Market my ass. The Music Industry, like many "mature" industries in the modern world, is effectively an oligopoly that uses government regulation as a means to perpetuate their market stance. This is the reality of capitalism. The "industry" doesn't always win in their control over the government; states have the unenviable role of being force to mediate between contrary demands, and only the most impressive of dictatorships can even pretend to be consistent in its behavior.
Intellectual Property is an even trickier area -- the concept that ideas have market value doesn't go back very far: maybe to the era of verbose hacks like Charles Dickens. Anyway, the problem here is that with IP, "The Market Provides" doesn't work as an argument, since IP guarantees a monopoly over a certain product. Don't like paying $110 for a Star Trek season DVD? Tough -- nobody else can sell that, and IP gives the owner the right to ask whatever price he likes. Yet the limited number of companies that control the market generally fix those prices fairly high. Remember the LP to CD transition? In changing formats, the retail cost of a recording doubled, artist royalties dropped, as did the production and distribution costs for the new media. But prices have "hard" value. What happens when these oligopolies decide to go after stuff with intangible value, such as personal information? If one company decides to make "phoning home" and "customer profiling" part of the package, they'll probably find most people won't object. And the other handful of companies that control the market can and will follow suit -- that's not a slippery slope; it's maximizing revenues. That leaves us with the choice of wearing tinfoil hats and living in caves, or surrendering valuable information about how we live our lives.
That's not a choice, and it is a good reason for governments to get involved on what are in effect unconscionable terms being foisted on the purchaser.
Then again, in a society where Google never forgets, I probably should be posting as AC if I wanted to maintain my privacy.
Sony: Wow -- neat hardware, big PS2 user base. Too bad crappy dev tools and byzantine Cell architecture by themselves generate several months of delays for developers. PS3 is gonna be on the front line of the war for the living room, so it's gonna be real pretty. Wait. You didn't think you actually owned any of your own content, did you? Hell, if you read the EULA carefully, you won't actually be owning the PS3 either!
M$: Nicer dev tools, and a relatively vanilla design (insofar as 3 PPCs can be boring, it is). Too bad you have to pay a subscription fee to M$ to use it online. The 360 can't compete with Windows Media Center, so it won't be _that_ pretty -- or it'll cost extra to use it that way. Engineered shortage? What are they going to do when they don't have the sellout they made their retailers guarantee?
Revolution: Cool controller. Y'all got a console that works with?
The question isn't "Who's going to win this?" But rather, "Who's gonna buy any of these?"
Everyone here seems to be concentrating in Nintendo vs. the world crap.
But damn, that there's a truly insightful article. I mean, I know that it's Sony vs. Microsoft for control of the living room, vs. Nintendo for video games, and I know that Sony's position as pure content and closed-system appliance provider dictates their system, while Microsoft, as pure medium (soft or hard), has to cut a different path, but this here article spells out what their strategies translate to in real terms.
Yeah, this is a "me too" post, but come on folks, y'all are talking like you got statues of mario in your backyard. Yes, the article here gives a big window for Nintendo, lets Microsoft have a shot, and suggests that Sony's gonna be selling a White Elephant. But like any good journalism, it leaves that interpretation open to the reader. Who knows? It's Sony's game to lose after all.
I'm glad I don't play consoles (yet). Watching them come to market is entertainment enough.
Yes, in the US, I was on the Do-not-call list, and it did kill a lot of the calls I was getting. For a while. Then election season rolled around and I got call after call from these robo-dialing get-out-the-vote thing. Excuse me? You don't even have the courtesy to pay someone to interrupt my day, and you want me to VOTE for your sorry ass? What kind of a mandate are you looking for? "A vote for me is a vote for more automated government intrusions on your personal life!"
Then someone figured out that "market research" can also be used for marketing purposes. So the calls started coming back:
Sir, I'm doing a market survey. What do you think of the [em]Gazette[/em]'s new layout and extensive sports coverage?
I never thought I'd see the day when sites were boasting a petabyte of porn. That's over 3 million hours of.avis -- if you sat down and watched them end-to-end, you'd have 348 years of "backdoor sliders", "dribblers to short", "pop flies", and "long balls". We live in an enlightened age.
Yeah, and who shopped the "quack" story around the hardware news outlets until someone (*cough* HardOCP) traded scruples for site hits and bought it?
Anybody
That's right... nVidia. It's funny, isn't it, that when I hear "unscrupulous reporting" and "smear politics" I think of two things: the Bush Administration and the Graphics Hardware marekt. I'll take it with a grain of salt, but not because of some campaign two generations ago that was entirely orchestrated by the competition.
Well, it's not quite as good as dual screens, but as a widescreen laptop user, yeah, I'm with you; also a 17" or even 20" screen carries with it an added bonus: the bigger the screen, the more keyboard space; the more keyboard space, the better the chances it'll be a keyboard you'd actually like to lose.
There are a couple problems with them, though.
A) First, I like my screen high resolution for exactly that purpose: it's supposed to replace a dual monitor setup. So I run a 15.4" widescreen in 1920x1200. It works great for all kinds of things, but the web can be problematic: it seems web designers like to make stuff in absolute pixel values, assuming a 72 dpi screen. Cheap streaming video players, like that crap that Microsoft pawns on me or Apple's crippleware player, also like to limit scalability to the medium. 320x200 at "200%" is still tiny. Apple's crippleware is useless (I know, I know, there are many fine Quicktime players out there that aren't made by Appple) for the same reason.
B) Second, everything still has to be on the same screen. With a dual-monitor setup, you can stick your comms and entertainment on one screen (the "distraction" screen), and focus on the task at hand on the other.
C) Most widescreens are not made for geeks who want to have 40 windows open. They are, in fact, made for the college kids who want to watch movies on them. So their resolutions are not near the "eyebleeding" level I demand.
(oh yeah, and this is what that 1920x1200 screen looks like in operation -- I stuck this up on Flickr some time ago: Desktop shot
Yes, I know, my life will be better when I get rid of that (X software in there) and run (Y software that's not) that's clearly superior, or use a free photographic host that allows more than 1024 pixels in their pictures.
Or they could use those electrostimulators I always see on the informercials that build muscle mass while you watch soap operas. I mean, they have to work -- they're on TV!
Well for that.1%, tracking your laser-printed docs shouldn't be your worry. Googling your name, then mining various associations will sooner or later lead them to all the compromising posts you make on/.
A) Hack your Nintendogs to introduce new behavior in online play, viz., your NintendRhodesianRidgeback runs down and eats NintendChihuahuas and McToyPoodles. Packet Injection attacks to replace Mario with something, uh, a little less "Kid-friendly" (play fair now)
Evil messages: "Billy, this is the happy leprachaun. Put your bigmac in mommy's purse". The possibilities are endless!
Heh. Funny, somewhere on my harddrive I have my old transcription a sermon by Pope Clement VI in the fall of 1348. His message was much the same, although his historical list of plagues was somewhat longer (and, oddly enough, his accounts were slightly less fictitious than the parent): "remember the plague of justinian and all the others before that; this isn't the end of the world folks."
Pandemics like the plague are quite commonly preceded by epizootics. The virus or bacillus multiplies itself over and over again. All it needs to kill lots of humans is a vector. It's one mutation away, and each day that it spreads through the bird/pig/human population, is one more day it gets that chance to find it.
...which is exactly what I said. Direct democratic representation does not exist; the reasons, I suspect are along the lines of what some of the other responses are: "the people can't be trusted with the power to govern". The United States Senate used to work this way too: state legislatures would appoint the senators. And the senate got known as "The Millionaires' Club". Four kinds of power exist over politicians: A) Money B) Other politicians C) The vote D) Popular uprising (cf. 'Bury the system/smash the state'). Most Citizens can only have direct access to C) and D) -- and I don't think anyone wants D. A "removed representation" system effectively puts the Citizens' control at a disadvantage in group B). At the higher levels of power (such as pan-european policy), this is a problem, hence why I called it a plutocracy.
I don't hate the EU/EC. More than once I've been a beneficiary of their questionable economic policies. But the facts remain as they are: it's not a representative democracy, and the majority population of many countries does not want the EU; probably for chaotic, confused and self-serving notions, but at least they're their own chaotic, confused and self-serving notions, and not those of a ruling elite.
Not, of course, that the EU/EC is any way constituted by a directly-elected representative body. So, yeah, if you don't like it, complain to your MP. How many Europeans actually like the EU these days anyway? Seems to me that in many key member states, a majority of citizens do not want to be part of the European Union as it currently is arranged. Their politicians, of course, do.
Actually, no. I thought I saw a review over at Tom's Hardware (but I can't seem to find it now), and by their datasheet you can see it's wireless B and WEP-only encryption.
So I guess we're still a ways off from someone making a VoIP wireless handset (I'll take skype, if you can get it) that doesn't require a computer to plug into. (think: if you thought the guys who used the local coffeeshop as their office were already pretty bad...)
Yow! That's good. That reminds me of back when I was in college and had a job testing all the crappy games being released. I remember one Basketball console title -- I think it was called "Take it to the Hoop" or something -- where we had to explain first to the producer, then to the programmer what constituted travelling. The guys had no knowledge or interest in sports: they were told to make a basketball game, and that's what they did.
So it sounds like the current mobile phone game market is a similar "gold rush" of crappy software made by hacks who don't give a damn.
Then again, they did get you bored enough to play that game 100 times.
Okay, so plenty are mentioning the general lack of interest in playing games on cellphones, and the poor interfaces for doing so. Here are some other problems to overcome:
A) Battery life. With the rush to "Small Form Factor" (aka microscopic physical size), they've shrunk the battery too. It seems that someone somewhere has decided that recharging yer phone every 2 days is acceptable. Playing games uses a lot of juice, and if that thirty minutes of messing around at lunchtime means your battery may die before you get home, then you've got a "feature" that inhibits the primary mission of the cellphone. In other words: people don't like recharging batteries.
B) Hardware issues. How many different cellphone OSs are out there? And within those OSs, how many different versions does your game software need to support? Games are playing to a serious weakness of the mobile phones: multiple platforms and hardware issues within the same platform. Cellphones are where PCs were in the late 1980s in terms of hardware configuration issues, only, as Nokia has shown, nobody buys a cellphone for games.
C) The joys of the vertical integration (aka "Vendor Lockin"). Mobile phone companies are making their stuff so the telcom companies can sell the hardware directly to the customer, tying in a fancy contract, turning off the features they don't like and nickle-and-diming the clients for every added "feature". So to sell a game, you need to develop it for a bunch of platforms, then negotiate with the telecom companies to deliver it to the customer at an inflated cost, with the end result that development costs are high and end-user interest is pretty darn low.
D) Negative user experience. Many phones come preloaded with games. The two I've bought in the past year came with 3 games each. All six of them suck. I mean, they _really_ suck. How are you going to sell a product to a group of people when every bit of experience they've had has been negative? "Well, every game I've ever seen for a mobile phone sucks, but this one I know will be good!" For that matter, when you stumble across some freak playing a mobile phone game, observe closely: is that person showing it to friends, or passers-by? Is anybody trying to look at it? No. Mobile phone games are extremely personal, like the phone itself, and generally aren't passed around. So the only effective way to expose someone to mobile phone games is to put them on the phone when that person buys them. And right now, the best thing out there is Nokia's Snake. woop-de-doo
Just the net was dismantled. The actual bots are now bot-Ronin, who will prove their loyalty by DDoSing the appropriate law enforcement websites into oblivion, before wiping their BIOS en masse.
Seriously, this is not the first anti-E3 piece aired on slashdot. Parent's post is dead on -- developers shop their wares all the time at E3. And, well, the small press gets short shrift because, well, there's a hierarchy out there. Sending Best Buy clerks to E3 may seem stupid to someone in the press, but from a developer/publisher perspective, it makes sense: marketing is no longer about a few magazines; there are "smaller publishers", such as websites featuring 19-year-old journalists; there are "special-interest sites", which often contain the hardcore of target demographics; there are the media aggregator sites (like this one), who are key to distributing buzz, and then there are the bloggers, some of whom may actually have audiences. Yes, we all understand that journalists are hungry for information. Developers and publishers are likewise hungry for exposure. But journalists don't live in peace with one another; the big traffic comes from access to privileged information and persons. Best Buy clerks can talk about rubbing shoulders with the vid companies; some may even speak of meeting a person who works for a company.
But you don't go to these conventions as a reporter, hoping to make contacts. You make contacts first. That's your job, after all.
The article features this in the concluding paragraph:
The saleability of such fruits in game form is a complex and erratic proposition, but it seems scarcely relevant
No offense, but it reads a bit like an undergraduate essay; perhaps an honors project, complete with a "hall of fame" for various aesthetic styles.
The point (as I understand it) is that visual representation and the drive towards "realism" detracts from the exploration of the wide range of visual styles available for game development. The author uses many examples, a few from film, but mostly from comics for his argument.
The problem with the article (besides its rather pretentious linguistic exuberance) lies in the incomplete realization of a very interesting thesis that lurks in the subtext, which betrays the failure to properly conceptualize the field of inquiry, viz. videogames. Alright, time to cut the pretentious babble: at times during the author's exposition, the issue of limitations creep up. Mostly, these are (as is not surprising for most videogame freaks, given historical development) limitations in technology, and remarks made in passing do indicate that game development has to take this into account (with a salient example being Katamari Damacy). But there are other limitations, the biggest one being money, whether expressed in development time, anticipated sales, or the burgeoning arts budgets of big-ticket games. In other words, aesthetics does not merely consider formal aspects, but rather formal aspects as expressed in the proximate matter that we call "the medium". A painter can't paint on moonlight, but needs a canvas (of some sort). A filmmaker without film (chemical or digital) is not a filmmaker. So at the heart of it is the computer, and its capabilities. But the problem here is not just material; it's formal. The Author assumes the essence of a computer game; that is he never defines his subject. As a result, he injects ideas and categorizations that are completely foreign to video games. When I was younger, and even more pretentious, I once declared that if cooking were an art, I'd have slipped motor oil into the compote. I'm glad there's someone following in my footsteps and suggesting a matisse-like (as opposed to 1920x1280 matrix-like) pointillist video game. "Computer game" is not a monolithic concept: games belong to specific types, and those types have their proper artwork. Puzzles (like tetris) do not need photorealistic artwork; in fact, a pure puzzle works best with an abstract and unambiguous semantic scheme that communicate the salient information immediately to the player (imagine how much fun tetris would be if the blocks were photorealistic bricks of nearly identical size). A narrative can play with representation (like the author's beloved comic books) and explore some of the more fantastic representational schemes. A simulation, however, needs to give the user the cognitive experience of the reality being simulated. That doesn't rule out art altogether; rather it establishes rules within which the art operates. Within these rules, "photorealism" is a dead end, or at least a misnomer. Few photographs convey the feeling of "being there". Extracting 2048x2048 textures from photographs, and slapping them on 100,000-poly models doesn't result in a realistic-looking model: any photographer will tell you the same object, photographed, will be entirely different from one part of the day to the next, and that the camera does not function identically to the eye. Making a "photograph" means putting something in focus, and directing the player's eye along. But the idea of "imagistic realism" itself, complete with complex graphics and lighting effects, is quite valid for games with a heavy simulation element. The largely narrative-driven ("sandbox") series Grand Theft Auto, when it shifted to a "first person" (or nearly) perspective with GTA3. went from an exploitational sidewalk-driving game to a blockbuster monument of game development with "Vice
But certainly, the dynamics of how the plague spreads, as well as how information on what the plague is and how to combat it are quite useful bits of information.
The story of the plague isn't simply the griefers and pranksters running around doing this, but the interpretations of _what_ it is by the general population (malicious attack, divine punishment, or simple screwup), the speed with which your average gamer changes (drastically) playing style to cope with the new reality, and the attempts at fixes and reactions of the players to the fixes. That's sociological gold. I'm reading these narratives in the light of accounts of 1347-1351, and there are some parallels.
.The kids running around infecting people because they're infected aren't the extent of what happens in a MMO-pandemic.
Slashdot Mirror
Market my ass. The Music Industry, like many "mature" industries in the modern world, is effectively an oligopoly that uses government regulation as a means to perpetuate their market stance. This is the reality of capitalism. The "industry" doesn't always win in their control over the government; states have the unenviable role of being force to mediate between contrary demands, and only the most impressive of dictatorships can even pretend to be consistent in its behavior.
Intellectual Property is an even trickier area -- the concept that ideas have market value doesn't go back very far: maybe to the era of verbose hacks like Charles Dickens. Anyway, the problem here is that with IP, "The Market Provides" doesn't work as an argument, since IP guarantees a monopoly over a certain product. Don't like paying $110 for a Star Trek season DVD? Tough -- nobody else can sell that, and IP gives the owner the right to ask whatever price he likes. Yet the limited number of companies that control the market generally fix those prices fairly high. Remember the LP to CD transition? In changing formats, the retail cost of a recording doubled, artist royalties dropped, as did the production and distribution costs for the new media. But prices have "hard" value. What happens when these oligopolies decide to go after stuff with intangible value, such as personal information? If one company decides to make "phoning home" and "customer profiling" part of the package, they'll probably find most people won't object. And the other handful of companies that control the market can and will follow suit -- that's not a slippery slope; it's maximizing revenues. That leaves us with the choice of wearing tinfoil hats and living in caves, or surrendering valuable information about how we live our lives.
That's not a choice, and it is a good reason for governments to get involved on what are in effect unconscionable terms being foisted on the purchaser.
Then again, in a society where Google never forgets, I probably should be posting as AC if I wanted to maintain my privacy.
Sony: Wow -- neat hardware, big PS2 user base. Too bad crappy dev tools and byzantine Cell architecture by themselves generate several months of delays for developers. PS3 is gonna be on the front line of the war for the living room, so it's gonna be real pretty. Wait. You didn't think you actually owned any of your own content, did you? Hell, if you read the EULA carefully, you won't actually be owning the PS3 either!
M$: Nicer dev tools, and a relatively vanilla design (insofar as 3 PPCs can be boring, it is). Too bad you have to pay a subscription fee to M$ to use it online. The 360 can't compete with Windows Media Center, so it won't be _that_ pretty -- or it'll cost extra to use it that way. Engineered shortage? What are they going to do when they don't have the sellout they made their retailers guarantee?
Revolution: Cool controller. Y'all got a console that works with?
The question isn't "Who's going to win this?" But rather, "Who's gonna buy any of these?"
Everyone here seems to be concentrating in Nintendo vs. the world crap.
But damn, that there's a truly insightful article. I mean, I know that it's Sony vs. Microsoft for control of the living room, vs. Nintendo for video games, and I know that Sony's position as pure content and closed-system appliance provider dictates their system, while Microsoft, as pure medium (soft or hard), has to cut a different path, but this here article spells out what their strategies translate to in real terms.
Yeah, this is a "me too" post, but come on folks, y'all are talking like you got statues of mario in your backyard. Yes, the article here gives a big window for Nintendo, lets Microsoft have a shot, and suggests that Sony's gonna be selling a White Elephant. But like any good journalism, it leaves that interpretation open to the reader. Who knows? It's Sony's game to lose after all.
I'm glad I don't play consoles (yet). Watching them come to market is entertainment enough.
Yes, in the US, I was on the Do-not-call list, and it did kill a lot of the calls I was getting. For a while. Then election season rolled around and I got call after call from these robo-dialing get-out-the-vote thing. Excuse me? You don't even have the courtesy to pay someone to interrupt my day, and you want me to VOTE for your sorry ass? What kind of a mandate are you looking for? "A vote for me is a vote for more automated government intrusions on your personal life!"
Then someone figured out that "market research" can also be used for marketing purposes. So the calls started coming back:
Sir, I'm doing a market survey. What do you think of the [em]Gazette[/em]'s new layout and extensive sports coverage?
The real solution is burn your phone.
Oooh Granpa! so, rev, how many MacTinis did it take?
I never thought I'd see the day when sites were boasting a petabyte of porn. .avis -- if you sat down and watched them end-to-end, you'd have 348 years of "backdoor sliders", "dribblers to short", "pop flies", and "long balls". We live in an enlightened age.
That's over 3 million hours of
Yeah, and who shopped the "quack" story around the hardware news outlets until someone (*cough* HardOCP) traded scruples for site hits and bought it?
Anybody
That's right... nVidia. It's funny, isn't it, that when I hear "unscrupulous reporting" and "smear politics" I think of two things: the Bush Administration and the Graphics Hardware marekt. I'll take it with a grain of salt, but not because of some campaign two generations ago that was entirely orchestrated by the competition.
HP/Compaq. Dell sells laptops with them in it too: just look for the WUXGA screen.
Come to think of it, my laptop choice was determined by the availability of at least a 1600x1200 screen.
Well, it's not quite as good as dual screens, but as a widescreen laptop user, yeah, I'm with you; also a 17" or even 20" screen carries with it an added bonus: the bigger the screen, the more keyboard space; the more keyboard space, the better the chances it'll be a keyboard you'd actually like to lose.
There are a couple problems with them, though.
A) First, I like my screen high resolution for exactly that purpose: it's supposed to replace a dual monitor setup. So I run a 15.4" widescreen in 1920x1200. It works great for all kinds of things, but the web can be problematic: it seems web designers like to make stuff in absolute pixel values, assuming a 72 dpi screen. Cheap streaming video players, like that crap that Microsoft pawns on me or Apple's crippleware player, also like to limit scalability to the medium. 320x200 at "200%" is still tiny. Apple's crippleware is useless (I know, I know, there are many fine Quicktime players out there that aren't made by Appple) for the same reason.
B) Second, everything still has to be on the same screen. With a dual-monitor setup, you can stick your comms and entertainment on one screen (the "distraction" screen), and focus on the task at hand on the other.
C) Most widescreens are not made for geeks who want to have 40 windows open. They are, in fact, made for the college kids who want to watch movies on them. So their resolutions are not near the "eyebleeding" level I demand.
(oh yeah, and this is what that 1920x1200 screen looks like in operation -- I stuck this up on Flickr some time ago: Desktop shot
Yes, I know, my life will be better when I get rid of that (X software in there) and run (Y software that's not) that's clearly superior, or use a free photographic host that allows more than 1024 pixels in their pictures.
Or they could use those electrostimulators I always see on the informercials that build muscle mass while you watch soap operas. I mean, they have to work -- they're on TV!
Linie Aquavit announced they were expanding their line to include Scotch Whiskey, London Gin, Mexican Tequila, and Peugeot motor cars.
Well for that .1%, tracking your laser-printed docs shouldn't be your worry. Googling your name, then mining various associations will sooner or later lead them to all the compromising posts you make on /.
See you in jail.
and think about the practical ones:
A) Hack your Nintendogs to introduce new behavior in online play, viz., your NintendRhodesianRidgeback runs down and eats NintendChihuahuas and McToyPoodles.
Packet Injection attacks to replace Mario with something, uh, a little less "Kid-friendly" (play fair now)
Evil messages: "Billy, this is the happy leprachaun. Put your bigmac in mommy's purse".
The possibilities are endless!
Heh. Funny, somewhere on my harddrive I have my old transcription a sermon by Pope Clement VI in the fall of 1348. His message was much the same, although his historical list of plagues was somewhat longer (and, oddly enough, his accounts were slightly less fictitious than the parent): "remember the plague of justinian and all the others before that; this isn't the end of the world folks."
Pandemics like the plague are quite commonly preceded by epizootics. The virus or bacillus multiplies itself over and over again. All it needs to kill lots of humans is a vector. It's one mutation away, and each day that it spreads through the bird/pig/human population, is one more day it gets that chance to find it.
I heard the devkits come with a "flexible linear debugging attachment", also known as a 'handle'.
...which is exactly what I said. Direct democratic representation does not exist; the reasons, I suspect are along the lines of what some of the other responses are: "the people can't be trusted with the power to govern". The United States Senate used to work this way too: state legislatures would appoint the senators. And the senate got known as "The Millionaires' Club". Four kinds of power exist over politicians: A) Money B) Other politicians C) The vote D) Popular uprising (cf. 'Bury the system/smash the state'). Most Citizens can only have direct access to C) and D) -- and I don't think anyone wants D. A "removed representation" system effectively puts the Citizens' control at a disadvantage in group B). At the higher levels of power (such as pan-european policy), this is a problem, hence why I called it a plutocracy.
I don't hate the EU/EC. More than once I've been a beneficiary of their questionable economic policies. But the facts remain as they are: it's not a representative democracy, and the majority population of many countries does not want the EU; probably for chaotic, confused and self-serving notions, but at least they're their own chaotic, confused and self-serving notions, and not those of a ruling elite.
Not, of course, that the EU/EC is any way constituted by a directly-elected representative body. So, yeah, if you don't like it, complain to your MP. How many Europeans actually like the EU these days anyway? Seems to me that in many key member states, a majority of citizens do not want to be part of the European Union as it currently is arranged. Their politicians, of course, do.
It's called plutocracy.
Actually, no. I thought I saw a review over at Tom's Hardware (but I can't seem to find it now), and by their datasheet you can see it's wireless B and WEP-only encryption.
So I guess we're still a ways off from someone making a VoIP wireless handset (I'll take skype, if you can get it) that doesn't require a computer to plug into. (think: if you thought the guys who used the local coffeeshop as their office were already pretty bad...)
Yow! That's good. That reminds me of back when I was in college and had a job testing all the crappy games being released. I remember one Basketball console title -- I think it was called "Take it to the Hoop" or something -- where we had to explain first to the producer, then to the programmer what constituted travelling. The guys had no knowledge or interest in sports: they were told to make a basketball game, and that's what they did.
So it sounds like the current mobile phone game market is a similar "gold rush" of crappy software made by hacks who don't give a damn.
Then again, they did get you bored enough to play that game 100 times.
Okay, so plenty are mentioning the general lack of interest in playing games on cellphones, and the poor interfaces for doing so. Here are some other problems to overcome:
A) Battery life. With the rush to "Small Form Factor" (aka microscopic physical size), they've shrunk the battery too. It seems that someone somewhere has decided that recharging yer phone every 2 days is acceptable. Playing games uses a lot of juice, and if that thirty minutes of messing around at lunchtime means your battery may die before you get home, then you've got a "feature" that inhibits the primary mission of the cellphone. In other words: people don't like recharging batteries.
B) Hardware issues. How many different cellphone OSs are out there? And within those OSs, how many different versions does your game software need to support? Games are playing to a serious weakness of the mobile phones: multiple platforms and hardware issues within the same platform. Cellphones are where PCs were in the late 1980s in terms of hardware configuration issues, only, as Nokia has shown, nobody buys a cellphone for games.
C) The joys of the vertical integration (aka "Vendor Lockin"). Mobile phone companies are making their stuff so the telcom companies can sell the hardware directly to the customer, tying in a fancy contract, turning off the features they don't like and nickle-and-diming the clients for every added "feature". So to sell a game, you need to develop it for a bunch of platforms, then negotiate with the telecom companies to deliver it to the customer at an inflated cost, with the end result that development costs are high and end-user interest is pretty darn low.
D) Negative user experience. Many phones come preloaded with games. The two I've bought in the past year came with 3 games each. All six of them suck. I mean, they _really_ suck. How are you going to sell a product to a group of people when every bit of experience they've had has been negative? "Well, every game I've ever seen for a mobile phone sucks, but this one I know will be good!" For that matter, when you stumble across some freak playing a mobile phone game, observe closely: is that person showing it to friends, or passers-by? Is anybody trying to look at it? No. Mobile phone games are extremely personal, like the phone itself, and generally aren't passed around. So the only effective way to expose someone to mobile phone games is to put them on the phone when that person buys them. And right now, the best thing out there is Nokia's Snake. woop-de-doo
Just the net was dismantled. The actual bots are now bot-Ronin, who will prove their loyalty by DDoSing the appropriate law enforcement websites into oblivion, before wiping their BIOS en masse.
That's 'cos cops like helping kids. Very few cops are shot by 8-year-olds who can't find their mommy.
--besides, they can be whiny.
Seriously, this is not the first anti-E3 piece aired on slashdot. Parent's post is dead on -- developers shop their wares all the time at E3. And, well, the small press gets short shrift because, well, there's a hierarchy out there. Sending Best Buy clerks to E3 may seem stupid to someone in the press, but from a developer/publisher perspective, it makes sense: marketing is no longer about a few magazines; there are "smaller publishers", such as websites featuring 19-year-old journalists; there are "special-interest sites", which often contain the hardcore of target demographics; there are the media aggregator sites (like this one), who are key to distributing buzz, and then there are the bloggers, some of whom may actually have audiences. Yes, we all understand that journalists are hungry for information. Developers and publishers are likewise hungry for exposure. But journalists don't live in peace with one another; the big traffic comes from access to privileged information and persons. Best Buy clerks can talk about rubbing shoulders with the vid companies; some may even speak of meeting a person who works for a company.
But you don't go to these conventions as a reporter, hoping to make contacts. You make contacts first. That's your job, after all.
No offense, but it reads a bit like an undergraduate essay; perhaps an honors project, complete with a "hall of fame" for various aesthetic styles.
The point (as I understand it) is that visual representation and the drive towards "realism" detracts from the exploration of the wide range of visual styles available for game development. The author uses many examples, a few from film, but mostly from comics for his argument.
The problem with the article (besides its rather pretentious linguistic exuberance) lies in the incomplete realization of a very interesting thesis that lurks in the subtext, which betrays the failure to properly conceptualize the field of inquiry, viz. videogames.
Alright, time to cut the pretentious babble: at times during the author's exposition, the issue of limitations creep up. Mostly, these are (as is not surprising for most videogame freaks, given historical development) limitations in technology, and remarks made in passing do indicate that game development has to take this into account (with a salient example being Katamari Damacy). But there are other limitations, the biggest one being money, whether expressed in development time, anticipated sales, or the burgeoning arts budgets of big-ticket games. In other words, aesthetics does not merely consider formal aspects, but rather formal aspects as expressed in the proximate matter that we call "the medium". A painter can't paint on moonlight, but needs a canvas (of some sort). A filmmaker without film (chemical or digital) is not a filmmaker.
So at the heart of it is the computer, and its capabilities. But the problem here is not just material; it's formal. The Author assumes the essence of a computer game; that is he never defines his subject. As a result, he injects ideas and categorizations that are completely foreign to video games.
When I was younger, and even more pretentious, I once declared that if cooking were an art, I'd have slipped motor oil into the compote. I'm glad there's someone following in my footsteps and suggesting a matisse-like (as opposed to 1920x1280 matrix-like) pointillist video game. "Computer game" is not a monolithic concept: games belong to specific types, and those types have their proper artwork. Puzzles (like tetris) do not need photorealistic artwork; in fact, a pure puzzle works best with an abstract and unambiguous semantic scheme that communicate the salient information immediately to the player (imagine how much fun tetris would be if the blocks were photorealistic bricks of nearly identical size). A narrative can play with representation (like the author's beloved comic books) and explore some of the more fantastic representational schemes. A simulation, however, needs to give the user the cognitive experience of the reality being simulated. That doesn't rule out art altogether; rather it establishes rules within which the art operates.
Within these rules, "photorealism" is a dead end, or at least a misnomer. Few photographs convey the feeling of "being there". Extracting 2048x2048 textures from photographs, and slapping them on 100,000-poly models doesn't result in a realistic-looking model: any photographer will tell you the same object, photographed, will be entirely different from one part of the day to the next, and that the camera does not function identically to the eye. Making a "photograph" means putting something in focus, and directing the player's eye along.
But the idea of "imagistic realism" itself, complete with complex graphics and lighting effects, is quite valid for games with a heavy simulation element. The largely narrative-driven ("sandbox") series Grand Theft Auto, when it shifted to a "first person" (or nearly) perspective with GTA3. went from an exploitational sidewalk-driving game to a blockbuster monument of game development with "Vice
But certainly, the dynamics of how the plague spreads, as well as how information on what the plague is and how to combat it are quite useful bits of information.
The story of the plague isn't simply the griefers and pranksters running around doing this, but the interpretations of _what_ it is by the general population (malicious attack, divine punishment, or simple screwup), the speed with which your average gamer changes (drastically) playing style to cope with the new reality, and the attempts at fixes and reactions of the players to the fixes. That's sociological gold. I'm reading these narratives in the light of accounts of 1347-1351, and there are some parallels.
.The kids running around infecting people because they're infected aren't the extent of what happens in a MMO-pandemic.