Judging from most games I've played I don't think "has written for many games" establishes him as a "good writer". What games has he written? What comics? Any novels? Not everyone who writes professionally is any good. Just look at the Star Wars novels.
(That may be taken as a flame, but other than Timothy Zahn it's just the sad truth. Nerds will buy anything to get another hit of their favorite universe.)
I was wondering the same thing. What is this "checking" they speak of? I don't even need to check Gmail. I can minimize the window and tell at a glance at the taskbar if there's a new message or not. and Outlook has the friendly pop up with summary. I can glance at the email and decide if I need to even read the whole thing or not.
I think this article is long on hysteria and short on common sense. Consider this:
About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt "driven" when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.
I think that for may people email replaces phone conversations. Who at work feels like they can just ignore the phone on a regular basis? Who feels that you can leisurely return a call after waiting longer than a day? In short: how much of this stress has anything to do with email and how much is just the stress of rapid communication no matter what form it's in? The important variable is not an individual's attitude towards email, it's what their job requires from them in terms of responsiveness. I'm an analyst. I can frequently delay an email up to a week if it's on a back-burner project. If the sales guys wait a day to call their clients and prospects back (or return an email) they are in trouble.
It has nothing to do with my personality vs. the sales guy, it's the nature of analytic work vs. services/sales work.
I give up. You obviously do not understand the meaning of the words you are using. If I am the only one who knows how to play a guitar and I sell that knowledge to someone else, then I still know how to play the guitar - thus the talent of guitar playing is not rivalrous. And once he knows how to play the guitar, I can't stop him from showing anyone else either. Thus it is not excludable either.
Simple question: do you understand/acknowledge the difference between the ability to play the guitar and the (for lack of a better word) status of being the only one who can play the guitar? That's the fundamental discconect that I see. You constantly refer to the content. You did the same with ideas in general. Give away an idea, and you still have it. Teach someone your song, and you still know it. I get that.
What I want to hear from you is whether you understand that exclusivity of a thing is a separate concept than the thing itself. Being able to play the guitar is not the same thing as being the only one who is able to play the guitar. Do you understand that? If you're on a deserted island with a few hundred folks and you're the only one who knows how to play the guitar your skill is worth something. If there are 10 guys who can play the guitar it's worth less. You haven't lost the content of your IP: you can play the guitar as well in either scenario. But you've lost the exlusivity. It's that *exclusivity* that is rivalrous and excludable, *not* the ability to play the guitar itself.
And your point is absolutely false. All examples you have provided are simply proxies for physical items.
So do Soto... is he wrong? Crazy? Or lying? Because he could not be more clear in what he's saying: merely making a property fungible is NOT sufficient for capitalism.
Are you serious? Do you really believe what you wrote? I think you gotta be trolling.
Yes. I'm dead serious. If you had a way to add $5 to your account and you did so, what would you be excluding? In what way does the addition of $5 to your account exclude someone else from anything? Unless you believe in a finite amount of "wealth", then I'm not sure how you are going to defend this.
Despite your apparent belief that I'm a troll, you seem to be having a hard time coming to grips with some pretty basic concepts here. Just to recap:
1. You insist on seeing only the content of IP and ignoring the exlusivity associated with it. This exclusivity is natural. As long as you don't tell anyone else your secret sauce - it's yours. Once you do, you lose that exclusivity. The recipe for secret sauce is not as rare. Sure, the *content* is unaffected but the exclusivity is not. This disintinction is the fundamental basis for all modern IP law. If you don't get that, than you don't get IP law. Period.
2. Capitalism is more than just making physical goods fungible. Period. Merely making goods transferrable by having a system of currency is not sufficient for capitalism. That's the entire point of "The Mystery of Capital". If currency is all you need, it's not much of a mystery now is it?
So, you are saying that the means of production is not property. Gee. I guess Adam Smith had that all wrong.
No. What I'm saying is that property is necessary but not sufficient for capital. Assets are physical. Therefore they are naturally rivalrous and excludable. If you own the cow, you get the potential with it. If I own the land, I get the potential with it. But without the "legal morass" I mentioned, neither one of us can do anything with the capital. It's dead. We can possess it, but we can't sell, exchange, or use it as collateral.
I agree that capital is also naturally rivalrous and excludable, but what I'm trying to illustrate is that capitalism requires more than merely the protection of property rights. The $9.3 trillion in assets the poor own is not contested. The own it. But they can't access the capital.
Capitalism occurs only when ownership is sufficiently abstracted and organized that you can say things like "I own.00002% of Apple Inc". This makes no sense in the strict natural understanding of ownership (as other posters have illustrated). Stock is a mere invention that is not directly tied to company's worth any longer, just as currency isn't tied to gold and bonds don't necessarily represent any real property. Bonds are rivalrous and excludabe because the government says so, not because of any natural law.
IP law functions with even less of a dependence on fiat than bonds. If you are the only one who knows how to play the guitar, than you have an exclusive and rivalrous talent. If you're the only one who knows how to make secret sauce than you have an exclusive and rivalrous bit of information. So patents and copyrights procede from natural law, but are abstracted from it. If someone else learns how to play the guitar, your ability to play the guitar is not impacted, but your exclusivity is. That is why IP doesn't protect the intellectual content itself, but the exclusive rights to do stuff with it. If someone steals your secret sauce recipe they have in no way harmed your capacity to make secret sauce, but they have completely destroyed your exclusivity.
Thus exclusivity *is* rivalrous and exclusive. And that's just for patents and copyrights. Trade and servicemarks are even more simple. There can be more than one "McCoy" in the cotton gin business, but if you've spent 20 years building up the brand name and then someone else enters the market with the same name, they are leeching off of the recognition you have. The name "McCoy" is not ex/ri, but the consumer confidence invested in the name *is*.
So that's really my point: Capitalism does more than recognize natural ownership and make it fungible. It also recognizes and creates abstractions that are not directly tied to the physical world. Intellectual content itself is not ex/ri, but the exclusivity that pertains to it is. Thus capitalism is just as entitled to guarantee IP rights as property rights as to guarantee stocks, bonds, currency, etc. as property rights.
If I transfer money from your account to my account has anything physically changed? No. It's just the idea of currency. Similarly, if I *create* money by hacking my account and just adding a couple of zeros to the balance, who have I excluded from having money? No one. But capitalism has a vested interest in discouraging this just as it does in discouraging theft of patents, or abuse of trademarks.
I was simply saying that if IP isn't property, because it isn't excludable and rivalrous, I don't think it qualifies for legal protections"
But IP is excludable and rivalrous by definition. That's not in contest. If I have a copyright on my song - you can't have one on my song too.
The question, I thought, is whether or not IP is *naturally* excludable and rivalrous, or whether it is so based on fiat. My argument is that it's not natural, but that neither is capital. People have this idea that capitalism = law of the jungle. It doesn't. Capitalism requires an extremely high degree of structure and order and it requires all sorts of abstractions (especially capital itself) to function.
So I'm agreeing that IP law doesn't fall in the realm of "property rights" in the strict natural sense of "property", but pointing out the capitalism must involve more than mere property rights. Capital is not guaranteed by property rights either. The poor own $9.3 trillion in assets. Their ownership of these assets is protected, but they can't access the capital and thus they can not participate in capitalism.
Does this make sense? Property rights are insufficient for capitalism.
I suppose it is a vice to assume that one can comprehend their own fallacies.
Suppose you're right. I'm the pot calling the kettle black. That makes me a hyprocrite. It doesn't make my argument fallacius. Earn your junior philosopher's merit badge on someone else's time.
Are you serious? Shares in a company are simply a proxy for portions of that real entity.
Yes, I'm quite serious. What "real entity" is "Apple, Inc"? How do you define it? There's the book value, sure. Factories, offices, raw material, inventory, etc. But what about brand value? How do you own.00002% of the Apple brand? You seem to think this is a trivial question. It's not.
Your inability to understand that nature of capital is - in a nutshell - the explanation for you inability to understand capitalism. More on this below:
That might work, if it weren't for that giant disconnect between all of de Soto's examples being real property - houses and so forth as a form of collateral
I'm honestly shocked at the fact that you've managed to not only miss the point of the essay (it's also a book) but actually state as de Soto's thesis the exact OPPOSITE of what he's trying to say. Be honest: did you even read the article? All de Soto's examples illustrate that real property - houses and so forth - *ARE NOT CAPITAL* Capital is the *potential* of property to generate more revenue, property, capital, etc. It's an entirely distinct type of thing. So yes: capitalism revolves around something that is NOT property. De Soto's metaphors could not be more clear. The property is the brick. The capital is the energy within the brick that can be theoretically unlocked via Einsteins theory.
And secondly, capitalism requires a vast government infrastucture to unlock capital.
Quotes that illustrate the distinction between property and capital:
In the West, however, the same assets also lead a parallel life as capital outside the physical world.
What I take from Smith is that capital is not the accumulated stock of assets but the potential it holds to deploy new production.
This essential meaning of capital has been lost to history. Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms in which it travels. It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible manifestations than in its essence. The mind wraps itself around "money" more easily than "capital." But it is a mistake to assume that money is what finally fixes capital. Money facilitates transactions, allowing us to buy and sell things, but it is not itself the progenitor of additional production.
Quote that illustrates how government intervention is absolutely necessary for capitalism to funtion:
Why has the genesis of capital become such a mystery? Why have the rich nations of the world, so quick with their economic advice, not explained how indispensable formal property is to capital formation? The answer is that the process within the formal property system that breaks down assets into capital is extremely difficult to visualize. It is hidden in thousands of pieces of legislation, statutes, regulations, and institutions that govern the system. Anyone trapped in such a legal morass
Did you get that? "Thousands of pieces of legislation, statutes, regulations and institutions... a legal morass". Where's your anarchist vision of capitalism now? In order for the market to function in requires ORDER. The government has a role in capitalism: provide that order.
So far you haven't shown that at all. De Soto's writings talk about extracting value from naturally rivalrous and excludable assets, making them fungible does not make them any less rivalrous nor excludable, no matter what sort of semantic games you play.
You either have not read or have not understood de Soto. Try it again. Start with his example of cattle. The cattle are physical property. You can make the fungi
IP laws are a form of regulation, and in pure capitalism, we'd have to do away with such regulation and let the market work it out.
So you're saying that in "pure capitalism" you need to "let the market work it all out". This means no IP law, right? What about government regulation of contracts, deeds, titles, etc. Do we let the "market" work that out as well?
I don't think you undersatnd what capitalism is. It is not a free for all. It is not the Wild West. It is not anarchy. Capitalism requires a very intricate system of laws and regulation in order to convert property (physical property, limited definition) into capital. (Source: de Soto's "Mystery of Capital").
So my questions to you are:
1. Do you acknowledge that a lot of government oversight is necessary to ensure that smooth operation of deeds, titles, contracts, etc.?
2. If you ackowledge the important role government has to play in (1), why are you so averse to all IP? Based on (1) we know that more than just natural property rights are required. In fact you don't get capitalism until you move away from natural property rights to include extra, non-natural, non-physical concepts. Given we have those, what's your basis for excluding all IP from a capitalist system?
However, you've strayed far from the original point of pure capitalism being (or not being) fundamentally described by the example of the imitation of form and function (and improvement thereof) by the Chinese of the iPhone (among other products).
OK, so the original post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=266327&cid=20 182475) responded to the question Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism? with the answer Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition.
So to me the original question is this: is capitalism no-holds-barred competition, or are there rules? I believe that not only *can* there be rules, there *have* to be rules. No-holds-barred competition is not capitalist. It means that if you're big and strong you can force the little guys out: monopolies. There are no monopolies in a free market. It means that if you want you can shoot your competitor and take his stuff. But that violates the idea of private ownership of property so again: not capitalist.
Pure capitalism, as I understand it, means that the only role of the government is to keep markets as fair as possible. This can include regulation of monopolies, regulation of the supply of information, protection from theft, fraud, murder, etc. So if you grab someone else's product, reverse-engineer it, and sell it as your own have you stolen anything? Is there fraud? There is certainly fraud if the fake good is passed off as legit. And I think there is arguably (although there is room for debate) theft when you've infringed someone's patents, trademarks, etc. I think current IP law needs a MAJOR overhaul, but the basic idea that creators get *some* exclusive rights is older than the term capitilism and is not, I think, anti-capitalist.
At the very least, capitalism requires stable and enforceable rules for transactions of capital (a non-natural form of property). Without a system to enforce rules of ownership, debt, etc. there can be no capitalism. This is the point made by de Soto in "The Mystery of Capital". So anyone who says "capitalism means no government involvement" is wrong. Capitalism requires government involvement.
"Nu unh, you are!" isn't a good argument. Even with fanciful Olde Englishe spelling.
Stocks, bonds and cash are just convenient abstractions that directly map to real property.
Stock is an abstraction for ownership. Please explain how owning ".0002% of Apple, Inc" translates to "real property". Can I claim a paperclip from their office?
You can argue all you want that such "legal entitlements" have plenty of historical precedent, but that does not make them a part of capitalism... If you want to argue about "textbook" definitions, then you've gone far, far astray.
Why? Because intellectual property is invention and stocks are abstraction? I think it's a distinction without much of a difference. Consider the difference betweeen "property" and "capital" if you want something a little more blatant. Capital is *not* an abstraction of property. It is value above and beyond the value of the property itself:
"Walk down most roads in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, or Latin America, and you will see many things: houses used for shelter; parcels of land being tilled, sowed, and harvested; merchandise being bought and sold. Assets in developing and former communist countries primarily serve these immediate physical purposes. In the West, however, the same assets also lead a parallel life as capital outside the physical world. They can be used to put in motion more production by securing the interests of other parties as "collateral" for a mortgage, for example, or by assuring the supply of other forms of credit and public utilities.
Why can't buildings and land elsewhere in the world also lead this parallel life? Why can't the enormous resources in developing and former communist countries, which my colleagues at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (Lima) and I estimate at $9.3 trillion of dead capital, produce value beyond their "natural" state? My reply is, dead capital exists because we have forgotten (or perhaps never realized) that converting a physical asset to generate capital--using your house to borrow money to finance an enterprise, for example--requires a very complex process. It is not unlike the process that Albert Einstein taught us whereby a single brick can be made to release a huge amount of energy in the form of an atomic explosion. By analogy, capital is the result of discovering and unleashing potential energy from the trillions of bricks that the poor have accumulated in their buildings."
Summary: capitalism is *not* restricted to only "natural state" economics. It not only includes non-natural ideas of property, the very essence of capitalism - capital - is a non-property according to your strict definition.
If the laws of nation that is the biggest promoter of those "legal entitlements" don't refer to them as property, who are you to claim otherwise?
You are playing games with semantics. Whether or not you want to call intellectual property "property" is not as important as whether or not intellectual property has been treated as property historically. Let's focus on copyrights. Before the inventing of the printing press there was no reason to worry about copyright because copying was such a laborious process. So how far back to copyrights date? To 1486. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright _law) That's just 46 years after the invention of the printing press in Europe.
I will grant you that the definitions of intellectal property have little to do with a "natural state". They are not, after all, physical commodities. However the existence of non-physical commodities is neither new nor, in and of itself, controversial. From stocks and bonds to various royal priveleges and monopolies the idea of owning, exchanging, renting, buying and selling non-physical commodities is *not* a recent invention.
And it is entirely reasonable to expect that a government would have every bit as much interest in protecting rights to these non-physical properties as to physical properties. In fact, acording to famed economist Hernando de Soto, a regulated and enforceable system of exchanging capital (which is the ultimate non-physical property) is the very essence of capitalism, and it is a lack of such systems more than anything else which keep the poor of this world in poverty. They are unable to tap into the estimated 9 trillion dollars worth of property they own to convert it into capital.
So if "legal entitlemens" are a complete fiction, they are a fiction that has been an integral part of the development of the Western economy going back at least hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution. In essence, these fictitious legal entitlemnts predate the development of economics as a theory by at least a couple centuries.
The GP refers to "property rights" as if that concept applies to knowledge. The problem with that assumption is, as any econ textbook will tell you, "property" has two defining qualities - it is excludable and rivalrous. Knowledge is neither and so his whole premise that cloners are somehow violating the principles of pure capitalism is completely without merit.
You are only digging the hole deeper. Your definition of property is correct, but you clearly have no understanding of what "intellectual property" means. You, like most people, seem to think that intellectual property means "ownership of ideas". But ideas - from patents to trademarks to copyrights - are not property. They can not be owned.
What *can* be owned are certain exclusive rights to the *use* of that property. These property rights *are* "excludable and rivalrous". Thus the term "property rights", while not referring to the ideas themselves, plainly can apply to the "legal entitlements" attached thereto.
"In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain names, written and recorded media, and inventions. The holders of these legal entitlements may exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the IP. "
Just what exclusive rights can and should go with the various ideas is a matter of debate (as the GGP notes). But the basic fact is this: "property rights" can indeed apply to "intellectual property".
Thanks for clearing that up. Why people who have clearly never even seen an econ textbook are so confident about their definition of economic terms is entirely beyond me.
But then, the less you know the easier it is to be certain.
I agree with LWATCDR on this one. I believe that some alone time/personal space is always required, but all couples are different. Before we were married my wife and I worked at the same job. It wasn't really high stress (it was a college computer lab), but I was still a bit nervous that there would be some weird work-relationship conflict, or that we would get tired of seeing each other all day. It was actually great. Now that we're married I see less of her (she stays at home, I work full time) and I miss it.
I think in most relationships the problem is either not enough time together or not enough of the right kind of time together: not that there's too little time together. That's just observation from my own relationship and those of our friends and family. Really, how often do married couples go out on dates? By the time you've got a little one (or two), house payments, job(s), etc. I can't imagine spending too much time together is the problem.
it's much easier and cleaner to leave when couple have separate accounts.
There's a difference between preparing for disaster and anticipating disaster. I'd be wary that all that planning for the divorce doesn't end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If GameCritics.com is "smart reviews for serious gamers" they are using a different definition of "smart" than I am. In just the first couple of paragraphs the writing is enough to make one shudder, and includes such gems as "The problem is simply that "art", and it's even more pretentious sibling "high art", are definited so vaguely,"
Honestly, I think GameCritics.com would do gamers a service not to enter into this discussion.
And in general I strongly disagree that storytelling is a one way street. The effort of the audience matters.
That's not what I'm saying. When an author sits down to write a story is it a one-way street? Yes. Novels are written with very little (if any) collaboration. When a story is READ than the reader invests their time and emotion into the story. So we've got separate creating the work from presenting/experiencing the work.
In the creation phase it is more or less unilateral. And I'm advocating that's how it should be for FPS that are going to be story based. You've got to write the story as a novel. When the player plays, that's a kind of input, but the story is already written and doesn't change.
If you *do* change the story 'at run time' you run into the problems I enumerated to the previous poster. Without AI it's impossible (the computer won't be able to get NPCs to react in human-like ways to unpredictable actions/decisions of the player). Even with humans the best you can do is improv. Which makes for great comedy (Who's Line is it Anyway?) but it's hard to imagine high drama from improv. (Sorry, all you LARPers. I'd prefer Shakespeare.)
I'll grant that the characters in the Iliad were archetypes, but I still don't concede for the Odyssey, which really does delve into Odysseus's motivations and flaws throughout. He may not be Just Plain Folks, but he's very much a fleshed-out character.
Let's see if I can explain a bit better. I'm not saying that they didn't have any well-drawn characters necessarily (although that's frequently a by-product of plot-driven narrative) but the real hallmark is that the events are frequently driven regardless of character motivation. Consider Greek tragedy - where the downfall is inescapable. Even in the Odyssey most of what happens is stuff that happens to Ulysses. A ship driven around by the gods is the perfect example of plot-driven narrative. Although I will certainly grant it's not a black-and-white issue.
Anyway, I'm still not buying the notion that we're into characters over plots. Most hit movies are driven by (usually inane) plots with characters that exist to further its tension and resolution. Character stories like Magnolia and Garden State are the minority.
This is a great point, but it's kind of exactly what I'm saying. What do we consider to be good stuff? Magnolia and Garden State. That's what we care about. That's what we consider art. If we're seriously talking about narrative in FPS than do we want to aim for "Lost in Translation" or "Bad Boys II"? We produce a lot of plot-driven stuff, but generally don't consider it art.
Now obviously an FPS is going to need some action. "Lost in Translation" doesn't really work as an FPS. But "The Last Samurai" might. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, but it's a film that has action and is character driven.
Keep in mind that if we are going to use FPS to tell stories we could have told in a novel or a film we're wasting our time. Different media lends itself to different narratives. I think we can learn from novels and films, but I'm not saying we can just take a movie and stick it in a video game. I'm saying that as we ponder how to tell great stories in FPS (which is something I hope we get to) we can apply lessons learned form older mediums of expression.
The input a novel requires is for the reader to put emotion into a bunch of words.
That's obviously not really "input". I mean input in the sense of "data that goes into the system and changes what comes out". Reading a novel doesn't change the words on the page. The work exists independent of what a reader thinks. You can appreciate a novel more or less based on input (in the sense of emotional investment) but not change the work itself.
You, like the OP fit into my idea that you simply don't want more so you don't get more.
If you invent your own storyline in a sand-box style game than that's great. But I thought we were talking about the storyline that is part of the FPS as it is created, not whether or not someone can come along and impose their own storyline on a blank slate. If that's what you're doing then great, but it's the difference between writing a novel and reading a novel.
Oh, so now this is an American problem. I just love the bashers.
It's not an "America problem". Just an observation. We like character-driven stories. There's nothing wrong with that. I like character driven stories. I find the Illiad and the Odyssey really hard to get into for precisely that reason.
Maybe you thought that since my counterexamples were stereotypical classics that I meant that plot-driven narrative is better. I don't mean that at all. It's just different. I happen to not like it.
I think that pretty much dispatches the rest of your ready-to-bake anti-bashing comments. There simply wan't any America-bashing going on.
If you think that making yourself a participant in the action in some form "eviscerates the entire plot" perhaps you should be mingling with people in public either. It's really sad that you probably take it so hard that people putting themselves into a dialog somehow ruins it for you.
I don't think you really understood my logic. Can you try reading it again without your trigger-happy anti-bashing reflex? What I'm saying is pretty simple. In American culture these days we like a plot where the action is driven by believable characters acting according to their internal desires, beliefs, attitudes, etc. So if one of your characters is paranoid he will move the plot forward by doing paranoid things. You can't swap him out with a relaxed character because than the relaxed character doing the things the paranoid character did would seem out-of-chararcter. If the drama is plot-driven the whole idea of "character" is not as important, but in a character-driven plot this is a big deal.
Now imagine that instead of a bit character who's paranoid you have a story that's written about the main character who is motivated by honor. (I'm simplifying here.) So the protagonist does x, y and z because they are trying to be honorable and all the other characters react to x, y and z according to their characterization and you've got a plot.
Now if you just rip out that main character and stick in a player who can act according to honor, or maybe according to sadism, or maybe according to boredom suddenly either it makes no sense for the protagonist to do x, y, and z or they actually don't do x, y and z. Either way you have a big problem. If they don't do x, y and z you have to have the NPCs react to the new actions according to their own character. If you limit what the protagonist can do and do a lot of scripting for all eventualities, you can get it to work but it's really hard and will probably seem a bit rushed. Otherwise, you just have ruined the plot because now characters are doing things out of character.
That's what it means when I say plugging a player into the protagonist's role eviscerates the plot.
As far as your personal attacks re: "making decision" go, I don't even know what to say. I love to make decisions when I do my own writing. But when I'm reading a book I am enjoying the decisions the author has made. I love games like Civilization where I make my own narrativ
"Ok, before you say ANYTHING about story in FPS games,..."
Hey, I was just commenting based on my observations. I didn't think I was trying to tell everyone "this is how all FPS games, ever, are".
I'll try out some of those games. I've seen Thief. It looked OK. Marathon I've read through, but it's a pain to try and actually get the game to run on anything. I don't know about System Shock 2 or Chronicles of Riddick.
I have read through pretty much the entire story line. It looks very deep, but there's just no way to really judge how it was presented without playing the game. The potential is certainly there, I just don't know about execution.
It's like reading the outline to a novel. If the outline sucks, the novel probably does too. But if the outline's great (as with Maraton) the novel might still suck.
"The great thing about the story lines was that you could make it make as much of a difference in the game as you wanted. Didn't give a damn about poor Alice being in an institution and suicidal? Ok, just chop something up with this knife. Don't give a damn about the Covenant family and the Undying back story? The game still gladly leads you by the nose as long as you don't get sloppy and get yourself killed."
That's another way of saying "they had no storyline". Do novels require input to have good storylines? No. We identify with characters who are sympathetic even though we can't influence them in any way. I think the whole "make your own story" is the reason that most FPS have the literary content of a "choose your own adventure" book.
Does anyone stop to realize why CYOA books never rose above 5th grade reading level? It's the same reason that "interactive" story lines won't either. The simplest explanation is this: Americans believe in character-driven stories (as oppose to plot-driven stories like the Illiad or the Odyssey). As a result you have to have good characterization and explain how the plot is advanced by the characters being who they are.
To take the main character and just say "oh, that's the actual human playing the game" is to eviscerate the entire plot. The plot has to be advanced by that person, but if we let them choose "meh, save the girl" or "rape the girl" or "ignore the girl", etc. then we basically end up writing 3 stories. Per every major decision. It's combinatorial explosion.
Instead the objective should be to show a protagonist who is sympathetic so that the player wants to participate in the action of the game. Sound impossible? It's what every novelist has to do to write an enjoyable novel.
HL has good cinematic elements to it in the form of scripted events, but I don't know that you can necessarily say it has a great story. I can't comment on HL2
That's being kind. Half life was not a good story. Period. Neither one nor two. It had a good plot - in terms of events - but very, very little in terms of character growth or personal interaction. There was no drama. The potential to tell a story was there, but we need more focus on the *people* in the narrative. All good stories, in the end, are about people.
Halo is so-so, but the crowning gem of FPS stories has to be Marathon.
I haven't played Marathon, but I have played Halo and consider it the best FPS yet from that angle. The most important element was Master Chief's relationship to Cortana. It wasn't Shakespeare, but there actually *was* a relationship. Not one that was told, but one that was shown throughout. It went beyond mere banter especially in the closing moments of Halo 2.
FPS needs to learn from big brothers novel, movie, and film. I think the novel is the best example, however, because novels can be written from first-person perspective as well (e.g. the popular Dresden Files by Jim Butcher) A first-person novel is the best prototype for developing story in a FPS, although I think character studies (e.g. Serenity) could be great models as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from most games I've played I don't think "has written for many games" establishes him as a "good writer". What games has he written? What comics? Any novels? Not everyone who writes professionally is any good. Just look at the Star Wars novels.
(That may be taken as a flame, but other than Timothy Zahn it's just the sad truth. Nerds will buy anything to get another hit of their favorite universe.)
See, now *that* is funny! In 6 words you made me smile - more than the entire boring flash video on the console wars.
Maybe you should be writing commentary instead.
I kept waiting for it to get funny, but it never did. Nor did it ever get insightful.
Alas, disappointment.
Who polls their email client at work anymore?
I was wondering the same thing. What is this "checking" they speak of? I don't even need to check Gmail. I can minimize the window and tell at a glance at the taskbar if there's a new message or not. and Outlook has the friendly pop up with summary. I can glance at the email and decide if I need to even read the whole thing or not.
I think this article is long on hysteria and short on common sense. Consider this:
About 33 per cent said they felt stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. A further 28 per cent said they felt "driven" when they checked messages because of the pressure to respond. Just 38 per cent of workers were relaxed enough to wait a day or longer before replying.
I think that for may people email replaces phone conversations. Who at work feels like they can just ignore the phone on a regular basis? Who feels that you can leisurely return a call after waiting longer than a day? In short: how much of this stress has anything to do with email and how much is just the stress of rapid communication no matter what form it's in? The important variable is not an individual's attitude towards email, it's what their job requires from them in terms of responsiveness. I'm an analyst. I can frequently delay an email up to a week if it's on a back-burner project. If the sales guys wait a day to call their clients and prospects back (or return an email) they are in trouble.
It has nothing to do with my personality vs. the sales guy, it's the nature of analytic work vs. services/sales work.
I give up. You obviously do not understand the meaning of the words you are using. If I am the only one who knows how to play a guitar and I sell that knowledge to someone else, then I still know how to play the guitar - thus the talent of guitar playing is not rivalrous. And once he knows how to play the guitar, I can't stop him from showing anyone else either. Thus it is not excludable either.
Simple question: do you understand/acknowledge the difference between the ability to play the guitar and the (for lack of a better word) status of being the only one who can play the guitar? That's the fundamental discconect that I see. You constantly refer to the content. You did the same with ideas in general. Give away an idea, and you still have it. Teach someone your song, and you still know it. I get that.
What I want to hear from you is whether you understand that exclusivity of a thing is a separate concept than the thing itself. Being able to play the guitar is not the same thing as being the only one who is able to play the guitar. Do you understand that? If you're on a deserted island with a few hundred folks and you're the only one who knows how to play the guitar your skill is worth something. If there are 10 guys who can play the guitar it's worth less. You haven't lost the content of your IP: you can play the guitar as well in either scenario. But you've lost the exlusivity. It's that *exclusivity* that is rivalrous and excludable, *not* the ability to play the guitar itself.
And your point is absolutely false. All examples you have provided are simply proxies for physical items.
So do Soto... is he wrong? Crazy? Or lying? Because he could not be more clear in what he's saying: merely making a property fungible is NOT sufficient for capitalism.
Are you serious? Do you really believe what you wrote? I think you gotta be trolling.
Yes. I'm dead serious. If you had a way to add $5 to your account and you did so, what would you be excluding? In what way does the addition of $5 to your account exclude someone else from anything? Unless you believe in a finite amount of "wealth", then I'm not sure how you are going to defend this.
Despite your apparent belief that I'm a troll, you seem to be having a hard time coming to grips with some pretty basic concepts here. Just to recap:
1. You insist on seeing only the content of IP and ignoring the exlusivity associated with it. This exclusivity is natural. As long as you don't tell anyone else your secret sauce - it's yours. Once you do, you lose that exclusivity. The recipe for secret sauce is not as rare. Sure, the *content* is unaffected but the exclusivity is not. This disintinction is the fundamental basis for all modern IP law. If you don't get that, than you don't get IP law. Period.
2. Capitalism is more than just making physical goods fungible. Period. Merely making goods transferrable by having a system of currency is not sufficient for capitalism. That's the entire point of "The Mystery of Capital". If currency is all you need, it's not much of a mystery now is it?
So, you are saying that the means of production is not property. Gee. I guess Adam Smith had that all wrong.
.00002% of Apple Inc". This makes no sense in the strict natural understanding of ownership (as other posters have illustrated). Stock is a mere invention that is not directly tied to company's worth any longer, just as currency isn't tied to gold and bonds don't necessarily represent any real property. Bonds are rivalrous and excludabe because the government says so, not because of any natural law.
No. What I'm saying is that property is necessary but not sufficient for capital. Assets are physical. Therefore they are naturally rivalrous and excludable. If you own the cow, you get the potential with it. If I own the land, I get the potential with it. But without the "legal morass" I mentioned, neither one of us can do anything with the capital. It's dead. We can possess it, but we can't sell, exchange, or use it as collateral.
I agree that capital is also naturally rivalrous and excludable, but what I'm trying to illustrate is that capitalism requires more than merely the protection of property rights. The $9.3 trillion in assets the poor own is not contested. The own it. But they can't access the capital.
Capitalism occurs only when ownership is sufficiently abstracted and organized that you can say things like "I own
IP law functions with even less of a dependence on fiat than bonds. If you are the only one who knows how to play the guitar, than you have an exclusive and rivalrous talent. If you're the only one who knows how to make secret sauce than you have an exclusive and rivalrous bit of information. So patents and copyrights procede from natural law, but are abstracted from it. If someone else learns how to play the guitar, your ability to play the guitar is not impacted, but your exclusivity is. That is why IP doesn't protect the intellectual content itself, but the exclusive rights to do stuff with it. If someone steals your secret sauce recipe they have in no way harmed your capacity to make secret sauce, but they have completely destroyed your exclusivity.
Thus exclusivity *is* rivalrous and exclusive. And that's just for patents and copyrights. Trade and servicemarks are even more simple. There can be more than one "McCoy" in the cotton gin business, but if you've spent 20 years building up the brand name and then someone else enters the market with the same name, they are leeching off of the recognition you have. The name "McCoy" is not ex/ri, but the consumer confidence invested in the name *is*.
So that's really my point: Capitalism does more than recognize natural ownership and make it fungible. It also recognizes and creates abstractions that are not directly tied to the physical world. Intellectual content itself is not ex/ri, but the exclusivity that pertains to it is. Thus capitalism is just as entitled to guarantee IP rights as property rights as to guarantee stocks, bonds, currency, etc. as property rights.
If I transfer money from your account to my account has anything physically changed? No. It's just the idea of currency. Similarly, if I *create* money by hacking my account and just adding a couple of zeros to the balance, who have I excluded from having money? No one. But capitalism has a vested interest in discouraging this just as it does in discouraging theft of patents, or abuse of trademarks.
I was simply saying that if IP isn't property, because it isn't excludable and rivalrous, I don't think it qualifies for legal protections"
But IP is excludable and rivalrous by definition. That's not in contest. If I have a copyright on my song - you can't have one on my song too.
The question, I thought, is whether or not IP is *naturally* excludable and rivalrous, or whether it is so based on fiat. My argument is that it's not natural, but that neither is capital. People have this idea that capitalism = law of the jungle. It doesn't. Capitalism requires an extremely high degree of structure and order and it requires all sorts of abstractions (especially capital itself) to function.
So I'm agreeing that IP law doesn't fall in the realm of "property rights" in the strict natural sense of "property", but pointing out the capitalism must involve more than mere property rights. Capital is not guaranteed by property rights either. The poor own $9.3 trillion in assets. Their ownership of these assets is protected, but they can't access the capital and thus they can not participate in capitalism.
Does this make sense? Property rights are insufficient for capitalism.
I suppose it is a vice to assume that one can comprehend their own fallacies.
.00002% of the Apple brand? You seem to think this is a trivial question. It's not.
Suppose you're right. I'm the pot calling the kettle black. That makes me a hyprocrite. It doesn't make my argument fallacius. Earn your junior philosopher's merit badge on someone else's time.
Are you serious? Shares in a company are simply a proxy for portions of that real entity.
Yes, I'm quite serious. What "real entity" is "Apple, Inc"? How do you define it? There's the book value, sure. Factories, offices, raw material, inventory, etc. But what about brand value? How do you own
Your inability to understand that nature of capital is - in a nutshell - the explanation for you inability to understand capitalism. More on this below:
That might work, if it weren't for that giant disconnect between all of de Soto's examples being real property - houses and so forth as a form of collateral
I'm honestly shocked at the fact that you've managed to not only miss the point of the essay (it's also a book) but actually state as de Soto's thesis the exact OPPOSITE of what he's trying to say. Be honest: did you even read the article? All de Soto's examples illustrate that real property - houses and so forth - *ARE NOT CAPITAL* Capital is the *potential* of property to generate more revenue, property, capital, etc. It's an entirely distinct type of thing. So yes: capitalism revolves around something that is NOT property. De Soto's metaphors could not be more clear. The property is the brick. The capital is the energy within the brick that can be theoretically unlocked via Einsteins theory.
And secondly, capitalism requires a vast government infrastucture to unlock capital.
Quotes that illustrate the distinction between property and capital:
In the West, however, the same assets also lead a parallel life as capital outside the physical world.
What I take from Smith is that capital is not the accumulated stock of assets but the potential it holds to deploy new production.
This essential meaning of capital has been lost to history. Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms in which it travels. It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible manifestations than in its essence. The mind wraps itself around "money" more easily than "capital." But it is a mistake to assume that money is what finally fixes capital. Money facilitates transactions, allowing us to buy and sell things, but it is not itself the progenitor of additional production.
Quote that illustrates how government intervention is absolutely necessary for capitalism to funtion:
Why has the genesis of capital become such a mystery? Why have the rich nations of the world, so quick with their economic advice, not explained how indispensable formal property is to capital formation? The answer is that the process within the formal property system that breaks down assets into capital is extremely difficult to visualize. It is hidden in thousands of pieces of legislation, statutes, regulations, and institutions that govern the system. Anyone trapped in such a legal morass
Did you get that? "Thousands of pieces of legislation, statutes, regulations and institutions... a legal morass". Where's your anarchist vision of capitalism now? In order for the market to function in requires ORDER. The government has a role in capitalism: provide that order.
So far you haven't shown that at all. De Soto's writings talk about extracting value from naturally rivalrous and excludable assets, making them fungible does not make them any less rivalrous nor excludable, no matter what sort of semantic games you play.
You either have not read or have not understood de Soto. Try it again. Start with his example of cattle. The cattle are physical property. You can make the fungi
IP laws are a form of regulation, and in pure capitalism, we'd have to do away with such regulation and let the market work it out.
So you're saying that in "pure capitalism" you need to "let the market work it all out". This means no IP law, right? What about government regulation of contracts, deeds, titles, etc. Do we let the "market" work that out as well?
I don't think you undersatnd what capitalism is. It is not a free for all. It is not the Wild West. It is not anarchy. Capitalism requires a very intricate system of laws and regulation in order to convert property (physical property, limited definition) into capital. (Source: de Soto's "Mystery of Capital").
So my questions to you are:
1. Do you acknowledge that a lot of government oversight is necessary to ensure that smooth operation of deeds, titles, contracts, etc.?
2. If you ackowledge the important role government has to play in (1), why are you so averse to all IP? Based on (1) we know that more than just natural property rights are required. In fact you don't get capitalism until you move away from natural property rights to include extra, non-natural, non-physical concepts. Given we have those, what's your basis for excluding all IP from a capitalist system?
However, you've strayed far from the original point of pure capitalism being (or not being) fundamentally described by the example of the imitation of form and function (and improvement thereof) by the Chinese of the iPhone (among other products).
0 182475) responded to the question Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism? with the answer Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition.
OK, so the original post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=266327&cid=2
So to me the original question is this: is capitalism no-holds-barred competition, or are there rules? I believe that not only *can* there be rules, there *have* to be rules. No-holds-barred competition is not capitalist. It means that if you're big and strong you can force the little guys out: monopolies. There are no monopolies in a free market. It means that if you want you can shoot your competitor and take his stuff. But that violates the idea of private ownership of property so again: not capitalist.
Pure capitalism, as I understand it, means that the only role of the government is to keep markets as fair as possible. This can include regulation of monopolies, regulation of the supply of information, protection from theft, fraud, murder, etc. So if you grab someone else's product, reverse-engineer it, and sell it as your own have you stolen anything? Is there fraud? There is certainly fraud if the fake good is passed off as legit. And I think there is arguably (although there is room for debate) theft when you've infringed someone's patents, trademarks, etc. I think current IP law needs a MAJOR overhaul, but the basic idea that creators get *some* exclusive rights is older than the term capitilism and is not, I think, anti-capitalist.
At the very least, capitalism requires stable and enforceable rules for transactions of capital (a non-natural form of property). Without a system to enforce rules of ownership, debt, etc. there can be no capitalism. This is the point made by de Soto in "The Mystery of Capital". So anyone who says "capitalism means no government involvement" is wrong. Capitalism requires government involvement.
Again, how blacketh is thy pot?
/ desoto.htm
"Nu unh, you are!" isn't a good argument. Even with fanciful Olde Englishe spelling.
Stocks, bonds and cash are just convenient abstractions that directly map to real property.
Stock is an abstraction for ownership. Please explain how owning ".0002% of Apple, Inc" translates to "real property". Can I claim a paperclip from their office?
You can argue all you want that such "legal entitlements" have plenty of historical precedent, but that does not make them a part of capitalism... If you want to argue about "textbook" definitions, then you've gone far, far astray.
Why? Because intellectual property is invention and stocks are abstraction? I think it's a distinction without much of a difference. Consider the difference betweeen "property" and "capital" if you want something a little more blatant. Capital is *not* an abstraction of property. It is value above and beyond the value of the property itself:
"Walk down most roads in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, or Latin America, and you will see many things: houses used for shelter; parcels of land being tilled, sowed, and harvested; merchandise being bought and sold. Assets in developing and former communist countries primarily serve these immediate physical purposes. In the West, however, the same assets also lead a parallel life as capital outside the physical world. They can be used to put in motion more production by securing the interests of other parties as "collateral" for a mortgage, for example, or by assuring the supply of other forms of credit and public utilities.
Why can't buildings and land elsewhere in the world also lead this parallel life? Why can't the enormous resources in developing and former communist countries, which my colleagues at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (Lima) and I estimate at $9.3 trillion of dead capital, produce value beyond their "natural" state? My reply is, dead capital exists because we have forgotten (or perhaps never realized) that converting a physical asset to generate capital--using your house to borrow money to finance an enterprise, for example--requires a very complex process. It is not unlike the process that Albert Einstein taught us whereby a single brick can be made to release a huge amount of energy in the form of an atomic explosion. By analogy, capital is the result of discovering and unleashing potential energy from the trillions of bricks that the poor have accumulated in their buildings."
"The Mystery of Capital", Herandno de Soto http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03
Summary: capitalism is *not* restricted to only "natural state" economics. It not only includes non-natural ideas of property, the very essence of capitalism - capital - is a non-property according to your strict definition.
If the laws of nation that is the biggest promoter of those "legal entitlements" don't refer to them as property, who are you to claim otherwise?
t _law) That's just 46 years after the invention of the printing press in Europe.
You are playing games with semantics. Whether or not you want to call intellectual property "property" is not as important as whether or not intellectual property has been treated as property historically. Let's focus on copyrights. Before the inventing of the printing press there was no reason to worry about copyright because copying was such a laborious process. So how far back to copyrights date? To 1486. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyrigh
I will grant you that the definitions of intellectal property have little to do with a "natural state". They are not, after all, physical commodities. However the existence of non-physical commodities is neither new nor, in and of itself, controversial. From stocks and bonds to various royal priveleges and monopolies the idea of owning, exchanging, renting, buying and selling non-physical commodities is *not* a recent invention.
And it is entirely reasonable to expect that a government would have every bit as much interest in protecting rights to these non-physical properties as to physical properties. In fact, acording to famed economist Hernando de Soto, a regulated and enforceable system of exchanging capital (which is the ultimate non-physical property) is the very essence of capitalism, and it is a lack of such systems more than anything else which keep the poor of this world in poverty. They are unable to tap into the estimated 9 trillion dollars worth of property they own to convert it into capital.
So if "legal entitlemens" are a complete fiction, they are a fiction that has been an integral part of the development of the Western economy going back at least hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution. In essence, these fictitious legal entitlemnts predate the development of economics as a theory by at least a couple centuries.
The GP refers to "property rights" as if that concept applies to knowledge. The problem with that assumption is, as any econ textbook will tell you, "property" has two defining qualities - it is excludable and rivalrous. Knowledge is neither and so his whole premise that cloners are somehow violating the principles of pure capitalism is completely without merit.
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You are only digging the hole deeper. Your definition of property is correct, but you clearly have no understanding of what "intellectual property" means. You, like most people, seem to think that intellectual property means "ownership of ideas". But ideas - from patents to trademarks to copyrights - are not property. They can not be owned.
What *can* be owned are certain exclusive rights to the *use* of that property. These property rights *are* "excludable and rivalrous". Thus the term "property rights", while not referring to the ideas themselves, plainly can apply to the "legal entitlements" attached thereto.
"In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain names, written and recorded media, and inventions. The holders of these legal entitlements may exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the IP. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_propert
Just what exclusive rights can and should go with the various ideas is a matter of debate (as the GGP notes). But the basic fact is this: "property rights" can indeed apply to "intellectual property".
Thanks for clearing that up. Why people who have clearly never even seen an econ textbook are so confident about their definition of economic terms is entirely beyond me.
But then, the less you know the easier it is to be certain.
I agree with LWATCDR on this one. I believe that some alone time/personal space is always required, but all couples are different. Before we were married my wife and I worked at the same job. It wasn't really high stress (it was a college computer lab), but I was still a bit nervous that there would be some weird work-relationship conflict, or that we would get tired of seeing each other all day. It was actually great. Now that we're married I see less of her (she stays at home, I work full time) and I miss it.
I think in most relationships the problem is either not enough time together or not enough of the right kind of time together: not that there's too little time together. That's just observation from my own relationship and those of our friends and family. Really, how often do married couples go out on dates? By the time you've got a little one (or two), house payments, job(s), etc. I can't imagine spending too much time together is the problem.
it's much easier and cleaner to leave when couple have separate accounts.
There's a difference between preparing for disaster and anticipating disaster. I'd be wary that all that planning for the divorce doesn't end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If GameCritics.com is "smart reviews for serious gamers" they are using a different definition of "smart" than I am. In just the first couple of paragraphs the writing is enough to make one shudder, and includes such gems as "The problem is simply that "art", and it's even more pretentious sibling "high art", are definited so vaguely,"
Honestly, I think GameCritics.com would do gamers a service not to enter into this discussion.
And in general I strongly disagree that storytelling is a one way street. The effort of the audience matters.
That's not what I'm saying. When an author sits down to write a story is it a one-way street? Yes. Novels are written with very little (if any) collaboration. When a story is READ than the reader invests their time and emotion into the story. So we've got separate creating the work from presenting/experiencing the work.
In the creation phase it is more or less unilateral. And I'm advocating that's how it should be for FPS that are going to be story based. You've got to write the story as a novel. When the player plays, that's a kind of input, but the story is already written and doesn't change.
If you *do* change the story 'at run time' you run into the problems I enumerated to the previous poster. Without AI it's impossible (the computer won't be able to get NPCs to react in human-like ways to unpredictable actions/decisions of the player). Even with humans the best you can do is improv. Which makes for great comedy (Who's Line is it Anyway?) but it's hard to imagine high drama from improv. (Sorry, all you LARPers. I'd prefer Shakespeare.)
I'll grant that the characters in the Iliad were archetypes, but I still don't concede for the Odyssey, which really does delve into Odysseus's motivations and flaws throughout. He may not be Just Plain Folks, but he's very much a fleshed-out character.
Let's see if I can explain a bit better. I'm not saying that they didn't have any well-drawn characters necessarily (although that's frequently a by-product of plot-driven narrative) but the real hallmark is that the events are frequently driven regardless of character motivation. Consider Greek tragedy - where the downfall is inescapable. Even in the Odyssey most of what happens is stuff that happens to Ulysses. A ship driven around by the gods is the perfect example of plot-driven narrative. Although I will certainly grant it's not a black-and-white issue.
Anyway, I'm still not buying the notion that we're into characters over plots. Most hit movies are driven by (usually inane) plots with characters that exist to further its tension and resolution. Character stories like Magnolia and Garden State are the minority.
This is a great point, but it's kind of exactly what I'm saying. What do we consider to be good stuff? Magnolia and Garden State. That's what we care about. That's what we consider art. If we're seriously talking about narrative in FPS than do we want to aim for "Lost in Translation" or "Bad Boys II"? We produce a lot of plot-driven stuff, but generally don't consider it art.
Now obviously an FPS is going to need some action. "Lost in Translation" doesn't really work as an FPS. But "The Last Samurai" might. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, but it's a film that has action and is character driven.
Keep in mind that if we are going to use FPS to tell stories we could have told in a novel or a film we're wasting our time. Different media lends itself to different narratives. I think we can learn from novels and films, but I'm not saying we can just take a movie and stick it in a video game. I'm saying that as we ponder how to tell great stories in FPS (which is something I hope we get to) we can apply lessons learned form older mediums of expression.
Uh, the Iliad wasn't character-driven? The whole epic was driven by larger-than-life characters, and padded out by grandiloquent speeches by the same.
...? So if a work is named after a person it must be person-driven?
Exactly. "Larger than life". E.g. not very realistic. Did you see character development? Nope. That's part of what I'm talking about.
And its sequel, the Odyssey, is freaking named after its central character.
Marathon runs good on Macs using the Aleph One open source engine, and I think the Map, Sound, Physics, etc files were made free some time ago.
I'll check it out on my macbook pro. I don't think I had a mac last time I tried to run Marathon (I know I tried it on XP, not OS X).
The input a novel requires is for the reader to put emotion into a bunch of words.
That's obviously not really "input". I mean input in the sense of "data that goes into the system and changes what comes out". Reading a novel doesn't change the words on the page. The work exists independent of what a reader thinks. You can appreciate a novel more or less based on input (in the sense of emotional investment) but not change the work itself.
You, like the OP fit into my idea that you simply don't want more so you don't get more.
If you invent your own storyline in a sand-box style game than that's great. But I thought we were talking about the storyline that is part of the FPS as it is created, not whether or not someone can come along and impose their own storyline on a blank slate. If that's what you're doing then great, but it's the difference between writing a novel and reading a novel.
Oh, so now this is an American problem. I just love the bashers.
It's not an "America problem". Just an observation. We like character-driven stories. There's nothing wrong with that. I like character driven stories. I find the Illiad and the Odyssey really hard to get into for precisely that reason.
Maybe you thought that since my counterexamples were stereotypical classics that I meant that plot-driven narrative is better. I don't mean that at all. It's just different. I happen to not like it.
I think that pretty much dispatches the rest of your ready-to-bake anti-bashing comments. There simply wan't any America-bashing going on.
If you think that making yourself a participant in the action in some form "eviscerates the entire plot" perhaps you should be mingling with people in public either. It's really sad that you probably take it so hard that people putting themselves into a dialog somehow ruins it for you.
I don't think you really understood my logic. Can you try reading it again without your trigger-happy anti-bashing reflex? What I'm saying is pretty simple. In American culture these days we like a plot where the action is driven by believable characters acting according to their internal desires, beliefs, attitudes, etc. So if one of your characters is paranoid he will move the plot forward by doing paranoid things. You can't swap him out with a relaxed character because than the relaxed character doing the things the paranoid character did would seem out-of-chararcter. If the drama is plot-driven the whole idea of "character" is not as important, but in a character-driven plot this is a big deal.
Now imagine that instead of a bit character who's paranoid you have a story that's written about the main character who is motivated by honor. (I'm simplifying here.) So the protagonist does x, y and z because they are trying to be honorable and all the other characters react to x, y and z according to their characterization and you've got a plot.
Now if you just rip out that main character and stick in a player who can act according to honor, or maybe according to sadism, or maybe according to boredom suddenly either it makes no sense for the protagonist to do x, y, and z or they actually don't do x, y and z. Either way you have a big problem. If they don't do x, y and z you have to have the NPCs react to the new actions according to their own character. If you limit what the protagonist can do and do a lot of scripting for all eventualities, you can get it to work but it's really hard and will probably seem a bit rushed. Otherwise, you just have ruined the plot because now characters are doing things out of character.
That's what it means when I say plugging a player into the protagonist's role eviscerates the plot.
As far as your personal attacks re: "making decision" go, I don't even know what to say. I love to make decisions when I do my own writing. But when I'm reading a book I am enjoying the decisions the author has made. I love games like Civilization where I make my own narrativ
"Ok, before you say ANYTHING about story in FPS games,..."
Hey, I was just commenting based on my observations. I didn't think I was trying to tell everyone "this is how all FPS games, ever, are".
I'll try out some of those games. I've seen Thief. It looked OK. Marathon I've read through, but it's a pain to try and actually get the game to run on anything. I don't know about System Shock 2 or Chronicles of Riddick.
I have read through pretty much the entire story line. It looks very deep, but there's just no way to really judge how it was presented without playing the game. The potential is certainly there, I just don't know about execution.
It's like reading the outline to a novel. If the outline sucks, the novel probably does too. But if the outline's great (as with Maraton) the novel might still suck.
"The great thing about the story lines was that you could make it make as much of a difference in the game as you wanted. Didn't give a damn about poor Alice being in an institution and suicidal? Ok, just chop something up with this knife. Don't give a damn about the Covenant family and the Undying back story? The game still gladly leads you by the nose as long as you don't get sloppy and get yourself killed."
That's another way of saying "they had no storyline". Do novels require input to have good storylines? No. We identify with characters who are sympathetic even though we can't influence them in any way. I think the whole "make your own story" is the reason that most FPS have the literary content of a "choose your own adventure" book.
Does anyone stop to realize why CYOA books never rose above 5th grade reading level? It's the same reason that "interactive" story lines won't either. The simplest explanation is this: Americans believe in character-driven stories (as oppose to plot-driven stories like the Illiad or the Odyssey). As a result you have to have good characterization and explain how the plot is advanced by the characters being who they are.
To take the main character and just say "oh, that's the actual human playing the game" is to eviscerate the entire plot. The plot has to be advanced by that person, but if we let them choose "meh, save the girl" or "rape the girl" or "ignore the girl", etc. then we basically end up writing 3 stories. Per every major decision. It's combinatorial explosion.
Instead the objective should be to show a protagonist who is sympathetic so that the player wants to participate in the action of the game. Sound impossible? It's what every novelist has to do to write an enjoyable novel.
Deus Ex is a definite yes.
Haven't played it.
HL has good cinematic elements to it in the form of scripted events, but I don't know that you can necessarily say it has a great story. I can't comment on HL2
That's being kind. Half life was not a good story. Period. Neither one nor two. It had a good plot - in terms of events - but very, very little in terms of character growth or personal interaction. There was no drama. The potential to tell a story was there, but we need more focus on the *people* in the narrative. All good stories, in the end, are about people.
Halo is so-so, but the crowning gem of FPS stories has to be Marathon.
I haven't played Marathon, but I have played Halo and consider it the best FPS yet from that angle. The most important element was Master Chief's relationship to Cortana. It wasn't Shakespeare, but there actually *was* a relationship. Not one that was told, but one that was shown throughout. It went beyond mere banter especially in the closing moments of Halo 2.
FPS needs to learn from big brothers novel, movie, and film. I think the novel is the best example, however, because novels can be written from first-person perspective as well (e.g. the popular Dresden Files by Jim Butcher) A first-person novel is the best prototype for developing story in a FPS, although I think character studies (e.g. Serenity) could be great models as well.