Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (which was a big influence to Adams' HG2G) would be a much better read for a lit class. It's a book of pure genius and there's as much insight into the human condition as there is humor. There is also a great Audiobook for this floating around for anyone too lazy to flip pages:)
More than most tiles I've seen here, I think the Ultima series could definitely benefit from a series reboot. While I'm a fan of the series, I think it has lost a lot of momentum lately because the design efforts of the last few titles in the series have been monotonous and uninteresting. Every title I'm just loading into the game, picking some Tarot cards, and running around with my bland Avatar in some typically bland fantasy kingdom.
I think it represents the idea of a reboot well because if another game came out, they would have to do something totally different than what they have been doing in order to resurrect the series.
I was addicted to EverQuest throughout all of high school. I pretty much missed that _entire_ time of social development. I wanted to avoid it, and EQ made it easy. EQ was the kind of game where you could sit there and do your homework while your group was meditating. I still kept my attendance up and had good grades. I just avoided social interaction.
I had parents and friends tell me that it was a bad idea, but I just turned on my defense mechanisms. It was Them Versus Me. By taking that approach, they became the bad guys. They became someone who doesn't understand because they didn't understand.
The only person who *might* be able to get through to your friend in a direct way is former MMO addict. But of course, as it's been reiterated on here plenty of times, the only one who can truly get through is the addict himself.
In my situation, it was a mixture of things that got me over my addiction. Firstly, the game started to get old. I tried other games like Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, SWG, etc. These continued my addiction for a while longer. But eventually you find the same things in every game and they just keep getting more boring.
Secondly, I started to really re-evaluate myself and what I was doing with my life. I knew I was a social misfit and that had to be fixed. When I started college, I quit my games and started on a clean slate. I developed for a while and it was going great. I was making some real progress. I even got a girlfriend that my friends gawked at.
Then EverQuest 2 came out. Yeah. I went back. It was a relapse, you could say. I went back to my habits of nothing but gaming. I still kept up with my school work but I avoided my girlfriend. Eventually, she gave me the ultimatum of her or the game. I tried to convince her that it was only temporary and that I'd be over it soon, but she wouldn't listen to that. So, I chose the game. I told myself 'I don't want a girlfriend who would give me an ultimatum like that. I want someone more patient.' In retrospect, I know it sounds pretty stupid. This is just how I reassured myself as I continued to play EQ2. It's just how the defense mechanisms work.
I regretted that decision for a long while, though. Eventually, as I expected, I got bored of EQ2. And WoW. And all the other games that were popular around 2004. Eventually *none* of them sparked my interest. I graduated from college and started a job. By that time, I was totally done with MMOs and I haven't looked back.
So, to sum up: it sometimes unfortunately takes big life transitions like going from college to a career to really wake someone up. Right now, in their life, they are at a point where they are content. They enjoy their games. You cannot argue this with them because it will only make it worse. You can only try to be subtle about it. Try to make them jealous. Bring over hot girls that they can't have. Go on trips with your buddies and come back and tell him how awesome it was. He won't be receptive at first--not at all. He will have some clever retort. But you will have planted the seed of corruption. Eventually, when he's tossing and turning trying to sleep, these things will eat at him.... not that I speak from experience in this department =x
Eventually, he'll get over it. Fortunately, MMO addictions are a lot easier to recover from than drug addictions. They can ruin lives just as well, but fortunately once you get a taste of some good fun in real life, you quickly forget why the hell you were playing those games in the first place.
Between billions of years of planetary bombardment by comets/asteroids/meteors, worldwide floods, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, recurring ice ages, black holes... it's only a matter of time. If anything, we aren't paranoid enough considering not only our world but the universe's natural tendencies toward destruction. We as a species haven't been here long.
Now, onto the OT: is it really worth it to gamble on something like global warming? We obviously aren't going to be colonizing any other planets soon. We might as well try to take care of this one as best as we can. It's for our own survival. Even if it's a.001% chance that Al Gore's vision of global warming is correct, I say we heed it anyway. Maybe that's not a logical position for a scientist, but it is a logical position for a human being.
I do not want astronauts defying gravity in front of my children. Nor do I want them driving their moonbuggies through our neighborhoods at all times of night, playing that theme to 2001 on their CosmoBlasters. Astronazis! Watch out! They'll try to stick an American flag in you! They can't eat normal food and they're addicted to tang!
Last October, an astronaut moved into my neighborhood... Simultaneously, all the leaves started dying.
Apparently I'm the minority on this thread, but I loved the Blair Witch Project. It seems like most of/. missed the point of the film--why so many people enjoyed the film. It had little to do with the jerky camera movements or the documentary style--that has been done before in other films and is not groundbreaking. BWP was so great because of how little it showed the viewer in terms of a monster/threat. It is extremely subtle the entire way through. If you depend solely on the movie to deliver to you everything you need to enjoy it, you'd be sorely disappointed. Is that the fault of the film makers? Sometimes, but in this case it's the fault of an audience with a lacking imagination.
I don't typically like horror/thriller movies because are predictable and usually are just shockers. They might have a little foreshadowing and then almost always show you exactly what the threat is, face-to-face. This "monster" or villain encounter is occasionally done well, but it is almost never as creepy as your imagination will make it seem. The BWP allowed your imagination to run wild, if you provided it with a suspension of disbelief. If half the people on this thread stopped trying to be witty cynics and tried to enjoy the film with an open mind, they'd probably have a pretty good time.
Anyway, to the thread parent: You will be bored during the beginning of Cloverfield - there's some shallow character setup and foreshadowing but it's not too interesting. It's quite Blair Witch-esque in style, but not in story or mood. Cloverfield, after the intro, is consistently entertaining with few dull moments in-between. It's quite eventful and they do actually show you some of the monster, unlike The BWP. Sure, the characters are dull. But it's enough to at least feel something for them, even if it's little. It's funny, the characters are not that complex and a little annoying but by the end of the movie I found myself actually caring about what happens to them. They just seemed like typical people in an extraordinary situation.
I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. I don't think either are completely groundbreaking or incredible works of art, but they are at least entertaining and fulfilling as long as you go in with the right expectation. Cloverfield is closer to a thrill ride than film. I don't think that's such a bad thing. Also, the jerky camera movements did not bother me at all. I got so used to it that by the end of the movie I didn't even notice it. I was too sucked into the movie to be whining about something like that.
You can probably bet that, they'll probably need tenfold those earnings in order to fight the eventual court battles in order to stay alive. The political situation in Sweden isn't static.
If you have a quirky sense of humor and like something "different" than the norm, you will probably love Earthbound. It's one of my favorite console RPGs, right next to Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and FFXI (III). It may not have the plot intricacy of some other games, but it's still a heartwarming story with alluring characters, a fantastically nostalgic soundtrack, and decent gameplay. Yeah, the gameplay isn't the highlight... but so much else about the game made up for it.
During high school, I managed at least 7 hours a day on weekdays playing EverQuest (and much more on weekends of course) , and I got mostly As and a few Bs here and there. I probably would have gotten straight As if it weren't for all the gaming, but I still think I did pretty well. I don't regret it. Honestly, though, I multitasked a lot. EQ had a lot of downtime, and it's not the most mentally demanding unless you're on a raid or something. It was pretty easy to work on homework during gaming.
Of course when you phrase it as, "Don't like a cartoon," it sounds childish. Using that simple mockery just dodges the real argument and makes your statement irrelevant. There's a lot more going on than a simple critique of a cartoon. We're talking about ideology and belief, not sketch aesthetics.
"Protecting life" is the excuse they consciously give themselves, but it's the offensive idea that fuels their actions. If they really wanted to "protect life"--and it was totally rational, I'm sure they could think of more constructive ways to accomplish that goal. That soundness of judgment is nowhere to be found; they are driven by extreme disgust of an idea: they are "OFFENDED." Therefore, I think the original comparison is still legit.
With sites like Starmen.net still active with a strong community, it's very likely that there will be an unofficial translation. I just hope it's a good one; if it's got a lot of quirky humor like Mother 2, I imagine a lot of that is difficult to translate over and still convey the same meaning. I'd imagine a lot of the text was changed drastically in the Mother 2 official translation from the Japanese version to the English version, but I could be wrong.
Re:I can't justify that sort of monthly expense
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 1
The Guild Wars marketing team was really quite genius. Just on this thread alone I see tons of posts calling it a "MMO", when it is nothing of the kind. It is like Diablo 2 with three-dimensional chat lobbies where you put games (instances) together. Sure, the gameplay has a MMORPG "feel" and "look", but it is all instanced; there is no *massive* world. The reason this was a genius bit of marketing was because it was advertised as being a "MMORPG without a monthly subscription," which instantly got it attention--especially from the people who refuse to play MMOs because of monthly fees (who also know pretty much nothing about what really makes an MMO, beyond perhaps a couple game trials in which they barely scratched the surface).
You might be thinking, "Well, it if looks and plays like an MMO, then what's your point?". If you've played EQ, DAoC, AC, or any other MMO for a very long period of your life, the difference is very obvious. It's hard to capture in words what having *real* massive world does to make a game so vastly different than Guild Wars even though the core gameplay seems similar. But having played both types of games, there is a totally different experience when you do not have a luxury of creating your own instance. There is a totally difference community formed--a totally different atmosphere. I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs talking about the unique experiences I've had in MMOs that just couldn't happen in Guild Wars. It's not the combat mechanics or the user interface that makes an MMORPG. It's the "massive world" - the thing Guild Wars lacks.
Nonetheless, most people don't sit down and say, "I'm going to create a piece of art, just to make art." If they do, it's likely to be pretentious junk. There's usually a purpose. Sometimes it's to emotionally move someone. Sometimes it's to deliver a powerful philosophical message. Sometimes it's to create stimulating or purposeful imagery. Sometimes, it's simply to entertain the audience, and occupy their time. Sometimes it's all of these things simultaneously, which almost all media are capable of: video games, movies, books, even reality TV shows. Whatever the reason, it's all art. Defining "artistic intent" is about as broad as defining art itself.
And if the "intention" is to entertain? If the "intention" is to design something to be functional? Somehow these intentions make a work no longer art? Where is the line drawn between a craft and a piece of art? What intentions are artistic, and which are not? Does it have to inspire us? It's blurry and subjective, and it's more correct to just say it's all art, rather than trying to draw some clear line between them.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate. I'll be the first one in line to trash the majority of cinema that's been in the theaters lately, and to complain about how the game industry is releasing loads of rehashed, unartistic garbage. But unartistic doesn't make it not art. Just because it doesn't have exceptional aesthetic quality doesn't mean it's just an object. A garbage movie with no artistic intention still reflects cultural values, even without intending to do so. It is an interesting product of our culture, and it says something about us that is more than the sum of its parts. Good or bad, it's still art.
"Most" movies these days only attempt to entertain as well. "Most" genre-based fiction only attempts to entertain.
All forms of media are art, whether they communicate the existential state of the human condition or communicate what a gunshot to the head might look like. It all doesn't have to be so literary. A piece of work can be aesthetically pleasing for a myriad of reasons beyond communicating something directly and coherently.
Video games are perhaps the most complex out of all media today because there are so many elements involved--visual, text, sound, music, and most importantly, interaction. All of these things on their own are works of art--in addition to the art of assembling these things together to make a one whole project. It is a massive undertaking of art even if it's purely for entertainment. Then, games like the Final Fantasy series, which do tend to be more literate and intentionally artistic, are just incredible in the amount of artwork being presented, working together.
Once the assumption has been agreed upon that all media is art, we can start stating our opinions about how crappy one piece of art is compared to another. But saying an entire medium "isn't art" is just plain stupid. Using a medium is an art of its own.
Yeah, I can see it now: "omg CrazyJim1 u r so elite @ starcraft can u autograph my sc cd case with ur battlenet username like omg!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!111"
So all plane hijackings after 9/11 are going to be, without a doubt, an attempted suicide attack. That's quite an assumption. It's an assumption I'll bet a lot of people today DO make. But like I said, that's a cultural thing today. It might not be years from now. It might go back to a "hostage" situation.
Socially today in America, it's true that people would likely rise against an attempted airplane hijacking. However, culture and ideology changes rather quickly; how people might react to that situation today could be totally different than, say, 20 years from now. So to say that it would *NEVER* happen again is quite a stretch. Once the fervor dies down, the chances of people on-board reacting in force will be probably about the same as it was on 9/11.
I've played more than a healthy amount of SOE games (EQ, EQ2, PlanetSide, SWG). Among all of these titles, SOE has consistently contradicted themselves through changes that go against their previous "philosophy" of the game's design.
However, nothing even compares to this new SWG change. I played it last night, and it is the most bizarre thing I have ever encountered in a MMO. Upon logging into my character, I was asked to select an "iconic" Star Wars class, based off of popular characters--each class with a photo of these characters next to them, just in case anyone playing the game wasn't quite sure of the names. Additionally, you can "preview" the class, and watch an extremely corny gameplay video that looks laughably like a bad movie trailer. Combat is like some pseudo-action console game with horrible controls. It's so bad, it's hard to even imagine what the developers were thinking when they released this. The engine was not made for this kind of gameplay.
Now, the most important question is:
When does Vanguard come out?
I suppose it's all relative. My mp3 archive sits at about 180GB, and I'm always looking for more. Storage unfortunately holds me back. If I knew that I had endless storage... I could easily be heading toward a terabyte or so of music. I'd just go crazy on random DC++ hubs, grabbing as much music as I can and checking it out. Especially on foreign servers, there's bound to be artists I haven't heard of before that I could potentially like.
When you go beyond the mainstream and start getting into various genres, it becomes pretty mindblowing how much good music is really out in the world. Not only today's independent artists, but throughout the past six decades or so. Jazz, folk, blues, hip-hop, avant-garde, et cetera--I love it all, and have a human drive to listen to as much as I can... but unfortunately not a hard drive that will fit it all.
So, in other words, 60GB is nothing. It's just a tiny molecule compared to what's out in the world. Organizing it isn't too difficult with ID3 tags.
That's all fine and dandy, except that Guild Wars is NOT an MMORPG. It's completely instanced. It's like if Counter-Strike limited its players to official servers only, and the hub that connected you to those servers was 3-dimensional and looked just like the game. That doesn't make it a "Massively Multiplayer" game, it just makes it appear so.
Yeah! A Scratchpad! I've been waiting to get one of these on my desktop forever!
I miss when Google was just Google. Just a simple webpage and a search, no nonsense. I know they want to expand, but please let me know when it's actually something that isn't going to clog my system up with this rubbish. How many programs out there have the bright idea to spam the weather and stock quotes, and have a little quick search bar on your screen? Google, let's get serious here: is this progress? If this is how you're going to build a technological empire, I think I'll stay clear away.
What a great advertisement. It took me a few sentences to actually realize that I was viewing an online commercial. The slick placement as a/. news article was what almost got me at first!
Slashdot Mirror
Try Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy. Great read.
Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (which was a big influence to Adams' HG2G) would be a much better read for a lit class. It's a book of pure genius and there's as much insight into the human condition as there is humor. There is also a great Audiobook for this floating around for anyone too lazy to flip pages :)
More than most tiles I've seen here, I think the Ultima series could definitely benefit from a series reboot. While I'm a fan of the series, I think it has lost a lot of momentum lately because the design efforts of the last few titles in the series have been monotonous and uninteresting. Every title I'm just loading into the game, picking some Tarot cards, and running around with my bland Avatar in some typically bland fantasy kingdom.
I think it represents the idea of a reboot well because if another game came out, they would have to do something totally different than what they have been doing in order to resurrect the series.
I was addicted to EverQuest throughout all of high school. I pretty much missed that _entire_ time of social development. I wanted to avoid it, and EQ made it easy. EQ was the kind of game where you could sit there and do your homework while your group was meditating. I still kept my attendance up and had good grades. I just avoided social interaction.
I had parents and friends tell me that it was a bad idea, but I just turned on my defense mechanisms. It was Them Versus Me. By taking that approach, they became the bad guys. They became someone who doesn't understand because they didn't understand.
The only person who *might* be able to get through to your friend in a direct way is former MMO addict. But of course, as it's been reiterated on here plenty of times, the only one who can truly get through is the addict himself.
In my situation, it was a mixture of things that got me over my addiction. Firstly, the game started to get old. I tried other games like Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, SWG, etc. These continued my addiction for a while longer. But eventually you find the same things in every game and they just keep getting more boring.
Secondly, I started to really re-evaluate myself and what I was doing with my life. I knew I was a social misfit and that had to be fixed. When I started college, I quit my games and started on a clean slate. I developed for a while and it was going great. I was making some real progress. I even got a girlfriend that my friends gawked at.
Then EverQuest 2 came out. Yeah. I went back. It was a relapse, you could say. I went back to my habits of nothing but gaming. I still kept up with my school work but I avoided my girlfriend. Eventually, she gave me the ultimatum of her or the game. I tried to convince her that it was only temporary and that I'd be over it soon, but she wouldn't listen to that. So, I chose the game. I told myself 'I don't want a girlfriend who would give me an ultimatum like that. I want someone more patient.' In retrospect, I know it sounds pretty stupid. This is just how I reassured myself as I continued to play EQ2. It's just how the defense mechanisms work.
I regretted that decision for a long while, though. Eventually, as I expected, I got bored of EQ2. And WoW. And all the other games that were popular around 2004. Eventually *none* of them sparked my interest. I graduated from college and started a job. By that time, I was totally done with MMOs and I haven't looked back.
So, to sum up: it sometimes unfortunately takes big life transitions like going from college to a career to really wake someone up. Right now, in their life, they are at a point where they are content. They enjoy their games. You cannot argue this with them because it will only make it worse. You can only try to be subtle about it. Try to make them jealous. Bring over hot girls that they can't have. Go on trips with your buddies and come back and tell him how awesome it was. He won't be receptive at first--not at all. He will have some clever retort. But you will have planted the seed of corruption. Eventually, when he's tossing and turning trying to sleep, these things will eat at him.... not that I speak from experience in this department =x
Eventually, he'll get over it. Fortunately, MMO addictions are a lot easier to recover from than drug addictions. They can ruin lives just as well, but fortunately once you get a taste of some good fun in real life, you quickly forget why the hell you were playing those games in the first place.
Between billions of years of planetary bombardment by comets/asteroids/meteors, worldwide floods, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, recurring ice ages, black holes... it's only a matter of time. If anything, we aren't paranoid enough considering not only our world but the universe's natural tendencies toward destruction. We as a species haven't been here long.
.001% chance that Al Gore's vision of global warming is correct, I say we heed it anyway. Maybe that's not a logical position for a scientist, but it is a logical position for a human being.
Now, onto the OT: is it really worth it to gamble on something like global warming? We obviously aren't going to be colonizing any other planets soon. We might as well try to take care of this one as best as we can. It's for our own survival. Even if it's a
I do not want astronauts defying gravity in front of my children. Nor do I want them driving their moonbuggies through our neighborhoods at all times of night, playing that theme to 2001 on their CosmoBlasters. Astronazis! Watch out! They'll try to stick an American flag in you! They can't eat normal food and they're addicted to tang!
Last October, an astronaut moved into my neighborhood... Simultaneously, all the leaves started dying.
-Upright Citizens Brigade
Apparently I'm the minority on this thread, but I loved the Blair Witch Project. It seems like most of /. missed the point of the film--why so many people enjoyed the film. It had little to do with the jerky camera movements or the documentary style--that has been done before in other films and is not groundbreaking. BWP was so great because of how little it showed the viewer in terms of a monster/threat. It is extremely subtle the entire way through. If you depend solely on the movie to deliver to you everything you need to enjoy it, you'd be sorely disappointed. Is that the fault of the film makers? Sometimes, but in this case it's the fault of an audience with a lacking imagination.
I don't typically like horror/thriller movies because are predictable and usually are just shockers. They might have a little foreshadowing and then almost always show you exactly what the threat is, face-to-face. This "monster" or villain encounter is occasionally done well, but it is almost never as creepy as your imagination will make it seem. The BWP allowed your imagination to run wild, if you provided it with a suspension of disbelief. If half the people on this thread stopped trying to be witty cynics and tried to enjoy the film with an open mind, they'd probably have a pretty good time.
Anyway, to the thread parent: You will be bored during the beginning of Cloverfield - there's some shallow character setup and foreshadowing but it's not too interesting. It's quite Blair Witch-esque in style, but not in story or mood. Cloverfield, after the intro, is consistently entertaining with few dull moments in-between. It's quite eventful and they do actually show you some of the monster, unlike The BWP. Sure, the characters are dull. But it's enough to at least feel something for them, even if it's little. It's funny, the characters are not that complex and a little annoying but by the end of the movie I found myself actually caring about what happens to them. They just seemed like typical people in an extraordinary situation.
I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. I don't think either are completely groundbreaking or incredible works of art, but they are at least entertaining and fulfilling as long as you go in with the right expectation. Cloverfield is closer to a thrill ride than film. I don't think that's such a bad thing. Also, the jerky camera movements did not bother me at all. I got so used to it that by the end of the movie I didn't even notice it. I was too sucked into the movie to be whining about something like that.
for the $$$$$$$? it's like selling your soul to the devil for a quick fix of cash. except more embarrassing.
You can probably bet that, they'll probably need tenfold those earnings in order to fight the eventual court battles in order to stay alive. The political situation in Sweden isn't static.
If you have a quirky sense of humor and like something "different" than the norm, you will probably love Earthbound. It's one of my favorite console RPGs, right next to Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and FFXI (III). It may not have the plot intricacy of some other games, but it's still a heartwarming story with alluring characters, a fantastically nostalgic soundtrack, and decent gameplay. Yeah, the gameplay isn't the highlight... but so much else about the game made up for it.
During high school, I managed at least 7 hours a day on weekdays playing EverQuest (and much more on weekends of course) , and I got mostly As and a few Bs here and there. I probably would have gotten straight As if it weren't for all the gaming, but I still think I did pretty well. I don't regret it. Honestly, though, I multitasked a lot. EQ had a lot of downtime, and it's not the most mentally demanding unless you're on a raid or something. It was pretty easy to work on homework during gaming.
Of course when you phrase it as, "Don't like a cartoon," it sounds childish. Using that simple mockery just dodges the real argument and makes your statement irrelevant. There's a lot more going on than a simple critique of a cartoon. We're talking about ideology and belief, not sketch aesthetics.
"Protecting life" is the excuse they consciously give themselves, but it's the offensive idea that fuels their actions. If they really wanted to "protect life"--and it was totally rational, I'm sure they could think of more constructive ways to accomplish that goal. That soundness of judgment is nowhere to be found; they are driven by extreme disgust of an idea: they are "OFFENDED." Therefore, I think the original comparison is still legit.
With sites like Starmen.net still active with a strong community, it's very likely that there will be an unofficial translation. I just hope it's a good one; if it's got a lot of quirky humor like Mother 2, I imagine a lot of that is difficult to translate over and still convey the same meaning. I'd imagine a lot of the text was changed drastically in the Mother 2 official translation from the Japanese version to the English version, but I could be wrong.
The Guild Wars marketing team was really quite genius. Just on this thread alone I see tons of posts calling it a "MMO", when it is nothing of the kind. It is like Diablo 2 with three-dimensional chat lobbies where you put games (instances) together. Sure, the gameplay has a MMORPG "feel" and "look", but it is all instanced; there is no *massive* world. The reason this was a genius bit of marketing was because it was advertised as being a "MMORPG without a monthly subscription," which instantly got it attention--especially from the people who refuse to play MMOs because of monthly fees (who also know pretty much nothing about what really makes an MMO, beyond perhaps a couple game trials in which they barely scratched the surface).
You might be thinking, "Well, it if looks and plays like an MMO, then what's your point?". If you've played EQ, DAoC, AC, or any other MMO for a very long period of your life, the difference is very obvious. It's hard to capture in words what having *real* massive world does to make a game so vastly different than Guild Wars even though the core gameplay seems similar. But having played both types of games, there is a totally different experience when you do not have a luxury of creating your own instance. There is a totally difference community formed--a totally different atmosphere. I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs talking about the unique experiences I've had in MMOs that just couldn't happen in Guild Wars. It's not the combat mechanics or the user interface that makes an MMORPG. It's the "massive world" - the thing Guild Wars lacks.
Nonetheless, most people don't sit down and say, "I'm going to create a piece of art, just to make art." If they do, it's likely to be pretentious junk. There's usually a purpose. Sometimes it's to emotionally move someone. Sometimes it's to deliver a powerful philosophical message. Sometimes it's to create stimulating or purposeful imagery. Sometimes, it's simply to entertain the audience, and occupy their time. Sometimes it's all of these things simultaneously, which almost all media are capable of: video games, movies, books, even reality TV shows. Whatever the reason, it's all art. Defining "artistic intent" is about as broad as defining art itself.
And if the "intention" is to entertain? If the "intention" is to design something to be functional? Somehow these intentions make a work no longer art? Where is the line drawn between a craft and a piece of art? What intentions are artistic, and which are not? Does it have to inspire us? It's blurry and subjective, and it's more correct to just say it's all art, rather than trying to draw some clear line between them.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate. I'll be the first one in line to trash the majority of cinema that's been in the theaters lately, and to complain about how the game industry is releasing loads of rehashed, unartistic garbage. But unartistic doesn't make it not art. Just because it doesn't have exceptional aesthetic quality doesn't mean it's just an object. A garbage movie with no artistic intention still reflects cultural values, even without intending to do so. It is an interesting product of our culture, and it says something about us that is more than the sum of its parts. Good or bad, it's still art.
"Most" movies these days only attempt to entertain as well. "Most" genre-based fiction only attempts to entertain.
All forms of media are art, whether they communicate the existential state of the human condition or communicate what a gunshot to the head might look like. It all doesn't have to be so literary. A piece of work can be aesthetically pleasing for a myriad of reasons beyond communicating something directly and coherently.
Video games are perhaps the most complex out of all media today because there are so many elements involved--visual, text, sound, music, and most importantly, interaction. All of these things on their own are works of art--in addition to the art of assembling these things together to make a one whole project. It is a massive undertaking of art even if it's purely for entertainment. Then, games like the Final Fantasy series, which do tend to be more literate and intentionally artistic, are just incredible in the amount of artwork being presented, working together.
Once the assumption has been agreed upon that all media is art, we can start stating our opinions about how crappy one piece of art is compared to another. But saying an entire medium "isn't art" is just plain stupid. Using a medium is an art of its own.
Yeah, I can see it now: "omg CrazyJim1 u r so elite @ starcraft can u autograph my sc cd case with ur battlenet username like omg!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!111"
So all plane hijackings after 9/11 are going to be, without a doubt, an attempted suicide attack. That's quite an assumption. It's an assumption I'll bet a lot of people today DO make. But like I said, that's a cultural thing today. It might not be years from now. It might go back to a "hostage" situation.
Socially today in America, it's true that people would likely rise against an attempted airplane hijacking. However, culture and ideology changes rather quickly; how people might react to that situation today could be totally different than, say, 20 years from now. So to say that it would *NEVER* happen again is quite a stretch. Once the fervor dies down, the chances of people on-board reacting in force will be probably about the same as it was on 9/11.
I've played more than a healthy amount of SOE games (EQ, EQ2, PlanetSide, SWG). Among all of these titles, SOE has consistently contradicted themselves through changes that go against their previous "philosophy" of the game's design. However, nothing even compares to this new SWG change. I played it last night, and it is the most bizarre thing I have ever encountered in a MMO. Upon logging into my character, I was asked to select an "iconic" Star Wars class, based off of popular characters--each class with a photo of these characters next to them, just in case anyone playing the game wasn't quite sure of the names. Additionally, you can "preview" the class, and watch an extremely corny gameplay video that looks laughably like a bad movie trailer. Combat is like some pseudo-action console game with horrible controls. It's so bad, it's hard to even imagine what the developers were thinking when they released this. The engine was not made for this kind of gameplay. Now, the most important question is: When does Vanguard come out?
I suppose it's all relative. My mp3 archive sits at about 180GB, and I'm always looking for more. Storage unfortunately holds me back. If I knew that I had endless storage... I could easily be heading toward a terabyte or so of music. I'd just go crazy on random DC++ hubs, grabbing as much music as I can and checking it out. Especially on foreign servers, there's bound to be artists I haven't heard of before that I could potentially like.
When you go beyond the mainstream and start getting into various genres, it becomes pretty mindblowing how much good music is really out in the world. Not only today's independent artists, but throughout the past six decades or so. Jazz, folk, blues, hip-hop, avant-garde, et cetera--I love it all, and have a human drive to listen to as much as I can... but unfortunately not a hard drive that will fit it all.
So, in other words, 60GB is nothing. It's just a tiny molecule compared to what's out in the world. Organizing it isn't too difficult with ID3 tags.
That's all fine and dandy, except that Guild Wars is NOT an MMORPG. It's completely instanced. It's like if Counter-Strike limited its players to official servers only, and the hub that connected you to those servers was 3-dimensional and looked just like the game. That doesn't make it a "Massively Multiplayer" game, it just makes it appear so.
Yeah! A Scratchpad! I've been waiting to get one of these on my desktop forever!
I miss when Google was just Google. Just a simple webpage and a search, no nonsense. I know they want to expand, but please let me know when it's actually something that isn't going to clog my system up with this rubbish. How many programs out there have the bright idea to spam the weather and stock quotes, and have a little quick search bar on your screen? Google, let's get serious here: is this progress? If this is how you're going to build a technological empire, I think I'll stay clear away.
What a great advertisement. It took me a few sentences to actually realize that I was viewing an online commercial. The slick placement as a /. news article was what almost got me at first!