"It's not a medium that lends it's self well to stories."
I disagree. People are just doing it wrong. The lure of interactive story-telling has destroyed the potential to tell good stories with the FPS genre. Interactive story-telling, if it ever works, will require either AI or dedicated human game-masters (like D&D). And honestly, how often has D&D even been good story telling?
If the focus was more on good plot development, good dialog, and believable characters we'd be way ahead of where we are. FPS has had way to much emphasis on graphics. That's like having a play where all anyone cares about is the costumes and the sets. And so FPS has some AMAZING costumes and sets. We can get there with the dialog, plot, and characters. We just haven't yet.
Yes, the popular ( read: pre-installed with an OS ) music playing software make it difficult to play Ogg but there are plenty of players around.
Yes. Another piece of software to install. That's what I really want. Look, I'm relatively tech savy. I use XP Pro, Vista, OS X and linux (albeit Ubuntu) on a pretty regular basis. And I've got to tell you that the more experience I have with OSS the less I like Stallman's ideology. I want tech that works. In my experience dealing with OSS can be maddening. Take Asterisk. Great capabilities. Voicemail is incapable of doing the same stuff that our 10-year old propietary system could to. VOICEMAIL. This is not an exotic feature. Most people have heard of it.
I'm aware of the perils of vendor lock in on the other side (in the middle of paying money to extricate our own data from an old Act! database). I just bristle when I see the open and simple world of practical OSS sullied by the antics of idealogues.
I (and many others I suspect) would say he is absolutely not-compromising and this decision is completely in line with Stallman's aims and philosophy and those of the FSF.
"Absolute" is a good word choice there. he's certainly not compromising on his principles. But I think he's putting principles ahead of results: which is the reason we have principles. He wants open format? Great. Release the data in open format. But if he wants to actually spread the message to people who aren't already on board why not make it easy?
It's like he thinks he'll become unclean if a.doc file touches his computer. It will give him the cooties, I suppose. That type of extremism smake of religious fanaticism and is a turn off to moderates how may share some of his views.
Not to mention I'm *not* going to go through the trouble of installing an.ogg player just to hear what the guy has to say. I already have more software odds and ends on my various machines that I would prefer.
Stallman's fanaticism is nowhere more perfectly reflected than in his release of the audio in only.ogg format. While legally.ogg is open, what is easier to play?.Ogg or.mp3? If the goal is to allow information to spread - then why not simply allow both formats?
To make a point Stallman seems to be compromising what should be the aims of his own movement - free flow of information and open access.
Does your ER simulator sell well compared to Halo?
Huh? It was never even for sale. I used to do statistical consulting for a medical outsourcing company that staffed ER rooms at hospitals. They asked me to build it for them. It was designed to order for their needs.
My point wasn't "I made a product that sells! Woowee!". It was that I do have some experience in: 1. modeling human behavior 2. modeling complex systems
It was a lack of understanding those two concepts that led to some of the flaws I was criticizing.
No, but I am in the business of predicting human behavior for a living and I have designed large-scale, moderately complex simulations (e.g. of an emergency room in a trauma hospital for use in deciding staffing levels). And I know that looking at marketing as an attempt to take a distinct cohort of people from "won't buy" to "will buy" is the wrong way to look at it. First of all, the actual buy/not buy event should be seen as the result of random experiment. There are some inputs that can be influenced, but many that are random. Take Joe Schmoe. Halo comes out in September. What is the chance his car breaks down the same month and he's out of cash? What are the chances its his birthday and he gets a gift certificate to Best Buy? The point is that whether or not Joe Schmoe buys Halo 3 is *not* a deterministic function based on his desire to buy it, but a random function based only in part on his determination to buy it.
Other than random vs. determined, there's the problem of binary vs. continuous. It's not a question of Joe Schmoe either wanting to buy or not buy Halo. It's a spectrum. Units aren't obvious, so let's just invent a scale called "desire" that ranges from 0 (would just as soon eat brussel sprouts) to 100 (would camp out a week to get the first copy). If Joe Schmoe's car breaks down but he's at 100, he's going to say "damn the repairs, I must have Halo 3!" If Joe Schmoe gets a birth certificate and an xbox 360 but his desire is 0, he's going to opt for some other game, or maybe an HD-DVD attachment a few HD-DVDs instead.
So to talk about it in terms of people who will or won't buy Halo is to rule out the randomness. There is no group of people who will buy Halo, and no group that won't. There is only a population that has various levels of desire from 0 to 100 for Halo 3. The more you can ratchet that desire up, the more of those people who, with varying degrees of interest, will actually purchase Halo 3 when all is said and done.
Your own analysis leaves off both the random and the continuous nature of this system, and thus fails to adequately represent the reality.
I agree. It seems as though he's just gunning to be the next non-fiction super-star like "Blink", "Tipping Point" or "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but he has to completely destroy his credibility to make any substantial claims.
Consider his dismissal of the impact on technology in first world countries:
It is said that we live in a "new economy," yet, of the world's top thirty companies (by revenue), only three are mainly in the business of high tech--General Electric (No. 11), Siemens (No. 22), and I.B.M. (No. 29)--and all three go back more than a century. The heights of the early-twenty-first-century corporate world are still occupied--as they have long been--by petroleum companies (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and B.P., Nos. 1, 3, and 4), retailing (Wal-Mart, No. 2), automobiles (General Motors, No. 5), and finance (I.N.G. and Citigroup, Nos. 13 and 14). No Hewlett-Packard (No. 33); no Microsoft (No. 140); no Merck (No. 289).
First of all, what does the age of a company have to do with the age of the technology it employs? Second of all, how does he imagine that petroleum companies, retailing, automobiles, and finance are not high-tech? We may still be making cars that use internal combustion, but thinks like braking-assist aren't exactly 19th century technology. The financial sector is not the same financial sector that existed before computers (day-trading, anyone?, or how about computer glitches at major stock exchanges? or credit cards?) and even retailing and petroleum make extensive use of modern technology (inventory control, for example, or new methods of exploring for new oil reserves). This entire point seems utterly fallacious.
His treatment of technology in WW2 seems equally questionable:
When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany's V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon's "A screaming comes across the sky." Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project "economically and militarily irrational." One historian wrote that "more people died producing it than died from being hit by it." Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, "the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF." Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, "it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power."
Measuring the impact of bombing in dollars doesn't make sense. The fact that 50 years later we still remember the V-2 rocket shows that it had an impact on the war out of proportion with it's dollar-contribution to destruction. War is not merely a game where you can keep score in terms of dollar value of lost infrastructure - psychology is essential. That is what explains both the attraction of the V2 rocket and the power of the atomic bomb. The fact that it only took one B-29 to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes it a fundamentally more powerful weapon than a fleet of B-29s with a conventional payload. The V2 rocket had much the same goal: to inflict damage upon the enemy at will without parallel risk to your own forces. And really, 5-times more artillery are supposed to be as powerful as an atomic bomb? I don't see the Cold War shaping the next 5-decades of history because American shipped over 500% more howitzers than was strictly necessary and now there's a great arms race between the US and the USSR to see who can point more conventional howitzers at the other.
It seems obvious that Edgerton's goal is to try and incit wonder and amazement whe
I think the viral-marketing aspect of the push may be a bit over-rated. Bungie likes to tell big stories. Look at Marathon. Look at Myst. I think that they would have done I Love Bees (and will probably do Iris) for that reason alone. I Love Bees, for example, included hours of audio drama not in any way necessary to play or understand the ARG. It was a self-contained story that expanded the Halo universe. It provided great back story for Halo 2 (e.g. accounted for the arrival of the Covenant at Earth in the beginning of the game).
I'm not trying to portray Bungie (which I know MS owns) as some kind of artsy philanthropic venture, but I do believe that the culture at Bungie includes not only making games, but telling stories. They tell a pretty good story with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but they clearly enjoy telling that story through ARGs as well. So I'd see the ARG not only as marketing, but as just part of what Bungie does: tell stories.
As far as marketing goes, the point is not to get someone who wouldn't buy the game at all to suddenly buy the game. Whether or not someone picks up Halo 3 is dependent on a variety of factors and a lot of it is random chance. One huge variable will be the number of their friends who are excited about the release. Bungie clearly played to the multiplayer crowd with their multiplayer demo (which was also great for balancing, I suppose). Now they are going after those players who actually care about the story. I'm one. The result will be that the Halo fanbois will be super-excited, and that excitement will spill on down from Halo fanbois to Halo fans, to casual xbox 360 players, to those who don't even own an xbox. I doubt very many of the non-owners will invest in an entire console to play the game, but it should increase the propensity to buy the game all the way down the spectrum.
Whether or not it actually pays for itself, no one will ever know for sure(since it's impossible to tell who would have bought the game with no ARG campaign). But Halo 3 will make more headlines, fanbois will get psyched, Bungie will be yet more endeared to their fans (rep is important in this industry: look at Blizzard) and Bungie will also get to tell more of their story.
It's not like Halo 3 is going to barely break even or something. This one's a no-brainer.
If it said GOOGLE STREET VIEW PICTURE CAM-VAN and wasn't secretive about doing it, it would upset me that much.
I agree that blurring license plates faces may be a good idea, but I can understand why Google doesn't wander around in a van that advertises "Hey! Do something crazy now and you'll be immortalized on Google!" Secrecy is not always a bad thing. Google just wants pictures of the streets as they are. If they advertise what they are doing the would get all kinds of crazies doing crazy/stupid/dangerous stuff.
and invested not only our money but our time working towards a poverty and disease free Africa.
I suggest you take a look at "White Man's Burden" by William Eastery, and possibly "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto, and most certainly this interview of a Kenyan economist by der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
Here's the intro to the interview:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...
Shikwati:... for God's sake, please just stop.
I'm pretty sure if we started sending money and medication to Africa we wouldn't make that many enemies.
Sadly this is not true. Take a look at Somalia. And why is this the case? Because to a great extent American aid (and Western aid in general) bolsters autocratic regimes either directly or indirectly.
The basic premise of Easterly's book is summed up on wikipedia:
In 2006, former World Bank economist William Easterly published The White Man's Burden, an analysis of "why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good". In this book he questioned the 'utopian social engineering' that the development community brings to local communities and plays the idea of the White Man's Burden through current benign intentions (Bill Gates, Bono, Sachs, etc.) ultimately derived from a long history of meddling in others' affairs - that usually goes wrong.
In it Easterly directly links the War in Iraq with African aid as two parallels facets of Western arrogance. We think we can impose political order on Iraq through military power, and we think we can impose economic and social order in Africa through gobs of money. Both cases are complete disasters. The arrogance of the right is met only with the arrogance of the left. Both seek good goals - freedom and stability - but both are doomed not only to failure, but to exacerbate tensions.
Hell send the USACoE over to build some infrastructure (plumbing, power, telephones and maybe even internet) haliburton could even have the contracts. At least we'd be over-paying to do some good. We don't have to blindly throw money at it, that probably will just breed corruption, but if we help elevate EVERY country in Africa in to the 20th (yes I said 20th) century the world would be a much better place.
This is exactly the type of nation-building utopianism that Shikwati claims is ruining his country (Kenya) and ultimately the entire continent. Yeah - send over Haliburton to build up the infrastucture. This is essentially the game plan of western aid for the last 40 years. A "big push" that would in one fell swoop elevate Africa beyond the quagmire of poverty and on the path to economic development. It doesn't work.
If you want to do something that does work, we need to reform Western aid agencies so that they are accountable to the people they are intended to serve (Africans) and not to well-intentioned but clueless Westerners (like Bono). As de Soto argues the poor of the world already have something like 9 trillion in assets that - given legal infrastucture - they could leverage as capital to lift themselves out of poverty. Another good idea is micro-lending. It's also important to keep Milton Friedman's theories in mind: political freedom is inextricably linked to economic freedom which is in turn inextricably linked to prosperity.
I applaud your ideals, but you need to examine the Wests dismal history of failure before you call for more of the same. Billions of dollars in forein aid have not managed to stamp out malaria in 4 decades (DDT would have done the trick if the West hadn't penalized developing nations from using it, but that's another story). In one day we can get Harry Potter book 7 into the hands of every kid in the west who wants one. In 3 or 4
Actually, what irks me the most is the overly-simplistic attitude we have towards civilians casualties at all. The idea that the US doesn't try hard enough strikes me as historically naive. That we try at all makes us practically unique in the history of armed combat.
Furthermore: who says avoiding civilian casualties is always the morally correct course? I think Sherman made a very compelling case for the idea of "total war", a case that was then expanded upon in world war 2 with the intentional bombing of axis population centers in a concious effort to break the will of our enemies.
I'm sorry if you're not the typical "Oh noes!!11 we killz de babiez!!" type. I'm just frustrated at the overall simplistic judgmentalism and double-standard I see applied to US foreign policy. Of course America has made some extremely bad policy decisions, but not every bad outcome is the result of bad decision making, and in a historical context I think America continues to set a high standard. It needs to be improved, I'm just suck of what I see as blind anti-Americanism.
We (the great U.S. of A.) have made plenty of mistakes when it comes to killing civilians.
Errr... could you please note your own use of the word mistakes. There's a key difference, don't you think, between intentionally killing civilians as your goal and not being able to avoid killing any civilians as you pursue some other goal?
It's not like MS and Sony are going to be sitting on their heels for the next 3 years either.
Of course they won't, but if they release a new console in that time-span it would be financial suicide. They lost a tremendous amount of money putting out these new consoles, and they need to recoup those losses before they can repeat the process. It's not for technological reasons but for financal reasons that neither MS nor Sony will come out with a new console in less than 5 years.
By the time Nintendo leapfrogs the PS3 and Xbox360, the PS4 and 720 will have leapfrogged the Nintendo box again, at least if Nintendo intends to keep the price at Wii levels.
If Nintendo just barely leapfrogs the PS3 and Xbox360 - e.g. only slightly outperforms them - then thay can probably roll that system out (I'm totally guessing) in around 2 or 3 years and sell it at Wii prices without taking a loss. Because they will not take a loss, they would be able to release ANOTHER one in 2 or 3 years to re-sync with MS/Sony.
It could be a huge problem to release consoles in such rapid succession, however. So the question is this: Either Nintendo will incrementally improve the Wii (as with GBA and DS) while biding their time for the next round of console wars, or they will release a new console before MS and Sony get a chance and then just fall out of step with MS and Sony. They would get leap-frogged by the 720 and PS4, but if they come out with a new system in 3 or 4 years, they'd have at least another 2 or 3 of dominance before the 720 and PS4 showed up: effectively puting them on a different hardware release schedule.
I think that's possible as well, but I'm wondering if they will be tempted to leap frog the PS3 and 360. That should be possible fairly easily (for cheap) in 3 or 4 years. They have chosen to go for casual first, but I think they will be tempted to pick up more hard-core cred if they can on the cheap.
I'm not going to sleep outside of stores or get raped on ebay just to join in, either.
I just checked every time I walked through Wal-Mart or Target (once or twice a week) and after a couple of trips I picked one up. There were 3 or 4 in the case. I haven't looked as much since then, but I think anyone who takes the trouble to just look around a bit ought to be able to get one. Then again, maybe I just got really, really lucky.
In any case, I am not super-impressed with the titles so far. The Wii Sports game is a lot of fun (tried it out on my non-video gaming parents last weekend, they were hooked) and Super Paper Mario is also a lot of fun. But I'm still not extremely psyched about the titles coming out. (For comparison, I own a 360 as well and my favorite game so far is Call of Duty 2 and I have the legendary edition of Halo 3 (yes - the $125 one) on reserve).
I will say that there's one point to consider: Nintendo is in a much better position to come out with a new system before MS or Sony can. I think we're talking what 5 years? 7? until we see Xbox 720 and PS4. I would be shocked if Nintendo doesn't come out with their own hi-def capable system in 3 or 4.
I'm not disagreeing nor agreeing with your point, just pointing out that the book analogy is a weak one
It depends on the game. Halo I love, so I've beaten it 5 or 6 times. But most FPS games I beat once or twice and that's it. Similarly most books I read once and that's it, but I've read the Lord of the Rings at least 5 or 6 times in my life as well. Civ III, on the other hand, you don't really beat in that sense. So your point is taken.
However unless replay value is really relevant to the discussion, and I don't think it is, the analogy isn't weak. An analogy is strong or weak not on how similar the two concepts are in general, but in relation to the relevant discussion. So you could make an analogy between a pick up truck and a watermelon and have it be a great analogy or a horrible one depending on the similarity you were trying to draw. (OK, I can't think of a good analogy for those particular objects off the top of my head, but you get the idea.)
Dude, calm down.. Its called a first job. He won't be making the same pay the rest of his life.
I'm describing my circumstances in my first job. Not everyone wants to wait many years after college to marry/have kids, and sometimes family circumstances mean you end up with dependents (e.g. elderly parents) no matter what your marital plans.
If you want to live the bachelor life or whatever that's fine. And 30K is probably all you need. But if you're life plan takes you elsewhere, then 30K is likely not enough. That's all I'm saying. The 30K assumes you have nothing significant going in your life, but a lot of people do.
BTW, renting versus owning is no longer such an obvious choice either.
Agreed. I'm not trying to replace one one-size-fits-all life guideline with another. I'm just saying that if you can afford to get into a house and the associated costs are reasonable, it's a great way to start building equity and financial stability earlier on. In general it can be prudent to invest the money in a house earlier, rather than wait until you really outgrow your apartment.
Who is going to loose thousands on a house after 5 years? That makes no sense. I've owned my house for less then 2 and already accrued more than 30K just in value. Not to mention a couple extra grand in equity from payments.
It's incredibly hard to get into your first house, especially early in your career, but doing so gets you a significant boost in financial security if you can do it responsibly.
I notice the actual question has to do with fantasy realities, and that the motivation is making games more accesible. This is analogous to saying "should we stop making fantasy books so that people read more books?" After all, not everyone is for 800-page novels with dozens of characters (often with unpronounceable names) and make-believe politics and geogrpaphy. Not to mention magic and possibly mythical creatures.
So should we stop writing fantasy?
How about we just keep writing fantasy, and also let people interested in straight-fiction just read straight-fiction. We can also have mysteries, educational books, sci-fi, horror, philosophy, etc.
Why criticize a genre to "help" a medium? Computer games are a medium. Fantasy games are a genre in that medium. If there's great response to brain age: make more games like it. There's no more reason to cut fantasy than there would be to cut the fantasy section of a bookstore.
$30K is more than enough to put food on the table in most areas.
If you don't mind literally throwing most of your money away every paycheck (renting vs. owning) don't have a wife and/or kid, and don't have any other dependents/obligations, then sure.
Not everyone is in that circumstance.
If I didn't have those, I would have been rolling in the cash.
You're not exactly into financial planning for your future, are you? Planning on living on social security when you retire, or what? If you look at life like a high schooler, $30K is probably fine. Rent, buy a few video games, eat out, etc. You're spending what you earn. If you're actually interested in having financial security and independence at any point you're going to need to start investing in your future.
And the response is FUD from the security officials. It's not stupid to leak plans like this. It saves actually having to put jamming equipment on the helicopter.
Let me just repeat the point I was trying to make.
Original post I responded to said basicaly "it doesn't matter why linux is safe. It could be intrinsically more secure, it could just be a smaller target. It comes to the same thing."
All I was trying to say was that it does matter why Linux is more secure. If it's intrinsically more secure, then you can rely on it to continue to be safe. If it just happens to be a small target, then the safety will decrease as linux is adopted by the end user. (I take "small target" to refer to clients, not servers, because as a general rule your local sys admin has more security sense than your aunt eddie or your uncle jimbob, so servers are to a greater extent hard targets and the only targets worth talking about are desktops/laptops.)
So I feel like people want me to actually defend the assertion that linux is not inherently more secure and it is just a small target, but I dont' believe that. I think it is more secure, and I think we should take pains to make that case and not merely rely on "who cares why? it just is" as a response.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's not a medium that lends it's self well to stories."
I disagree. People are just doing it wrong. The lure of interactive story-telling has destroyed the potential to tell good stories with the FPS genre. Interactive story-telling, if it ever works, will require either AI or dedicated human game-masters (like D&D). And honestly, how often has D&D even been good story telling?
If the focus was more on good plot development, good dialog, and believable characters we'd be way ahead of where we are. FPS has had way to much emphasis on graphics. That's like having a play where all anyone cares about is the costumes and the sets. And so FPS has some AMAZING costumes and sets. We can get there with the dialog, plot, and characters. We just haven't yet.
Yes, the popular ( read: pre-installed with an OS ) music playing software make it difficult to play Ogg but there are plenty of players around.
.doc file touches his computer. It will give him the cooties, I suppose. That type of extremism smake of religious fanaticism and is a turn off to moderates how may share some of his views.
.ogg player just to hear what the guy has to say. I already have more software odds and ends on my various machines that I would prefer.
Yes. Another piece of software to install. That's what I really want. Look, I'm relatively tech savy. I use XP Pro, Vista, OS X and linux (albeit Ubuntu) on a pretty regular basis. And I've got to tell you that the more experience I have with OSS the less I like Stallman's ideology. I want tech that works. In my experience dealing with OSS can be maddening. Take Asterisk. Great capabilities. Voicemail is incapable of doing the same stuff that our 10-year old propietary system could to. VOICEMAIL. This is not an exotic feature. Most people have heard of it.
I'm aware of the perils of vendor lock in on the other side (in the middle of paying money to extricate our own data from an old Act! database). I just bristle when I see the open and simple world of practical OSS sullied by the antics of idealogues.
I (and many others I suspect) would say he is absolutely not-compromising and this decision is completely in line with Stallman's aims and philosophy and those of the FSF.
"Absolute" is a good word choice there. he's certainly not compromising on his principles. But I think he's putting principles ahead of results: which is the reason we have principles. He wants open format? Great. Release the data in open format. But if he wants to actually spread the message to people who aren't already on board why not make it easy?
It's like he thinks he'll become unclean if a
Not to mention I'm *not* going to go through the trouble of installing an
Stallman's fanaticism is nowhere more perfectly reflected than in his release of the audio in only .ogg format. While legally .ogg is open, what is easier to play? .Ogg or .mp3? If the goal is to allow information to spread - then why not simply allow both formats?
To make a point Stallman seems to be compromising what should be the aims of his own movement - free flow of information and open access.
Does your ER simulator sell well compared to Halo?
Huh? It was never even for sale. I used to do statistical consulting for a medical outsourcing company that staffed ER rooms at hospitals. They asked me to build it for them. It was designed to order for their needs.
My point wasn't "I made a product that sells! Woowee!". It was that I do have some experience in:
1. modeling human behavior
2. modeling complex systems
It was a lack of understanding those two concepts that led to some of the flaws I was criticizing.
Are you in marketing?
No, but I am in the business of predicting human behavior for a living and I have designed large-scale, moderately complex simulations (e.g. of an emergency room in a trauma hospital for use in deciding staffing levels). And I know that looking at marketing as an attempt to take a distinct cohort of people from "won't buy" to "will buy" is the wrong way to look at it. First of all, the actual buy/not buy event should be seen as the result of random experiment. There are some inputs that can be influenced, but many that are random. Take Joe Schmoe. Halo comes out in September. What is the chance his car breaks down the same month and he's out of cash? What are the chances its his birthday and he gets a gift certificate to Best Buy? The point is that whether or not Joe Schmoe buys Halo 3 is *not* a deterministic function based on his desire to buy it, but a random function based only in part on his determination to buy it.
Other than random vs. determined, there's the problem of binary vs. continuous. It's not a question of Joe Schmoe either wanting to buy or not buy Halo. It's a spectrum. Units aren't obvious, so let's just invent a scale called "desire" that ranges from 0 (would just as soon eat brussel sprouts) to 100 (would camp out a week to get the first copy). If Joe Schmoe's car breaks down but he's at 100, he's going to say "damn the repairs, I must have Halo 3!" If Joe Schmoe gets a birth certificate and an xbox 360 but his desire is 0, he's going to opt for some other game, or maybe an HD-DVD attachment a few HD-DVDs instead.
So to talk about it in terms of people who will or won't buy Halo is to rule out the randomness. There is no group of people who will buy Halo, and no group that won't. There is only a population that has various levels of desire from 0 to 100 for Halo 3. The more you can ratchet that desire up, the more of those people who, with varying degrees of interest, will actually purchase Halo 3 when all is said and done.
Your own analysis leaves off both the random and the continuous nature of this system, and thus fails to adequately represent the reality.
Basically, I think he's full of it.
I agree. It seems as though he's just gunning to be the next non-fiction super-star like "Blink", "Tipping Point" or "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but he has to completely destroy his credibility to make any substantial claims.
Consider his dismissal of the impact on technology in first world countries:
It is said that we live in a "new economy," yet, of the world's top thirty companies (by revenue), only three are mainly in the business of high tech--General Electric (No. 11), Siemens (No. 22), and I.B.M. (No. 29)--and all three go back more than a century. The heights of the early-twenty-first-century corporate world are still occupied--as they have long been--by petroleum companies (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and B.P., Nos. 1, 3, and 4), retailing (Wal-Mart, No. 2), automobiles (General Motors, No. 5), and finance (I.N.G. and Citigroup, Nos. 13 and 14). No Hewlett-Packard (No. 33); no Microsoft (No. 140); no Merck (No. 289).
First of all, what does the age of a company have to do with the age of the technology it employs? Second of all, how does he imagine that petroleum companies, retailing, automobiles, and finance are not high-tech? We may still be making cars that use internal combustion, but thinks like braking-assist aren't exactly 19th century technology. The financial sector is not the same financial sector that existed before computers (day-trading, anyone?, or how about computer glitches at major stock exchanges? or credit cards?) and even retailing and petroleum make extensive use of modern technology (inventory control, for example, or new methods of exploring for new oil reserves). This entire point seems utterly fallacious.
His treatment of technology in WW2 seems equally questionable:
When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany's V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon's "A screaming comes across the sky." Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project "economically and militarily irrational." One historian wrote that "more people died producing it than died from being hit by it." Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, "the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF." Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, "it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power."
Measuring the impact of bombing in dollars doesn't make sense. The fact that 50 years later we still remember the V-2 rocket shows that it had an impact on the war out of proportion with it's dollar-contribution to destruction. War is not merely a game where you can keep score in terms of dollar value of lost infrastructure - psychology is essential. That is what explains both the attraction of the V2 rocket and the power of the atomic bomb. The fact that it only took one B-29 to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes it a fundamentally more powerful weapon than a fleet of B-29s with a conventional payload. The V2 rocket had much the same goal: to inflict damage upon the enemy at will without parallel risk to your own forces. And really, 5-times more artillery are supposed to be as powerful as an atomic bomb? I don't see the Cold War shaping the next 5-decades of history because American shipped over 500% more howitzers than was strictly necessary and now there's a great arms race between the US and the USSR to see who can point more conventional howitzers at the other.
It seems obvious that Edgerton's goal is to try and incit wonder and amazement whe
I think the viral-marketing aspect of the push may be a bit over-rated. Bungie likes to tell big stories. Look at Marathon. Look at Myst. I think that they would have done I Love Bees (and will probably do Iris) for that reason alone. I Love Bees, for example, included hours of audio drama not in any way necessary to play or understand the ARG. It was a self-contained story that expanded the Halo universe. It provided great back story for Halo 2 (e.g. accounted for the arrival of the Covenant at Earth in the beginning of the game).
I'm not trying to portray Bungie (which I know MS owns) as some kind of artsy philanthropic venture, but I do believe that the culture at Bungie includes not only making games, but telling stories. They tell a pretty good story with Halo 1 and Halo 2, but they clearly enjoy telling that story through ARGs as well. So I'd see the ARG not only as marketing, but as just part of what Bungie does: tell stories.
As far as marketing goes, the point is not to get someone who wouldn't buy the game at all to suddenly buy the game. Whether or not someone picks up Halo 3 is dependent on a variety of factors and a lot of it is random chance. One huge variable will be the number of their friends who are excited about the release. Bungie clearly played to the multiplayer crowd with their multiplayer demo (which was also great for balancing, I suppose). Now they are going after those players who actually care about the story. I'm one. The result will be that the Halo fanbois will be super-excited, and that excitement will spill on down from Halo fanbois to Halo fans, to casual xbox 360 players, to those who don't even own an xbox. I doubt very many of the non-owners will invest in an entire console to play the game, but it should increase the propensity to buy the game all the way down the spectrum.
Whether or not it actually pays for itself, no one will ever know for sure(since it's impossible to tell who would have bought the game with no ARG campaign). But Halo 3 will make more headlines, fanbois will get psyched, Bungie will be yet more endeared to their fans (rep is important in this industry: look at Blizzard) and Bungie will also get to tell more of their story.
It's not like Halo 3 is going to barely break even or something. This one's a no-brainer.
If it said GOOGLE STREET VIEW PICTURE CAM-VAN and wasn't secretive about doing it, it would upset me that much.
I agree that blurring license plates faces may be a good idea, but I can understand why Google doesn't wander around in a van that advertises "Hey! Do something crazy now and you'll be immortalized on Google!" Secrecy is not always a bad thing. Google just wants pictures of the streets as they are. If they advertise what they are doing the would get all kinds of crazies doing crazy/stupid/dangerous stuff.
You could have just pointed out that 775 computers isn't a lot for Brazil, China, etc. Especially sharing between them.
Guess you were too busy frist pwnsting to get the actual typo in there, eh?
and invested not only our money but our time working towards a poverty and disease free Africa.
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... for God's sake, please just stop.
I suggest you take a look at "White Man's Burden" by William Eastery, and possibly "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto, and most certainly this interview of a Kenyan economist by der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518
Here's the intro to the interview:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...
Shikwati:
I'm pretty sure if we started sending money and medication to Africa we wouldn't make that many enemies.
Sadly this is not true. Take a look at Somalia. And why is this the case? Because to a great extent American aid (and Western aid in general) bolsters autocratic regimes either directly or indirectly.
The basic premise of Easterly's book is summed up on wikipedia:
In 2006, former World Bank economist William Easterly published The White Man's Burden, an analysis of "why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good". In this book he questioned the 'utopian social engineering' that the development community brings to local communities and plays the idea of the White Man's Burden through current benign intentions (Bill Gates, Bono, Sachs, etc.) ultimately derived from a long history of meddling in others' affairs - that usually goes wrong.
In it Easterly directly links the War in Iraq with African aid as two parallels facets of Western arrogance. We think we can impose political order on Iraq through military power, and we think we can impose economic and social order in Africa through gobs of money. Both cases are complete disasters. The arrogance of the right is met only with the arrogance of the left. Both seek good goals - freedom and stability - but both are doomed not only to failure, but to exacerbate tensions.
Hell send the USACoE over to build some infrastructure (plumbing, power, telephones and maybe even internet) haliburton could even have the contracts. At least we'd be over-paying to do some good. We don't have to blindly throw money at it, that probably will just breed corruption, but if we help elevate EVERY country in Africa in to the 20th (yes I said 20th) century the world would be a much better place.
This is exactly the type of nation-building utopianism that Shikwati claims is ruining his country (Kenya) and ultimately the entire continent. Yeah - send over Haliburton to build up the infrastucture. This is essentially the game plan of western aid for the last 40 years. A "big push" that would in one fell swoop elevate Africa beyond the quagmire of poverty and on the path to economic development. It doesn't work.
If you want to do something that does work, we need to reform Western aid agencies so that they are accountable to the people they are intended to serve (Africans) and not to well-intentioned but clueless Westerners (like Bono). As de Soto argues the poor of the world already have something like 9 trillion in assets that - given legal infrastucture - they could leverage as capital to lift themselves out of poverty. Another good idea is micro-lending. It's also important to keep Milton Friedman's theories in mind: political freedom is inextricably linked to economic freedom which is in turn inextricably linked to prosperity.
I applaud your ideals, but you need to examine the Wests dismal history of failure before you call for more of the same. Billions of dollars in forein aid have not managed to stamp out malaria in 4 decades (DDT would have done the trick if the West hadn't penalized developing nations from using it, but that's another story). In one day we can get Harry Potter book 7 into the hands of every kid in the west who wants one. In 3 or 4
Actually, what irks me the most is the overly-simplistic attitude we have towards civilians casualties at all. The idea that the US doesn't try hard enough strikes me as historically naive. That we try at all makes us practically unique in the history of armed combat.
Furthermore: who says avoiding civilian casualties is always the morally correct course? I think Sherman made a very compelling case for the idea of "total war", a case that was then expanded upon in world war 2 with the intentional bombing of axis population centers in a concious effort to break the will of our enemies.
I'm sorry if you're not the typical "Oh noes!!11 we killz de babiez!!" type. I'm just frustrated at the overall simplistic judgmentalism and double-standard I see applied to US foreign policy. Of course America has made some extremely bad policy decisions, but not every bad outcome is the result of bad decision making, and in a historical context I think America continues to set a high standard. It needs to be improved, I'm just suck of what I see as blind anti-Americanism.
Apologies if that shoe doesn't fit you.
We (the great U.S. of A.) have made plenty of mistakes when it comes to killing civilians.
Errr... could you please note your own use of the word mistakes. There's a key difference, don't you think, between intentionally killing civilians as your goal and not being able to avoid killing any civilians as you pursue some other goal?
It's not like MS and Sony are going to be sitting on their heels for the next 3 years either.
Of course they won't, but if they release a new console in that time-span it would be financial suicide. They lost a tremendous amount of money putting out these new consoles, and they need to recoup those losses before they can repeat the process. It's not for technological reasons but for financal reasons that neither MS nor Sony will come out with a new console in less than 5 years.
By the time Nintendo leapfrogs the PS3 and Xbox360, the PS4 and 720 will have leapfrogged the Nintendo box again, at least if Nintendo intends to keep the price at Wii levels.
If Nintendo just barely leapfrogs the PS3 and Xbox360 - e.g. only slightly outperforms them - then thay can probably roll that system out (I'm totally guessing) in around 2 or 3 years and sell it at Wii prices without taking a loss. Because they will not take a loss, they would be able to release ANOTHER one in 2 or 3 years to re-sync with MS/Sony.
It could be a huge problem to release consoles in such rapid succession, however. So the question is this: Either Nintendo will incrementally improve the Wii (as with GBA and DS) while biding their time for the next round of console wars, or they will release a new console before MS and Sony get a chance and then just fall out of step with MS and Sony. They would get leap-frogged by the 720 and PS4, but if they come out with a new system in 3 or 4 years, they'd have at least another 2 or 3 of dominance before the 720 and PS4 showed up: effectively puting them on a different hardware release schedule.
I think that's possible as well, but I'm wondering if they will be tempted to leap frog the PS3 and 360. That should be possible fairly easily (for cheap) in 3 or 4 years. They have chosen to go for casual first, but I think they will be tempted to pick up more hard-core cred if they can on the cheap.
I'm not going to sleep outside of stores or get raped on ebay just to join in, either.
I just checked every time I walked through Wal-Mart or Target (once or twice a week) and after a couple of trips I picked one up. There were 3 or 4 in the case. I haven't looked as much since then, but I think anyone who takes the trouble to just look around a bit ought to be able to get one. Then again, maybe I just got really, really lucky.
In any case, I am not super-impressed with the titles so far. The Wii Sports game is a lot of fun (tried it out on my non-video gaming parents last weekend, they were hooked) and Super Paper Mario is also a lot of fun. But I'm still not extremely psyched about the titles coming out. (For comparison, I own a 360 as well and my favorite game so far is Call of Duty 2 and I have the legendary edition of Halo 3 (yes - the $125 one) on reserve).
I will say that there's one point to consider: Nintendo is in a much better position to come out with a new system before MS or Sony can. I think we're talking what 5 years? 7? until we see Xbox 720 and PS4. I would be shocked if Nintendo doesn't come out with their own hi-def capable system in 3 or 4.
I have a 40 gig OEM drive on this machine that I've had since 2003, and I still haven't approached the half way mark.
And you're obviously not storing any substantial media. I have more then 40GB just of MP3s.
I'm not disagreeing nor agreeing with your point, just pointing out that the book analogy is a weak one
It depends on the game. Halo I love, so I've beaten it 5 or 6 times. But most FPS games I beat once or twice and that's it. Similarly most books I read once and that's it, but I've read the Lord of the Rings at least 5 or 6 times in my life as well. Civ III, on the other hand, you don't really beat in that sense. So your point is taken.
However unless replay value is really relevant to the discussion, and I don't think it is, the analogy isn't weak. An analogy is strong or weak not on how similar the two concepts are in general, but in relation to the relevant discussion. So you could make an analogy between a pick up truck and a watermelon and have it be a great analogy or a horrible one depending on the similarity you were trying to draw. (OK, I can't think of a good analogy for those particular objects off the top of my head, but you get the idea.)
Dude, calm down.. Its called a first job. He won't be making the same pay the rest of his life.
I'm describing my circumstances in my first job. Not everyone wants to wait many years after college to marry/have kids, and sometimes family circumstances mean you end up with dependents (e.g. elderly parents) no matter what your marital plans.
If you want to live the bachelor life or whatever that's fine. And 30K is probably all you need. But if you're life plan takes you elsewhere, then 30K is likely not enough. That's all I'm saying. The 30K assumes you have nothing significant going in your life, but a lot of people do.
BTW, renting versus owning is no longer such an obvious choice either.
Agreed. I'm not trying to replace one one-size-fits-all life guideline with another. I'm just saying that if you can afford to get into a house and the associated costs are reasonable, it's a great way to start building equity and financial stability earlier on. In general it can be prudent to invest the money in a house earlier, rather than wait until you really outgrow your apartment.
Who is going to loose thousands on a house after 5 years? That makes no sense. I've owned my house for less then 2 and already accrued more than 30K just in value. Not to mention a couple extra grand in equity from payments.
It's incredibly hard to get into your first house, especially early in your career, but doing so gets you a significant boost in financial security if you can do it responsibly.
I notice the actual question has to do with fantasy realities, and that the motivation is making games more accesible. This is analogous to saying "should we stop making fantasy books so that people read more books?" After all, not everyone is for 800-page novels with dozens of characters (often with unpronounceable names) and make-believe politics and geogrpaphy. Not to mention magic and possibly mythical creatures.
So should we stop writing fantasy?
How about we just keep writing fantasy, and also let people interested in straight-fiction just read straight-fiction. We can also have mysteries, educational books, sci-fi, horror, philosophy, etc.
Why criticize a genre to "help" a medium? Computer games are a medium. Fantasy games are a genre in that medium. If there's great response to brain age: make more games like it. There's no more reason to cut fantasy than there would be to cut the fantasy section of a bookstore.
$30K is more than enough to put food on the table in most areas.
If you don't mind literally throwing most of your money away every paycheck (renting vs. owning) don't have a wife and/or kid, and don't have any other dependents/obligations, then sure.
Not everyone is in that circumstance.
If I didn't have those, I would have been rolling in the cash.
You're not exactly into financial planning for your future, are you? Planning on living on social security when you retire, or what? If you look at life like a high schooler, $30K is probably fine. Rent, buy a few video games, eat out, etc. You're spending what you earn. If you're actually interested in having financial security and independence at any point you're going to need to start investing in your future.
It was.... .... a joke.
And the response is FUD from the security officials. It's not stupid to leak plans like this. It saves actually having to put jamming equipment on the helicopter.
Awe, come on, what's Slashdot without a little partisan flamewar on at least a weekly basis.
What we really need is a story about how not enough girls in engineering contributes to global warming.
Let me just repeat the point I was trying to make.
Original post I responded to said basicaly "it doesn't matter why linux is safe. It could be intrinsically more secure, it could just be a smaller target. It comes to the same thing."
All I was trying to say was that it does matter why Linux is more secure. If it's intrinsically more secure, then you can rely on it to continue to be safe. If it just happens to be a small target, then the safety will decrease as linux is adopted by the end user. (I take "small target" to refer to clients, not servers, because as a general rule your local sys admin has more security sense than your aunt eddie or your uncle jimbob, so servers are to a greater extent hard targets and the only targets worth talking about are desktops/laptops.)
So I feel like people want me to actually defend the assertion that linux is not inherently more secure and it is just a small target, but I dont' believe that. I think it is more secure, and I think we should take pains to make that case and not merely rely on "who cares why? it just is" as a response.