"Most computer users today are... well idiots who wouldn't know how to install an OS if their life depended on it."
I don't think that's the issue, computer customizability are simply not important for people who just want to surf, email, IM and game. It's worth the price of a license not to have to dick around with drivers and random-errors on install due to unique configuration or strange hardware problem #2122349521 and what have you.
I know I used to be a tech head years ago and would install the os look in the registry, etc, became an adept user but today with a full time job an extra 100 or so bucks on a computer is no big deal just like it is for everyone else.
" For now it seems every new incarnation of the major CPUs (Intel, AMD) is wasting only more power"
I really don't think that's the case, there are plenty of applications that CPU power cannot effectively use just yet, i.e. voice recognition, etc. For the most part computers still leave a lot ot be desired in terms of ease of use without the user having to learn anything in terms of user interface, etc. I've been using dragon naturally speaking and I have to 'train it' to teach it words that it messes up, imagine if it could 'fill in the blanks' by itself.
While it may seem that it is 'wasting more power' there are plenty of applications and new ideas in development that will simply take 10 years or more to develop into something useful that can use all those 'spare' processor cycles. While games and entertainment may seem 'trivial' the truth is they are helping push technology forward. I agree power efficiency is a good goal but it has to be balanced against performance, there are tonnes of projects that need cpu more computational time then is available and I'm glad for one that there are projects like folding@home, etc to use them!
"After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else..."
The truth is most people don't understsand the physics of intelligence, it's hard to understand what 'intelligence is' when the the technology that is 'smarter' then us really only is a suped up extension of the human mind, all technology is essentially a compensation for our mental deficits. If you really look at computers they are 'smarter' (more competent) at doing things we can't do as fast, thats the whole purpose of invention, we invented shovels so you wouldn't have to digg with your hands, and we invented backhoes as suped up versions of the simple 'shovel' for more demanding digging tasks.
Also if Big blue or any other computer can do everything a human can do there still remains one thing... is it just a well programmed manican with no sense of identity? (i.e. patterns of matter and energy just moving around in particular patterns). If you look at anything those super compuers do, and even the not so super computers. Take a first person shooter video game, you can make the computer godlike (exceeding the skill of all the players so that it hits every time). In the real world people do not have the kind of precision that machines do, when I move my arm, I dont' calculate it to avery accurate in my head using math, I just do move it. Where as a computer can move and do things (like machinery, etc) in very precise increments.
To me I think the most interesting questions in AI are just what exactly is the threshold of self-awareness and what kind of 'equipment' that is required to be aware of your own existence. Is biological equipment necessary for consciousness for an artifical AI?
"After playing hours of Tetris, I've found myself almost unwillingly thinking about moves, combos etc... even after I'd moved on."
The truth is it's about learning and/or your brain digesting the information. I know I've had the same thing happen in games you play frequently, your mind gets stuck in 'game playing / solving mode' and takes a little while to get back to normal.
The frustrating thing about raid cards though is that you'd like to make a one time investment, not every decade or so when interface formats change (ISA--> PCI --> PCI-E).
I have an older fast-track RAID-5 card I just got a few years ago, if PCI slots all but disappear on the next socket change/processor or two, then I will be a little annoyed.
"The ISPs never should have promised the amount of bandwidth they're offering, and charging for, if they can't actually deliver it."
You forget ISP's like most businesses will do anything to make a profit, that means lie, cheat and extort their way to profit on the ignorance of society then so be it. The truth is ISP's tightwads, the reason they get away with such crap is because the majority are not tech savvy.
Mr. Carmack has said the later versions of DX (specifically 9) are just as good if not better then OpenGL, OpenGL no longer has anything serious on Direct X. Direct X is no longer the crap it once was.
Here's Johns 2007 Keynote from Quakecon(?) I believe.
"typical human shortsightedness and lack of gratitude"
The truth is too many cops abuse their power, many people that get hired as cops should not have been. Cops where I live with invade your privacy constantly. I remember when I was a out with a girl and geetting down and dirty in the car, and what would you know THE COPS FUCKING SHOW UP, not once, but TWICE, whenever I parked my car in some out of the way privace place they would always show the fuck up and butt their fucking noses in.
They think it is there business to invade peoples privacy especially when you're not on your own property they can be totally fucktards. In some places it IS like living in a police state.
"What we should NOT do is abandon the whole premise of measuring progress just because the tests could be better."
I think by and large schools do not measure "progress" they are doing a really crude form of psychometric testing. When someone is doing math for instance, a persons processing speed and working memory are put under strain, so if there's problems there expecting kids to just 'study harder' while in some sense you will see improvement, you can't make a brain and memory run faster and with less errors.
By and large I believe a lot of the school system is pretty messed up in that it kills a lot of kids natural desire to learn, I don't buy that kids don't like to learn, its just they do not have a good grasp on where one should go to get to 'cool stuff x'. Where cool stuff x could be, the things they think are cool and interesting to do with a career when they are young but schools miss these kids 'windows of opportunity', simply because the school system is so rigid and institutionalized.
The truth is education today is in the dark ages, many advances have been made in psychonmetric testing and while not perfect, I took the WAIS-3 as an adult, and it would have helped a lot if my teachers understood that my processing speed was slower then other students, and that I had memory problems (specficially things would get jumbled in working memory when I went to copy questions down from the textbook). And other things like when doing equations writing the wrong numbers without noticing the error, but effectively doing the equations correctly and understanding the work.
We can make students lives much easier if we individualized their learning to their unique abilities and difficulties... in other words, instead of forcing say me to copy down math questions and expecting me to go at the speed of other students, develop tools and assistance for students who have issues.
The biggest part of school for me was that I never checked my work, it was time consuming. I'd understand what was being taught but come text time my error rates were significant, I'd make lots of stupid mistakes do to memory corruption, and misplaced attention issues.
What I think many kids need is understanding of how their brains work, I'm very certain computer science and information processing theories have a lot to add to understanding of education.
"it was a simple shooter with awesome graphics, no real story or plot to help carry it."
Yeah but exactly where were they going to go from Doom 2? It's not like the doom series was big on story to begin with, and I would have to say that as a gaming experience Doom 3 and its expansion was FAR from bad, Doom 3 had some of the most scary and memorable bosses, I agree the story wasn't very cohesive or convincing but it was hardly bad.
The level design was very good and the art was stellar, the real problem was with not breaking up the constant monotony with interesting revelations, etc.
I love how people love to bag on Doom 3 but ignore Halo and Halo 2, the orignial halo's story... sucked real badly! People just get a boner over master chief and cortana. They ripped off the flood from the countless Aliens movies and also from half life, many of the aliens in Halo near the end looked awfully like the ones Half-life 2.
Doom 3 was a pure action game, it wasn't the best but it was by far a lot better then a lot of stuff out there. They nailed the fear factor pretty good in Doom 3 in my opinion.
"And I agree with you. Sort of. Stealing corporate secrets is only wrong if they are under copyright or you've signed some sort of NDA."
I'd say many NDA's are wrong to begin with. If a company doesn't want people knowing, I can see NDA's for workers, but what if the company is going out of its way to give "sneak peeks" of a product not already finished like in the games industry? I mean sometimes I think businesses are just asking for the impossible, kind of like prohibition where you know you wont be able to enforce it.
"with businesses standing to lose more from customers fleeing than from missed demographic data revenue."
The truth is businesses will never be totally transparent, it will be akin to what wal-mart does, they are so big and widespread they can get away with selling knock-off merchandise simply because it's time consuming to track down every story that is doing it and then bring a lawsuit aginst them, ensuring that only big companies with a vested interest in deterring knock offs will bring the lawsuits.
It's more like companies will "double dip" there will be genuine companies concerned about privacy and then their will be the the weasels who won't really give much of a damn and because of the weasels and the money to be made from smaller nimbler elements, it will still make privacy pretty impossible.
Take for example Wal-marts in store security camera's, I know for a fact they watch people steal small items and then change their policies to prevent theft, for instance in the electronics section people now tie off the bags with plastic and a security sticker so that people dont take small stuff after they've bought a genuine item out of the store. At it's heart though you simply cannot stop mass surveilance when the technology is so good, so well hidden, and/or so small and so hidden that you cannot notice it.
I really REALLY doubt the "big winner" is privacy, as long as there is money to be made from knowing as much as possible companies will find a way.
No one is going to give up personal information thats worth billions of dollars in terms of market research and increasing profits for many industries.
"(I know, it's flamebait, I admit it. Go ahead and mod it down. I'm just feeling disgusted right now and needed to vent after being on the other end of a depressingly similar conversation.)"
The truth of the matter is... religious people breed more then secular people, if you want to stamp out religion you can't do it through converting the already infected. You do it by outbreeding them and investments in education, and then waiting for them to die out.
The truth is if people really care about the state of the worlds religiousness, you should do your part by breeding children who are not indoctrinated. Most children come by way of religion through being born into a religious family and their evolutionary systems are taken advantage of through indoctrination and I'd also venture to say that religion is a successful evolutionary meme whether we like it or not. I'm sure many slashdotters owe their existence to religious meme's, that caused those religious ancestors to stave off depression, etc, and concieve ancestors that led to you. As much as you may complain about creationists and religious people a culture that has had thousands of years of history is not destroyed in a day, religion is effective anti-depressant and breeding meme.
Not to mention the fairly nihilistic universe in which we are born. I know it was meant to be funny, but the truth of the matter is, life is not funny. Millions of people die for no particular reason, life is short, most people will never see the singularity (if we make it to that point assuming its even practically feasible).
"because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. "
I have to say that John is a visionary, I'm glad he's not so popertarian or wrapped in idealogy he cannot see the bigger picture in adding to the spread, understanding and improvement of human knowledge.
You're right but the truth is when a game becomes too easy it becomes boring, so there must be some kind of push-pull with the player or gaming becomes a pointless excercise (no risk, no reward). There is such a thing as too easy and too hard. The thing that differentiates games from movies is PASSIVITY and lack of interactivity (taking part). Many modern games are becoming more passive, and hence skewing towards what a game shouldn't be: Passive. We have movies and other forms of entertainment for those people.
"It has treated the less-skilled player with contempt and derision for far too long."
What the heck are you talking about? There have been many games who've tried to go beyond the hardcore crowd and didn't succeed financially or otherwise. MMORPG's in my opinion are the epitome of the mass market mindset: Computer controlled avatars you simply navigate and press menu buttons, everything else is handled automatically.
"You're an old-time hardcore gamer, so you think of easy games as bad ones."
Wrong again, hardcore is such a vague all-encompassing definition with no real specific meaning. I like games of all types because I like hardocore games doesn't mean I don't like "mass market" games. I am passionate about games, there's a difference between respecting someones enjoyment and wanting to understand enjoyment and fun as passion to create better games for different types of people. I analyze why different people enjoy games and what about them they enjoy, just because you enjoy something doesn't mean you are able to judge the quality of the overall development of gaming as a whole.
"but the days when the industry would pander to the hardcore gamer's every whim are over."
What? Zelda TWP and Halo 3, Final fantasy 12 are 'hardcore', in fact the hardcore base is what fueled gamings growth up to this point, it certainly wasn't the barbarian hordes that got gaming to this point.
"Don't worry, though, I'm sure a few companies will still make games for your little niche."
That "little niche" supported the likes of Civilization, Mario, Sonic, Halo, Half-life, etc, name any of histories greatest games and you will see "hardcore" written on it, and by "hardcore" I don't mean it in the sense of deriding other less experienced, casual gamers, etc, (since hardocre vs casual really is vague), I mean it in the sense of pushing the envelope or refining the quality of game development.
Game mechanics matter, I really truly wonder if Wii, PS3 or Xbox could survive without a hardcore audience (i.e. a market that actually BUYS games), and yes games like Halo are definitely hardcore even though they are percieved to be 'mainstream', the truth is the mechanics are still based off quality game design.
The truth is market economics and developing quality games to not mix well, period. You measure a games success by it's audience size or money it makes, this is of course incorrect way to judge value.
It's based on a MARKET VALUE SYSTEM, i.e. how much money can this item attract. While gaming is a 'business' the many people in the business are not in it just for the money.
An excellent example of the market value system can be seen with bill gates comments here, on why millions of people are allowed to die.
Bill gates said:
"So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system."
As if this statement says ANYTHING about game quality. The Dev team even admitted the SP campaign was pure crap! That right there says quite a lot.
Yes thats right, since I actually own the piece of crap called NWN. It was totally mediocre to anyone who's played RPG's for the last 20 years, so I'd say my opinion has a bit more weight behind it then a D&D fanatic or some newbie gamer with no gaming history under their belt. How one experiences NWN is directly related to the amount of games they have played and what kind of gaming history they have.
I will respect bioware for their valiant attempt in NWN because they really made an attempt at making great tools for the mod community but it ended up making the game itself a mediocre pile of crap and no one with serious gaming acument can dispute this. I really WANTED to like NWN, lots of good things ended up in the game but the gmae really needed another 2 years in development, NWN was like a game who's potential was never truly realized, period.
"I for one sincerely enjoyed the original campaign, it wasn't the *best* I've ever played, but it was very enjoyable for me."
Then you are either:
1) Inexperienced gamer or 2) Have a very low thresh-hold for enjoyment
"I think too many people say the community is what saved NWN."
Give me a break, many people on the forums complained about the utter crappyness of the single player experience compared to their (biowares) previous games like Baldurs gate, BG2, and other infinity engine games not made by them like Torment and Icewind dale. The truth is NWN basically attracted all the really strange D&D fanatics & weirdos who didn't really care much for game quality. The truth is I compare the majority of the people who bought and liked NWN with the likes of people who bought and liked the matrix or 50 cent games, I have the same respect for them as I do say creationists. As hard as that may be to swallow, I know gaming in's and outs I have played nearly every game under the sun and I analyze games to find out what makes them percieved as "good" to different gaming demographics. The truth was the barrier to playing NWN was very low, since it took a page from MMO's with their automatically controlled gaming mechanics (i.e. the user just pushed menu buttons), WoW and NWN have the exact same mindless interface for the drooling hordes, which I can understand from but the content simply could not make up for the borefest of crappy single player content.
And yes the community did a lot to save NWN, most of my enjoyment from NWN came from playing other peoples mod's and the single player and sp campaign was truly horrible. The fact that you had one single character you could truly control in the party which was handled automatically (robot avatar) made for a tenuous and boring game with little for the player to do then sit and drool through the SP campaign.
If you enjoyed NWN over those prior games, I have to say you are among the reasons why gaming is taking a nosedive in quality to serve the mass audience of mediocrity.
"Bioware's internal surveys and statistics always indicated that the singleplayer portion of NWN was far more popular."
Of course but because something is popular doesn't make it good. I'm not the only one that feels that gaming is backsliding into mediocrity.
"Playtesting is not just done for marketing reasons; it's absolutely imperative if you want to make sure the game is as good as it can be."
I would make the argument that actually games are NOT truly targetted FOR *players*, if we are speaking about advancing the art of game design and gameplay. Tonnes of mediocre games rake in a lot of money for many other reasons.
I'd say lots of playtesting now-a-days is geared towards dumbing down and making games easier, less interactive, more passive and more mediocre. One only has to look at modern MMO's and console RPG's to compare the basic battle mechanics in those games with a game like God of War or other RPG's whose battle systems have real-time or more interactive elements.
I've been gaming for a long time and games have been steadily declining towards rigidity (rigid by the books game mechanics with minor tweaks) or mediocrity where game mechanics are thrown out or dumbed down entirely for making it easier to insert eye candy or to make it so easy to "play" all a drooling moron would have to do would be to babysit the robotic avatar.
"Neverwinter Nights was also a franchise that was well received and supported by an active community."
The community was the only thing that saved NWN from total disaster, as a game it *SUCKED* and it sucked hard. I would like to say that bioware was never been truly a consistent top tier developer. Kotor was above average, but bioware is pretty hit and miss, since different dev teams for different games do not all produce equally.
Piracy is a market force, get used to it. Piracy has been around forever, the only thing thats changed is technologies have now have freed music from scarcity. Music is a commodity get over it.
Think of how many people have been screwed over by new technologies, or new sources of cheap labour, from loom workers, to factory workers, to white collar workers, etc. And everyone picks on the "low skilled" labour people and the poor, who usually are anything but stupid, peoples lives are short and history is and progress are not always kind to you in the time and place in which you live.
You sound like a whining idealist, in the real world over 2 billion people live on less then $1 a day, so it's hard to feel sorry about someone who lives in a good country and has a roof over his head, food in his belly and access to enormous opportunities that others don't.
"The argument that's used for mod chips is that purchasers of games should be allowed to make backup copies of them. But I don't consider that the real issue here."
The real issue is that consumers need a bill of rights, if they had a self-funded corporate like entity to protect their interests lots of these attempts at private tyranny would be mitigated.
The first thing is, a government body has to start treating consumers as co-owners and investors of the products they buy (i.e. invest in), this way corporations cannot say they own "exclusively" all intellectual property since consumers are also legitimate financiers (and investors in the IP's success).
This would stop companies from becoming lazy and abusing intellectual property if the public has some co-ownership and can force companies hands to release it to the public domain since they were the investors in said product and were also responsible for it's success.
It has nothing to do with "decent wages", what you see as "pork barrel policies and incompetent politicians" I see as potential masking military and other strategic spending.
It's not *just* about attracting people to work and live there, there are other reasons like: because of Alaska's military-strategic position and resources, any "subsidy", "taken" from the "lower 48 states", certainly makes up for it when you consider the resources it's feeding the American economy. It's more then likely the spending makes up for it for controlling that portion of the landmass.
"But why? It's not like there is nowhere else to live."
It's not *just* about attracting people to work and live there, there are other reasons like: because of Alaska's military-strategic position and resources, any "subsidy" more then likely makes up for it for controlling that portion of the landmass.
"...they are wrapped in a thick mink coat of subsidies."
While this is true, I think the issue is of keeping and attracting workers to a place in the world thats REALLY FUCKING COLD, and not exactly your #1 tourist destination or place to live. This doesn't excuse subsidy or corruption but you have to give people a reason to stay and work there.
"No, the internet isn't a truck. It isn't a series of tubes, either. It's a distributed packet switched network. That's not too hard to say, now is it? "
Not to be pendantic but... I believe the "tubes" phraseoloy is just how he thinks in metaphors for sending and recieving of information, after all you could see a packet switched network metaphorically as a conveyor system, or waterworks system.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most computer users today are... well idiots who wouldn't know how to install an OS if their life depended on it."
I don't think that's the issue, computer customizability are simply not important for people who just want to surf, email, IM and game. It's worth the price of a license not to have to dick around with drivers and random-errors on install due to unique configuration or strange hardware problem #2122349521 and what have you.
I know I used to be a tech head years ago and would install the os look in the registry, etc, became an adept user but today with a full time job an extra 100 or so bucks on a computer is no big deal just like it is for everyone else.
" For now it seems every new incarnation of the major CPUs (Intel, AMD) is wasting only more power"
I really don't think that's the case, there are plenty of applications that CPU power cannot effectively use just yet, i.e. voice recognition, etc. For the most part computers still leave a lot ot be desired in terms of ease of use without the user having to learn anything in terms of user interface, etc. I've been using dragon naturally speaking and I have to 'train it' to teach it words that it messes up, imagine if it could 'fill in the blanks' by itself.
While it may seem that it is 'wasting more power' there are plenty of applications and new ideas in development that will simply take 10 years or more to develop into something useful that can use all those 'spare' processor cycles. While games and entertainment may seem 'trivial' the truth is they are helping push technology forward. I agree power efficiency is a good goal but it has to be balanced against performance, there are tonnes of projects that need cpu more computational time then is available and I'm glad for one that there are projects like folding@home, etc to use them!
"After running through a few unsatisfactory definitions, my conclusion was that people used intelligence to mean whatever could be done better by a human being than anything else..."
The truth is most people don't understsand the physics of intelligence, it's hard to understand what 'intelligence is' when the the technology that is 'smarter' then us really only is a suped up extension of the human mind, all technology is essentially a compensation for our mental deficits. If you really look at computers they are 'smarter' (more competent) at doing things we can't do as fast, thats the whole purpose of invention, we invented shovels so you wouldn't have to digg with your hands, and we invented backhoes as suped up versions of the simple 'shovel' for more demanding digging tasks.
Also if Big blue or any other computer can do everything a human can do there still remains one thing... is it just a well programmed manican with no sense of identity? (i.e. patterns of matter and energy just moving around in particular patterns). If you look at anything those super compuers do, and even the not so super computers. Take a first person shooter video game, you can make the computer godlike (exceeding the skill of all the players so that it hits every time). In the real world people do not have the kind of precision that machines do, when I move my arm, I dont' calculate it to avery accurate in my head using math, I just do move it. Where as a computer can move and do things (like machinery, etc) in very precise increments.
To me I think the most interesting questions in AI are just what exactly is the threshold of self-awareness and what kind of 'equipment' that is required to be aware of your own existence. Is biological equipment necessary for consciousness for an artifical AI?
"After playing hours of Tetris, I've found myself almost unwillingly thinking about moves, combos etc... even after I'd moved on."
The truth is it's about learning and/or your brain digesting the information. I know I've had the same thing happen in games you play frequently, your mind gets stuck in 'game playing / solving mode' and takes a little while to get back to normal.
"Depends on the raid card."
The frustrating thing about raid cards though is that you'd like to make a one time investment, not every decade or so when interface formats change (ISA--> PCI --> PCI-E).
I have an older fast-track RAID-5 card I just got a few years ago, if PCI slots all but disappear on the next socket change/processor or two, then I will be a little annoyed.
"The ISPs never should have promised the amount of bandwidth they're offering, and charging for, if they can't actually deliver it."
You forget ISP's like most businesses will do anything to make a profit, that means lie, cheat and extort their way to profit on the ignorance of society then so be it. The truth is ISP's tightwads, the reason they get away with such crap is because the majority are not tech savvy.
Mr. Carmack has said the later versions of DX (specifically 9) are just as good if not better then OpenGL, OpenGL no longer has anything serious on Direct X. Direct X is no longer the crap it once was.
n _carmack-quakecon-keynote-2007.mp3
Here's Johns 2007 Keynote from Quakecon(?) I believe.
http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Rage/Movies/joh
"typical human shortsightedness and lack of gratitude"
The truth is too many cops abuse their power, many people that get hired as cops should not have been. Cops where I live with invade your privacy constantly. I remember when I was a out with a girl and geetting down and dirty in the car, and what would you know THE COPS FUCKING SHOW UP, not once, but TWICE, whenever I parked my car in some out of the way privace place they would always show the fuck up and butt their fucking noses in.
They think it is there business to invade peoples privacy especially when you're not on your own property they can be totally fucktards. In some places it IS like living in a police state.
"What we should NOT do is abandon the whole premise of measuring progress just because the tests could be better."
I think by and large schools do not measure "progress" they are doing a really crude form of psychometric testing. When someone is doing math for instance, a persons processing speed and working memory are put under strain, so if there's problems there expecting kids to just 'study harder' while in some sense you will see improvement, you can't make a brain and memory run faster and with less errors.
By and large I believe a lot of the school system is pretty messed up in that it kills a lot of kids natural desire to learn, I don't buy that kids don't like to learn, its just they do not have a good grasp on where one should go to get to 'cool stuff x'. Where cool stuff x could be, the things they think are cool and interesting to do with a career when they are young but schools miss these kids 'windows of opportunity', simply because the school system is so rigid and institutionalized.
The truth is education today is in the dark ages, many advances have been made in psychonmetric testing and while not perfect, I took the WAIS-3 as an adult, and it would have helped a lot if my teachers understood that my processing speed was slower then other students, and that I had memory problems (specficially things would get jumbled in working memory when I went to copy questions down from the textbook). And other things like when doing equations writing the wrong numbers without noticing the error, but effectively doing the equations correctly and understanding the work.
We can make students lives much easier if we individualized their learning to their unique abilities and difficulties... in other words, instead of forcing say me to copy down math questions and expecting me to go at the speed of other students, develop tools and assistance for students who have issues.
The biggest part of school for me was that I never checked my work, it was time consuming. I'd understand what was being taught but come text time my error rates were significant, I'd make lots of stupid mistakes do to memory corruption, and misplaced attention issues.
What I think many kids need is understanding of how their brains work, I'm very certain computer science and information processing theories have a lot to add to understanding of education.
"it was a simple shooter with awesome graphics, no real story or plot to help carry it."
Yeah but exactly where were they going to go from Doom 2? It's not like the doom series was big on story to begin with, and I would have to say that as a gaming experience Doom 3 and its expansion was FAR from bad, Doom 3 had some of the most scary and memorable bosses, I agree the story wasn't very cohesive or convincing but it was hardly bad.
The level design was very good and the art was stellar, the real problem was with not breaking up the constant monotony with interesting revelations, etc.
I love how people love to bag on Doom 3 but ignore Halo and Halo 2, the orignial halo's story... sucked real badly! People just get a boner over master chief and cortana. They ripped off the flood from the countless Aliens movies and also from half life, many of the aliens in Halo near the end looked awfully like the ones Half-life 2.
Doom 3 was a pure action game, it wasn't the best but it was by far a lot better then a lot of stuff out there. They nailed the fear factor pretty good in Doom 3 in my opinion.
"And I agree with you. Sort of. Stealing corporate secrets is only wrong if they are under copyright or you've signed some sort of NDA."
I'd say many NDA's are wrong to begin with. If a company doesn't want people knowing, I can see NDA's for workers, but what if the company is going out of its way to give "sneak peeks" of a product not already finished like in the games industry? I mean sometimes I think businesses are just asking for the impossible, kind of like prohibition where you know you wont be able to enforce it.
"with businesses standing to lose more from customers fleeing than from missed demographic data revenue."
The truth is businesses will never be totally transparent, it will be akin to what wal-mart does, they are so big and widespread they can get away with selling knock-off merchandise simply because it's time consuming to track down every story that is doing it and then bring a lawsuit aginst them, ensuring that only big companies with a vested interest in deterring knock offs will bring the lawsuits.
It's more like companies will "double dip" there will be genuine companies concerned about privacy and then their will be the the weasels who won't really give much of a damn and because of the weasels and the money to be made from smaller nimbler elements, it will still make privacy pretty impossible.
Take for example Wal-marts in store security camera's, I know for a fact they watch people steal small items and then change their policies to prevent theft, for instance in the electronics section people now tie off the bags with plastic and a security sticker so that people dont take small stuff after they've bought a genuine item out of the store. At it's heart though you simply cannot stop mass surveilance when the technology is so good, so well hidden, and/or so small and so hidden that you cannot notice it.
I really REALLY doubt the "big winner" is privacy, as long as there is money to be made from knowing as much as possible companies will find a way.
No one is going to give up personal information thats worth billions of dollars in terms of market research and increasing profits for many industries.
"(I know, it's flamebait, I admit it. Go ahead and mod it down. I'm just feeling disgusted right now and needed to vent after being on the other end of a depressingly similar conversation.)"
The truth of the matter is... religious people breed more then secular people, if you want to stamp out religion you can't do it through converting the already infected. You do it by outbreeding them and investments in education, and then waiting for them to die out.
The truth is if people really care about the state of the worlds religiousness, you should do your part by breeding children who are not indoctrinated. Most children come by way of religion through being born into a religious family and their evolutionary systems are taken advantage of through indoctrination and I'd also venture to say that religion is a successful evolutionary meme whether we like it or not. I'm sure many slashdotters owe their existence to religious meme's, that caused those religious ancestors to stave off depression, etc, and concieve ancestors that led to you. As much as you may complain about creationists and religious people a culture that has had thousands of years of history is not destroyed in a day, religion is effective anti-depressant and breeding meme.
Not to mention the fairly nihilistic universe in which we are born. I know it was meant to be funny, but the truth of the matter is, life is not funny. Millions of people die for no particular reason, life is short, most people will never see the singularity (if we make it to that point assuming its even practically feasible).
"because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. "
I have to say that John is a visionary, I'm glad he's not so popertarian or wrapped in idealogy he cannot see the bigger picture in adding to the spread, understanding and improvement of human knowledge.
"There's nothing wrong with easy games."
- gates.html
You're right but the truth is when a game becomes too easy it becomes boring, so there must be some kind of push-pull with the player or gaming becomes a pointless excercise (no risk, no reward). There is such a thing as too easy and too hard. The thing that differentiates games from movies is PASSIVITY and lack of interactivity (taking part). Many modern games are becoming more passive, and hence skewing towards what a game shouldn't be: Passive. We have movies and other forms of entertainment for those people.
"It has treated the less-skilled player with contempt and derision for far too long."
What the heck are you talking about? There have been many games who've tried to go beyond the hardcore crowd and didn't succeed financially or otherwise. MMORPG's in my opinion are the epitome of the mass market mindset: Computer controlled avatars you simply navigate and press menu buttons, everything else is handled automatically.
"You're an old-time hardcore gamer, so you think of easy games as bad ones."
Wrong again, hardcore is such a vague all-encompassing definition with no real specific meaning. I like games of all types because I like hardocore games doesn't mean I don't like "mass market" games. I am passionate about games, there's a difference between respecting someones enjoyment and wanting to understand enjoyment and fun as passion to create better games for different types of people. I analyze why different people enjoy games and what about them they enjoy, just because you enjoy something doesn't mean you are able to judge the quality of the overall development of gaming as a whole.
"but the days when the industry would pander to the hardcore gamer's every whim are over."
What? Zelda TWP and Halo 3, Final fantasy 12 are 'hardcore', in fact the hardcore base is what fueled gamings growth up to this point, it certainly wasn't the barbarian hordes that got gaming to this point.
"Don't worry, though, I'm sure a few companies will still make games for your little niche."
That "little niche" supported the likes of Civilization, Mario, Sonic, Halo, Half-life, etc, name any of histories greatest games and you will see "hardcore" written on it, and by "hardcore" I don't mean it in the sense of deriding other less experienced, casual gamers, etc, (since hardocre vs casual really is vague), I mean it in the sense of pushing the envelope or refining the quality of game development.
Game mechanics matter, I really truly wonder if Wii, PS3 or Xbox could survive without a hardcore audience (i.e. a market that actually BUYS games), and yes games like Halo are definitely hardcore even though they are percieved to be 'mainstream', the truth is the mechanics are still based off quality game design.
The truth is market economics and developing quality games to not mix well, period. You measure a games success by it's audience size or money it makes, this is of course incorrect way to judge value.
It's based on a MARKET VALUE SYSTEM, i.e. how much money can this item attract. While gaming is a 'business' the many people in the business are not in it just for the money.
An excellent example of the market value system can be seen with bill gates comments here, on why millions of people are allowed to die.
Bill gates said:
"So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system."
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.14/99
"That is your opinion."
l og_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25099957
As if this statement says ANYTHING about game quality. The Dev team even admitted the SP campaign was pure crap! That right there says quite a lot.
Yes thats right, since I actually own the piece of crap called NWN. It was totally mediocre to anyone who's played RPG's for the last 20 years, so I'd say my opinion has a bit more weight behind it then a D&D fanatic or some newbie gamer with no gaming history under their belt. How one experiences NWN is directly related to the amount of games they have played and what kind of gaming history they have.
I will respect bioware for their valiant attempt in NWN because they really made an attempt at making great tools for the mod community but it ended up making the game itself a mediocre pile of crap and no one with serious gaming acument can dispute this. I really WANTED to like NWN, lots of good things ended up in the game but the gmae really needed another 2 years in development, NWN was like a game who's potential was never truly realized, period.
"I for one sincerely enjoyed the original campaign, it wasn't the *best* I've ever played, but it was very enjoyable for me."
Then you are either:
1) Inexperienced gamer or
2) Have a very low thresh-hold for enjoyment
"I think too many people say the community is what saved NWN."
Give me a break, many people on the forums complained about the utter crappyness of the single player experience compared to their (biowares) previous games like Baldurs gate, BG2, and other infinity engine games not made by them like Torment and Icewind dale. The truth is NWN basically attracted all the really strange D&D fanatics & weirdos who didn't really care much for game quality. The truth is I compare the majority of the people who bought and liked NWN with the likes of people who bought and liked the matrix or 50 cent games, I have the same respect for them as I do say creationists. As hard as that may be to swallow, I know gaming in's and outs I have played nearly every game under the sun and I analyze games to find out what makes them percieved as "good" to different gaming demographics. The truth was the barrier to playing NWN was very low, since it took a page from MMO's with their automatically controlled gaming mechanics (i.e. the user just pushed menu buttons), WoW and NWN have the exact same mindless interface for the drooling hordes, which I can understand from but the content simply could not make up for the borefest of crappy single player content.
And yes the community did a lot to save NWN, most of my enjoyment from NWN came from playing other peoples mod's and the single player and sp campaign was truly horrible. The fact that you had one single character you could truly control in the party which was handled automatically (robot avatar) made for a tenuous and boring game with little for the player to do then sit and drool through the SP campaign.
If you enjoyed NWN over those prior games, I have to say you are among the reasons why gaming is taking a nosedive in quality to serve the mass audience of mediocrity.
"Bioware's internal surveys and statistics always indicated that the singleplayer portion of NWN was far more popular."
Of course but because something is popular doesn't make it good. I'm not the only one that feels that gaming is backsliding into mediocrity.
http://www.gamespot.com/users/Cube_of_MooN/show_b
"Playtesting is not just done for marketing reasons; it's absolutely imperative if you want to make sure the game is as good as it can be."
I would make the argument that actually games are NOT truly targetted FOR *players*, if we are speaking about advancing the art of game design and gameplay. Tonnes of mediocre games rake in a lot of money for many other reasons.
I'd say lots of playtesting now-a-days is geared towards dumbing down and making games easier, less interactive, more passive and more mediocre. One only has to look at modern MMO's and console RPG's to compare the basic battle mechanics in those games with a game like God of War or other RPG's whose battle systems have real-time or more interactive elements.
I've been gaming for a long time and games have been steadily declining towards rigidity (rigid by the books game mechanics with minor tweaks) or mediocrity where game mechanics are thrown out or dumbed down entirely for making it easier to insert eye candy or to make it so easy to "play" all a drooling moron would have to do would be to babysit the robotic avatar.
The community was the only thing that saved NWN from total disaster, as a game it *SUCKED* and it sucked hard. I would like to say that bioware was never been truly a consistent top tier developer. Kotor was above average, but bioware is pretty hit and miss, since different dev teams for different games do not all produce equally.
"who's basically been screwed by piracy."
Piracy is a market force, get used to it. Piracy has been around forever, the only thing thats changed is technologies have now have freed music from scarcity. Music is a commodity get over it.
Think of how many people have been screwed over by new technologies, or new sources of cheap labour, from loom workers, to factory workers, to white collar workers, etc. And everyone picks on the "low skilled" labour people and the poor, who usually are anything but stupid, peoples lives are short and history is and progress are not always kind to you in the time and place in which you live.
You sound like a whining idealist, in the real world over 2 billion people live on less then $1 a day, so it's hard to feel sorry about someone who lives in a good country and has a roof over his head, food in his belly and access to enormous opportunities that others don't.
"The argument that's used for mod chips is that purchasers of games should be allowed to make backup copies of them. But I don't consider that the real issue here."
The real issue is that consumers need a bill of rights, if they had a self-funded corporate like entity to protect their interests lots of these attempts at private tyranny would be mitigated.
The first thing is, a government body has to start treating consumers as co-owners and investors of the products they buy (i.e. invest in), this way corporations cannot say they own "exclusively" all intellectual property since consumers are also legitimate financiers (and investors in the IP's success).
This would stop companies from becoming lazy and abusing intellectual property if the public has some co-ownership and can force companies hands to release it to the public domain since they were the investors in said product and were also responsible for it's success.
It has nothing to do with "decent wages", what you see as "pork barrel policies and incompetent politicians" I see as potential masking military and other strategic spending.
It's not *just* about attracting people to work and live there, there are other reasons like: because of Alaska's military-strategic position and resources, any "subsidy", "taken" from the "lower 48 states", certainly makes up for it when you consider the resources it's feeding the American economy. It's more then likely the spending makes up for it for controlling that portion of the landmass.
"But why? It's not like there is nowhere else to live."
It's not *just* about attracting people to work and live there, there are other reasons like: because of Alaska's military-strategic position and resources, any "subsidy" more then likely makes up for it for controlling that portion of the landmass.
"...they are wrapped in a thick mink coat of subsidies."
While this is true, I think the issue is of keeping and attracting workers to a place in the world thats REALLY FUCKING COLD, and not exactly your #1 tourist destination or place to live. This doesn't excuse subsidy or corruption but you have to give people a reason to stay and work there.
"No, the internet isn't a truck. It isn't a series of tubes, either. It's a distributed packet switched network. That's not too hard to say, now is it? "
Not to be pendantic but... I believe the "tubes" phraseoloy is just how he thinks in metaphors for sending and recieving of information, after all you could see a packet switched network metaphorically as a conveyor system, or waterworks system.