Someone must have the "Wipe to Clean" patent on cleaning your butt. That's only reason I can explain the abundance of crap patents like "Slide to Unlock." I'll be submitting my patent for "Pour into Glass" for beverages; I'm sure to make a killing.
So, I just went to the store and dropped $30 on the Oblivion Platinum Edition with the two expansions, expressly for the purpose of knocking around aimlessly. I'd purchased Oblivion years ago when it came out, and it had fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. I went to the store to take a look at new games, and Oblivion won hands-down. I say your comments are entirely accurate. I paid $30 for a 5 year old game to avoid the gaming-as-a-movie feeling that is all too common now. The gaming industry today reminds me in some ways of the software industry years ago when the MBAs arrived and started managing, only now it's the movie-style production managers taking over with "let's give them an immersive experience". Guess, what? Games are about the experience I CREATE, not the one you try to give me. Games are best when they give you the elements necessary to create a story, not when the designer gives you a story. Books are for that. You don't play Chess so someone can tell you, "You're going to win with mate in 5 after 43 movies, unless you take the Knight at move 21--then you win in 48 movies. Get to it!" I don't play games for that experience either.
I remember sunny Sunday afternoons playing FF VII on the deck for hours and hours. Ahh. I'd spend another $30 RIGHT NOW for that.:-)
Incorporating feedback is the death of creativity. The uniqueness of the artist's perspective and expression is greatness. The ability to produce what other's want isn't art; it's business. This trend of monitoring user behavior is nothing more than marketing to maximize profit. The singularly amazing game experiences will always be the uncompromising vision of those with the courage to make a statement and public opinion be damned. Giving people what they want is foolish. Giving people what they need is wise. Knowing the difference is genius. I'd have to say Blizzard's work is the epitome of this problem. Deplorably average in every way and catering to the profit line without taking risks; watered down, derivative (a hodge-podge of cultural homages and recycled tripe--Warcraft I, II, III, etc.)
Explanation #1: Car is invented. Buggy whip manufacturers go out of business. Internet is invented. Traditional news goes out of business.
Explanation #2: A free market dictates that the consumer will pay for the level of quality that they want. A trend away from traditional journalism indicates that the consumer is getting sufficient quality from the internet. The consumer is a lot more honest about what the consumer wants than the FCC is.
Explanation #3: Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
"volunteer for the monitoring as a way to avoid continuation school or prosecution"
This is no different than depriving people of their rights because they might be terrorists (they have a turban on their head). "I volunteer to be flogged because I don't want to be shot." Is that voluntary? The slippery slope is the use of the threat of continuation school or prosecution for progressively less serious reasons. That's were volition quietly dies.
If this program were truly for the benefit of the child in time management and development of other skills, then it should be a product or service offered entirely independent of the penal system. Oh, wait. A parent can do this already with many readily available cell phone apps that allow you to track friends and family.
I think there is still something here as far as, "something that leads to a bad place".
I really don't want a car that responds to my brain directly. One of the great things about current vehicles is that nodding off at the wheel doesn't mean certain doom when you start dreaming of flying. What about day-dreamers? There's a reason we have bodies, and I think it's because being able to move things with your mind would mean that on an off-day you'd accidentally turn your brain into a pretzel (which I'm fairly certain is an unsupported configuration).
The article contains poor logic. Consider Conway's Game of Life. Too much life in an area in the short-term is ultimately terminal in subsequent generations. In fact, the constant may still be optimal; the real question is what a creator would consider to be optimal and why. A cosmologist can crunch some numbers, but the latter question is more the domain of philosophy. If you plant a garden, what do you put in it, how much, how closely and why? The answers vary widely depending on what you are really after.
Good arguments, but there's a chicken/egg phenomenon here. People may not bother continuing to later levels of a game because the developers didn't invest time in holding the interest of the players or providing content worth exploring. Then developers conclude that it's not worth investing money in a longer game. Then the game gets shorter and the new end of the game begins to get short-changed for similar reasons...
And pretty soon all anyone can buy is a God Damn 1 level game demo, that never materializes into anything substantial because the developers are already on to the next purchase enticing demo.
If you follow this shit out, then what you end up building is the shortest possible piece of shit that you can sucker people into shelling out the most money for. And that's what's wrong with letting economics be the primary driver of creation. The great games are ones that are built on a vision of something amazing and the follow through is driven by that personal desire for greatness by the developers rather than what the ROI will be.
It is, of course, true that you need good management of a project to keep the costs sane, but I would say that the games that are driven more by projected ROI end up as shit, and the games that are well-managed but allowed the time necessary to reach an artistic level of completeness are far superior. I don't like Blizzard very much, but if you look at their games, they don't design the first half of a campaign to be great and then just trail off. They build them great from beginning to end because they believe in their vision and they believe the ROI will follow suit.
No offense, but I'm sick of whiny bitches complaining about 14 year olds with more time than them. If you're an adult with a job--here's a news flash--use your adult social skills to find a couple friends and log on together and wipe the floor with the 14 year old jackass.
Or just grow some tougher skin and use those kids to get better. I'm almost 40 and I still kick most peoples' ass in multiplayer FPS, but sometimes I get my ass handed to me by some kid--so what? I've called up a friend before for the express reason of giving a beat down to some pimple-faced twit and that was good fun.
"First we'll introduce these annoying eye-catching interruptions that generate a profit from the Sheep-90% of the population that buys stuff because we tell them to buy. Then we'll charge the remaining Smart-10% money to take that annoying shit back out."
What to do? When you're crushed in with 90% sheep, you go where they go, and aren't distinguishable in any meaningful way. Unless you get out of the herd. Then a wolf eats you.
HTML5 is still under initial development. Flash has been around for years. Of course, Flash is the more mature technology. The point of HTML5 is to develop an open standard alternative with comparable functionality (including security). That isn't going to happen over night, and, as with any product, it will take some time to stabilize, mature, and become secure.
The reason HTML5 is important is the open standard aspect of it. Flash is ubiquitous on the web, but we are all at the mercy of a company and their proprietary technology. Believe me when I say that this is a huge risk, because I work full-time on a product that uses Flash as its core technology (www.smilebox.com). When the Flash 10.1 minor revision came out, it broke out product--HARD. And we had no choice but to deal with it and quickly because Adobe pushes hard on the update path in browsers. What resulted was a costly scramble to identify bugs, many of them in the 10.1 player, and adjust our product for the new API.
Mind you, this was in a minor revision, but I can tell you the changes and impact were huge and sudden. That. Really. Sucks. So an open-standard with more transparency is a valuable alternative. And that's where the real face-off is between the two alternatives.
Nature has had millions of years to come up with a 3D storage solution and it came up with neurons. Neurons have variable activation thresholds; the dendrites can adjust to require a variable amount of chemical stimulation from axons before they fire. Our memory system is based on resistance based circuits.
Nature tries to find the most efficient path. That means achieving the most storage/computation in the least space/energy. I think memristors are big, because we're following in the path of Nature.
Only if we also require operating systems to show a splash screen with a person as correspondingly fat as the operating system itself. Welcome to FattyOS!
'Now imagine Shattrath City with ads you just saw on television or read in a newspaper—the latest movie release or television show or a new car model,' he said. 'Imagine further that it is up-to-the-minute, whether you played your game today or six months from now. That is much more realistic.'
Appropriately modified, Marketing Fuckwit #2's statement is entirely realistic.
Some of my most memorable gaming moments from two decades ago involved the most offensively challenging parts of a game and me eventually conquering it. "And finally, after a seemingly endless evening of running across the bridge and into the chamber again and again, our fearless hero was on the verge of destroying the evil vampire when--DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" and the game locks up with the endless drone of a single note from the musical score. $@#*ing Castlevania!
Yet, I remember this moment most fondly of almost all my gaming memories from that time. Shortly after, I pwn'd that damn vampire.
My point is, profiling people and giving them what they want is shit. It's what you don't want or expect that often becomes the most valuable experience in retrospect. It's the people you end up working with that you would never have chosen to work with because they are so different that often ending up making the most valuable contributions to your growth.
And then again, when someone deliberately tries to place you with "complementary" people, that can be a disaster as well.
I think it is best to simply offer as uncompromisingly good an experience that you can to a gamer. It may not be the type of game they have enjoyed in the past--so what? It may take them in a new direction; they might simply avoid it. Pandering to every taste is a recipe for mediocrity. It's just like trying to be everything to all people. Disaster.
You put yourself or your game out there as your best expression of what you think you or your game should be, and then people take what they want away from the experience. It's a general pattern in all things. Like trying to optimize peoples' DNA into certain archetypes at the expense of a diverse array of genetic responses to potential pathogens. In other words, man breeds robustness out of the system by trying to game the system and create the "perfect experience".
There should be a univeral rule for this mistake we make again and again: something like all maxima are relative and any finite set of maxima is insufficient. What the Hell am I even saying? *goes to bed*
What these 2 times a month people don't do, is contribute to the community aspect of the game. They aren't wired into a guild or other group of people in a meaningful social way. They don't contribute to the fabric of social interactions that occur on a daily basis for the more wired in players. In other words, they cost Blizzard less, but they also contribute a lot less to what brings a lot of people to the game. The sense of community.
If you want to enjoy the group or raid oriented content, or have a rewarding battleground or Arena experience, you need people that you can rely on to not be socially incapable and unskilled. Scrubs will really ruin your game experience, turning a 2 hour run into a 4 hour nightmare, or giving you an evening of getting annihilated repeatedly by an opposing team that is well-organized, communicates well, and is having fun.
So, I think the concept of "many" you describe is where the real question is. I would respond, though I don't have the data, that those people don't cost Blizzard much, but also a lot of those people stop spending their money on WoW after a few months when they realize they paid $45 to log on 6 times in 3 months and play for 6 hours. More importantly, they aren't driving additional subscriptions or retention of current subscribers that keep playing because their friends do and that's what makes it fun for them.
The original article is just very short-sighted. Look at the movie industry. Yes, there is the processed formulaic shit put out as mainstream entertainment. But there is also the much higher quality, thought-provoking and rewarding material available, and there's a huge market for it. The volume is smaller, but it's a huge market. It's a market created by more discerning customers and supplied by more discerning creators of content that wouldn't find anything less amazing a rewarding use of their time.
The article is just fluff. It's written by one of those less discerning people, and it will be happily consumed with a nod of agreement by our less discerning fellows.
Men aren't unclear about signals from women for the most part. (Of course, there's a spectrum from clueless idiot to extremely skilled in any population.) I find that a large number of woman are very unclear. They're in "selection-mode" for long periods of time and they have a lot of fear centered around their genetic destiny. If they get cold feet, they will later look back on previous exchanges as "not expressing interest at all" even though they were.
Not all women are like this. Some are quite well adjusted and clear, just as is the case for men. There are a ton of wafflegirls out there. The reason its women is because the evolutionary role of women is "selector", and for men it's "initiator". So to initiate you've already made a choice. To select, you can be in "making a choice" mode for as long as you want. Hence, men are more clear in general.
I'm addicted to eating and sleeping. I experience severe withdrawal without them. As I am also addicted to not sleeping and eating while playing online games, there is balance and I declare myself healthy.
We have stop lights and HOV (carpool) lanes for a good reason. The question isn't whether we should differentiate traffic or meter it--we must. The question is who will do it and what type of oversight will be present. Currently, we have limited legislation for this, and providers like Comcast can do it, so they do it.
What's absent is legislation to hold Comcast to ethical standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone must have the "Wipe to Clean" patent on cleaning your butt. That's only reason I can explain the abundance of crap patents like "Slide to Unlock." I'll be submitting my patent for "Pour into Glass" for beverages; I'm sure to make a killing.
So, I just went to the store and dropped $30 on the Oblivion Platinum Edition with the two expansions, expressly for the purpose of knocking around aimlessly. I'd purchased Oblivion years ago when it came out, and it had fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. I went to the store to take a look at new games, and Oblivion won hands-down. I say your comments are entirely accurate. I paid $30 for a 5 year old game to avoid the gaming-as-a-movie feeling that is all too common now. The gaming industry today reminds me in some ways of the software industry years ago when the MBAs arrived and started managing, only now it's the movie-style production managers taking over with "let's give them an immersive experience". Guess, what? Games are about the experience I CREATE, not the one you try to give me. Games are best when they give you the elements necessary to create a story, not when the designer gives you a story. Books are for that. You don't play Chess so someone can tell you, "You're going to win with mate in 5 after 43 movies, unless you take the Knight at move 21--then you win in 48 movies. Get to it!" I don't play games for that experience either.
:-)
I remember sunny Sunday afternoons playing FF VII on the deck for hours and hours. Ahh. I'd spend another $30 RIGHT NOW for that.
Incorporating feedback is the death of creativity. The uniqueness of the artist's perspective and expression is greatness. The ability to produce what other's want isn't art; it's business. This trend of monitoring user behavior is nothing more than marketing to maximize profit. The singularly amazing game experiences will always be the uncompromising vision of those with the courage to make a statement and public opinion be damned. Giving people what they want is foolish. Giving people what they need is wise. Knowing the difference is genius. I'd have to say Blizzard's work is the epitome of this problem. Deplorably average in every way and catering to the profit line without taking risks; watered down, derivative (a hodge-podge of cultural homages and recycled tripe--Warcraft I, II, III, etc.)
Fuck that.
Explanation #1: Car is invented. Buggy whip manufacturers go out of business. Internet is invented. Traditional news goes out of business.
Explanation #2: A free market dictates that the consumer will pay for the level of quality that they want. A trend away from traditional journalism indicates that the consumer is getting sufficient quality from the internet. The consumer is a lot more honest about what the consumer wants than the FCC is.
Explanation #3: Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
"volunteer for the monitoring as a way to avoid continuation school or prosecution"
This is no different than depriving people of their rights because they might be terrorists (they have a turban on their head). "I volunteer to be flogged because I don't want to be shot." Is that voluntary? The slippery slope is the use of the threat of continuation school or prosecution for progressively less serious reasons. That's were volition quietly dies.
If this program were truly for the benefit of the child in time management and development of other skills, then it should be a product or service offered entirely independent of the penal system. Oh, wait. A parent can do this already with many readily available cell phone apps that allow you to track friends and family.
I think there is still something here as far as, "something that leads to a bad place".
I really don't want a car that responds to my brain directly. One of the great things about current vehicles is that nodding off at the wheel doesn't mean certain doom when you start dreaming of flying. What about day-dreamers? There's a reason we have bodies, and I think it's because being able to move things with your mind would mean that on an off-day you'd accidentally turn your brain into a pretzel (which I'm fairly certain is an unsupported configuration).
Inanimate objects are wonderfully forgiving.
The article contains poor logic. Consider Conway's Game of Life. Too much life in an area in the short-term is ultimately terminal in subsequent generations. In fact, the constant may still be optimal; the real question is what a creator would consider to be optimal and why. A cosmologist can crunch some numbers, but the latter question is more the domain of philosophy. If you plant a garden, what do you put in it, how much, how closely and why? The answers vary widely depending on what you are really after.
Don't pay for the shit DLC, and Supply and Demand economics will take care of the problem.
Good arguments, but there's a chicken/egg phenomenon here. People may not bother continuing to later levels of a game because the developers didn't invest time in holding the interest of the players or providing content worth exploring. Then developers conclude that it's not worth investing money in a longer game. Then the game gets shorter and the new end of the game begins to get short-changed for similar reasons...
And pretty soon all anyone can buy is a God Damn 1 level game demo, that never materializes into anything substantial because the developers are already on to the next purchase enticing demo.
If you follow this shit out, then what you end up building is the shortest possible piece of shit that you can sucker people into shelling out the most money for. And that's what's wrong with letting economics be the primary driver of creation. The great games are ones that are built on a vision of something amazing and the follow through is driven by that personal desire for greatness by the developers rather than what the ROI will be.
It is, of course, true that you need good management of a project to keep the costs sane, but I would say that the games that are driven more by projected ROI end up as shit, and the games that are well-managed but allowed the time necessary to reach an artistic level of completeness are far superior. I don't like Blizzard very much, but if you look at their games, they don't design the first half of a campaign to be great and then just trail off. They build them great from beginning to end because they believe in their vision and they believe the ROI will follow suit.
No offense, but I'm sick of whiny bitches complaining about 14 year olds with more time than them. If you're an adult with a job--here's a news flash--use your adult social skills to find a couple friends and log on together and wipe the floor with the 14 year old jackass.
Or just grow some tougher skin and use those kids to get better. I'm almost 40 and I still kick most peoples' ass in multiplayer FPS, but sometimes I get my ass handed to me by some kid--so what? I've called up a friend before for the express reason of giving a beat down to some pimple-faced twit and that was good fun.
"First we'll introduce these annoying eye-catching interruptions that generate a profit from the Sheep-90% of the population that buys stuff because we tell them to buy. Then we'll charge the remaining Smart-10% money to take that annoying shit back out."
What to do? When you're crushed in with 90% sheep, you go where they go, and aren't distinguishable in any meaningful way. Unless you get out of the herd. Then a wolf eats you.
*bleat* *munch* *poop* *dinner*
HTML5 is still under initial development. Flash has been around for years. Of course, Flash is the more mature technology. The point of HTML5 is to develop an open standard alternative with comparable functionality (including security). That isn't going to happen over night, and, as with any product, it will take some time to stabilize, mature, and become secure.
The reason HTML5 is important is the open standard aspect of it. Flash is ubiquitous on the web, but we are all at the mercy of a company and their proprietary technology. Believe me when I say that this is a huge risk, because I work full-time on a product that uses Flash as its core technology (www.smilebox.com). When the Flash 10.1 minor revision came out, it broke out product--HARD. And we had no choice but to deal with it and quickly because Adobe pushes hard on the update path in browsers. What resulted was a costly scramble to identify bugs, many of them in the 10.1 player, and adjust our product for the new API.
Mind you, this was in a minor revision, but I can tell you the changes and impact were huge and sudden. That. Really. Sucks. So an open-standard with more transparency is a valuable alternative. And that's where the real face-off is between the two alternatives.
Nature has had millions of years to come up with a 3D storage solution and it came up with neurons. Neurons have variable activation thresholds; the dendrites can adjust to require a variable amount of chemical stimulation from axons before they fire. Our memory system is based on resistance based circuits.
Nature tries to find the most efficient path. That means achieving the most storage/computation in the least space/energy. I think memristors are big, because we're following in the path of Nature.
Only if we also require operating systems to show a splash screen with a person as correspondingly fat as the operating system itself. Welcome to FattyOS!
We've just entered the Neoneolithic Age.
'Now imagine Shattrath City with ads you just saw on television or read in a newspaper—the latest movie release or television show or a new car model,' he said. 'Imagine further that it is up-to-the-minute, whether you played your game today or six months from now. That is much more realistic.'
Appropriately modified, Marketing Fuckwit #2's statement is entirely realistic.
What these 2 times a month people don't do, is contribute to the community aspect of the game. They aren't wired into a guild or other group of people in a meaningful social way. They don't contribute to the fabric of social interactions that occur on a daily basis for the more wired in players. In other words, they cost Blizzard less, but they also contribute a lot less to what brings a lot of people to the game. The sense of community.
If you want to enjoy the group or raid oriented content, or have a rewarding battleground or Arena experience, you need people that you can rely on to not be socially incapable and unskilled. Scrubs will really ruin your game experience, turning a 2 hour run into a 4 hour nightmare, or giving you an evening of getting annihilated repeatedly by an opposing team that is well-organized, communicates well, and is having fun.
So, I think the concept of "many" you describe is where the real question is. I would respond, though I don't have the data, that those people don't cost Blizzard much, but also a lot of those people stop spending their money on WoW after a few months when they realize they paid $45 to log on 6 times in 3 months and play for 6 hours. More importantly, they aren't driving additional subscriptions or retention of current subscribers that keep playing because their friends do and that's what makes it fun for them.
The original article is just very short-sighted. Look at the movie industry. Yes, there is the processed formulaic shit put out as mainstream entertainment. But there is also the much higher quality, thought-provoking and rewarding material available, and there's a huge market for it. The volume is smaller, but it's a huge market. It's a market created by more discerning customers and supplied by more discerning creators of content that wouldn't find anything less amazing a rewarding use of their time.
The article is just fluff. It's written by one of those less discerning people, and it will be happily consumed with a nod of agreement by our less discerning fellows.
So, I've payed > $13.99 * 48 = $672 to play WoW over the past 2 and a half years and they can turn it off whenever. $50 might just be a bargain.
Not all women are like this. Some are quite well adjusted and clear, just as is the case for men. There are a ton of wafflegirls out there. The reason its women is because the evolutionary role of women is "selector", and for men it's "initiator". So to initiate you've already made a choice. To select, you can be in "making a choice" mode for as long as you want. Hence, men are more clear in general.
I'm addicted to eating and sleeping. I experience severe withdrawal without them. As I am also addicted to not sleeping and eating while playing online games, there is balance and I declare myself healthy.
We have stop lights and HOV (carpool) lanes for a good reason. The question isn't whether we should differentiate traffic or meter it--we must. The question is who will do it and what type of oversight will be present. Currently, we have limited legislation for this, and providers like Comcast can do it, so they do it.
What's absent is legislation to hold Comcast to ethical standards.
Anyone that has read Alistair Reynold's Revelation Ark sees a disaster coming with this little buggers.
*watches the evolution of Earth's first true AI's optical system*