The incoherence of the incoherents
on
Videogame Mythbusting
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Counter-counter claims
1. "Statistics lie" is a pretty weak argument. Even weaker is the fallacy of possibility for probability. It's also possible that the statistics cited are a complete aberration due to the influence of a martian mystery cult. It's not probable though. In any case, as a refutation, all H.J. needs to do is disprove the claim of the other. By claiming "Well, crime statistics don't prove anything", you've destroyed the basis for the claim as well (games lead to violence). The burden of proof is on the person making the argument, not the one refuting it. 2. The same. The claim is "You can't use those studies of evidence as proof of anything, because these studies are flawed". Responding "go do your own studies" is beside the point. If you try to tell me "All Robots wear Aprons" based on a study of The Jetsons, I could nullify your claim by pointing out that The Jetsons is a small sample, and fictional to boot. 3. Straw Man and Suppressed Evidence. The author does not argue for or against 18+ games. The Suppressed Evidence is that the #1 retailer in the US will not stock 18+ games, but will stock M games; so game makers will object -- not because they want to sell to kids, but because the rating limits its exposure to adults. 4. beside the point -- or maybe that is the point. Video games aren't just FPS like the public suspects they are. 5. Both you and H.J. miss the fallacy here. The claim itself is just wrong. The military does not use games to train soldiers to kill people, unless in the banal way that all military training is by definition on how to kill people, and all simulations are games. To shoot a gun, or fire a mortar, you might encounter augmented reality: a realistic mockup of the weapon in a room with projections of a battlefield around there. But augmented reality is pretty far away from "games". And the argument usually runs "militaries use games to desensitize soldiers to killing. Therefore kids who play video games are desensitized to killing". And in that sense, the major is false. Militaries do not use games to desensitize. Sensitivity to killing (and being shot at) has significant tactical value. Those armed forces that are desensitized to killing don't seem as concerned about fratricide; and those that aren't sensitive to being shot at don't use cover and concealment effectively. 7. Growing number of geeks? Dude, Geeks and Gays have been around for centuries, and the notion that either of them are growing is inherently wrong. If anything, the last couple decades has shown an increasing number of well socialized folks playing video games. I see the kids today talk about video games as if they were cool. That didn't happen twenty years ago. 8. huh? "overexposure"? where is that defined? and where is the "original claim" that shows that? and for that matter, you're holding up an experience with your niece in non-mortal combat against a bunch of peer-reviewed studies of human, primate and higher-order mammalian behavior?
same here. A few years back, my university (US skool, 25K students), fired its IT guy after he forced all the faculty, admins and the rest across the board onto Microsoft Exchange with Outlook calendars and stuff. Retrain 5000 academics? Are you crazy?
Aye, the article is a masturbatory bit of proto-hype for a game the author knows nothing about in a genre the author has no experience in.
I, however, have played WW2OL, and it demonstrates (among many other instructive lessons in software design) why MMOFPS is not a good idea. The online FPSs that are popular are all high-speed high-adrenaline, shoot-move-shoot-die-respawn-move-shoot 30 minute extravaganzas. A MMO environment can't sustain that. If you want persistant worlds and 2000-4000 people online (I guess WW2OL has dropped off from those numbers in the last couple years), you can't have high-density action like that.
How many people actually buy a game based on the reviews in the press? If it's a big-ticket item, the reviews are going to be but one part of a marketing onslaught. If it isn't, the reviews aren't going to affect much: these days, especially with computer-related stuff, the hardcore has much more effective ways of getting at what's cool.
aye, and frames do suck most of the time, for the reasons specified. I am continually annoyed by those things. So I assume we're supposed to sit back and chuckle that "them naysayers are just like the luddites who said frames were bad". Frames still stuck, most of the time, even with a decade of workarounds to fix the broken functionality.
Yeah, that logic is worse though. I mean, we're talking serious horsecrap.
"The National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV) has developed a ratings system to evaluate the violent content of video games, ranging from XUnfit, XV, and RV (highly violent) to PG and G."
Uh, is this a joke article or something? In what nation is this coalition, who forms it and who do they represent. And then, why the hell I have never heard of these guys.
Likewise the study of psychologists:
"Our study reveals that young men who are habitually aggressive may be especially vulnerable to the aggression-enhancing effects of repeated exposure to violent video games," said Anderson. "Even a brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants."
: Translation: young men who are already aggressive get very competitive while (remember, this is a "temporary increase") they play video games. Some may even break joysticks when they lose.
Anderson also notes that "violent video games provide a forum for learning and practicing aggressive solutions to conflict situations."
Yeah -- particularly since smirkboy harps on the "fantasy violence". Mom has restricted you to your room until you do your homework? No problem, just put on a size 38DD sport bra, grab a katana and tell her it's a clan match.
What does any of this have to do with degrees in video games? Maybe this smartass dude needs to take a course in the social history of american cinema.
Okay, while Matt Leone over at 1up gives us another "Ask the Devs" bit of speculation on the Revolution's controller, let's take the time to consider the real news.
At one year in, people are treating as obvious the fact that the DS roundly trounced the PSP in the handheld wars. A quick glance at the sales figures suggests that this is indeed the case, but I haven't seen any full studies yet. Clearly, some nintendo nut has got to have the time to collate the hardware and software sales data, make some pretty graphs, and mark the times of hardware and software releases in various markets. Add a little text, calling it "How Nintendo Won the Handheld Wars (again)", some inconspicuous ads, and you'll get instant slashdotting (after all, they're so desperate for Nintendo news they slap in another controller piece) -- if you're lucky, enough to buy beer for a week. The world demands that you do this market research, and for free!
Wow. I wonder a lot about the xbox 360 stuff, and I see the "Core System" model as a mistake-by-committee, but dang, that Forbes article was a rant. Yearning for the lost youth, when the whole idea of games was new? Who isn't? Want something fresh and exciting from an era when there was nothing to make a sequel to? Sure. of course.
Ending the article by declaring the greatest game of all time to be DragonStomper? Okay, this guy is nuts. I mean hell, for few years of my life I'd run into Steve, and while certainly he was held in high esteemed, and was known for his good works in the game field, nobody ever introduced him as "The genius behind DragonStomper" -- and these were his friends!
What's that guy smoking?
The other article is much more sensible and balanced, even if not in a huge national business publication.
Oh give me a break. Code complete. this thing will sing through QA. I'm telling you, Windows Vista will be the most perfect work of man since the Septuagint translation, and those guys had the advantage of only a 72-person dev team!
There will be no bugs or security problems. And if there are any, well Microsoft can always postpone Christmas. They've done it before, haven't they?
Besides, nobody may understand what the hell you're talking about, but some will pretend they do, just to score some karma. Hell, you might even get a response that reads like it was lifted directly from a rejected fanfic script for ST:TNG!
Geordi: True, a 1-6-11 spread will maximize the spectrum with minimum nodular-crossinterference, but a triple-stepped 4 channel spread will remodularize the wifi matrix- Riker (adjusting uniform): which would maximize headerless throughput and give us another 10 Teracycles on the core processes! Picard: Make it so. Troi: I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment here. Chewbacca: Arrrr!
... until they perfect the tracking mechanism to determine the precise location of each mosquito, and feed that into an IMDS (integrated mosquito defense system), that uses picolasers to fry those bastards outta the sky.
Seriously, the world would be a better place without mosquitoes. Those of you in parts of the world where you don't have them, or you don't have many of them, really needn't comment on the environmental damage they['d do. The mosquito population can certainly stand the hit from being denied access to mammals in certain desert areas (known as "cities"). Mosquito though is one of the top vectors for human diseases, and many nasty ones.
On the other hand, spraying pesticides does come with environmental costs.
and for me, that "good long chat" would be: "look motherf*, if I ever see you around me, I will kill you, all your spawn, and do my best to exterminate your whole species!"
Well, no crap. There are some notorious for-profit tech schools that make their money on poorly paid staff training flunkouts. Still, some schools are recruiting designers and "industry people", thinking (rightly) that a rigorous curriculum with quality instructors will attract the best of those called to make games.
But you don't go into this field to make money, any more than people go into cinema (yeah, I had a film studies minor, thank you very much) to make money. Hmmm... But, well, video game criticism and history (oh yeah, social history of video games -- now there is a seminar for you) are fields that need some serious development, and which some schools at least should be teaching as an academic discipline.
With the exception of a few classic franchises, successful movies don't do more than two sequels, and if they do, the last couple are straight-to-DVD. it's just not profitable to send those things into the theaters. Why? Well the only new audience you're gonna get for Police Academy VI are the kids who were too young to get into Police Academy V. Releasing sequels doesn't by itself get you much marketshare; sequels are a way to maximize income from a niche, but the "niche" should, all other things being equal, diminish with each iteration. To have a long franchise, you need a dedicated core and product that, if not legendary, has a flavor all its own
If this is the case, why have so many computer game sequels been so successful for so long?
Well, "all other things" have not been equal. Technology has been improving, as has installed user base. But will it keep going that way?
Take installed user base: Will the Xbox, PS3 or Revolution "capture" the living room? Will the number of PC gamers in the world multiply tenfold in the next decade? I don't see it happening. Sorry.
What about technology? Stuff is still going faster and better; every year, the games look sweeter. Ten, even five years ago, what were the kinds of technology-driven gaming improvements people were talking about in games? True 3-dimensional environments, 3D sound effects, texture-mapped worlds, internet-based multiplayer, high-quality analog controllers, FF steering wheels -- in short stuff that revolutionized how the games are perceived and played. Now what are we looking at? Photorealism and rag-doll physics. Cool stuff, but at best refinements of what came before. The only thing that really inspires imagination is the nintendo controller, and we have yet to see how practical that will be in the home.
So now you've got sequels after sequels; EA I hear is going out on a limb and releasing one non-sequel game this year. Well, sequels do cost less money to develop as you recycle code and dev teams. But at some point the diminishing returns do catch up to you.
But EA's gonna ride the Madden Bus all the way to Blackhawk.
A) yes, if you do your research, you can probably find a good separate tuner card. If you do a half-assed job, however, you end up slave to MSI's TV@nywhere Master: neat hardware, proprietary design working only with proprietary software (seriously, no F/OSS solution existed as of a year ago when I through the thing into the bin). Said proprietary software was done by intervideo, but someone seems to have left out the phrase "deliver properly tested, stable software" out of the contract. So there's actually hardware out there that doesn't work.
B) Sorry but, Linux is cool and all, but most home PC platforms are running Windows. You might also notice that Serenity did not have a great box office showing either. Popularity is not necessarily a quality you want to have, particularly on a "news for nerds" site, but running Linux has nothing to do with Popularity. Besides, this is an Open-Source site, not a Linux site. Maybe I don't want to run Linux.
C) For folks who want to run an HTPC setup, putting a tuner card on the video card makes the hardware simpler.
D) Why is this article posted here? What, you don't like to read about goofy hardware? This is an aggregator site, and all kinds of stuff gets posted here, regardless of whether you agree with it. Heck, they regularly feature John Dvorak's slashdot-troll pieces. Maybe it's Slashtivism?
Sure, AiWs have always had space issues, but it's time to get on the HD bandwagon.
Bah, the medieval catholic church wasn't nearly that bad. The problem was faulty economic theory (money is dead, it doesn't grow, therefore there shouldn't be interest); and yet in the Middle Ages there were many good Catholics who made livings as merchants (selling goods for more than they paid for them), and bankers.
The disanalogy between all your other examples and video games is that none of the industries behind them design their products specifically to be addictive, none market them as addiction-causing, and none explicitly support groups of addicts to encourage and to further their addiction.
We sit here and ridicule the notion that a video game could sap someone's free will and make them do something as patently absurd as commit suicide. Okay, probably this is a case that's bound to be lost.
But this is an industry where addiction is a major problem. Some video gamers are showing the signs of clinical addiction. These things are making people sick, and what do marketing and design people do? They try to make them more addictive, of course.
Heck, your whole MMORPG industry is built on the concept of "levelling", which some smart lawyer is sooner or later gonna figure out is nothing other than intermittent behavioral reinforcement. Then they'll find that the games like that have whole "support" industries of addicts encouraging others in their addiction.
Snicker, call me a troll, but take a look at the tobacco industry for a second.
Better make it a few minutes -- I'm gonna finish this level before continuing my rant.
Yeah, but say no to film and TV tie-ins this christmas season. Tie Fighter's a ghost of xmas past dude.
Same for GTA. Don't avoid GTA -- avoid GTA ripoffs.
And WWII. WW2 games got a kick in popularity from Band of Brothers, and we saw a bunch of ripoffs of that series. Now we're seeing the ripoff of the ripoffs.
Original and indie titles do often suck -- hell, they're often much worse than the McSoftware that EA vends. But you *might* find something good; and if you don't, well, at least you can be smug and self-righteous on Slashdot. Hell, you could even make a blog entry about ahow indie games suck, get some AdSense or Google Ads or whatever links, get your ass slashdotted and recoup the cost of the games. See? Indie games pay for themselves, whether you like them or not!
Point 1) see Internet-based casual games, and bargain bin games; heck even xbox360's business plan calls for "discount games" of this sort.
Point 2) video game rental is still around for console titles, at least until Sony tries to kill it.
Point 3) who says the militaries of the world aren't using COTS gaming technology right now? But how many gamers are there, and how many military PCs do you think there are? The same for business, architecture and education: games-based products may have a niche there, but you're not going to move nearly as many units as in the game world. So to cover your investment, you need to charge more for the end product. Now you've got a perception problem. Many people, when they buy commercial software, think in terms of spending money on product value. You suggest that many video gamers are not wlling to spend $50 for a game, no matter how good it is. Try selling a video game that's not terribly different from a commercial one to somebody for $5000. That's the problem. Even if you build on a common game base, expanding into the other markets requires specialization, and that requires extra time and money. But even with that specialization, people will still conceive of it and see value as a video game.
Well, because *this* is something fans have learned in the manner of the old saying:
I've been puking so long I'm starting to like it
Sorry man, but developers -- for all their artistic vision -- have very real budgets to keep. And, this may come as a surprise, but even in a speculative venture like a PC game, you can get a pretty decent estimate of how long it takes to develop something.
Why, then, is stuff perpetually late, or rushed to market?
Well, first, most titles aren't late or rushed. Most of them are on time and on budget. And most of them, most people wouldn't want to play. But they generate a steady budget. The others? Well, sure they're pushing the envelope. Why? Because they have a bunch of nuts at the helm who don't necessarily care about business. What happens when you pair those nuts with a distribution model? Bad things. Really bad things.
What do I mean? Hell, when I set down to make something, I'm excited. I write the damn code, and it's fun and interesting. Then it's written. And I show it off, and folks want changes to the UI, or additional functionality, no matter how much of a pain in the ass. So I do that. Then I get the damn thing full of their functionality, and guess what? It's time to test it. And develop the game content to use the little engine, and test that. And mysteriously, the time from getting the idea to writing the initial draft of the code is pretty damn short. And to get myself through those dark hours, I convince myself that it's gonna work fine the first time, yeah sure.
But too many folks out there actually believe it will. Crap, man, I see so many otherwise respectable game companies issue "coming soon" or "imminent" release notices on software they obviously haven't even gotten to beta stage. Yet anyone with a brain schedules beta to last 3x longer than alpha.
You can predict how long a dev cycle will take, even with new hardware and questionable vendor support -- we now have several such generations of data available. And if you're in doubt, remember Scotty's advice from his TNG appearance.
So sure, give a date, and put it way down the road. Get funding till then and everything's good; better yet, only give a date to those who are funding you, and get plenty of funding. Only declare a release date when you've inked the deals with the distributors. Really, "buzz" and "viral marketing" is one thing; "letting my community manager feel cool" is entirely something else. Learn the difference.
But run your company so that you need to hit "miracle-coder" dates, and each project could sink you, and you won't be around for long.
I'm amazed how many clods out there don't follow these basic rules.
(scratches head, returns to fixing up the "trial balloon" he floated and the suits sold as a complete product to deliver in two months) errr... nevermind
Debout^H^H^H^H^H^H#TOP les damnes de la terre! Debout les forcats^H^H^Hks de la faim La raison tonne en son cratere//Someone explain why this line is here? C'est l'eruption de la fin^H^H^H#END// Say what?
Actually it makes sense. If he's uploaded those three films, it's clear that he's not doing to promote art and good taste, but simply to steal. It's kinda like being Catholic and eating both fish and steak on Friday in Lent: if it were just steak, you could claim fish was too expensive. This guy was flaunting it -- "I don't even need to steal good films".
To be fair, they should send the producers who greenlighted those films up the river too.
Keeping persistent score records results in score-whoring? Who woula thunk it?
Ah, yeah, brings back to mind the good old days of Air Warrior and Warbirds, before I even played them, where there was a "bomber" ranking for the most damage. Someone figured which hangars got the highest score, and would fly around the map bombing those. Or heck, before that, on that PLATO MP flight sim, I recall...
Basic law folks: when you make recognition A depend on artificial measure B, you generate experts in achieving B. "No child left behind" or "Battlefield 2" -- it's the same thing: you make everything depend on a test, and you generate good test-takers.
Of course, in a game where there are other metrics than the personal one, you won't get all score-whores, but you will get your share. Welcome to teh intardnet.
Slashdot Mirror
Counter-counter claims
1. "Statistics lie" is a pretty weak argument. Even weaker is the fallacy of possibility for probability. It's also possible that the statistics cited are a complete aberration due to the influence of a martian mystery cult. It's not probable though. In any case, as a refutation, all H.J. needs to do is disprove the claim of the other. By claiming "Well, crime statistics don't prove anything", you've destroyed the basis for the claim as well (games lead to violence). The burden of proof is on the person making the argument, not the one refuting it.
2. The same. The claim is "You can't use those studies of evidence as proof of anything, because these studies are flawed". Responding "go do your own studies" is beside the point. If you try to tell me "All Robots wear Aprons" based on a study of The Jetsons, I could nullify your claim by pointing out that The Jetsons is a small sample, and fictional to boot.
3. Straw Man and Suppressed Evidence. The author does not argue for or against 18+ games. The Suppressed Evidence is that the #1 retailer in the US will not stock 18+ games, but will stock M games; so game makers will object -- not because they want to sell to kids, but because the rating limits its exposure to adults.
4. beside the point -- or maybe that is the point. Video games aren't just FPS like the public suspects they are.
5. Both you and H.J. miss the fallacy here. The claim itself is just wrong. The military does not use games to train soldiers to kill people, unless in the banal way that all military training is by definition on how to kill people, and all simulations are games. To shoot a gun, or fire a mortar, you might encounter augmented reality: a realistic mockup of the weapon in a room with projections of a battlefield around there. But augmented reality is pretty far away from "games". And the argument usually runs "militaries use games to desensitize soldiers to killing. Therefore kids who play video games are desensitized to killing". And in that sense, the major is false. Militaries do not use games to desensitize. Sensitivity to killing (and being shot at) has significant tactical value. Those armed forces that are desensitized to killing don't seem as concerned about fratricide; and those that aren't sensitive to being shot at don't use cover and concealment effectively.
7. Growing number of geeks? Dude, Geeks and Gays have been around for centuries, and the notion that either of them are growing is inherently wrong. If anything, the last couple decades has shown an increasing number of well socialized folks playing video games. I see the kids today talk about video games as if they were cool. That didn't happen twenty years ago.
8. huh? "overexposure"? where is that defined? and where is the "original claim" that shows that? and for that matter, you're holding up an experience with your niece in non-mortal combat against a bunch of peer-reviewed studies of human, primate and higher-order mammalian behavior?
same here. A few years back, my university (US skool, 25K students), fired its IT guy after he forced all the faculty, admins and the rest across the board onto Microsoft Exchange with Outlook calendars and stuff. Retrain 5000 academics? Are you crazy?
Aye, the article is a masturbatory bit of proto-hype for a game the author knows nothing about in a genre the author has no experience in.
I, however, have played WW2OL, and it demonstrates (among many other instructive lessons in software design) why MMOFPS is not a good idea. The online FPSs that are popular are all high-speed high-adrenaline, shoot-move-shoot-die-respawn-move-shoot 30 minute extravaganzas. A MMO environment can't sustain that. If you want persistant worlds and 2000-4000 people online (I guess WW2OL has dropped off from those numbers in the last couple years), you can't have high-density action like that.
How many people actually buy a game based on the reviews in the press? If it's a big-ticket item, the reviews are going to be but one part of a marketing onslaught. If it isn't, the reviews aren't going to affect much: these days, especially with computer-related stuff, the hardcore has much more effective ways of getting at what's cool.
aye, and frames do suck most of the time, for the reasons specified. I am continually annoyed by those things. So I assume we're supposed to sit back and chuckle that "them naysayers are just like the luddites who said frames were bad". Frames still stuck, most of the time, even with a decade of workarounds to fix the broken functionality.
Yeah, that logic is worse though. I mean, we're talking serious horsecrap.
"The National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV) has developed a ratings system to evaluate the violent content of video games, ranging from XUnfit, XV, and RV (highly violent) to PG and G."
Uh, is this a joke article or something? In what nation is this coalition, who forms it and who do they represent. And then, why the hell I have never heard of these guys.
Likewise the study of psychologists:
"Our study reveals that young men who are habitually aggressive may be especially vulnerable to the aggression-enhancing effects of repeated exposure to violent video games," said Anderson. "Even a brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants."
: Translation: young men who are already aggressive get very competitive while (remember, this is a "temporary increase") they play video games. Some may even break joysticks when they lose.
Anderson also notes that "violent video games provide a forum for learning and practicing aggressive solutions to conflict situations."
Yeah -- particularly since smirkboy harps on the "fantasy violence". Mom has restricted you to your room until you do your homework? No problem, just put on a size 38DD sport bra, grab a katana and tell her it's a clan match.
What does any of this have to do with degrees in video games? Maybe this smartass dude needs to take a course in the social history of american cinema.
Okay, while Matt Leone over at 1up gives us another "Ask the Devs" bit of speculation on the Revolution's controller, let's take the time to consider the real news.
At one year in, people are treating as obvious the fact that the DS roundly trounced the PSP in the handheld wars. A quick glance at the sales figures suggests that this is indeed the case, but I haven't seen any full studies yet. Clearly, some nintendo nut has got to have the time to collate the hardware and software sales data, make some pretty graphs, and mark the times of hardware and software releases in various markets. Add a little text, calling it "How Nintendo Won the Handheld Wars (again)", some inconspicuous ads, and you'll get instant slashdotting (after all, they're so desperate for Nintendo news they slap in another controller piece) -- if you're lucky, enough to buy beer for a week. The world demands that you do this market research, and for free!
Wow. I wonder a lot about the xbox 360 stuff, and I see the "Core System" model as a mistake-by-committee, but dang, that Forbes article was a rant. Yearning for the lost youth, when the whole idea of games was new? Who isn't? Want something fresh and exciting from an era when there was nothing to make a sequel to? Sure. of course.
Ending the article by declaring the greatest game of all time to be DragonStomper? Okay, this guy is nuts. I mean hell, for few years of my life I'd run into Steve, and while certainly he was held in high esteemed, and was known for his good works in the game field, nobody ever introduced him as "The genius behind DragonStomper" -- and these were his friends!
What's that guy smoking?
The other article is much more sensible and balanced, even if not in a huge national business publication.
Oh give me a break. Code complete. this thing will sing through QA. I'm telling you, Windows Vista will be the most perfect work of man since the Septuagint translation, and those guys had the advantage of only a 72-person dev team!
There will be no bugs or security problems. And if there are any, well Microsoft can always postpone Christmas. They've done it before, haven't they?
Yeah, but if down a few pints made with high quality Saaz hops grown around the Chernobyl plant, it'll clear that liver cancer right up.
Dude, if you're gonna shoot, shoot. Don't talk.
Besides, nobody may understand what the hell you're talking about, but some will pretend they do, just to score some karma. Hell, you might even get a response that reads like it was lifted directly from a rejected fanfic script for ST:TNG!
Geordi: True, a 1-6-11 spread will maximize the spectrum with minimum nodular-crossinterference, but a triple-stepped 4 channel spread will remodularize the wifi matrix-
Riker (adjusting uniform): which would maximize headerless throughput and give us another 10 Teracycles on the core processes!
Picard: Make it so.
Troi: I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment here.
Chewbacca: Arrrr!
Well, duh, it is vapourware.
... until they perfect the tracking mechanism to determine the precise location of each mosquito, and feed that into an IMDS (integrated mosquito defense system), that uses picolasers to fry those bastards outta the sky.
Seriously, the world would be a better place without mosquitoes. Those of you in parts of the world where you don't have them, or you don't have many of them, really needn't comment on the environmental damage they['d do. The mosquito population can certainly stand the hit from being denied access to mammals in certain desert areas (known as "cities"). Mosquito though is one of the top vectors for human diseases, and many nasty ones.
On the other hand, spraying pesticides does come with environmental costs.
and for me, that "good long chat" would be: "look motherf*, if I ever see you around me, I will kill you, all your spawn, and do my best to exterminate your whole species!"
Well, no crap. There are some notorious for-profit tech schools that make their money on poorly paid staff training flunkouts. Still, some schools are recruiting designers and "industry people", thinking (rightly) that a rigorous curriculum with quality instructors will attract the best of those called to make games.
But you don't go into this field to make money, any more than people go into cinema (yeah, I had a film studies minor, thank you very much) to make money. Hmmm... But, well, video game criticism and history (oh yeah, social history of video games -- now there is a seminar for you) are fields that need some serious development, and which some schools at least should be teaching as an academic discipline.
Gotta disagree with you here.
With the exception of a few classic franchises, successful movies don't do more than two sequels, and if they do, the last couple are straight-to-DVD. it's just not profitable to send those things into the theaters. Why? Well the only new audience you're gonna get for Police Academy VI are the kids who were too young to get into Police Academy V. Releasing sequels doesn't by itself get you much marketshare; sequels are a way to maximize income from a niche, but the "niche" should, all other things being equal, diminish with each iteration. To have a long franchise, you need a dedicated core and product that, if not legendary, has a flavor all its own
If this is the case, why have so many computer game sequels been so successful for so long?
Well, "all other things" have not been equal. Technology has been improving, as has installed user base. But will it keep going that way?
Take installed user base: Will the Xbox, PS3 or Revolution "capture" the living room? Will the number of PC gamers in the world multiply tenfold in the next decade? I don't see it happening. Sorry.
What about technology? Stuff is still going faster and better; every year, the games look sweeter. Ten, even five years ago, what were the kinds of technology-driven gaming improvements people were talking about in games? True 3-dimensional environments, 3D sound effects, texture-mapped worlds, internet-based multiplayer, high-quality analog controllers, FF steering wheels -- in short stuff that revolutionized how the games are perceived and played. Now what are we looking at? Photorealism and rag-doll physics. Cool stuff, but at best refinements of what came before. The only thing that really inspires imagination is the nintendo controller, and we have yet to see how practical that will be in the home.
So now you've got sequels after sequels; EA I hear is going out on a limb and releasing one non-sequel game this year. Well, sequels do cost less money to develop as you recycle code and dev teams. But at some point the diminishing returns do catch up to you.
But EA's gonna ride the Madden Bus all the way to Blackhawk.
Yeah, I'm waiting for the Xbox 360.1
Why AiW cards are popular:
A) yes, if you do your research, you can probably find a good separate tuner card. If you do a half-assed job, however, you end up slave to MSI's TV@nywhere Master: neat hardware, proprietary design working only with proprietary software (seriously, no F/OSS solution existed as of a year ago when I through the thing into the bin). Said proprietary software was done by intervideo, but someone seems to have left out the phrase "deliver properly tested, stable software" out of the contract. So there's actually hardware out there that doesn't work.
B) Sorry but, Linux is cool and all, but most home PC platforms are running Windows. You might also notice that Serenity did not have a great box office showing either. Popularity is not necessarily a quality you want to have, particularly on a "news for nerds" site, but running Linux has nothing to do with Popularity. Besides, this is an Open-Source site, not a Linux site. Maybe I don't want to run Linux.
C) For folks who want to run an HTPC setup, putting a tuner card on the video card makes the hardware simpler.
D) Why is this article posted here? What, you don't like to read about goofy hardware? This is an aggregator site, and all kinds of stuff gets posted here, regardless of whether you agree with it. Heck, they regularly feature John Dvorak's slashdot-troll pieces. Maybe it's Slashtivism?
Sure, AiWs have always had space issues, but it's time to get on the HD bandwagon.
Dude -- run some hardcore cooling through that, punch it through a turbine, and knock 10% off your power bill.
Bah, the medieval catholic church wasn't nearly that bad. The problem was faulty economic theory (money is dead, it doesn't grow, therefore there shouldn't be interest); and yet in the Middle Ages there were many good Catholics who made livings as merchants (selling goods for more than they paid for them), and bankers.
The disanalogy between all your other examples and video games is that none of the industries behind them design their products specifically to be addictive, none market them as addiction-causing, and none explicitly support groups of addicts to encourage and to further their addiction.
We sit here and ridicule the notion that a video game could sap someone's free will and make them do something as patently absurd as commit suicide. Okay, probably this is a case that's bound to be lost.
But this is an industry where addiction is a major problem. Some video gamers are showing the signs of clinical addiction. These things are making people sick, and what do marketing and design people do? They try to make them more addictive, of course.
Heck, your whole MMORPG industry is built on the concept of "levelling", which some smart lawyer is sooner or later gonna figure out is nothing other than intermittent behavioral reinforcement. Then they'll find that the games like that have whole "support" industries of addicts encouraging others in their addiction.
Snicker, call me a troll, but take a look at the tobacco industry for a second.
Better make it a few minutes -- I'm gonna finish this level before continuing my rant.
Yeah, but say no to film and TV tie-ins this christmas season. Tie Fighter's a ghost of xmas past dude.
Same for GTA. Don't avoid GTA -- avoid GTA ripoffs.
And WWII. WW2 games got a kick in popularity from Band of Brothers, and we saw a bunch of ripoffs of that series. Now we're seeing the ripoff of the ripoffs.
Original and indie titles do often suck -- hell, they're often much worse than the McSoftware that EA vends. But you *might* find something good; and if you don't, well, at least you can be smug and self-righteous on Slashdot. Hell, you could even make a blog entry about ahow indie games suck, get some AdSense or Google Ads or whatever links, get your ass slashdotted and recoup the cost of the games. See? Indie games pay for themselves, whether you like them or not!
Point 1) see Internet-based casual games, and bargain bin games; heck even xbox360's business plan calls for "discount games" of this sort.
Point 2) video game rental is still around for console titles, at least until Sony tries to kill it.
Point 3) who says the militaries of the world aren't using COTS gaming technology right now? But how many gamers are there, and how many military PCs do you think there are? The same for business, architecture and education: games-based products may have a niche there, but you're not going to move nearly as many units as in the game world. So to cover your investment, you need to charge more for the end product. Now you've got a perception problem. Many people, when they buy commercial software, think in terms of spending money on product value. You suggest that many video gamers are not wlling to spend $50 for a game, no matter how good it is. Try selling a video game that's not terribly different from a commercial one to somebody for $5000. That's the problem. Even if you build on a common game base, expanding into the other markets requires specialization, and that requires extra time and money. But even with that specialization, people will still conceive of it and see value as a video game.
Well, because *this* is something fans have learned in the manner of the old saying:
I've been puking so long I'm starting to like it
Sorry man, but developers -- for all their artistic vision -- have very real budgets to keep. And, this may come as a surprise, but even in a speculative venture like a PC game, you can get a pretty decent estimate of how long it takes to develop something.
Why, then, is stuff perpetually late, or rushed to market?
Well, first, most titles aren't late or rushed. Most of them are on time and on budget. And most of them, most people wouldn't want to play. But they generate a steady budget. The others? Well, sure they're pushing the envelope. Why? Because they have a bunch of nuts at the helm who don't necessarily care about business. What happens when you pair those nuts with a distribution model? Bad things. Really bad things.
What do I mean?
Hell, when I set down to make something, I'm excited. I write the damn code, and it's fun and interesting. Then it's written. And I show it off, and folks want changes to the UI, or additional functionality, no matter how much of a pain in the ass. So I do that. Then I get the damn thing full of their functionality, and guess what? It's time to test it. And develop the game content to use the little engine, and test that. And mysteriously, the time from getting the idea to writing the initial draft of the code is pretty damn short. And to get myself through those dark hours, I convince myself that it's gonna work fine the first time, yeah sure.
But too many folks out there actually believe it will. Crap, man, I see so many otherwise respectable game companies issue "coming soon" or "imminent" release notices on software they obviously haven't even gotten to beta stage. Yet anyone with a brain schedules beta to last 3x longer than alpha.
You can predict how long a dev cycle will take, even with new hardware and questionable vendor support -- we now have several such generations of data available. And if you're in doubt, remember Scotty's advice from his TNG appearance.
So sure, give a date, and put it way down the road. Get funding till then and everything's good; better yet, only give a date to those who are funding you, and get plenty of funding. Only declare a release date when you've inked the deals with the distributors. Really, "buzz" and "viral marketing" is one thing; "letting my community manager feel cool" is entirely something else. Learn the difference.
But run your company so that you need to hit "miracle-coder" dates, and each project could sink you, and you won't be around for long.
I'm amazed how many clods out there don't follow these basic rules.
(scratches head, returns to fixing up the "trial balloon" he floated and the suits sold as a complete product to deliver in two months) errr... nevermind
IP socialism? Is there another kind?
//Someone explain why this line is here?
Debout^H^H^H^H^H^H#TOP les damnes de la terre!
Debout les forcats^H^H^Hks de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratere
C'est l'eruption de la fin^H^H^H#END// Say what?
Okay, so it's weak...
Actually it makes sense. If he's uploaded those three films, it's clear that he's not doing to promote art and good taste, but simply to steal. It's kinda like being Catholic and eating both fish and steak on Friday in Lent: if it were just steak, you could claim fish was too expensive. This guy was flaunting it -- "I don't even need to steal good films".
To be fair, they should send the producers who greenlighted those films up the river too.
Keeping persistent score records results in score-whoring? Who woula thunk it?
Ah, yeah, brings back to mind the good old days of Air Warrior and Warbirds, before I even played them, where there was a "bomber" ranking for the most damage. Someone figured which hangars got the highest score, and would fly around the map bombing those. Or heck, before that, on that PLATO MP flight sim, I recall...
Basic law folks: when you make recognition A depend on artificial measure B, you generate experts in achieving B. "No child left behind" or "Battlefield 2" -- it's the same thing: you make everything depend on a test, and you generate good test-takers.
Of course, in a game where there are other metrics than the personal one, you won't get all score-whores, but you will get your share. Welcome to teh intardnet.