You pose that as a rhetorical question, but it seems to me it's a legitimate one. I take it that your answer is "no"?
I would say that Picard's argumentation was that Data could not really be distinguished from a living, sentient being, so that the ruling should be in his favor. His vision was that if the judge would allow Data to be "enslaved" because he was ruled not to be sentient, the judge should be very clear about where the line is drawn, because that would open the door to the enslaving of all kinds of races.
The supposedly rethorical question is not legitimate (in this episode), because the existence of a soul is not brought forth as an issue by either Picard or Riker. It should not play a role in the judge's ruling. The answer should be "no" with or without Data having a soul.
And if you ask my personal opinion: I do not believe in the concept of a soul as a separate entity that occupies our bodies and can exist after death. So I say that I have no soul. And still I do not wish to be dismantled. The fact that I admit that I have no soul is no reason to dismantle me. The fact that I can express the genuine wish not to be dismantled should secure my rights in that respect.
But if I was just an entity in a Chinese Room experiment, with no other desires and wishes than just to translate scribbles to different scribbles, it seems to me that I am not sentient. So, if there comes a day that I am reduced to that, please dismantle me.
The Zork trilogy had some puzzles that even some very smart people I knew just couldn't crack.
I solved the Zork trilogy in the early eighties completely unassisted.
It took me two years.
Two f*cking years!
And for all you unattached geeks out there: the solution to the last puzzle that had me stuck for over six months (where to hide the ring in the museum) came to me when doozing after two hours of 'activity' with my girlfriend. So, you see, sex is actually good for something.
Actually, in general ALL theses are published. It is just a very small print, and copies are available from the author, usually for free or for a nominal fee. If there is anything an academic wants, it is to get noticed. So, almost ALL theses are found on the web somewhere in PDF format. The only reason why someone would not do that, is when they want to turn their thesis into a book.
This was the first really good TNG episode. Unfortunately, it was spoiled somewhat by the final speech of the judge, in which she started to raise the question whether or not Data has a soul. A soul is a metaphysical construct that has nothing to do with the facts that were presented by either Picard or Riker, and does not belong in a court of law. The judge finally awarded victory to Data because she felt she was unable to decide whether or not he has a soul, so she gave him the benefit of the doubt. But think of it: if it could be proven that Data actually has no soul, does that mean he would have been handed over to Starfleet and be dismantled? Urgh.
Re:how do i play sys shock or sys shock ii on xp?
on
The Words of Shodan
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· Score: 1
As for the original System Shock: I have tried for many hours but could not get it to work. There is a thread on it at the TTLG forums, but for me the tips there did not work. It is a pity, because System Shock is among my favorite games of all time, and I would love to play it again, this time in 640x480 mode.
You want to play modern board games online? Go to BrettSpielWelt. Free, online playing of over a hundred boardgames. Not only Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but also Caylus, Citadels, Medina, Power Grid, Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, Ra, San Juan, and many, many, many more. The language to use is English at most of the site. Warning: there are many very strong players there, so prepare for a humiliating defeat at your favorite game.
You should realise, of course, that the calculation Newsweek uses takes into account ALL the faculties. It might be that a university scores high when you take all faculties into account, but looking at the list is no way to select the best university for AI research.
Note, for instance, that in their scoring they mainly take into account the amount of citations. That is a pretty skewing number because (a) in some fields scientists publish much more (and thus get citated much more, because they cite in their own field) than in other sciences (e.g., medical science publishes a shitload of papers, while computer science is much more limited in this respect) (b) not all universities cover all fields (a small university with an excellent track record in one field will not make the list), (c) US scientists have a much easier time to get published (and thus get cited) than scientists from other countries, which is not a guarantee that they actually do better science, (d) they probably did not take into account all the publications which are not in English, i.e., virtually the whole of Asia was ignored, and (e) Science and Nature get cited a lot, but accept only publications from a fairly limited point of view - try to get a hard AI paper in one of these, and you will most definitely fail.
What I CAN tell you is that in the field of AI research, especially the application of AI in games, the University of Alberta is number one worldwide. That is acknowledged by all the other institutes which do this kind of research (and there are not a lot of those).
This is a good question. The answer is: it depends on what kind of AI you are interested in. Computer chess is played mainly by deep and hard searching, and some good heuristics. When we could not do that very well (say 25 years ago), this was still an AI problem. Now we hardly call chess programs AI, and research is focussing more on other games which are still hard for computers, such as GO.
With poker, due to the incomplete information and non-determinism, searching will get you nowhere. Indeed, poker is a game of chance. In principle (and with unlimited funds and no limits), you can play an average game by exactly calculating the odds and betting accordingly. Two problems with that. The first is that in this case from your betting strategy basically the value of your hand can be deduced. The second is that this will never let you win, you play at most an average game.
The best human players win poker games because they can predict and manipulate their opponents. Sure, they also need luck, and a good player will not win with bad hands. However, the top players nearly always play a pretty good game, because they (a) manage to manipulate their opponents, and (b) manage to avoid being manipulated themselves. BOTH of these are hard for a computer.
As we see it now, you need "human" qualities to be a good poker player. So, if we manage to build a strong poker program that can defeat even the best human players, we have discovered a way to make a computer more human - in a limited field, of course.
While being a European, I have some experience with Master degrees at US universities. As I see it, in the US the MSc degree is really the beginning of a PhD path. If you do not intend to get a PhD at some point, there is no reason to bother about an MSc. In Europe, however, an MSc degree is considered more a rounding off of your academic career. A BSc means you are only half-finished.
Any Americans out there who wish to correct me, please go ahead.
Maybe his statements are not correct from a legal point of view, but they do illustrate a practical issue which will surely rear its head with a patent-wiki.
Usually, a company applies for patents on all kinds of novelties for their new products. Often these novelties are not really patent-worthy: they are based on a novelty in an obscure older product (prior art), or they are quite obvious to anyone with the right skills. Still, the company applies for the patents because they might get some of them granted (since the USPTO cannot do a good job), which gives them leverage in court should the need arise.
And what if they do not get a patent? Well, no problems there, they will probably still be the first who brings a certain novelty to the market because the competition does not know what they are working on. Unfortunately, that will change with a patent-wiki: the competition will have a pretty good idea what will be in the new product, and will make sure that they do the same thing - especially if they feel the novelty is not patent-worthy, which they will vehemently argue on the wiki.
So the patent-wiki will probably stem the flood of patent applications for practical reasons.
I once wrote interest-calculation software for a bank. This was new software to replace their old stuff. Naturally, I stored the values in cents, not guilders/dollars/euros, to avoid rounding errors (which really have a big effect in interest calculations).
When I delivered my software, they compared my output to the output their old software produced. There were small differences. They asked me where these came from, and I traced them back to rounding errors in their old software. I showed them this by example, thinking that they would be happy that their new software did not have this problem.
Their response? "The new software should produce exactly the same numbers as the old software." "But the old numbers are WRONG!" "That does not matter, the new software should produce exactly the same numbers as the old software."
It is really hell to make good new software error-compatible with faulty old garbage.
Drawing too many "bad" tiles will indeed make any player lose. However, drawing the "good" tiles does not ensure a win. The game is maybe 20% luck, the rest is skill. Which, in settings with casual gamers, is actually nice, since everybody has a chance of winning (even if the more tactical players win most games).
Yes, many users are just stupid and will automatically click "yes" on things, but at that point it's their own damn fault.
No, it is not.
If a developer make a system for a specific type of user, he should make sure that that type of user will actually be able to use the system in the right way. And not by training the user to behave in a certain way, but by designing the system so that he will use it the right way naturally.
Microsoft has posed Windows as the system that every user, no matter how computer illiterate, can use easily and safely. So it is the responsibility of Microsoft to ensure that Windows complies with that.
I know, in the US it is standard practice to paste warning labels on everything so that legal responsibilities are avoided.
I also know that it is impossible to create a safe-and-easy-to-use OS in today's environment where everything is connected to everything and criminals and frustrated schoolboys are eager to turn PCs into zombies. The simple truth is that computers are no longer for everybody. But that message won't be told by any software developer who gets his money from Joe Sixpack.
What this means is that everytime an action is undertaken that actually requires administrative rights, Vista will pop up a dialogue (a la security warnings in Internet Explorer) and make sure you really wanted to do that. If you think this would be annoying (and would just train users to click yes) let me tell you that it was actually worse in Beta1.
On my dad's computer, every time a window pops up in XP that asks for a confirmation my dad calls me and asks whether or not he should confirm. If my dad ever installs Vista, I am going to set his account to administrator rights by default, to avoid all those extra popups. Oh wait, no, I will just tell my dad not to install Vista. But what are all those other home tech supporters going to do?
I played it on the PC. For a while. It crashed on me about every ten minutes. That would not have stopped me, were it not for the fact that the game uses savepoints instead of the good old "save anywhere, anytime". So, for me the game was quite unplayable.
What I did see of it, led to this review: "Nice looks. Nice characters. Fun environment. Scene changes far too slow. Combat much too hard. Crash. Crash. Crash."
I mean, seriously, Kira had more venom for the Federation in the first season than she had for the Dominion after they took over DS9.
Kira is probably the best-developed character in the DS9 universe. The fact is that during the first season she had left the resistance very recently, and she still had a resistance attitude, with lots of distrust and cropped-up anger. However, when the Dominion took over, she had developed a Federation-attitude, and therefore accepted the new situation quite well. And it took her quite a few episodes before she realised that that particular Federation attitude was not the best way to act in her new surroundings, so she went back to her resistance roots.
That said, I agree with you that the "story arc" of later DS9 seasons sucked. However, some of the real gems among the DS9 episodes occurred in the later seasons. The first two seasons were not very good, but seasons three to five were absolutely wonderful. And, of course, season six has "In the Pale Moonlight", probably the second-best Star Trek episode ever (just behind DS9's "The Visitor").
Oh well, Looking Glass you will be missed, I bought your games, pity nobody else did.
I bought three copies of Ultima Underworld, two copies of Ultima Underworld II, four copies of System Shock, one copy of Terra Nova, one copy of Thief, two copies of Thief Gold, and one copy of Thief II.
Yes, they went down, but I did my part to prevent it.
I am currently playing Psychonauts, and I have precisely this problem. I love the look of the game, I love the characters, I enjoy the humor, I think I will like the story -- but I get stuck on the action sequences because I simply am unable to do those. I am not a twitch gamer. Especially with a mouse and keyboard these sequences are much too hard for me. So this game will probably get deleted out of frustration. Which is a really sad conclusion.
Ah well, I went through the whole document and almost all of the charts are senseless. I mean, who uses a line graph when there is no sequence? Who uses a spider-web graph when there IS a sequence (without loopback)? I can't say I read all of the texts, but I read quite a few, and my general impression is "much ado about nothing". The sad thing is that the few wise words which are undoubtly in there (which wiki hasn't got those?) are embedded in a big pile of self-promotion and people trying to sound important without saying anything substantive. This attitude is typical for the IGDA and the main reason why I never joined up.
I am on page 20 of 116, and already my eyes are watering from the spelling and style errors, the triviality, the blah-blah, the self-importance, the silly distinctions, and the senseless charts. I mean, who the hell shows a half-page pie-chart of the hours spent on gaming per week, with the whole pie representing 24 hours? That is just meaningless.
From TFA, Gilbert describing what he would want to do with a game: You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling. So what you can do there is take those puzzles and that storytelling that really appeal to people on a certain level, but you can fuse it with the kind of action and mindless play mixed in.
While I pretty much like what Gilbert says in TFA, here is going completely in the wrong direction. He does not seem to realise that the people who want stories and adventure-style puzzles are turned off by mindless action sequences. Mixing up different styles is a surefire way to make a game fail miserably. Try to please all, and you wll please none.
Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: KOTOR 1; OK, these are pretty much story-based.
Oblivion. Even less story than Morrowind, which was pretty light on story anyway.
Neverwinter Nights. Story? "Collect the four X's, then kill the evil wizard"-style. That is a typical example of what is mentioned as "not really a story" in TFA.
Diablo 2. Story? HAH!
Day of the Tentacle. Good story, but over a decade old.
There are still story-based games out there, but there are very few. LucasArts, which was great in this respect, basically stopped producing these games. BioWare sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails with stories. And a REALLY GOOD story I have seen for the last time in Planescape Torment and Shadows of Amn.
Just this morning, I read two stories on the second page of my (Dutch) newspaper.
The first described a woman who was director of a collective that was supposed to arrange fake marriages for immigrants who wanted to get Dutch citizenship. She asked for 20,000 euros for each arrangement. Of course, once she had the money, she didn't bother contacting the potential immigrant again. She made at least 80 million euros this way. She was fined the "huge sum" of 3.3 million euros. A nice profit, I would say.
The second described some crooks who phoned US dentists and offered them investments in stocks of fine wines. They got at least 100 million euros this way. After collecting the money, they ran to South America. The wines, of course, did not exist. They are currently being prosecuted - in their absence. No doubt they will get big prison sentences - which they will have to serve if they ever set foot in the US or in Europe again. Not that they have any reason to return.
What struck from these stories is how incredibly easy it is to get a shitload of money when you have no scruples. You don't need special skills. Just a phone and a bit of creativity in establishing your "good name" is sufficient. I mean, these US dentists sent all their pension money to The Netherlands because they got a phone call. Of course, these are the same people that believe that Nigerians are willing to share several millions of US dollars with them just for lending them a bank account number.
Many (otherwise quite smart) people are obnoxiously stupid when confronted with a crook that promises them gold mountains. In my case, the main reason that I do not exploit that is that I am quite happy with my current sappy salary, and I just have too much (misplaced?) empathy with my fellow men. But this stupidity makes me quite mad anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
You pose that as a rhetorical question, but it seems to me it's a legitimate one. I take it that your answer is "no"?
I would say that Picard's argumentation was that Data could not really be distinguished from a living, sentient being, so that the ruling should be in his favor. His vision was that if the judge would allow Data to be "enslaved" because he was ruled not to be sentient, the judge should be very clear about where the line is drawn, because that would open the door to the enslaving of all kinds of races.
The supposedly rethorical question is not legitimate (in this episode), because the existence of a soul is not brought forth as an issue by either Picard or Riker. It should not play a role in the judge's ruling. The answer should be "no" with or without Data having a soul.
And if you ask my personal opinion: I do not believe in the concept of a soul as a separate entity that occupies our bodies and can exist after death. So I say that I have no soul. And still I do not wish to be dismantled. The fact that I admit that I have no soul is no reason to dismantle me. The fact that I can express the genuine wish not to be dismantled should secure my rights in that respect.
But if I was just an entity in a Chinese Room experiment, with no other desires and wishes than just to translate scribbles to different scribbles, it seems to me that I am not sentient. So, if there comes a day that I am reduced to that, please dismantle me.
The Zork trilogy had some puzzles that even some very smart people I knew just couldn't crack.
I solved the Zork trilogy in the early eighties completely unassisted.
It took me two years.
Two f*cking years!
And for all you unattached geeks out there: the solution to the last puzzle that had me stuck for over six months (where to hide the ring in the museum) came to me when doozing after two hours of 'activity' with my girlfriend. So, you see, sex is actually good for something.
Actually, in general ALL theses are published. It is just a very small print, and copies are available from the author, usually for free or for a nominal fee. If there is anything an academic wants, it is to get noticed. So, almost ALL theses are found on the web somewhere in PDF format. The only reason why someone would not do that, is when they want to turn their thesis into a book.
This was the first really good TNG episode. Unfortunately, it was spoiled somewhat by the final speech of the judge, in which she started to raise the question whether or not Data has a soul. A soul is a metaphysical construct that has nothing to do with the facts that were presented by either Picard or Riker, and does not belong in a court of law. The judge finally awarded victory to Data because she felt she was unable to decide whether or not he has a soul, so she gave him the benefit of the doubt. But think of it: if it could be proven that Data actually has no soul, does that mean he would have been handed over to Starfleet and be dismantled? Urgh.
For System Shock 2, see this thread on the TTLG forums.
As for the original System Shock: I have tried for many hours but could not get it to work. There is a thread on it at the TTLG forums, but for me the tips there did not work. It is a pity, because System Shock is among my favorite games of all time, and I would love to play it again, this time in 640x480 mode.
You want to play modern board games online? Go to BrettSpielWelt. Free, online playing of over a hundred boardgames. Not only Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but also Caylus, Citadels, Medina, Power Grid, Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, Ra, San Juan, and many, many, many more. The language to use is English at most of the site. Warning: there are many very strong players there, so prepare for a humiliating defeat at your favorite game.
You should realise, of course, that the calculation Newsweek uses takes into account ALL the faculties. It might be that a university scores high when you take all faculties into account, but looking at the list is no way to select the best university for AI research.
Note, for instance, that in their scoring they mainly take into account the amount of citations. That is a pretty skewing number because (a) in some fields scientists publish much more (and thus get citated much more, because they cite in their own field) than in other sciences (e.g., medical science publishes a shitload of papers, while computer science is much more limited in this respect) (b) not all universities cover all fields (a small university with an excellent track record in one field will not make the list), (c) US scientists have a much easier time to get published (and thus get cited) than scientists from other countries, which is not a guarantee that they actually do better science, (d) they probably did not take into account all the publications which are not in English, i.e., virtually the whole of Asia was ignored, and (e) Science and Nature get cited a lot, but accept only publications from a fairly limited point of view - try to get a hard AI paper in one of these, and you will most definitely fail.
What I CAN tell you is that in the field of AI research, especially the application of AI in games, the University of Alberta is number one worldwide. That is acknowledged by all the other institutes which do this kind of research (and there are not a lot of those).
This is a good question. The answer is: it depends on what kind of AI you are interested in. Computer chess is played mainly by deep and hard searching, and some good heuristics. When we could not do that very well (say 25 years ago), this was still an AI problem. Now we hardly call chess programs AI, and research is focussing more on other games which are still hard for computers, such as GO.
With poker, due to the incomplete information and non-determinism, searching will get you nowhere. Indeed, poker is a game of chance. In principle (and with unlimited funds and no limits), you can play an average game by exactly calculating the odds and betting accordingly. Two problems with that. The first is that in this case from your betting strategy basically the value of your hand can be deduced. The second is that this will never let you win, you play at most an average game.
The best human players win poker games because they can predict and manipulate their opponents. Sure, they also need luck, and a good player will not win with bad hands. However, the top players nearly always play a pretty good game, because they (a) manage to manipulate their opponents, and (b) manage to avoid being manipulated themselves. BOTH of these are hard for a computer.
As we see it now, you need "human" qualities to be a good poker player. So, if we manage to build a strong poker program that can defeat even the best human players, we have discovered a way to make a computer more human - in a limited field, of course.
And that is what "strong" AI is all about.
While being a European, I have some experience with Master degrees at US universities. As I see it, in the US the MSc degree is really the beginning of a PhD path. If you do not intend to get a PhD at some point, there is no reason to bother about an MSc. In Europe, however, an MSc degree is considered more a rounding off of your academic career. A BSc means you are only half-finished.
Any Americans out there who wish to correct me, please go ahead.
Maybe his statements are not correct from a legal point of view, but they do illustrate a practical issue which will surely rear its head with a patent-wiki.
Usually, a company applies for patents on all kinds of novelties for their new products. Often these novelties are not really patent-worthy: they are based on a novelty in an obscure older product (prior art), or they are quite obvious to anyone with the right skills. Still, the company applies for the patents because they might get some of them granted (since the USPTO cannot do a good job), which gives them leverage in court should the need arise.
And what if they do not get a patent? Well, no problems there, they will probably still be the first who brings a certain novelty to the market because the competition does not know what they are working on. Unfortunately, that will change with a patent-wiki: the competition will have a pretty good idea what will be in the new product, and will make sure that they do the same thing - especially if they feel the novelty is not patent-worthy, which they will vehemently argue on the wiki.
So the patent-wiki will probably stem the flood of patent applications for practical reasons.
Which, I suppose, is a good thing.
I once wrote interest-calculation software for a bank. This was new software to replace their old stuff. Naturally, I stored the values in cents, not guilders/dollars/euros, to avoid rounding errors (which really have a big effect in interest calculations).
When I delivered my software, they compared my output to the output their old software produced. There were small differences. They asked me where these came from, and I traced them back to rounding errors in their old software. I showed them this by example, thinking that they would be happy that their new software did not have this problem.
Their response? "The new software should produce exactly the same numbers as the old software." "But the old numbers are WRONG!" "That does not matter, the new software should produce exactly the same numbers as the old software."
It is really hell to make good new software error-compatible with faulty old garbage.
Drawing too many "bad" tiles will indeed make any player lose. However, drawing the "good" tiles does not ensure a win. The game is maybe 20% luck, the rest is skill. Which, in settings with casual gamers, is actually nice, since everybody has a chance of winning (even if the more tactical players win most games).
Yes, many users are just stupid and will automatically click "yes" on things, but at that point it's their own damn fault.
No, it is not.
If a developer make a system for a specific type of user, he should make sure that that type of user will actually be able to use the system in the right way. And not by training the user to behave in a certain way, but by designing the system so that he will use it the right way naturally.
Microsoft has posed Windows as the system that every user, no matter how computer illiterate, can use easily and safely. So it is the responsibility of Microsoft to ensure that Windows complies with that.
I know, in the US it is standard practice to paste warning labels on everything so that legal responsibilities are avoided.
I also know that it is impossible to create a safe-and-easy-to-use OS in today's environment where everything is connected to everything and criminals and frustrated schoolboys are eager to turn PCs into zombies. The simple truth is that computers are no longer for everybody. But that message won't be told by any software developer who gets his money from Joe Sixpack.
What this means is that everytime an action is undertaken that actually requires administrative rights, Vista will pop up a dialogue (a la security warnings in Internet Explorer) and make sure you really wanted to do that. If you think this would be annoying (and would just train users to click yes) let me tell you that it was actually worse in Beta1.
On my dad's computer, every time a window pops up in XP that asks for a confirmation my dad calls me and asks whether or not he should confirm. If my dad ever installs Vista, I am going to set his account to administrator rights by default, to avoid all those extra popups. Oh wait, no, I will just tell my dad not to install Vista. But what are all those other home tech supporters going to do?
I played it on the PC. For a while. It crashed on me about every ten minutes. That would not have stopped me, were it not for the fact that the game uses savepoints instead of the good old "save anywhere, anytime". So, for me the game was quite unplayable.
What I did see of it, led to this review: "Nice looks. Nice characters. Fun environment. Scene changes far too slow. Combat much too hard. Crash. Crash. Crash."
I mean, seriously, Kira had more venom for the Federation in the first season than she had for the Dominion after they took over DS9.
Kira is probably the best-developed character in the DS9 universe. The fact is that during the first season she had left the resistance very recently, and she still had a resistance attitude, with lots of distrust and cropped-up anger. However, when the Dominion took over, she had developed a Federation-attitude, and therefore accepted the new situation quite well. And it took her quite a few episodes before she realised that that particular Federation attitude was not the best way to act in her new surroundings, so she went back to her resistance roots.
That said, I agree with you that the "story arc" of later DS9 seasons sucked. However, some of the real gems among the DS9 episodes occurred in the later seasons. The first two seasons were not very good, but seasons three to five were absolutely wonderful. And, of course, season six has "In the Pale Moonlight", probably the second-best Star Trek episode ever (just behind DS9's "The Visitor").
Hey, I have a Jenna Jameson doll which I intend to trade up to the real thing.
And play Beethoven as background music.
Oh well, Looking Glass you will be missed, I bought your games, pity nobody else did.
I bought three copies of Ultima Underworld, two copies of Ultima Underworld II, four copies of System Shock, one copy of Terra Nova, one copy of Thief, two copies of Thief Gold, and one copy of Thief II.
Yes, they went down, but I did my part to prevent it.
I am currently playing Psychonauts, and I have precisely this problem. I love the look of the game, I love the characters, I enjoy the humor, I think I will like the story -- but I get stuck on the action sequences because I simply am unable to do those. I am not a twitch gamer. Especially with a mouse and keyboard these sequences are much too hard for me. So this game will probably get deleted out of frustration. Which is a really sad conclusion.
Ah well, I went through the whole document and almost all of the charts are senseless. I mean, who uses a line graph when there is no sequence? Who uses a spider-web graph when there IS a sequence (without loopback)? I can't say I read all of the texts, but I read quite a few, and my general impression is "much ado about nothing". The sad thing is that the few wise words which are undoubtly in there (which wiki hasn't got those?) are embedded in a big pile of self-promotion and people trying to sound important without saying anything substantive. This attitude is typical for the IGDA and the main reason why I never joined up.
I am on page 20 of 116, and already my eyes are watering from the spelling and style errors, the triviality, the blah-blah, the self-importance, the silly distinctions, and the senseless charts. I mean, who the hell shows a half-page pie-chart of the hours spent on gaming per week, with the whole pie representing 24 hours? That is just meaningless.
From TFA, Gilbert describing what he would want to do with a game: You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling. So what you can do there is take those puzzles and that storytelling that really appeal to people on a certain level, but you can fuse it with the kind of action and mindless play mixed in.
While I pretty much like what Gilbert says in TFA, here is going completely in the wrong direction. He does not seem to realise that the people who want stories and adventure-style puzzles are turned off by mindless action sequences. Mixing up different styles is a surefire way to make a game fail miserably. Try to please all, and you wll please none.
Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: KOTOR 1; OK, these are pretty much story-based.
Oblivion. Even less story than Morrowind, which was pretty light on story anyway.
Neverwinter Nights. Story? "Collect the four X's, then kill the evil wizard"-style. That is a typical example of what is mentioned as "not really a story" in TFA.
Diablo 2. Story? HAH!
Day of the Tentacle. Good story, but over a decade old.
There are still story-based games out there, but there are very few. LucasArts, which was great in this respect, basically stopped producing these games. BioWare sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails with stories. And a REALLY GOOD story I have seen for the last time in Planescape Torment and Shadows of Amn.
Its remarkably easy to scam people
Unfortunately, this is all too true.
Just this morning, I read two stories on the second page of my (Dutch) newspaper.
The first described a woman who was director of a collective that was supposed to arrange fake marriages for immigrants who wanted to get Dutch citizenship. She asked for 20,000 euros for each arrangement. Of course, once she had the money, she didn't bother contacting the potential immigrant again. She made at least 80 million euros this way. She was fined the "huge sum" of 3.3 million euros. A nice profit, I would say.
The second described some crooks who phoned US dentists and offered them investments in stocks of fine wines. They got at least 100 million euros this way. After collecting the money, they ran to South America. The wines, of course, did not exist. They are currently being prosecuted - in their absence. No doubt they will get big prison sentences - which they will have to serve if they ever set foot in the US or in Europe again. Not that they have any reason to return.
What struck from these stories is how incredibly easy it is to get a shitload of money when you have no scruples. You don't need special skills. Just a phone and a bit of creativity in establishing your "good name" is sufficient. I mean, these US dentists sent all their pension money to The Netherlands because they got a phone call. Of course, these are the same people that believe that Nigerians are willing to share several millions of US dollars with them just for lending them a bank account number.
Many (otherwise quite smart) people are obnoxiously stupid when confronted with a crook that promises them gold mountains. In my case, the main reason that I do not exploit that is that I am quite happy with my current sappy salary, and I just have too much (misplaced?) empathy with my fellow men. But this stupidity makes me quite mad anyway.