Gears of War looks to be one of the most innovative FPS games in a long time, attempting to invent a new sub-genre, the "cover-shooter", putting an extremely strong focus on using your environment as cover while in firefights.
How is that new? Tactical shooters require that AFAIK and you practically need to use cover if you want to survive firefights in FEAR.
What about the 360? Gears of War looks beautiful, so what next? Completely destructable, more free form levels, thats what!
I thought we reached that with Black (PS2/Xbox) already?
Re:Well, videogames aren't about the story.
on
Once Upon A Game
·
· Score: 1
That's not the only factor. We've seen a lot more works than the people from back then and most of our works were created with knowledge of works that weren't written back then. What was a new idea back then may have become boring in the meantime (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, the basic idea as well as many scenes have been used as a base for modern works so much the original seems downright mundane). What may have been a witty or daring joke back then is an old clichee by now (Soviet Russia jokes were funny once upon a time). Language and practices change, the "hidden allegories" in old pieces may have been highly obvious at the time, the language used may have conveyed something that is lost on us today (in 200 years I doubt many will know what "gangsta" language expresses today). References to contemporary events (especially rulers) mean nothing to us today.
Why did the creator do all that work for free, hoping to sell copies later, when it's obvious that any "leech" can sell copies at an equal or lower price? That doesn't sound like a sensible business plan at all.
Yes but who are you going to charge for the process of creating that work? A very rich person who wants something done maybe but publishers would be better off to go the leech route instead of hiring someone to create a work.
It's no different from saying that a monopoly on wheat held by one farmer doesn't take away my ability to compete with him, so long as I sell rye instead. You're ignoring that I can't compete with him in the wheat market, and that this lack of competition may harm the public and harms me by restricting my freedom.
Except we're talking about luxuries, not necessities and it is much harder to create a new kind of crop than it is to create a new work of art*. If Twain charged too much he wouldn't sell much.
Yes. If I have a Mickey Mouse story I want to tell, then I'm going to need the character. Not being able to use it harms me, since I'm not free to create the works I want. It harms the public, since they can't get those works, which could very well be better than those that Disney makes. It harms Disney to a degree, since the lack of competition lets it sit on its laurels.
You are free to create a character that is sufficiently similar to Mickey Mouse for the purpose of your story. If you need a character with the amount of backstory that Mickey Mouse has then you have to create that backstory yourself instead of resting on someone else's laurels. This forces you to compete by using your ability to contribute new ideas to the market instead of your ability to copy others. Or go to Japan (most of those games simply disregard copyright and use other people's characters).
Now I'm hardly a poster child of honouring copyright but I think that if you wish to compete in the market you should do it with your own ideas so the market can judge you on your own merits.
Yes because there are people who like the stuff that comes out of there. Losing the sector as it is today would mean losing a lot of variety out there. While you may get enough voluntary workers to make a few books and songs, maybe even the occassional movie, there'd be almost no videogames available.
I paid for the OS which included updates for a period of time, why would I go to Joe instead? He didn't make the OS I purchased...
If MS didn't charge for the updates it would obviously not be a new source of income. If Joe set up a mirror offering the updates for free MS couldn't rely on that income anymore.
What about them... if you'll look at the parent post you'll see this is about not making money ONLY from the media (Which IP laws make very profitable) but from the value of additional services that can be purchased that enhance the main creation.
Yes and Daggon wants to know how you'd generate that extra income if the data on the medium does not need any additional services (e.g. a music CD).
For example, most every game should eventually have the changable terrain that we saw in Red Faction.
I think that issue is rooted in game design rather than technical limitations, just like there is no technical limit that forces RPG stories on the PS2 to be completely linear. The less variables there are to take into account the better you can predict what the user will do. Changeable terrain means you have to think of what could happen to your level design. In a game where wooden doors aren't indestructible you won't see wooden doors require much more than shooting, in a game where thin walls can be destroyed you won't see thin walls around areas that require keys to get into. In current games you see a lot of complaints about realism because the player wants to do something he's not supposed to do. If you're suddently supposed to do it and the game takes it into account it's no longer as interesting because it doesn't give you an unexpected advantage. See that bonus item behind unbreakable glass? Do you think it'd be put into the same place if you could just shoot the glass? If the designer doesn't want you to do something then he'll design the game to not allow that (without some serious trickery), no matter what your abilities.
Jazz Jackrabbit and Commander Keen are incompatible, anyway. Id Software's games regularly proclaim "The Dopefish lives" but in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 it was said that "Spaz ate the Dopefish".
Sure. But the key question is, what's best for the public? Having works be unencumbered with efficient competition, or having encumberances and less competition but more investment put into works?
Both are valuable, and we should strive to have a balance of the two that is best for the public, rather than concentrating on one over the other. Of course, shifts in technology and society may tip the balance against copyright. But I don't think we're close to that yet.
I don't think copyright takes away any ability to compete, it merely requires you to compete using your own work instead of other people's work. Nobody's stopping you from creating a work of art and using it to compete with the big players. Of course, if you can't contribute something meaningful to the market you will be ignored and that's the way it should be, those who cannot compete should be pushed out of the market, except competing is restricted to creating works and selling them instead of copying other people's works and selling them at a lower price.
Patents may hurt the competition that happens in a market but copyright certainly does not.
Some list the "perpetual copyright" on Mickey Mouse as a problem that Copyrighrt has brought upon us but they should ask themselves "Is it really important that works can contain Mickey Mouse?". Copyright does not withold anything you'd need to compte in a market, it always leaves you the option to create a viable substitute for use in your work.
If some copyrighted work is too expensive for you, well, ignore it. It's not food, it's not water, it's just entertainment. You can live without it.
Which is why you need to sell more than the data on the CD. Sell the support, sell the add-on hardware, sell the live performance, sell the training, sell the installation, sell a follow-up newsletter. The time you spend making that CD is your labor -- don't put in your labor until you know how you can market the product in a world of competition and "piracy."
So if you had the idea and ability to create a product that could not give you these additional income sources (e.g. movies, music or videogames) you'd either not do it or intentionally cripple your product to require such additional services? That'd still kill off the largest part of the entertainment sector.
If you went to Target and bought a bottle of Soda with the word 'Coke' on it, and it had coffee in it (actually, see Coke Blak, heh), or had a knockoff cola, you'd stop shopping at Target. Leave the quality control to the middle man between you and Coke -- that's their job to make sure you're happy.
But you wouldn't know which store is Target, either. Or visit some other place, you couldn't rely on the names at all to help you identify anything, you could go into Target and find a grocery store or a bar or a brothel. You wouldn't know which "Coke" they are selling until you try it, you could not carry over any previous experience with any product. All that just for some idea that "names should belong to noone".
If you can do a job cheaper, the market will prosper. I don't believe in derivative profits being forced by law -- I believe the market sets many precedents why people will buy the original over the knockoff (see "generic products" for details).
Problem is when you add media to the deal. With media the good sold is information, not the physical medium. But there would be no protection on the information and we have technology to duplicate the information without loss of quality. Concrete example: Take CDs. Data on a CD can take months or years and thousands or millions of dollars to produce but the actual medium only costs pennies these days. As you know, it's trivial to just take a CD and make an exact duplicate of it. A leech could sell tons of CDs for 1$ a piece by simply copying content he did not create. The original creator cannot offer any advantage to the buyer (except for the feeling of supporting the creator but few care about that) that the copiers cannot offer. So the creator would have to compete with the leeches on price directly but the leech has no development costs to cover. As a result the leech has a competitive advantage over the creator.
A market for data simply cannot exist without some restriction on just going out and copying it. And while you may argue that it's better to create art for the love of it instead of for money, you cannot deny that it would lower the productivity of artists simply because they would have to spend time they would spend on creating art on earning the money to live. Oh, and of course because they can't use the same budget current for-profit art uses. While some argue that Hollywood movies are unnecessary I still think that it would mean a loss of variety and artistic freedom. It's not like anyone's preventing you from making your own art in your free time, that possibility always remains. But without copyright the freedom to use expensive elements in your art would be greatly reduced, simply because you can't afford it.
So long time players can scream at people who dare to buy a sniper rifle and call them "n00b" and claim that they are using an aimbot because obviously noone but them could hit a barn without using cheats.
I think "unskippable" trailers are only found on DVDs for rental places. Not that it matters, I haven't encountered a DVD that'd disable enough buttons to prevent me from skipping the "unskippable" material (admittedly I don't watch many DVDs), though I'm tempted to send the DVD player back to the manufacturer as defective because "sometimes the buttons don't work, there must be something broken in the firmware".
Re:I think the point is missed by a few of you
on
Once Upon A Game
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· Score: 1
but there is not one game where you can say the majority of the educated populace has played.
Tetris?
Re:Well, videogames aren't about the story.
on
Once Upon A Game
·
· Score: 1
Last I checked most great works were also highly entertaining works at the time of their creation. A true master can wrap a message into an entertaining work without compromising either part.
Re:Well, videogames aren't about the story.
on
Once Upon A Game
·
· Score: 1
Now take Hitchcock's timing and apply it to a book. See the problem? There is no time in a book. Each medium has its abilities and limits, while a book can describe the thoughts and inner workings of a character and can brush aside time with a single sentence a movie can use timing and visuals to its advantage.
realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But then you are creating a book or movie with a few game elements, not a game. You are trying to shoehorn the paradigms of a traditional medium into a different one. That approach will not net us any good "literature" for games unless by accident. To create a truly great work you must use your medium to your advantage, not fight it. Instead of thinking up a static storyline and making a game for the player to play while listening to it you need to ask yourself "What can the interactive medium do for me?". Trying to shoehorn one type of literature into another one gives us the many book-to-movie conversions that lack 90% of the story because the movie format is not suited for gigantic storylines.
The interactive medium can explore how changing variables can affect the system as a whole. Take the movie Lola Runs: It shows three different stories effected by changing one variable, the time at which Lola leaves the house. Now expand upon that. In the interactive medium you do not write down scenarios and how they would play out under your guidance, you create a scenario and teach the machine to play them out for you. The user makes choices within the game and the game reacts. Instead of leading the user along a path to show predetermined events you'd put the user in there, guide the user but don't force him, let him change the world through his actions and see the outcome.
The sandbox is the real point of the interactive medium but it could be improved yet. If you wanted to convey a morality you could let the player play around with the things you want him to learn about, showing the outcomes of his interaction in a dynamic way that makes the player understand the logic you are using. Of course, that has to be subtle or the user will brand it as propaganda (e.g. open the window while the heating is on "the world dies of global warming", as seen in some pro-environment educational game). If you wanted to show the way our politicians make decisions, make a political simulation that puts the player into similar situations and let him see what his proposed actions would cause, if you wanted to talk about the value of life you could let the player perform actions that could hurt or kill others and see the suffering, etc.
Writing a storyline and calling it a game is like drawing a graph and calling it a function.
Well, if you haven't found any non-skippable sections on your DVDs, you're lucky...
Non-skippable as in "the device won't let you use certain buttons" or as in "no amount of hammering the stop, next chapter and menu buttons will make it do what you want"?
He's talking about HDCP, the HD disc standards require that your device will not send the full data unless the target device uses HDCP. No currently sold PC hardware uses that. And only devices that can't record are allowed to use HDCP, I think.
I think the FF games don't call it death, they say the character is wounded or incapacitated. Which would also explain why you can revive a characer a hundred times during battle but it suddently stops working when the character is killed in a cutscene. Though it does not explain why damage in a cutscene is fatal in a single blow while you can take tank shells to the face without even flinching in combat.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't describe what makes UE easier than Doom 3.
Mods are usually made for games with large userbases, MP keeps the userbase larger after release.
Gears of War looks to be one of the most innovative FPS games in a long time, attempting to invent a new sub-genre, the "cover-shooter", putting an extremely strong focus on using your environment as cover while in firefights.
How is that new? Tactical shooters require that AFAIK and you practically need to use cover if you want to survive firefights in FEAR.
What about the 360? Gears of War looks beautiful, so what next? Completely destructable, more free form levels, thats what!
I thought we reached that with Black (PS2/Xbox) already?
That's not the only factor. We've seen a lot more works than the people from back then and most of our works were created with knowledge of works that weren't written back then. What was a new idea back then may have become boring in the meantime (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, the basic idea as well as many scenes have been used as a base for modern works so much the original seems downright mundane). What may have been a witty or daring joke back then is an old clichee by now (Soviet Russia jokes were funny once upon a time). Language and practices change, the "hidden allegories" in old pieces may have been highly obvious at the time, the language used may have conveyed something that is lost on us today (in 200 years I doubt many will know what "gangsta" language expresses today). References to contemporary events (especially rulers) mean nothing to us today.
Consumer demand for new works guarantees that there'll always be money for people who can write them.
But if it's cheaper to buy from a leech, how much of that money is really available for the people who can write them?
Why did the creator do all that work for free, hoping to sell copies later, when it's obvious that any "leech" can sell copies at an equal or lower price? That doesn't sound like a sensible business plan at all.
Yes but who are you going to charge for the process of creating that work? A very rich person who wants something done maybe but publishers would be better off to go the leech route instead of hiring someone to create a work.
It's no different from saying that a monopoly on wheat held by one farmer doesn't take away my ability to compete with him, so long as I sell rye instead. You're ignoring that I can't compete with him in the wheat market, and that this lack of competition may harm the public and harms me by restricting my freedom.
Except we're talking about luxuries, not necessities and it is much harder to create a new kind of crop than it is to create a new work of art*. If Twain charged too much he wouldn't sell much.
Yes. If I have a Mickey Mouse story I want to tell, then I'm going to need the character. Not being able to use it harms me, since I'm not free to create the works I want. It harms the public, since they can't get those works, which could very well be better than those that Disney makes. It harms Disney to a degree, since the lack of competition lets it sit on its laurels.
You are free to create a character that is sufficiently similar to Mickey Mouse for the purpose of your story. If you need a character with the amount of backstory that Mickey Mouse has then you have to create that backstory yourself instead of resting on someone else's laurels. This forces you to compete by using your ability to contribute new ideas to the market instead of your ability to copy others. Or go to Japan (most of those games simply disregard copyright and use other people's characters).
Now I'm hardly a poster child of honouring copyright but I think that if you wish to compete in the market you should do it with your own ideas so the market can judge you on your own merits.
*= apply term loosely
Yes because there are people who like the stuff that comes out of there. Losing the sector as it is today would mean losing a lot of variety out there. While you may get enough voluntary workers to make a few books and songs, maybe even the occassional movie, there'd be almost no videogames available.
I paid for the OS which included updates for a period of time, why would I go to Joe instead? He didn't make the OS I purchased...
If MS didn't charge for the updates it would obviously not be a new source of income. If Joe set up a mirror offering the updates for free MS couldn't rely on that income anymore.
What about them... if you'll look at the parent post you'll see this is about not making money ONLY from the media (Which IP laws make very profitable) but from the value of additional services that can be purchased that enhance the main creation.
Yes and Daggon wants to know how you'd generate that extra income if the data on the medium does not need any additional services (e.g. a music CD).
For example, most every game should eventually have the changable terrain that we saw in Red Faction.
I think that issue is rooted in game design rather than technical limitations, just like there is no technical limit that forces RPG stories on the PS2 to be completely linear. The less variables there are to take into account the better you can predict what the user will do. Changeable terrain means you have to think of what could happen to your level design. In a game where wooden doors aren't indestructible you won't see wooden doors require much more than shooting, in a game where thin walls can be destroyed you won't see thin walls around areas that require keys to get into. In current games you see a lot of complaints about realism because the player wants to do something he's not supposed to do. If you're suddently supposed to do it and the game takes it into account it's no longer as interesting because it doesn't give you an unexpected advantage. See that bonus item behind unbreakable glass? Do you think it'd be put into the same place if you could just shoot the glass? If the designer doesn't want you to do something then he'll design the game to not allow that (without some serious trickery), no matter what your abilities.
Jazz Jackrabbit and Commander Keen are incompatible, anyway. Id Software's games regularly proclaim "The Dopefish lives" but in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 it was said that "Spaz ate the Dopefish".
Sure. But the key question is, what's best for the public? Having works be unencumbered with efficient competition, or having encumberances and less competition but more investment put into works?
Both are valuable, and we should strive to have a balance of the two that is best for the public, rather than concentrating on one over the other. Of course, shifts in technology and society may tip the balance against copyright. But I don't think we're close to that yet.
I don't think copyright takes away any ability to compete, it merely requires you to compete using your own work instead of other people's work. Nobody's stopping you from creating a work of art and using it to compete with the big players. Of course, if you can't contribute something meaningful to the market you will be ignored and that's the way it should be, those who cannot compete should be pushed out of the market, except competing is restricted to creating works and selling them instead of copying other people's works and selling them at a lower price.
Patents may hurt the competition that happens in a market but copyright certainly does not.
Some list the "perpetual copyright" on Mickey Mouse as a problem that Copyrighrt has brought upon us but they should ask themselves "Is it really important that works can contain Mickey Mouse?". Copyright does not withold anything you'd need to compte in a market, it always leaves you the option to create a viable substitute for use in your work.
If some copyrighted work is too expensive for you, well, ignore it. It's not food, it's not water, it's just entertainment. You can live without it.
Which is why you need to sell more than the data on the CD. Sell the support, sell the add-on hardware, sell the live performance, sell the training, sell the installation, sell a follow-up newsletter. The time you spend making that CD is your labor -- don't put in your labor until you know how you can market the product in a world of competition and "piracy."
So if you had the idea and ability to create a product that could not give you these additional income sources (e.g. movies, music or videogames) you'd either not do it or intentionally cripple your product to require such additional services? That'd still kill off the largest part of the entertainment sector.
If you went to Target and bought a bottle of Soda with the word 'Coke' on it, and it had coffee in it (actually, see Coke Blak, heh), or had a knockoff cola, you'd stop shopping at Target. Leave the quality control to the middle man between you and Coke -- that's their job to make sure you're happy.
But you wouldn't know which store is Target, either. Or visit some other place, you couldn't rely on the names at all to help you identify anything, you could go into Target and find a grocery store or a bar or a brothel. You wouldn't know which "Coke" they are selling until you try it, you could not carry over any previous experience with any product. All that just for some idea that "names should belong to noone".
If you can do a job cheaper, the market will prosper. I don't believe in derivative profits being forced by law -- I believe the market sets many precedents why people will buy the original over the knockoff (see "generic products" for details).
Problem is when you add media to the deal. With media the good sold is information, not the physical medium. But there would be no protection on the information and we have technology to duplicate the information without loss of quality. Concrete example: Take CDs. Data on a CD can take months or years and thousands or millions of dollars to produce but the actual medium only costs pennies these days. As you know, it's trivial to just take a CD and make an exact duplicate of it. A leech could sell tons of CDs for 1$ a piece by simply copying content he did not create. The original creator cannot offer any advantage to the buyer (except for the feeling of supporting the creator but few care about that) that the copiers cannot offer. So the creator would have to compete with the leeches on price directly but the leech has no development costs to cover. As a result the leech has a competitive advantage over the creator.
A market for data simply cannot exist without some restriction on just going out and copying it. And while you may argue that it's better to create art for the love of it instead of for money, you cannot deny that it would lower the productivity of artists simply because they would have to spend time they would spend on creating art on earning the money to live. Oh, and of course because they can't use the same budget current for-profit art uses. While some argue that Hollywood movies are unnecessary I still think that it would mean a loss of variety and artistic freedom. It's not like anyone's preventing you from making your own art in your free time, that possibility always remains. But without copyright the freedom to use expensive elements in your art would be greatly reduced, simply because you can't afford it.
So long time players can scream at people who dare to buy a sniper rifle and call them "n00b" and claim that they are using an aimbot because obviously noone but them could hit a barn without using cheats.
I think "unskippable" trailers are only found on DVDs for rental places. Not that it matters, I haven't encountered a DVD that'd disable enough buttons to prevent me from skipping the "unskippable" material (admittedly I don't watch many DVDs), though I'm tempted to send the DVD player back to the manufacturer as defective because "sometimes the buttons don't work, there must be something broken in the firmware".
but there is not one game where you can say the majority of the educated populace has played.
Tetris?
Last I checked most great works were also highly entertaining works at the time of their creation. A true master can wrap a message into an entertaining work without compromising either part.
Now take Hitchcock's timing and apply it to a book. See the problem? There is no time in a book. Each medium has its abilities and limits, while a book can describe the thoughts and inner workings of a character and can brush aside time with a single sentence a movie can use timing and visuals to its advantage.
realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But then you are creating a book or movie with a few game elements, not a game. You are trying to shoehorn the paradigms of a traditional medium into a different one. That approach will not net us any good "literature" for games unless by accident. To create a truly great work you must use your medium to your advantage, not fight it. Instead of thinking up a static storyline and making a game for the player to play while listening to it you need to ask yourself "What can the interactive medium do for me?". Trying to shoehorn one type of literature into another one gives us the many book-to-movie conversions that lack 90% of the story because the movie format is not suited for gigantic storylines.
The interactive medium can explore how changing variables can affect the system as a whole. Take the movie Lola Runs: It shows three different stories effected by changing one variable, the time at which Lola leaves the house. Now expand upon that. In the interactive medium you do not write down scenarios and how they would play out under your guidance, you create a scenario and teach the machine to play them out for you. The user makes choices within the game and the game reacts. Instead of leading the user along a path to show predetermined events you'd put the user in there, guide the user but don't force him, let him change the world through his actions and see the outcome.
The sandbox is the real point of the interactive medium but it could be improved yet. If you wanted to convey a morality you could let the player play around with the things you want him to learn about, showing the outcomes of his interaction in a dynamic way that makes the player understand the logic you are using. Of course, that has to be subtle or the user will brand it as propaganda (e.g. open the window while the heating is on "the world dies of global warming", as seen in some pro-environment educational game). If you wanted to show the way our politicians make decisions, make a political simulation that puts the player into similar situations and let him see what his proposed actions would cause, if you wanted to talk about the value of life you could let the player perform actions that could hurt or kill others and see the suffering, etc.
Writing a storyline and calling it a game is like drawing a graph and calling it a function.
Well, if you haven't found any non-skippable sections on your DVDs, you're lucky...
Non-skippable as in "the device won't let you use certain buttons" or as in "no amount of hammering the stop, next chapter and menu buttons will make it do what you want"?
He's talking about HDCP, the HD disc standards require that your device will not send the full data unless the target device uses HDCP. No currently sold PC hardware uses that. And only devices that can't record are allowed to use HDCP, I think.
I'm more interested in using those disks for HD backups or storing all those gigabytes of... um... patches.
I think the FF games don't call it death, they say the character is wounded or incapacitated. Which would also explain why you can revive a characer a hundred times during battle but it suddently stops working when the character is killed in a cutscene. Though it does not explain why damage in a cutscene is fatal in a single blow while you can take tank shells to the face without even flinching in combat.