Creating an MMOG is a lot more difficult than creating a single-player game. If what you say could be successful, it would have happened already for single-player games. But it hasn't. For several reasons.
1) Games are diverse. While people want application software all to look and work alike, they want all games to look and work different. A cookie-cutter game won't sell.
2) Game designers know it is a huge mistake to try to put too many different things in a game. You should not burden a racing game with puzzles, role playing aspects, RTS elements and first-person shooter stuff. Different types of games work for different people, and if you try to be everything at once you'll please no-one.
3) The required support would be devastating for any company.
Now, you might find some middleware for graphics and even for basic gaming functions, but not a toolbox that requires the game designer to just have a good idea. Any game worth anything will require a dedicated team of good technicians to build it.
Lessons learned from all the past attempts to create the ultimate program design tool/language. Remember Visual Basic? ADA? Clipper?
I have celebrated my fortieth birtday. I still play games. Lack of time prevents me from doing it as much as I like to (and certainly not as much as I used to), but I play about three different games each year. Last year, those games were Thief 2, Morrowind and Deus Ex (the original).
I love to play games. But I am selective. Games I don't enjoy are a bloody waste of my time. Fortunately I played so many different games that I now know what I like and can recognize quality. And quality does not mean "the coolest graphics". It means "the best gameplay". Therefore I don't mind playing older games. As long as they are fun.
It's the same with music. When you're a teen, you listen to all the crap that's pooped into the airwaves over the radio. Then your taste matures. You may get interested in classical music, or at least you realize there are only a few good bands out there.
It's the same with books. As a teen you read lots of SF (if you are a geeky type), but when you mature you realize most of it is just a waste of good trees.
Remember, most of it. Not all of it.
When you acquire a mature taste, you don't need to spend so much time on something to get your fix. But your love need not diminish.
The funny thing is that, since movies are taped 24 fps, movies on tv are often simply transmitting the 24 fps as 25 fps. A movie with a length of 1:40 will therefore only last 1:36 on tv. Of course, commercials stretch this to 2:30...
Since I haven't watched any tv in the last 10 years, I don't know if this still happens with the rise of digital technology, but I have checked this a couple of times when I still spent 2 hours per night on the couch in front of the boob tube.
What the article doesn't discuss is that Microsoft takes serious losses on every XBox sold. Even at its original release, they needed to sell four games with every XBox to break even. With the price cuts, this has gone up to about a dozen games per XBox. And not at discounts, but at their new-release prices.
Of course, it is not Microsoft's plan to lose money. Their plan is, as always, to become so big a player in their chosen market that all the other will be marginalized. Then, and only then, their price setting will rise to a point that they make profits. Serious profits.
Did the XBox live up to my expectations? I expected Microsoft to do better in pushing out their two main competitors, but they did not succeed in that. And I hope they won't succeed in the future, because then the gaming community is going to suffer.
Personally I couldn't care less about console gaming, but any power to Microsoft on the gaming market is, in my opinion, A Bad Thing. We have only to look at games that are developed for both PC and XBox at the same time to realize that PC games are tarnished by the XBox factor.
Morrowind, for instance, is a great game, but the interface on the PC could have been a lot more user-friendly. Come on, hundreds of spells available and only one that can be activated at any time, requiring lots of menu switching and scrolling to select another one? Can you say "Button-pushers"?
I was very recently at a game developers conference where several people from the industry claimed that at the moment the only games that really make money are the MMOGs. All others, at best, break even.
They also claimed that the market for MMOGs basically was saturated, that 5 years ago there were 50 MMOGs around, and there still are. True, they are different ones and they do change, but there does not seem to be a market for more than 50.
I personally believe that new independents should go into mobile games: that market is still pretty much open, although it is closing fast.
As a scientist I will jealously guard my research and results up to practical applications as my own property. I have patents and will defend those if necessary.
I am a scientist. I have novel ideas. I research them and then I publish them. In my view, that is the function of science: furthering humanity by increasing its knowledge base.
Two weeks ago I was at an international conference where I presented a new idea. This conference was visited not only by scientists but also by people from industry. The first question I got asked after giving my talk was: "Have you patented this idea?"
No, I have not patented any of my ideas an I am not going to. Why not? Because patenting takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and is probably useless because I will never be able to hold it up in court if I don't have the money to hire expensive lawyers. Bothering with patents only keeps me from the job I love: doing research. I publish my ideas as fast as I can and hope that other people get inspired by them and continue the work.
Currently I am bothered by the fact that companies can read my ideas and then attempt to patent them. The patent office will probably not notice that I published those ideas before, and therefore will grant the patents. And I will not be able to do anything about it in court, because, as I said, I don't have the money to hire lawyers.
I am even more bothered that companies can stop me from publishing my research because they can claim I am infringing on one of their patents. Whether that is true or not doesn't matter, I don't have the money to defend myself. I guess I'm lucky I'm not living in the USA, but the forces that drive Europe in the direction of USA-style patenting are strong.
Patenting is the death of research. Especially a scientist should acknowledge that.
I have software on download.com. Last year they sent me an email that specified how I could get better rankings for money. Since my software is under the GPL and I give it away for free, I told I was not going to pay them to promote my software. But I suspect commercial developers take them up on this. So rankings on download.com are not to be trusted anyway.
Actually, I thought it very funny that the angel wields a sword that is restricted to Lawful Good alignment. While your own alignment in the game, being the Nameless One, shifts according to your actions, the angel, while performing outrageously evil acts, remains fixed at Lawful Good. The design of Planescape Torment is so good that I assume this is intentional, but it still is weird. I mean, Fall-From-Grace did fall from grace and was no longer evil. Perhaps this is because for Grace it was a conscious decision, while the angel, not completely sound-of-mind, feels forced to act the way he does.
And talking about villains, it seems to me PS:T does not really have any villains, contrary to almost any other game. Even the final "boss" is not an opponent - only if the Nameless One chooses to regard him a villain, he becomes one.
I fully agree with your endorsement of PS:T, by the way. Hopefully this underrated game will be picked up by more people after your post.
Engineer has an idea. Engineer implements the idea. Engineer is happy. Engineer's peers are happy. Non-engineer picks it up and uses it to get a lot of money, tarnishing the original idea in the process. All engineers are outraged.
The article states that engineers should be more aware of politics. That's bull.
An engineer that takes politics into account will accomplish nothing, because he is battling windmills. Trying to protect your inventions against corporate meddling is impossible. The problem is that those who invent simply do not have the power to enforce the "right" use of their invention. Being aware that that power lies with people who are mainly interested in squeezing money out of ideas will only make you despressed.
And there are reasons that this is the way it is. The two main ones are (1) the innovators are the grease-monkeys of the corporate and political worlds; and (2) the fact that innovations can generate money is the catalyst that allows engineers to innovate.
These two reasons lead to three possible solutions for the described situation.
Solution 1: More engineers become politicians, thereby gaining influence on law-making and getting the ability to bend the laws to idealistic purposes. Unfortunately, engineers (just as scientists and artists) do not want to be politicians. It's a frustrating job, especially if you are idealistic. If someone is only interested in money and power, it can be a fulfilling job, but I don't expect idealistic law-making from such a person.
Solution 2: Engineers refuse to work for corporations and develop their ideas for themselves. Unfortunately, this will mean that they do not have the funding to work on their interesting ideas, and even if they succeed, a big corporation will notice them and run away with them.
Solution 3: Engineers do not create inventions that can be or need to be exploited for money. Translated: Engineers won't innovate at all.
Conclusion: All three solutions won't work in practice. Since that is a depressing thought, perhaps you better not read this comment.
I am not happy with new Palm OS versions arriving regularly. I developed several apps for the Palm, when it was on OS 2. Lots of people still use them. Then OS 3 and 4 arrived, and gave no problems. Then OS 5.0 arrived, and suddenly my apps broke, and took quite a bit of work to fix. Then OS 5.3 arrived, and again my apps broke. I haven't found the time yet to update them (yes, I released them as Open Source, but you know, only once I found someone willing to spend some time on them, out of millions of users).
When you write a new Palm app now, you have a choice: either develop it for the latest OS version and lose many users, or try to implement a cross-platform version and spend enormous amounts of time testing it on every possible configuration (if you can afford them - the emulators only help up to a certain point). Really, for me the fun has gone out of developing for the Palm OS.
Once, Palm had a philosophy that for handhelds simpler is better. Unfortunately, they have not been able to keep this up. Probably good for their bottom line, but they lost one advocate in me.
I will buy them when Lucas has finished all three trilogies, and all nine movies are bundled together in the Ultimate Death Star Box, including both the classic and the extended editions, at least three special feature DVDs, and with and without Jar Jar replaced by a pink furry rabbit.
I thought Microsoft had argued in many court cases that removing anything from Windows would break it completely so it wouldn't work anymore? So how will they go about crippling their flagship?
Scoble's idea is that you will add metadata to your files. Can you imagine? You have literally tens of thousands of files you created (photos, documents, etc.) on your hard drive and you are going to add metadata to all of them? Does he really think people are going to do that? If they would be willing to do that, they would just rename those photo files from "DSC00001.JPG" to "MyWedding00001.JPG".
Judiging from the interview, the "innovative" Longhorn seems to allow you to add metadata in a slightly user-friendly way. But virtually nobody will use it, except maybe to mark a few important files which you have stored in a special place anyway.
So what would be a better solution then? My idea is that metadata should be added automatically. For instance, a human will recognize most wedding photos for what they are. Getting a computer to recognize this is not trivial, but lots of research is currently invested in this. Already computers can easily recognize general categories ("groups of people", "nature", "animal", "portrait"). My guess is that it is already possible to implement a system that you can train to let the computer recognize your particular brand of photos.
I don't expect Microsoft to try to go into this way of innovation. They will probably wait until an entrepeneur develops it and then copy it or buy them out.
I don't know exactly where I read this, but the budget for the production of an average porn movie is in the range of tens of thousands of dollars. Actor salaries vary, a male gets something like a thousand dollars per movie, and a female gets between two and ten thousand dollars (so actually, this business discriminates against males).
For female actors the porn business might sound a fairly good deal (the better ones do several movies per month), but since they usually are in it only for a few years, it won't make them rich. What most of them do, therefore, is being an escort girl on the side. Since they get a lot of men fantasizing over them because of their movies, this can make them quite rich.
After answering your question, getting back on topic: since a porn movie is so cheap to produce, file-sharing doesn't hurt that much: few sales are needed to make a profit. In the music business, things are different, of course. The production costs of a single new album are in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.
Slashdot Mirror
...I don't think the gaming public is qualified to choose the best game of all time.
Hookers only suck when you pay extra.
I know the average geek can't appreciate fashion. And rightly so. But we have to deal with it.
inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer
I skimmed the paper, searched for Lego, and as it turns out he's really not uses Legos to power his system. It's merely built out of Legos.
...And I thought the printer was made out of chocolate.
What disappointments!
Puzzle Pirates.
1) Games are diverse. While people want application software all to look and work alike, they want all games to look and work different. A cookie-cutter game won't sell.
2) Game designers know it is a huge mistake to try to put too many different things in a game. You should not burden a racing game with puzzles, role playing aspects, RTS elements and first-person shooter stuff. Different types of games work for different people, and if you try to be everything at once you'll please no-one.
3) The required support would be devastating for any company.
Now, you might find some middleware for graphics and even for basic gaming functions, but not a toolbox that requires the game designer to just have a good idea. Any game worth anything will require a dedicated team of good technicians to build it.
Lessons learned from all the past attempts to create the ultimate program design tool/language. Remember Visual Basic? ADA? Clipper?
The lawyers don't agree.
I love to play games. But I am selective. Games I don't enjoy are a bloody waste of my time. Fortunately I played so many different games that I now know what I like and can recognize quality. And quality does not mean "the coolest graphics". It means "the best gameplay". Therefore I don't mind playing older games. As long as they are fun.
It's the same with music. When you're a teen, you listen to all the crap that's pooped into the airwaves over the radio. Then your taste matures. You may get interested in classical music, or at least you realize there are only a few good bands out there.
It's the same with books. As a teen you read lots of SF (if you are a geeky type), but when you mature you realize most of it is just a waste of good trees.
Remember, most of it. Not all of it.
When you acquire a mature taste, you don't need to spend so much time on something to get your fix. But your love need not diminish.
The funny thing is that, since movies are taped 24 fps, movies on tv are often simply transmitting the 24 fps as 25 fps. A movie with a length of 1:40 will therefore only last 1:36 on tv. Of course, commercials stretch this to 2:30...
Since I haven't watched any tv in the last 10 years, I don't know if this still happens with the rise of digital technology, but I have checked this a couple of times when I still spent 2 hours per night on the couch in front of the boob tube.
Of course, it is not Microsoft's plan to lose money. Their plan is, as always, to become so big a player in their chosen market that all the other will be marginalized. Then, and only then, their price setting will rise to a point that they make profits. Serious profits.
Did the XBox live up to my expectations? I expected Microsoft to do better in pushing out their two main competitors, but they did not succeed in that. And I hope they won't succeed in the future, because then the gaming community is going to suffer.
Personally I couldn't care less about console gaming, but any power to Microsoft on the gaming market is, in my opinion, A Bad Thing. We have only to look at games that are developed for both PC and XBox at the same time to realize that PC games are tarnished by the XBox factor.
Morrowind, for instance, is a great game, but the interface on the PC could have been a lot more user-friendly. Come on, hundreds of spells available and only one that can be activated at any time, requiring lots of menu switching and scrolling to select another one? Can you say "Button-pushers"?
I thought the most famous cliche was the lone troll in a 10x10 room guarding a chest.
They also claimed that the market for MMOGs basically was saturated, that 5 years ago there were 50 MMOGs around, and there still are. True, they are different ones and they do change, but there does not seem to be a market for more than 50.
I personally believe that new independents should go into mobile games: that market is still pretty much open, although it is closing fast.
I am a scientist. I have novel ideas. I research them and then I publish them. In my view, that is the function of science: furthering humanity by increasing its knowledge base.
Two weeks ago I was at an international conference where I presented a new idea. This conference was visited not only by scientists but also by people from industry. The first question I got asked after giving my talk was: "Have you patented this idea?"
No, I have not patented any of my ideas an I am not going to. Why not? Because patenting takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and is probably useless because I will never be able to hold it up in court if I don't have the money to hire expensive lawyers. Bothering with patents only keeps me from the job I love: doing research. I publish my ideas as fast as I can and hope that other people get inspired by them and continue the work.
Currently I am bothered by the fact that companies can read my ideas and then attempt to patent them. The patent office will probably not notice that I published those ideas before, and therefore will grant the patents. And I will not be able to do anything about it in court, because, as I said, I don't have the money to hire lawyers.
I am even more bothered that companies can stop me from publishing my research because they can claim I am infringing on one of their patents. Whether that is true or not doesn't matter, I don't have the money to defend myself. I guess I'm lucky I'm not living in the USA, but the forces that drive Europe in the direction of USA-style patenting are strong.
Patenting is the death of research. Especially a scientist should acknowledge that.
I have software on download.com. Last year they sent me an email that specified how I could get better rankings for money. Since my software is under the GPL and I give it away for free, I told I was not going to pay them to promote my software. But I suspect commercial developers take them up on this. So rankings on download.com are not to be trusted anyway.
Sounds like this would have an irresistable attraction on Scrooge McDuck.
And talking about villains, it seems to me PS:T does not really have any villains, contrary to almost any other game. Even the final "boss" is not an opponent - only if the Nameless One chooses to regard him a villain, he becomes one.
I fully agree with your endorsement of PS:T, by the way. Hopefully this underrated game will be picked up by more people after your post.
I assume they will have a big show with a live presentation from the Dead Alewives (mp3).
Microsoft Lawyer #2: "Can we patent it?"
MSL1: "No, it's in the public domain, or something."
MSL2: "Why does that mean we can't patent it?"
MSL1: "Really, we can't. It would backfire. Even the patent office wouldn't accept it."
MSL2: "So what does it do?"
MSL1: "I don't understand it completely, but I gather you can use it to define your own extensible file format."
MSL2: "Come again?"
MSL1: "You can put anything you want in a file and you distinguish between file items with something called 'tags'. And you can define your own tags."
MSL2: "Anything you want?"
MSL1: "Yes."
MSL2: "Even program code?"
MSL1: "Yes, anything."
MSL2: "Then we'll patent that!"
MSL1: "What?"
MSL2: "Don't you see? We are not going to patent using those 'tags' thingies for anything, we patent using them for program code!"
MSL1: "That's so ridiculous it might just work!"
Engineer has an idea. Engineer implements the idea. Engineer is happy. Engineer's peers are happy. Non-engineer picks it up and uses it to get a lot of money, tarnishing the original idea in the process. All engineers are outraged.
The article states that engineers should be more aware of politics. That's bull.
An engineer that takes politics into account will accomplish nothing, because he is battling windmills. Trying to protect your inventions against corporate meddling is impossible. The problem is that those who invent simply do not have the power to enforce the "right" use of their invention. Being aware that that power lies with people who are mainly interested in squeezing money out of ideas will only make you despressed.
And there are reasons that this is the way it is. The two main ones are (1) the innovators are the grease-monkeys of the corporate and political worlds; and (2) the fact that innovations can generate money is the catalyst that allows engineers to innovate.
These two reasons lead to three possible solutions for the described situation.
Solution 1: More engineers become politicians, thereby gaining influence on law-making and getting the ability to bend the laws to idealistic purposes. Unfortunately, engineers (just as scientists and artists) do not want to be politicians. It's a frustrating job, especially if you are idealistic. If someone is only interested in money and power, it can be a fulfilling job, but I don't expect idealistic law-making from such a person.
Solution 2: Engineers refuse to work for corporations and develop their ideas for themselves. Unfortunately, this will mean that they do not have the funding to work on their interesting ideas, and even if they succeed, a big corporation will notice them and run away with them.
Solution 3: Engineers do not create inventions that can be or need to be exploited for money. Translated: Engineers won't innovate at all.
Conclusion: All three solutions won't work in practice. Since that is a depressing thought, perhaps you better not read this comment.
Too late.
When you write a new Palm app now, you have a choice: either develop it for the latest OS version and lose many users, or try to implement a cross-platform version and spend enormous amounts of time testing it on every possible configuration (if you can afford them - the emulators only help up to a certain point). Really, for me the fun has gone out of developing for the Palm OS.
Once, Palm had a philosophy that for handhelds simpler is better. Unfortunately, they have not been able to keep this up. Probably good for their bottom line, but they lost one advocate in me.
I will buy them when Lucas has finished all three trilogies, and all nine movies are bundled together in the Ultimate Death Star Box, including both the classic and the extended editions, at least three special feature DVDs, and with and without Jar Jar replaced by a pink furry rabbit.
I thought Microsoft had argued in many court cases that removing anything from Windows would break it completely so it wouldn't work anymore? So how will they go about crippling their flagship?
Judiging from the interview, the "innovative" Longhorn seems to allow you to add metadata in a slightly user-friendly way. But virtually nobody will use it, except maybe to mark a few important files which you have stored in a special place anyway.
So what would be a better solution then? My idea is that metadata should be added automatically. For instance, a human will recognize most wedding photos for what they are. Getting a computer to recognize this is not trivial, but lots of research is currently invested in this. Already computers can easily recognize general categories ("groups of people", "nature", "animal", "portrait"). My guess is that it is already possible to implement a system that you can train to let the computer recognize your particular brand of photos.
I don't expect Microsoft to try to go into this way of innovation. They will probably wait until an entrepeneur develops it and then copy it or buy them out.
...Although I doubt Jenna Jameson will stay in bed for less than ten grand.
For female actors the porn business might sound a fairly good deal (the better ones do several movies per month), but since they usually are in it only for a few years, it won't make them rich. What most of them do, therefore, is being an escort girl on the side. Since they get a lot of men fantasizing over them because of their movies, this can make them quite rich.
After answering your question, getting back on topic: since a porn movie is so cheap to produce, file-sharing doesn't hurt that much: few sales are needed to make a profit. In the music business, things are different, of course. The production costs of a single new album are in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.