"He disagreed and said creativity comes from pressure and deadlines."
I disagree, creativity comes from simply spending time on a problem. There are many problems that take years of sitting on before one comes to a conclusion in many fields, where a person has worked on a problem off and on in their spare time. Much 'creativity' is just as much spending time doing combinations in a random/blind search as anything else.
If we had the ability to take what was imagined in a persons mind and directly translate it into images and sounds, I think we would see a lot more 'creativity' and 'genius'. Right now the bottleneck is getting the creativity out of the head, not the brain itself, but in expressing inward ideas and notions outwardly.
I'm sure there are many 'genius' creatives out there who have sick genius imaginations but simply never had the inclination nor the means to express it.
I agree, supcom had a lot of potential that was blown by bad design decisions. It's too bad they lost any kind of creativity when they mirrored the factions, the xpack was entirely underwhelming, Supcom did not need another race, what it needed was the replacement and/or tweaking and upgrading of the art and units that already existed.
The artist they hired to do supcom were simply all over the map, some of the stuff they produced was great, while the bulk of it was "meh" and uninspired.
"for instance, persecuting someone because of their sexual orientation--that is bigotry."
So are you saying it's bigotted to discriminate against pedophiles, what about against incest? Technically these are orientations that 'can't be changed'?
"And even if you can express the theorems that way, that doesn't necessarily give them the same meaning. Equivalent yet different meaning? That must be philosophy!;)
All the symbol pushing in the world doesn't necessarily result in meaningful computation, and there is a necessary degree of applicability, at least intuitively, for many elements of mathematics which is the duality of its power to be wonderfully applicable to the world we live in to express observations yet also a study in the beauty and nature of structure and relation independent of any observation at all!"
I hear you but mathematicas has become a kind of cult/religion for many, people don't like having what they deem as 'the most reliable way to truth' shown to be wrong, i.e. it is one of many paths, which makes their claims to 'the only way' erroneus.
We could frame it a different way too, the whole idea of subjective and objective is also incoherent, consider: You feel that something is hot, are you going to consider that a subjective feeling? Because if you don't move your hand you will get burned.
We could put it another way: If life is incapable of determining truth, then how did it survive and evolve? Being able to know and navigate an environment (knowing truth from error) is a paramount ability, and this totally lost on many in western science and the current fallacies of the enlightenment we currently suffer from.
The idea that reality is seperate from itself has come out of the enlightenment and the idea that things are seperate, when in fact they are not.
Some books you might enjoy, they are not perfect but they are stimulating reads:
Privacy is at odds with existing in the world...
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Googling Security
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· Score: 2, Interesting
... as it is today.
Privacy can't really be protected, it's an illusion. If my neighborhood has webcams pointing out their window at my house or appartment can I stop them? If someone is dedicated enough or well funded enough, they can find out much about you simply since by existing and interacting with society you leave 'breadcrumb' traces of yourself everywhere you go. Anytime you make any kind of economic transaction via electronic means that is recorded, even if you use money, camera's inside the store are recording your habits.
Why does no one complain about being recorded inside a supermarket for instance? Why is it acceptable, when over the years people can study it and research it and deduce things about you? Google just makes the process convenient and slightly easier, the lack of privacy has always been there whenever you enter into stores, shops and malls. If google needs to have data requested, why don't all corporations who record and monitor people over a long time also not need to be queried about their data?
As you can see the scope and financial undertaking of being consistent would be fairly large, and I doubt you'd get much out of it.
Supreme commander 1 was horribly designed, this fact must be faced. It used a tonne of memory and the art direction was barely passable for roughly %50 of units for all races.
They also ruined the story of the game in the expansion by cutting off any interesting threats one could generate off the first game. The seraphim just became another evil-alien faction, when in the beginning they were these enlightened beings. It was really sad that the seraphim were all cookie-cutter. They killed the russian girl in the 2nd expansion in just the stupidest way. The supcom team proved they had the skills to make a game but not one outstanding unfortunately, they made a lot of basic blunders that had been learned 10 years prior. I still can point out basic errors when I go back to starcraft and see how they basically mimic'd the interludes between and sometimes in missions with animated faces.
The art direction for supcom in game was horrible and uninspired, I have to say. They had some neat units but they were outnumbered very largely by mundane and uninspired ones. They bit off way more then they could chew, and the strategic zoom really made the art irrelevant since the distance and scale of the units was way off so you could hardly ever realy enjoy the units that were halfway decent becuase you were almost always zoomed out for strategic reasons.
"I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"
Your sample is not representative... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.
The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.
... because it challenges all forms of knowledge. Math is actually an extension of philosophy, what George Boole and other mathematicians did, was they began to develop systems of logic under a mathematical style.
Most people here have no clue of what has been discovered in Cognitive linguistics in the last 30 years and it's implications for wester thought and mathematics as a whole. The mind does not use symbolic computation at all. Therefore it does not use the symbolic logic mathematicians developed over the centuries, and this has a lot of philosophical implications for math and scientific method as a whole.
For those up for it you should begin you adventues here:
What has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years undermines the enlightenments view of reason and enlightenment's view of education., most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason:
Philosophy is important and is highly under-rated, those who disdain it know nothing much about it. You can tell people who are intelligent from who is not, from their opinions about philosophy and the kinds of things they know or say about it. I think Ibn Al-Haytham expresses the need to always question societies sacred dogma's.
"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
This is what too few human beings do, they always trust in what they have been taught... when much of what they know is fraught with error. I am weary of anything I say as well as anything any other man says, that cannot be demonstrated. Therefore, I only defend what can be demonstrated.
The majority of people do not take the above view, they are overconfident in what they think they know when they hardly know anything at all.
"I don't care much about, though, is that they are still focused on killing monsters and amassing wealth, and it gets very tedious after a while. Are there really no games where the goal isn't so much about increasing your own power and defeating others, but where you instead grow by doing things that benefit others, where enemies shouldn't be killed out of hand, but befriended; where learning, teaching, research and social skills are more important than killing and conquering?"
The truth is not enough is known to make such a game, not only that it is subject to aesthetic prejudices and what not. I would imagine text adventures would fall into the realm you're looking for... any GUI based game needs all the bells and whistles to be compelling to an audience.
If the market wanted such games it would demand them and pay for them, you are in an extreme minority IMHO.
The technology is not there yet to do "social" games, the AI and interfaces are pretty primitive and no computer NPC's would be believable, hell games have a hard enough time portraying well voice acted computer animated characters with gusto... the truth is what the OP wants in the story is not technically within our means, and most "help each other games" are subject to the same kind of politics and BS and those who have free time vs those who don't (disproportionately kids, teens or idiots).
Finally.. go do good deeds in the real world, that is what the real world is for. Games are an escape from real life, that is what they are supposed to be - fantasy and wish fulfillment.
The point of games is to do what is entertaining. Almost all videogames have elements of competition in them, or competition against the computer.
You missed the point, I was talking about each game being better and 'more exciting' then the last, few games really are. MK Double dash was a slap in the face.
"FF8 and 10 were fantastic games..."
FF8 was ok, but FFX was not "fantastic", it was ho-hum, I hated the lack of variety in enemies, the sameness of it all. FFX had too many points where you could just 'check out' for 10-15 or more minutes at a time not doing anything - that totally sucks. FFX had the least customizable characters in the FF series! Armor and weapons were gay as hell... how you could say FFX was the best is just seriously in question when you consider the gameplay flaws of FFX.
After FF7 with its graphics whorefest it attracted a lot of stupid people into the RPG fold. I would easily class FF4, FF6, FF7 > FFX. FFX had the really forced and horrible voice acting, trynig to fit it to japanese voice animated models, I really hope some day companies get a clue and include Japanese Voiceovers with english subtitles.
"but your opinion isn't exactly the majority viewpoint,"
Which means absolutely nothing, many gamers are drooling idiots, many of whom have no prior gaming experience or who's tastes are shitty as many games and their sales prove. As gaming became more mainstream gameplay started to take a backseat in certain genres in certain games, ironically you point out RPG's which are some of the worst offenders when it comes to having grown stale in the gameplay innovation department.
"Call of Duty 1 and 2 were kind of OK games in my opinion, but Call of Duty 4 was amazing, and was a big step forward for the franchise."
I agree some games buck the trend, I wholeheartedly a gree CoD4 was better then the other first 3, but I was never a big CoD fan, CoD seemed to come out of the "FPS mass market" churn machine for quarterly profits IMHO. I was pleasantly surprised by CoD4, the first CoD game I actually really dug.
I agree also that Mario galaxy reclaimed some marioness and is par with M64, but after sunshine I was not looking forward to another mario game so that kind of sapped my energy. Sunshine really killed the experience for me at the time.
Twilight princess could have been a hell of a lot better, there were times in windwaker that easily outshone Twilight princess, TWP felt really forced in parts and because TWP was for the most part a gamecube game, it suffered graphically. TWP is the game the gamecube really needed but never got. Also the ocean in Wind waker was what really killed windwaker for me and a lot of others, that and the lack of dungeons. Windwaker had all the elements of a good game, but was missing the content and the stupid design decision to have the boat and the ocean play a major part was what messed up the game.
"Part of the charm of FF9 for me was the music and art direction. It was a homage to the older games."
I know but they could have done a way better job, I would have loved FF1'ish world remade with a modern FF story, FF1 had some of the best thematic art for boss, characters and monsters.
The thing I didn't like about FF9 was the art direction and the fact it was caught between sci-fi and a bad disney movie, the game itself was ok, but the art direction really ruined a lot of it for me. Especially the tin man guy and the monkey boy, the main hero, and the fat greenish queen... ugh. That and they took the black mage and cutified him to the maximum extent (vivi?? wtf?), I was hoping FF9 would take the world thematically right back to it's roots in FF1, but that was not the case. So FF9 for me was quite a let down in that regard, although I have to say over all it was a decent game, but still nowhere approaching the earlier games.
It just seems to me the people at square have some real issues sticking to a thematic vision, their games after FF7 started to go all over the place. I remember one of the big boss men taking his teams to task recently in comments I read about "making games for gamers, not the ones you want to make!" which is absolutely necessary, especially if you don't know how to design a gaming experience.
Just because they have the skills to make a game, does not mean they know how to design a gaming experience! as I like to say. The bossman apparently agreed.
"You know what? This whining that there hasn't been a decent new game in years is getting seriously old."
It's not that there hasn't been a decent new game in years, it's that there hasn't been a decent IMPROVEMENT in the new games in a franchise, in years! I can count MANY games who after their first sequel or two started going downhill and just sputtering around. There are tonnes of games that never live up to their potential and I am not the only one who feels this way. I can name a tonne right off the bat:
-Mario kart Double dash and Wii (not as good as original, MK64 and the one for the DS) -Zelda's after OOT started going downhill. OoT > Majora's mask, OoT > Twilight princess > Wind waker. -Mario Sunshine, Mario 64 > Sunshine, Mario Galaxy > Sunshine. -Final fantasy series FF4, FF6, FF7 > FF8, FF9, FF10 -Streetfighter2+, Street Fighter 2 > many from the SF Alpha series (can't remember all of them) -Megaman X, Megaman X and X2, > others in the series -Original Megaman, MM1, MM2, MM3 > most of the rest practically -Chrono Trigger, Chronot trigger > Chrono Cross (Chrono Cross totally f'd up the chrono universe, I'm not the only one who feels this way AGHHH!!) -Castlevania after Castlevania IV (SNES) and SOTN (PS1), sputtered out, CS4, SoTN > Most if not all of the 3D castlevania's... and that is just the beginning of my list, I could go on.
Sometimes I have to wonder how out of touch many people are, and especially some of the people who work at game companies.
... I wonder if this is an easy way of coming down on net neutrality, under the guise of being "rational".
Re:Cue the "where are MY games" whining
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The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
"Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax"
These sites are not representative of the gaming community at large, they are anecdotal at best. Not only that, but most hardcore gamers are older then the whiny peeps you find at gamefaqs and the wii boards. You have a minority of whiny people who know shit all about gaming, If they have even been with gaming since the 80's or earlier. Remember only people who have something to whine about will post, so you get a disproportinate amount of whining. You rarely get posts to say "hey this is great!" on any kind of forum.
The internet can make what is a tiny radical minority look like a whole group.
Re:Cue the "where are MY games" whining
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The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"The crowd that has labeled themselves the "hardcore" gamers is going to be upset about this."
Cue "hardcore are the sux" troll. No one is going to be upset about this, the hardcore is not "upset" about gaming becoming more mainstream. In fact MANY hardcore gamers are behind the push of "exer-gaming", many hardcore gamers have had the thought about combining gaming with their exercise. I know because I used to do it, it's the whole reason many of us got a DS or gameboy advance - you can sit on a exercise bike and game while keeping your mind from going insane from boredom. I also used to take my gameboy advance and played classics like Final fantasy 2 and FF tactics while I walked. This is NOT new to the hardcore let me assure you, if anything the hardcore are the ones leading the pack. Many of us have had similar thoughts of combining racing/gaming with exercising, other gamers who wanted to develop such things knew the time wasn't ready for it in terms of 1) Cost and 2) Market readyness to be profitable. Now that gaming is much more mainstream, we're really seeing the fulfillment of a lot of ideas the hardcore have had ALL along.
This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls.
"At this point, the only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of a citizenry who would rather demand their rights to be dependent consumers be affirmed than actually take responsibility and take effective steps to remedy their situation."
Most people are too ignorant of technology, it's not that they are "lazy", most have no idea of the implications of what is going on. So companies simply take advantage of the ignorance of a population at the time of the net's development. Most people are not tech savvy, they're essentialy zombies in that they use the net to 'get stuff done' but don't give a shit otherwise.
"Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you."
And? Everyone has a copy of a television in their house and a phone, do we go back to sharing one TV, one phone, with our neighborhood like they do in poorer countries? It's impossible to have autonomy. The problem is human beings suck, suppose we delegated an online storage/TV/video website so that users had access to that one video file around the clock, there would be no way to pay for it and content providers would be screaming bloody murder.
The truth is, people are not going back to add infested content unless forced to in certain sectors where it is possible for special interests to limit users access.
"Part of this is the fact that such applications require someone to relatively social and extroverted (to find value in interaction for interaction's sake), yet also find a need to supplement or replace being social in the real world with doing it online. These subsets don't overlap too much."
You're assuming way too much here, I believe the audience would be for the introverts first. Introverts ARE social beings, it's the real world face-to-face stuff that throws some of them off. They recharge by being alone, they are drained in crowds in the real world. A virtual world takes away the "draining" aspect of socializing, it also gives introverts time to think and respond, instead of having to do it instinctually on the fly.
What is slashdot, if not one big socializing forum on a page? Most people come to slashdot for the comments, the stories are important in their own right. But they act more like a lens to focus discussion on relevant (and not so relevant) issues to people. What would slashdot be without it's comments section? People want to engage other people, whether they are introverted/socially mal-adjusted or whether they are extraverted.
"I'm sorry- How is an author's desire to get paid for his sweat, labor, and time "obsolete"?"
The same way technology displaced the desire of the horse and buggy peoples desire to get paid for doing horse and buggy stuff, and hence put those guys out of work. The same way technology replaced a plethora of menial jobs. Instead of paying people who have desire for more pay - you have a machine do it. If technology was advanced enough there would be mass unemployment or no one would have to work and some other economic system would have to come about --> capitalism obsoleted/transformed by automation technology, why pay an expensive human when creative robot AI 3000 can design and make your IP, software, games, entertainment, etc?
When virtual actors get good enough real hollywood actors will become even more a minority then they are now, or who will only stay aloft because people will bay for the "reality" of real actors, over AI and computer generated characters and movies. So yes an author's desire to get paid can be obsoleted by new technology, engineers are authors of physical stuff, while writers are authors of information. Which in the information age has highly fluctuating value due to ease of copying, etc.
Most books written by authors on technical subjects suck because such books are beyond the scope of a few people. It is rare when you can find a person or group of persons to author a book that hits all the bases. IMHO the nature of authorship is greatly enhanced by the internet because now you can do mass collaboration with wiki's and forums, which is beyond any single or single small group of human beings.
Gears of Wars for the PC was a travesty, that windows for live shit just killed it. Not to mention the crash to desktop bugs. Gears for PC was a sloppy seconds port, and I think we should all kill microsoft for introducing windows live bullshit. I imagine it was more to to frustrate users/pirates then anything else, but Gears war pirated anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"During stress testing they had over 300 players in one small area fighting without a hiccup (try that in any FPS game!)."
You can't compare an MMO to an FPS, MMO's play mechanics are severely restricted and neutered compared to real-time games.
"He disagreed and said creativity comes from pressure and deadlines."
I disagree, creativity comes from simply spending time on a problem. There are many problems that take years of sitting on before one comes to a conclusion in many fields, where a person has worked on a problem off and on in their spare time. Much 'creativity' is just as much spending time doing combinations in a random/blind search as anything else.
If we had the ability to take what was imagined in a persons mind and directly translate it into images and sounds, I think we would see a lot more 'creativity' and 'genius'. Right now the bottleneck is getting the creativity out of the head, not the brain itself, but in expressing inward ideas and notions outwardly.
I'm sure there are many 'genius' creatives out there who have sick genius imaginations but simply never had the inclination nor the means to express it.
I agree, supcom had a lot of potential that was blown by bad design decisions. It's too bad they lost any kind of creativity when they mirrored the factions, the xpack was entirely underwhelming, Supcom did not need another race, what it needed was the replacement and/or tweaking and upgrading of the art and units that already existed.
The artist they hired to do supcom were simply all over the map, some of the stuff they produced was great, while the bulk of it was "meh" and uninspired.
"for instance, persecuting someone because of their sexual orientation--that is bigotry."
So are you saying it's bigotted to discriminate against pedophiles, what about against incest? Technically these are orientations that 'can't be changed'?
"And even if you can express the theorems that way, that doesn't necessarily give them the same meaning. Equivalent yet different meaning? That must be philosophy! ;)
All the symbol pushing in the world doesn't necessarily result in meaningful computation, and there is a necessary degree of applicability, at least intuitively, for many elements of mathematics which is the duality of its power to be wonderfully applicable to the world we live in to express observations yet also a study in the beauty and nature of structure and relation independent of any observation at all!"
I hear you but mathematicas has become a kind of cult/religion for many, people don't like having what they deem as 'the most reliable way to truth' shown to be wrong, i.e. it is one of many paths, which makes their claims to 'the only way' erroneus.
We could frame it a different way too, the whole idea of subjective and objective is also incoherent, consider: You feel that something is hot, are you going to consider that a subjective feeling? Because if you don't move your hand you will get burned.
We could put it another way: If life is incapable of determining truth, then how did it survive and evolve? Being able to know and navigate an environment (knowing truth from error) is a paramount ability, and this totally lost on many in western science and the current fallacies of the enlightenment we currently suffer from.
The idea that reality is seperate from itself has come out of the enlightenment and the idea that things are seperate, when in fact they are not.
Some books you might enjoy, they are not perfect but they are stimulating reads:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/
http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
... as it is today.
Privacy can't really be protected, it's an illusion. If my neighborhood has webcams pointing out their window at my house or appartment can I stop them? If someone is dedicated enough or well funded enough, they can find out much about you simply since by existing and interacting with society you leave 'breadcrumb' traces of yourself everywhere you go. Anytime you make any kind of economic transaction via electronic means that is recorded, even if you use money, camera's inside the store are recording your habits.
Why does no one complain about being recorded inside a supermarket for instance? Why is it acceptable, when over the years people can study it and research it and deduce things about you? Google just makes the process convenient and slightly easier, the lack of privacy has always been there whenever you enter into stores, shops and malls. If google needs to have data requested, why don't all corporations who record and monitor people over a long time also not need to be queried about their data?
As you can see the scope and financial undertaking of being consistent would be fairly large, and I doubt you'd get much out of it.
Supreme commander 1 was horribly designed, this fact must be faced. It used a tonne of memory and the art direction was barely passable for roughly %50 of units for all races.
They also ruined the story of the game in the expansion by cutting off any interesting threats one could generate off the first game. The seraphim just became another evil-alien faction, when in the beginning they were these enlightened beings. It was really sad that the seraphim were all cookie-cutter. They killed the russian girl in the 2nd expansion in just the stupidest way. The supcom team proved they had the skills to make a game but not one outstanding unfortunately, they made a lot of basic blunders that had been learned 10 years prior. I still can point out basic errors when I go back to starcraft and see how they basically mimic'd the interludes between and sometimes in missions with animated faces.
The art direction for supcom in game was horrible and uninspired, I have to say. They had some neat units but they were outnumbered very largely by mundane and uninspired ones. They bit off way more then they could chew, and the strategic zoom really made the art irrelevant since the distance and scale of the units was way off so you could hardly ever realy enjoy the units that were halfway decent becuase you were almost always zoomed out for strategic reasons.
"I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"
Your sample is not representative ... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.
The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.
... because it challenges all forms of knowledge. Math is actually an extension of philosophy, what George Boole and other mathematicians did, was they began to develop systems of logic under a mathematical style.
Most people here have no clue of what has been discovered in Cognitive linguistics in the last 30 years and it's implications for wester thought and mathematics as a whole. The mind does not use symbolic computation at all. Therefore it does not use the symbolic logic mathematicians developed over the centuries, and this has a lot of philosophical implications for math and scientific method as a whole.
For those up for it you should begin you adventues here:
What has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years undermines the enlightenments view of reason and enlightenment's view of education., most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason:
(quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg [tinypic.com]
Longer version:
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142 [linktv.org]
Philosophy is important and is highly under-rated, those who disdain it know nothing much about it. You can tell people who are intelligent from who is not, from their opinions about philosophy and the kinds of things they know or say about it. I think Ibn Al-Haytham expresses the need to always question societies sacred dogma's.
"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]
This is what too few human beings do, they always trust in what they have been taught... when much of what they know is fraught with error. I am weary of anything I say as well as anything any other man says, that cannot be demonstrated. Therefore, I only defend what can be demonstrated.
The majority of people do not take the above view, they are overconfident in what they think they know when they hardly know anything at all.
"I don't care much about, though, is that they are still focused on killing monsters and amassing wealth, and it gets very tedious after a while. Are there really no games where the goal isn't so much about increasing your own power and defeating others, but where you instead grow by doing things that benefit others, where enemies shouldn't be killed out of hand, but befriended; where learning, teaching, research and social skills are more important than killing and conquering?"
The truth is not enough is known to make such a game, not only that it is subject to aesthetic prejudices and what not. I would imagine text adventures would fall into the realm you're looking for... any GUI based game needs all the bells and whistles to be compelling to an audience.
If the market wanted such games it would demand them and pay for them, you are in an extreme minority IMHO.
The technology is not there yet to do "social" games, the AI and interfaces are pretty primitive and no computer NPC's would be believable, hell games have a hard enough time portraying well voice acted computer animated characters with gusto... the truth is what the OP wants in the story is not technically within our means, and most "help each other games" are subject to the same kind of politics and BS and those who have free time vs those who don't (disproportionately kids, teens or idiots).
Finally.. go do good deeds in the real world, that is what the real world is for. Games are an escape from real life, that is what they are supposed to be - fantasy and wish fulfillment.
The point of games is to do what is entertaining. Almost all videogames have elements of competition in them, or competition against the computer.
You missed the point, I was talking about each game being better and 'more exciting' then the last, few games really are. MK Double dash was a slap in the face.
"FF8 and 10 were fantastic games..."
FF8 was ok, but FFX was not "fantastic", it was ho-hum, I hated the lack of variety in enemies, the sameness of it all. FFX had too many points where you could just 'check out' for 10-15 or more minutes at a time not doing anything - that totally sucks. FFX had the least customizable characters in the FF series! Armor and weapons were gay as hell... how you could say FFX was the best is just seriously in question when you consider the gameplay flaws of FFX.
After FF7 with its graphics whorefest it attracted a lot of stupid people into the RPG fold. I would easily class FF4, FF6, FF7 > FFX. FFX had the really forced and horrible voice acting, trynig to fit it to japanese voice animated models, I really hope some day companies get a clue and include Japanese Voiceovers with english subtitles.
"but your opinion isn't exactly the majority viewpoint,"
Which means absolutely nothing, many gamers are drooling idiots, many of whom have no prior gaming experience or who's tastes are shitty as many games and their sales prove. As gaming became more mainstream gameplay started to take a backseat in certain genres in certain games, ironically you point out RPG's which are some of the worst offenders when it comes to having grown stale in the gameplay innovation department.
"Call of Duty 1 and 2 were kind of OK games in my opinion, but Call of Duty 4 was amazing, and was a big step forward for the franchise."
I agree some games buck the trend, I wholeheartedly a gree CoD4 was better then the other first 3, but I was never a big CoD fan, CoD seemed to come out of the "FPS mass market" churn machine for quarterly profits IMHO. I was pleasantly surprised by CoD4, the first CoD game I actually really dug.
I agree also that Mario galaxy reclaimed some marioness and is par with M64, but after sunshine I was not looking forward to another mario game so that kind of sapped my energy. Sunshine really killed the experience for me at the time.
Twilight princess could have been a hell of a lot better, there were times in windwaker that easily outshone Twilight princess, TWP felt really forced in parts and because TWP was for the most part a gamecube game, it suffered graphically. TWP is the game the gamecube really needed but never got. Also the ocean in Wind waker was what really killed windwaker for me and a lot of others, that and the lack of dungeons. Windwaker had all the elements of a good game, but was missing the content and the stupid design decision to have the boat and the ocean play a major part was what messed up the game.
"Part of the charm of FF9 for me was the music and art direction. It was a homage to the older games."
I know but they could have done a way better job, I would have loved FF1'ish world remade with a modern FF story, FF1 had some of the best thematic art for boss, characters and monsters.
"but I thought FF9 was fantastic "
The thing I didn't like about FF9 was the art direction and the fact it was caught between sci-fi and a bad disney movie, the game itself was ok, but the art direction really ruined a lot of it for me. Especially the tin man guy and the monkey boy, the main hero, and the fat greenish queen... ugh. That and they took the black mage and cutified him to the maximum extent (vivi?? wtf?), I was hoping FF9 would take the world thematically right back to it's roots in FF1, but that was not the case. So FF9 for me was quite a let down in that regard, although I have to say over all it was a decent game, but still nowhere approaching the earlier games.
It just seems to me the people at square have some real issues sticking to a thematic vision, their games after FF7 started to go all over the place. I remember one of the big boss men taking his teams to task recently in comments I read about "making games for gamers, not the ones you want to make!" which is absolutely necessary, especially if you don't know how to design a gaming experience.
Just because they have the skills to make a game, does not mean they know how to design a gaming experience! as I like to say. The bossman apparently agreed.
"You know what? This whining that there hasn't been a decent new game in years is getting seriously old."
It's not that there hasn't been a decent new game in years, it's that there hasn't been a decent IMPROVEMENT in the new games in a franchise, in years! I can count MANY games who after their first sequel or two started going downhill and just sputtering around. There are tonnes of games that never live up to their potential and I am not the only one who feels this way. I can name a tonne right off the bat:
-Mario kart Double dash and Wii (not as good as original, MK64 and the one for the DS) ... and that is just the beginning of my list, I could go on.
-Zelda's after OOT started going downhill. OoT > Majora's mask, OoT > Twilight princess > Wind waker.
-Mario Sunshine, Mario 64 > Sunshine, Mario Galaxy > Sunshine.
-Final fantasy series FF4, FF6, FF7 > FF8, FF9, FF10
-Streetfighter2+, Street Fighter 2 > many from the SF Alpha series (can't remember all of them)
-Megaman X, Megaman X and X2, > others in the series
-Original Megaman, MM1, MM2, MM3 > most of the rest practically
-Chrono Trigger, Chronot trigger > Chrono Cross (Chrono Cross totally f'd up the chrono universe, I'm not the only one who feels this way AGHHH!!)
-Castlevania after Castlevania IV (SNES) and SOTN (PS1), sputtered out, CS4, SoTN > Most if not all of the 3D castlevania's
Sometimes I have to wonder how out of touch many people are, and especially some of the people who work at game companies.
... I wonder if this is an easy way of coming down on net neutrality, under the guise of being "rational".
"Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax"
These sites are not representative of the gaming community at large, they are anecdotal at best. Not only that, but most hardcore gamers are older then the whiny peeps you find at gamefaqs and the wii boards. You have a minority of whiny people who know shit all about gaming, If they have even been with gaming since the 80's or earlier. Remember only people who have something to whine about will post, so you get a disproportinate amount of whining. You rarely get posts to say "hey this is great!" on any kind of forum.
The internet can make what is a tiny radical minority look like a whole group.
"The crowd that has labeled themselves the "hardcore" gamers is going to be upset about this."
Cue "hardcore are the sux" troll. No one is going to be upset about this, the hardcore is not "upset" about gaming becoming more mainstream. In fact MANY hardcore gamers are behind the push of "exer-gaming", many hardcore gamers have had the thought about combining gaming with their exercise. I know because I used to do it, it's the whole reason many of us got a DS or gameboy advance - you can sit on a exercise bike and game while keeping your mind from going insane from boredom. I also used to take my gameboy advance and played classics like Final fantasy 2 and FF tactics while I walked. This is NOT new to the hardcore let me assure you, if anything the hardcore are the ones leading the pack. Many of us have had similar thoughts of combining racing/gaming with exercising, other gamers who wanted to develop such things knew the time wasn't ready for it in terms of 1) Cost and 2) Market readyness to be profitable. Now that gaming is much more mainstream, we're really seeing the fulfillment of a lot of ideas the hardcore have had ALL along.
This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls.
"At this point, the only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of a citizenry who would rather demand their rights to be dependent consumers be affirmed than actually take responsibility and take effective steps to remedy their situation."
Most people are too ignorant of technology, it's not that they are "lazy", most have no idea of the implications of what is going on. So companies simply take advantage of the ignorance of a population at the time of the net's development. Most people are not tech savvy, they're essentialy zombies in that they use the net to 'get stuff done' but don't give a shit otherwise.
"I want something like an Eee Box, but optimized for movies and gaming. We could call it the "We Box". "
It already exists, it's called the Xbox 360. Also if Intel consolized their margins on CPU's would go way down.
"Hell... It's about time"
"Garbage isn't the problem.. the problem is that we have millions of copies of the same data. Think of the 50gb of video games you may have installed.. 10 million people have the same games as you."
And? Everyone has a copy of a television in their house and a phone, do we go back to sharing one TV, one phone, with our neighborhood like they do in poorer countries? It's impossible to have autonomy. The problem is human beings suck, suppose we delegated an online storage/TV/video website so that users had access to that one video file around the clock, there would be no way to pay for it and content providers would be screaming bloody murder.
The truth is, people are not going back to add infested content unless forced to in certain sectors where it is possible for special interests to limit users access.
"New technology is in no way replacing authors and publishers the way it replaced horse and buggy people."
You misread my comment, it is replace peoples desire to get a profit from a work that is no longer profitable.
"Part of this is the fact that such applications require someone to relatively social and extroverted (to find value in interaction for interaction's sake), yet also find a need to supplement or replace being social in the real world with doing it online. These subsets don't overlap too much."
You're assuming way too much here, I believe the audience would be for the introverts first. Introverts ARE social beings, it's the real world face-to-face stuff that throws some of them off. They recharge by being alone, they are drained in crowds in the real world. A virtual world takes away the "draining" aspect of socializing, it also gives introverts time to think and respond, instead of having to do it instinctually on the fly.
What is slashdot, if not one big socializing forum on a page? Most people come to slashdot for the comments, the stories are important in their own right. But they act more like a lens to focus discussion on relevant (and not so relevant) issues to people. What would slashdot be without it's comments section? People want to engage other people, whether they are introverted/socially mal-adjusted or whether they are extraverted.
"I'm sorry- How is an author's desire to get paid for his sweat, labor, and time "obsolete"?"
The same way technology displaced the desire of the horse and buggy peoples desire to get paid for doing horse and buggy stuff, and hence put those guys out of work. The same way technology replaced a plethora of menial jobs. Instead of paying people who have desire for more pay - you have a machine do it. If technology was advanced enough there would be mass unemployment or no one would have to work and some other economic system would have to come about --> capitalism obsoleted/transformed by automation technology, why pay an expensive human when creative robot AI 3000 can design and make your IP, software, games, entertainment, etc?
When virtual actors get good enough real hollywood actors will become even more a minority then they are now, or who will only stay aloft because people will bay for the "reality" of real actors, over AI and computer generated characters and movies. So yes an author's desire to get paid can be obsoleted by new technology, engineers are authors of physical stuff, while writers are authors of information. Which in the information age has highly fluctuating value due to ease of copying, etc.
Most books written by authors on technical subjects suck because such books are beyond the scope of a few people. It is rare when you can find a person or group of persons to author a book that hits all the bases. IMHO the nature of authorship is greatly enhanced by the internet because now you can do mass collaboration with wiki's and forums, which is beyond any single or single small group of human beings.
"I played Gears of War 1 on the PC."
Gears of Wars for the PC was a travesty, that windows for live shit just killed it. Not to mention the crash to desktop bugs. Gears for PC was a sloppy seconds port, and I think we should all kill microsoft for introducing windows live bullshit. I imagine it was more to to frustrate users/pirates then anything else, but Gears war pirated anyway.