Many are assuming that Hawking is proposing that the universe came into existance from complete nothingness. This isn't what he was saying at all:
From the article:
According to Hawking, the origin of the universe can be depicted as bubbles in a steam in boiling water. Small bubbles that appear and then collapse represent mini universes that expand only to disintegrate.
All this is is a simple analogy to represent the way in which the universe came into existance, it says nothing about what caused it to do so. In fact, even in his analogy, the bubbles are caused by extreme heat through a medium in a transitional state. This most definitely is "something".
In a discussion with one of the more thoughtful news anchors at my work, I was caught making the following statement, "everything must have an origin", but in actuality, we have no proof of that. Traditionally, when we talk of creation, we are really refering to a transformation of something into something else. We've never actually seen creation, in the purist sense of the word, so we have no way of proving that anything ever was created.
I have come to believe that there never has been nothing. Some form of SOMETHING (be it matter, energy, time, or what-have-you, since we're talking multi-dimensional proporties outside of our existing concept of reality) has always existed. Time could very well simply be a property unique to our universe, so "eternity" may have no real meaning whatsoever. But in any case, something has always existed in some form or another. It is impossible to come to any conclusion otherwise. Even if you take into account that physics, reality, space, and time, as we know it, may very-well only exist inside our universe, there must be some form of physical properties, be they very different, outside our universe, and changes in those properties were the cause of our universe.
Simply because one is busy concentrating on the creation of a bubble in boiling water doesn't mean that you can completely disregard the existance of the boiling water, or the energy coming off the stove, as part of what went into creating the bubble.
That's why my "multiplayer gaming" consists of playing a single-player game, and then talking about it with friends later... this even involves REAL HUMAN CONTACT!
Probably the most interesting 2d/3d map editing came out of a game called Avara, a Mac-only Mech/platformer game distributed by Ambrosia Software. The game read files created by a simple, vector-based drawing program, "ClarisWorks Draw", to create a true, polygonal 3D map. Rectangle objects were used to denote all walls/floors, and other structural polygons. With each object, the designer would include a small text object that contained a set of instructions: things like depth or slope of the object. The result was that fully 3D maps could be created with a simple multi-layer drawing program. Objects could bridge each other without problem, so fairly highly sophisticated platformer style maps could be constructed. Unfortunately, the lack of any textural data made the game look graphically outdated, and there-for could never have been a runaway success.
I have no idea how Marathon or Doom maps were edited, but I imagine it was a similar concept, although I have no clue why layering objects on top of each other was such a difficult task.
Will Wright embodies an outdated, traditionalist view of social and cultural growth. He's cut from the same cloth as the parents protesting that there's too much art in schools, and "god damnit, kids should be learning more history!" That's how he appears to me, anyway. Instead of litterary or artistic frameworks, he insists that games have scientific, historical, ecconomic, or political meaning. There's no question that he's a very creative person, indeed, but his games reward developement rather than creative design.
It's like claiming that history textbooks are going to change the world. Maybe to a point, but don't we want to inspire people to think and create for themselves, rather than simply having them memorize procedures?
Spore might, at first glance, appear to be a creative canvas, of sorts. But at first glance, so did SimCity, which was most deffinitely not. It wasn't a creative tool so much as a procedural one, and I have no doubt, from what I've heard, that Spore will be no different.
If there is absolutely nothing, then that means you're certain of both how much energy is present (zero), and the rate of change of energy (also zero). That violates the uncertainty principle. So absolute nothing is unstable, because if you're totally certain there's nothing there then you have absolutely no idea of how rapidly that state of affairs is changing.
Well put. The end result is that the "beginning of something" is a paradox unto itself. It is theoretically impossible to argue that there was no beginning to the universe, yet since no change can come of nothing, it is impossible to argue that our universe began from nothing. Our very presense, itself, defies all logic.
It would have been much simpler to interpret, had nothing ever existed. However, there would be noone to interpret it, anyway, so what's the point?
I was most definitely around back then, and I was around when Wolfenstien shook the world, as well. I remember my younger 2nd cousins on the computer yelling "Die, Doggy, Die!" as they shot at the guard dogs. The buzz was huge in high school. Among other things, everyone was trying to figure out how to get Wolfenstien 3D on their graphing calculators... obviously, that wasn't possible until a couple years later.
I'm also surprised FF doesn't make an appearence... but it wouldn't be with FF7. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing, due to FF6 and Chrono Trigger. If you want to talk about huge leaps in story telling, take a look at the difference between the styles of FF4 or FF5, to FF6, and the jump between FF6 to FF7 looks almost non-existant in comparison (I would argue that it is almost non-existant), similarly, FF3 to FF4 is a huge huge deal. FF7 wins hands down on a popularity contest, but I would argue that it was little more than a stepping stone, which was already pretty well layed out by the previous installment.
Regardless, this is pointless, everyone has their opinions on the series. But I believe that the original Final Fantasy is the only one that belongs anywhere close to that list, as the jRPG could have died right back then, if it hadn't been for that game.
Each continued installment of the series became more and more wellknown up through FF8. FF6 (III), contributed a lot to making the series a household name, just as did FF4. Why FF7 has become a threshold, of sorts, is beyond me. I remember the hype surrounding FF6, it was huge, I saw moogle pictures everywhere, and everyone was talking about it. By the time FF7 came out, the genre was already snowballing, names like FF6 and Chrono Trigger continued to push the genre out into the mainstream, with no end in sight. FF7 simply continued that trend, and, once again, struck a chord with its audience. Sure, FF7 was even more so, but where do you draw the line?
I just say you don't draw one. The only revolutionary game in the series was the original, as it completely rejuvinated a genre. Without Final Fantasy, the jRPG genre would have died in infancy. I believe this list is about influential and revolutionary games, which is less subjective than bsst or most popular. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing... it, in itself, did very little. Not that it isn't an incredible game and one of the better installments in the series, but the only one that belongs anywhere close to this list is the original, as lame as it looks to our standards, today.
Because apparently it being free/cheaper, legal and works wouldn't be part of the reasons why a power user 'loves' Linux?
Sadly, yes, even those are reasons many people don't use Linux. People are scared of free things, it makes them feel like there must be something fishy going on. Business people, especially, in which their entire life revolves around making money, are incredibly skeptical of things that are given away. Legality: once again, many business people admire Microsoft's [underhanded] way of doing business, and think they are geniouses for doing things the way they do them. At least, in my work place, that's the way things are. We're forbidden from using any non-Microsoft program, if there's a Microsoft alternative.
As much as I love Marathon, I'll have to call you on some things. Actually, the maps were completely 2D. Even though they had stairs and lifts, you could never bridge one object over another. They did a lot of great level design to make you forget that, but the map design was still 2D, but with height modifiers for each section of ground (which Doom did as well). You could never walk under a lift, or have a bridge above a section of ground. Now, the envirnonment could include polygons above the ground, but they could never be walked on. The first game that I remember that allowed for this was a little known game called Rise of the Triad, in which there was full vertical movement, spring boards, and sections of floor and lifts that you could walk under (and be crushed by, in the case of lifts). It was also the first game to make marks in the wall where the bullet hit. Duke Nukem 3D was, unfortunately, probably the first well-known game to encorporate these elements.
Marathon did, however, introduce a whole lot of new things to the genre It was the first to have a dual-trigger system, and wield two weapons at once. This isn't exactly an innovation, but it was the first FPS to have adventure game elements, where a "complex" story would unfold over the course of the game, and effect the gameplay. It was also the first to include NPCs (which were good for little more than killing and getting ammo... but still).
Yeah, Marathon was definitely a genre-altering game... sadly, it's Mac-only appearance (until the third installment), made it far less known. I have no doubt Doom would have been completely overshadowed, had either bungie ported it to windows, or had the mac been more popular than it was.
Give me a break, okay? Who cares about the technology used. "2.5D" (what a stupid name), played pretty much like the "true 3D" games of their time. Basically, the only fundimental difference was that they used sprites for characters and objects instead of polygons. But the world was fully 3D. Some "2.5D" games even allowed for vertical movement and allowed the bridging of platforms (Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D). I hate the term 2.5D, it's so missleading. Even today, many games use sprites to denote objects (Final Fantasy XII, even, has a surprising amount of them), but the gameplay and environment, now and then, are fully 3D.
I'd actually agree about Myst, even though you should probably hire a bodygaurd to ward off all the adventure-game fans who are now going to try to murder you in your sleep. But I'd agree if only for the reason that it was one of the first games to make people wake up and realize that video games could be artistic. Suddenly, parents, who had said that video games were nothing but mindless fluf, had a conundrum on their hands. As for the genre of adventure games? It innovated and influenced surprisingly little.
The only thing that game ever did was to spawn the term "fanboy", as well as to give teenage boys the idea that it was now okay to whack-off to video game characters.;)
Wow, I like that list. Thank you for including NBA Jam. I'm not a sports gamer, myself, but I remember the hubbub when that game came out... it was really the first mega-hit sports game and was able to win over a lot of new players. You can't really trace the very first sports game easilly, but I think this was THE major milestone in the genre. Although, in some ways, including NBA Jam is sorta like including Final Fantasy VII, which, I think, most of us agree shouldn't be anywhere near that list.
Also, I love the inclusion of Myst. It's neither the most influential game to adventure games, nor was it the biggest, nor the first. But it's the first game that made a whole lot of people look up and question whether video games could be an art form. That's a big question, and many have answered in one way or another. So, in a way, Myst could be considered the beginning of a new era of gaming, in which video games could be looked at in more ways than just "a fun pastime for the kiddies". Quite possibly one of the most important games since their invention. But again, it's often not mentioned because, within its own genre, it was neither the first nor the most influential.
But yeah, your list is a hell of a lot better than the one in the artical.
Okay, I'll buy that. It was a huge deal at the time, I can remember that. But I wouldn't say that it's the most important advancement in the genre. 2D platformers, and many 3D platformers, even today, are fairly linear. The ability to pick one level or another may be cool, but is it really all that important? I wouldn't say so, especially when 90% of the map, you have a linear progression anyway, and the same is still true today with most platformers.
Now, if we're talking non-linearity within the levels themselves... I'd say without question, it's a big deal... but it's simply an evolution from the non-linearity demonstrated in Doki-Doki Panic (Super Mario 2). This was the first game to have long sections of levels branch and reconnect. Mario 1 did it a little bit with pipes and vines, but these areas were really minor, so I wouldn't exactly call them branches in the same sense.
Mario 3 could be said to have perfected the art of non-linear level design, sure, I'll buy that. But in looking at other choices from this list, "perfected" doesn't seem to be key here.
I dunno, dude, I remember WarCraft II being a huge hit when it came out, and after that, many people went back and got Warcraft I, but at what point do you call a game a break-out success? I wouldn't say that WarCraft was a household name until after WarCraft II came out. More than Dune, maybe, but not by all that much.
It's really hard to point to a game and name one that was the "breakout success". Super Mario Bros was a breakout success, but for its time, so was Donkey Kong, one could make an arguement for Mario 3, since it was one of the first games that had a HUGE ad campaign, and got everyone playing. But it's much easier to point to the game that really had the most influence on the genre: Super Mario Bros 1 is that, without question, Dune II would probably be in there (even I remember Dune II, and I never play RTSs). Wolfenstien 3D would be there instead of Doom (this was a real "WTF" choice for me), Final Fantasy I or Dragon Warrior should have been in there. And WTF is Sensible World of Soccer?
SimCity, Zork, Tetris, and Spacewar make perfect sense to me, but the other just seem to be favorites of the list's creators.
And as great of a game as Doom was, it's Quake that really was the break out point of FPS and the GPU requirements. If it wasn't for Quake where would nVidia and ATI be now?
Yeah, Doom makes no sense to me either, it was neither the first: Wolfenstien came out long before, nor probably the most popular: Quake or Halo probably recieve that honor. Wolfenstien was a huge hit... maybe not as much as Doom, but still large enough to be recognized in its spawning of FPSs. I'd also argue that Marathon and Rise of the Triad, which came out nearly the same time as Doom, were far more advanced, if we want to talk about technical advancements in a series, and were huge influence on the genre as well. But the bottom line, for FPSs, I think the honor goes, unquestionably, to Wolfenstien 3D.
I'd agree with the list for the most part, but no Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior? They spawned/rejuvinated (how ever you want to look at it) an entire genre. I mean, they're no Super Mario Bros or (which is also strangely absent from the list), but I don't understand how they're any less significant than Civ or Warcraft.
The inclusion of Mario 3 really throws the list off balance as well. If we're speaking about the most influential games, then Mario 3 needs to go (even if it is possibly the best in the series) since Mario 1 is far more influential. If we're talking a top 10 list of games from an aesthetic standpoint, then half of the other games shouldn't be on there. The inclusion of Warcraft AND Civ AND Sim City, three games from closely related genres that all influenced each other, just leads me to believe that there's a lot of cherry picking going on.
Also... what the heck is Sensible World of Soccar? I've never even heard of it, and it looks like a pretty recent game, not like there haven't been gobs of sports games since the beginning of time.
Linux is a piece-meal OS, and this is one of the primary reasons why people who use it, got it in the first place. Similarly, it's the same crowd who are going to want to build a custom PC... not a Dell.
Until you can convince a sizable portion of the mainstream population, for which detailed custom-built machines are not a priority, that they need Linux... you're going to have a tough time selling a linux distro to them. Apple did it, but they had to lock in one propriatary distro and make it into almost a whole different animal. As much as some people don't want to believe this... it's going to take something similar to sell ANY linux distro to mainstream users.
Basically, the reasons why power users love Linux so much are precisely the same reasons why mainstream users won't use it. We're just going to have to face that cold, hard, fact, and get over ourselves... only then will Linux previal.
That makes me even more suspicious. I was involved in a number of Ambrosia Software communities way back when I was in middle school: Avara and Escape Velocity, specifically. We were doing exactly that, creating, sharing, and critiquing levels. As fun as it was, though, I remember two things: the only people who were interested in it were pretty hard core, not your mainstream gamers, more realistically, your future game designer types (if they were any good). Secondly, it got old, and the turnover rate was pretty high.
Folks, this is NOT a new concept, and I fail to see it being able to take off and stay aloft for very long. It's been tried countless times, by various developers, and the best that can ever be achieved is an occult group who share their creations while passing in the dark. Heck, Quake 2 had a mod scene, yet only a small percentage of people who bought the game took part in it.
All I'm trying to say is that you can't expect "custom level designing" to ever be one of your mass market selling points. It should be one of the last bullet points on your list of marketable features, because it's a feature that will only appeal to a hardcore audience, of which will probably buy the game anyway. I'm just skeptical that project sounds like its being done by a group of game developers who have gotten caught up in the trap of imprinting their own interests onto their audience. The reality is that MOST people really have little interest in being creative enough to design their own game environments.
Not sure if I'm very impressed. Some would call me a Nintendo fanboy; I got a Wii at launch, still think its a great system, but I'm not sure if this seems very reliavent. As someone who is interested quite a bit by game design philosophy, I would hope that a developer conference would put forth some inspiring new visions into the heads of developers who are studying implementations for upcoming projects. There's a lot more that can be done with the motion sensing hardware than is currently being done, and I'd hope to see developers eager to try out new theories and ideas.
That said, I'm all about defining an over-arching philosophy or view of the future of the industry, I think that is very important and a key difference that separates Nintendo from Sony/Microsoft, but at some point, you've gotta move from inspring people to follow your new direction, and actually identifying some ways in which they can actually do that. Where-as Sony/Microsoft seem to be pracariously leaning towards only discussing implementations and seem to not have any inspirational overall vision to present, Nintendo seems to be suffering from the exact opposite problem.
If there's anyone who can talk specifics regarding the philosophy of game design, it's Miyamoto, but I don't see any of that. I'm not talking about wowing the public with release dates and explosive pyrotechnics, I'm talking about presenting methods of opporation, new design ideas, things like that. I just don't see it here, I see rehashes of Nintendo's umbrella direction... which we've come to know and love, but let's see some specifics.
Unfortunately, pretty much all educational TV is based around force feeding people facts, instead of inspiring them to think for themselves. Video games, on the other hand, often develop problem solving skills and mental accuity. I'd argue that this is much much more important than simply learning various facts, as it teaches people how to more accurately identify and interpret information. Obviously, learning facts is part of the equation, but if one is not very capable of interpreting pieces of knowledge, than what's the point? Bottom line, simply knowing facts isn't going to get you very far in life; how people deal with the information they're given is much more important.
However, TV can accomplish this as well: a good mystery can stimulate similar thinking patterns; a good drama can inspire philosophical thinking and psychology, which are other high-level mental functions that should probably be stressed more in modern education. But these things are also being explored in games, if at a slightly more primative stage of developement.
In the end, though, I think that video games, as a whole, tend to inspire excersise in mental accuity a great deal more than TV does. Simply because a fewer percentage of games are deemed "edutainment" doesn't really mean anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just imagine 20 years from now:
"Congradulations! You have just downloaded a new video card. Print video card? [Yes] [Cancel]"
Many are assuming that Hawking is proposing that the universe came into existance from complete nothingness. This isn't what he was saying at all:
From the article:All this is is a simple analogy to represent the way in which the universe came into existance, it says nothing about what caused it to do so. In fact, even in his analogy, the bubbles are caused by extreme heat through a medium in a transitional state. This most definitely is "something".
In a discussion with one of the more thoughtful news anchors at my work, I was caught making the following statement, "everything must have an origin", but in actuality, we have no proof of that. Traditionally, when we talk of creation, we are really refering to a transformation of something into something else. We've never actually seen creation, in the purist sense of the word, so we have no way of proving that anything ever was created.
I have come to believe that there never has been nothing. Some form of SOMETHING (be it matter, energy, time, or what-have-you, since we're talking multi-dimensional proporties outside of our existing concept of reality) has always existed. Time could very well simply be a property unique to our universe, so "eternity" may have no real meaning whatsoever. But in any case, something has always existed in some form or another. It is impossible to come to any conclusion otherwise. Even if you take into account that physics, reality, space, and time, as we know it, may very-well only exist inside our universe, there must be some form of physical properties, be they very different, outside our universe, and changes in those properties were the cause of our universe.
Simply because one is busy concentrating on the creation of a bubble in boiling water doesn't mean that you can completely disregard the existance of the boiling water, or the energy coming off the stove, as part of what went into creating the bubble.
That's why my "multiplayer gaming" consists of playing a single-player game, and then talking about it with friends later... this even involves REAL HUMAN CONTACT!
Probably the most interesting 2d/3d map editing came out of a game called Avara, a Mac-only Mech/platformer game distributed by Ambrosia Software. The game read files created by a simple, vector-based drawing program, "ClarisWorks Draw", to create a true, polygonal 3D map. Rectangle objects were used to denote all walls/floors, and other structural polygons. With each object, the designer would include a small text object that contained a set of instructions: things like depth or slope of the object. The result was that fully 3D maps could be created with a simple multi-layer drawing program. Objects could bridge each other without problem, so fairly highly sophisticated platformer style maps could be constructed. Unfortunately, the lack of any textural data made the game look graphically outdated, and there-for could never have been a runaway success.
I have no idea how Marathon or Doom maps were edited, but I imagine it was a similar concept, although I have no clue why layering objects on top of each other was such a difficult task.
Will Wright embodies an outdated, traditionalist view of social and cultural growth. He's cut from the same cloth as the parents protesting that there's too much art in schools, and "god damnit, kids should be learning more history!" That's how he appears to me, anyway. Instead of litterary or artistic frameworks, he insists that games have scientific, historical, ecconomic, or political meaning. There's no question that he's a very creative person, indeed, but his games reward developement rather than creative design.
It's like claiming that history textbooks are going to change the world. Maybe to a point, but don't we want to inspire people to think and create for themselves, rather than simply having them memorize procedures?
Spore might, at first glance, appear to be a creative canvas, of sorts. But at first glance, so did SimCity, which was most deffinitely not. It wasn't a creative tool so much as a procedural one, and I have no doubt, from what I've heard, that Spore will be no different.
Well put. The end result is that the "beginning of something" is a paradox unto itself. It is theoretically impossible to argue that there was no beginning to the universe, yet since no change can come of nothing, it is impossible to argue that our universe began from nothing. Our very presense, itself, defies all logic.
It would have been much simpler to interpret, had nothing ever existed. However, there would be noone to interpret it, anyway, so what's the point?
Arggg, my head is spinning!
I was most definitely around back then, and I was around when Wolfenstien shook the world, as well. I remember my younger 2nd cousins on the computer yelling "Die, Doggy, Die!" as they shot at the guard dogs. The buzz was huge in high school. Among other things, everyone was trying to figure out how to get Wolfenstien 3D on their graphing calculators... obviously, that wasn't possible until a couple years later.
I'm also surprised FF doesn't make an appearence... but it wouldn't be with FF7. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing, due to FF6 and Chrono Trigger. If you want to talk about huge leaps in story telling, take a look at the difference between the styles of FF4 or FF5, to FF6, and the jump between FF6 to FF7 looks almost non-existant in comparison (I would argue that it is almost non-existant), similarly, FF3 to FF4 is a huge huge deal. FF7 wins hands down on a popularity contest, but I would argue that it was little more than a stepping stone, which was already pretty well layed out by the previous installment.
Regardless, this is pointless, everyone has their opinions on the series. But I believe that the original Final Fantasy is the only one that belongs anywhere close to that list, as the jRPG could have died right back then, if it hadn't been for that game.
Each continued installment of the series became more and more wellknown up through FF8. FF6 (III), contributed a lot to making the series a household name, just as did FF4. Why FF7 has become a threshold, of sorts, is beyond me. I remember the hype surrounding FF6, it was huge, I saw moogle pictures everywhere, and everyone was talking about it. By the time FF7 came out, the genre was already snowballing, names like FF6 and Chrono Trigger continued to push the genre out into the mainstream, with no end in sight. FF7 simply continued that trend, and, once again, struck a chord with its audience. Sure, FF7 was even more so, but where do you draw the line?
I just say you don't draw one. The only revolutionary game in the series was the original, as it completely rejuvinated a genre. Without Final Fantasy, the jRPG genre would have died in infancy. I believe this list is about influential and revolutionary games, which is less subjective than bsst or most popular. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing... it, in itself, did very little. Not that it isn't an incredible game and one of the better installments in the series, but the only one that belongs anywhere close to this list is the original, as lame as it looks to our standards, today.
As much as I love Marathon, I'll have to call you on some things. Actually, the maps were completely 2D. Even though they had stairs and lifts, you could never bridge one object over another. They did a lot of great level design to make you forget that, but the map design was still 2D, but with height modifiers for each section of ground (which Doom did as well). You could never walk under a lift, or have a bridge above a section of ground. Now, the envirnonment could include polygons above the ground, but they could never be walked on. The first game that I remember that allowed for this was a little known game called Rise of the Triad, in which there was full vertical movement, spring boards, and sections of floor and lifts that you could walk under (and be crushed by, in the case of lifts). It was also the first game to make marks in the wall where the bullet hit. Duke Nukem 3D was, unfortunately, probably the first well-known game to encorporate these elements.
Marathon did, however, introduce a whole lot of new things to the genre It was the first to have a dual-trigger system, and wield two weapons at once. This isn't exactly an innovation, but it was the first FPS to have adventure game elements, where a "complex" story would unfold over the course of the game, and effect the gameplay. It was also the first to include NPCs (which were good for little more than killing and getting ammo... but still).
Yeah, Marathon was definitely a genre-altering game... sadly, it's Mac-only appearance (until the third installment), made it far less known. I have no doubt Doom would have been completely overshadowed, had either bungie ported it to windows, or had the mac been more popular than it was.
Yeah, but you see, those are console games, and we all know that console games are for children, right folks?
Yeah... I couldn't agree more. This list is extremely PC biased.
Give me a break, okay? Who cares about the technology used. "2.5D" (what a stupid name), played pretty much like the "true 3D" games of their time. Basically, the only fundimental difference was that they used sprites for characters and objects instead of polygons. But the world was fully 3D. Some "2.5D" games even allowed for vertical movement and allowed the bridging of platforms (Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D). I hate the term 2.5D, it's so missleading. Even today, many games use sprites to denote objects (Final Fantasy XII, even, has a surprising amount of them), but the gameplay and environment, now and then, are fully 3D.
Okay... I'll give Bethesda a thanks:
"Thank you, Bethesda, for fucking up a perfectly good genre of games."
There, ya happy?
I'd actually agree about Myst, even though you should probably hire a bodygaurd to ward off all the adventure-game fans who are now going to try to murder you in your sleep. But I'd agree if only for the reason that it was one of the first games to make people wake up and realize that video games could be artistic. Suddenly, parents, who had said that video games were nothing but mindless fluf, had a conundrum on their hands. As for the genre of adventure games? It innovated and influenced surprisingly little.
You said Final Fantasy VII... fuck you.
;)
The only thing that game ever did was to spawn the term "fanboy", as well as to give teenage boys the idea that it was now okay to whack-off to video game characters.
Wow, I like that list. Thank you for including NBA Jam. I'm not a sports gamer, myself, but I remember the hubbub when that game came out... it was really the first mega-hit sports game and was able to win over a lot of new players. You can't really trace the very first sports game easilly, but I think this was THE major milestone in the genre. Although, in some ways, including NBA Jam is sorta like including Final Fantasy VII, which, I think, most of us agree shouldn't be anywhere near that list.
Also, I love the inclusion of Myst. It's neither the most influential game to adventure games, nor was it the biggest, nor the first. But it's the first game that made a whole lot of people look up and question whether video games could be an art form. That's a big question, and many have answered in one way or another. So, in a way, Myst could be considered the beginning of a new era of gaming, in which video games could be looked at in more ways than just "a fun pastime for the kiddies". Quite possibly one of the most important games since their invention. But again, it's often not mentioned because, within its own genre, it was neither the first nor the most influential.
But yeah, your list is a hell of a lot better than the one in the artical.
Okay, I'll buy that. It was a huge deal at the time, I can remember that. But I wouldn't say that it's the most important advancement in the genre. 2D platformers, and many 3D platformers, even today, are fairly linear. The ability to pick one level or another may be cool, but is it really all that important? I wouldn't say so, especially when 90% of the map, you have a linear progression anyway, and the same is still true today with most platformers.
Now, if we're talking non-linearity within the levels themselves... I'd say without question, it's a big deal... but it's simply an evolution from the non-linearity demonstrated in Doki-Doki Panic (Super Mario 2). This was the first game to have long sections of levels branch and reconnect. Mario 1 did it a little bit with pipes and vines, but these areas were really minor, so I wouldn't exactly call them branches in the same sense.
Mario 3 could be said to have perfected the art of non-linear level design, sure, I'll buy that. But in looking at other choices from this list, "perfected" doesn't seem to be key here.
I dunno, dude, I remember WarCraft II being a huge hit when it came out, and after that, many people went back and got Warcraft I, but at what point do you call a game a break-out success? I wouldn't say that WarCraft was a household name until after WarCraft II came out. More than Dune, maybe, but not by all that much.
It's really hard to point to a game and name one that was the "breakout success". Super Mario Bros was a breakout success, but for its time, so was Donkey Kong, one could make an arguement for Mario 3, since it was one of the first games that had a HUGE ad campaign, and got everyone playing. But it's much easier to point to the game that really had the most influence on the genre: Super Mario Bros 1 is that, without question, Dune II would probably be in there (even I remember Dune II, and I never play RTSs). Wolfenstien 3D would be there instead of Doom (this was a real "WTF" choice for me), Final Fantasy I or Dragon Warrior should have been in there. And WTF is Sensible World of Soccer?
SimCity, Zork, Tetris, and Spacewar make perfect sense to me, but the other just seem to be favorites of the list's creators.
I'd agree with the list for the most part, but no Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior? They spawned/rejuvinated (how ever you want to look at it) an entire genre. I mean, they're no Super Mario Bros or (which is also strangely absent from the list), but I don't understand how they're any less significant than Civ or Warcraft.
The inclusion of Mario 3 really throws the list off balance as well. If we're speaking about the most influential games, then Mario 3 needs to go (even if it is possibly the best in the series) since Mario 1 is far more influential. If we're talking a top 10 list of games from an aesthetic standpoint, then half of the other games shouldn't be on there. The inclusion of Warcraft AND Civ AND Sim City, three games from closely related genres that all influenced each other, just leads me to believe that there's a lot of cherry picking going on.
Also... what the heck is Sensible World of Soccar? I've never even heard of it, and it looks like a pretty recent game, not like there haven't been gobs of sports games since the beginning of time.
Linux is a piece-meal OS, and this is one of the primary reasons why people who use it, got it in the first place. Similarly, it's the same crowd who are going to want to build a custom PC... not a Dell.
Until you can convince a sizable portion of the mainstream population, for which detailed custom-built machines are not a priority, that they need Linux... you're going to have a tough time selling a linux distro to them. Apple did it, but they had to lock in one propriatary distro and make it into almost a whole different animal. As much as some people don't want to believe this... it's going to take something similar to sell ANY linux distro to mainstream users.
Basically, the reasons why power users love Linux so much are precisely the same reasons why mainstream users won't use it. We're just going to have to face that cold, hard, fact, and get over ourselves... only then will Linux previal.
That makes me even more suspicious. I was involved in a number of Ambrosia Software communities way back when I was in middle school: Avara and Escape Velocity, specifically. We were doing exactly that, creating, sharing, and critiquing levels. As fun as it was, though, I remember two things: the only people who were interested in it were pretty hard core, not your mainstream gamers, more realistically, your future game designer types (if they were any good). Secondly, it got old, and the turnover rate was pretty high.
Folks, this is NOT a new concept, and I fail to see it being able to take off and stay aloft for very long. It's been tried countless times, by various developers, and the best that can ever be achieved is an occult group who share their creations while passing in the dark. Heck, Quake 2 had a mod scene, yet only a small percentage of people who bought the game took part in it.
All I'm trying to say is that you can't expect "custom level designing" to ever be one of your mass market selling points. It should be one of the last bullet points on your list of marketable features, because it's a feature that will only appeal to a hardcore audience, of which will probably buy the game anyway. I'm just skeptical that project sounds like its being done by a group of game developers who have gotten caught up in the trap of imprinting their own interests onto their audience. The reality is that MOST people really have little interest in being creative enough to design their own game environments.
Not sure if I'm very impressed. Some would call me a Nintendo fanboy; I got a Wii at launch, still think its a great system, but I'm not sure if this seems very reliavent. As someone who is interested quite a bit by game design philosophy, I would hope that a developer conference would put forth some inspiring new visions into the heads of developers who are studying implementations for upcoming projects. There's a lot more that can be done with the motion sensing hardware than is currently being done, and I'd hope to see developers eager to try out new theories and ideas.
That said, I'm all about defining an over-arching philosophy or view of the future of the industry, I think that is very important and a key difference that separates Nintendo from Sony/Microsoft, but at some point, you've gotta move from inspring people to follow your new direction, and actually identifying some ways in which they can actually do that. Where-as Sony/Microsoft seem to be pracariously leaning towards only discussing implementations and seem to not have any inspirational overall vision to present, Nintendo seems to be suffering from the exact opposite problem.
If there's anyone who can talk specifics regarding the philosophy of game design, it's Miyamoto, but I don't see any of that. I'm not talking about wowing the public with release dates and explosive pyrotechnics, I'm talking about presenting methods of opporation, new design ideas, things like that. I just don't see it here, I see rehashes of Nintendo's umbrella direction... which we've come to know and love, but let's see some specifics.
Define "Education"
Unfortunately, pretty much all educational TV is based around force feeding people facts, instead of inspiring them to think for themselves. Video games, on the other hand, often develop problem solving skills and mental accuity. I'd argue that this is much much more important than simply learning various facts, as it teaches people how to more accurately identify and interpret information. Obviously, learning facts is part of the equation, but if one is not very capable of interpreting pieces of knowledge, than what's the point? Bottom line, simply knowing facts isn't going to get you very far in life; how people deal with the information they're given is much more important.
However, TV can accomplish this as well: a good mystery can stimulate similar thinking patterns; a good drama can inspire philosophical thinking and psychology, which are other high-level mental functions that should probably be stressed more in modern education. But these things are also being explored in games, if at a slightly more primative stage of developement.
In the end, though, I think that video games, as a whole, tend to inspire excersise in mental accuity a great deal more than TV does. Simply because a fewer percentage of games are deemed "edutainment" doesn't really mean anything.