The other issue older gamers will face is the ever increasing difficulty of games.
It seems that many older games made up for technical limitations on content by being very difficult. Donkey Kong for Atari 2600 is hard, because it has to be. Otherwise it wouldn't provide more than five minutes of entertainment. (One could reasonably debate whether it provides much more than that as it is, but at least it's still a good challenge.) Modern games are, in my opinion, on average less difficult because they don't need the difficulty to compensate for lack of content.
Note: difficulty is not the same as time required to beat the game. WoW can take six months or so to get to level 60, but doesn't really require much skill. Many 8-bit nintendo games, on the other hand, can be beaten in one sitting but require far better reflexes.
I just picked up populous for super nintendo at a garage sale. I had played it on genesis a few times about a decade or so ago, and it is still quite as much fun as I remembered.
I like the idea that the people you "control" are mostly autonomous - there isn't the same degree of micromanagement as, say, Command and Conquer or Warcraft; though, reshaping the land and recruiting knights can be a bit tedious.
I could imagine populous being remade as a mmorpg; player characters could be the people, and the gods could be controlled by computers. The bandwidth requirements of mutable, shared terrain could be quite high, though.
Actually, the 9250 is the fasted fully supported ATI card under Linux.
This is anecdotal, but my experience (as of a couple months ago) is that the ATI 9250 SE doesn't work doesn't work properly with the open source driver. It renders, but appears not to be double-buffering. The screen flashes in a very ugly manner and I get to see frames of partially-rendered geometry. If I remember correctly, I got similar behavior with a radeon 7000. Currently, I'm using a cheap Nvidia card with the binary drivers (which seem to work ok this time around; the previous release would hang the machine if I tried to run any of several of the xscreensaver modules). This is with a 64-bit dual-core processor; 32-bit may work just fine.
Exactly! If someone could make a MMORPG that the average person could play a couple of hours a night and feel like they got enough but not feel lame for taking 2 years to get a level 60 character, then they would make a ton of money.
For awhile I played Legend of the Green Dragon, a web-based mud-type game. It only allows you to fight so many monsters per day, so its pretty hard to play for more than half an hour or so at a time. I think that is a good idea that could be applied to MMORPGs.
If Blizzard set up a server that limited all players to an average of two hours per day, or five hours max and reduced the XP required to level by half, would you play on that server? I would.
I picked one of those up at a garage sale recently; I suspect its probably a decade old or so, and will probably still work a decade hence if I don't bother to replace it with something smaller and faster. It currently shares the living room with a record player, an Atari 2600, a mechanical mantle clock, and a number of other more modern and less interesting devices.
Anything that isn't specifically enumerated for Congress to govern/make laws for is considered a right of the State or the Individual.
That sounds like a well-reasoned objection, though I am not an expert in this area.
The DMCA and all IP laws show that you need to use government force to support inefficient and unprofitable businesses. Without government force, these businesses would be much more competitive, and new markets and profitable sectors would arise out of the creation of content. Unfortunately, the average consumer, taxpayer and voter doesn't see the freedom that real freedom would bring us -- instead they think we need more force to battle the problems that previous use of force created.
I don't know that abolition of IP laws would necessarily be good for the average person. They exist so that people have an incentive to produce new intellectual property. If you abolish copyrights and patents, you'll need to introduce new incentives to create. This could be through government funding; perhaps people could copy things freely, then the original artists/inventors could be compensated based on the popularity of what they create. This would, however, be very difficult to implement; and from what you've said so far, you don't strike me as the type who would approve of a big-government solution (though a lot of basic research is already government funded, so in that respect it wouldn't be much of a change).
My position (largely influenced by Lawrence Lessig) is that copyright and patents are useful, but are over-used. They should benefit content creators as well as consumers, and the latter have long been overlooked. Patents are too easily granted, and copyrights take way too long to expire.
I also think (though I haven't entirely convinced myself that this is a good idea) that perhaps intellectual property laws should only apply to commercial distribution - in other words, people sharing files for free on the Internet should be exempt from copyright, and open source projects should be exempt from patent intfringement. Non-for-profit "piracy" is, after all, the most difficult to prevent.
My biggest objection to the DMCA is that it creates new crimes when it would be better (or, at least, make more sense) to instead enforce the laws that already exist (sort of like: "Jaywalking is against the law, but people keep jaywalking. Let's make using sandals to jaywalk a crime as well, because lots of jaywalkers wear sandals and we want to discourage jaywalking.").
Nice to see some people still know their poetry.:-)
Actually, I don't. I just happen to have recently been reading the (science fiction) Hyperion books by Dan Simmons (not to be confused with an epic poem by Keats of the same name), in which Keats (or, actually, a reconstruction of Keats meant to be similar to the original historical Keats) plays a significant role.
I believe that phrase likely originated with the poet John Keats:
He died on February 23, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was followed, and thus he was buried under a tomb stone reading, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Here is a representative example of what I was talking about. 14 Miyazaki films on 4 dvds, region free for $20? Something tells me that's not legit, even if the box looks believable. The seller has over 30,000 transactions, and some random sampling of recent transactions would lead me to believe that this guy doesn't sell anything but bootlegs (from what I understand, region free discs with more than 4 half-hour episodes on a disc are almost always bootlegs -- someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that), and he's been selling things for over a year. I don't know if it would be hard to catch the seller and convict him of a crime, but ebay could easily shut down his account if they received complaints. This seems rather public and blatant, not some shop in Chinatown with a hidden back room.
I agree that fansubbing is a good example of how "piracy" can be a good thing for all involved. Bootlegging of licensed anime, on the other hand, is a real problem. I went looking for Haibane Renmei and various Miyazaki films on ebay the other day and was somewhat surprised to find that the majority of anime on ebay appears to be bootlegs. American companies like to whine about the Chinese pirating their work (perhaps for good reason), but not much has been said about Americans buying Chinese bootlegs of Japanese shows and movies. It seems like American authorities shouldn't turn a blind eye to piracy of foreign work if they want our "intellectual property" to be respected in foreign countries. Maybe the problem is that, according to American arrogance, only American IP is worth anything. If other countries take similar attitudes, is it any surprise that "piracy" is rampant? Perhaps we should remove the plank from our own eye before removing the mote from our neighbor's.
They'll just lose the tape if it shows something bad.
That's kind of the point, but you've got it backwards. If everyone has a camera, they can't be censored by any one organization. (The truly paranoid might upload video continuously and wirelessly to a nearby hidden storage device, so the camera can be confiscated without losing data.)
The police are public servants. Not only should it be legal to videotape them, it should be encouraged as part of citizen oversight!
Quite true. I have long suspected that the single most effective defense against most abuses of power is a camera (at least in civilized places where public opinion matters). Without video footage, no one will believe the abuses really happened.
Ubiquitous surveilance is often seen as a tool of big brother, but it can also be a tool against oppression as well. Imagine a society in which many people wear a webcam attached to an ipod-like device with a ring buffer storing everything the wearer sees. Then imagine you are a corrupt police officer who likes to intimidate and/or abuse certain people. Would it give you pause if you knew your actions were quite likely to show up on the news the next day?
I am curious if the developers have done anything to avoid suffering the same fate as bnetd, which the courts found to have violated the DMCA and the EULA. Blizzard's main complaint appears to have been that bnetd did not verify CD keys. Does the same issue exist here?
Perhaps they could trade stability for weight and install a flywheel acting as a gyroscope to increase stability. Would that be practical, or would a flywheel need to be too heavy before it contributed significantly to stability?
The best thing to do to a keyboard to increase keying speed is to make the backspace much more difficult to use.
I disagree. Perhaps mistakes make typing much slower because the backspace is already far too difficult to reach? And perhaps the typist may decide to write something else after having typed it? For awhile, I had a keyboard set up with semicolon and backspace swapped, and I liked the arangement much better, even when coding C, which requires a semicolon at the end of most lines. Perhaps you think me a horrible typist if such an arrangement is an improvement (and maybe you'd be right), but realistically, much of what a person types will need to be erased shortly thereafter anyways, not because it was mistyped but because the typist changed his/her mind. Keyboards should accomodate the way most users use them in real life, not maximum speed for copying text. We have OCR software for that.
Now i realize this isn't exactly what you were looking for, Trees can be cut down and planted or whatnot. But it's the same idea. If your Corporation has a starbase to mine a rare metal from a moon that nobody can get anywhere else, you have a lot of power over the local ecosystem.
A realistically functioning closed economy (as opposed to faucet/drain in which bad guys drop loot that eventually gets used up and/or sold back to NPCs) isn't quite the same thing as a realistically functioning closed ecology, though they ought to share some traits: conservation of matter (iron can be made into a sword, or it can rust back into raw iron, but there is always a fixed amount of iron in the world) and it can be affected by the players (making new items reduces their price; chopping down a tree drives away birds that would nest in it). I suspect that a closed economy is a first step towards building a closed ecology. If the economy is dependent on the ecology, then one could introduce realistic tactics into a game, like conquering a neighboring kingdom by burning its fields and causing a famine. (A somewhat underhanded trick, but plausible.)
Eve online sounds interesting, though I prefer old-technology rural settings for purely aesthetic reasons. How well does the economy work? Can players crash the economy by hoarding vital resources, or is that self-correcting (all the other players attack the hoarder)? Are there problems with inflation or hoarding of currency?
If players can't kill off species or destabilize the system, it isn't much of a realistic one, imo. After all, isn't that what people have been doing since the stone age?
Well, people have been able to affect their local environment for a long time, but it's only recently that humans have been capable of affecting the environment globally in any significant way. Sure, it may have been possible for humans a thousand years ago to kill off the last of some species that was already on the verge of extinction, but they couldn't cut down every single tree in the whole world (and that would be hard for us to do now, short of using nuclear weapons). Similarly, it shouldn't be possible for some griefer to cut down every single tree in the virtual world just to see what happens. However, it should be possible (and part of the strategy of the game) to affect the local environment - the goal (or at least one possible goal) of the game could be to create a pocket of civilization in a vast wilderness.
On the other hand, a virtual ecology that is globally brittle may be an interesting game world as well, but only if the players don't mind the possibility of the permanent death of not just their character, but the whole world.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that many older games made up for technical limitations on content by being very difficult. Donkey Kong for Atari 2600 is hard, because it has to be. Otherwise it wouldn't provide more than five minutes of entertainment. (One could reasonably debate whether it provides much more than that as it is, but at least it's still a good challenge.) Modern games are, in my opinion, on average less difficult because they don't need the difficulty to compensate for lack of content.
Note: difficulty is not the same as time required to beat the game. WoW can take six months or so to get to level 60, but doesn't really require much skill. Many 8-bit nintendo games, on the other hand, can be beaten in one sitting but require far better reflexes.
I just picked up populous for super nintendo at a garage sale. I had played it on genesis a few times about a decade or so ago, and it is still quite as much fun as I remembered.
I like the idea that the people you "control" are mostly autonomous - there isn't the same degree of micromanagement as, say, Command and Conquer or Warcraft; though, reshaping the land and recruiting knights can be a bit tedious.
I could imagine populous being remade as a mmorpg; player characters could be the people, and the gods could be controlled by computers. The bandwidth requirements of mutable, shared terrain could be quite high, though.
If Blizzard set up a server that limited all players to an average of two hours per day, or five hours max and reduced the XP required to level by half, would you play on that server? I would.
Maybe next they'll be able to explain this...
I picked one of those up at a garage sale recently; I suspect its probably a decade old or so, and will probably still work a decade hence if I don't bother to replace it with something smaller and faster. It currently shares the living room with a record player, an Atari 2600, a mechanical mantle clock, and a number of other more modern and less interesting devices.
That may very well be, I'm not really familiar with that poem (it was only by coincidence that I knew of the Keats quote).
My position (largely influenced by Lawrence Lessig) is that copyright and patents are useful, but are over-used. They should benefit content creators as well as consumers, and the latter have long been overlooked. Patents are too easily granted, and copyrights take way too long to expire.
I also think (though I haven't entirely convinced myself that this is a good idea) that perhaps intellectual property laws should only apply to commercial distribution - in other words, people sharing files for free on the Internet should be exempt from copyright, and open source projects should be exempt from patent intfringement. Non-for-profit "piracy" is, after all, the most difficult to prevent.
My biggest objection to the DMCA is that it creates new crimes when it would be better (or, at least, make more sense) to instead enforce the laws that already exist (sort of like: "Jaywalking is against the law, but people keep jaywalking. Let's make using sandals to jaywalk a crime as well, because lots of jaywalkers wear sandals and we want to discourage jaywalking.").
I likewise find it somewhat odd that two people modded me funny. To each his own, I guess.
Here is a representative example of what I was talking about. 14 Miyazaki films on 4 dvds, region free for $20? Something tells me that's not legit, even if the box looks believable. The seller has over 30,000 transactions, and some random sampling of recent transactions would lead me to believe that this guy doesn't sell anything but bootlegs (from what I understand, region free discs with more than 4 half-hour episodes on a disc are almost always bootlegs -- someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that), and he's been selling things for over a year. I don't know if it would be hard to catch the seller and convict him of a crime, but ebay could easily shut down his account if they received complaints. This seems rather public and blatant, not some shop in Chinatown with a hidden back room.
I agree that fansubbing is a good example of how "piracy" can be a good thing for all involved. Bootlegging of licensed anime, on the other hand, is a real problem. I went looking for Haibane Renmei and various Miyazaki films on ebay the other day and was somewhat surprised to find that the majority of anime on ebay appears to be bootlegs. American companies like to whine about the Chinese pirating their work (perhaps for good reason), but not much has been said about Americans buying Chinese bootlegs of Japanese shows and movies. It seems like American authorities shouldn't turn a blind eye to piracy of foreign work if they want our "intellectual property" to be respected in foreign countries. Maybe the problem is that, according to American arrogance, only American IP is worth anything. If other countries take similar attitudes, is it any surprise that "piracy" is rampant? Perhaps we should remove the plank from our own eye before removing the mote from our neighbor's.
Coincidentally, casual gaming is the topic of today's strip at real life comics.
Interesting. There's an article on sousveillance on wikipedia.
I actually have read that, but it was so long ago (I was in middle school at the time) I don't remember much.
Quite true. I have long suspected that the single most effective defense against most abuses of power is a camera (at least in civilized places where public opinion matters). Without video footage, no one will believe the abuses really happened.
Ubiquitous surveilance is often seen as a tool of big brother, but it can also be a tool against oppression as well. Imagine a society in which many people wear a webcam attached to an ipod-like device with a ring buffer storing everything the wearer sees. Then imagine you are a corrupt police officer who likes to intimidate and/or abuse certain people. Would it give you pause if you knew your actions were quite likely to show up on the news the next day?
I am curious if the developers have done anything to avoid suffering the same fate as bnetd, which the courts found to have violated the DMCA and the EULA. Blizzard's main complaint appears to have been that bnetd did not verify CD keys. Does the same issue exist here?
Perhaps they could trade stability for weight and install a flywheel acting as a gyroscope to increase stability. Would that be practical, or would a flywheel need to be too heavy before it contributed significantly to stability?
They're close to skin color, so unfortunately it isn't terribly obvious. This isn't that kind of anime. Sheesh.
FAQ
I disagree. Perhaps mistakes make typing much slower because the backspace is already far too difficult to reach? And perhaps the typist may decide to write something else after having typed it? For awhile, I had a keyboard set up with semicolon and backspace swapped, and I liked the arangement much better, even when coding C, which requires a semicolon at the end of most lines. Perhaps you think me a horrible typist if such an arrangement is an improvement (and maybe you'd be right), but realistically, much of what a person types will need to be erased shortly thereafter anyways, not because it was mistyped but because the typist changed his/her mind. Keyboards should accomodate the way most users use them in real life, not maximum speed for copying text. We have OCR software for that.
A realistically functioning closed economy (as opposed to faucet/drain in which bad guys drop loot that eventually gets used up and/or sold back to NPCs) isn't quite the same thing as a realistically functioning closed ecology, though they ought to share some traits: conservation of matter (iron can be made into a sword, or it can rust back into raw iron, but there is always a fixed amount of iron in the world) and it can be affected by the players (making new items reduces their price; chopping down a tree drives away birds that would nest in it). I suspect that a closed economy is a first step towards building a closed ecology. If the economy is dependent on the ecology, then one could introduce realistic tactics into a game, like conquering a neighboring kingdom by burning its fields and causing a famine. (A somewhat underhanded trick, but plausible.)
Eve online sounds interesting, though I prefer old-technology rural settings for purely aesthetic reasons. How well does the economy work? Can players crash the economy by hoarding vital resources, or is that self-correcting (all the other players attack the hoarder)? Are there problems with inflation or hoarding of currency?
On the other hand, a virtual ecology that is globally brittle may be an interesting game world as well, but only if the players don't mind the possibility of the permanent death of not just their character, but the whole world.