These questions are proof positive that humans are still immature... the truth is you make it an ethical requirement of an requirement to be an astronaut to not bow to animal prejudices, and by animal prejudices I mean drama nad political bullshit, not going without sex.
To develop programs to rid people of nervous system agitation and make people face their fears and prejudices and understand the source of their likes / dislikes, etc:
--Develop programs that expose people to tearing down their dislike / prejudice of others --Look into religions and other meditative traditions as binding principles.
Many people have gone without sex for years for religious and other reasons (will power, etc) it's not as hard as people make it out to be. What needs to be done is making them aware that their animal nervous system (i.e. their "personal likes / dislikes") are not sacred...
They have to have the wisdom not to temper there spirits... the fact is thats what the really need to do.
"but I think it will be a VERY long time before anyone doing business on the internet can afford to ignore Google."
Unfortunately the nature of free market idealogy rubs up against technology... with the advent of advanced and accurate measuring devices, planning and scientific prediction take precedent over "competitiveness", its more like social warfare to get rich then it is about civil exchange of monetary transactions. Good design, simplicity and ease of use go against the idea of competitiveness, and towards the idea of co-operation and community. Google got to be where they are because they were not only the best, but did what the did well and they didn't try to piss off their community of users by being overly invasive and commercialistic and offending their userbase. Know that a search engine is only relevant if it is useful and isn't filled with spam links, the more spam, the more users will stop using your search engine in droves.
"Eventually, there needs to be some capitation on capitalism for the world to be truly global and to balance local interests with common global ones."
It's a little too late for that, as soon as we as a culture accepted capitalism and allowed no limits on earning power and allowed corporations personhood it was game over. People who have the gold in this world make the rules and unless you threaten them with death they are not going to change for you.
Many ancient societies knew they couldn't let wealth concentration get out of control because tyranny of the haves would enslave the havenots just like it is today.
"Then there is the big fact that progammers these days are sloppy and waste resources. A machine that is faster than one needs today will only be adequate in 2 or 3 years given upgrades to all the programs. (Am I being cynical? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.)"
The truth is the power will definitely be used it just takes *years* of research to develop killer apps. Dragon Naturally speaking for instance is finally getting to a fairly usable point. The training feature is nice, while it isn't the best application it shows the seeds of the kind of potential of computational power if AI is ever developed, where you have AI assists that act nearly human using subsets of functions from humans.
"Yes. Having a thick skin is the price of living in a free society... but for adults, not for children."
A "free society" full of barbarians isn't necessarily a healthy society, the fact that you mention needing thick skin shows how barbaric human beings still are.
I still think you vastly underestimate how influenced people are by bullying as adults as well, indeed intimidation and idealogical force in market society is just as virulent and torturous anything a teenager can cookup. Your comments about adults being able to 'brush it off easier' is a bordering on nonsensical, there is no universal maturity demarcation for people. Most adults simply supress their true feelings and vent to their friends behind closed doors or on the internet. If you know any women, you should know just how much they talk shit about people to their friends and social circle, the shit that comes out of peoples (adults and teens, everyone basically) when they are in their social circle is just as venomous. The internet is a great place to see what "adults" are *really* like on the inside: Children themselves most of the time.
People mature at incredibly different rates and not all at the same time. Even the concept "maturity" we could debate for hours on end if adults are truly "mature" with all the shit they load their kids with, along with being idealogical and social cowards most of them.
"However, it is quite probable that things will have a more "masculine slant", or to be misrepresented, and for CS, this can result in the low enrollment of women."
Personally I think trying to attract anyone to subjects they aren't interested in naturally is a mistake, I think the best one can do is expose students to what subjects are like and let them decide. In my many years it seems people forget that not everything can be brought out of cultural or biological niches... for thousands of years men and women adopted the roles they were best suited for and didn't think much of it. Only as people become bored with their current situation and start to hyper focus on themselves and differences do they become disgruntled and annoyed. The bottom line is: Things have to get done and it shouldn't matter who does them.
I think the whole idea of attracting women into CS is stupid, CS should be presneted or exposed to students while in school and then students should make the decisions on what interests them.
I really hate this "edu-advertising" going on in teh educational system which is really a plot to increase profits and wages for the faculty and related businesses.
Unofortunately higher education is more and more about a being a business then education in my opinion.
You're missing the point, sim city was originally 'hardcore' game, many of will-wrights ideas are *hard core*, he just makes them accessable to other people. Many sim-city games are not that 'casual' at all, I've played all the sim City's and I wouldn't call them "casual". "The sims" is more casual then sim city ever was. Either way you're missing the main point: Most of the best game designers are 'hardcore gamers' and the distinction between 'casual' and 'hardcore' is not 'night and day', the casual gamer does not care about what makes games great. The hardcore gamers *does*. Will wright is perhaps the only exception in the industry, almost all others were hardcore. My point was what makes games great is "hardcore" elements. Lose that and you lose what gaming is about: non-passive interactivity.
"In the future, the majority of games will be like summer blockbuster films. This is not bad, because the volume of games will increase such that we will still see the same number of "hardcore" titles, including AAA ones."
I think you're not understanding the market nor the nature of the beast that is gaming and game devleopment, the market is more complicated then your post will admit.
Right now there is major economic upheavel in North america. While you made one valid point: that theres tension and shift between hardcore and casual... the core of gaming is still built around the so-called "hardcore". The best games in existence are hardcore, don't tell me Will-wright got to where he was by making "casual" games, or Peter Molyneux, or John carmack, or Mark Rein of epic games... all these guys are "hardcore". While profitability has suffered, its because of factors beyond the so-called "market" the truth is it's due to technological power and the technolust of game developers / publishers. Many games could be profitable if they didn't spend so much on graphics devleopment and were not forced by wal-mart publishers into ridiculous development catch-22's.
MMO's and games like God of War, are -- hardcore. WoW makes casual accessability to "hardcore" (read: interesting, deep) play mechanics easy for everyone by simplifying the interface. WoW deeply borrowed lots of hardcore elements from diablo, the only thing missing was more twitch real-time control over your character in WoW.
The solution is not ot make more "casual" games, the solution is to find a way to make "hardcore" (read: deep interacitivity and choices, and other fun stuff) accessable to people beyond the hardcore while still retaining "hardcore" elements, basically, deep and engaging interactivity, and an emphasis on not going into passive gamer la-la land like many games today (MMO's I'm looking at you). Personally I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the gaming industry who makes games who is not *hardcore* about games, real game developers are to some extent hardcore gamers or else they wouldn't put in the blood sweat and tears to develop games. I think you underestimate the power and influence of the "hardcore" gamers... without the hardcore gaming would not have been nourished and fed the money it needed to get to this point. Gears of War, Halo, and other 'hardcore' games prove theres still lots of money to be made from hardcore gamers if you provide *an experience worth paying for*, the FPS is one of the games thats near universally accessable or at least looks so interesting casual players will spend the time to pick up and play an FPS. A good looking game that plays like crap is still a shit game, despite its sales, and at the core of every game you have to have something fun, or else your profitability will eventually suffer.
I think "causal" games for most people will be more of a passing fad, since most true gamers associate 'casual' games with games that are not in the vein of most games. Just because more casual people have picked up video gaming doesn't mean that *they will buy games*. In my opinion the people least likely to buy games are casual players.
Gears of War and Halo are by definition *hardcore games*, which sold millions of units. Anyone who says FPS is "casual" is an understatement.
... in that game companies had to focus on making gameplay mechanics interesting becuase they couldn't rely on graphics to sell the games. Most games today unfortunately are really focused on the graphicsal / cinematic angle a little too much. Although games like Gears of War give me a little hope where Cinematic presentation doesn't get in the way of *actual game play mechanics* you dont sacrifice gameplay to cinematic presentation.
Although at some point I think the game industry is getting dangerously close to boring its audience to death because they've allowed costs and their whole tech-obsessed culture to drive their costs out of control.
Graphics are ok, gameplay is better.
The truth is, I'm tired of many modern games. When RPG's evolved into MMO's they lost a whole heap of learned lessons from single player RPG's. Great gaming conventinos like town portal, and other travel-boredom reducing items were purposely broken to extend "the game" in MMO's. Most MMO's are bad singleplayer RPG's wrapped in semi-decent to good graphics. I can barely tolerate World of warcraft as it is. The monsters are too far and in between, the variety is severely lacking and they are for the most part too dispersed for a *game*.
After playing a game like God of War or God of War 2 and then playing a game like WoW where everything you character does is automatically controlled by the computer and way too much time is spent simply doing nothing but boring navigating. You can see that gaming has taken a step back in major ways...
I feel the game industry is getting closer to peddling useless merchandise that people buy but never play or really enjoy, then actual games. The expansion packs for Guild wars in my opinion are the two biggest signs that made be even more suspicious of "expansions" to original games.
"NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap."
I'm sorry but the original NWN *was a total disaster*, it was only good for the user made content but even the engine itself was awful and cumbersome. It was a game you simply *watched* rather then played. Automatic combat, maybe clicking a few buttons on you command bar now and then after all the tedious and god awfully slow *navigation*. Not to mention all that while looking at graphics that just made you want to stick pens in you eyes due to it's god awful uglyness.
Neverwinter nights is one of those games I find myself shaking my head at how it succeeded, as a game it has nothing on games like Torment or even the original baldurs gate. I'd take BG or torment *any day* over the tedious nightmare that was the first NWN, and its bastard sequel, boredom winter nights 2.
"I realize that Oblivion is a very popular game that a lot of people like. But I just can't get into it. If anything, it's too open-ended"
You're in good company, a lot of really crappy games (read: so easy even a retard could play it) end up becoming hits, if anything it's what happens to many good products when the market was smaller and the quality was higher, it becomes commoditized to the lowest common denominator. Read : Entertainment for hapless morons.
I'm sad to say many "successful" games are bad games that have *regressed* the gains made by many previous games... MMO's regressed all the accomplishments of console and PC RPGS all rolled into one big steaming pile of crap.
MMO's are the worst offenders, they take an RPG and break everything to extend the amount of time you play the game (read: travelling = no town portal, etc) and make it simply tedious and time consuming before you get to the *fun parts* of the game, you'll have 5-10+ minutes travelling places for every few minutes of fun. I refer to most MMO's as "navigation simulators", since over 50% of the time in the game is spent simply navigating and not doing anything else. It sucks and I hope the game industry has real hard times soon, because many in the industry truly deserve it.
"An RPG is more of a 'hack'n'slash' if anything else now."
Give me a break, RPG's were based on old war miniature board games and the like. Go look at one of the most famous games of all time, a text game - Legend of the red dragon from the BBS days, a text game based heavily on combat, stats and humorously written one liners. The thing is because of the lack of graphics the text was input for the hugest creativity engine in existence: Your brain. You fill in the gaps and imagine things while playing the game simply based on the text output, you imagine it in your head just the way you want it. Such complexity is "Not here yet" (tm)
RPG's do not have to be complicated to the nth degree with too much social or other scaffolding that gets in the way of the core elements of roleplaying games ** to be engaged in interesting activities ** that are *enjoyable*. What seperates the real game developers out there from what I like to call "western computer RPG purists", is that they understand that games must ENTERTAIN and be fun above all most of the time a vast audience or they make no money. Myself, as primarily an action oriented gamer, I get frustrated when I am doing things that are boring and tedious where I am taken out of the game to watch some lengthly B-rated cutscene... or in which I am not in control of the activity. I find Navigating the world for 3-5 minutes straight or more with me doing nothing but being a passive observer (being taken out of the game) boring as hell. This is why I always have had a huge love-hate relationship with modern MMO's the time required to travel from place to place is enormous and MMO's waste countless hours of real engagement simply floating or running around the map (A waste of my valuable time IMHO). When games like Diablo and Diablo 2 Understood the value of TOWN PORTAL. MMO's basically take the best gaming conventions learned by trial and error and gut them completely. MMO developers make standard features (like town portal) broken or unavailable to the point where it is just bordering on limits of player annoyance just to make sure you dont "go through the content too fast". Which IMHO is working against what game making should be about: Making great games, not breaking the immersion and reducing their fun factor for profit.
So MMO's and their ilk breed generations of passive gamers (i.e. TV watchers) rather then real 'game players' (i.e. where you are directly involved in controlling or skilllfully mastering a character and making decisions that effect outcomes).
... when you look at the enormous size of china's populations and when the world's wealth is so unequally distributed.
What about all the money SAVED by the people from their piracy? Piracy is not a simple one-way street economically speaking, money not spent on games is spent elsewhere.
"Take a fucking breather people. There are a lot of things to bitch about when it comes to the US and its direction. That said, the extreme hyperbole where you compare the Soviet Union justice system to the US makes you sound like an idiot not worth listening to."
What about all the illegal US wars? I mean its one thing to force people into labour camps, its another to attack any group of people that are not your own for wholesale plunder. No system on earth is immune from stealing and oppression, both capitalism and communism do the same thing: Capitalism by creating new sources of cheap labour and resouces via wars, communism via similar means.
It's still fundamentally about resources.
While the US might be a great place to live, its because the power base is not focusing all its efforts of greed and power against its own population, but external populations who the local US population do not really give a rats ass about. If stalin or anyone had turned outward (to war) instead of turning his ambitions inward you would see a very similar pattern to how the US has behaved and engaged in wars.
No country is an angel, the US just masks and redirects its oppressive influences on others besides their home country.
It is, although pretty adds to the fun. Was it huxley who coined the term (to paraphrase him not exactly) "emotioneering"? The truth is that what games really are: Emotional and intellectual stimulation engines.
But there is no longevity in something that is pretty that has no depth. Almost all games today fall under "lacking depth" with a few exceptions because of the unfortunate skyrocketing of developing costs and development time associated with those costs.
While everyone is playing through and done with the new Halo 3, I'll still be enjoying the games like Civ 4, Alpha centauri, etc. Good games never stop being fun, thats how you know a great game from the rest of the one-shot wonders.
I can go back to warcraft 3 to this day and still enjoy how well the cheezy in-game cinematics compare to other games who use pre-renders (like RPG's) and the fact that a game like warcraft 3 compares well storytelling wise against a game like final fantasy says a lot about the game itself.
War 3 hasn't aged well in terms of graphics but I certainly have fond memories of the characters (unique art design) and the story.
The truth is the desktop some real killer apps have to be released to want to give programmers inspiration IMHO. I'm sure there are many "killer apps" just waiting in the wings until computational power gets there. I have a shit tonne of ideas for great desktop programmes in my head that I've put part of the design to paper already but much of it has to wait because the time and expertise requires is a huge undertaking.
I also have a tonne of desktop software I would love to use if it was more advanced and the computational power was there. I love Dragon's naturally speaking and not having to type since I'm a natural orator in my mind and the words just can't come out fast enough when I get going. Not only that but not having to type keeps me focused on what I'm saying.
Lots of desktop applications will have to wait further advancements in science and art of information interpretation, that is converting human data and crunching it as easy as we do.
"Terrorism is linked to extremism. You cannot eliminate extremism so you cannot eliminate terrorism. But you can can reduce the appeal of extremism by increasing the accessibility of political and economic power."
The crux of the issue is that...
People want what they want, and when they can't have it or are prevented from doing what they wish or believing, they will begin to feel trapped and suffocated until they embrace "extreme-ism" or a method that allows them some reprieve from the tyranny of other groups ideas, ethos or way of life. The world CHANGED because of people embracing extremism, people once thought slavery was 'natural' and to not believe in slavery was "extremism", anything can be extremism. Extremism is a tool to change society when all your other options cut off. People don't embrace extremism for nothing, they embrace it because the cannot solve their problems or get access to resources in a timely manner. Or are prevented by cultural racism from living a civil life. Most people in the world today are uncivilized, slaves to their animal nervous systems prejudices. i.e. think of the last time you told someone to get away from you because "you didn't like him" for no justifiable reason, just 'because' he offended your senses.
Indeed it has scarcely been 100 years since moving away from racism and slavery and we STILL haven't moved away from racism and slavery, we're still at war with them both, corporations want to re-institute slavery under the guise of capitalism but the truth is: A good war is better then a tenuous and suffocating peace.
You can't win idealogical or philosophical battles that people are programmed to believe. This is why capitalism, communism and socialism are such politically hardening terms. You can scarcely have a discussion without the the ideology of the dominant group mocking any dissent. This is especially apparent in our market society.
"The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural"
I'm not sure where you live buddy but during my public schooling we saw everything, by the time highschool was around the corner nothing was a big deal. IMHO sheltered kids DO tend to have problems later in life especially socially. Think about all those kids "sheltered" by their religious nutcase parents, that kind of sheltering still exists unfortunate as it is.
In my opinion there is little you can do to raise a kid right other then learn how to parent yourself, if you want to be a good parent, just look at how your parents failed you. That's all you need, I'd venture to guess some of the best parents are among the faild children of the world. Because they know everything their parents did wrong and promised themselves not to repeat it.
"If corporations can outsource labor, why can't I outsource purchase?"
Don't you just love the doublespeak of free-market fundamentalists? Why can't we outsource the poor to countries they'd be rich? What about the disabled? We could save a lot of money if we shipped them to an economy where our dollars purchasing power is 8 times what it is in the local economy. Indeed the poor and disabled must think we're overpaid lazy slobs if only they had wits enough about them to move and pressure government into keeping their social assistance going while they lived a middle class life in china or india. Time to learn a new language!!
The fact is this is why democracy and open source projects are prone to breakdown: Because they are demographically challenged, either mentally or in terms of skill.
That's the real issue, there are many ways to solve the same problem. The real problem is everyone wants THEIR VISION of what the program or implementation should be realized, that's really the issue... contests of will imho.
All too often open source software neglects usability, i.e. 'designed by programmers, made for programmers'. It may be programmed well but you have to remember who your end user is in the end: The end user, not a programmer.
Even if you have the best team and discipline it means nothing without perspective and proper understanding of the issues of usability, I don't care how amazing your program is if it is clunky and inefficient to use. This is one of the reasons the market to some degree works: You find the best people and you are forced to hunker down under the vision of leads, sometimes which are carefully chosen, othertimes not. At some point it doesn't matter and you just have to take the risk and get things done or nothing gets done at all, because you call can't commit to a unified vision.
No, you come on... market integrity is a must... witness:
"For example, statutory and regulatory requirements designed to detect and deter fraud and cheating of market participants, such as those relating to exchange audit trails, competitive trading and open pricing, would cease to exist. Many of the customer protections currently in place were added by Congress in 1992 after the 1989 FBI-CFTC investigation revealed the existence of widespread cheating of customers -- including large institutional customers -- in the pits of the Chicago exchanges. The 1992 legislation added tougher audit trail standards, dual trading prohibitions, exchange governance requirements, floor trader registration requirements, and ethics training requirements. None of these protections would be required for the professional markets envisioned in the pending legislation.
The proposed professional markets provision also sweeps away many regulatory tools designed to safeguard market integrity. There would be no Commission surveillance of the professional markets, and requirements such as speculative position limits, large trader reporting, and exchange recordkeeping would be eliminated. Thus, the Commission would not have the data to analyze aberrational price movements on the markets, including suspected price manipulation. Exchanges also would not be subject to any of the current legal standards relating to their contracts, rules or governance. "
Yes but lets not forget that capitalist economy must be protected from threats (i.e. places that suck up money from the economy in which there is a FIXED amount of money).
The whole "gambling crackdown" is about the integrity of an economy with a fixed money supply, and gambling sites do suck up money and money pools there under the guise of people hoping to get rich, which does have real effects on the economy. The government is a capitalist nazi, in Canada you cannot leave the country for too much time or you will be cut off from social assistance for instance. Why exactly would they have that? Because money is leaking from the economy (not staying at home).
I'm going to be unapologetically logical in this post, so mod me down if you must, but looking at things from a pragmatists perspective...
First we have problems simply enforcing human rights, man is still at heart barbaric because nature is brutal and we have yet to develop the technology that basically makes engaging in barbaric practices and men enslaving men obsolete.
No animals should have human rights unless found to have intelligence that confers man-like civilization, that is: A species who's interest goes beyond mere brute survival and works towards technologically efficient means of controlling and subduing the unstable natural environment.
It bugs me to no end that life forms and species that would otherwise die when the sun blows up should have *rights*. People can cry and whine all they want about animal rights but humans didn't get to be the dominant species by being moral, they did it by being pragmatic in regards to the barbaric harshness of nature or the natural environment, which by all accounts is harsh and unstable (tsunami's, earthquakes, solar flares, storms, hurricanes, virus's, bacteria, organic pollution, etc).
I feel similarly about vegetarians - vegetarianism is useless... Most organisms on the planet do nothing but consume resources until they go extinct and are not intelligent enough to escape death if the solar system goes belly up (as many have in the past). Next living things are nothing more then conglomerations of prior dead animals and plants: That life had to destroy other life in order to exist. There's no getting around it.
Life and most life on this planet is a fleeting thing, it's not something sacred.
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These questions are proof positive that humans are still immature... the truth is you make it an ethical requirement of an requirement to be an astronaut to not bow to animal prejudices, and by animal prejudices I mean drama nad political bullshit, not going without sex.
To develop programs to rid people of nervous system agitation and make people face their fears and prejudices and understand the source of their likes / dislikes, etc:
--Develop programs that expose people to tearing down their dislike / prejudice of others
--Look into religions and other meditative traditions as binding principles.
Many people have gone without sex for years for religious and other reasons (will power, etc) it's not as hard as people make it out to be. What needs to be done is making them aware that their animal nervous system (i.e. their "personal likes / dislikes") are not sacred...
They have to have the wisdom not to temper there spirits... the fact is thats what the really need to do.
"but I think it will be a VERY long time before anyone doing business on the internet can afford to ignore Google."
Unfortunately the nature of free market idealogy rubs up against technology... with the advent of advanced and accurate measuring devices, planning and scientific prediction take precedent over "competitiveness", its more like social warfare to get rich then it is about civil exchange of monetary transactions. Good design, simplicity and ease of use go against the idea of competitiveness, and towards the idea of co-operation and community. Google got to be where they are because they were not only the best, but did what the did well and they didn't try to piss off their community of users by being overly invasive and commercialistic and offending their userbase. Know that a search engine is only relevant if it is useful and isn't filled with spam links, the more spam, the more users will stop using your search engine in droves.
"Eventually, there needs to be some capitation on capitalism for the world to be truly global and to balance local interests with common global ones."
It's a little too late for that, as soon as we as a culture accepted capitalism and allowed no limits on earning power and allowed corporations personhood it was game over. People who have the gold in this world make the rules and unless you threaten them with death they are not going to change for you.
Many ancient societies knew they couldn't let wealth concentration get out of control because tyranny of the haves would enslave the havenots just like it is today.
"Then there is the big fact that progammers these days are sloppy and waste resources. A machine that is faster than one needs today will only be adequate in 2 or 3 years given upgrades to all the programs. (Am I being cynical? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.)"
The truth is the power will definitely be used it just takes *years* of research to develop killer apps. Dragon Naturally speaking for instance is finally getting to a fairly usable point. The training feature is nice, while it isn't the best application it shows the seeds of the kind of potential of computational power if AI is ever developed, where you have AI assists that act nearly human using subsets of functions from humans.
"Yes. Having a thick skin is the price of living in a free society... but for adults, not for children."
A "free society" full of barbarians isn't necessarily a healthy society, the fact that you mention needing thick skin shows how barbaric human beings still are.
I still think you vastly underestimate how influenced people are by bullying as adults as well, indeed intimidation and idealogical force in market society is just as virulent and torturous anything a teenager can cookup. Your comments about adults being able to 'brush it off easier' is a bordering on nonsensical, there is no universal maturity demarcation for people. Most adults simply supress their true feelings and vent to their friends behind closed doors or on the internet. If you know any women, you should know just how much they talk shit about people to their friends and social circle, the shit that comes out of peoples (adults and teens, everyone basically) when they are in their social circle is just as venomous. The internet is a great place to see what "adults" are *really* like on the inside: Children themselves most of the time.
People mature at incredibly different rates and not all at the same time. Even the concept "maturity" we could debate for hours on end if adults are truly "mature" with all the shit they load their kids with, along with being idealogical and social cowards most of them.
"However, it is quite probable that things will have a more "masculine slant", or to be misrepresented, and for CS, this can result in the low enrollment of women."
Personally I think trying to attract anyone to subjects they aren't interested in naturally is a mistake, I think the best one can do is expose students to what subjects are like and let them decide. In my many years it seems people forget that not everything can be brought out of cultural or biological niches... for thousands of years men and women adopted the roles they were best suited for and didn't think much of it. Only as people become bored with their current situation and start to hyper focus on themselves and differences do they become disgruntled and annoyed. The bottom line is: Things have to get done and it shouldn't matter who does them.
I think the whole idea of attracting women into CS is stupid, CS should be presneted or exposed to students while in school and then students should make the decisions on what interests them.
I really hate this "edu-advertising" going on in teh educational system which is really a plot to increase profits and wages for the faculty and related businesses.
Unofortunately higher education is more and more about a being a business then education in my opinion.
You're missing the point, sim city was originally 'hardcore' game, many of will-wrights ideas are *hard core*, he just makes them accessable to other people. Many sim-city games are not that 'casual' at all, I've played all the sim City's and I wouldn't call them "casual". "The sims" is more casual then sim city ever was. Either way you're missing the main point: Most of the best game designers are 'hardcore gamers' and the distinction between 'casual' and 'hardcore' is not 'night and day', the casual gamer does not care about what makes games great. The hardcore gamers *does*. Will wright is perhaps the only exception in the industry, almost all others were hardcore. My point was what makes games great is "hardcore" elements. Lose that and you lose what gaming is about: non-passive interactivity.
"In the future, the majority of games will be like summer blockbuster films. This is not bad, because the volume of games will increase such that we will still see the same number of "hardcore" titles, including AAA ones."
I think you're not understanding the market nor the nature of the beast that is gaming and game devleopment, the market is more complicated then your post will admit.
Right now there is major economic upheavel in North america. While you made one valid point: that theres tension and shift between hardcore and casual... the core of gaming is still built around the so-called "hardcore". The best games in existence are hardcore, don't tell me Will-wright got to where he was by making "casual" games, or Peter Molyneux, or John carmack, or Mark Rein of epic games... all these guys are "hardcore". While profitability has suffered, its because of factors beyond the so-called "market" the truth is it's due to technological power and the technolust of game developers / publishers. Many games could be profitable if they didn't spend so much on graphics devleopment and were not forced by wal-mart publishers into ridiculous development catch-22's.
MMO's and games like God of War, are -- hardcore. WoW makes casual accessability to "hardcore" (read: interesting, deep) play mechanics easy for everyone by simplifying the interface. WoW deeply borrowed lots of hardcore elements from diablo, the only thing missing was more twitch real-time control over your character in WoW.
The solution is not ot make more "casual" games, the solution is to find a way to make "hardcore" (read: deep interacitivity and choices, and other fun stuff) accessable to people beyond the hardcore while still retaining "hardcore" elements, basically, deep and engaging interactivity, and an emphasis on not going into passive gamer la-la land like many games today (MMO's I'm looking at you). Personally I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the gaming industry who makes games who is not *hardcore* about games, real game developers are to some extent hardcore gamers or else they wouldn't put in the blood sweat and tears to develop games. I think you underestimate the power and influence of the "hardcore" gamers... without the hardcore gaming would not have been nourished and fed the money it needed to get to this point. Gears of War, Halo, and other 'hardcore' games prove theres still lots of money to be made from hardcore gamers if you provide *an experience worth paying for*, the FPS is one of the games thats near universally accessable or at least looks so interesting casual players will spend the time to pick up and play an FPS. A good looking game that plays like crap is still a shit game, despite its sales, and at the core of every game you have to have something fun, or else your profitability will eventually suffer.
I think "causal" games for most people will be more of a passing fad, since most true gamers associate 'casual' games with games that are not in the vein of most games. Just because more casual people have picked up video gaming doesn't mean that *they will buy games*. In my opinion the people least likely to buy games are casual players.
Gears of War and Halo are by definition *hardcore games*, which sold millions of units. Anyone who says FPS is "casual" is an understatement.
... in that game companies had to focus on making gameplay mechanics interesting becuase they couldn't rely on graphics to sell the games. Most games today unfortunately are really focused on the graphicsal / cinematic angle a little too much. Although games like Gears of War give me a little hope where Cinematic presentation doesn't get in the way of *actual game play mechanics* you dont sacrifice gameplay to cinematic presentation.
Although at some point I think the game industry is getting dangerously close to boring its audience to death because they've allowed costs and their whole tech-obsessed culture to drive their costs out of control.
Graphics are ok, gameplay is better.
The truth is, I'm tired of many modern games. When RPG's evolved into MMO's they lost a whole heap of learned lessons from single player RPG's. Great gaming conventinos like town portal, and other travel-boredom reducing items were purposely broken to extend "the game" in MMO's. Most MMO's are bad singleplayer RPG's wrapped in semi-decent to good graphics. I can barely tolerate World of warcraft as it is. The monsters are too far and in between, the variety is severely lacking and they are for the most part too dispersed for a *game*.
After playing a game like God of War or God of War 2 and then playing a game like WoW where everything you character does is automatically controlled by the computer and way too much time is spent simply doing nothing but boring navigating. You can see that gaming has taken a step back in major ways...
I feel the game industry is getting closer to peddling useless merchandise that people buy but never play or really enjoy, then actual games. The expansion packs for Guild wars in my opinion are the two biggest signs that made be even more suspicious of "expansions" to original games.
"NWN is a great game, NWN2 on the other hand is crap. The story is crap, the engine is crap, and it's held together with crap."
I'm sorry but the original NWN *was a total disaster*, it was only good for the user made content but even the engine itself was awful and cumbersome. It was a game you simply *watched* rather then played. Automatic combat, maybe clicking a few buttons on you command bar now and then after all the tedious and god awfully slow *navigation*. Not to mention all that while looking at graphics that just made you want to stick pens in you eyes due to it's god awful uglyness.
Neverwinter nights is one of those games I find myself shaking my head at how it succeeded, as a game it has nothing on games like Torment or even the original baldurs gate. I'd take BG or torment *any day* over the tedious nightmare that was the first NWN, and its bastard sequel, boredom winter nights 2.
"I realize that Oblivion is a very popular game that a lot of people like. But I just can't get into it. If anything, it's too open-ended"
You're in good company, a lot of really crappy games (read: so easy even a retard could play it) end up becoming hits, if anything it's what happens to many good products when the market was smaller and the quality was higher, it becomes commoditized to the lowest common denominator. Read : Entertainment for hapless morons.
I'm sad to say many "successful" games are bad games that have *regressed* the gains made by many previous games... MMO's regressed all the accomplishments of console and PC RPGS all rolled into one big steaming pile of crap.
MMO's are the worst offenders, they take an RPG and break everything to extend the amount of time you play the game (read: travelling = no town portal, etc) and make it simply tedious and time consuming before you get to the *fun parts* of the game, you'll have 5-10+ minutes travelling places for every few minutes of fun. I refer to most MMO's as "navigation simulators", since over 50% of the time in the game is spent simply navigating and not doing anything else. It sucks and I hope the game industry has real hard times soon, because many in the industry truly deserve it.
"It is particularly telling that organized crime is/has been so frequently involved with unions."
Hey they just follow the leaders: Businessmen. Maybe you haven't seen CEO pay lately?
"An RPG is more of a 'hack'n'slash' if anything else now."
Give me a break, RPG's were based on old war miniature board games and the like. Go look at one of the most famous games of all time, a text game - Legend of the red dragon from the BBS days, a text game based heavily on combat, stats and humorously written one liners. The thing is because of the lack of graphics the text was input for the hugest creativity engine in existence: Your brain. You fill in the gaps and imagine things while playing the game simply based on the text output, you imagine it in your head just the way you want it. Such complexity is "Not here yet" (tm)
RPG's do not have to be complicated to the nth degree with too much social or other scaffolding that gets in the way of the core elements of roleplaying games ** to be engaged in interesting activities ** that are *enjoyable*. What seperates the real game developers out there from what I like to call "western computer RPG purists", is that they understand that games must ENTERTAIN and be fun above all most of the time a vast audience or they make no money. Myself, as primarily an action oriented gamer, I get frustrated when I am doing things that are boring and tedious where I am taken out of the game to watch some lengthly B-rated cutscene... or in which I am not in control of the activity. I find Navigating the world for 3-5 minutes straight or more with me doing nothing but being a passive observer (being taken out of the game) boring as hell. This is why I always have had a huge love-hate relationship with modern MMO's the time required to travel from place to place is enormous and MMO's waste countless hours of real engagement simply floating or running around the map (A waste of my valuable time IMHO). When games like Diablo and Diablo 2 Understood the value of TOWN PORTAL. MMO's basically take the best gaming conventions learned by trial and error and gut them completely. MMO developers make standard features (like town portal) broken or unavailable to the point where it is just bordering on limits of player annoyance just to make sure you dont "go through the content too fast". Which IMHO is working against what game making should be about: Making great games, not breaking the immersion and reducing their fun factor for profit.
So MMO's and their ilk breed generations of passive gamers (i.e. TV watchers) rather then real 'game players' (i.e. where you are directly involved in controlling or skilllfully mastering a character and making decisions that effect outcomes).
... when you look at the enormous size of china's populations and when the world's wealth is so unequally distributed.
What about all the money SAVED by the people from their piracy? Piracy is not a simple one-way street economically speaking, money not spent on games is spent elsewhere.
"Take a fucking breather people. There are a lot of things to bitch about when it comes to the US and its direction. That said, the extreme hyperbole where you compare the Soviet Union justice system to the US makes you sound like an idiot not worth listening to."
What about all the illegal US wars? I mean its one thing to force people into labour camps, its another to attack any group of people that are not your own for wholesale plunder. No system on earth is immune from stealing and oppression, both capitalism and communism do the same thing: Capitalism by creating new sources of cheap labour and resouces via wars, communism via similar means.
It's still fundamentally about resources.
While the US might be a great place to live, its because the power base is not focusing all its efforts of greed and power against its own population, but external populations who the local US population do not really give a rats ass about. If stalin or anyone had turned outward (to war) instead of turning his ambitions inward you would see a very similar pattern to how the US has behaved and engaged in wars.
No country is an angel, the US just masks and redirects its oppressive influences on others besides their home country.
"Maybe fun really is more important than pretty?"
It is, although pretty adds to the fun. Was it huxley who coined the term (to paraphrase him not exactly) "emotioneering"? The truth is that what games really are: Emotional and intellectual stimulation engines.
But there is no longevity in something that is pretty that has no depth. Almost all games today fall under "lacking depth" with a few exceptions because of the unfortunate skyrocketing of developing costs and development time associated with those costs.
While everyone is playing through and done with the new Halo 3, I'll still be enjoying the games like Civ 4, Alpha centauri, etc. Good games never stop being fun, thats how you know a great game from the rest of the one-shot wonders.
I can go back to warcraft 3 to this day and still enjoy how well the cheezy in-game cinematics compare to other games who use pre-renders (like RPG's) and the fact that a game like warcraft 3 compares well storytelling wise against a game like final fantasy says a lot about the game itself.
War 3 hasn't aged well in terms of graphics but I certainly have fond memories of the characters (unique art design) and the story.
The truth is the desktop some real killer apps have to be released to want to give programmers inspiration IMHO. I'm sure there are many "killer apps" just waiting in the wings until computational power gets there. I have a shit tonne of ideas for great desktop programmes in my head that I've put part of the design to paper already but much of it has to wait because the time and expertise requires is a huge undertaking.
I also have a tonne of desktop software I would love to use if it was more advanced and the computational power was there. I love Dragon's naturally speaking and not having to type since I'm a natural orator in my mind and the words just can't come out fast enough when I get going. Not only that but not having to type keeps me focused on what I'm saying.
Lots of desktop applications will have to wait further advancements in science and art of information interpretation, that is converting human data and crunching it as easy as we do.
"Terrorism is linked to extremism. You cannot eliminate extremism so you cannot eliminate terrorism. But you can can reduce the appeal of extremism by increasing the accessibility of political and economic power."
The crux of the issue is that...
People want what they want, and when they can't have it or are prevented from doing what they wish or believing, they will begin to feel trapped and suffocated until they embrace "extreme-ism" or a method that allows them some reprieve from the tyranny of other groups ideas, ethos or way of life. The world CHANGED because of people embracing extremism, people once thought slavery was 'natural' and to not believe in slavery was "extremism", anything can be extremism. Extremism is a tool to change society when all your other options cut off. People don't embrace extremism for nothing, they embrace it because the cannot solve their problems or get access to resources in a timely manner. Or are prevented by cultural racism from living a civil life. Most people in the world today are uncivilized, slaves to their animal nervous systems prejudices. i.e. think of the last time you told someone to get away from you because "you didn't like him" for no justifiable reason, just 'because' he offended your senses.
Indeed it has scarcely been 100 years since moving away from racism and slavery and we STILL haven't moved away from racism and slavery, we're still at war with them both, corporations want to re-institute slavery under the guise of capitalism but the truth is: A good war is better then a tenuous and suffocating peace.
You can't win idealogical or philosophical battles that people are programmed to believe. This is why capitalism, communism and socialism are such politically hardening terms. You can scarcely have a discussion without the the ideology of the dominant group mocking any dissent. This is especially apparent in our market society.
"The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural"
I'm not sure where you live buddy but during my public schooling we saw everything, by the time highschool was around the corner nothing was a big deal. IMHO sheltered kids DO tend to have problems later in life especially socially. Think about all those kids "sheltered" by their religious nutcase parents, that kind of sheltering still exists unfortunate as it is.
In my opinion there is little you can do to raise a kid right other then learn how to parent yourself, if you want to be a good parent, just look at how your parents failed you. That's all you need, I'd venture to guess some of the best parents are among the faild children of the world. Because they know everything their parents did wrong and promised themselves not to repeat it.
"If corporations can outsource labor, why can't I outsource purchase?"
Don't you just love the doublespeak of free-market fundamentalists? Why can't we outsource the poor to countries they'd be rich? What about the disabled? We could save a lot of money if we shipped them to an economy where our dollars purchasing power is 8 times what it is in the local economy. Indeed the poor and disabled must think we're overpaid lazy slobs if only they had wits enough about them to move and pressure government into keeping their social assistance going while they lived a middle class life in china or india. Time to learn a new language!!
The fact is this is why democracy and open source projects are prone to breakdown: Because they are demographically challenged, either mentally or in terms of skill.
That's the real issue, there are many ways to solve the same problem. The real problem is everyone wants THEIR VISION of what the program or implementation should be realized, that's really the issue... contests of will imho.
All too often open source software neglects usability, i.e. 'designed by programmers, made for programmers'. It may be programmed well but you have to remember who your end user is in the end: The end user, not a programmer.
Even if you have the best team and discipline it means nothing without perspective and proper understanding of the issues of usability, I don't care how amazing your program is if it is clunky and inefficient to use. This is one of the reasons the market to some degree works: You find the best people and you are forced to hunker down under the vision of leads, sometimes which are carefully chosen, othertimes not. At some point it doesn't matter and you just have to take the risk and get things done or nothing gets done at all, because you call can't commit to a unified vision.
No, you come on... market integrity is a must... witness:
"For example, statutory and regulatory requirements designed to detect and deter fraud and cheating of market participants, such as those relating to exchange audit trails, competitive trading and open pricing, would cease to exist. Many of the customer protections currently in place were added by Congress in 1992 after the 1989 FBI-CFTC investigation revealed the existence of widespread cheating of customers -- including large institutional customers -- in the pits of the Chicago exchanges. The 1992 legislation added tougher audit trail standards, dual trading prohibitions, exchange governance requirements, floor trader registration requirements, and ethics training requirements. None of these protections would be required for the professional markets envisioned in the pending legislation.
The proposed professional markets provision also sweeps away many regulatory tools designed to safeguard market integrity. There would be no Commission surveillance of the professional markets, and requirements such as speculative position limits, large trader reporting, and exchange recordkeeping would be eliminated. Thus, the Commission would not have the data to analyze aberrational price movements on the markets, including suspected price manipulation. Exchanges also would not be subject to any of the current legal standards relating to their contracts, rules or governance. "
"its a freaking game!!!"
Yes but lets not forget that capitalist economy must be protected from threats (i.e. places that suck up money from the economy in which there is a FIXED amount of money).
The whole "gambling crackdown" is about the integrity of an economy with a fixed money supply, and gambling sites do suck up money and money pools there under the guise of people hoping to get rich, which does have real effects on the economy. The government is a capitalist nazi, in Canada you cannot leave the country for too much time or you will be cut off from social assistance for instance. Why exactly would they have that? Because money is leaking from the economy (not staying at home).
"Take his words with a grain of salt - all he writes about is Microsoft and he never has anything positive to say."
True but just by reading what he says you can tell he's smart as a whip. He knew that gaming was one of the primary reasons anyone stuck with windows.
I'm going to be unapologetically logical in this post, so mod me down if you must, but looking at things from a pragmatists perspective...
First we have problems simply enforcing human rights, man is still at heart barbaric because nature is brutal and we have yet to develop the technology that basically makes engaging in barbaric practices and men enslaving men obsolete.
No animals should have human rights unless found to have intelligence that confers man-like civilization, that is: A species who's interest goes beyond mere brute survival and works towards technologically efficient means of controlling and subduing the unstable natural environment.
It bugs me to no end that life forms and species that would otherwise die when the sun blows up should have *rights*. People can cry and whine all they want about animal rights but humans didn't get to be the dominant species by being moral, they did it by being pragmatic in regards to the barbaric harshness of nature or the natural environment, which by all accounts is harsh and unstable (tsunami's, earthquakes, solar flares, storms, hurricanes, virus's, bacteria, organic pollution, etc).
I feel similarly about vegetarians - vegetarianism is useless... Most organisms on the planet do nothing but consume resources until they go extinct and are not intelligent enough to escape death if the solar system goes belly up (as many have in the past). Next living things are nothing more then conglomerations of prior dead animals and plants: That life had to destroy other life in order to exist. There's no getting around it.
Life and most life on this planet is a fleeting thing, it's not something sacred.