Your hypothesis has a basic error that will cause a lot of trouble for the other questions you are wondering about.
At some level every (creation/invention/artwork) is the "embodiment of the particular idiosyncrasies... of the... creator" but what generally are acknowledged as the greatest or most influential of these creations are those that also are the most universal. These are the creations where the creators have been able to tap into something common to different cultures or underlying culture altogether.
Thus your questions make more sense if you are asking *which* of the technological creations go beyond a single culture or, even more accurately, what are the different levels of "idiosyncrasies" versus "commonalities" of each creation. Instead of assuming that the internet and the personal computer are both products of the Western mind you can study which of them is more quickly adopted in other cultures, what changes they go through if any, etc to see which is more "Western" than the other.
Off the top of my head I would guess you will find technologies and cultures such that they are quickly adopted with minimal changes into a culture that didn't produce them because although the culture and the technology was a "perfect match" (or the changes required to match the technology were relatively low cost) the creative, manufacturing or governmental environment wasn't in the position to create the technology. For example, South Korea I think would be an excellent place to study.
While everyone is responsible for their own lives, the game designers (and likely the producers and corporate types) at Blizzard should also be held responsible. In a general sense, the subscription-based, time-is-more-important-than-skill MMORPG industry can be held responsible.
The current belief for subscription games is that you need to have addictive gameplay and gameplay that caters to those with vast amounts of time to keep the customers paying the monthly fees. In drug-terms, they are the chemists who believe their livelihood depends on creating a drug that is addictive enough to keep the customer coming back and a drug whose high requires large time investments or improves with amount of time invested.
There is a difference between what could be called "instinctually" fun (ie. triggers the same sort of brain regions as slot machines and other random rewards) and "meaningfully" fun (making new friends, overcoming personal challenges, learning new skills, etc). Both can keep your customers coming back for more, but the first appeals to the oldest parts of our brains - our "lizard" brains. Treat people like lizards and they will act like lizards - especially those that are most susceptible (ie: get the best high from lizard stimulus).
The aquisition gameplay could very easily be removed and there would still remain a great game about being a hero and the conflict between Horde and Alliance. Likewise, the amount of time it takes to succeed could be greatly reduced, but this game would likely lose many subscribers to other games (some of which offer lizard gameplay).
Many players would be upset that they couldn't "prove their worth" by getting the most rare doodad or feel like they have spent their time well because of their "hard work" to aquire something that proves how hard they worked. If players are looking for acknowledgement of their accomplishments there are better ways of do so than random loot drops and much, much better accomplishments to acknowledge (running a guild, helping teach new players the game, role-playing or creating in-game events, etc).
So, while every player should be held accountable for their actions, so too should the creators of the game whose limited vision and use of addictive gameplay has resulted in a game that is more likely to enrich them then their players.
Like many others here I disagree that increased utility, functionality, and accessibility disqualify any creative expression from being art. Perhaps your art may "feel" differently (more museum-like for Mr. Kojima) but it isn't disqualified.
What distinguishes something from craft (even excellent craft) and turns it into Art is the ability of that work to change the audience either through conveying an experience of the artist's or (in the case of games) allowing the audience to have an experience. Great art will change your outlook on life, including: opening up a new way for you to appreciate something (basically creating a new love) or creating some form of new awareness (about issues or other people's viewpoints). These sorts of changes are fully possible in functional and accessible work, regardless of medium.
To claim that *any* medium cannot convey artistic expression is dubious, but claiming that games, which are better than most mediums for conveying expression, cannot achieve "Artfulness" is downright silly.
Taco, if you are feeling twice damned in your submission selection you need to make a little script that hides the submitters name/info/etc from the editors while they are making submission choices. Choose submissions based on their quality, not the submitter.
No one can blame you for choosing X submitter if you don't know it was that submitter in the first place. Obviously we have to have trust that you are actually hiding the submitters name, etc during the selection process, which won't stop the conspiracy theorists, but the rest of us will take it on good faith that you are choosing submissions "blind" to the submitter.
GW has a far better PvP system. After playing many fantasy MMORPGs the improvements in quality, accessibility, variety, and fairness of the PvP are astounding. If you play because you enjoy interacting with other players more than you like collecting levels and gear then GW offers a better experience.
You can of course use a pre-made with a full set of 8 pre-selected skills.
Many of us have lobbied for less PvE and more importantly less grind, but it seems as though it is still impossible to release a game that doesn't cater to the people that feel like they need to work to develop their characters.
GW has the least grind though, so it is worth supporting. You can also unlock skills so that eventually you can quickly create the characters you want for PvP... it is just too bad that all skills weren't unlocked from the beginning. Many beta testers campaigned hard for a more casual and PvP friendly game - we tried!
So can someone explain how they were operating at a loss and also price fixing? Was everyone in the industry operating at a loss or just the companies listed?
Only thing I can think of is that the industry decided as a whole to inflate prices and spend all their price fixed profits on new infrastructure.
Anyone know some real details and not just wild guesses?
MMORPGs have generally catered to the time-rich. The eBay and other markets sprung up as the time-poor (but money-rich) struggled for fair treatment. Anyone complaining about buying and selling of items is usually time-rich and enjoys the advantages they have playing a game designed for the time-rich. Most of them believe you have to "earn" your character, paying in labour far beyond the price you paid for the game and the monthly fees. They must be the sort of customers accountants dream of.:)
The MMORPG industry is filled with exploitive businesses producing badly designed games that are inherently discriminatory based on the amount of time commitment players can make to them. This isn't about how much practice a player puts in, but giving their avatar/character advantages based on time invested. Skill becomes a secondary factor, slave to the monthly fee driven treadmill. I suppose for non-competitive MMORPGs, whatever floats your boat, but for games involving PvP this makes casual gamers into second class gamers.
Thankfully, companies like ArenaNet are producing games like Guild Wars that are starting to make positive changes.
The more these games can start focusing on role-playing and meaningful interactions (including competition) between players and less about time-based character development the better. Item markets like SOE's are a step down a sidepath, but I'm happy to see anything that allow more types of gamers, not just the time-rich, get their gaming fix. In the end, the industry will greatly profit from making MMORPG games more accessible and fair - and so they should.
The article only has it half right. The real reason why MMORPGs will have subscription issues is because of http://guildwars.com/.
The "casual friendly slayers" mentioned in the article are going to love Guild Wars (GW) and since there is no subscription fee the company (ArenaNet) doesn't lose out when they stop playing after a few months.
GW also has incredible and accessible PvP which is the only content that doesn't turn into grind (given a large enough community).
Personally, I'm sick of MMORPG companies monthly milking of their customers. Stretching out 60-80 hours of content into 400 hours is akin to watching a movie that repeats each scene five times... and you have to pay to keep watching.
GW is out on April 28th, once the word spreads about the true casual friendly play, lack of griefing, combined with the best fantasy PvP available... all using a pay for new content (expansions) model instead of a monthly subscription I hope it forces it's competitors to start treating their customers less like cash cows.
I think you need to ask yourself whether you are more interested in making games or programming.
If it is making games then I suggest you take an existing game that has a well developed mod community and a simple to use tool. I would check out Neverwinter Nights if you are into fantasy RPGs.
If you are interested in programming then make the simplest game you can think of. I'm talking Tic Tac Toe simple. Perhaps a remake of some early Atari/arcade stuff or something like text-based adventure game. The game in this instance is just an excuse to write code.
The main thing is to start the project with something so simple it might not even seem worth doing. Get it done. Then make it more complex.
Jeff Strain: I definitely think that Guild Wars will change the way gamers think about online games and subscription fees in particular. As a passionate gamer myself, I like to play around with a lot of games at once. I may not finish them all, but I love the fact that I can play Zelda: Four Swords Adventure for a few weeks, put it down to play Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3, and then come back to it a few months later on a rainy afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not playing. I don't have to feel like I can only have one game that I am actively playing at a time. We think subscription fees are contrary to the way most people want to play games, in that they force you to pay every month, even if you are not playing. Our goal is to provide an online experience with all of the support and evolving ongoing content that you get with a traditional MMO, but without the need for that subscription fee; that is exactly what Guild Wars is all about. There are no gimmicks, hidden advertising, or fees in small print. You will not be paying in installments, or paying more than you would for any other AAA game. It just works exactly like you would expect: buy the game, play online for no additional charge, and when a new chapter comes out every six months or so, decide whether you think it is cool enough to buy. The choice is always yours. Do I think players will want to see more of this type of business model for online games? No, I think they will demand it!
McHenry brings up interesting points that I think are worth discussion:
"Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy."
"Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler."
His main claim is that an open process will gravitate towards a median of accuracy and quality. For now let us lump quality and accuracy together.
What McHenry is really counting on is that only a few can recognize quality and that they must be entrusted with promoting and preserving that quality.
His comparison of Wikipedia to a committee is flawed because a committee is not open, it is a selected group with limited membership and thus is actually an example of the Britanica system. That McHenry isn't able to see that is an example of just how much he doesn't understand what a truely open and collaborative process is.
Now to investigate the all articles evolve to the median argument. Assuming you could score an article on quality, McHenry's claim is true if the quality score of edits that reduce quality are equal to the score of edits that increase quality. Furthermore the reductions must overwrite or not be overwritten by increases. Basically given an already median quality the chance that an edit reduces quality must be 50%.
Ignoring sabotage and dealing only with the claim that stupid/ignorant people will harm the Wikipedia we can quite quickly see that his argument falls apart.
Grammatical errors and typos will definitely see an improvement over time and not a move towards a median. No one would change a correct spelling with a wrong one (besides American vs British English arguments). Edits that add new text will introduce new errors but those too will be corrected over time.
Thus for negative quality edits that will bring aricles to a mediocre median you require incorect information and a belief that you are more right than the Wikipedia - proud ignorance. McHenry assumes that there are more proud ignorant people than there are committed people with accurate information. I'm not sure where he gets his numbers from.
For McHenry's claim to be true a high quality article wil get more negative edits than positive edits. The proud ignorants must disregard more obviously correct (high quality) information. I would propose the opposite - that the number of negative edits decreases slightly as the quality of the article increases as those who are ignorant accept the article as true rather than their previous beliefs. I would also propose that the decrease in negative edits does not linearly correspond to the increase in quality. There will always be people who think they are right no matter how good the evidence against them is but this is a small minority of the population of editors not the majority.
Most importantly though is Wikipedias ability to compromise and admit ambiguity. This is a huge strength. For topics where there are multiple and/or conflicting truths/information the highest quality edits wil be those that acknowledge the disagreements and uncertainties. McHenry himself gives an excellent example in the brithdate of Alexander Hamilton. In this way the cycle of edit wars is resolved in a postive edit that is much more likely to resist further negative edits. It is this phenomenon that will create a rising trend of quality especially if those types of edits become a regular part of the Wikipedia culture/community.
I like the system of bidding to resolve which nurses get which shifts but I think that there are good points about lower quality of service.
A slight change to the system should help improve quality.
Instead of using hourly rate as the bidding unit use number of hours work. So the shift might be 8 hours but you bid 16 equivalent hours (so each hour counts double). Nurses can be paid an hourly wage based on their quality, experience, etc but compete with each other based on how many hours the work counts as. Since the system is for "over-time" and other less wanted shifts this only makes sense.
Then high quality nurses can compete just as effectively as low quality nurses.
Hospitals will save less money but if you cap the max equivalent hours such that it is less than what it would cost to bring in a temp compared to your highest paid (or perhaps average nurse) at max bid then everyone wins.
A little thought to the goals of the system and how to maximize everyones profit is all it takes.
I find that hitting refresh always fixes the borked margins.
Re:Injecting a little perspective here.
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
I do not share your concept of human nature.
I believe what motivates most people is quite different from what motivates a tiny fraction of the world population that controls a disproportionate amount of the wealth and power. As you say, we are not worker bees, and neither do we have a single "human nature". There are variations of genetic influences and the mutability of society as well.
Furthermore, I'm not suggesting an abandonment of IP, just an improvement. Certain things are fundamental like authorship and providing incentives for identifying, developing, commercializing, and maintaining IP.
People being selish and independent with conflicting ideas and processes is what will make a reformed IP system work.
Let's examine your cure for cancer example again but assuming IP reform:
Since any company can manufacture the drugs the large pharmaceuticals break into two (or more) parts. The manufacturing and distribution becomes separate from the research.
The manufacturer/distributors compete with each other but since they don't pay for R&D the prices are much lower - they compete in terms of quality of manufacturing and how many people can get access to what they are selling. This is good for consumers.
The researchers get their funding from a number of soruces. The government helps fund some of the (less popular) research, but most of the money comes from private individual investors and from the distributors. The lower costs of medicine (along with all other IP based products) allow people to invest in research that benefits them or their family. Research teams compete with one another in terms of approach, track record, cost, and speed. Teams that cooperate tend to be more successful and thus get more funding. The distributors tend to fund research that will lead to drugs that the majority will want to buy (thus increasing their own sales).
In the end people may pay the same total cost for their medicine if you count previous investment plus the cost at the counter. However once the research has been paid for there is no wasted money going to executives pockets. Centralized control over research is replaced by a more democractic approach and business is the strategy used mainly for manufacturing and distribution (less creative processes). Everyone is still selfish and independent, but the free flow of IP works with "human nature".
There is nothing to suggest that a human society must have ideas controlled by a few, regardless if those few feel that the idea was theirs because they expressed it first or they bought it from someone else.
Re:Injecting a little perspective here.
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
You make the msot common mistake that most people that support current IP laws make: you assume that they way things get produced in society will remain the same if IP laws are changed.
"In scenario 2, the world would never get a cancer cure. Why? Because no company is going to spend $20 billion developing anything if it can't be assured of making that money back! Any research project or invention requiring any significant amount of investment in order to bring to fruition simply won't be done."
It likely won't be done by one company if other companies can also benefit immediately. However, (just like developing standards in technology) consortiums of companies that all stand to gain from a cancer cure would undertake the research cooperatively. Improving IP laws encourages cooperation.
IP laws can be improved to both provide more freedom and more incentive.
"A few centuries ago, around 1791 to be exact, France tried a little plan of abolishing patent laws... Only it didn't work."
Things have changed. Production and distribution costs were much higher (especially compared to digital information goods). Using a 1791 example to prove that it won't work now is dubious at best.
More importantly I would assume (perhaps incorrectly) that any country that improves their IP laws should be able to vastly benefit from utilizing the IP developed in other countries for free. Local companies could reduce their R&D budgets and sell "generics". Even better they could sell those "generics" back to the countries with the old IP laws at great profit. This is what is happening with prescription drugs right now in the US.
The worry for countries that improve their IP laws isn't financial ruin from improved IP laws it is trade sanctions from the US or an invasion.
What You Can't Say Reviewed
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I posted a summary and review on the essay on my blog:
Graham writes about heresy - moral heresy. Saying the things that would be considered distasteful or would get you in to trouble. He brilliantly notes moralities similarity to fashion; "invisible to most people... Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good."
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
This is the test that I regularly apply to my own beliefs and which regularly causes my friends to sigh in frustration. There he goes... again. It's great having friends that still love you after you challenge every belief that you share with them. Sometimes I find out that our shared belief rested on a strong foundation of experience and/or tradition, but usually I find out that we've just been thinking what we've been told to think.
If you don't have friends like I do, Graham mentions other ways to seek out heresy besides "The Conformist Test":
Trouble: look for things people say and get in trouble for. Heresy: look for the label 'heresy' in any one of it's forms ("indecent", "unamerican", "defeatist"). New ones are created to silence current heresy. Time and Space: compare heresies between cultures separated by time or space. If one culture has a heresy another doesn't than it is likely the heresy is mistaken. For example, taboos against murder are nearly universal. Prigs: find prigs, subtract lived experiences and examine their thoughts. Kids and teenagers are the best repositories for complete mint collections of taboos. Mechanism: examine how taboos are created. "To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it... And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo" The taboo breakers on the otherhand "will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd."
Another rather heretic point Graham makes is that, "Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think."
I would however questions Graham's belief that, "there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress." This seems like an assumption that needs to be broken heretically. There are many smart people that use their intelligence to reinforce convention or shape convention to suit their needs. I do think that some people are more 'disruptively intelligent" than others. They have an easier time than others ignoring or challenging convention. For example, people that are classically 'mentally challenged' generally challenge convention more than average. I would argue that their intelligence is just different from the average - they are more intelligent in certain
NYT to replace The Onion!
on
RIAA Bits
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ms. Frank, the MTV executive, noted the limitations of unlimited customization, even amid unlimited access. For young Americans, she said, "because of the way they've trained themselves to use media, they never have to be exposed to an idea, an artist, or anything that they did not select for themselves."
I call BULLSHIT! Obvious this person is either lying straight out, misquoted, or an complete asshat if she works at MTV and doesn't understand what is going on. First, I'm willing to bet that kids (just like me) do research to find artists they like: especially the trend setters. Those that don't spend the time finding the good stuff are the sheep: they follow the trend setters. Thus, peer influences are going to be the biggest factor - and yes, MTV tries very, very hard to pass itself off as a peer, or at least showing "peers" watching and listening to the crap they play on MTV.
Thirdly (and most importantly), what the f8sck is wrong with people listening to the artists they choose themselves? The quote is implying that the kids aren't listening to what we told them to! "Whaaa! How can we use marketing to control people that make their own decisions!?" This is a great example the NYTimes doing what it does best. Here is an example of something really positive - people chosing what they like - and the Times spins it like it is some sort of terrible limitation. Unless the Times has replaced The Onion...
Focusing your life around *anything* for long periods of time such that you exclude everything that used to keep you healthy and happy is not going to be good for you.
Anyone got Mr. Greenspans email address? It would be nice to send him the link to this page and challenge a few of his assumptions.
His assumptions that I believe are wrong:
1) "Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected." Disagree. Ownership or authorship of an idea is fairly easy to record and protect. Controlling distribution of the idea is difficult.
2) "Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate." Disagree. Difficult perhaps, but not impossible. Tracking changes from one set of bits to another and determining how different one set is from another is possible. Opening up (and recording)the innovative process will make tracking and differentiating of one piece of IP from another even easier.
3)"In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one."
Once you are able to reliably calculate the contribution of each innovator a system for division of (electronic) payments shouldn't be that difficult.
Even assuming that the payment system wouldn't be completely accurate or "fair", it would still distribute wealth to innovators better than the current system.
Greenspan is showing his age. Improved technology and understanding of information can more appropriately deal with intellectual property. Fight fire with fire.
I was very surprised by the nature of the Prince manifesto as well. At first I was put off, but if you actually *read* it without prejudice then you would quickly understand that he does have a good grasp of language and grammar. He uses very carefully chosen and specific words when they are appropriate, it is mainly the context that gets manipulated.
Basically he seems unafraid to start using a new symbol system... a system that for better or worse is beginning to take hold as the literacy rate increases and more people are reading and writing. Increased literacy will hopefully promote a better and simpler system of reading symbols, and to suppose that written English language is already at a optimal or "good" state is ignoring history and non-English symbol systems. There is really little difference between "be4" and "before" besides a difference in symbology. (Yes, Im making up these terms as I am hardly a linguist, but I have no doubt I'll be painfully corrected.)
Although I generally find "leetspeak" to make communication more difficult, this article did not negatively impact my ability to understand it even using nontraditional spelling.
I refuse 2 cast judgement b4 I learn about what I am 2 judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Your hypothesis has a basic error that will cause a lot of trouble for the other questions you are wondering about.
At some level every (creation/invention/artwork) is the "embodiment of the particular idiosyncrasies... of the... creator" but what generally are acknowledged as the greatest or most influential of these creations are those that also are the most universal. These are the creations where the creators have been able to tap into something common to different cultures or underlying culture altogether.
Thus your questions make more sense if you are asking *which* of the technological creations go beyond a single culture or, even more accurately, what are the different levels of "idiosyncrasies" versus "commonalities" of each creation. Instead of assuming that the internet and the personal computer are both products of the Western mind you can study which of them is more quickly adopted in other cultures, what changes they go through if any, etc to see which is more "Western" than the other.
Off the top of my head I would guess you will find technologies and cultures such that they are quickly adopted with minimal changes into a culture that didn't produce them because although the culture and the technology was a "perfect match" (or the changes required to match the technology were relatively low cost) the creative, manufacturing or governmental environment wasn't in the position to create the technology. For example, South Korea I think would be an excellent place to study.
While everyone is responsible for their own lives, the game designers (and likely the producers and corporate types) at Blizzard should also be held responsible. In a general sense, the subscription-based, time-is-more-important-than-skill MMORPG industry can be held responsible.
The current belief for subscription games is that you need to have addictive gameplay and gameplay that caters to those with vast amounts of time to keep the customers paying the monthly fees. In drug-terms, they are the chemists who believe their livelihood depends on creating a drug that is addictive enough to keep the customer coming back and a drug whose high requires large time investments or improves with amount of time invested.
There is a difference between what could be called "instinctually" fun (ie. triggers the same sort of brain regions as slot machines and other random rewards) and "meaningfully" fun (making new friends, overcoming personal challenges, learning new skills, etc). Both can keep your customers coming back for more, but the first appeals to the oldest parts of our brains - our "lizard" brains. Treat people like lizards and they will act like lizards - especially those that are most susceptible (ie: get the best high from lizard stimulus).
The aquisition gameplay could very easily be removed and there would still remain a great game about being a hero and the conflict between Horde and Alliance. Likewise, the amount of time it takes to succeed could be greatly reduced, but this game would likely lose many subscribers to other games (some of which offer lizard gameplay).
Many players would be upset that they couldn't "prove their worth" by getting the most rare doodad or feel like they have spent their time well because of their "hard work" to aquire something that proves how hard they worked. If players are looking for acknowledgement of their accomplishments there are better ways of do so than random loot drops and much, much better accomplishments to acknowledge (running a guild, helping teach new players the game, role-playing or creating in-game events, etc).
So, while every player should be held accountable for their actions, so too should the creators of the game whose limited vision and use of addictive gameplay has resulted in a game that is more likely to enrich them then their players.
Like many others here I disagree that increased utility, functionality, and accessibility disqualify any creative expression from being art. Perhaps your art may "feel" differently (more museum-like for Mr. Kojima) but it isn't disqualified.
What distinguishes something from craft (even excellent craft) and turns it into Art is the ability of that work to change the audience either through conveying an experience of the artist's or (in the case of games) allowing the audience to have an experience. Great art will change your outlook on life, including: opening up a new way for you to appreciate something (basically creating a new love) or creating some form of new awareness (about issues or other people's viewpoints). These sorts of changes are fully possible in functional and accessible work, regardless of medium.
To claim that *any* medium cannot convey artistic expression is dubious, but claiming that games, which are better than most mediums for conveying expression, cannot achieve "Artfulness" is downright silly.
Taco, if you are feeling twice damned in your submission selection you need to make a little script that hides the submitters name/info/etc from the editors while they are making submission choices. Choose submissions based on their quality, not the submitter.
No one can blame you for choosing X submitter if you don't know it was that submitter in the first place. Obviously we have to have trust that you are actually hiding the submitters name, etc during the selection process, which won't stop the conspiracy theorists, but the rest of us will take it on good faith that you are choosing submissions "blind" to the submitter.
GW has a far better PvP system. After playing many fantasy MMORPGs the improvements in quality, accessibility, variety, and fairness of the PvP are astounding. If you play because you enjoy interacting with other players more than you like collecting levels and gear then GW offers a better experience.
The only advantage to electric vehicles is that they open up the possiblity of using alternate enery sources...
Electric vehicles can also reduce energy waste through regenerative braking, not idling, etc.
Recommendation? Guild Wars, of course.
For team-oriented players, Guild Wars offers much better gameplay, although do have to get out of the beginner zones before it really starts to shine.
You can of course use a pre-made with a full set of 8 pre-selected skills.
Many of us have lobbied for less PvE and more importantly less grind, but it seems as though it is still impossible to release a game that doesn't cater to the people that feel like they need to work to develop their characters.
GW has the least grind though, so it is worth supporting. You can also unlock skills so that eventually you can quickly create the characters you want for PvP... it is just too bad that all skills weren't unlocked from the beginning. Many beta testers campaigned hard for a more casual and PvP friendly game - we tried!
Fundamentally, free (libre) software is a civil rights issue that grows in importance as our dependence on software tools grows.
So can someone explain how they were operating at a loss and also price fixing? Was everyone in the industry operating at a loss or just the companies listed?
Only thing I can think of is that the industry decided as a whole to inflate prices and spend all their price fixed profits on new infrastructure.
Anyone know some real details and not just wild guesses?
I think this is a good thing.
:)
MMORPGs have generally catered to the time-rich. The eBay and other markets sprung up as the time-poor (but money-rich) struggled for fair treatment. Anyone complaining about buying and selling of items is usually time-rich and enjoys the advantages they have playing a game designed for the time-rich. Most of them believe you have to "earn" your character, paying in labour far beyond the price you paid for the game and the monthly fees. They must be the sort of customers accountants dream of.
The MMORPG industry is filled with exploitive businesses producing badly designed games that are inherently discriminatory based on the amount of time commitment players can make to them. This isn't about how much practice a player puts in, but giving their avatar/character advantages based on time invested. Skill becomes a secondary factor, slave to the monthly fee driven treadmill. I suppose for non-competitive MMORPGs, whatever floats your boat, but for games involving PvP this makes casual gamers into second class gamers.
Thankfully, companies like ArenaNet are producing games like Guild Wars that are starting to make positive changes.
The more these games can start focusing on role-playing and meaningful interactions (including competition) between players and less about time-based character development the better. Item markets like SOE's are a step down a sidepath, but I'm happy to see anything that allow more types of gamers, not just the time-rich, get their gaming fix. In the end, the industry will greatly profit from making MMORPG games more accessible and fair - and so they should.
If you enjoy FPS games, GW PvP is for you.
I'm more of MMORPG player, but I can safely say that GW PvP is by far the best I've ever played.
The article only has it half right. The real reason why MMORPGs will have subscription issues is because of http://guildwars.com/.
The "casual friendly slayers" mentioned in the article are going to love Guild Wars (GW) and since there is no subscription fee the company (ArenaNet) doesn't lose out when they stop playing after a few months.
GW also has incredible and accessible PvP which is the only content that doesn't turn into grind (given a large enough community).
Personally, I'm sick of MMORPG companies monthly milking of their customers. Stretching out 60-80 hours of content into 400 hours is akin to watching a movie that repeats each scene five times... and you have to pay to keep watching.
GW is out on April 28th, once the word spreads about the true casual friendly play, lack of griefing, combined with the best fantasy PvP available... all using a pay for new content (expansions) model instead of a monthly subscription I hope it forces it's competitors to start treating their customers less like cash cows.
I think you need to ask yourself whether you are more interested in making games or programming.
If it is making games then I suggest you take an existing game that has a well developed mod community and a simple to use tool. I would check out Neverwinter Nights if you are into fantasy RPGs.
If you are interested in programming then make the simplest game you can think of. I'm talking Tic Tac Toe simple. Perhaps a remake of some early Atari/arcade stuff or something like text-based adventure game. The game in this instance is just an excuse to write code.
The main thing is to start the project with something so simple it might not even seem worth doing. Get it done. Then make it more complex.
Jeff Strain: I definitely think that Guild Wars will change the way gamers think about online games and subscription fees in particular. As a passionate gamer myself, I like to play around with a lot of games at once. I may not finish them all, but I love the fact that I can play Zelda: Four Swords Adventure for a few weeks, put it down to play Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3, and then come back to it a few months later on a rainy afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not playing. I don't have to feel like I can only have one game that I am actively playing at a time. We think subscription fees are contrary to the way most people want to play games, in that they force you to pay every month, even if you are not playing. Our goal is to provide an online experience with all of the support and evolving ongoing content that you get with a traditional MMO, but without the need for that subscription fee; that is exactly what Guild Wars is all about. There are no gimmicks, hidden advertising, or fees in small print. You will not be paying in installments, or paying more than you would for any other AAA game. It just works exactly like you would expect: buy the game, play online for no additional charge, and when a new chapter comes out every six months or so, decide whether you think it is cool enough to buy. The choice is always yours. Do I think players will want to see more of this type of business model for online games? No, I think they will demand it!
Guild Wars: http://www.guildwars.com/
McHenry brings up interesting points that I think are worth discussion:
"Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy."
"Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler."
His main claim is that an open process will gravitate towards a median of accuracy and quality. For now let us lump quality and accuracy together.
What McHenry is really counting on is that only a few can recognize quality and that they must be entrusted with promoting and preserving that quality.
His comparison of Wikipedia to a committee is flawed because a committee is not open, it is a selected group with limited membership and thus is actually an example of the Britanica system. That McHenry isn't able to see that is an example of just how much he doesn't understand what a truely open and collaborative process is.
Now to investigate the all articles evolve to the median argument. Assuming you could score an article on quality, McHenry's claim is true if the quality score of edits that reduce quality are equal to the score of edits that increase quality. Furthermore the reductions must overwrite or not be overwritten by increases. Basically given an already median quality the chance that an edit reduces quality must be 50%.
Ignoring sabotage and dealing only with the claim that stupid/ignorant people will harm the Wikipedia we can quite quickly see that his argument falls apart.
Grammatical errors and typos will definitely see an improvement over time and not a move towards a median. No one would change a correct spelling with a wrong one (besides American vs British English arguments). Edits that add new text will introduce new errors but those too will be corrected over time.
Thus for negative quality edits that will bring aricles to a mediocre median you require incorect information and a belief that you are more right than the Wikipedia - proud ignorance. McHenry assumes that there are more proud ignorant people than there are committed people with accurate information. I'm not sure where he gets his numbers from.
For McHenry's claim to be true a high quality article wil get more negative edits than positive edits. The proud ignorants must disregard more obviously correct (high quality) information. I would propose the opposite - that the number of negative edits decreases slightly as the quality of the article increases as those who are ignorant accept the article as true rather than their previous beliefs. I would also propose that the decrease in negative edits does not linearly correspond to the increase in quality. There will always be people who think they are right no matter how good the evidence against them is but this is a small minority of the population of editors not the majority.
Most importantly though is Wikipedias ability to compromise and admit ambiguity. This is a huge strength. For topics where there are multiple and/or conflicting truths/information the highest quality edits wil be those that acknowledge the disagreements and uncertainties. McHenry himself gives an excellent example in the brithdate of Alexander Hamilton. In this way the cycle of edit wars is resolved in a postive edit that is much more likely to resist further negative edits. It is this phenomenon that will create a rising trend of quality especially if those types of edits become a regular part of the Wikipedia culture/community.
Last, there are many tools that
I like the system of bidding to resolve which nurses get which shifts but I think that there are good points about lower quality of service.
A slight change to the system should help improve quality.
Instead of using hourly rate as the bidding unit use number of hours work. So the shift might be 8 hours but you bid 16 equivalent hours (so each hour counts double). Nurses can be paid an hourly wage based on their quality, experience, etc but compete with each other based on how many hours the work counts as. Since the system is for "over-time" and other less wanted shifts this only makes sense.
Then high quality nurses can compete just as effectively as low quality nurses.
Hospitals will save less money but if you cap the max equivalent hours such that it is less than what it would cost to bring in a temp compared to your highest paid (or perhaps average nurse) at max bid then everyone wins.
A little thought to the goals of the system and how to maximize everyones profit is all it takes.
I find that hitting refresh always fixes the borked margins.
I do not share your concept of human nature.
I believe what motivates most people is quite different from what motivates a tiny fraction of the world population that controls a disproportionate amount of the wealth and power. As you say, we are not worker bees, and neither do we have a single "human nature". There are variations of genetic influences and the mutability of society as well.
Furthermore, I'm not suggesting an abandonment of IP, just an improvement. Certain things are fundamental like authorship and providing incentives for identifying, developing, commercializing, and maintaining IP.
People being selish and independent with conflicting ideas and processes is what will make a reformed IP system work.
Let's examine your cure for cancer example again but assuming IP reform:
Since any company can manufacture the drugs the large pharmaceuticals break into two (or more) parts. The manufacturing and distribution becomes separate from the research.
The manufacturer/distributors compete with each other but since they don't pay for R&D the prices are much lower - they compete in terms of quality of manufacturing and how many people can get access to what they are selling. This is good for consumers.
The researchers get their funding from a number of soruces. The government helps fund some of the (less popular) research, but most of the money comes from private individual investors and from the distributors. The lower costs of medicine (along with all other IP based products) allow people to invest in research that benefits them or their family. Research teams compete with one another in terms of approach, track record, cost, and speed. Teams that cooperate tend to be more successful and thus get more funding. The distributors tend to fund research that will lead to drugs that the majority will want to buy (thus increasing their own sales).
In the end people may pay the same total cost for their medicine if you count previous investment plus the cost at the counter. However once the research has been paid for there is no wasted money going to executives pockets. Centralized control over research is replaced by a more democractic approach and business is the strategy used mainly for manufacturing and distribution (less creative processes). Everyone is still selfish and independent, but the free flow of IP works with "human nature".
There is nothing to suggest that a human society must have ideas controlled by a few, regardless if those few feel that the idea was theirs because they expressed it first or they bought it from someone else.
"In scenario 2, the world would never get a cancer cure. Why? Because no company is going to spend $20 billion developing anything if it can't be assured of making that money back! Any research project or invention requiring any significant amount of investment in order to bring to fruition simply won't be done."
It likely won't be done by one company if other companies can also benefit immediately. However, (just like developing standards in technology) consortiums of companies that all stand to gain from a cancer cure would undertake the research cooperatively. Improving IP laws encourages cooperation.
IP laws can be improved to both provide more freedom and more incentive.
"A few centuries ago, around 1791 to be exact, France tried a little plan of abolishing patent laws... Only it didn't work."
Things have changed. Production and distribution costs were much higher (especially compared to digital information goods). Using a 1791 example to prove that it won't work now is dubious at best.
More importantly I would assume (perhaps incorrectly) that any country that improves their IP laws should be able to vastly benefit from utilizing the IP developed in other countries for free. Local companies could reduce their R&D budgets and sell "generics". Even better they could sell those "generics" back to the countries with the old IP laws at great profit. This is what is happening with prescription drugs right now in the US.
The worry for countries that improve their IP laws isn't financial ruin from improved IP laws it is trade sanctions from the US or an invasion.
Graham writes about heresy - moral heresy. Saying the things that would be considered distasteful or would get you in to trouble. He brilliantly notes moralities similarity to fashion; "invisible to most people... Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good."
This is the test that I regularly apply to my own beliefs and which regularly causes my friends to sigh in frustration. There he goes... again. It's great having friends that still love you after you challenge every belief that you share with them. Sometimes I find out that our shared belief rested on a strong foundation of experience and/or tradition, but usually I find out that we've just been thinking what we've been told to think.
If you don't have friends like I do, Graham mentions other ways to seek out heresy besides "The Conformist Test":
Trouble: look for things people say and get in trouble for.
Heresy: look for the label 'heresy' in any one of it's forms ("indecent", "unamerican", "defeatist"). New ones are created to silence current heresy.
Time and Space: compare heresies between cultures separated by time or space. If one culture has a heresy another doesn't than it is likely the heresy is mistaken. For example, taboos against murder are nearly universal.
Prigs: find prigs, subtract lived experiences and examine their thoughts. Kids and teenagers are the best repositories for complete mint collections of taboos.
Mechanism: examine how taboos are created. "To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it... And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo" The taboo breakers on the otherhand "will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd."
Another rather heretic point Graham makes is that, "Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think."
I would however questions Graham's belief that, "there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress." This seems like an assumption that needs to be broken heretically. There are many smart people that use their intelligence to reinforce convention or shape convention to suit their needs. I do think that some people are more 'disruptively intelligent" than others. They have an easier time than others ignoring or challenging convention. For example, people that are classically 'mentally challenged' generally challenge convention more than average. I would argue that their intelligence is just different from the average - they are more intelligent in certain
I call BULLSHIT! Obvious this person is either lying straight out, misquoted, or an complete asshat if she works at MTV and doesn't understand what is going on. First, I'm willing to bet that kids (just like me) do research to find artists they like: especially the trend setters. Those that don't spend the time finding the good stuff are the sheep: they follow the trend setters. Thus, peer influences are going to be the biggest factor - and yes, MTV tries very, very hard to pass itself off as a peer, or at least showing "peers" watching and listening to the crap they play on MTV.
Thirdly (and most importantly), what the f8sck is wrong with people listening to the artists they choose themselves? The quote is implying that the kids aren't listening to what we told them to! "Whaaa! How can we use marketing to control people that make their own decisions!?" This is a great example the NYTimes doing what it does best. Here is an example of something really positive - people chosing what they like - and the Times spins it like it is some sort of terrible limitation. Unless the Times has replaced The Onion...
Why is it hard to remember?
Focusing your life around *anything* for long periods of time such that you exclude everything that used to keep you healthy and happy is not going to be good for you.
Anyone got Mr. Greenspans email address? It would be nice to send him the link to this page and challenge a few of his assumptions.
His assumptions that I believe are wrong:
1) "Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected."
Disagree. Ownership or authorship of an idea is fairly easy to record and protect. Controlling distribution of the idea is difficult.
2) "Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate."
Disagree. Difficult perhaps, but not impossible. Tracking changes from one set of bits to another and determining how different one set is from another is possible. Opening up (and recording)the innovative process will make tracking and differentiating of one piece of IP from another even easier.
3)"In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one."
Once you are able to reliably calculate the contribution of each innovator a system for division of (electronic) payments shouldn't be that difficult.
Even assuming that the payment system wouldn't be completely accurate or "fair", it would still distribute wealth to innovators better than the current system.
Greenspan is showing his age. Improved technology and understanding of information can more appropriately deal with intellectual property. Fight fire with fire.
I was very surprised by the nature of the Prince manifesto as well. At first I was put off, but if you actually *read* it without prejudice then you would quickly understand that he does have a good grasp of language and grammar. He uses very carefully chosen and specific words when they are appropriate, it is mainly the context that gets manipulated.
Basically he seems unafraid to start using a new symbol system... a system that for better or worse is beginning to take hold as the literacy rate increases and more people are reading and writing. Increased literacy will hopefully promote a better and simpler system of reading symbols, and to suppose that written English language is already at a optimal or "good" state is ignoring history and non-English symbol systems. There is really little difference between "be4" and "before" besides a difference in symbology. (Yes, Im making up these terms as I am hardly a linguist, but I have no doubt I'll be painfully corrected.)
Although I generally find "leetspeak" to make communication more difficult, this article did not negatively impact my ability to understand it even using nontraditional spelling.
I refuse 2 cast judgement b4 I learn about what I am 2 judge.