'm not sure this is true. If there was a database with the movements of everyone, and someone found themselves in court over an infraction, they could easily show that there are many other offenders out there that also have to be prosecuted, show bias from other prosecutions, and so on- all the data is out there and probably would be accessible to the defense. It's much easier to discriminate while enforcing a blanket law if the means of detection are also random and arbitrary (e.g. a cop riding around in a car only pulling over people within range).
The result may be one of two things- the first is the government would realize they can't give full due process to so many offenders and move to streamline the system.
Whenever anyone talks about making the government more efficient, you should suspect that the efficiency they're talking about is either one of taking away freedoms from ordinary individuals or of granting freedoms and immunities to large corporations- freedoms are kind of a big burden for the government to bear after all, it can operate with much more efficiency if it only has a handful of very wealthy 'citizens' it is granting rights to and representing the interests of rather than hundreds of millions of people. It's a human thing to do to make assumptions that will simplify the decision process- a congressperson can try to make out statistical mumbo-jumbo about the varied and subtle effects of a new law on the masses of diverse people or they can simply see that a handful of rich people or companies will add millions or billions to their profit margins as a result of a new law.
But the second result is that so many voters will be affected that they will move to get rid of stupid laws, or vastly decrease the negative effects of conviction. It's also possible the sort of crimes the government starts convicting of are made to be felonies, and then they can disenfranchise potential backlash voters very quickly- felons don't get to vote.
In the future, most of the people living in the country might be disenfranchised felons who can be easily stripped of remaining rights as the government sees fit.
One sure sign that the movement to add these tracking devices is a corrupt one is if there are any exceptions: rich people, government officials, or the police themselves will be able to disable or remove the devices legally?
Ebert tries to interpret games in the same manner that he does movies, as a visual and aural experience. He completely misses the point.
"That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept."
He's saying games can be works of art visually, but that what has come so far isn't yet good enough. He doesn't talk about the possibility of 'gameplay' being an artform, but I would suspect he would claim that even if it was an artform it also does yet not match up to the art of other media.
Game mechanics and design are just as important if not more important than story, art or music.
True, but does that make it art? (I don't really want to get into defining art though...) Even if the act of designing a game is an artform, does it necessarily mean that the product of that art is also art? Craftsmanship is a perfectly acceptable term I think, even if it falls short of being art. Is chess or football art, were their designers artists?
Can playing a game be an art form? A skilled athlete or non-sport game player may sometimes be considered to have artistic qualities, perform moves that are artistic, but the real focus remains on the game, the mechanics, and winning.
To me, a lot of gameplay taps into something basically nonverbal and non-emotional- button pressing is sometimes a muscle memory thing, other games require the player to develop complex internalized models of what's going on in the game- but there's still no great human truths to be uncovered in that territory- great primate/mammalian truths perhaps, but lacking something somehow higher ellicited by words and images and sound- games can use words and images and sound to achieve that effect, but like Ebert says it hasn't been done as well as the greatest yet and when it does it's not because of the gameplay but because of the words/images/sounds that are already present in other media. It may be possible to encode complex and deeply meaningful messages into gameplay itself, but I don't think it has happened yet.
He goes on:
"video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
I interpret this as saying that games are too long. The ratio of time spent to great art experienced is too low compared to other things out there to be enjoyed. Games may be fun, which makes up for the lower art density for most of us, but apparently not Ebert.
I think you can follow this thought further- how can one really hold up a game, or part of a game, as an example of art when the barrier to experiencing that art is so high? There is some correlation between difficulty in reading books and playing games- there's a certain amount of work required to experience them fully unlike passive works like film that propels itself forward whether the viewer is engaged in it or not. Very difficult books, with complex use of language invented and only used by the author are hard to read, analogous to hard games. Books and movies have built-in cheating methods- you can flip ahead a few pages, or even to the end of the books and fast-forward a movie.
Video games are problematic to use as references. If I were to write a paper citing the nth mission of some game, there is no way for someone to go experience that level without playing the entire game to that point or investing time in finding cheat codes, or getting someone to give them a saved game for that point. There needs to be a uniform way of experiencing any part of any game without having played any of it before hand.
How do I 'quote' a game? Screenshots and videos don't really do it, because the gameplay is removed- there needs to be a way to generate a fair use demo of any part of a game and distribute it along with another work making use of that 'quote'.
There's a renaissance for text and images on the i
This is just like when Burger King and Safeway canceled their aid after learning that food was being distributed for free to New Orleans residents in the wake of the disaster.
Seriously though, the city probably has the right to just take the building from BellSouth anyway- if you can kick people off their land to build a mall or a stadium no one is going to raise an eyebrow if you eminent domain a building to help maintain law and order in the city. It is just better PR if everyone is happy about it.
This is pretty bad, although the reputation of the New Orleans police was tarnished a bit in the disaster. Can you imagine the shitstorm if the building was going to go to firefighters and BellSouth reneged on that?
It's one of those contradictions of our business system- in a capitalist system resources are allocated through the market which kind of aggregates and handles the whims and desires and needs of the consumers and producers involved effectively, but then you have centrally planning as operated in say the Soviet Union where a rigid hierarchy decides how to move resources around, although there are still external market forces from competing capitalist societies, other central planned but independent countries, and what not. The thing is, companies in capitalist system internally operate with central planning, which is fine on a certain scale but the larger they get the larger the amount of resources in the nominally capitalist system are being allocated in non-capitalist ways, and I think everyone suffers from a less effective market as a result.
1. No leveling. What? Did Captain Kirk constantly go on away missions to zap thousands of space rats with his phaser just so he could travel to a more dangerous planet? Hell no!
Mostly agree there. I'd say put in a very short training portion of the game, over in a few hours, where one zips through their career prior to being a captain of a ship in a few hours. You'd have to follow orders, perform a few menial tasks (and some exciting ones too), but then you get your own ship. Maybe not the finest ship in the fleet, but something. After that, there could be ranks gained, but perhaps there could be a system where there is no treadmill, but a way for everyone to have interesting and unique path to higher rank, not just 'I patrolled the frontier for 20 hours zapping pirates and am now awarded an automatic promotion'.
5. Make it so the players crew the ships. Not some NPCs.
I don't really understand the MMO obsession with creating worlds entirely manned by real players. AI sucks, I know, but usually the result of 'live people for everthing' is:
A. A depiction of a society (or an interstellar fleet in this case) where there are no crappy jobs, so the society is not at all realistic. This is usually worse for licenses, because in the movie or book or whatever there were a handful of heroes adventuring in world with a backdrop of more average people doing mundane things- the people that the heroes are trying to saving because they can't save themselves. But then in the online version there are no innocents or average citizens, but teaming hordes of hero characters running around.
B. Players are required to fulfill those crappy job roles. Sucks for obvious reasons.
4. Make it open ended and that you always have the choice of which planet to go to.
Perhaps there's another early phase where your assignment/orders prevent you from leaving a limited set of star systems, but later you gain the ability to have a more open-ended assignment. Maybe there would be crisis points where ships are ordered to defend fronts, attack the borg, or whatever, and disobeying orders would penalize the player somehow (but not too harshly).
Speaking of the borg, I thought their whole thing was a kind of monolithic single-mindedness, not at all what you would get with bunch of online players all wanting to go off in different directions and assimilate who they want to assimilate.
My impression is that Slashdot editors are pushing the Xbox 360 fever to incredible hights. Every time I visit Slashdot, there is a story on the 360.
I mostly agree- though new console releases aren't that common (I don't remember this much pointless coverage of DS or PSP releases). The only effect of increased hype will be to make the system release more likely to be seen as a failure even if it does moderately well, and that perceived failure will later manifest itself as real failure. The hype dries up soon after the system comes out, and fence-sitting slashdot readers no longer see stories about the system every day or every few hours anymore, so they feel more justified in not purchasing one and that indeed it was all just hype.
The key to making this a successful sport that supports lots of professionals is viewers- if you can't fill a stadium or arena or have millions watching on tv then there isn't going to be a lot of money in it. Watching someone sitting in front of a computer doesn't make for a good viewing experience (millions of shitty webcam photos to prove that, even when there is cleavage involved), and the games themselves aren't yet so visually stimulating that watching but not playing is all that worthwhile for extended periods of time.
It will be sort of interesting to watch where this goes, but it's hard to imagine the benefit to the casual gamers from having more professional players out there. At best there will just be a pro-gaming world perhaps living in a separate bubble adjacent to the normal gaming market- there will be mods and maps made specifically for tournament play, or even entire games, where single player and internet play would be afterthoughts or not included at all. At worst the pro gaming would distort or damage the normal games market and the types of games that are released because everything would be oriented to making the big money off of pro gaming.
I was sitting here, pondering a definition of sport that would exclude things like Nascar
You can drink and drive in Nascar?!
If "acting" is what's important, then why are all actresses (even the B-list ones), with a few minor exceptions, ridiculously hot? I mean, is it a coincidence? Something genetic (genes for hotness and acting related)? I'd buy the idea that hotter girls (and guys, it's the same there) are more self-confident, giving them a slight acting boost. But really, it's pretty clear that hot girl actresses don't need to act well in order to be famous.
The short answer is is that there are a lot of attractive people in the world, probably tens of millions, while the number of people on the A-list or B-list is a tiny fraction of that- so you can be selective with regard to acting ability while still maintaining attractiveness, because attractive people are usually the people who pursue movie careers because they or their friends and family see they are just as attractive as people on tv and are then pushed in that direction.
I think you'll find that a lot of the A and B-list actors are attractive, but attractive in unique and interesting ways- they have facial features, speaking styles, facial and bodily mannerisms that set them apart- the first is more genetics (surgery usually produces bland and generic 'good looks') but the last two I attribute to 'acting' (even if the actor is just being themselves). For audiences it's the difference between wanting to spend two hours watching a hot but annoying bimbo versus a girl who looks good but also seems like a real person they can connect with emotionally.
> An actor's performance is cruical to the success of the movie.
I hate to break this to you, but no it isn't. It's based off of who has more charisma on the screen, and in most cases, who has the hottest babes.
This is total bullshit. I have mod points to mod you down with, but since that doesn't do anything for the other modders I'll respond and hope they read this and mod you down for me.
Movies are all about people, or things anthropomorphized to be like people. The people have to move around and say things (the actor's performance), and do it decently, otherwise the movie is going to be incredibly boring or stupid. It's important to have at least one or two attractive people in the lead roles, but everyone else you want to look convincing in their roles.
If the movie is entirely filled with fresh-faced pretty 20-somethings it's not going to be a very good movie, because it's probably a movie about partying in Cancun or starring the winners of American Idol- and both of those movies made basically nothing at the box office. Real movies are going have cops with weathered faces, overweight and/or goofy looking comedians, and so on. Audiences connect with actors who have interesting and unique looks a lot better than they connect with a platinum blonde girl with fake tits in a bikini starring in a beer ad. The more generically good-looking an actor is, the better their performance has to be to convince the audience they aren't an arrogant asshole or an annoying bimbo.
> Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun? I suppose if the same game featured a young white inner-city youth roaming the mean streets, or a latino kid, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?
I like the way that you use selective political-correctness to try and accuse them of being racist, yet you completely disregard the fact that they also said man.
I suppose if the same game featured a woman, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?
Both of you are wrong, there's no racism or sexism, the original story was simply following a generalization with an example, not adding qualifications to the generalization. They said not to buy games overly inspired by the setting of GTA rather than the components that make it truly extraordinary (great car driving physics + incredibly detailed seamless world, IMHO). There are a large number of games coming out that involve black gang culture, in part inspired by GTA:SA and also motivated by rap star interest in games, and no doubt a lot of them are critically flawed and not worth playing.
I get annoyed by people using the term 'political correctness' as if we were still living in the 1990s- the term first saw widespread use back then, but if you think about it it is a thing that exists wherever there is politics- there is no specific viewpoint or ideology that defines political correctness, it is decided mostly by the people who wield the most political power at the given moment, or at least the most vocal of them. These days, being politically correct means you have to equate opposing certain policies of a country with opposing the country, its people, institutions, traditions, religions etc. to the point of wanting them destroyed.
Instead of buying one $50 game, buy 5-10 $5-10 games. You know, games that are a year old, on clearance, etc... Sometimes you find a good game that you otherwise would have overlooked.
There are still a lot of games not even worth $5-$10, I've found many times I'll put down a game after only playing a few levels. It's odd, because if I had paid more money I probably would have felt more compelled to give the game a chance and would have put more effort into getting past a difficult section or more willing to put up with minor flaws- I want to get my money's worth.
We went to metacritic, used the advanced search, and printed off a list of the top 25 FPS for Xbox, stopped by Gamestop at lunch and he picked up 3 highly rated games.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this post, where we learn whether a guy just wasted $150 on a load of crap games, or that a particular website is decent for this reviewing and recommending sort of thing.
It's a pretty smart move, I think, and doesn't leave a lot of people (like an entire continent) feel left out.
I wish more companies would take the simultaneous release route for books, movies, and games, and every other product that is typically and annoyingly released one continent/country/whatever at a time. If we truly are going to achieve a globalized economy then companies have to take the attitude of the entire world as one giant market: sell products for the same price everywhere, make them available everywhere (at the same time), and not create artificial barriers to trade like regional encoding, and not coerce the governments or resellers into restricting customers from buying their product from anywhere in the world to be delivered anywhere else.
It introduces a lot more risk to have to supply and advertise to one huge market, and have to deal with remaining 'natural' barriers to trade like differing languages. But truly global companies should be able to handle it if they want to compete in that arena.
What the industry really needs is a way to keep development costs down
I suggest that games be made shorter. Quality over quantity, let online play, mod-makers, or cheap unlockables extend the life of the game beyond 5-10 hours, or sell expansion packs/sequels only after making a profit from the earlier game. That assumes more levels and art and so on actually costs a lot more- if a game is half as long but only 10% cheaper to produce then that's a poor tradeoff.
The hard part will be keeping it fresh and lively, and not stagnating into a series of endless sequels with better graphics.
I haven't ever heard a convincing argument as to why sequels with better graphics can't be fresh and lively. Over the life of a console it's true games don't innovate that much, but I think there are many franchises that go in new directions after a console update, and also experiment with games in the same franchise but with different gameplay styles.