In a way, you can argue that the Grand Theft Auto games are already educational games. The physics are unreal, but real enough to give young people a pretty good idea of what is a completely stupid idea when driving. When you drive fast in the rain, your ability to handle the vehicle is diminished to a huge extent. This makes you drive more cautiously. If you're driving a heavier vehicle, it won't turn as sharply and will have difficulty cornering. Tall vehicles are not suitable for sharp turns unless you enjoy being crushed and burned.
An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.
While playing GTA, you learn quickly how to recover from a skid, how to turn an uncontrolled spin into a powerslide, how to avoid rolling your vehicle, how to safely control a skid to avoid a collision and what sort of collisions are least damaging if you cannot avoid a collision. These skills do translate to real life - although I'd never before regained control of an actual vehicle which loses traction on ice or gravel, I've spared myself a severe accident on three occasions (once at a 100 foot long patch of black ice, once on a long stretch of frozen ice which looked like snow-covered pavement, and once when run off a mountain road by a logging truck driver who passed illegally) thanks in part to the combat driving skills learned in games like GTA and Interstate '76.
Just because we're not learning how to be more civilly responsible and urbane people by playing these games does not mean that the skills we learn while playing them are not valid, nor does it mean that nothing is being learned at all.
Of course mediocrity appeals to the masses... The masses are by definition mediocre.
Conservative creative efforts will be fiscally rewarded disproportionately with the more risky efforts. If you design two games, one with an ingenious core mechanic that people will either "get" or "not get" (like Portal) and one with all other aspects being equal (art, humor, charm, challenge, time commitment) except that the second game is based on platform-jumping (a familiar and easy-to-learn mechanic), then the more familiar title will win... Unless the novelty of the core mechanic is sufficient to overcome the difficulty of learning the new mechanic. In the case of Portal, the risk paid off and produced a truly exceptional game - a first-person puzzle platformer which uses Newtonian physics in an eccentric space which is deformable by the player. Valve hedged their bets by packaging the more risky title with a pair of titles that they knew would be successful, later to discover that Portal would probably have succeeded on its own.
Other experimental games have not always been so lucky. It's small consolation to a smaller studio who is in danger of being closed that their products became sleeper hits or cult classics after they've been shut down by their publisher.
If risk was the sort of thing that every publisher took as a matter of course, where part of every bargain for an A-list game was that the company be funded to make one experimental game with a comparable budget, then we'd have much more variation in the games market. And as you've pointed out, a lot of trial and error is required to figure out what "mediocre" even is, which is one of the reason that the game industry has been dominated by games riding on the coattails of successful titles of ages past. Ultimately, however, the biggest difference between a mediocre but poorly performing title and a mediocre but best-selling title is the level of polish and the talent of the people executing the core concepts. And that's where the imagination comes in.
Simulators are almost never fun. On the other hand, you could quite easily make a game about attempting to avoid insanity while being in solitary confinement wherein gameplay happens only in your dreams. Or a game about attempting to escape solitary confinement where the prison itself is completely physically simulated and an unknown person visits you after lights-out.
Being a whale trapped under ice for six months would definitely suck as a game premise, but you could make quite a challenging game that would make the same point by being a team attempting to keep the whale alive. Or the whale is forced to find other breathing holes closer to open water during the higher temperature days and return to the original hole at night lest it freeze over.
It's no mystery that people don't need games to be fun in order to appreciate them - people play games because they satisfy a need. What that need is depends on the person. When I was working graveyard shift and all of my friends and roommates were on the day shift, I'd play MMORPGs on my days off just to have somebody to talk to in the hours I was awake. I wasn't necessarily enjoying playing the game so much as I was just happy that there was somebody awake who was worth talking to.
Some people play games not to enjoy but to fulfill a need for competition. They may get a thrill out of it, but it's in all likelihood more scratching an itch than it is relaxing and having play time. Casual games have been taking off in popularity because they are part of a subset of games which actually do have to be fun and relaxing.
I'd argue that most AAA game titles that have come out in the last decade have not just been simple fun, in that they were not designed to promote relaxed and enjoyable play, but to drive competition, to require significant effort to improve your skills, to require constant learning and adaptation (even in the most primitive shooters) and to (for most action games) attempt to engage the player in a fiction.
The parallels being drawn between movies, books and games are definitely not baseless; video games serve the same purposes as the classes of fiction in which are rooted. They seek to inspire wonder, fear, excitement, anger and righteous indignation... Ultimately, they serve much of the same purpose as the heroic epics of ancient times; to get people excited about the idea of things that people other than them get to do, while at the same time showing them the sort of awful crap happens to those heroes. The significant difference between video games and epic tales of heroes is that in video games, the hero seldom dies at the end (with a few spectacularly successful exceptions). This remains rewarding to the audience because of their increased level of participation in the myth.
Also, video games serve a very real purpose by allowing a player, albeit fleetingly, to be a hero and make meaningful changes in their environment with a laissez-faire which is not to be found anywhere in the civilized world. A man stuck in a dead-end job in some rural region, so long as he can afford a computer and internet access, can for a brief time every night become an epic hero in a world full of his peers. A child who finds himself alone and bored in the inner city, so long as his parents can afford $15 at a garage sale can be a young boy with a sword who saves a princess and an entire world.
It certainly can't be generalized to the experience of most people playing most games that they're being engaged on an artistic level and are having some deep-seated psychological or emotional need fulfilled by their video gaming experience, but it can certainly be established that not every game is played for fun, and not every game is designed to be fun.
That's a very good point. So you can't get your programming on the machine? So what? Don't buy it. It's not for you.
You already have access to netbooks, laptops, cell phones (if you were mad enough to do your programming work on one).
This seems to be a stab at what the PDA originally was - a personal organizer that can blend seamlessly with work space. A majority of the people in the working world who would see a device like this as practical are exactly the sort of people who have to maintain calendars, make meetings, find locations, and just generally keep their world organized.
When I was working as a spotter for a utility locating company I could certainly have used something like this. Naturally, the computer maps were terrible back then (1997 or so) however, and an always-on internet connection was unheard of. Somebody who works for a living on the road and needs to find unfamiliar places on tight time schedules would love a device that worked as demonstrated.
This is also not to say that there'd be only one mode. They're showing the applications which are likely to catch the attention (and maybe pre-orders) of big business.
For consumers, how about some sort of fully integrated painting application using some of the physically-simulated painting research that has been done at the UW and Microsoft Research? How about taking that notebook metaphor along with tablet sketching and selling it to math majors? How about integrating Microsoft Visio and some sort of commercial drafting software with drawn shape recognition and intelligent snap settings to produce the ultimate portable CAD device for architects, landscapers, network specialists who need to sketch up a quick organizational chart, etc?
Students and professionals of virtually every kind could come up (with a little imagination) with a way that a device like this could be handy. Does hat mean it WILL be handy in those ways? No, but we're talking about the potential of a device and some rough interface concepts that MS has put out, not Microsoft's actual implementation once the marketers have gotten through with it.
If they found some alternate way to monetize it (as with the Amazon Kindle and its bundled store), they might even decide to subsidize some sort of cellular data service (like the Kindle). Would you see value in it then? I don't think it's likely that Microsoft would do something like that, but then again, I'm not that sure they could monetize the use of the device to the extent that Amazon has the Kindle.
If you turn the brightness all the way down then read on a tight format black on white (like Microsoft Reader's default format) with a good print font (not a screen font) in a room that's comfortably lit, it's really no different from reading from a printed page. The light levels are identical and the contrast is just as good as reading a low quality paperback. I read on my laptop that way and have for years. It's quite comfortable, as soon as you figure out how to hold the laptop for maximum relaxation (actually less effort than reading a hardback book).
I keep seeing people on Slashdot complain about how intensely bright the screen is and how it's just terrible. Has it not occurred to anybody to turn down the backlight and then read in a well-lit room (which you should be doing if you're reading anyway?)
I can't read outdoors on a sunny day either because of the intensity of the light reflecting from the page, why should I expect to be able to comfortably read from a screen without turning the backlight down to minimum?
Yeah, this is a perfect example of contemporary business missing the point entirely.
Higher value = higher price. Why? Because the only money that matters is money you have now, not money you'll get 20-50 years from now, not money you'll get next quarter, only money now.
The best content may not come at a premium up front, but people will still pay full price for it 10 years later. Why? Because it's good content and people still want it.
Compare:
Video games - Madden 05 vs Shadow of the Colossus (2005). People would buy Shadow of the Colossus again if they lost their discs, or if a friend didn't have it because it is good. The Madden example may be less valid due to the fact that these sports games are done in iterations and must be renewed to remain topical (current rosters), but consider 50 Cent Bulletproof (also 2005).
Studio Albums - Led Zeppelin and Abbey Road vs Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde and The Best of Traffic. All 1969. Staying power is based on the power and appeal of the music, not the starting cost of the album.
Movies - Would you pay more to have seen Alien on its opening date than you would have paid to see Pitch Black on its opening date? Probably not, not knowing what you were walking into. Would you come back to the theater and pay full price to see the 30 year anniversary of Pitch Black, restored and on a big screen? Probably not.
The quality of media of any kind should not be gauged on its opening price or first week's sales numbers (like shortsighted bean counters prefer) but on its longevity and lasting value to the providers of that media (like a smart bean counter should prefer).
Although the article is correct that micropayments aren't going to be the silver bullet which saves the journalistic trade, it has nothing to do with perceived value vs the maximum possible price and everything to do with long term value. People buy a subscription to a magazine not just because they save money up front vs buying newsstand - what if they don't want to read anything in the magazine 6 months out of the year? People buy subscriptions because of convenience and perceived value as well. People support magazines because the magazines please them and they want to show their approval with their dollar. It doesn't matter that essentially only the magazine's distribution is funded by subscriptions and most magazines make nearly all of their money from advertising.
As FrkyD points out below, the print industry knows that it's not funded by its subscribers. The concept espoused by the AP and Murdoch is that we suddenly need to start paying them for the privilege of having them send us news because newspapers aren't profitable anymore and living on online advertising is hard. Well, too bad. If it's hard, you might just have to hire some people to do it and create jobs.
It also ignores the fact that newspapers and web sites who want to use AP news sources have to pay for an AP subscription. These people are triple dipping - they're trying to get the people buying the news to pay for the news, then profit from advertising, then get the readers to pay again!
the trouble with a horizontal touch surface is that you still have arm fatigue, or your mouse will always be stuck down at the bottom where your elbows will end up resting.
Why use a mouse with a touchscreen? If you need to use a mouse you could just mount your screen like a regular old-fashioned screen (if the screen is small and light-weight enough to be handled that way).
I believe he meant "cursor" not "mouse."
I don't think the GP was thinking of a table angled like a drafting/drawing table but rather the ill-conceived Microsoft Surface which is a flat table with no place to rest your arms or coffee which will give you neck cramps.
Getting hit in the head with a styrofoam cooler weighing less than 2 pounds total at 17mph would hurt, but do no real damage unless you were short a skull.
...and a new character which gets added to the plot takes about 8 hours of spriting work even in games with graphics as complicated as Wasteland or The Bard's Tale.
Although the technology of the time was state of the art, it was frankly simpler to produce content for than what is the state of the art today (of course composing sound effects for FM sound chips was quite a bit harder than recording somebody banging a watermelon in a car door.)
I think that MMOs were a great idea at first but ran rampant in the direction that market forces took them at the expense of the more contemplative gameplay they found their roots in. By making them suitable for the mass market, they lost a little of the "technical" nuts and bolts and opportunities for participatory fiction which make RPGs entertaining for a good sized subset of their target audience.
Smaller scale multiplayer tends to promote more important interpersonal relationships (in the game context, not necessarily socially) by promoting rivalries, intrigues and uneasy alliances. They allow this by giving more influence over the world's state to each individual player than is typically possible in these giant multiplayer environments. This also allows for more involvement with the world itself - engaging the medium as a sort of extra character. Man vs Environment is a hard scenario to pull off in the mass-market MMORPG genre.
Getting back to the social aspect, however; even in Ultima Online (before attempts were made to increase its mass market appeal), a single player or small group of friends could change the shape of the world in fairly profound ways - walling off entire areas of a valley, teleporting monsters into regions they ordinarily were not found, building player cities, raiding and ultimately destroying those cities, creating lasting resource shortages, etc. This promoted a much more intense form of competition between the players than is typically found in larger systems such as WoW's Azeroth or the huge universe of EverQuest.
The fact that seldom were there more than 400 people per server online at any given time exaggerated that effect by making each player's actions more significant in the larger world.
I'd like to see somebody daring enough to create small-scale multiplayer (anywhere from 8 to 64 player) persistent worlds which are procedurally generated and distributed amongst the players with a centrally stored database. The worlds would have to be huge but extremely unsafe so that only by cooperation and consistent effort could the players extend safe zones. These safe zones would be extended either by clearing them of rogue AI (monsters, animals, computer players, whatever) or by literally building safe zones such as fortifications, cities, supply chains, etc.
A game like that would remove the need for a single player to commit significantly more time than the others (the chief problem with game mastering) while allowing players to have real control over their world. Ideally, these games would be played by small groups of friends or social cliques (your dorm floor back in college) where dynamics outside the game world could produce interesting consequences within.
I don't believe the article is too far off base in claiming that social aspects can be much more important than others - especially when you look outside the game world and realize that a lot of people play what their friends are playing, even if they're not multiplayer games. It seems logical to just try to harness this in a tighter social context than "everybody in the entire damned world" for those people who prefer a more insular and personal experience from their entertainment.
Not to burst your bubble, and that may be a helpful link for people, a virtual game table is not quite the same thing as a game master driven CRPG. It's not even technically a CRPG (although it may be what the GP meant). The difference is how much of the game is moderated by the machine and how much is mediated by hidden rules.
The Natural Selection mod for HL comes closer to the point - it's a game where a bunch of people are playing roles which are directed by the actions of one or more users. True, NS is just an RTS with a FPS attached to it (acro overload), but it displays the difference - the game server mediates what the consequences of the players' actions are but the actual direction that gameplay takes and the shape of the environment is largely controlled by a second class of player - the game masters (in NS' case, the commanders.)
I envision something like a realtime version of Neverwinter Nights' authoring tools with a toolbox metaphor which allows the game master to throw prefabs they'd prepared ahead of time (or gotten in a purchased module or downloaded from other GMs or pulled from the CRPG's library of builtins) at their friends.
WebGL is attempting to build an actual standard (unlike Flash) which people might really use (unlike VRML) to put accelerated (unlike Flash) 2d and 3d graphics on the web.
Why? I'd imagine (other than trying to beat Microsoft to the punch with WebX or whatever they decide to put forth) that it's a move toward cloud applications. Adobe's been talking for years about putting Premiere, Flash and Photoshop into web applications. Google beat Microsoft to the punch with Google Docs. A decent accelerated 3d surface in the mainstream browsers would bring applications like Maya, 3DStudio Max, Mudbox, Blender, etc into the game.
3d authoring would be accessible to everybody, not just well-paid techy people and people who are ok with piracy. Ignoring games entirely (and I hate to do that) for the moment, we'll talk about some other stuff.
3d display technology is coming to consumers whether the consumers like it or not, and by and large, the consumers do like it. When you've got a 3d display to work with, communicating certain concepts to consumers becomes fairly easy. You can bet some automotive manufacturer will put up 3d models of their cars to play with (a couple of them did with VRML). How about fashion? Being able to see what the weave looks like in some designer clothing might be a selling point. Premium real estate with those horrible 3d walkthroughs would improve incrementally. Especially if they combined it with that Microsoft Labs Photosynth project.
3d photography will no doubt become a larger subset of the hobbyist market once 3d displays become reasonably common. How about 3d Street View on Google Maps? How about a web version of Google Earth?
With processor power increasing, JavaScript engines becoming more efficient and vaguely standardized with ECMAScript, 3d on the browser will be inconvenient only for a little while, then commonplace, then expected.
The neurophysiology of pain and pleasure are not fully understood (at least not well enough to give somebody an injection of nostalgia or patriotism), but you could be damned sure you could figure out how to punish a computer (or make it punish itself).
You've got it backwards. The fact that we don't understand the roots of free will makes it more likely that we'll implement it while trying to improve upon autonomy.
I think a thin layer Windows GUI over the top of a Linux kernel (like OSX is a thin layer of Apple over the top of a BSD kernel) would be an excellent thing for consumers. Plus Microsoft could still make locked binary drivers which implemented all the DRM and spyware they wanted without violating GPL (at least v2) and not sacrifice a bit of security (which would not be that excellent a thing for consumers, but meh.)
I doubt if that's a strategy that's being actively considered, but it's a damned sight better than having to reinvent your entire kernel every few years just to fix a few security holes that some eggheads found in what passed automated tests as being "secure" code a few months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Send Ophelia to a nunnery before Act I Level III, or alternately, convince Polonius to send her with Laertes.
In a way, you can argue that the Grand Theft Auto games are already educational games. The physics are unreal, but real enough to give young people a pretty good idea of what is a completely stupid idea when driving. When you drive fast in the rain, your ability to handle the vehicle is diminished to a huge extent. This makes you drive more cautiously. If you're driving a heavier vehicle, it won't turn as sharply and will have difficulty cornering. Tall vehicles are not suitable for sharp turns unless you enjoy being crushed and burned.
An 11-year old girl knew to pull her parents from their car when it had rolled by climbing out of a broken window because she knew from GTA that cars can catch fire when they roll upside down.
While playing GTA, you learn quickly how to recover from a skid, how to turn an uncontrolled spin into a powerslide, how to avoid rolling your vehicle, how to safely control a skid to avoid a collision and what sort of collisions are least damaging if you cannot avoid a collision. These skills do translate to real life - although I'd never before regained control of an actual vehicle which loses traction on ice or gravel, I've spared myself a severe accident on three occasions (once at a 100 foot long patch of black ice, once on a long stretch of frozen ice which looked like snow-covered pavement, and once when run off a mountain road by a logging truck driver who passed illegally) thanks in part to the combat driving skills learned in games like GTA and Interstate '76.
Just because we're not learning how to be more civilly responsible and urbane people by playing these games does not mean that the skills we learn while playing them are not valid, nor does it mean that nothing is being learned at all.
Of course mediocrity appeals to the masses... The masses are by definition mediocre.
Conservative creative efforts will be fiscally rewarded disproportionately with the more risky efforts. If you design two games, one with an ingenious core mechanic that people will either "get" or "not get" (like Portal) and one with all other aspects being equal (art, humor, charm, challenge, time commitment) except that the second game is based on platform-jumping (a familiar and easy-to-learn mechanic), then the more familiar title will win... Unless the novelty of the core mechanic is sufficient to overcome the difficulty of learning the new mechanic. In the case of Portal, the risk paid off and produced a truly exceptional game - a first-person puzzle platformer which uses Newtonian physics in an eccentric space which is deformable by the player. Valve hedged their bets by packaging the more risky title with a pair of titles that they knew would be successful, later to discover that Portal would probably have succeeded on its own.
Other experimental games have not always been so lucky. It's small consolation to a smaller studio who is in danger of being closed that their products became sleeper hits or cult classics after they've been shut down by their publisher.
If risk was the sort of thing that every publisher took as a matter of course, where part of every bargain for an A-list game was that the company be funded to make one experimental game with a comparable budget, then we'd have much more variation in the games market. And as you've pointed out, a lot of trial and error is required to figure out what "mediocre" even is, which is one of the reason that the game industry has been dominated by games riding on the coattails of successful titles of ages past. Ultimately, however, the biggest difference between a mediocre but poorly performing title and a mediocre but best-selling title is the level of polish and the talent of the people executing the core concepts. And that's where the imagination comes in.
Simulators are almost never fun. On the other hand, you could quite easily make a game about attempting to avoid insanity while being in solitary confinement wherein gameplay happens only in your dreams. Or a game about attempting to escape solitary confinement where the prison itself is completely physically simulated and an unknown person visits you after lights-out.
Being a whale trapped under ice for six months would definitely suck as a game premise, but you could make quite a challenging game that would make the same point by being a team attempting to keep the whale alive. Or the whale is forced to find other breathing holes closer to open water during the higher temperature days and return to the original hole at night lest it freeze over.
It's no mystery that people don't need games to be fun in order to appreciate them - people play games because they satisfy a need. What that need is depends on the person. When I was working graveyard shift and all of my friends and roommates were on the day shift, I'd play MMORPGs on my days off just to have somebody to talk to in the hours I was awake. I wasn't necessarily enjoying playing the game so much as I was just happy that there was somebody awake who was worth talking to.
Some people play games not to enjoy but to fulfill a need for competition. They may get a thrill out of it, but it's in all likelihood more scratching an itch than it is relaxing and having play time. Casual games have been taking off in popularity because they are part of a subset of games which actually do have to be fun and relaxing.
I'd argue that most AAA game titles that have come out in the last decade have not just been simple fun, in that they were not designed to promote relaxed and enjoyable play, but to drive competition, to require significant effort to improve your skills, to require constant learning and adaptation (even in the most primitive shooters) and to (for most action games) attempt to engage the player in a fiction.
The parallels being drawn between movies, books and games are definitely not baseless; video games serve the same purposes as the classes of fiction in which are rooted. They seek to inspire wonder, fear, excitement, anger and righteous indignation... Ultimately, they serve much of the same purpose as the heroic epics of ancient times; to get people excited about the idea of things that people other than them get to do, while at the same time showing them the sort of awful crap happens to those heroes. The significant difference between video games and epic tales of heroes is that in video games, the hero seldom dies at the end (with a few spectacularly successful exceptions). This remains rewarding to the audience because of their increased level of participation in the myth.
Also, video games serve a very real purpose by allowing a player, albeit fleetingly, to be a hero and make meaningful changes in their environment with a laissez-faire which is not to be found anywhere in the civilized world. A man stuck in a dead-end job in some rural region, so long as he can afford a computer and internet access, can for a brief time every night become an epic hero in a world full of his peers. A child who finds himself alone and bored in the inner city, so long as his parents can afford $15 at a garage sale can be a young boy with a sword who saves a princess and an entire world.
It certainly can't be generalized to the experience of most people playing most games that they're being engaged on an artistic level and are having some deep-seated psychological or emotional need fulfilled by their video gaming experience, but it can certainly be established that not every game is played for fun, and not every game is designed to be fun.
That's somewhere around 4 miles... 20,000ft / 5,280ft per mile ~= 3.788 miles
That's a very good point. So you can't get your programming on the machine? So what? Don't buy it. It's not for you.
You already have access to netbooks, laptops, cell phones (if you were mad enough to do your programming work on one).
This seems to be a stab at what the PDA originally was - a personal organizer that can blend seamlessly with work space. A majority of the people in the working world who would see a device like this as practical are exactly the sort of people who have to maintain calendars, make meetings, find locations, and just generally keep their world organized.
When I was working as a spotter for a utility locating company I could certainly have used something like this. Naturally, the computer maps were terrible back then (1997 or so) however, and an always-on internet connection was unheard of. Somebody who works for a living on the road and needs to find unfamiliar places on tight time schedules would love a device that worked as demonstrated.
This is also not to say that there'd be only one mode. They're showing the applications which are likely to catch the attention (and maybe pre-orders) of big business.
For consumers, how about some sort of fully integrated painting application using some of the physically-simulated painting research that has been done at the UW and Microsoft Research? How about taking that notebook metaphor along with tablet sketching and selling it to math majors? How about integrating Microsoft Visio and some sort of commercial drafting software with drawn shape recognition and intelligent snap settings to produce the ultimate portable CAD device for architects, landscapers, network specialists who need to sketch up a quick organizational chart, etc?
Students and professionals of virtually every kind could come up (with a little imagination) with a way that a device like this could be handy. Does hat mean it WILL be handy in those ways? No, but we're talking about the potential of a device and some rough interface concepts that MS has put out, not Microsoft's actual implementation once the marketers have gotten through with it.
If they found some alternate way to monetize it (as with the Amazon Kindle and its bundled store), they might even decide to subsidize some sort of cellular data service (like the Kindle). Would you see value in it then? I don't think it's likely that Microsoft would do something like that, but then again, I'm not that sure they could monetize the use of the device to the extent that Amazon has the Kindle.
If you turn the brightness all the way down then read on a tight format black on white (like Microsoft Reader's default format) with a good print font (not a screen font) in a room that's comfortably lit, it's really no different from reading from a printed page. The light levels are identical and the contrast is just as good as reading a low quality paperback. I read on my laptop that way and have for years. It's quite comfortable, as soon as you figure out how to hold the laptop for maximum relaxation (actually less effort than reading a hardback book).
I keep seeing people on Slashdot complain about how intensely bright the screen is and how it's just terrible. Has it not occurred to anybody to turn down the backlight and then read in a well-lit room (which you should be doing if you're reading anyway?)
I can't read outdoors on a sunny day either because of the intensity of the light reflecting from the page, why should I expect to be able to comfortably read from a screen without turning the backlight down to minimum?
In other news, if you do something completely stupid with a programming language, the language will respond in kind.
Yeah, this is a perfect example of contemporary business missing the point entirely.
Higher value = higher price. Why? Because the only money that matters is money you have now, not money you'll get 20-50 years from now, not money you'll get next quarter, only money now.
The best content may not come at a premium up front, but people will still pay full price for it 10 years later. Why? Because it's good content and people still want it.
Compare:
The quality of media of any kind should not be gauged on its opening price or first week's sales numbers (like shortsighted bean counters prefer) but on its longevity and lasting value to the providers of that media (like a smart bean counter should prefer).
Although the article is correct that micropayments aren't going to be the silver bullet which saves the journalistic trade, it has nothing to do with perceived value vs the maximum possible price and everything to do with long term value. People buy a subscription to a magazine not just because they save money up front vs buying newsstand - what if they don't want to read anything in the magazine 6 months out of the year? People buy subscriptions because of convenience and perceived value as well. People support magazines because the magazines please them and they want to show their approval with their dollar. It doesn't matter that essentially only the magazine's distribution is funded by subscriptions and most magazines make nearly all of their money from advertising.
As FrkyD points out below, the print industry knows that it's not funded by its subscribers. The concept espoused by the AP and Murdoch is that we suddenly need to start paying them for the privilege of having them send us news because newspapers aren't profitable anymore and living on online advertising is hard. Well, too bad. If it's hard, you might just have to hire some people to do it and create jobs.
It also ignores the fact that newspapers and web sites who want to use AP news sources have to pay for an AP subscription. These people are triple dipping - they're trying to get the people buying the news to pay for the news, then profit from advertising, then get the readers to pay again!
the trouble with a horizontal touch surface is that you still have arm fatigue, or your mouse will always be stuck down at the bottom where your elbows will end up resting.
Why use a mouse with a touchscreen? If you need to use a mouse you could just mount your screen like a regular old-fashioned screen (if the screen is small and light-weight enough to be handled that way).
I believe he meant "cursor" not "mouse."
I don't think the GP was thinking of a table angled like a drafting/drawing table but rather the ill-conceived Microsoft Surface which is a flat table with no place to rest your arms or coffee which will give you neck cramps.
They want it to come back down again somewhere near where they launched it.
Getting hit in the head with a styrofoam cooler weighing less than 2 pounds total at 17mph would hurt, but do no real damage unless you were short a skull.
...and a new character which gets added to the plot takes about 8 hours of spriting work even in games with graphics as complicated as Wasteland or The Bard's Tale.
Although the technology of the time was state of the art, it was frankly simpler to produce content for than what is the state of the art today (of course composing sound effects for FM sound chips was quite a bit harder than recording somebody banging a watermelon in a car door.)
Ban Power ready!
It's a nifty project. I wish there was a larger community around it and RPG publishers were more forgiving of fan-published materials.
I think that MMOs were a great idea at first but ran rampant in the direction that market forces took them at the expense of the more contemplative gameplay they found their roots in. By making them suitable for the mass market, they lost a little of the "technical" nuts and bolts and opportunities for participatory fiction which make RPGs entertaining for a good sized subset of their target audience.
Smaller scale multiplayer tends to promote more important interpersonal relationships (in the game context, not necessarily socially) by promoting rivalries, intrigues and uneasy alliances. They allow this by giving more influence over the world's state to each individual player than is typically possible in these giant multiplayer environments. This also allows for more involvement with the world itself - engaging the medium as a sort of extra character. Man vs Environment is a hard scenario to pull off in the mass-market MMORPG genre.
Getting back to the social aspect, however; even in Ultima Online (before attempts were made to increase its mass market appeal), a single player or small group of friends could change the shape of the world in fairly profound ways - walling off entire areas of a valley, teleporting monsters into regions they ordinarily were not found, building player cities, raiding and ultimately destroying those cities, creating lasting resource shortages, etc. This promoted a much more intense form of competition between the players than is typically found in larger systems such as WoW's Azeroth or the huge universe of EverQuest.
The fact that seldom were there more than 400 people per server online at any given time exaggerated that effect by making each player's actions more significant in the larger world.
I'd like to see somebody daring enough to create small-scale multiplayer (anywhere from 8 to 64 player) persistent worlds which are procedurally generated and distributed amongst the players with a centrally stored database. The worlds would have to be huge but extremely unsafe so that only by cooperation and consistent effort could the players extend safe zones. These safe zones would be extended either by clearing them of rogue AI (monsters, animals, computer players, whatever) or by literally building safe zones such as fortifications, cities, supply chains, etc.
A game like that would remove the need for a single player to commit significantly more time than the others (the chief problem with game mastering) while allowing players to have real control over their world. Ideally, these games would be played by small groups of friends or social cliques (your dorm floor back in college) where dynamics outside the game world could produce interesting consequences within.
I don't believe the article is too far off base in claiming that social aspects can be much more important than others - especially when you look outside the game world and realize that a lot of people play what their friends are playing, even if they're not multiplayer games. It seems logical to just try to harness this in a tighter social context than "everybody in the entire damned world" for those people who prefer a more insular and personal experience from their entertainment.
Not to burst your bubble, and that may be a helpful link for people, a virtual game table is not quite the same thing as a game master driven CRPG. It's not even technically a CRPG (although it may be what the GP meant). The difference is how much of the game is moderated by the machine and how much is mediated by hidden rules.
The Natural Selection mod for HL comes closer to the point - it's a game where a bunch of people are playing roles which are directed by the actions of one or more users. True, NS is just an RTS with a FPS attached to it (acro overload), but it displays the difference - the game server mediates what the consequences of the players' actions are but the actual direction that gameplay takes and the shape of the environment is largely controlled by a second class of player - the game masters (in NS' case, the commanders.)
I envision something like a realtime version of Neverwinter Nights' authoring tools with a toolbox metaphor which allows the game master to throw prefabs they'd prepared ahead of time (or gotten in a purchased module or downloaded from other GMs or pulled from the CRPG's library of builtins) at their friends.
WebGL is attempting to build an actual standard (unlike Flash) which people might really use (unlike VRML) to put accelerated (unlike Flash) 2d and 3d graphics on the web.
Why? I'd imagine (other than trying to beat Microsoft to the punch with WebX or whatever they decide to put forth) that it's a move toward cloud applications. Adobe's been talking for years about putting Premiere, Flash and Photoshop into web applications. Google beat Microsoft to the punch with Google Docs. A decent accelerated 3d surface in the mainstream browsers would bring applications like Maya, 3DStudio Max, Mudbox, Blender, etc into the game.
3d authoring would be accessible to everybody, not just well-paid techy people and people who are ok with piracy. Ignoring games entirely (and I hate to do that) for the moment, we'll talk about some other stuff.
3d display technology is coming to consumers whether the consumers like it or not, and by and large, the consumers do like it. When you've got a 3d display to work with, communicating certain concepts to consumers becomes fairly easy. You can bet some automotive manufacturer will put up 3d models of their cars to play with (a couple of them did with VRML). How about fashion? Being able to see what the weave looks like in some designer clothing might be a selling point. Premium real estate with those horrible 3d walkthroughs would improve incrementally. Especially if they combined it with that Microsoft Labs Photosynth project.
3d photography will no doubt become a larger subset of the hobbyist market once 3d displays become reasonably common. How about 3d Street View on Google Maps? How about a web version of Google Earth?
With processor power increasing, JavaScript engines becoming more efficient and vaguely standardized with ECMAScript, 3d on the browser will be inconvenient only for a little while, then commonplace, then expected.
The fact that a printer driver can make it bluescreen?
Security, stability and memory footprint.
Leelah?
The same way you punish and reward a human brain.
The neurophysiology of pain and pleasure are not fully understood (at least not well enough to give somebody an injection of nostalgia or patriotism), but you could be damned sure you could figure out how to punish a computer (or make it punish itself).
You've got it backwards. The fact that we don't understand the roots of free will makes it more likely that we'll implement it while trying to improve upon autonomy.
Could be hedging their bets.
I think a thin layer Windows GUI over the top of a Linux kernel (like OSX is a thin layer of Apple over the top of a BSD kernel) would be an excellent thing for consumers. Plus Microsoft could still make locked binary drivers which implemented all the DRM and spyware they wanted without violating GPL (at least v2) and not sacrifice a bit of security (which would not be that excellent a thing for consumers, but meh.)
I doubt if that's a strategy that's being actively considered, but it's a damned sight better than having to reinvent your entire kernel every few years just to fix a few security holes that some eggheads found in what passed automated tests as being "secure" code a few months ago.