The article evokes my English 101 course freshman year at college. We read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and when it came to discussion this one guy (named, of all things, Blue) burst out, "Where's the antagonism?"
Basically, the article's author is trying to convince game industry types why writers and story are necessary, but he shoots himself in the foot by limiting the industry to one genre and deploying a notion of "classical narrative" from literature that really doesn't work outside of epics and sitcoms.
Reading his article, his focus is on long, narrative-driven games. But this focus limits the utility. When he argues at the end that writers are necessary, I ask: why? Okay, for some pompous over-the-top thing like Deus Ex, sure. But the whole Mario Brothers franchise? Antagonism and Reversal are reduced to mere stubs to drive the platform-based fun. And the last game Maxis produced with antagonism in it was Robosport, and I don't see that mentioned as their greatest achievement.
The article starts out with a comparison to the early days of cinema. The inherent problem is that, well, viewing cinema as a teleological march, isolated from other genres presents a distorted picture of the medium. You know why? They're still showing moving pictures of stage plays, and travelogues, and all those other genres that the article wants to imply "failed" because of a lack of narrative. They're just showing them on TV, not in the movie theaters. And, incidently, the way movies were socially experienced 75 years ago is entirely different from today. So the genre doesn't evolve in a vacuum. The same could be said for videogames. They're still making games like Snake, and little puzzle games, but they're on telephones and portable game machines.
So I object to the 80/20 rules too. Plays are not 80-20 audio-visual any more than movies are 80-20 visual-audio: it varies from piece to piece. Go into a godawful European nineteenth-century opera house, imagine it full of people (heaven forfend going to an opera--I wouldn't ask that of anyone), and tell me it's 80% about the singing. If that's so, why all the visual distractions that bombard us?
But if you're going to characterize videogames or any other bit of entertainment, look at how they're experienced. The cognitive experience is the target, not what goes to the screen or the speakers, or the overglorified adult novelty device they call a controller.
So, you want to say dialog sucks. Well, having just tried facade, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But then again, I've had some excellent experiences of in-game dialog, but they all involved communications with other humans. Robo-Dialog also works for setting the context: radio chatter, conversations at a party, a domestic squabble in an abandoned building, some surreal nonsense blasted from huge loudspeakers. But sure, dialog central to the narrative is problematic because the player can't (yet) interact with the characters on the same level (if anyone wants some facade scripts where I yell repeatedly for a goddamned martini only to get quizzical looks from the warring couple, let me know).
I guess that brings us back to the novel, and the issue of fiction. If the game has a linear structure, then someone has to write that linear structure, and a Joseph Campbellesque High School writing class approach will work just fine for most cases. But don't think that all great literature is written that way, nor even that most games have such a structure. There are plenty of other structures out there:
Sports: the game provides regulated social interaction. It doesn't matter whether it is a "sports game" (Madden), a simulation (CS), MMORPG, or something completely abstract: the value people derive from it is social contact with others. Narrative, writers and all that are not necessary for the sports element to work: people create their own narratives.
The great secret of today's video games that has been lost in the moral panic over "Grand Theft Auto" is how difficult the games have become. That difficulty is not merely a question of hand-eye coordination; most of today's games force kids to learn complex rule systems, master challenging new interfaces, follow dozens of shifting variables in real time and prioritize between multiple objectives.
I haven't seen SA, but from what I've encountered in GTA (a noble series that it may be), there are no "complex rule systems": just a big sandbox and some simple rules. "New interfaces" are nothing that a bog-standard game controller can do and has done for the last fifteen years, and "multiple objectives" are pretty much ruled out by the straightforward mission structure.
Worse if the game actually were as characterized, it wouldn't sell as many copies: way too difficult, not entertaining enough.
But the description sounds really good. "Training the wage slaves of the information age"
"I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to," said Kutaragi to a mostly Japanese crowd. "But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best (in containing the price)."
So what does this mean? Is sony aiming for businesses that deman premium gaming consoles, or rich bachelors with no life and tons of money?
As someone who's used his share of cheap belt-drive turntables acquired at garage sales (and then rewired), and who has had some experience at spinning platters this project needs:
Direct drive. There's a reason why DD turntables cost more. Those pulleys wear out, they slip, they stretch on start up and oscillate as they balance out. Why bother with a brushless motor if you're slapping it to a rubber band? Why praise the electronic speed control features of the floppy motor when you're wiring it to a system that by design can't regulate it? Give me torque. When I press that "go" button, I want it spinning perfectly at 33, 45 or maybe 78 RPM, now, not a quarter turn from now. I'm sure there's a way to wire a floppy to do just that, so get back at it!
cf. The Hold Steady, "Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs"
Well, it also has supercool features requiring "A browser that supports ActiveX controls". Maybe Microsoft will soon release a "Tips for selecting a web browser" along the lines of their popular tips for buying a flash media player.
I can see the "popular options" already: Does it support ActiveX controls? Many web sites offer exclusive content through ActiveX controls; a browser not using ActiveX controls won't be able to allow web sites to harness the full potential of your computer.
Does it support only Windows XP and 2000 as platforms? Browsers that support many platforms are that many times more likely to become the target of attacks. Also, with a Win XP/2000 only browser, you know you're getting the most out of your Microsoft Windows experience.
Does it have MSN as its default homepage? Some browsers default to a Google home page with very few options. For optimal surfing, be sure MSN pops up first.
Okay, how many of you are thinking of a modified USB device that in a ten-second transaction gains root access and installs some finely tuned malware (a keylogger, a packet sniffer, some "communications" software)? You'd slip it in, take it out, and wait for it to "phone home"-- or have it collect data silently until you attached a USB collection device. What are the vulnerabilities?
A) public computers: not just university computer labs and libraries, but kiosks in shopping malls, airports, you name it. Look around -- there are loads of places featuring "secured" installations of windows (or Linux, for that matter).
Now, think about some of these networks -- are they all going to be wired to keep the "secured, public boxes" away from more sensitive traffic? Is anybody going to be trained to notice a 10-second move as a hacking attempt? B) even scarier are places like hospitals. I know I've sat waiting for a doctor to come in a room with a thin client running some flavor of windows on a password-secured system -- they leave you unsupervised for half an hour sometimes. I'd really rather not have someone poking around my medical data.
C. Industrial Espionage: Physical access doesn't require a hacker. You can have any number of low-paid, unskilled workers do the injection for you. Slip the janitor a USB key and some Franklins and you're in business.
Okay, I admit, I don't know what I'm talking about. But it's scary stuff, huh?
MMO flight sims have been using "predictive technology" (=lag balancing) for at least a decade. Physics at that speed means that you can't really pull any surprises on the lag engine; on the other hand, collisions are done on the attacking machine. So you objects in your six view are closer than they appear, that guy who doesn't look like he has a shot probably does, and single-aircraft midair collisions do happen.
Still, you could introduce a cool-looking "bullet time" effect by playing with the "predictive buffer".
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
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· Score: 1
Nice theoretical presentation, and compelling reading -- probably more compelling than any implementation of such a game will be.
First off, innovation is well and good, but innovating is not the same as entertaining. So the statement "the market doesn't support innovation" isn't quite accurate. The fact is that innovations that are also entertaining are few compared to the innovations that just don't work game-wise.
Second, current MMORPGs base their success on two principles: A) every player gets the feeling of doing something exceptional. Sure, there are those long boring bits of slaving away doing whatever boring crap it is, but everyone needs their moment of achievement. MMORPGs are like kindergarten science fairs: everybody gets a prize. After all, these are games built around addiction, and who's gonna play or pay for a game they're no good at, and in which they see no progress? In the real world, that's called a "day job" for most people, and they get paid to do it. B) MMORPGs have a heavy social element. It's an online game, and you play with other people. Social interaction needs to occur.
Okay, now let's inject the idea of a "realistic" as opposed to a "canned" environment.
You're talking about lots of expense. On the one hand, like TFAs "simple ideas", were looking at a much more complicated core design. Yes, TFAs "player houses" are a cool idea, but you just made parts of the world dynamic and in need of an update everytime every player enters a region. Thats a lot more bandwidth, and a lot more complex code to deal with, all of it fundamentally MP. And debugging MP code is time-consuming and costly. A dynamic world is even worse. These things can and have been done, but not on the scale being suggested here; these implementations are always costly and usually buggy. In this case, we need folks who know quite a bit about economics, social structures, ecology and related fields to make a sustainable environment: Otherwise your pelts will go extinct in a hurry and shopkeepers will starve. Worst of all, all this complexity has nothing to do with the user experience in sense A) or B). In fact, I'd argue that such a "realistic world" approach detracts from the user appeal of such a game. According to A), everybody's gotta be special, at least at something, or they ain't gonna play. But a realistic world model won't support a world full of superspecial people, as Thoreau found out. For something truly epic to occur, 10,000 other people need to have mundane experiences. So you're committed to making AI characters, most of which are less competent than your average home user. But per a real world model, you'll need a lot of NPCs for each human. Now we get to B). How are the humans going to interact? I've got an idea: let's have canned 'quests' and a basic combat system!
There are other cool MMOG models out there, but for any one of them, the way to start is with the user experience and work to design. The worst way to proceed is go from "what an ideal reality would be" and make technology and player experience take a back seat to an overarching, compelling bit of intellectual masturbation.
Last time I went to buy a train ticket in Italy, the poor guy there spent 5-10 minutes on this antique computer trying to dial it up. Then the darn thing crashed and he had to reboot... splash screen:
A) Bohemia Interactive and Operation Flashpoint. Doing war games, just like doing war movies, is never neutral. But the internet communities built around those games make it all the more vocal. Look at any WW2 simulation forum, and you'll find fans of german equipment whining about something or other (okay, just so I don't get modded troll, fans of every other country do the same thing). Look at BIS's forum from when Flashpoint:Resistance came out, and you'll find quite a few posts from Russians upset with the fictional depiction of 1984 renegade Russian troops. Even simulated atrocities have a real-world impact here. oh yeah, and the moral impact of destructible buildings is questionable. I remember a friend who used to play Falcon 2.0 at college with a buddy. There was a church along the departure path. They'd always bomb it "For Good Luck" on the way out and do a low fly-by on the way back. I know I'm looking forward to a BIS sim with destructable buildings so I can make some virtual rubble. I put the "moral impact" of it right in the same bag as someone trying to convince me that it was important to simulate artillery accurately, so "people would understand the severity of civilian casualties". Reality check folks -- go talk to anyone who's seen the shiny DPICM objects all over Iraq, and tell me how we're going to simulate years of nastiness for civilians, especially following the dud rate given in the unclassified field manuals. We can build a virtual world, but our simulations are only as good as the data we give it, and that inevitably follows what we believe to be the case.
B) World View: Continuing that thought, far more powerful than the explicit choices made are the implicit ones. Did Will Wright study urban planning before the original Sim City? If he did, would he have changed the model from one based on city blocks (never a functional form, even if most of the US is laid out that way)? You could say the same thing about his urban model. Sim City is a "toy" more than a "game", but most people when they play the "game", at least the original, seemed to play to get the highest "score": Wealthiest neighborhoods, rich city, low crime, no pollution. That's wonderful, but it makes you wonder whether the sequel shoulda been called Shaker Heights 2000.
C) Poetics: acceptable pompous references to Aristotle are "The Philosopher" (scholastic/medieval) and (classicizing) "The Stagirite". Geeky nerd reference is "Harry" (for "Harry Stotle"). "Ari" would be acceptable if the dude were dutch. Anyway, I think the point is made that games don't communicate emotions. So at the end of all this, what is it they do?
f both of you confess, you both go to jail for 4 years. What do you do?
Get the DA to agree, in writing to grant you immunity before you rat out your buddy.
If you make the latter choice and turn up heads, then your total amount will be doubled to $100; if you turn up tails, then the amount will be halved.
Easy: turn up heads. Flip it to your hand, and if it's tails, quickly slap it on your wrist, insisting it was "part of the flip". The other guy doesn't have any experience with how you flip coins.
Do you switch, or do you stay?
say, "well Monty, I'd like to here from the audience on this one". As their shouting their insipid answers, look at the two doors: which one is against the wall, and which one has acreage of studio space behind it? Note the light leakage from camera lights behind one, and the mysterious cables running that way. Finally, if you're male, like me, use your keenly-tuned ability to detect female pheremones to determine behind which door the missing 3-4 game show hostesses are. There's no guarantee the prize will be Monty's Hog Farm, but at least the prize will be.
yeah, not only does it require IE, it has "Almost-TV" quality. Legality and morality aside, MovieLink is not the way to go. Let's see: 1: Charges more than a rental 2: Fewer titles available than rental 3: Quality and DRM features make the product much less attractive than one that can be easily downloaded.
When people pay for movies they want a cinematic experience. A 400 kbps stream gives them a rabbit-ear experience.
On the other hand, the critical weakness of the pirate movie world is bandwidth. Most home users who are capable of pirating movies, and hence would be the ones to pay for this service, have residential broadband with asymmetric up/down bandwidth. Most of them don't have a neighborhood dumpsite they can log into -- for movies they'll be using something like Kazaa (for ever movie server there's enough downloaders to choke the stream, or so I've been told) or BitTorrent (give and you shall receive, upload rate caps download rate). So you're talking downloads that last overnight or that take several days. Sure, this may improve in the future, but if you can, NOW, offer a "fast-as-you-can-handle-it" download of recent movies, at a quality that people want to watch (i.e., Not MovieLink -- the crappiest videocam jobs are better than that), and find a way to serve it cheap enough, it'll work.
Well, OFP, IIRC, uses a combination of stateful AI and (within that) some sort of neural net system to run their bots. It looks like Facade is using a complicated expert system: there is a story to tell, and your behaviour will "trip" certain triggers.
Both systems have their limitations: NN-based stuff is dependent on the inputs given. OFP Bots, for example, "learned" back in the days of development. And their information on visible is a combination of what the person is doing (crawling makes them less visible than running), and where they are (concealment is preferable to cover). On the other hand, "being shot at" is not an input (it does however initiate a state change -- from "AWARE" to "COMBAT"). The result is that the AI does some things that work pretty well against other bots with the same inputs: they run across an open field, then crawl on their belly in the middle: "Disappearing" to the eyes of the enemy bots, but presenting a tasty target for humans. Anyway, coding OFP missions is like herding cats a lot of the time: the AI has its own mind of doing things, and it's not always tactically sound.
On the other hand, the Expert System approach ends up being canned: you do actions to change states, and your range of action is limited to what the developers thought up. Hence Facade: it looks sophisticated as hell, and I'll download it and check it out, but it sounds like a superfancy Eliza.
Oh and for a good assault, lay in some artillery, send two squads to the target on "SEARCH AND DESTROY" and have a reserve squad set on "GUARD" (so they close with the enemy when the others make contact).
BTW, most of everything is garbage. The internet and science fiction writers even managed to cobble together a "law" to that effect.
Well, CS is still as far as I know the reigning champ of number of users online at any time, and by a great margin.
Generally, sure, if you want something simple that looks really good and has mass appeal, there's no reason to worry about mods anywhere, and yeah, the console market, with its lack of configuration issues (one vid card, one sound card, one CPU to rule them all, until, of course, they become three or a whole mess of cell processors), DRM'd to hell design, and raving bands who buy the latest game, play it for a few hours, then pass to the next, is much more attractive business-wise than PCs. But I wouldn't give mods the short shrift. The major advantage PCs have over game machines is that they are more versatile and PC Gamers should have a streak of the hardcore in them. With a decent game platform, the internet, a vision, proper direction and development, a serious mod group can put out a product that may not be economically viable to the big guys, but that addresses a niche. To see this in action, it helps to move beyond the "big titles" to some of the farther corners of the PC gaming world, to the world of Simulation: Flight Sims, Military Sims, Racing Games -- just name a title, and you'll find an active mod community. You want games with a "long tail", you'll find them here: it's not unusual for a group of increasingly insane modmakers to work on a platform 4 or 5 years after release. The big titles are taking notice, and are including mod tools in the package: the PC version of BF2 has a map editor, from what I've heard. Will the console version have that? I don't think "PC Gaming" will be able to compete with the next generation of consoles, but the PC's greater versatility, the numerous niche groups on the internet, and the crazed fools into PC Simulations all mean that a reasonable market will be there.
Trying to view blogspot, and at some point, it harassed me for a login at some point (maybe I wandered in the wrong direction). So I used the firefox BugMeNot plugin, and voila`, I had a blog. Okay, so it was more of a wiki than a blog, I really didn't post anything, and it was always being covered by folks writing crappy poetry. Then some dweeb from canuckistan changed the password and uses it to boost the google ratings for his pathetic little torontine blog about getting drunk with ron jeremy.
The "random blog" used to show that most of the blogs on blogspot were in fact spam. Where'd that button go?
Name brand vs. Generic memory. I guess YMMV on this. Sure, you don't need ridiculous LED displays on your memory (as he's got here), but as someone who's bought his share of memory, I'll say that generic is _not_ the way to go if you value system stability. But, I mean, hey, if you get stuff, it passes MemTest86 without problems, and runs at the timing you like, more power to you. Just make sure the shop you buy it from has a good return policy, and folks who will believe you when you take back a stick of RAM that will pass yer bog-standard POST memory test. On the other hand, if you're buying at Fry's, better buy name brand, just not necessarily ultra-riced out LANparty garbage with airdams and a spoiler
GF6200: certainly, top-o-the-line stuff is way too pricey, but come on, we're talking about a Game Machine/i here, not something that will only score competitively on the vaunted "TuxRacer FPS" benchmark.
Sorry, impressionistic articles like this can mean that the reviewer is simply bored, or (maybe) got a woody for a project that reminded him of his "original game" idea, without realizing that it wasn't exactly new or innovative: there's a whole genre of "hunting games". The only difference is that this one doesn't have any hunting in it. Alright, that shoulda made you chuckle, but, come on, has nobody seen these deer- hunting games: what I want to know is what makes it different from a hunting game without the gun? Or (to use his "original idea": orienteering), what makes an orienteering game different from a decent military sim (okay, there are few, but those there are are very dear to me) without the guns?
So on the one hand, what some consider novel msy be old hat.
On the other hand, who's to say there's more "new stuff" now, then in the past, and it's not just a "media lull": the aftermath of Doom 3, HL2 and any number of other features.
Or could it be that, after being at the forefront of hardcore gaming for a while, the latest generation of consoles are making PCs irrelevant for the "big titles", and companies are looking elsewhere?
Of course, with the success of the London edition, Hasbro is considering deploying a US Version (aka "The Original"), in which, as is known, the streets are those of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The Taxicabs will still be there, but to ensure proper coverage of the board, GPS transceivers will also be attached to a select number of Hookers, Pimps, and Retirees off the bus from NYC.
yeah, okay, so one idjit needs some parchment, can't afford a flock of sheep for a new book, so scrapes over some text he can't read anyway. Does the fact that he's a Christian even enter into his decision to use this parchment?
And yeah, the church courts told Galileo that he could not sustain as the absolute, unequivocal truth the theory that the sun was the center of the universe. They did not say that he had to hold the unequivocal truth to be the theory that the earth was the center of the universe. You know what? The church courts were right, as most of us believe neither the sun nor the earth to be the center of the universe (it is, in fact, me). Anyway, good troll.
Alright, many of the preceding posts have hinted at it, but I'll lay it on the line:
If you're a startup, you have limited resources across the board. Okay, okay, If you have tons of VC money, feel free to follow his advice, then explain to the VC dudes why you didn't get them the massive ROI they expected two years down the road.
The worst thing you can do in any business is advertise a product too soon. Whether you're selling the Osbourne 2 or Team Fortress 2, early hype is "the kiss of death". A previous poster commented something to the effect of the mantra I've followed for a while: Ideas are cheap; it's execution that matters. TFA seems to think that Ideas are what matters, and that stealth is all about protecting those. While I agree that stealth is a dumb way to protect ideas, it is a great way to shield your staff from "outside distractions" while they execute that idea. And it's also a great way to control the media -- and there's no business in the world that doesn't benefit from positive media control.
Well, yes, switching to Windows costs money too. And the money is more in retraining staff than it is in buying hardware/software. So if you, as a hardware/software manufacturer, force a complete hardware/software change every couple of years, you've just eliminated one of the big savings associated with your platform: the lack of need to retrain staff.
...but, in all fairness, many of the publishing houses have already bailed on the Mac. The original reason for preferring a Mac was its ability to do fonts (even weird ones) and layouts well. Windows has caught up, but at the same time, Mac has lost its legacy support.
A few weeks ago I found myself on the horn (blower for you brits) to an academic publisher in Holland, trying to sort out a sticky wicket. A colleague was submitting camera-ready text of a book he was editing, as a series of files from his OSX macintosh. One of his contributors wrote hers on an old OS9 laptop (remember, not everyone who publishes books and articles is a computer geek -- this scholar, for example, still had "fast save" enabled on MacWord, and self-bloating files). Anyway, my colleague sends off the book to Holland, and then gets a message: the bibliography sent by his contributor uses a polytonic font not recognized by the editors, and said contributor has fled the country leaving us with this mess.
So I get to be the one to call the publisher. Me: well did you try viewing it on a MacIntosh? Publisher: I think we have one somewhere in the back, I don't know. We don't really use them. So we try it on my colleague's Mac; we try to find this polytonic font from back in the stone age, and try to convert it to unicode or something. After running through the building, we find another macintosh user who happened to have the font. But it doesn't install on OS-X. And if it did install, we'd have no way to convert it anyway. Better to retype.
Bottom line: Technically, it helps Macintosh a lot to have complete control of the hardware and software. Business-wise, it means Apple can't rely on legacy users.
And one other thing -- anyone else wonder if some of these columnists don't specialize in generating ad revenue through/. flamebait? I mean look at Dvorak's stuff -- it's a collection of/. icons assembled in the most offensive manner.
Yeah, I've got problems with the idea. The back catalog is cool, and will tap into the nostalgia market, but if you're going to do a revolution, you can't go halfway. The NES inaugurated the current console business model, where the software paid for the hardware. By taking their cut from the software sales, the console makers could also insist on uniform QA and comprehensible interfaces, and prevent the retail channels from being flooded with ET clones. What the NES did to console games was like what McDonalds did to cheap food: it made it standardized and predictable. You bought a cartridge, and the game might suck or not, but you knew it would work in a certain way.
Fast-forward to now, and we're still seeing this split: The PC games market is for the enthusiast who spends far more money on hardware than software; console sales are driven by "must have" titles more than "neat-o" architecture. If you want to have a revolution that makes the console more accessible to the "niche markets" and "long-tailed games", you're going to need a way to guarantee the same level of quality with small-market products. That means higher overhead, high enough that you probably can't pay for it with the manufacturer cut from mediocre sales.
So, unless the revolution involves separate publishing standards for retail and download, and the "download" system has a separate tier of unpaid enthusiasts who act as a filter for amateur/indie products, I don't see the Revolution going this way.
Slashdot Mirror
The article evokes my English 101 course freshman year at college. We read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and when it came to discussion this one guy (named, of all things, Blue) burst out, "Where's the antagonism?"
Basically, the article's author is trying to convince game industry types why writers and story are necessary, but he shoots himself in the foot by limiting the industry to one genre and deploying a notion of "classical narrative" from literature that really doesn't work outside of epics and sitcoms.
Reading his article, his focus is on long, narrative-driven games. But this focus limits the utility. When he argues at the end that writers are necessary, I ask: why? Okay, for some pompous over-the-top thing like Deus Ex, sure. But the whole Mario Brothers franchise? Antagonism and Reversal are reduced to mere stubs to drive the platform-based fun. And the last game Maxis produced with antagonism in it was Robosport, and I don't see that mentioned as their greatest achievement.
The article starts out with a comparison to the early days of cinema. The inherent problem is that, well, viewing cinema as a teleological march, isolated from other genres presents a distorted picture of the medium. You know why? They're still showing moving pictures of stage plays, and travelogues, and all those other genres that the article wants to imply "failed" because of a lack of narrative. They're just showing them on TV, not in the movie theaters. And, incidently, the way movies were socially experienced 75 years ago is entirely different from today. So the genre doesn't evolve in a vacuum. The same could be said for videogames. They're still making games like Snake, and little puzzle games, but they're on telephones and portable game machines.
So I object to the 80/20 rules too. Plays are not 80-20 audio-visual any more than movies are 80-20 visual-audio: it varies from piece to piece. Go into a godawful European nineteenth-century opera house, imagine it full of people (heaven forfend going to an opera--I wouldn't ask that of anyone), and tell me it's 80% about the singing. If that's so, why all the visual distractions that bombard us?
But if you're going to characterize videogames or any other bit of entertainment, look at how they're experienced. The cognitive experience is the target, not what goes to the screen or the speakers, or the overglorified adult novelty device they call a controller.
So, you want to say dialog sucks. Well, having just tried facade, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But then again, I've had some excellent experiences of in-game dialog, but they all involved communications with other humans. Robo-Dialog also works for setting the context: radio chatter, conversations at a party, a domestic squabble in an abandoned building, some surreal nonsense blasted from huge loudspeakers. But sure, dialog central to the narrative is problematic because the player can't (yet) interact with the characters on the same level (if anyone wants some facade scripts where I yell repeatedly for a goddamned martini only to get quizzical looks from the warring couple, let me know).
I guess that brings us back to the novel, and the issue of fiction. If the game has a linear structure, then someone has to write that linear structure, and a Joseph Campbellesque High School writing class approach will work just fine for most cases. But don't think that all great literature is written that way, nor even that most games have such a structure. There are plenty of other structures out there:
Sports: the game provides regulated social interaction. It doesn't matter whether it is a "sports game" (Madden), a simulation (CS), MMORPG, or something completely abstract: the value people derive from it is social contact with others. Narrative, writers and all that are not necessary for the sports element to work: people create their own narratives.
Drugs: many, many games work on the princ
Worse if the game actually were as characterized, it wouldn't sell as many copies: way too difficult, not entertaining enough.
But the description sounds really good. "Training the wage slaves of the information age"
So what does this mean? Is sony aiming for businesses that deman premium gaming consoles, or rich bachelors with no life and tons of money?
As someone who's used his share of cheap belt-drive turntables acquired at garage sales (and then rewired), and who has had some experience at spinning platters this project needs:
Direct drive. There's a reason why DD turntables cost more. Those pulleys wear out, they slip, they stretch on start up and oscillate as they balance out. Why bother with a brushless motor if you're slapping it to a rubber band? Why praise the electronic speed control features of the floppy motor when you're wiring it to a system that by design can't regulate it? Give me torque. When I press that "go" button, I want it spinning perfectly at 33, 45 or maybe 78 RPM, now, not a quarter turn from now. I'm sure there's a way to wire a floppy to do just that, so get back at it!
cf. The Hold Steady, "Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs"
Well, it also has supercool features requiring "A browser that supports ActiveX controls". Maybe Microsoft will soon release a "Tips for selecting a web browser" along the lines of their popular tips for buying a flash media player.
I can see the "popular options" already:
Does it support ActiveX controls? Many web sites offer exclusive content through ActiveX controls; a browser not using ActiveX controls won't be able to allow web sites to harness the full potential of your computer.
Does it support only Windows XP and 2000 as platforms? Browsers that support many platforms are that many times more likely to become the target of attacks. Also, with a Win XP/2000 only browser, you know you're getting the most out of your Microsoft Windows experience.
Does it have MSN as its default homepage? Some browsers default to a Google home page with very few options. For optimal surfing, be sure MSN pops up first.
Okay, how many of you are thinking of a modified USB device that in a ten-second transaction gains root access and installs some finely tuned malware (a keylogger, a packet sniffer, some "communications" software)?
You'd slip it in, take it out, and wait for it to "phone home"-- or have it collect data silently until you attached a USB collection device.
What are the vulnerabilities?
A) public computers: not just university computer labs and libraries, but kiosks in shopping malls, airports, you name it. Look around -- there are loads of places featuring "secured" installations of windows (or Linux, for that matter).
Now, think about some of these networks -- are they all going to be wired to keep the "secured, public boxes" away from more sensitive traffic? Is anybody going to be trained to notice a 10-second move as a hacking attempt?
B) even scarier are places like hospitals. I know I've sat waiting for a doctor to come in a room with a thin client running some flavor of windows on a password-secured system -- they leave you unsupervised for half an hour sometimes. I'd really rather not have someone poking around my medical data.
C. Industrial Espionage: Physical access doesn't require a hacker. You can have any number of low-paid, unskilled workers do the injection for you. Slip the janitor a USB key and some Franklins and you're in business.
Okay, I admit, I don't know what I'm talking about. But it's scary stuff, huh?
MMO flight sims have been using "predictive technology" (=lag balancing) for at least a decade. Physics at that speed means that you can't really pull any surprises on the lag engine; on the other hand, collisions are done on the attacking machine. So you objects in your six view are closer than they appear, that guy who doesn't look like he has a shot probably does, and single-aircraft midair collisions do happen.
Still, you could introduce a cool-looking "bullet time" effect by playing with the "predictive buffer".
Nice theoretical presentation, and compelling reading -- probably more compelling than any implementation of such a game will be.
First off, innovation is well and good, but innovating is not the same as entertaining. So the statement "the market doesn't support innovation" isn't quite accurate. The fact is that innovations that are also entertaining are few compared to the innovations that just don't work game-wise.
Second, current MMORPGs base their success on two principles: A) every player gets the feeling of doing something exceptional. Sure, there are those long boring bits of slaving away doing whatever boring crap it is, but everyone needs their moment of achievement. MMORPGs are like kindergarten science fairs: everybody gets a prize. After all, these are games built around addiction, and who's gonna play or pay for a game they're no good at, and in which they see no progress? In the real world, that's called a "day job" for most people, and they get paid to do it.
B) MMORPGs have a heavy social element. It's an online game, and you play with other people. Social interaction needs to occur.
Okay, now let's inject the idea of a "realistic" as opposed to a "canned" environment.
You're talking about lots of expense. On the one hand, like TFAs "simple ideas", were looking at a much more complicated core design. Yes, TFAs "player houses" are a cool idea, but you just made parts of the world dynamic and in need of an update everytime every player enters a region. Thats a lot more bandwidth, and a lot more complex code to deal with, all of it fundamentally MP. And debugging MP code is time-consuming and costly. A dynamic world is even worse. These things can and have been done, but not on the scale being suggested here; these implementations are always costly and usually buggy. In this case, we need folks who know quite a bit about economics, social structures, ecology and related fields to make a sustainable environment: Otherwise your pelts will go extinct in a hurry and shopkeepers will starve. Worst of all, all this complexity has nothing to do with the user experience in sense A) or B).
In fact, I'd argue that such a "realistic world" approach detracts from the user appeal of such a game. According to A), everybody's gotta be special, at least at something, or they ain't gonna play. But a realistic world model won't support a world full of superspecial people, as Thoreau found out. For something truly epic to occur, 10,000 other people need to have mundane experiences. So you're committed to making AI characters, most of which are less competent than your average home user. But per a real world model, you'll need a lot of NPCs for each human. Now we get to B). How are the humans going to interact?
I've got an idea: let's have canned 'quests' and a basic combat system!
There are other cool MMOG models out there, but for any one of them, the way to start is with the user experience and work to design. The worst way to proceed is go from "what an ideal reality would be" and make technology and player experience take a back seat to an overarching, compelling bit of intellectual masturbation.
Nonsense. "We're sorry. Our personal image and passphrase server is offline for routine maintenance. Please continue about your transaction."
and they had to go through several re-edits before they got an R Rating for their puppet sex.
I think she just handed him a copy of Howl. It's not her fault that the press makes her look like the author.
Last time I went to buy a train ticket in Italy, the poor guy there spent 5-10 minutes on this antique computer trying to dial it up. Then the darn thing crashed and he had to reboot... splash screen:
OS/2 Warp
I guess it still beats Chicago.
A) Bohemia Interactive and Operation Flashpoint. Doing war games, just like doing war movies, is never neutral. But the internet communities built around those games make it all the more vocal. Look at any WW2 simulation forum, and you'll find fans of german equipment whining about something or other (okay, just so I don't get modded troll, fans of every other country do the same thing). Look at BIS's forum from when Flashpoint:Resistance came out, and you'll find quite a few posts from Russians upset with the fictional depiction of 1984 renegade Russian troops. Even simulated atrocities have a real-world impact here.
oh yeah, and the moral impact of destructible buildings is questionable. I remember a friend who used to play Falcon 2.0 at college with a buddy. There was a church along the departure path. They'd always bomb it "For Good Luck" on the way out and do a low fly-by on the way back. I know I'm looking forward to a BIS sim with destructable buildings so I can make some virtual rubble. I put the "moral impact" of it right in the same bag as someone trying to convince me that it was important to simulate artillery accurately, so "people would understand the severity of civilian casualties". Reality check folks -- go talk to anyone who's seen the shiny DPICM objects all over Iraq, and tell me how we're going to simulate years of nastiness for civilians, especially following the dud rate given in the unclassified field manuals. We can build a virtual world, but our simulations are only as good as the data we give it, and that inevitably follows what we believe to be the case.
B) World View: Continuing that thought, far more powerful than the explicit choices made are the implicit ones. Did Will Wright study urban planning before the original Sim City? If he did, would he have changed the model from one based on city blocks (never a functional form, even if most of the US is laid out that way)? You could say the same thing about his urban model. Sim City is a "toy" more than a "game", but most people when they play the "game", at least the original, seemed to play to get the highest "score": Wealthiest neighborhoods, rich city, low crime, no pollution. That's wonderful, but it makes you wonder whether the sequel shoulda been called Shaker Heights 2000.
C) Poetics: acceptable pompous references to Aristotle are "The Philosopher" (scholastic/medieval) and (classicizing) "The Stagirite". Geeky nerd reference is "Harry" (for "Harry Stotle"). "Ari" would be acceptable if the dude were dutch. Anyway, I think the point is made that games don't communicate emotions. So at the end of all this, what is it they do?
Get the DA to agree, in writing to grant you immunity before you rat out your buddy.
Easy: turn up heads. Flip it to your hand, and if it's tails, quickly slap it on your wrist, insisting it was "part of the flip". The other guy doesn't have any experience with how you flip coins.
say, "well Monty, I'd like to here from the audience on this one". As their shouting their insipid answers, look at the two doors: which one is against the wall, and which one has acreage of studio space behind it? Note the light leakage from camera lights behind one, and the mysterious cables running that way. Finally, if you're male, like me, use your keenly-tuned ability to detect female pheremones to determine behind which door the missing 3-4 game show hostesses are. There's no guarantee the prize will be Monty's Hog Farm, but at least the prize will be.
yeah, not only does it require IE, it has "Almost-TV" quality. Legality and morality aside, MovieLink is not the way to go. Let's see:
1: Charges more than a rental
2: Fewer titles available than rental
3: Quality and DRM features make the product much less attractive than one that can be easily downloaded.
When people pay for movies they want a cinematic experience. A 400 kbps stream gives them a rabbit-ear experience.
On the other hand, the critical weakness of the pirate movie world is bandwidth. Most home users who are capable of pirating movies, and hence would be the ones to pay for this service, have residential broadband with asymmetric up/down bandwidth. Most of them don't have a neighborhood dumpsite they can log into -- for movies they'll be using something like Kazaa (for ever movie server there's enough downloaders to choke the stream, or so I've been told) or BitTorrent (give and you shall receive, upload rate caps download rate). So you're talking downloads that last overnight or that take several days. Sure, this may improve in the future, but if you can, NOW, offer a "fast-as-you-can-handle-it" download of recent movies, at a quality that people want to watch (i.e., Not MovieLink -- the crappiest videocam jobs are better than that), and find a way to serve it cheap enough, it'll work.
But I don't think it's going to happen.
Well, OFP, IIRC, uses a combination of stateful AI and (within that) some sort of neural net system to run their bots.
It looks like Facade is using a complicated expert system: there is a story to tell, and your behaviour will "trip" certain triggers.
Both systems have their limitations: NN-based stuff is dependent on the inputs given. OFP Bots, for example, "learned" back in the days of development. And their information on visible is a combination of what the person is doing (crawling makes them less visible than running), and where they are (concealment is preferable to cover). On the other hand, "being shot at" is not an input (it does however initiate a state change -- from "AWARE" to "COMBAT"). The result is that the AI does some things that work pretty well against other bots with the same inputs: they run across an open field, then crawl on their belly in the middle: "Disappearing" to the eyes of the enemy bots, but presenting a tasty target for humans. Anyway, coding OFP missions is like herding cats a lot of the time: the AI has its own mind of doing things, and it's not always tactically sound.
On the other hand, the Expert System approach ends up being canned: you do actions to change states, and your range of action is limited to what the developers thought up. Hence Facade: it looks sophisticated as hell, and I'll download it and check it out, but it sounds like a superfancy Eliza.
Oh and for a good assault, lay in some artillery, send two squads to the target on "SEARCH AND DESTROY" and have a reserve squad set on "GUARD" (so they close with the enemy when the others make contact).
Hehe... that's what, another +5 Troll?
BTW, most of everything is garbage. The internet and science fiction writers even managed to cobble together a "law" to that effect.
Well, CS is still as far as I know the reigning champ of number of users online at any time, and by a great margin.
Generally, sure, if you want something simple that looks really good and has mass appeal, there's no reason to worry about mods anywhere, and yeah, the console market, with its lack of configuration issues (one vid card, one sound card, one CPU to rule them all, until, of course, they become three or a whole mess of cell processors), DRM'd to hell design, and raving bands who buy the latest game, play it for a few hours, then pass to the next, is much more attractive business-wise than PCs.
But I wouldn't give mods the short shrift. The major advantage PCs have over game machines is that they are more versatile and PC Gamers should have a streak of the hardcore in them. With a decent game platform, the internet, a vision, proper direction and development, a serious mod group can put out a product that may not be economically viable to the big guys, but that addresses a niche.
To see this in action, it helps to move beyond the "big titles" to some of the farther corners of the PC gaming world, to the world of Simulation: Flight Sims, Military Sims, Racing Games -- just name a title, and you'll find an active mod community. You want games with a "long tail", you'll find them here: it's not unusual for a group of increasingly insane modmakers to work on a platform 4 or 5 years after release.
The big titles are taking notice, and are including mod tools in the package: the PC version of BF2 has a map editor, from what I've heard. Will the console version have that?
I don't think "PC Gaming" will be able to compete with the next generation of consoles, but the PC's greater versatility, the numerous niche groups on the internet, and the crazed fools into PC Simulations all mean that a reasonable market will be there.
Trying to view blogspot, and at some point, it harassed me for a login at some point (maybe I wandered in the wrong direction). So I used the firefox BugMeNot plugin, and voila`, I had a blog. Okay, so it was more of a wiki than a blog, I really didn't post anything, and it was always being covered by folks writing crappy poetry.
Then some dweeb from canuckistan changed the password and uses it to boost the google ratings for his pathetic little torontine blog about getting drunk with ron jeremy.
The "random blog" used to show that most of the blogs on blogspot were in fact spam. Where'd that button go?
sounds cool, and in general I'd agree, except:
Name brand vs. Generic memory. I guess YMMV on this. Sure, you don't need ridiculous LED displays on your memory (as he's got here), but as someone who's bought his share of memory, I'll say that generic is _not_ the way to go if you value system stability. But, I mean, hey, if you get stuff, it passes MemTest86 without problems, and runs at the timing you like, more power to you. Just make sure the shop you buy it from has a good return policy, and folks who will believe you when you take back a stick of RAM that will pass yer bog-standard POST memory test. On the other hand, if you're buying at Fry's, better buy name brand, just not necessarily ultra-riced out LANparty garbage with airdams and a spoiler
GF6200: certainly, top-o-the-line stuff is way too pricey, but come on, we're talking about a Game Machine/i here, not something that will only score competitively on the vaunted "TuxRacer FPS" benchmark.
Sorry, impressionistic articles like this can mean that the reviewer is simply bored, or (maybe) got a woody for a project that reminded him of his "original game" idea, without realizing that it wasn't exactly new or innovative: there's a whole genre of "hunting games". The only difference is that this one doesn't have any hunting in it.
Alright, that shoulda made you chuckle, but, come on, has nobody seen these deer- hunting games: what I want to know is what makes it different from a hunting game without the gun? Or (to use his "original idea": orienteering), what makes an orienteering game different from a decent military sim (okay, there are few, but those there are are very dear to me) without the guns?
So on the one hand, what some consider novel msy be old hat.
On the other hand, who's to say there's more "new stuff" now, then in the past, and it's not just a "media lull": the aftermath of Doom 3, HL2 and any number of other features.
Or could it be that, after being at the forefront of hardcore gaming for a while, the latest generation of consoles are making PCs irrelevant for the "big titles", and companies are looking elsewhere?
Of course, with the success of the London edition, Hasbro is considering deploying a US Version (aka "The Original"), in which, as is known, the streets are those of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The Taxicabs will still be there, but to ensure proper coverage of the board, GPS transceivers will also be attached to a select number of Hookers, Pimps, and Retirees off the bus from NYC.
yeah, okay, so one idjit needs some parchment, can't afford a flock of sheep for a new book, so scrapes over some text he can't read anyway. Does the fact that he's a Christian even enter into his decision to use this parchment?
And yeah, the church courts told Galileo that he could not sustain as the absolute, unequivocal truth the theory that the sun was the center of the universe. They did not say that he had to hold the unequivocal truth to be the theory that the earth was the center of the universe. You know what? The church courts were right, as most of us believe neither the sun nor the earth to be the center of the universe (it is, in fact, me).
Anyway, good troll.
Alright, many of the preceding posts have hinted at it, but I'll lay it on the line:
If you're a startup, you have limited resources across the board. Okay, okay, If you have tons of VC money, feel free to follow his advice, then explain to the VC dudes why you didn't get them the massive ROI they expected two years down the road.
The worst thing you can do in any business is advertise a product too soon. Whether you're selling the Osbourne 2 or Team Fortress 2, early hype is "the kiss of death".
A previous poster commented something to the effect of the mantra I've followed for a while: Ideas are cheap; it's execution that matters. TFA seems to think that Ideas are what matters, and that stealth is all about protecting those. While I agree that stealth is a dumb way to protect ideas, it is a great way to shield your staff from "outside distractions" while they execute that idea. And it's also a great way to control the media -- and there's no business in the world that doesn't benefit from positive media control.
Well, yes, switching to Windows costs money too. And the money is more in retraining staff than it is in buying hardware/software. So if you, as a hardware/software manufacturer, force a complete hardware/software change every couple of years, you've just eliminated one of the big savings associated with your platform: the lack of need to retrain staff.
...but, in all fairness, many of the publishing houses have already bailed on the Mac. The original reason for preferring a Mac was its ability to do fonts (even weird ones) and layouts well. Windows has caught up, but at the same time, Mac has lost its legacy support.
/. flamebait? I mean look at Dvorak's stuff -- it's a collection of /. icons assembled in the most offensive manner.
A few weeks ago I found myself on the horn (blower for you brits) to an academic publisher in Holland, trying to sort out a sticky wicket. A colleague was submitting camera-ready text of a book he was editing, as a series of files from his OSX macintosh. One of his contributors wrote hers on an old OS9 laptop (remember, not everyone who publishes books and articles is a computer geek -- this scholar, for example, still had "fast save" enabled on MacWord, and self-bloating files). Anyway, my colleague sends off the book to Holland, and then gets a message: the bibliography sent by his contributor uses a polytonic font not recognized by the editors, and said contributor has fled the country leaving us with this mess.
So I get to be the one to call the publisher.
Me: well did you try viewing it on a MacIntosh?
Publisher: I think we have one somewhere in the back, I don't know. We don't really use them.
So we try it on my colleague's Mac; we try to find this polytonic font from back in the stone age, and try to convert it to unicode or something. After running through the building, we find another macintosh user who happened to have the font. But it doesn't install on OS-X. And if it did install, we'd have no way to convert it anyway. Better to retype.
Bottom line: Technically, it helps Macintosh a lot to have complete control of the hardware and software. Business-wise, it means Apple can't rely on legacy users.
And one other thing -- anyone else wonder if some of these columnists don't specialize in generating ad revenue through
Yeah, I've got problems with the idea. The back catalog is cool, and will tap into the nostalgia market, but if you're going to do a revolution, you can't go halfway.
The NES inaugurated the current console business model, where the software paid for the hardware. By taking their cut from the software sales, the console makers could also insist on uniform QA and comprehensible interfaces, and prevent the retail channels from being flooded with ET clones. What the NES did to console games was like what McDonalds did to cheap food: it made it standardized and predictable. You bought a cartridge, and the game might suck or not, but you knew it would work in a certain way.
Fast-forward to now, and we're still seeing this split: The PC games market is for the enthusiast who spends far more money on hardware than software; console sales are driven by "must have" titles more than "neat-o" architecture.
If you want to have a revolution that makes the console more accessible to the "niche markets" and "long-tailed games", you're going to need a way to guarantee the same level of quality with small-market products. That means higher overhead, high enough that you probably can't pay for it with the manufacturer cut from mediocre sales.
So, unless the revolution involves separate publishing standards for retail and download, and the "download" system has a separate tier of unpaid enthusiasts who act as a filter for amateur/indie products, I don't see the Revolution going this way.
But what do I know?