" but it just seems like every new thing makes me cringe."
With the advent of the net companies can now get away with tying their software to require online. We see what's happened to PC games where every other game is an MMO. Heck, age of empires online is a free to play MMO not a proper sequel for god sakes! The thing is developers are purposely trying to make their software less valuable trying to turn software into "software as a service" (more like software as a scam). I hate the model as well but games have gotten significantly more costly to make and some developers feel like they have no alternative in order to make money.
You're forgetting the fact that the PC had the power of the PS3 4 years ago. You can get an 8800 GTS for less then $100 there's no point in comparing if you forget the used video card market. Comparing a PS3 price dropped TODAY against a modern videocard is dumb as rocks considering the PC has been well ahead of the consoles since the 8800 and Core 2 duo which was 4 years ago.
I can run any big name multiplatform game on a core 2 + 8800 GTS (Assasins creed, Darksiders, etc) at higher resolutions and better framerates then a console and that is on last gen hardware.
"Now -- watch for the elitist responses blaming the players for not being up to the challenge."
WoW is as casual as it gets, everything in the game is automated outside of menubar clicking from time to time and moving. The real issue is the real-time nature of the game. In a turnbased game even the most absolute newb doesn't have to worry about getting wacked. Truth is MMO's are basically these hybrid anti-game's, they do nothing for core gamers attract tenuous and casual gamers on mass and out of those casual gamers there is an 'elite core', since MMO's are casual games by definition because they cater to a mass audience.
... World of warcraft set back single player RPG's and single player games in general hugely. As everyone tried to copy WoW or wow'ify their RPG experience and now with the whole rise of the free 2 play phenomenon one wonders if there will ever be good variety of single player RPG's ever again on the PC.
... is that they cannot accept imperfection. They are too close to the code and need to stop designing for themselves and design for the masses. One can have 1 version of linux for the engineers, the other for the desktop. No one cares about the obscure stuff linux people argue about. They just want stuff to "just work" and be easy to understand and use.
... the new snake-oil for slick marketers, hipster wannabe game developers and incompetent academics.
What we're really talking about here is engagement. The word "gamification" is a misnomer. Games have tapped into some aspects of human mind and behavior that can make some subset of learning and perhaps other experiences more rewarding/engaging. But this is far cry from all the unrealistic over-the-top hype that 'gamification is going to change everything', which is just pure bullshit.
"Rewriting a game to work on modern platforms is no different than translating a book to a foreign language. And yes, the copyright holder has the eclusive right to do that. If he doesn't bother, abandons the book, lets it go out of print... tough. You still can't translate it to Japanese and distribute it."
And this here is where we part ways, you don't believe in public domain at all. The whole point of copyright/licensing is to DENY anything from ever entering public domain through abusing language and the law. You have no interest in your own rights to own the things you buy. You are entirely centered around capitalist contracts rather then the public good, and until you can get out of "ownership mode" you'll never understand what I'm saying. Everything you've ever made is drawn from nature (the commons) therefore the public has a right to have what came from the commons go back to it so future generations can build on the work of others.
We already see this in patent law already where patents are hindering innovation and there needs to be a way to get at work that is common that everyone builds upon.
A whole lot of gaming history is going to end up being stifled just because of these ridiculous laws.
"You can't paint all corporations with the same brush, and steal from one group because of actions of another group."
Yes you can because it's the entire culture of criminal underhandedness that profiteering brings. What happens to really old games or abandonware I've purchased? I can't as an owner of mech2 or Fantasy General (abandonware) go grab the source from say a library and fix it/update it for modern systems even though *I invested in* and *paid for* the product, its development, etc buy buying it. This is the whole point of abusing language to enact laws that are underhanded and criminal to deny customer rights because most of the population is not bright enough to defend itself.
"I doubt game companies were involved in the copyright term extension act."
No but they are now on the same side with the rise of online DRM and all sorts of bullshit like DLC. The fact remains though that copyright / licensing is being abused by corporations. The fact that you just accept it as "just the way things are" is proof of your lack of critical thinking. You want to have no rights then you're one of the ignorant.
The whole point of me pointing out chrono trigger is that many games fall into defunct status never to rise again because their companies go out of business so they become "abandoneware" you can't fix these old games or update them for modern platforms without the source and that's all because of copyright/licensing bs where the customer "never owns" the things he buys which is a bunch of bullshit to keep stuff out of the public domain.
" It's not like World Of Warcraft has a patent on MMOs."
You're missing the whole point, games before the net were sold as finished products (stuff you owned) it's only through publics lack of intelligence and ignorance that stuff like software licensing for certain kinds of software got off the ground and so we have a blanket model in favor of corporations, and if you don't think that corporations have stolen the public domain then you clearly are one of the ignorant.
The whole point of IP, copyright, is to lock up works so that corporations can perpetually control/resell profitable ideas. So things like this become impossible.
"Not really a free market; since you don't have to pay for the product."
Given the whole theft of the public domain we can say piracy is a counterbalance to this overwhelming corporate theft of the public domain. So IMHO piracy is par for the course. Companies get to redefine the law and set cultural boundaries buy buying government influence to create laws in their favor so customers have no right to own (theft of rights). These industries are even more shifty then any pirate. For instance software is 'never owned' so one doesn't have the source so one can't modify one's own software which one paid for.
Things like http://www.descent2.de/ and http://scp.indiegames.us/ should be much more common then they are but the so called "rights holders" have stolen the rights of customers to own via legal shenanigans because most people aren't bright enough to revolt against these practices.
"If the piracy is directly linked to review scores, it means that people just want the games for free and aren't that much interested in trying them out before actually buying them."
The opposite is true, so many games are rehashes of old tropes or are half-baked on release, therefore people check the game out to see if anything has changed. You can use numbers to lie about anything but for many of us with all the DRM, half-baked releases, etc, we now live in an era of a "true" free market. We get to decide whether dev/pub screwing us gets paid.
"Why is it that videogames always seem to presume that a post-apocalyptic future will have no green?"
Many videogames are about conflict and war, and many do it to create a sense of barren wasteland. Most games center around conflict vs monsters/enemies. You wouldn't exactly want smurf village. Also Crisis and Far cry have done the green/tree thing just fine and so has Modern Warfare series, do you not remember the snow/mountain levels, or the jungle levels? I think many gamers have a bad memory. CoD 5 was jungle/trees for a long time.
Darksiders. Darksiders had horrible PC support on release and many had to use an xbox 360 controller emulator to fix the camera being stuck in looking at the sky/turning in loops. I wanted to buy darksiders but without taking PC support seriously it's pointless to buy these games that are one offs and have no lasting value.
"Y'know, people need to just learn to turn off their brains once in a while."
We do all the time the problem is even to our turned off brains they are stupid. There are simple movies that are bad, and there are simple movies that are good. It has very little to do with "brainyness" and has to do with movies being poorly made.
... more difficult to detect then picture quality. Imperfection in sound that aren't obvious pops' clicks and hisses are not going to be heard by the majority of the population. Often the only way to tell the sound quality is to train your ears and do back-to-back comparisons.
There is such a thing as "good enough" sound quality, which digital music and the popularity of MP3 players have shown.
"There is definitely a cultural aspect to this problem."
There is no problem, everyone is afraid of putting in all that effort only to have the wage you are paid in stem fields decline as available stem jobs aren't able to keep pace with demand for those kinds of jobs.
Not to mention many stem jobs are life sucking, life draining activities that most people would rather avoid. Some people live to work, others work to live.
Problem is are those corridor shooters worth making to begin with? Why BUY a game? Why not just rent it or get it used? It makes no sense to buy a game that has no lasting value unless the price drops dramatically.
"Length is a pretty dumb metric for value in video games any way."
Speak for yourself. Diablo 2 was so good because it combined length with replayability. The desire for short games is the desire for cutting corners on game quality disguised under the argument "length is bad". No one working on games in a previous era ever spoke so much about game length. It's all propaganda to disguise the fact that the game industry wants higher margins, faster development time and lower development costs and to do this something has to give - i.e. game quality.
The above poster is correct - there was something lost between Doom 1+2 and doom 3 as graphics got more realistic. I'm sure many of us felt that Doom 3 while an average shooter was not as exciting as the original games when they were released and a lot of it has to do with the design and aesthetics. There was a lot of charm to the 2D art style of the doom universe that was lost in it's transition to full 3D. Doom 3 was not true to it's roots it tried to be more of a "horror style" fps where doom was more a full in your face monster bash with entire rooms full of baddies to mow down and armies of demons. The move to 3D meant rooms were smaller and the amount of enemies you were fighting at a given time were a lot lower so Doom 3 ended up feeling like a spin off rather then a direct sequel to Doom 1 and 2.
Serious Sam has more in common with doom then Doom 3 does, it gives you that same feeling you got in doom with hoards of monsters relentlessly coming at you. Doom 3 was much more of a small scale corridor shooter.
You forget the private sector has had tonnes of time and they've also done dick all, if NASA is so pork there should be abundant private space flight. I don't think it's anywhere near as simple as you're painting it.
"And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately..."
The problem is not the "pork" it's human beings underestimating realistically how long it will take to achieve the next advancement, people want advancements tomorrow but there are often huge speed bumps in the advancement of knowledge or technology. Intel thought we would have 10 Ghz processors today but it turned out heat and leakage disrupted those plans and we have multi-core processors instead. One can look at all the boondoggles of the private sector to see natural laws often rub up against our naive beliefs in progress.
There are tonnes of things like that, that the average human being doesn't understand because they don't understand the immense undertaking it is because of their ignorance.
"And if you are a salesperson who analyzes these sorts of things, fuck you."
I'm not sure I totally agree, analytics may bring some key insights that are hidden about game development. I'm reminded of arcades of the 80's. Everyone accepted Pay to play at the arcades and many of gamings best games had their beginning as arcade games (pay to play). I agree that analytics of social games can and will be used to exploit end users but it may also reveal hidden universal concepts about game design that can improve regular AAA games.
"As private entities, why should the ISPs be held to some arbitrary standard outlined by an outside party?"
Because the internet is a political game changer, the business people and leaders fear political and social unrest as the plebians learn about their leader misdeeds.
History is far from over and marx was developing a theory of how society develops over time, just because capitalism has won a few battles today does not mean over the long term it won't be transformed from within into something much more along what marx predicted. Most human beings don't take a long term historical view of things, the winds of history change over time. Everyone cheering capitalism as it exists today won't be around to see what happens tomorrow.
You think your views are the last word on capitalism's history? All the contradictions of capitalism are still there underneath waiting for the right circumstances, the right level of intelligence, the right level of technology to ignite them. It could very well be that there are more "economic shocks" on the way with disruptive technology (robots/AI) that will force the issue socializing production even more then it is today or you will have revolution/war. History over the long term has a nasty way of proving all ideologues wrong, everyone thinks there society/ideal will last forever but things change.
Slashdot Mirror
" but it just seems like every new thing makes me cringe."
With the advent of the net companies can now get away with tying their software to require online. We see what's happened to PC games where every other game is an MMO. Heck, age of empires online is a free to play MMO not a proper sequel for god sakes! The thing is developers are purposely trying to make their software less valuable trying to turn software into "software as a service" (more like software as a scam). I hate the model as well but games have gotten significantly more costly to make and some developers feel like they have no alternative in order to make money.
http://www.ageofempiresonline.com/
You're forgetting the fact that the PC had the power of the PS3 4 years ago. You can get an 8800 GTS for less then $100 there's no point in comparing if you forget the used video card market. Comparing a PS3 price dropped TODAY against a modern videocard is dumb as rocks considering the PC has been well ahead of the consoles since the 8800 and Core 2 duo which was 4 years ago.
I can run any big name multiplatform game on a core 2 + 8800 GTS (Assasins creed, Darksiders, etc) at higher resolutions and better framerates then a console and that is on last gen hardware.
"Now -- watch for the elitist responses blaming the players for not being up to the challenge."
WoW is as casual as it gets, everything in the game is automated outside of menubar clicking from time to time and moving. The real issue is the real-time nature of the game. In a turnbased game even the most absolute newb doesn't have to worry about getting wacked. Truth is MMO's are basically these hybrid anti-game's, they do nothing for core gamers attract tenuous and casual gamers on mass and out of those casual gamers there is an 'elite core', since MMO's are casual games by definition because they cater to a mass audience.
... World of warcraft set back single player RPG's and single player games in general hugely. As everyone tried to copy WoW or wow'ify their RPG experience and now with the whole rise of the free 2 play phenomenon one wonders if there will ever be good variety of single player RPG's ever again on the PC.
... is that they cannot accept imperfection. They are too close to the code and need to stop designing for themselves and design for the masses. One can have 1 version of linux for the engineers, the other for the desktop. No one cares about the obscure stuff linux people argue about. They just want stuff to "just work" and be easy to understand and use.
... the new snake-oil for slick marketers, hipster wannabe game developers and incompetent academics.
What we're really talking about here is engagement. The word "gamification" is a misnomer. Games have tapped into some aspects of human mind and behavior that can make some subset of learning and perhaps other experiences more rewarding/engaging. But this is far cry from all the unrealistic over-the-top hype that 'gamification is going to change everything', which is just pure bullshit.
"Rewriting a game to work on modern platforms is no different than translating a book to a foreign language. And yes, the copyright holder has the eclusive right to do that. If he doesn't bother, abandons the book, lets it go out of print... tough. You still can't translate it to Japanese and distribute it."
And this here is where we part ways, you don't believe in public domain at all. The whole point of copyright/licensing is to DENY anything from ever entering public domain through abusing language and the law. You have no interest in your own rights to own the things you buy. You are entirely centered around capitalist contracts rather then the public good, and until you can get out of "ownership mode" you'll never understand what I'm saying. Everything you've ever made is drawn from nature (the commons) therefore the public has a right to have what came from the commons go back to it so future generations can build on the work of others.
We already see this in patent law already where patents are hindering innovation and there needs to be a way to get at work that is common that everyone builds upon.
A whole lot of gaming history is going to end up being stifled just because of these ridiculous laws.
"You can't paint all corporations with the same brush, and steal from one group because of actions of another group."
Yes you can because it's the entire culture of criminal underhandedness that profiteering brings. What happens to really old games or abandonware I've purchased? I can't as an owner of mech2 or Fantasy General (abandonware) go grab the source from say a library and fix it/update it for modern systems even though *I invested in* and *paid for* the product, its development, etc buy buying it. This is the whole point of abusing language to enact laws that are underhanded and criminal to deny customer rights because most of the population is not bright enough to defend itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_General
"I doubt game companies were involved in the copyright term extension act."
No but they are now on the same side with the rise of online DRM and all sorts of bullshit like DLC. The fact remains though that copyright / licensing is being abused by corporations. The fact that you just accept it as "just the way things are" is proof of your lack of critical thinking. You want to have no rights then you're one of the ignorant.
The whole point of me pointing out chrono trigger is that many games fall into defunct status never to rise again because their companies go out of business so they become "abandoneware" you can't fix these old games or update them for modern platforms without the source and that's all because of copyright/licensing bs where the customer "never owns" the things he buys which is a bunch of bullshit to keep stuff out of the public domain.
" It's not like World Of Warcraft has a patent on MMOs."
You're missing the whole point, games before the net were sold as finished products (stuff you owned) it's only through publics lack of intelligence and ignorance that stuff like software licensing for certain kinds of software got off the ground and so we have a blanket model in favor of corporations, and if you don't think that corporations have stolen the public domain then you clearly are one of the ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The whole point of IP, copyright, is to lock up works so that corporations can perpetually control/resell profitable ideas. So things like this become impossible.
http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
There is more then enough evidence to indict the whole industry.
"Not really a free market; since you don't have to pay for the product."
Given the whole theft of the public domain we can say piracy is a counterbalance to this overwhelming corporate theft of the public domain. So IMHO piracy is par for the course. Companies get to redefine the law and set cultural boundaries buy buying government influence to create laws in their favor so customers have no right to own (theft of rights). These industries are even more shifty then any pirate. For instance software is 'never owned' so one doesn't have the source so one can't modify one's own software which one paid for.
Things like http://www.descent2.de/ and http://scp.indiegames.us/ should be much more common then they are but the so called "rights holders" have stolen the rights of customers to own via legal shenanigans because most people aren't bright enough to revolt against these practices.
"If the piracy is directly linked to review scores, it means that people just want the games for free and aren't that much interested in trying them out before actually buying them."
The opposite is true, so many games are rehashes of old tropes or are half-baked on release, therefore people check the game out to see if anything has changed. You can use numbers to lie about anything but for many of us with all the DRM, half-baked releases, etc, we now live in an era of a "true" free market. We get to decide whether dev/pub screwing us gets paid.
"Why is it that videogames always seem to presume that a post-apocalyptic future will have no green?"
Many videogames are about conflict and war, and many do it to create a sense of barren wasteland. Most games center around conflict vs monsters/enemies. You wouldn't exactly want smurf village. Also Crisis and Far cry have done the green/tree thing just fine and so has Modern Warfare series, do you not remember the snow/mountain levels, or the jungle levels? I think many gamers have a bad memory. CoD 5 was jungle/trees for a long time.
"Feel free to provide more examples."
Darksiders. Darksiders had horrible PC support on release and many had to use an xbox 360 controller emulator to fix the camera being stuck in looking at the sky/turning in loops. I wanted to buy darksiders but without taking PC support seriously it's pointless to buy these games that are one offs and have no lasting value.
"Y'know, people need to just learn to turn off their brains once in a while."
We do all the time the problem is even to our turned off brains they are stupid. There are simple movies that are bad, and there are simple movies that are good. It has very little to do with "brainyness" and has to do with movies being poorly made.
... more difficult to detect then picture quality. Imperfection in sound that aren't obvious pops' clicks and hisses are not going to be heard by the majority of the population. Often the only way to tell the sound quality is to train your ears and do back-to-back comparisons.
There is such a thing as "good enough" sound quality, which digital music and the popularity of MP3 players have shown.
"There is definitely a cultural aspect to this problem."
There is no problem, everyone is afraid of putting in all that effort only to have the wage you are paid in stem fields decline as available stem jobs aren't able to keep pace with demand for those kinds of jobs.
Not to mention many stem jobs are life sucking, life draining activities that most people would rather avoid. Some people live to work, others work to live.
Problem is are those corridor shooters worth making to begin with? Why BUY a game? Why not just rent it or get it used? It makes no sense to buy a game that has no lasting value unless the price drops dramatically.
"Length is a pretty dumb metric for value in video games any way."
Speak for yourself. Diablo 2 was so good because it combined length with replayability. The desire for short games is the desire for cutting corners on game quality disguised under the argument "length is bad". No one working on games in a previous era ever spoke so much about game length. It's all propaganda to disguise the fact that the game industry wants higher margins, faster development time and lower development costs and to do this something has to give - i.e. game quality.
The above poster is correct - there was something lost between Doom 1+2 and doom 3 as graphics got more realistic. I'm sure many of us felt that Doom 3 while an average shooter was not as exciting as the original games when they were released and a lot of it has to do with the design and aesthetics. There was a lot of charm to the 2D art style of the doom universe that was lost in it's transition to full 3D. Doom 3 was not true to it's roots it tried to be more of a "horror style" fps where doom was more a full in your face monster bash with entire rooms full of baddies to mow down and armies of demons. The move to 3D meant rooms were smaller and the amount of enemies you were fighting at a given time were a lot lower so Doom 3 ended up feeling like a spin off rather then a direct sequel to Doom 1 and 2.
Serious Sam has more in common with doom then Doom 3 does, it gives you that same feeling you got in doom with hoards of monsters relentlessly coming at you. Doom 3 was much more of a small scale corridor shooter.
You forget the private sector has had tonnes of time and they've also done dick all, if NASA is so pork there should be abundant private space flight. I don't think it's anywhere near as simple as you're painting it.
"And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately..."
The problem is not the "pork" it's human beings underestimating realistically how long it will take to achieve the next advancement, people want advancements tomorrow but there are often huge speed bumps in the advancement of knowledge or technology. Intel thought we would have 10 Ghz processors today but it turned out heat and leakage disrupted those plans and we have multi-core processors instead. One can look at all the boondoggles of the private sector to see natural laws often rub up against our naive beliefs in progress.
There are tonnes of things like that, that the average human being doesn't understand because they don't understand the immense undertaking it is because of their ignorance.
"And if you are a salesperson who analyzes these sorts of things, fuck you."
I'm not sure I totally agree, analytics may bring some key insights that are hidden about game development. I'm reminded of arcades of the 80's. Everyone accepted Pay to play at the arcades and many of gamings best games had their beginning as arcade games (pay to play). I agree that analytics of social games can and will be used to exploit end users but it may also reveal hidden universal concepts about game design that can improve regular AAA games.
"As private entities, why should the ISPs be held to some arbitrary standard outlined by an outside party?"
Because the internet is a political game changer, the business people and leaders fear political and social unrest as the plebians learn about their leader misdeeds.
i.e.
dailybail.com
History is far from over and marx was developing a theory of how society develops over time, just because capitalism has won a few battles today does not mean over the long term it won't be transformed from within into something much more along what marx predicted. Most human beings don't take a long term historical view of things, the winds of history change over time. Everyone cheering capitalism as it exists today won't be around to see what happens tomorrow.
You think your views are the last word on capitalism's history? All the contradictions of capitalism are still there underneath waiting for the right circumstances, the right level of intelligence, the right level of technology to ignite them. It could very well be that there are more "economic shocks" on the way with disruptive technology (robots/AI) that will force the issue socializing production even more then it is today or you will have revolution/war. History over the long term has a nasty way of proving all ideologues wrong, everyone thinks there society/ideal will last forever but things change.