His article says: Another technology you may have heard about is Parasitic Computing. Parasitic Computing can use any computer connected to the Internet to process a tiny amount of data. While the idea is intriguing, it is not practical because the computing power needed just to send and receive the data packet is thousands of times more than just processing it yourself. I mention this because Leech Computing and Parasitic Computing share these basic ideas: the user does not know data is being processed, no software is installed, and no system changes are made.
Please try to read the article before you go making redundant peanut gallery comments. The link you provided is helpful, though.
You might be a geek if:
- Every combination of two, three, or four letters is a meaningful acronym for you:)
"Yeah, I think we all want FOTR to do well. I feel the same way about ABM, although RH's vision may differ substantially from what SN had in mind. IIRC, GL overcame similar obstacles in TPM... "
And no more amazing, nearly supernatural link between mother and child. Good idea.
This isn't necessarily true. The nearly supernatural link between mother and child is psychological. Women can attatch (and have attached, often enough) themselves thusly on adopted children and pets. My cousin Clive, who lives in England, is an adoptee, but I have seen his mother, my aunt, willing to kill for him. This is true of most mammals.
I think it sounds great! Women can have children now without ever having to go through pregnancy. No morning sickness, no weird cravings, no hormonal imbalance, no labor, none of the ripping and tearing during actual birth, no cesarian sections, no death-by-childbirth. And none of the post-partisan depression that occurs after pregnancy, and none of the losing-your-figure.
Some finer points in design; I see some stuff like this a lot as well:
function bob( varlist ) { $var = $joe + 12345; return $var; }
You're wasting memory and such for the variable declaration and assignment, simply return $joe + 12345;.
Well, when you simply return $joe + 12345, the complier creates a variable of the same type as $joe, gives it the new value, and then returnes it, negating any hoped-for savings on memory.
These robots will never suck blood.
on
Modular Robots
·
· Score: 1
Soon we'll have to hunt robot mosquitos and spiders with the fly swatter -- or possibly with a hammer if these damn things keep repairing themselves.
How many modules do you think it would take to build a modular mechanic mosquito? Take into account that you're dealing with "5cm cube modules.":)
in order to miss where the selection ocurred. Only the surviving bots reproduce. They were selected in that they survived. Survival rate as a measure for fitness is not too crude, and this can be deduced by the fact that survival rate is the only measure of fitness. Well, that and ability to reproduce. But what you're doubtless thinking is that there are other fitness carachtaristics - like size, copmlexity, intelligence etc. These are survival charachtaristics only when they are means for survival, which they sometimes aren't. The only thing that an animal always wants is to survive. Evolution is not unilineal.
now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring). That seems to be some binary kind of selection which I at least have never come across in real life
On the contrary, that's exactly what happens in real life. Indiviuals which survive either Reproduce, or Do Not Reproduce. And in a lot of animals, like, oh, say, humans - the number of offspring per reproduction is quite binary - 1 or 0. The fact that a human can produce more than one offspring in a lifetime is based on its multiple reproductions. Which, by the way, the robots also have.
A machine cannot posess a will of its own. And if it has no will, it has no ambition or wants or desires. Without any of these things, robots will have no reason to wipe us out or replace us or whatever. It's just plain ridiculous.
I would call attention to the fact that our brains are just big, sloppy, complicated machines.
I would also call attention to the fact that defining "will", esp. "free will" has been abandoned by postmodern philosophy. There's no way to tell whether an entity has a "will" except maybe by being that entity, which is still arguable.
Maybe the mechanics that make our brains work are not known to us yet (like, maybe quantum uncertainty, which has no part in present-day computer logic, is what gives us unpredictability), but nobody has proven that we can't figure ourselves out. And once we do, we better remember to program our robots with the first two rules of robot behaviour (paraphrased).
1) Never harm or endanger a human.
2) Never harm or endanger a robot, except when this rule conflicts with rule 1.
Still, I think it's unlikely that we'd model robots after ourselves. We can always make more humans just by fucking. We'd probably just give the limited capacity to serve us and no desires except to do so. Unless a "Robot Rights" committe were formed:) I'm reminded of the cow-like animal in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was bred to want to be eaten, so there would be no political brawling.
With essentially indistructable services like Gnutella and Kazaa (etc) out there and working just fine (thank-you-very-much), why would anyone in their right mind pay Napster a monthly fee?
Something very interesting about the indestructable-ness of the p2p networks:
The RIAA no doubt hates them, but even when (if) it finishes off iMesh, Morpheus et al, there will be no way for The Law to shut down a p2p network. At all. IANAL, but IMO this marks the first timesince prohibition that a law was unenforceable. And this time, it's not through massive public distaste for the law. It only takes about 0.1% of the population to flagrantly and withoug liability, break the law.
Technology has become wide-spread enough and given enough power to individuals that they can ignore the government.
That's how the national-government structure of the earth falls apart in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
See my other post: They know that since the light is always travelling at c, that if it takes longer than c*(distance) time increments to get to the other side, it was stopped (in different places along the way) for a grand total of (measured time) - (expected time) time increments.
Only average lightspeed changes. The speed of light (photons - same speed as all massless particles) is always c (about 300kk in m/s). However, the light can be delayed. When a photon hits an atom, it usually transfers its energy to an electron, which jumps to a higher orbital. The electron then nearly instantly drops down to its old orbital and gives off the energy in the form of (guess what) a photon. A constant rate of interception and expulsion by atoms can cause the average speed of the light to be slowed, but the photon is always moving at c. The crystal/laser combination mentioned in the article just keeps the energy from the light a LOT longer than the picoseconds it spends in electrons normally
Jar-Jar sucked, and episode 1's target audience was Lucas's three adolescent adoptees. I don't like him any more. BUT
After his 13-year-old girl bugged him to let N'SYNC guys into the movie, he showed her by putting them in a scene where they appear in the background for a fraction of a second, amidst a crowd of hundreds of others, and then get killed.
In my first super-risky anti-blizzard post, I made my statements inoffensively. You did not respond in kind. I'm not going to be nice to you either.
If anything, I think that starcraft, especially, needs less micromanagement than some of its competitors. In Age of Kings and Age of Empires (both are Microsoft games) there are like 6 different kinds of resources for you to worry about. Blizzard kept it simple with just minerals and vespene
If you think fewer resources is better, try Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. That only has one resource. It sucks. But I agree with you about the MS-sponsored games; they're even worse than StarCraft. They don't excuse it, though. You have to be tanked up on caffiene to stand a chance in a serious StarCraft game, whereas in a Total Annihilation (the game I mean to praise) game, you can often get up and go to the bathroom without pausing it and have your opponent not even notice. That is because of TA's waypoint system. The StarCraft waypoint system sucks - you can't queue anything other than movement commands. TA lets you queue anything.
Starcraft strategy gets *very* complicated. True, basically you build up an army and then attack, but you have to decide what units to use, who to attack, and where. Since you don't usually have complete information about what the enemy is doing, this gets really complicated real fast. There are about four different main options for each race in terms of unit strategies. Choosing whom to attack, when, and where - that is StarCraft's high point. However, it isn't very complicated. Attack their main in early-game, attack their expansions once they start making them. Exceptions are only made in the case of air attacks, which are mainly successful due to the ridiculous amount of micromanagement needed to defend against them.
Almost all of Blizzard's games have been groundbreaking. They tend to spen a lot of time worrying about gameplay and less about graphics and sound. Their graphics have traditionally been a year or two behind the tech curve. You don't need the latest greatest box to play. But, their graphics have looked good. It doesn't look like an ancient NES game It seems like the only argument you make that their games are groundbreaking is that they don't have such good graphics after all. Look at games like Lemmings, and Wolfenstein. Maybe Warcraft I. Those were groundbreaking. No Blizzard game ever had an original concept. Or not a big one - I guess you could count "stimpacks" original. Or "cloaking".
Starcraft is the only RTS that I know about that offers "attack mode" where you can tell your units to walk to a location *but fight back if they're attacked on the way*. Sounds like a little thing, right? Wrong. First, in SC, units don't just fight back if attacked. They attack any enemy unit they see. You don't have the option to tell them to just return fire.
In Total Annihilation, and all other Cavedog RTSs, you can set your units to be in "Hold Fire", "Return Fire", or "Fire At Will" mode. You can guess what they do in each mode. However, these changes are permenant, and can be set at the factory to be default for every unit built there. You can even have the units keep moving at their destination while they're firing and then break off when they get there, unilke in SC, where the units forget they had movement orders until after the battle's over.
If you want a game that requires hard thinking, try chess or go. But even in those games, memorization of previous board positions and learning through experience play a large part. And looking down your nose at "clicking on sprites" doesn't make you 1337. It just makes you someone who probably got his ass kicked in starcraft or warcraft, and wants to make excuses for himself. 1) I actually look down my nose at people who try to apply the term "1337" to themselves, not to sprites. One of my favorite games of all is "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night", a 2-d sidescroller that came out long after Quake. What I was objecting to was the fact that Blizzard never does anything else.
2) I do play chess, and I appreciate the hard thinking. But weren't you earlier telling me that SC was very complicated? Are you backing off on that now?
3) I am not some loser who resented his inability to accomplish at StarCraft and started bashing it. (Even if I were, this argument would be ad hominum and null - you have to tell me what's wrong with what I said, not what's wrong with me.) I was playing StarCraft two weeks before it was released, and I was consistantly in the top 500 at it before Brood War. But I couldn't stick with it once I started playing Total Annihilation, which in my not-at-all humble opinion is a better game in every way (except graphics and sound).
I seem to be the only person who thinks so, but...
Blizzard doesn't have a good track record.
1) Warcraft II was a good game, and so was Starcraft, but they were both a little heavy on the micromanagement and a little light on actual strategy.
2) Diablo and II were both very addictive, but enormously shallow. After four hours of play, you've seen everything the game has to show, and all that's left is to explore every possible combination of random item and skill.
3) None of their games have been groundbreaking in any catagory, and they tend to spend a metric assload on graphics and sound but not too much time worrying about gameplay Exploding Sheep was probably their only original idea.
4) They have never strayed from their one game concept - control one sprite and make it try to kill other sprites by clicking on them.
Making a big, strong safehaven like this and telling everyone negates its effects. Telling everyone about how great your security is gives it a shorter lifetime than the completely not-scure (either from hacking or from "foreigh invasion") computer I'm using to type this. A shitload of physical defences and paranoid geeks are great for security, but not nearly so good as keeping a secret.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
You can't really say (+1, Taco Actually Did It), so I guess I owe this Wyatt Erp guy a point of karma. I decided, instead of spending one of my precious mod points on his post, to reply to it - and pointing everyone to the Holiday Guide to Geek Gifts he requested. (Please don't give me "Informative" for this - anyone who reads this post has already seen that article. It's above this one on the main page. Mostly I'm just patting Erp on the back.)
I wonder if Taco got the idea from Erp's post? Anyway, I'd also like to request that one of you other moderators give this guy some karma. It was a really good idea. Non-geeks have a phenomenally hard time christmas shopping for geeks. The only snag is that only geeks read slashdot - so I guess we'll all have to say "Here, read this!" to our potential gift-givers, which is akin to asking for a present:\
The Difference Between Art and Craft
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The difference between art and craft, as defined by my college English department, is as follows:
-Art forges new ground and manifests new ideas
Pros: Can be the most interesting creations
Cons: Often misunderstood, too strange, or
just meaningless
-Craft repeats what has been done before in new combinations and perhaps with a new twist
Pros: Gauranteed to be decent; based on a
previous success
Cons: Gauranteed not to raise eyebrows; based
on a previous success
Obviously this is not a clear-cut distinction - one could easily find border cases in any medium which is somehow considered art. However, it seems obvious that craft cannot exist without art of some degree; in order to copy an idea, the idea must have been created new by someone once.
We can easily find computer and video games that seem to fall well into either catagory. Art would be a game that broke new ground and was unlike anything that came before it, like Wolfenstein 3D, or Lemmings. Craft would be a game that did what has been done before, with little creativity (Spear of Destiny, or an add-on of new Lemmings levels) or a lot (Half-Life). Once again, it's easy to find border cases, like each new iteration of the ID 3D engine, which were full of new ideas but based on the same old one.
We can see, though, that even if most or almost all computer games fall into the Craft category, and even if some are border cases (they eventually fall into one of the two categories), that the medium as a whole is an artistic one. Craft is simply a word that means uncreative art. Just because it lacks snob appeal doesn't mean it isn't aesthetically pleasing.
Since all computer and video games have no purpose other than to entertain, the medium must be considered an artistic one. Craft does not exist in a medium without the potential for art. The quality of the art, and whether or not it is ideal enough to escape the title "craft," does not, even in the cruelest cynic's video-game-hating eyes allow its dismissal as anything less than poor art. We may notice that the assertion that the art is poor is a qualitative statement, which is in the eye of the beholder, but that the asswertion that it is art at all is a quantitative one and bears no argument. Cogito ergo sum - if someone thinks it's art, the harshest blow one can deal it is say it isn't very good.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess it's easier to type "Voyager" than "Pioneer" when you've got you've got your left thumb stuck up your butt...
votahewr
voryager
vottager
pioneer
ppioneer
ioneer
I did a lot better with pioneer. And my left hand stinks now. Thanks a lot.
Sorry I flew off the handle.
I'd mod you up, but I can't now that I've participated in this discussion.
His article says:
Another technology you may have heard about is Parasitic Computing. Parasitic Computing can use any computer connected to the Internet to process a tiny amount of data. While the idea is intriguing, it is not practical because the computing power needed just to send and receive the data packet is thousands of times more than just processing it yourself. I mention this because Leech Computing and Parasitic Computing share these basic ideas: the user does not know data is being processed, no software is installed, and no system changes are made.
Please try to read the article before you go making redundant peanut gallery comments. The link you provided is helpful, though.
The death star was built by wookiee slaves.
You might be a geek if: :)
- Every combination of two, three, or four letters is a meaningful acronym for you
"Yeah, I think we all want FOTR to do well. I feel the same way about ABM, although RH's vision may differ substantially from what SN had in mind. IIRC, GL overcame similar obstacles in TPM... "
And no more amazing, nearly supernatural link between mother and child. Good idea.
This isn't necessarily true. The nearly supernatural link between mother and child is psychological. Women can attatch (and have attached, often enough) themselves thusly on adopted children and pets. My cousin Clive, who lives in England, is an adoptee, but I have seen his mother, my aunt, willing to kill for him. This is true of most mammals.
I think it sounds great! Women can have children now without ever having to go through pregnancy. No morning sickness, no weird cravings, no hormonal imbalance, no labor, none of the ripping and tearing during actual birth, no cesarian sections, no death-by-childbirth. And none of the post-partisan depression that occurs after pregnancy, and none of the losing-your-figure.
And for we men, no more hearing about all of it.
Pregnancy is scary. Not this.
I guess you don't need it any more :) by the time I posted this comment, the link in the parent story was fixed.
Some finer points in design; I see some stuff like this a lot as well:
function bob( varlist ) { $var = $joe + 12345; return $var; }
You're wasting memory and such for the variable declaration and assignment, simply return $joe + 12345;.
Well, when you simply return $joe + 12345, the complier creates a variable of the same type as $joe, gives it the new value, and then returnes it, negating any hoped-for savings on memory.
Soon we'll have to hunt robot mosquitos and spiders with the fly swatter -- or possibly with a hammer if these damn things keep repairing themselves.
:)
How many modules do you think it would take to build a modular mechanic mosquito? Take into account that you're dealing with "5cm cube modules."
in order to miss where the selection ocurred. Only the surviving bots reproduce. They were selected in that they survived. Survival rate as a measure for fitness is not too crude, and this can be deduced by the fact that survival rate is the only measure of fitness. Well, that and ability to reproduce. But what you're doubtless thinking is that there are other fitness carachtaristics - like size, copmlexity, intelligence etc. These are survival charachtaristics only when they are means for survival, which they sometimes aren't. The only thing that an animal always wants is to survive. Evolution is not unilineal.
now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring). That seems to be some binary kind of selection which I at least have never come across in real life
On the contrary, that's exactly what happens in real life. Indiviuals which survive either Reproduce, or Do Not Reproduce. And in a lot of animals, like, oh, say, humans - the number of offspring per reproduction is quite binary - 1 or 0. The fact that a human can produce more than one offspring in a lifetime is based on its multiple reproductions. Which, by the way, the robots also have.
...but I was afraid Microsoft would come to my house and kill me, so I did it as Anonymous Coward :)
Yeah, that's why I said "paraphrased" :) I forgot how Asimov's rules originally worked.
A machine cannot posess a will of its own. And if it has no will, it has no ambition or wants or desires. Without any of these things, robots will have no reason to wipe us out or replace us or whatever. It's just plain ridiculous.
:) I'm reminded of the cow-like animal in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was bred to want to be eaten, so there would be no political brawling.
I would call attention to the fact that our brains are just big, sloppy, complicated machines.
I would also call attention to the fact that defining "will", esp. "free will" has been abandoned by postmodern philosophy. There's no way to tell whether an entity has a "will" except maybe by being that entity, which is still arguable.
Maybe the mechanics that make our brains work are not known to us yet (like, maybe quantum uncertainty, which has no part in present-day computer logic, is what gives us unpredictability), but nobody has proven that we can't figure ourselves out. And once we do, we better remember to program our robots with the first two rules of robot behaviour (paraphrased).
1) Never harm or endanger a human.
2) Never harm or endanger a robot, except when this rule conflicts with rule 1.
Still, I think it's unlikely that we'd model robots after ourselves. We can always make more humans just by fucking. We'd probably just give the limited capacity to serve us and no desires except to do so. Unless a "Robot Rights" committe were formed
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/02/02/wef.pre dictions.reut/index.html
With essentially indistructable services like Gnutella and Kazaa (etc) out there and working just fine (thank-you-very-much), why would anyone in their right mind pay Napster a monthly fee?
Something very interesting about the indestructable-ness of the p2p networks:
The RIAA no doubt hates them, but even when (if) it finishes off iMesh, Morpheus et al, there will be no way for The Law to shut down a p2p network. At all. IANAL, but IMO this marks the first timesince prohibition that a law was unenforceable. And this time, it's not through massive public distaste for the law. It only takes about 0.1% of the population to flagrantly and withoug liability, break the law.
Technology has become wide-spread enough and given enough power to individuals that they can ignore the government.
That's how the national-government structure of the earth falls apart in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
They know that since the light is always travelling at c, that if it takes longer than c*(distance) time increments to get to the other side...
This should have been (distance)/c, not c*distance. Sorry.
See my other post: They know that since the light is always travelling at c, that if it takes longer than c*(distance) time increments to get to the other side, it was stopped (in different places along the way) for a grand total of (measured time) - (expected time) time increments.
Only average lightspeed changes. The speed of light (photons - same speed as all massless particles) is always c (about 300kk in m/s). However, the light can be delayed. When a photon hits an atom, it usually transfers its energy to an electron, which jumps to a higher orbital. The electron then nearly instantly drops down to its old orbital and gives off the energy in the form of (guess what) a photon. A constant rate of interception and expulsion by atoms can cause the average speed of the light to be slowed, but the photon is always moving at c. The crystal/laser combination mentioned in the article just keeps the energy from the light a LOT longer than the picoseconds it spends in electrons normally
Jar-Jar sucked, and episode 1's target audience was Lucas's three adolescent adoptees. I don't like him any more. BUT
After his 13-year-old girl bugged him to let N'SYNC guys into the movie, he showed her by putting them in a scene where they appear in the background for a fraction of a second, amidst a crowd of hundreds of others, and then get killed.
In my first super-risky anti-blizzard post, I made my statements inoffensively. You did not respond in kind. I'm not going to be nice to you either.
If anything, I think that starcraft, especially, needs less micromanagement than some of its competitors. In Age of Kings and Age of Empires (both are Microsoft games) there are like 6 different kinds of resources for you to worry about. Blizzard kept it simple with just minerals and vespene
If you think fewer resources is better, try Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. That only has one resource. It sucks. But I agree with you about the MS-sponsored games; they're even worse than StarCraft. They don't excuse it, though. You have to be tanked up on caffiene to stand a chance in a serious StarCraft game, whereas in a Total Annihilation (the game I mean to praise) game, you can often get up and go to the bathroom without pausing it and have your opponent not even notice. That is because of TA's waypoint system. The StarCraft waypoint system sucks - you can't queue anything other than movement commands. TA lets you queue anything.
Starcraft strategy gets *very* complicated. True, basically you build up an army and then attack, but you have to decide what units to use, who to attack, and where. Since you don't usually have complete information about what the enemy is doing, this gets really complicated real fast.
There are about four different main options for each race in terms of unit strategies. Choosing whom to attack, when, and where - that is StarCraft's high point. However, it isn't very complicated. Attack their main in early-game, attack their expansions once they start making them. Exceptions are only made in the case of air attacks, which are mainly successful due to the ridiculous amount of micromanagement needed to defend against them.
Almost all of Blizzard's games have been groundbreaking. They tend to spen a lot of time worrying about gameplay and less about graphics and sound. Their graphics have traditionally been a year or two behind the tech curve. You don't need the latest greatest box to play. But, their graphics have looked good. It doesn't look like an ancient NES game
It seems like the only argument you make that their games are groundbreaking is that they don't have such good graphics after all. Look at games like Lemmings, and Wolfenstein. Maybe Warcraft I. Those were groundbreaking. No Blizzard game ever had an original concept. Or not a big one - I guess you could count "stimpacks" original. Or "cloaking".
Starcraft is the only RTS that I know about that offers "attack mode" where you can tell your units to walk to a location *but fight back if they're attacked on the way*. Sounds like a little thing, right? Wrong.
First, in SC, units don't just fight back if attacked. They attack any enemy unit they see. You don't have the option to tell them to just return fire.
In Total Annihilation, and all other Cavedog RTSs, you can set your units to be in "Hold Fire", "Return Fire", or "Fire At Will" mode. You can guess what they do in each mode. However, these changes are permenant, and can be set at the factory to be default for every unit built there. You can even have the units keep moving at their destination while they're firing and then break off when they get there, unilke in SC, where the units forget they had movement orders until after the battle's over.
If you want a game that requires hard thinking, try chess or go. But even in those games, memorization of previous board positions and learning through experience play a large part. And looking down your nose at "clicking on sprites" doesn't make you 1337. It just makes you someone who probably got his ass kicked in starcraft or warcraft, and wants to make excuses for himself.
1) I actually look down my nose at people who try to apply the term "1337" to themselves, not to sprites. One of my favorite games of all is "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night", a 2-d sidescroller that came out long after Quake. What I was objecting to was the fact that Blizzard never does anything else.
2) I do play chess, and I appreciate the hard thinking. But weren't you earlier telling me that SC was very complicated? Are you backing off on that now?
3) I am not some loser who resented his inability to accomplish at StarCraft and started bashing it. (Even if I were, this argument would be ad hominum and null - you have to tell me what's wrong with what I said, not what's wrong with me.) I was playing StarCraft two weeks before it was released, and I was consistantly in the top 500 at it before Brood War. But I couldn't stick with it once I started playing Total Annihilation, which in my not-at-all humble opinion is a better game in every way (except graphics and sound).
I seem to be the only person who thinks so, but...
Blizzard doesn't have a good track record.
1) Warcraft II was a good game, and so was Starcraft, but they were both a little heavy on the micromanagement and a little light on actual strategy.
2) Diablo and II were both very addictive, but enormously shallow. After four hours of play, you've seen everything the game has to show, and all that's left is to explore every possible combination of random item and skill.
3) None of their games have been groundbreaking in any catagory, and they tend to spend a metric assload on graphics and sound but not too much time worrying about gameplay Exploding Sheep was probably their only original idea.
4) They have never strayed from their one game concept - control one sprite and make it try to kill other sprites by clicking on them.
Making a big, strong safehaven like this and telling everyone negates its effects. Telling everyone about how great your security is gives it a shorter lifetime than the completely not-scure (either from hacking or from "foreigh invasion") computer I'm using to type this. A shitload of physical defences and paranoid geeks are great for security, but not nearly so good as keeping a secret.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
You can't really say (+1, Taco Actually Did It), so I guess I owe this Wyatt Erp guy a point of karma. I decided, instead of spending one of my precious mod points on his post, to reply to it - and pointing everyone to the Holiday Guide to Geek Gifts he requested. (Please don't give me "Informative" for this - anyone who reads this post has already seen that article. It's above this one on the main page. Mostly I'm just patting Erp on the back.)
:\
I wonder if Taco got the idea from Erp's post? Anyway, I'd also like to request that one of you other moderators give this guy some karma. It was a really good idea. Non-geeks have a phenomenally hard time christmas shopping for geeks. The only snag is that only geeks read slashdot - so I guess we'll all have to say "Here, read this!" to our potential gift-givers, which is akin to asking for a present
The difference between art and craft, as defined by my college English department, is as follows:
-Art forges new ground and manifests new ideas
Pros: Can be the most interesting creations
Cons: Often misunderstood, too strange, or
just meaningless
-Craft repeats what has been done before in new combinations and perhaps with a new twist
Pros: Gauranteed to be decent; based on a
previous success
Cons: Gauranteed not to raise eyebrows; based
on a previous success
Obviously this is not a clear-cut distinction - one could easily find border cases in any medium which is somehow considered art. However, it seems obvious that craft cannot exist without art of some degree; in order to copy an idea, the idea must have been created new by someone once.
We can easily find computer and video games that seem to fall well into either catagory. Art would be a game that broke new ground and was unlike anything that came before it, like Wolfenstein 3D, or Lemmings. Craft would be a game that did what has been done before, with little creativity (Spear of Destiny, or an add-on of new Lemmings levels) or a lot (Half-Life). Once again, it's easy to find border cases, like each new iteration of the ID 3D engine, which were full of new ideas but based on the same old one.
We can see, though, that even if most or almost all computer games fall into the Craft category, and even if some are border cases (they eventually fall into one of the two categories), that the medium as a whole is an artistic one. Craft is simply a word that means uncreative art. Just because it lacks snob appeal doesn't mean it isn't aesthetically pleasing.
Since all computer and video games have no purpose other than to entertain, the medium must be considered an artistic one. Craft does not exist in a medium without the potential for art. The quality of the art, and whether or not it is ideal enough to escape the title "craft," does not, even in the cruelest cynic's video-game-hating eyes allow its dismissal as anything less than poor art. We may notice that the assertion that the art is poor is a qualitative statement, which is in the eye of the beholder, but that the asswertion that it is art at all is a quantitative one and bears no argument. Cogito ergo sum - if someone thinks it's art, the harshest blow one can deal it is say it isn't very good.