"The REAL problem, which we can solve, is understanding how to MANAGE complexity properly"
The problem is developers usually cut major corners or just take the easy route like they do in MMO's and automating their combat systems. Combat systems are critical for an RPG and most modern combat systems have removed and significantly dumbed down the participation part. Final fantasy 12 is a case in point - hold forward, set your bot to win. All you do in the game is navigate you don't have to make or participate in any meaningful way.
The major problem is cinematics and story is crowding out the game aspects to a significant degree. Game developers realized they could expand their market by getting rid of the participatory elements of gameplay because most people just don't really like video games at all - ones where you have to participate. Most modern games are little more then glorified movies which you can move around in and your hand is held all the way through.
This wouldn't be so bad if the game also was designed properly for experienced players so that a newbie and an expert player different experiences. Since casual gamers tend to not like the gaming (the activity and participation) aspects of games.
Better design would be great but developers and publishers don't seem to want to put in the time or money to make the best games they can, they seem to want to cut corners to maximize profits because their are too many stupid consumers out there.
Bullshit. Western RPG's are just as bad in their own ways, most modern western RPG's can hardly even be called RPG's anymore. Mass effect 1 and 2? Really? Cover based shooting with a few skills on the side is far from traditional video game RPG's as you can get. Most modern "RPGs" have been turned into first person shooters because the developers are so incompetent at "RPG's" part so and they see all that Call of duty money out there. The only good RPG's coming out lately are from out of left field like Torchlight and Magicka and a few others I can't name at the moment. Skyrim and oblivion can hardly be called RPG's in considering their dumbed down forms of older more RPG'esque games.
Lets face facts, the modern gamer is so simple minded he can't deal with the more complex RPG's of the past so developers have turned them into first person shooters or cinematic computer rendered movies because too many gamers out there don't really like videogames anymore for the game part, but only for the story/cinematics and hollywood effects.
"There's no reason to upgrade every year or two like there used to be."
Many reasons this happened:
1) Hardware hit a clockspeed wall around 3ghz 2) Game consoles became the main platform of games so all ports run easily on PC (provided they aren't too sloppily ported). 3) Graphics are good enough for many games now it's up to art direction. 4) Games got too big an expensive to make (not as many games worth sinking $ into).
"There is also a huge difference between equitable capitalism and a feudal system under the the guise of capitalism using corporations as proxies of power for the "noble class"."
Historically their isn't, one only has to look at the founding of america and the issues with the East india company to see that you are simply wrong.
"Adam Smith was talking about small communities doing deals one-on-one."
Smith in many ways was a moron who never really grasped the implications of his theory. Giving men the ability to set prices allows them to amass significant amounts of power when they "win" in the market and many encumbants end up staying their permanently North america has a permanent plutocracy where less then 1% of the people have more wealth then the bottom 90% combined. That's how adam smiths theory plays out in the real world. There's no easy price and property disputation mechanism for people to have legal way take back price-setting power and abuses of society from business people. Since business people are so nannied by the state with all the laws they create in their favor (just see copyright, DMCA).
Not only that Smith was a believer in the enlightenment theory of human behavior, markets only work if people are rational and reasonably intelligent but modern science shows human beings are as dumb as rocks. So entire "industries" or "markets" exist just out of stupidity and inertia, not based on any kind of rationality. Their are entire industries based in barbarism and ineptitude of human beings. The fact that people celebrate this as a triumph of the market is pretty disgusting in and of itself.
Adam smith was also wrong about human morality - if modern society shows us anything it's that large scale societies don't have the collective intelligence and values in common to form any kind check against corporate power.
"There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects"
The problem is simply because in the society and age we live people still have to work (make money) for a living. So large projects become unfeasible unless you are already rich (see: canonical).
That and the tools for modifying software and making it still by and large are arcane and not complex enough to offload more everyday design tasks to automation so that users can design their own software. We do not yet have sophisticated enough tools where end users can actually modify their software easily without having to be programmers. One day we will get there but it's decades and even possibly a century away.
The real issue is whether it's costs can be brought down and whether it can scale. Quantum computing may stay too expensive for anyone outside of governments and corporations doing serious scientific research. The idea that just because you have quantum bits on one scale, that this scale will continue up as systems get larger is the flaw. You may get scalability but might hit a cost wall. BTW we still don't have flying cars. I use flying cars as an example of drawing a conclusion about the cost of technology and it's feasibility.
"This project has generated better illustrative proof than ever before that randomness will eventually produce everything."
I don't think you understand what this means, randomness in an ideal world will produce anything. Randomness in the real world will not. There are all sorts of gotcha's that make such a statement meaningless outside someones imagination.
"The next effect is that ARM devices will be cheaper to buy and to run."
I don't believe this at all since modern video cards use ARM already and they are extremely power hungry. Speed costs you in power no matter which way you look at it.
Has always been a scam, it's there to feed the military industrial complex and to provide jobs for people in a crap economy with high unemployment. Too often politics becomes shite just to give people a reason to be employed in a shitty economic system.
All hardware advances to have meaning require killer apps, it's a chicken and egg scenario. As hardware gets more powerful someone will find the killer app. No one knew we needed google until it existed, the same thing will happen as hardware becomes more powerful.
Every era computing era has had periods of centralization and decentralization the trend will continue on for the indefinite future. When centralization reaches it's limits, decentralization occurs (think the mainframes vs the internet). The same thing goes on with cpu architectures, what will be 'more then enough' for you today won't be 30 years from now. The standard will keep moving as killer apps are found/developed that require more power.
"Extension cards are almost gone, more and more of the north/south bridge and motherboard chips is moving into the CPU, now even the graphics card is moving into the CPU for many."
You're missing the point unfortunately, the laws of physics demands that expansion cards are here to stay. The memory bandwidth you can get from a dedicated card exceeds that of today's modern CPU's. Specializations is here to stay. The same argument was made by epic games over 10 years ago when they thought everything would be pushed into the CPU it didn't happen. Some stuff is being integrated but there's still the problem of heat, clock frequency and power dissipation that will make 'integration' for high speed stuff problematic. By the time we have system on a chip specialized hardware will be that much faster.
Memory bandwidth and heat are the big elephant in the room though.
... it's highly likely the bandwidth will be the constraining factor. Not only that but much of the world doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. These predictions keep forgetting about billions of middle class and poor in other countries besides the west.
"You can always vote with your money. Really, if it's so important to you don't buy the product."
This argument is meaningless because most people are stupid/incompetent/anti-intellectual or clueless. Also most kids aren't going to wait or boycott something especially if it's something they are emotionally attached to. People are not rational, so markets in many instances don't work at all.
See the Modern warfare boycott here (notice a lot "boycotting" the game actually didn't)
The point you're missing is that there are people fighting at this very moment against inhuman conditions that are completely unnecessary. The next time you're thinking how awesome the rich and corporations are just remember when the shit hits the fan they get what they want straight away. Trillions of dollars in secret (at the time) bailouts. While poor and disabled have to fight for decades often with no response from the government.
"All power comes from being able to make someone happy. Really, think about it. A gun is no guarantee that someone will comply. "
I don't now if you've noticed but you live in a world of millions of suffering people, you have billionaires and homeless people not for a lack of homes but for a lack of guns on part of power to kill/subdue the rich. There is no rational reason to have as much suffering as we do in the developed world because of capitalism but most people fear guns.
... really needed to start focus on apps other then browsers IMHO. Why are they so obsessed with the browser, there's tonnes of other apps they could be working on. There is no need to constantly release browsers any more, one should think about the needs of end users and design apps around that.
... really a "metaverse" since it takes enormous amounts of cash to build and maintain the things, if videogames are the metaverse then it's a metaverse everyone will be paying monthly fee's to support to enjoy.
The game industry is on a slow push enclosing some of their games as MMO's they'd like to eventually enclose all games behind walled gardens with DRM/MMO as copyprotection and then hit us all with monthly fee's. Time will tell if gamers will just take it up the bum like morons. But if league of legends, Heroes of newerth and other Free 2 play games are anything to go by the end of the single player game that you actually own may be on it's way out driven by clueless teens as demographics shift.
... even worse then the author. Most people are mediocre, there are all stars among the fans but knowing who they are isn't something you know until after they've produced something and there's been a reaction.
Ms is moving towards "platformization" they are including Xbox live with windows 8 and I wouldn't be surprised if appstore/game store is included. Right now there is a slow push to end user owned software (we're seeing the beginning of this with steam and free2play).
"You've been fearmongering for 8 years about something that will never happen."
Steam and free2play games online are already happening (enlosure) through simply having new generations grow up with things being that way. Most kids don't give a shit about DRM. They just want to play.
You still know its a lie so technically it is lying. The point is to get your biology to your mind to adapt in such a way as if you are recalling a valid memory hence the imagination portion of it. Since for many of us we're not taught to lie professionally or practice it. We do it mostly on the spot and while we can dupe others with our 'on the spot lying' the average person doesn't have infinite resources to spend considering whether something is true or a lie. Where as the article is really trying to catch 'everyday lying' catching people unprepared and offhand. Most of us don't have to deal with having such resources thrown at our everyday fibs since they usually don't involve serious risks, as those risks go up then practicing and finding away around it become more important.
... all you have to do is memorize and rehearse lies in advance and imagine them and recall them as if they were memories. People get caught in lies because it's cognitively demanding to make it up on the spot unprepared.
If you don't believe this consider religious faith. Many people I'm sure believe those falsehoods genuinely because they are well ingrained in their imaginations.
"Try living in a real tyrannical system before using hyperbole."
You live in a world where there is billionaires and homeless people _in the same damn country_ and the rich attack and demonize the poor. The next time you think that the rich and corporations aren't tyrannical when they can get trillions of dollars in secret (at the time) bailouts while people trying to improve the meager $1000 a month assistance for the disabled who have been fighting to increase it to a livable wage for 40 years I think you need to get your head read sir. Copyright is just one of a long list of abuses capitalists have been engaging in over human history. There are tonnes of others we can list that are still going on today with endless military pork and laws written by lobbyists.
The next time you think about polishing the knobs of capitalists just remember the following video where whole sections of the upper class get just what they want at the time saying "we can't afford to protect the weak". I think you are historically naive and illiterate person. There is tonnes of injustice and tyrannical things going on around you.
Every social gain in the past century has required conflict and bloodshed against moneyed interests. Just because the tyrannical aspects of capitalism don't effect you personally doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact many aspects are hidden/downplayed by propaganda and exported to other countries. The fact that you don't can't see the negative things all around you is proof you're rather ignorant.
Are you a moron or something? The fact that the public domain has been downright destroyed by ignorant people like yourself is tragic.
Tell me do you really want to live in a world where fan remakes, spinoffs, and updating game-code and assets are not possible? And that's just a tip of a giant iceberg due to games being an area I know a lot about. I don't think you understand the BS that is copyright because the stupidity hasn't effected you yet.
Slashdot Mirror
"The REAL problem, which we can solve, is understanding how to MANAGE complexity properly"
The problem is developers usually cut major corners or just take the easy route like they do in MMO's and automating their combat systems. Combat systems are critical for an RPG and most modern combat systems have removed and significantly dumbed down the participation part. Final fantasy 12 is a case in point - hold forward, set your bot to win. All you do in the game is navigate you don't have to make or participate in any meaningful way.
The major problem is cinematics and story is crowding out the game aspects to a significant degree. Game developers realized they could expand their market by getting rid of the participatory elements of gameplay because most people just don't really like video games at all - ones where you have to participate. Most modern games are little more then glorified movies which you can move around in and your hand is held all the way through.
This wouldn't be so bad if the game also was designed properly for experienced players so that a newbie and an expert player different experiences. Since casual gamers tend to not like the gaming (the activity and participation) aspects of games.
Better design would be great but developers and publishers don't seem to want to put in the time or money to make the best games they can, they seem to want to cut corners to maximize profits because their are too many stupid consumers out there.
"Western RPGs keep growing and innovating."
Bullshit. Western RPG's are just as bad in their own ways, most modern western RPG's can hardly even be called RPG's anymore. Mass effect 1 and 2? Really? Cover based shooting with a few skills on the side is far from traditional video game RPG's as you can get. Most modern "RPGs" have been turned into first person shooters because the developers are so incompetent at "RPG's" part so and they see all that Call of duty money out there. The only good RPG's coming out lately are from out of left field like Torchlight and Magicka and a few others I can't name at the moment. Skyrim and oblivion can hardly be called RPG's in considering their dumbed down forms of older more RPG'esque games.
Lets face facts, the modern gamer is so simple minded he can't deal with the more complex RPG's of the past so developers have turned them into first person shooters or cinematic computer rendered movies because too many gamers out there don't really like videogames anymore for the game part, but only for the story/cinematics and hollywood effects.
"There's no reason to upgrade every year or two like there used to be."
Many reasons this happened:
1) Hardware hit a clockspeed wall around 3ghz
2) Game consoles became the main platform of games so all ports run easily on PC (provided they aren't too sloppily ported).
3) Graphics are good enough for many games now it's up to art direction.
4) Games got too big an expensive to make (not as many games worth sinking $ into).
"There is also a huge difference between equitable capitalism and a feudal system under the the guise of capitalism using corporations as proxies of power for the "noble class"."
Historically their isn't, one only has to look at the founding of america and the issues with the East india company to see that you are simply wrong.
"Adam Smith was talking about small communities doing deals one-on-one."
Smith in many ways was a moron who never really grasped the implications of his theory. Giving men the ability to set prices allows them to amass significant amounts of power when they "win" in the market and many encumbants end up staying their permanently North america has a permanent plutocracy where less then 1% of the people have more wealth then the bottom 90% combined. That's how adam smiths theory plays out in the real world. There's no easy price and property disputation mechanism for people to have legal way take back price-setting power and abuses of society from business people. Since business people are so nannied by the state with all the laws they create in their favor (just see copyright, DMCA).
Not only that Smith was a believer in the enlightenment theory of human behavior, markets only work if people are rational and reasonably intelligent but modern science shows human beings are as dumb as rocks. So entire "industries" or "markets" exist just out of stupidity and inertia, not based on any kind of rationality. Their are entire industries based in barbarism and ineptitude of human beings. The fact that people celebrate this as a triumph of the market is pretty disgusting in and of itself.
See:Enlightenment was wrong about human reasoning
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
Adam smith was also wrong about human morality - if modern society shows us anything it's that large scale societies don't have the collective intelligence and values in common to form any kind check against corporate power.
"There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects"
The problem is simply because in the society and age we live people still have to work (make money) for a living. So large projects become unfeasible unless you are already rich (see: canonical).
http://www.canonical.com/
That and the tools for modifying software and making it still by and large are arcane and not complex enough to offload more everyday design tasks to automation so that users can design their own software. We do not yet have sophisticated enough tools where end users can actually modify their software easily without having to be programmers. One day we will get there but it's decades and even possibly a century away.
The real issue is whether it's costs can be brought down and whether it can scale. Quantum computing may stay too expensive for anyone outside of governments and corporations doing serious scientific research. The idea that just because you have quantum bits on one scale, that this scale will continue up as systems get larger is the flaw. You may get scalability but might hit a cost wall. BTW we still don't have flying cars. I use flying cars as an example of drawing a conclusion about the cost of technology and it's feasibility.
"This project has generated better illustrative proof than ever before that randomness will eventually produce everything."
I don't think you understand what this means, randomness in an ideal world will produce anything. Randomness in the real world will not. There are all sorts of gotcha's that make such a statement meaningless outside someones imagination.
"The next effect is that ARM devices will be cheaper to buy and to run."
I don't believe this at all since modern video cards use ARM already and they are extremely power hungry. Speed costs you in power no matter which way you look at it.
"national security."
Has always been a scam, it's there to feed the military industrial complex and to provide jobs for people in a crap economy with high unemployment. Too often politics becomes shite just to give people a reason to be employed in a shitty economic system.
All hardware advances to have meaning require killer apps, it's a chicken and egg scenario. As hardware gets more powerful someone will find the killer app. No one knew we needed google until it existed, the same thing will happen as hardware becomes more powerful.
Every era computing era has had periods of centralization and decentralization the trend will continue on for the indefinite future. When centralization reaches it's limits, decentralization occurs (think the mainframes vs the internet). The same thing goes on with cpu architectures, what will be 'more then enough' for you today won't be 30 years from now. The standard will keep moving as killer apps are found/developed that require more power.
"Extension cards are almost gone, more and more of the north/south bridge and motherboard chips is moving into the CPU, now even the graphics card is moving into the CPU for many."
You're missing the point unfortunately, the laws of physics demands that expansion cards are here to stay. The memory bandwidth you can get from a dedicated card exceeds that of today's modern CPU's. Specializations is here to stay. The same argument was made by epic games over 10 years ago when they thought everything would be pushed into the CPU it didn't happen. Some stuff is being integrated but there's still the problem of heat, clock frequency and power dissipation that will make 'integration' for high speed stuff problematic. By the time we have system on a chip specialized hardware will be that much faster.
Memory bandwidth and heat are the big elephant in the room though.
... it's highly likely the bandwidth will be the constraining factor. Not only that but much of the world doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. These predictions keep forgetting about billions of middle class and poor in other countries besides the west.
"You can always vote with your money. Really, if it's so important to you don't buy the product."
This argument is meaningless because most people are stupid/incompetent/anti-intellectual or clueless. Also most kids aren't going to wait or boycott something especially if it's something they are emotionally attached to. People are not rational, so markets in many instances don't work at all.
See the Modern warfare boycott here (notice a lot "boycotting" the game actually didn't)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/5/1258035395841.jpg/
"Do you ever talk to homeless people?"
Do you ever talk to poor people? Do you ever talk to the disabled?
http://www.odspaction.ca/
The point you're missing is that there are people fighting at this very moment against inhuman conditions that are completely unnecessary. The next time you're thinking how awesome the rich and corporations are just remember when the shit hits the fan they get what they want straight away. Trillions of dollars in secret (at the time) bailouts. While poor and disabled have to fight for decades often with no response from the government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
http://www.dailybail.com/
"All power comes from being able to make someone happy. Really, think about it. A gun is no guarantee that someone will comply. "
I don't now if you've noticed but you live in a world of millions of suffering people, you have billionaires and homeless people not for a lack of homes but for a lack of guns on part of power to kill/subdue the rich. There is no rational reason to have as much suffering as we do in the developed world because of capitalism but most people fear guns.
... really needed to start focus on apps other then browsers IMHO. Why are they so obsessed with the browser, there's tonnes of other apps they could be working on. There is no need to constantly release browsers any more, one should think about the needs of end users and design apps around that.
... really a "metaverse" since it takes enormous amounts of cash to build and maintain the things, if videogames are the metaverse then it's a metaverse everyone will be paying monthly fee's to support to enjoy.
The game industry is on a slow push enclosing some of their games as MMO's they'd like to eventually enclose all games behind walled gardens with DRM/MMO as copyprotection and then hit us all with monthly fee's. Time will tell if gamers will just take it up the bum like morons. But if league of legends, Heroes of newerth and other Free 2 play games are anything to go by the end of the single player game that you actually own may be on it's way out driven by clueless teens as demographics shift.
... even worse then the author. Most people are mediocre, there are all stars among the fans but knowing who they are isn't something you know until after they've produced something and there's been a reaction.
"And the story has the DRM/Straitjacket icon?"
Ms is moving towards "platformization" they are including Xbox live with windows 8 and I wouldn't be surprised if appstore/game store is included. Right now there is a slow push to end user owned software (we're seeing the beginning of this with steam and free2play).
"You've been fearmongering for 8 years about something that will never happen."
Steam and free2play games online are already happening (enlosure) through simply having new generations grow up with things being that way. Most kids don't give a shit about DRM. They just want to play.
"In which case, it won't be lying anymore"
You still know its a lie so technically it is lying. The point is to get your biology to your mind to adapt in such a way as if you are recalling a valid memory hence the imagination portion of it. Since for many of us we're not taught to lie professionally or practice it. We do it mostly on the spot and while we can dupe others with our 'on the spot lying' the average person doesn't have infinite resources to spend considering whether something is true or a lie. Where as the article is really trying to catch 'everyday lying' catching people unprepared and offhand. Most of us don't have to deal with having such resources thrown at our everyday fibs since they usually don't involve serious risks, as those risks go up then practicing and finding away around it become more important.
... all you have to do is memorize and rehearse lies in advance and imagine them and recall them as if they were memories. People get caught in lies because it's cognitively demanding to make it up on the spot unprepared.
If you don't believe this consider religious faith. Many people I'm sure believe those falsehoods genuinely because they are well ingrained in their imaginations.
"Try living in a real tyrannical system before using hyperbole."
You live in a world where there is billionaires and homeless people _in the same damn country_ and the rich attack and demonize the poor. The next time you think that the rich and corporations aren't tyrannical when they can get trillions of dollars in secret (at the time) bailouts while people trying to improve the meager $1000 a month assistance for the disabled who have been fighting to increase it to a livable wage for 40 years I think you need to get your head read sir. Copyright is just one of a long list of abuses capitalists have been engaging in over human history. There are tonnes of others we can list that are still going on today with endless military pork and laws written by lobbyists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
The next time you think about polishing the knobs of capitalists just remember the following video where whole sections of the upper class get just what they want at the time saying "we can't afford to protect the weak". I think you are historically naive and illiterate person. There is tonnes of injustice and tyrannical things going on around you.
US torturing people
http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/issues/torture/us-torture/
Every social gain in the past century has required conflict and bloodshed against moneyed interests. Just because the tyrannical aspects of capitalism don't effect you personally doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact many aspects are hidden/downplayed by propaganda and exported to other countries. The fact that you don't can't see the negative things all around you is proof you're rather ignorant.
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html
Are you a moron or something? The fact that the public domain has been downright destroyed by ignorant people like yourself is tragic.
Tell me do you really want to live in a world where fan remakes, spinoffs, and updating game-code and assets are not possible? And that's just a tip of a giant iceberg due to games being an area I know a lot about. I don't think you understand the BS that is copyright because the stupidity hasn't effected you yet.
http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/