People think that what their minds perceive and read into events is 'the truth', most people are not aware or sophisticated enough to distrust and question their own perceptions. It's something learned through introspection, much reading, and experience... that one cannot trust how one feels/reads or perceives the world all the time, and that much of what we perceive or think we perceive, is riddled with errors throughout. Most people never question their first 'impressions' when they 'perceive' racism.
As always - people see what they want to see. Think of popular movies or novels, if you asked what was the message of a the movie or novel, you'd get a tonne of different responses, each person reading things into and out of the entertainment experience based on their own psyche and past history.
... this all comes back to the fact that we have a limited amount of attention and the more we spend it focusing on conversation and thinking about what is being talked about (our minds eye being 'elsewhere') the less we are focused on our environmental surroundings, we're increasing the attention resolution for conversation on the phone while decreasing our attention to the surrounding environment.
This happens even without a phone, I remember driving and having something fall on my lap, just the momentary lapse of your mind focusing on something other then what you're doing takes your ability to focus attention on the environmental changes as needed. I remember almost hitting someone, even though just a few seconds before everything was clear. After that I promised myself never again would I ever change the focus of my attention. It's just too dangerous a lot of the time, in heavy traffic / slowed to a crawl, I don't mind if people are on their phones when traffic is going to be at a dead stop for a while but outside of that, I wouldn't personally.
It's the same thing - using your mind to assess the situation intelligently, it applies to everthing - if you exercise and don't overeat you won't get fat (barring extenuating circumstances like disease, etc).
Personally I think anyone who's a phone junky really needs to experience what it's like to have a near miss accident, there's nothing like a near miss to change your thinking about driving forever IMHO. I'm glad my near miss never hurt anyone, and it certainly smartens you up afterwards. For the people who say "eh I'll risk it", I just hope you don't one day end up regretting it.
Note that they don't actually open the packages themselves unless there is an extenuating circumstance (bomb, etc), they might quickly look inside the box with a scanner to detect explosive devices/etc, but this is far and away from what ISP's can do, you can't send bombs that can blow people up in packets. Your counter example is not with the intent of my original message - being able to open private mail.
"It's not logical reasons that keep people from shifting to Linux now, it's just the fear of the unknown."
Personally I don't understand why linux doesn't merely mimic the desktop of XP and windows completely, people don't give a shit about the OS they use. Those kinds of details are beyond them most of the time. If I were adding to linux development, I'd get really serious about copying the user shell of windows completely and then the user would not have to know that he's "Using linux" and worry about the unfamiliarity of linux. I'm not sure if they could get away with this without MS claiming some BS. But that would be the way to go is to 'sneak linux in' by making the UI work and look exactly like XP so the user can't tell the difference and doesn't have to be 'afraid' of using linux because the user experience is the same.
"Seriously, feel free to go to some other website. Some of us want lack of quality here on/.. That's what gives it character."
More importantly, I think people who complain about spelling and errors forget what it is to be human. In fact I think most sane people as they get older are not bugged by the small stuff and know errors will happen. People aren't perfect and this naive idea that they should be held up to a "higher standard" is nonsense. I'd certainly like to talk to the co-workers and wives/husbands exboyfriends/girlfriends of these complainers and see what kind of mistakes they make in their lives and how they treat other people.
People need to chill out and relax and not take everything so seriously, there are far more serious things in the world to worry about that actually need to be addressed like war and poverty, then pedantically worrying about mistakes people make. You'd think professionals would know by now that mistakes always happen, constantly, even if you are not aware of them and human beings are not these perfect machines. They get old, they have health problems, they are under constant stress... they are for the most part just trying to live like everybody else.
"Isn't territorial behaviour a precursor to privacy? I mean, the idea of "Stay out of my room, I'm getting dressed" can't be that far off "Stay out of my burrow or I bite you, you strange animal""
That's kind of a bad example, many cultures have had no problem with nudity. What is strange is how human cultures differ in respect to how they view themselves, their bodies, nudity, etc. Christianity and western culture is really fucked up when it concerns nudity and sexuality when you compare it against other peoples, cultures and times. Modern people like to think they are greatest thing since sliced bread and they aren't "primitive", but anyone who is a student of history knows this is not the case. Many modern people are more primitive then many ancient cultures in their behaviour and ethics.
"So the game went from unplayable at the lowest settings possible, to being still unplayable at the lowest settings possible?
Great move MS, youv'e really solved a problem there."
The software render is for older games, not for the cutting edge. The theory is - as CPU's get faster, games will be able to be playable. It's not a bad idea IMHO because many games 'break' on GPU's if they are not supported in the driver as hardware changes. Software compatability is something that is a bit frustrating with GPU's, to give an example: Final fantasy 7 for the PC will not work properly on modern cards without issues. In these cases the software render is a godsend provided it intelligently maintains the needed functionality for such games and doesn't botch it like many GPU manufacturers.
"The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it."
Which reminds me about the problem of all MMO's: Too much time is wasted travelling, in every MMO almost, almost all waste an enormous amount of time making you travel at slow spaces and limiting things like warping, etc, which causes the game and action to drag. In space this problem is MUCH worse and anyone suggesting the idea of "infinite space" is asking for enormous gameplay problems with herding players in the right direction. If you play ANY game in which large levels and open spaces are a part, the contact between players is more infrequent and the time between events is more spaced out, and this ends up being boring and a waste of players time.
This is the reason why good level design and the best levels in games manage the flow of gameplay and events over time so that you don't get totally bored out of your mind by poor design and lack of interesting things to do or events to engage in.
Many people who complain about games have no understanding of what makes game fun to begin with, and I think if they actually were forced to design the levels and have to endure the wrath of end users they would think twice about their 'perfect level' or 'perfect world' of 'open-ness', open worlds have severe drawbacks in that interaction between users, items, npc's and events becomes longer in time and spaced more far apart. Most people hate travelling, this is why people pay good money when they travel around the world for the fastest flights. The same applies to games : People don't have infinite time and reducing time spent doing menial and boring tasks is something all game designers need to be aware of.
In my opinion one of the cardinal sins of MMO's is the backtracking of gameplay to try to force users to waste even more time in their worlds as they collect money over the months. MMO's have been a real setback IMHO in terms of gameplay for RPG's and games in general in a lot of ways where the business becomes about breaking gameplay for profit, which is the exact opposite of why games became great in the first place.
"We don't need a reinvented GUI, we need programmers that enforce just that little bit of GUI hygiene in the first place."
I don't believe this is the case at all, I am quite frustrated by modern GUI's and the rather enormous amount of complexity that has come about for information and data-types in general, try pasting text directly into youtube video, etc, adding/changing and editing things right now is a real PITA (pain in the ass) because many GUI's for editing absolutely suck, but hte problem goes deeper and I think many modern gui's suffer from lack of creativity in the programming space.
Some apps I really love that have enormous creative ideas for GUI development should anyone actually take these ideas and improve them and blend them right...
IMHO right now what is must frustrating about user interfaces is in fact the fact that one needs seperate programs to modify disparate and differing formats of video, audio and text. Mixing and mashing different data-types for even the most SIMPLEST and basic things one could do in the real world takes a hell of a lot of work on a computer.
I've often thought of writing a GUI totally based on proper hybrid of vector based shapes and typography, as well as the implementation of layers (ala photoshop) and nodes ala the brain for connecting data in different ways which would need to be prototyped and tested. I have so many ideas for GUI development that I'm bursting at the seems, but I don't have the time to poor into such a large project, though it's something I've personally thought about and writing about and hoping someone could pick up the design and run with it.
... really the whole point of playing an interactive game is to be there, to be present, to be interacting. The "avatar" is merely a game developers idea of what kinds of avatars will appeal generally to a broad audience. Personally the thing that got me so hooked on Galactiv Civilizations 2 and Need for speed underground, was the ability to shape and customize your "avatar" (in GC2 it was ships, in NFS it was cars), to a greater or lesser degree. NFS was limited by the designs of the cars themselves and our expectations of what 'cars' should look like. In Galciv2 you have more leeway and your designs did not have to submit to such expectations of "looking right".
In fact it's a turn off when game developers make characters people don't want to BE playing and have no feedback when you change gear/armor/etc/etc, Diablo and Diablo2 had some amount of visual feedback when users changed equipment and that's what I thought really added to the game - you are there, you are in the game, you are able to modify and change stuff and have that change reflected in the reality of the game world. Their is level of personal investment in characters whether people are aware of it or not, even 'machines' like planes, cars, etc. Because you are the one in control of the experience provided game developers have given you something you want to experience.
"The notion that memory == intelligence is just wrong."
Memory is intimately tied to intelligence, so memory in many circumstances does equal intelligence. If you look at any psychometric testing at all and looked at the tests for working memory, and especially PS scores. PS scores + working memory correlate well with matehmatical ability. Having a good size working memory is critical for problem solving. Think about it in another way: How high can the visual fidelity be on a computer with little video memory? Not much. Same applies to many other things where processing large amounts of data is required.
I think most people wish they had better memories, memory is critical in learning. Everything you learn becomes memorized to some extent at the subconscious level. When you learn to ride a bike, you've remembered it.
"Garriott is a veteran, the whole Ultima Franchise, not to mention UO (more or less) started the whole (grahpical) MMO thing. To have created an epic fail like Tabula Rasa, is surprising."
Garriott was out of his element, he hasn't really designed games (been in the trenches) for years, he should have stuck to fantasy I knew his sci-fi work was doomed from the moment I heard it. Few companies can do sci-fi, and even then their success is moderate.
"It WAS a lot of fun. It just couldn't shake the stigma attached to it when it went through the public beta. The game had VASTLY improved throughout the year. They resolved many of the issues people had with the game. It is sad really."
Why is it sad? Why should customers expect to pay on launch for a product that isn't ready? I really hate that about the software industry, from a design and engineering perspective, the software industry still sucks at designing things.
Emotion and rational thought cannot ever be disconnected from one another, most people are unaware of what the cognitive sciences have discovered in the last 30 years. The elightenments/western view of science and reason right now is being undermined by the cognitive sciences, and many in the cognitive sciences are well aware of this fact.
(to get to the good part, watch from 15 to 25 mins)
A few wise words from our old friend Ibn...
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
I'm talking about the type of game and not just merely the process of creating art. I'm talking about overall content creation for 2D games, not the process of creating 2D art and textures for a 3D game (which still requires more work then a 2D game). Things also have advanced considerably since then in terms of hardware horsepower and graphical resolution, thereby increasing demands in both domains. Consider the level of detail of old 8-bit and 16-bit games, you don't need anywhere near the texture detail you need as in a modern 3d game that has many levels of zoom, mip maps, because the perspective (in 3D) changes, the textures have to look good at many angles and many levels of zoom, this is not the case for 2D games for most of them.
Midtown madness had a large play area and you could drive around and do whatever you wanted but it quickly got boring, we will still need developers to tune the experience and the content. I imagine autogenerated content will not be enough, there will always be tuning required and always the need for artists and animators for art direction, and such like.
But just generating content for contents sake today is not what is going to make a game, you have to have interesting things to do and interesting characters that inhabit them. There is one thing that makes game memorable are hitting all the notes, some games get it all right (god of war comes to mind) but most others get a few right (mainly visuals) and everything else barely passable.
I can only imagine how long it took to tune the game mechanics in a game like god of war, the settings, the camera angles, etc. It's not merely content generation, it's the experience that the developers create for the gamers themselves. Why should a gamer care about game x/y/z? what's the hook? whats the draw?
The thing I loved about 8-bit games was that developers had to find the fun and expression of meaning within constraints and not depend on merely flash to sell games.
"If you've never made a game yourself, you'd be amazed at how much work it is to create content."
And it's so much work because of the art, animation and effects, lets face this fact. Back in the 8-bit days the amount of work required was a lot but managable, you could put a lot more content into a 2D game in a lot less time then you can in a modern 3D rendered game in which the resolution is much higher and the more artists and designers you need just to get the most basic and mundane things done that existed in the 2D area. The same content in 2D that was easy, takes infinitely more time in the 3rd dimension just to get anywhere near the artistic quality of a good team of 2D artists. But this is something companies brought on themselves with their technolust, as we've seen with MegaMan 9 there are still people out there that like games for more then just their looks.
... are we still in fucking highschool? I really wish women did not call guys "creepy", most guys that are labelled such are most likely socially inexperienced and anxious, I really hate how women have a monopoly on dehumanizing these men when what they really need is some friends and some advice about what they are doing that is socially repellant.
I swear such women are seriously giving the good women of their gender a bad name by being so immature, by continuing to dehumanize them based on their social difficulties.
I'm sorry but you're not sophisticated enough in terms of conceptualization to engage my arguments. None of what you presented touches upon the parsimony of what I have said. You don't have the background to take on the above arguments and it would take too much time to educate you on such matters.
From our knowledge, knowability requires detectability (that is connection), there is no knowability without detectability, to trying to have a disembodied entity as you suggest goes against the grain of parsimony again. Hence the most parsimonious conceptions of god being that existence and god are one and the same, and god is the substance of all that exists.
I will simply suggest you look into the nature of truth and whether you are a derived from of reality (you being a derived form), whether there is one reality, and many subdistinctions, or there are 'many', your thinking is mired in fallacies of the enlightenment reasoning which the cognitive and brain sciences have shown to be false and quite erroneous.
(to get to the good part, watch from 15 to 25 mins)
A few wise words from are good old friend Ibn...
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
... I always laugh at people who think "ewww yuck" at recycled water, if they knew the kinds of waste products from all the other organisms that exist in their drinking water, the lakes they swim in, etc, they would be just as disgusted. We already do technically eat the waste products of other animals and ourselves and have been doing so since forever, the fact that people are so distanced from nature I think add's a lot of distortion to their perception. Since once you become divorced from the cycles of nature, by being brought up in a modern society not having to deal with or observe such processes up close and personal as a part of ones daily living, you develop really fucked up views divorced from the processes of the world.
"If the universe were eternal, why wouldn't it be possible for the universe and God to be co-eternal but distinct? The numbers "1" and "2" are both timeless abstract objects (eternal) but yet distinct."
But 2 is just a duplication of 1, you forget that the number two is made out of the first distinction (1). Not only that you're playing semantic games, "co eternal but distinct" has no meaning, if you're eternal, you're eternal all the way through. I'm assuming you're of a theological bent here... if god is omnipresent as many traditional religions present such a being, then the only explanation is that everything is made of god. Thereby everything being manifestations of existence itself, there is no simpler explanation then god the substance of existence if you are to maintain any kind of parsimony. The idea's of 'seperation' would be mere linguistic artifacts and bastardizations done by human beings that can't don't want to deal with the unparsimonious picture of god represented in their favorite holy text.
... the whole idea that there are multi-verses goes right against the grain of science itself, multiplying entities needlessly.
The two general explanations are:
Universe is eternal Universe is not eternal (eternal something else exists "outside" the universe that caused our universe)
Out of those two, you have a few options:
1) Universe is eternal, the universe is godless a) Universe is eternal, the universe is god (i.e. reality/god = same thing)
2) Universe is not eternal, the universe is godless a) Universe is not eternal, the universe has a god "outside" the universe (which is a misnomer, technically the universe would be 'inside' god, or made out of god, god being the substance of all existence, in this case).
Those are the most parsimonious explanations, if you want to be honest with yourself.
"The good is only abundant after decidedly non-abundant software engineers, artists, musicians, etc. have worked for a few years to produce the "abundant" final product."
Which is entirely irrelevant, according to the laws of supply and demand, their "product" should net zero because supply always exceeds demand. Imagine you had the same situation in the real world, lets say someone invents replicator technology, suddenly entire industries would go belly up. I find it highly annoying that slashdots resident capitalists are so pro protectionist, you want to protect an industry that clearly has "whip and buggy" issues, they want to try to profit off something that is not scarce. If it were food and water and the means to transport them virtually free, these people would be politically ostracized. These people still profit mightily despite piracy and artificially restricting supply. So until these industries go belly up any argument to the contrary is quite hollow. I could talk about the violation of civil and consumer rights that these industries engage in but I won't bother here since most of the responses are too mired in ideology, rather then reason.
There's no right to profit, period, if you don't like the situation don't work in the industry. Maybe you'd have us go back to pre-internet times and have all our hardware locked down with orwellian spyware just to make sure we were paying for our goods. The truth is modern protectionists need their head read, did prohibition work? Trying to go against the flow of human advancement with primitive territoriality and propertarianism is only going to further stifle innovation. We've seen what "protecting IP" has done for the patent trolls.
"But 'going without' seems to not be part of today's vocabulary...."
There is a fundamental, philosophical, problem with the traditional means of distribution: the product is abundant.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
The world of "data" follows different laws of physics. Once I have the data in my hot little hands, I can dupe it and give it to my friends at zero direct cost to the producer. There is no deprivation of use nor loss of mineral resources nor expenditure of manpower nor anything of the sort on the part of the original developer when I dupe the game. None. And I can keep duplicating this ad infinitum, at the same cost (of zero). Furthermore, my friends can do the same thing with the copy I gave them...there is no quality loss. Once the good exists, it can instantly exist everywhere. It is "abundant."
So, since data follows these laws (rather than the laws of physics as they apply to physical goods) people feel like they are being cheated when they are asked to pretend like data follows the laws of physical matter. They feel like they are buying into a game of control that is unfounded in reality and ultimately to their detriment (since they have to pay money for something that doesn't cost anything to produce *at this point* (excluding initial development costs).
I think that is the crux of the issue. We all know the good is abundant, and we all feel like pretending it is not abundant is just silly, and harmful to us (our money is valuable and if we can get games for free then we have optimized our entertainment budget and have more money left over to spend on things like real cars or educations for our kids or what-have-you).
What about the potential sale that we are "stealing" by copying a game? We tend to respond to such a representation of the situation with great cynicism. We feel like the only reason you feel entitled to every single "potential sale" is because of your insistence in everyone pretending that an abundant good is not abundant. We also feel that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism doesn't guarantee a ROI on any kind of development project, so when you pound your fist in frustration at your inability to monetize your efforts we just say, "so try something else...thats what every other entrepreneur in the world has had to do...what makes you special? If you can't make money making games, do something else, and stop whining." That is the same answer we get when we complain about being downsized, or having low-paying jobs, or what-have-you...so we are just responding in turn.
Lastly...the age-old mantra that if you can't get money for every copy of a game sold then nobody will produce games. I call BS. Piracy has been alive and well since before the computer games industry even existed...and since long before DRM existed...and the games industry thrived anyway. And it still thrives, despite the continued piracy. Enough people pay for the games (even though they don't have to) that the industry remains profitable. If that model suddenly stops working, alternative models will take its place (subscription-based games and so on). If that doesn't work, and we actually reach a state of utter cultural impoverishment where no games (or music or movies, for that matter) are being produced because nobody can figure out how to make a living doing it (and no hobbiests manage to churn out anything but crap)...which I maintain is an economic impossibility...but if it actually does occur THEN it might make sense to talk about legislation...and there would be a conscious buy-in to the legislation from the masses who are hungry for cultural enrichment. However, this has not happened, and I therefore submit that it makes no sense to try to preemptively pass laws based on the premise that it might happen (given that it is unlikely and that the situation could be remedied after the fact anyway).
"If I'm not mistaken, 360 games aren't areacoded, and there's really no huge homebrew-scene for it, so the only thing modchips are good for are "backups", which - let's face it - are an excuse to run pirated games..."
Which I consider a fair trade considering the corporate extension of copyright law and the lack of works going into the public domain. Let's not act as if these gamers are the only bad guys, corporations are much more nasty then the average plebe can hope to comprehend.
Slashdot Mirror
... let's not forget that.
People think that what their minds perceive and read into events is 'the truth', most people are not aware or sophisticated enough to distrust and question their own perceptions. It's something learned through introspection, much reading, and experience... that one cannot trust how one feels/reads or perceives the world all the time, and that much of what we perceive or think we perceive, is riddled with errors throughout. Most people never question their first 'impressions' when they 'perceive' racism.
As always - people see what they want to see. Think of popular movies or novels, if you asked what was the message of a the movie or novel, you'd get a tonne of different responses, each person reading things into and out of the entertainment experience based on their own psyche and past history.
... this all comes back to the fact that we have a limited amount of attention and the more we spend it focusing on conversation and thinking about what is being talked about (our minds eye being 'elsewhere') the less we are focused on our environmental surroundings, we're increasing the attention resolution for conversation on the phone while decreasing our attention to the surrounding environment.
This happens even without a phone, I remember driving and having something fall on my lap, just the momentary lapse of your mind focusing on something other then what you're doing takes your ability to focus attention on the environmental changes as needed. I remember almost hitting someone, even though just a few seconds before everything was clear. After that I promised myself never again would I ever change the focus of my attention. It's just too dangerous a lot of the time, in heavy traffic / slowed to a crawl, I don't mind if people are on their phones when traffic is going to be at a dead stop for a while but outside of that, I wouldn't personally.
It's the same thing - using your mind to assess the situation intelligently, it applies to everthing - if you exercise and don't overeat you won't get fat (barring extenuating circumstances like disease, etc).
Personally I think anyone who's a phone junky really needs to experience what it's like to have a near miss accident, there's nothing like a near miss to change your thinking about driving forever IMHO. I'm glad my near miss never hurt anyone, and it certainly smartens you up afterwards. For the people who say "eh I'll risk it", I just hope you don't one day end up regretting it.
Note that they don't actually open the packages themselves unless there is an extenuating circumstance (bomb, etc), they might quickly look inside the box with a scanner to detect explosive devices/etc, but this is far and away from what ISP's can do, you can't send bombs that can blow people up in packets. Your counter example is not with the intent of my original message - being able to open private mail.
"It's not logical reasons that keep people from shifting to Linux now, it's just the fear of the unknown."
Personally I don't understand why linux doesn't merely mimic the desktop of XP and windows completely, people don't give a shit about the OS they use. Those kinds of details are beyond them most of the time. If I were adding to linux development, I'd get really serious about copying the user shell of windows completely and then the user would not have to know that he's "Using linux" and worry about the unfamiliarity of linux. I'm not sure if they could get away with this without MS claiming some BS. But that would be the way to go is to 'sneak linux in' by making the UI work and look exactly like XP so the user can't tell the difference and doesn't have to be 'afraid' of using linux because the user experience is the same.
"Seriously, feel free to go to some other website. Some of us want lack of quality here on /.. That's what gives it character."
More importantly, I think people who complain about spelling and errors forget what it is to be human. In fact I think most sane people as they get older are not bugged by the small stuff and know errors will happen. People aren't perfect and this naive idea that they should be held up to a "higher standard" is nonsense. I'd certainly like to talk to the co-workers and wives/husbands exboyfriends/girlfriends of these complainers and see what kind of mistakes they make in their lives and how they treat other people.
People need to chill out and relax and not take everything so seriously, there are far more serious things in the world to worry about that actually need to be addressed like war and poverty, then pedantically worrying about mistakes people make. You'd think professionals would know by now that mistakes always happen, constantly, even if you are not aware of them and human beings are not these perfect machines. They get old, they have health problems, they are under constant stress... they are for the most part just trying to live like everybody else.
"Isn't territorial behaviour a precursor to privacy? I mean, the idea of "Stay out of my room, I'm getting dressed" can't be that far off "Stay out of my burrow or I bite you, you strange animal""
That's kind of a bad example, many cultures have had no problem with nudity. What is strange is how human cultures differ in respect to how they view themselves, their bodies, nudity, etc. Christianity and western culture is really fucked up when it concerns nudity and sexuality when you compare it against other peoples, cultures and times. Modern people like to think they are greatest thing since sliced bread and they aren't "primitive", but anyone who is a student of history knows this is not the case. Many modern people are more primitive then many ancient cultures in their behaviour and ethics.
"So the game went from unplayable at the lowest settings possible, to being still unplayable at the lowest settings possible?
Great move MS, youv'e really solved a problem there."
The software render is for older games, not for the cutting edge. The theory is - as CPU's get faster, games will be able to be playable. It's not a bad idea IMHO because many games 'break' on GPU's if they are not supported in the driver as hardware changes. Software compatability is something that is a bit frustrating with GPU's, to give an example: Final fantasy 7 for the PC will not work properly on modern cards without issues. In these cases the software render is a godsend provided it intelligently maintains the needed functionality for such games and doesn't botch it like many GPU manufacturers.
"The bottlenecks are a source of fun, not a detraction from it."
Which reminds me about the problem of all MMO's: Too much time is wasted travelling, in every MMO almost, almost all waste an enormous amount of time making you travel at slow spaces and limiting things like warping, etc, which causes the game and action to drag. In space this problem is MUCH worse and anyone suggesting the idea of "infinite space" is asking for enormous gameplay problems with herding players in the right direction. If you play ANY game in which large levels and open spaces are a part, the contact between players is more infrequent and the time between events is more spaced out, and this ends up being boring and a waste of players time.
This is the reason why good level design and the best levels in games manage the flow of gameplay and events over time so that you don't get totally bored out of your mind by poor design and lack of interesting things to do or events to engage in.
Many people who complain about games have no understanding of what makes game fun to begin with, and I think if they actually were forced to design the levels and have to endure the wrath of end users they would think twice about their 'perfect level' or 'perfect world' of 'open-ness', open worlds have severe drawbacks in that interaction between users, items, npc's and events becomes longer in time and spaced more far apart. Most people hate travelling, this is why people pay good money when they travel around the world for the fastest flights. The same applies to games : People don't have infinite time and reducing time spent doing menial and boring tasks is something all game designers need to be aware of.
In my opinion one of the cardinal sins of MMO's is the backtracking of gameplay to try to force users to waste even more time in their worlds as they collect money over the months. MMO's have been a real setback IMHO in terms of gameplay for RPG's and games in general in a lot of ways where the business becomes about breaking gameplay for profit, which is the exact opposite of why games became great in the first place.
"We don't need a reinvented GUI, we need programmers that enforce just that little bit of GUI hygiene in the first place."
I don't believe this is the case at all, I am quite frustrated by modern GUI's and the rather enormous amount of complexity that has come about for information and data-types in general, try pasting text directly into youtube video, etc, adding/changing and editing things right now is a real PITA (pain in the ass) because many GUI's for editing absolutely suck, but hte problem goes deeper and I think many modern gui's suffer from lack of creativity in the programming space.
Some apps I really love that have enormous creative ideas for GUI development should anyone actually take these ideas and improve them and blend them right...
I've been keeping my eye on the following:
http://www.spacetime.com/
http://www.thebrain.com/
http://www.cooliris.com/
IMHO right now what is must frustrating about user interfaces is in fact the fact that one needs seperate programs to modify disparate and differing formats of video, audio and text. Mixing and mashing different data-types for even the most SIMPLEST and basic things one could do in the real world takes a hell of a lot of work on a computer.
I've often thought of writing a GUI totally based on proper hybrid of vector based shapes and typography, as well as the implementation of layers (ala photoshop) and nodes ala the brain for connecting data in different ways which would need to be prototyped and tested. I have so many ideas for GUI development that I'm bursting at the seems, but I don't have the time to poor into such a large project, though it's something I've personally thought about and writing about and hoping someone could pick up the design and run with it.
... really the whole point of playing an interactive game is to be there, to be present, to be interacting. The "avatar" is merely a game developers idea of what kinds of avatars will appeal generally to a broad audience. Personally the thing that got me so hooked on Galactiv Civilizations 2 and Need for speed underground, was the ability to shape and customize your "avatar" (in GC2 it was ships, in NFS it was cars), to a greater or lesser degree. NFS was limited by the designs of the cars themselves and our expectations of what 'cars' should look like. In Galciv2 you have more leeway and your designs did not have to submit to such expectations of "looking right".
In fact it's a turn off when game developers make characters people don't want to BE playing and have no feedback when you change gear/armor/etc/etc, Diablo and Diablo2 had some amount of visual feedback when users changed equipment and that's what I thought really added to the game - you are there, you are in the game, you are able to modify and change stuff and have that change reflected in the reality of the game world. Their is level of personal investment in characters whether people are aware of it or not, even 'machines' like planes, cars, etc. Because you are the one in control of the experience provided game developers have given you something you want to experience.
"The notion that memory == intelligence is just wrong."
Memory is intimately tied to intelligence, so memory in many circumstances does equal intelligence. If you look at any psychometric testing at all and looked at the tests for working memory, and especially PS scores. PS scores + working memory correlate well with matehmatical ability. Having a good size working memory is critical for problem solving. Think about it in another way: How high can the visual fidelity be on a computer with little video memory? Not much. Same applies to many other things where processing large amounts of data is required.
I think most people wish they had better memories, memory is critical in learning. Everything you learn becomes memorized to some extent at the subconscious level. When you learn to ride a bike, you've remembered it.
"Garriott is a veteran, the whole Ultima Franchise, not to mention UO (more or less) started the whole (grahpical) MMO thing. To have created an epic fail like Tabula Rasa, is surprising."
Garriott was out of his element, he hasn't really designed games (been in the trenches) for years, he should have stuck to fantasy I knew his sci-fi work was doomed from the moment I heard it. Few companies can do sci-fi, and even then their success is moderate.
"It WAS a lot of fun. It just couldn't shake the stigma attached to it when it went through the public beta. The game had VASTLY improved throughout the year. They resolved many of the issues people had with the game. It is sad really."
Why is it sad? Why should customers expect to pay on launch for a product that isn't ready? I really hate that about the software industry, from a design and engineering perspective, the software industry still sucks at designing things.
Emotion and rational thought cannot ever be disconnected from one another, most people are unaware of what the cognitive sciences have discovered in the last 30 years. The elightenments/western view of science and reason right now is being undermined by the cognitive sciences, and many in the cognitive sciences are well aware of this fact.
(Quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg
(Longer version)
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
(to get to the good part, watch from 15 to 25 mins)
A few wise words from our old friend Ibn...
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-haytham
I'm talking about the type of game and not just merely the process of creating art. I'm talking about overall content creation for 2D games, not the process of creating 2D art and textures for a 3D game (which still requires more work then a 2D game). Things also have advanced considerably since then in terms of hardware horsepower and graphical resolution, thereby increasing demands in both domains. Consider the level of detail of old 8-bit and 16-bit games, you don't need anywhere near the texture detail you need as in a modern 3d game that has many levels of zoom, mip maps, because the perspective (in 3D) changes, the textures have to look good at many angles and many levels of zoom, this is not the case for 2D games for most of them.
I hear what you're saying we'll get to heavily auto-generated content sooner or later with simply advancements in math, science and technology.
Your post reminds me of midtown madness...
http://www.microsoft.com/games/midtown/default.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/games/midtown/screens/feb99/bacon0033.jpg
Midtown madness had a large play area and you could drive around and do whatever you wanted but it quickly got boring, we will still need developers to tune the experience and the content. I imagine autogenerated content will not be enough, there will always be tuning required and always the need for artists and animators for art direction, and such like.
But just generating content for contents sake today is not what is going to make a game, you have to have interesting things to do and interesting characters that inhabit them. There is one thing that makes game memorable are hitting all the notes, some games get it all right (god of war comes to mind) but most others get a few right (mainly visuals) and everything else barely passable.
I can only imagine how long it took to tune the game mechanics in a game like god of war, the settings, the camera angles, etc. It's not merely content generation, it's the experience that the developers create for the gamers themselves. Why should a gamer care about game x/y/z? what's the hook? whats the draw?
The thing I loved about 8-bit games was that developers had to find the fun and expression of meaning within constraints and not depend on merely flash to sell games.
"If you've never made a game yourself, you'd be amazed at how much work it is to create content."
And it's so much work because of the art, animation and effects, lets face this fact. Back in the 8-bit days the amount of work required was a lot but managable, you could put a lot more content into a 2D game in a lot less time then you can in a modern 3D rendered game in which the resolution is much higher and the more artists and designers you need just to get the most basic and mundane things done that existed in the 2D area. The same content in 2D that was easy, takes infinitely more time in the 3rd dimension just to get anywhere near the artistic quality of a good team of 2D artists. But this is something companies brought on themselves with their technolust, as we've seen with MegaMan 9 there are still people out there that like games for more then just their looks.
... are we still in fucking highschool? I really wish women did not call guys "creepy", most guys that are labelled such are most likely socially inexperienced and anxious, I really hate how women have a monopoly on dehumanizing these men when what they really need is some friends and some advice about what they are doing that is socially repellant.
I swear such women are seriously giving the good women of their gender a bad name by being so immature, by continuing to dehumanize them based on their social difficulties.
I'm sorry but you're not sophisticated enough in terms of conceptualization to engage my arguments. None of what you presented touches upon the parsimony of what I have said. You don't have the background to take on the above arguments and it would take too much time to educate you on such matters.
From our knowledge, knowability requires detectability (that is connection), there is no knowability without detectability, to trying to have a disembodied entity as you suggest goes against the grain of parsimony again. Hence the most parsimonious conceptions of god being that existence and god are one and the same, and god is the substance of all that exists.
I will simply suggest you look into the nature of truth and whether you are a derived from of reality (you being a derived form), whether there is one reality, and many subdistinctions, or there are 'many', your thinking is mired in fallacies of the enlightenment reasoning which the cognitive and brain sciences have shown to be false and quite erroneous.
Quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg
(Longer version)
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
(to get to the good part, watch from 15 to 25 mins)
A few wise words from are good old friend Ibn...
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-haytham [wikipedia.org]
... I always laugh at people who think "ewww yuck" at recycled water, if they knew the kinds of waste products from all the other organisms that exist in their drinking water, the lakes they swim in, etc, they would be just as disgusted. We already do technically eat the waste products of other animals and ourselves and have been doing so since forever, the fact that people are so distanced from nature I think add's a lot of distortion to their perception. Since once you become divorced from the cycles of nature, by being brought up in a modern society not having to deal with or observe such processes up close and personal as a part of ones daily living, you develop really fucked up views divorced from the processes of the world.
"If the universe were eternal, why wouldn't it be possible for the universe and God to be co-eternal but distinct? The numbers "1" and "2" are both timeless abstract objects (eternal) but yet distinct."
But 2 is just a duplication of 1, you forget that the number two is made out of the first distinction (1). Not only that you're playing semantic games, "co eternal but distinct" has no meaning, if you're eternal, you're eternal all the way through. I'm assuming you're of a theological bent here... if god is omnipresent as many traditional religions present such a being, then the only explanation is that everything is made of god. Thereby everything being manifestations of existence itself, there is no simpler explanation then god the substance of existence if you are to maintain any kind of parsimony. The idea's of 'seperation' would be mere linguistic artifacts and bastardizations done by human beings that can't don't want to deal with the unparsimonious picture of god represented in their favorite holy text.
... the whole idea that there are multi-verses goes right against the grain of science itself, multiplying entities needlessly.
The two general explanations are:
Universe is eternal
Universe is not eternal (eternal something else exists "outside" the universe that caused our universe)
Out of those two, you have a few options:
1) Universe is eternal, the universe is godless
a) Universe is eternal, the universe is god (i.e. reality/god = same thing)
2) Universe is not eternal, the universe is godless
a) Universe is not eternal, the universe has a god "outside" the universe (which is a misnomer, technically the universe would be 'inside' god, or made out of god, god being the substance of all existence, in this case).
Those are the most parsimonious explanations, if you want to be honest with yourself.
"The good is only abundant after decidedly non-abundant software engineers, artists, musicians, etc. have worked for a few years to produce the "abundant" final product."
Which is entirely irrelevant, according to the laws of supply and demand, their "product" should net zero because supply always exceeds demand. Imagine you had the same situation in the real world, lets say someone invents replicator technology, suddenly entire industries would go belly up. I find it highly annoying that slashdots resident capitalists are so pro protectionist, you want to protect an industry that clearly has "whip and buggy" issues, they want to try to profit off something that is not scarce. If it were food and water and the means to transport them virtually free, these people would be politically ostracized. These people still profit mightily despite piracy and artificially restricting supply. So until these industries go belly up any argument to the contrary is quite hollow. I could talk about the violation of civil and consumer rights that these industries engage in but I won't bother here since most of the responses are too mired in ideology, rather then reason.
There's no right to profit, period, if you don't like the situation don't work in the industry. Maybe you'd have us go back to pre-internet times and have all our hardware locked down with orwellian spyware just to make sure we were paying for our goods. The truth is modern protectionists need their head read, did prohibition work? Trying to go against the flow of human advancement with primitive territoriality and propertarianism is only going to further stifle innovation. We've seen what "protecting IP" has done for the patent trolls.
"But 'going without' seems to not be part of today's vocabulary...."
There is a fundamental, philosophical, problem with the traditional means of distribution: the product is abundant.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
The world of "data" follows different laws of physics. Once I have the data in my hot little hands, I can dupe it and give it to my friends at zero direct cost to the producer. There is no deprivation of use nor loss of mineral resources nor expenditure of manpower nor anything of the sort on the part of the original developer when I dupe the game. None. And I can keep duplicating this ad infinitum, at the same cost (of zero). Furthermore, my friends can do the same thing with the copy I gave them...there is no quality loss. Once the good exists, it can instantly exist everywhere. It is "abundant."
So, since data follows these laws (rather than the laws of physics as they apply to physical goods) people feel like they are being cheated when they are asked to pretend like data follows the laws of physical matter. They feel like they are buying into a game of control that is unfounded in reality and ultimately to their detriment (since they have to pay money for something that doesn't cost anything to produce *at this point* (excluding initial development costs).
I think that is the crux of the issue. We all know the good is abundant, and we all feel like pretending it is not abundant is just silly, and harmful to us (our money is valuable and if we can get games for free then we have optimized our entertainment budget and have more money left over to spend on things like real cars or educations for our kids or what-have-you).
What about the potential sale that we are "stealing" by copying a game? We tend to respond to such a representation of the situation with great cynicism. We feel like the only reason you feel entitled to every single "potential sale" is because of your insistence in everyone pretending that an abundant good is not abundant. We also feel that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism doesn't guarantee a ROI on any kind of development project, so when you pound your fist in frustration at your inability to monetize your efforts we just say, "so try something else...thats what every other entrepreneur in the world has had to do...what makes you special? If you can't make money making games, do something else, and stop whining." That is the same answer we get when we complain about being downsized, or having low-paying jobs, or what-have-you...so we are just responding in turn.
Lastly...the age-old mantra that if you can't get money for every copy of a game sold then nobody will produce games. I call BS. Piracy has been alive and well since before the computer games industry even existed...and since long before DRM existed...and the games industry thrived anyway. And it still thrives, despite the continued piracy. Enough people pay for the games (even though they don't have to) that the industry remains profitable. If that model suddenly stops working, alternative models will take its place (subscription-based games and so on). If that doesn't work, and we actually reach a state of utter cultural impoverishment where no games (or music or movies, for that matter) are being produced because nobody can figure out how to make a living doing it (and no hobbiests manage to churn out anything but crap)...which I maintain is an economic impossibility...but if it actually does occur THEN it might make sense to talk about legislation...and there would be a conscious buy-in to the legislation from the masses who are hungry for cultural enrichment. However, this has not happened, and I therefore submit that it makes no sense to try to preemptively pass laws based on the premise that it might happen (given that it is unlikely and that the situation could be remedied after the fact anyway).
"If I'm not mistaken, 360 games aren't areacoded, and there's really no huge homebrew-scene for it, so the only thing modchips are good for are "backups", which - let's face it - are an excuse to run pirated games..."
Which I consider a fair trade considering the corporate extension of copyright law and the lack of works going into the public domain. Let's not act as if these gamers are the only bad guys, corporations are much more nasty then the average plebe can hope to comprehend.