The society and the people in it are two different things.
As I understand him, our society doe not foster a reasonable set of ethics, and thus people who could just as easily behave well instead do not, as they don't have a strong ethical sense to buttress any natural tendency toward honesty.
His worldview seems based on his view of himself - a good kid at heart who was never given a proper foundation in ethical behavior.
I wonder if he addresses the messy politics of teaching ethics in one of his books.
My name is Andrew Ryan...
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...and I'm here to ask you a question.
Is a man not deserving of enjoying a good PC game without being thought a shallow tool?
No, says the gaming industry. Only the crap sells.
No, says Roger Ebert, no game can be art.
No, says half the posters in this thread, you're a lackey of SecuROM.
I rejected these answers. Instead, I came up with something different. I chose... HAPPINESS.
HAPPINESS. A state where we enjoy good games when they come along, which is rare. Where the gamer is not bound by an understandable but crippling nostalgia for old LGS games. Where great design is not belittled to death.
And with the sweat of your brow, HAPPINESS can become your state as well.
So for those still seeking out the gaming utopia you seem so fondly to desire, would you kindly go jump in the ocean, or better yet, make a better game.
Amen. A single-player game set in a dynamic world that is not solely dependent on the player's actions is not to be underestimated. Too bad no one has made a decent one with the sensory immersion of Obvilion or Bioshock yet. Some strategy games like Europa Universalis 3 approach that kind of interaction, when the player's attempt to rewrite history for one nation runs smack into the AI's simultaneous attempt to rewrite history for dozens of others. This kind of effect, if present, generally gets sold as "NO TWO GAMES/ENCOUNTERS ARE THE SAME!" as if chance or circumstance had little or no effect on our common lives.
As for Kirk, the author of the article, along with quite a few Trekkies, is mistaken on his Freud. The ego and the superego only exist to deal with the desires of the id - therefore, Kirk is the rampaging, implusive id, Spock is the rational ego, trying to solve the captain's many problems (many of which were created by that 'action-oriented' nature) and McCoy is the scolding superego, vetoing or objecting to many of the ego's green-blooded Vulcan decisions. Without those two, Kirk would have croaked a long time ago with every STD in the known universe. If you're going to use a psychological analogy for Trek, Spock is the real main character.
I did basic hardware repair on thousands of Thinkpads around '03-'04, mostly T21, T22, T23, T30s, and 40/41s, as well as the X series, 20-30-40, and some of big yet delicate A20s and A30s, as well as some models I've forgotten the names of. My favorites are the old T2x, and the X20's.
But I have a hard time viewing them as durable, as all the ones I ever saw were screwed up in some way. All the models have their stress points where the plastic always gives, and none took spill damage well. A lot of it was just wanton customer abuse, of course.
Still, I saw several T-series come in after getting backed over by a truck and still boot. They weren't my favorite jobs, though.
I'm guessing this is a clever reference to where Anthony's horrific creations go in the TZ episode "It's a Good Life," which I saw again over the New Year break.
http://tzone.the-croc.com/tzeplist/goodlife.html
Jack is what the Greeks called a sykophant - someone who starts suits for profit - an activity regarded at the time on par with child molestation. I think they had it roughly right.
Also, in almost every state, even the notice itself (written) is optional. The exceptions are generally state employees or employees with contracts explicitly demanding written notice.
I just finished it the other night. Without a doubt, the ending was vastly simplified at some point. It's ruined for me, almost completely. It's not what was advertised, certainly.
All the complex interactions between characters, the careful building up of influence, the moral issues raised - it is all simply frittered away. It's one of the worst endings to any RPG I've ever seen, and I've played a ton.
This regrettable state of affairs does lend heavily to one of three conclusions:
1) there was a major disagreement among the creators in the coding or script writing that led to a bad compromise with the ending;
2) time constraints forced a rush job that cut out anything deeply non-essential to shipping;
3) they just couldn't deliver on the ambitious nature of the plot.
It might have been all three. I certainly don't want to think the last, but this was a new studio doing the sequel. They certainly delivered a great game right up to the 'end sequence', then dropped the ball in a way that KOTOR certainly did not.
Spoilers to follow...
In the first KOTOR, the endings left the state of the party more or less known, as most of their tales were resolved before the final battle.
But here, save for perhaps Visas, none of the side characters' stories are resolved. (I played a light-side Jedi, BTW). Why bother putting HK-47 back together, or awakening the Force in anyone? No one save Kreia plays a significant role in the endgame, and I can't even sway her fate. It just turned into a Sith kill-fest and completely lost the questy, thoughtful nature that had been developed for 20+ hours of play.
And in the end, the Ebon Hawk just soars off. To where? Why? Who's at the controls? Did anyone survive the crash? My entire party just evaporated save for Mira and that annoying floating droid.
Kriea's whole plan is the height of Bizarro logic; she makes Malak in the first game look alarmingly sane. Her buddies Sion and Whatsits-with-the-mask were anticlimatic pushovers, also; they folded too easily and served no greater purpose than speed bumps.
When Kriea says, 'there is no great revelation' in the end, I knew I'd been screwed. Because there needed to be one. I expected some classic Star Wars drama - "I'm Balista/Revan/someone-other-than-an-insane-preachy -witch, looking for redemption by destroying everything, starting with you." and I didn't get it.
This was not the kind of story that needed a Patrick O'Brian-style adrupt ending. It needed an epilogue at the very least, beyond Kriea's musings before the main character is set off into the void.
...Starflight 3, Fallout 3, and Wasteland 2 come out. But by then, at 185, I will be too old to move the mouse. Hopefully, my feeble brainwaves will be up to the task.
The moral question, I suppose, is not if she should be able to force them to vote, but/should/ she force them to vote.
Americans pride themselves on their freedom so much that being stupid has also become a freedom, in an half-assed fashion. Following this to its logical conclusion, she's wrong to deny them this right; but she's also a professor in an university, in a English department, and these usually give their instructors some leeway on teaching methods (I'm a unversity TA right now and have considerable powers that I have not even explored.) By enrolling in her class her students are subject to her methods and the policies on her syllabus. She's not asking them to kill a homeless person, do handstands, or construct WOMD. I doubt this came out of left field.
I'll note none of the students have dropped or protested; all the noise is coming from outside sources that don't have their grades on the line.
Good luck. The market is pretty narrow for serious fantasy. I had an agent for almost two years on one I wrote, but it never went anywhere. Baen is the only house I'm positive that looked at it in any depth, and they liked it but said it was 'too dark'; my self-imposed ban on elves, fairies, and other cute creatures backfired, I guess...
I ended up self-publishing, which banished it to obscurity, but at least it's available. It's called Elise Journey, for the interested, on Amazon:
Slashdot Mirror
The society and the people in it are two different things.
As I understand him, our society doe not foster a reasonable set of ethics, and thus people who could just as easily behave well instead do not, as they don't have a strong ethical sense to buttress any natural tendency toward honesty.
His worldview seems based on his view of himself - a good kid at heart who was never given a proper foundation in ethical behavior.
I wonder if he addresses the messy politics of teaching ethics in one of his books.
...and I'm here to ask you a question.
Is a man not deserving of enjoying a good PC game without being thought a shallow tool?
No, says the gaming industry. Only the crap sells.
No, says Roger Ebert, no game can be art.
No, says half the posters in this thread, you're a lackey of SecuROM.
I rejected these answers. Instead, I came up with something different. I chose... HAPPINESS.
HAPPINESS. A state where we enjoy good games when they come along, which is rare. Where the gamer is not bound by an understandable but crippling nostalgia for old LGS games. Where great design is not belittled to death.
And with the sweat of your brow, HAPPINESS can become your state as well.
So for those still seeking out the gaming utopia you seem so fondly to desire, would you kindly go jump in the ocean, or better yet, make a better game.
Amen. A single-player game set in a dynamic world that is not solely dependent on the player's actions is not to be underestimated. Too bad no one has made a decent one with the sensory immersion of Obvilion or Bioshock yet. Some strategy games like Europa Universalis 3 approach that kind of interaction, when the player's attempt to rewrite history for one nation runs smack into the AI's simultaneous attempt to rewrite history for dozens of others. This kind of effect, if present, generally gets sold as "NO TWO GAMES/ENCOUNTERS ARE THE SAME!" as if chance or circumstance had little or no effect on our common lives. As for Kirk, the author of the article, along with quite a few Trekkies, is mistaken on his Freud. The ego and the superego only exist to deal with the desires of the id - therefore, Kirk is the rampaging, implusive id, Spock is the rational ego, trying to solve the captain's many problems (many of which were created by that 'action-oriented' nature) and McCoy is the scolding superego, vetoing or objecting to many of the ego's green-blooded Vulcan decisions. Without those two, Kirk would have croaked a long time ago with every STD in the known universe. If you're going to use a psychological analogy for Trek, Spock is the real main character.
I did basic hardware repair on thousands of Thinkpads around '03-'04, mostly T21, T22, T23, T30s, and 40/41s, as well as the X series, 20-30-40, and some of big yet delicate A20s and A30s, as well as some models I've forgotten the names of. My favorites are the old T2x, and the X20's. But I have a hard time viewing them as durable, as all the ones I ever saw were screwed up in some way. All the models have their stress points where the plastic always gives, and none took spill damage well. A lot of it was just wanton customer abuse, of course. Still, I saw several T-series come in after getting backed over by a truck and still boot. They weren't my favorite jobs, though.
I'm guessing this is a clever reference to where Anthony's horrific creations go in the TZ episode "It's a Good Life," which I saw again over the New Year break. http://tzone.the-croc.com/tzeplist/goodlife.html
Jack is what the Greeks called a sykophant - someone who starts suits for profit - an activity regarded at the time on par with child molestation. I think they had it roughly right.
Also, in almost every state, even the notice itself (written) is optional. The exceptions are generally state employees or employees with contracts explicitly demanding written notice.
1) there was a major disagreement among the creators in the coding or script writing that led to a bad compromise with the ending;
2) time constraints forced a rush job that cut out anything deeply non-essential to shipping;
3) they just couldn't deliver on the ambitious nature of the plot.
It might have been all three. I certainly don't want to think the last, but this was a new studio doing the sequel. They certainly delivered a great game right up to the 'end sequence', then dropped the ball in a way that KOTOR certainly did not.
Spoilers to follow...
In the first KOTOR, the endings left the state of the party more or less known, as most of their tales were resolved before the final battle.
But here, save for perhaps Visas, none of the side characters' stories are resolved. (I played a light-side Jedi, BTW). Why bother putting HK-47 back together, or awakening the Force in anyone? No one save Kreia plays a significant role in the endgame, and I can't even sway her fate. It just turned into a Sith kill-fest and completely lost the questy, thoughtful nature that had been developed for 20+ hours of play.
And in the end, the Ebon Hawk just soars off. To where? Why? Who's at the controls? Did anyone survive the crash? My entire party just evaporated save for Mira and that annoying floating droid.
Kriea's whole plan is the height of Bizarro logic; she makes Malak in the first game look alarmingly sane. Her buddies Sion and Whatsits-with-the-mask were anticlimatic pushovers, also; they folded too easily and served no greater purpose than speed bumps.
When Kriea says, 'there is no great revelation' in the end, I knew I'd been screwed. Because there needed to be one. I expected some classic Star Wars drama - "I'm Balista/Revan/someone-other-than-an-insane-preachy -witch, looking for redemption by destroying everything, starting with you." and I didn't get it.
This was not the kind of story that needed a Patrick O'Brian-style adrupt ending. It needed an epilogue at the very least, beyond Kriea's musings before the main character is set off into the void.
...Starflight 3, Fallout 3, and Wasteland 2 come out. But by then, at 185, I will be too old to move the mouse. Hopefully, my feeble brainwaves will be up to the task.
The moral question, I suppose, is not if she should be able to force them to vote, but /should/ she force them to vote.
Americans pride themselves on their freedom so much that being stupid has also become a freedom, in an half-assed fashion. Following this to its logical conclusion, she's wrong to deny them this right; but she's also a professor in an university, in a English department, and these usually give their instructors some leeway on teaching methods (I'm a unversity TA right now and have considerable powers that I have not even explored.) By enrolling in her class her students are subject to her methods and the policies on her syllabus. She's not asking them to kill a homeless person, do handstands, or construct WOMD. I doubt this came out of left field.
I'll note none of the students have dropped or protested; all the noise is coming from outside sources that don't have their grades on the line.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1589 393694/qid=1096075472/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/104-2573553-3573533?v=glance&s=books&n=5078 /