That really is a pretty good MMO idea. Two factions in a game: one tries to run around and commit as many crimes as possible, the other tries to stop them however possible.
You could get more complex than that. The "good guys" could be composed of a loose organization, rather than just one group (ala CoH). Some could choose to use detective work, to wear light armor and carry a little revolver since they're probably not going to get shot at very often. These guys are PIs, and they catch their criminal PCs with the intent of jailing them. Another group of good guys could be Judge Dredd-type vigilantes, who get more heavily penalized than the PIs if they arrest criminals without a rap sheet (and even more heavily so if they kill them) because they have more freedom to do so.
Someone would, of course, get the idea that the criminal's game is more to rack up crime points than to outwit the PIs and outshoot the vigiliantes, so you'd have problems with good guy characters being attacked on the server level and crap, but maybe not more so than in other PvP MMOs. Of course, the Children's Crusaders (Protect the Children! is their war cry) would hate it, and would say that you could plot real crimes using the game as an engine. Well, you sure could, and you'd end up with plans that include calling in a stolen Osprey helicopter to hold off Judge Fredd.
Doctors get paid the big bucks because they know the secret of leading the cells before they shoot rockets--I mean, laser spots.
The real question is this: will researchers soon be able to join a different research group if they can't get a good ping to the one they're working with at the moment? It's an important issue for many reasons. Nothing's worse than some 14 year old scientist getting into your research group and spamming crap like "LOL Nd:YAG? more liek Nd:FAG!!!"
I can't wait until companies stop the pretense and just say, "You can support (whatever) by just complying with whatever unreasonable demand we can foist on you via the law." It'll happen. Before it does, someone better write a book about it so we cal all laugh and comment on how unlikely it is that'll ever actually happen.
Damn skippy! Down with reading. I say that on the front of the box, we need graphic and detailed images of exactly what kind of nudity, violence, and animal molestation we can expect from a video game!
(No, really. Maybe if you put a picture of a faceless guy in a leather jacket splitting a prostitute's skull with a golf club on the front of a GTA box, parents will finally realize that the game _contains violence._)
I'd like to see a press release touting nothing more than a game's "amazing, breathtaking plot and involving, even charming characters!" that turns out to be a tech demo for a novel, rather than a movie showing how much more realistic is the shine in some nameless girl's eye.
Maybe instead of graphics engines and physics engines, developers should focus on generating some kind of "plot engine."
This is just another way direction in which game budgets are inflating, pushing out smaller developers/publishers/etc. who can't afford huge music budgets and the detailed development of thousand gigabyte player meshes.
I don't know what it's called, but I'm sure there's some clever and elegant phrase to describe seeing more of a certain event or object because you've become involved with it somehow--like buying a new Honda, and then suddenly noticing all the other Hondas on the road. I've seen that here with the gaming section. Before I registered and started looking more often at the headlines, I didn't see so many posts about gaming as I do now. I suspect this is because I've started looking for these posts now, rather than there simply being more gaming news than before.
Anyway, my point is that the gaming news items always seem to have fewer posts than other items, except when they touch on Slashdot hot-buttons like censorship and inter-platform performance. I don't know if that's because people are becoming bored with all the gaming news, if gaming news is less interesting, or if there's just not so much for the gamer nerds here to add to these articles.
One critical direction for games at this point is the multiplayer bent. You don't really _get to have_ any character development there. I shouldn't even have to get into multiplayer FPS-es, where your character development is limited to a two-sentence blurb in the game's manual that nobody reads.
Co-op doesn't count, because I can't think of a game that's substantially different in the storyline when you have more than one player working towards the goal--I mean, basically where you play an entirely/substantially different story based on the number of people in your "party." Wait, there was that co-op themed Half-Life game, which I think was for a console. Unfortunately, I haven't played that one, and it's more of a tangentially-related plot than a real digression of the standard plot. Can you imagine what Half-Life would've been like if you could play through with one OR two scientists? What if one of the two was female? What if Gordon fell in love with her, even though she's played by your pasty white room mate? How would HL2 be differnent if Valve had to deal with two different scenarios: one where Gordon escapes alone, and one where he escapes with a lover?
Let's discuss MMOs (and by that I mean I'm going to talk at you about it now). There's a delicate balance in multiplayer games--specifically MMOs--when it comes to the player. Since _everyone_ in an MMO usually gets a chance to complete a quest, you can't do much to tailor the enounter (usually between NPC and players) without leaving some groups of players out--you can't give seven dialog options for every encounter in the game if you want to complete it in a reasonable amount of time (what EA considers reasonable). If you force the PC to say anything at all, you're branding that character with that reaction, so unless it's totally generic you ruin any role-playing the player might happen to be trying to enact--it's not likely that the people playing characters such as Sefiroth and xXSePHIROthXx and SeFiR0f are trying to role play, but maybe once in a while you'll find someone who cares about that little-seen but important MMO aspect. It's important to them, at least. However, if you don't have any tailoring, then there's little to no real interaction in the encounter--and I don't mean between player and NPC, I mean between PC and NPC. The encounter is hollow, like listening to an answering machine message.
In many MMOs, I think this point is moot anyhow. Most players play MMOs for the social environment, and so the NPCs are generic, and the PCs provide the interaction. But that comes at the cost of a substantial plot: unless your players are heavily into role-playing, it's hard to support a plot driven by the characters. If the plot is driven by the hollow NPCs, you come to the problems mentioned above, where the whole world rests on the shoulders of a king with as much in-game dialog as one of those "Welcome to Corneria!" guards.
The industry is producing many games that are solely online (think Enemy Territory 2), and many that have interesting settings with very little story (you see very elaborate character designs and settings in some Korean MMOs and Multiplayer FPS-es with almost zero backstory in-game), so I suppose that these lessons, sadly, apply more to single-player games, your Metroids and your Halos. I would love to see a game with a mutable story based on the number of people playing. Imagine a game that offered one of the players the chance to backstab the others and take a completely different story line. Imagine the final battle of that game, where the Good guys have to fight their Evil Overlord room mate, who not only betrayed them but took the last Dr. Pepper. That would be one for the gaming history books.
I've played FF games since the first one on the Nintendo, and I fondly remember many of those characters. Some I remember for having interesting stories (Freya Crescent, for one, underdeveloped as she was), some I remember for just being interesting for other reasons (the Psycho Cyan bug!)--
Well, we also had MC Kids for the NES (which wasn't half bad), and some game about Cheetos for the SNES... Chester Cheetah?
Those aside, I can't remember any other glaring examples offhand. I like to think that sort of thing died with the early 90's. Maybe you can count some sports games and that sort of thing in there since they're basically _made_ so that you're simulating playing football with actual players, driving real cars, etc. The people who buy those games, though, don't need to see NFL or McLaren (or whatever) ads--they're suffused with the former, and can't afford the latter. You could only succeed with this sort of ad cum game by pitching it to people who can afford it--sell popular junk food and junk TV to teens who're too brain-dead to realize they're not actually playing one big ad, but are doing so in essence. Throw it on top of the piles of ads in the uninspired TV they watch, the vapid magazines they read, the movies they watch at the theater; all the nonsense that people who don't buy crap because they saw it in between Big Brother and the nightly news put up with on an increasing basis.
I'm off-subject. Unless they come to dominate the genre, I'm not afraid of entire games devoted to promoting a product in this day and age. I'm afraid of the subtle infiltration of ads into other games, that I'll have to sit through three minutes of commercials while FFMCMXLI loads, or click through Sony ads whenever I die in Counter-Strike: Substance, or dine in GTA4 at Taco Bell. I don't want to see real-life ads in my video games, because I don't play video games to emulate real life. I don't want to play as cheeky pop-culture caricature Bingo Protagonist, siding with McDonald's or Burger King in between missions. I'd love to see more clever spoofs of real-world ads and corporations as much as I'd hate for the industry to be infiltrated by actual corporate advertising.
An Eldrich Gun-Fu Shotgun Dancer healing with a can of Sprunk could even be funny, under the right conditions.
While I'm at it: we've been seeing product placement in movies for years. Does that mean we don't see as many movies set in 3000 AD or 3000 BC because of lucre?
No. Greed makes us have to sit through a quarter hour of ads (more if you arrive early) before the previews if we'd like to see a movie in a theater. Why can't they plaster game boxes with ads and package sixty little fliers in with the games? Although I guess what I'm suggesting is more along the lines of adding fifteen minutes of ads before the unskippable "EA GAMES OWNS YOU" and "NVIDIA THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY ON YOUR ATI BOX" segue videos we have to put up with today. That's a scary thought, too.
This was _three years ago._ Are we through fighting this spectre, or are we in for the second round? Why didn't EA keep up with this sort of thing? _EA_ of all people/companies.
That's a pretty disturbing thought. If the ads are germane to the setting of the game--I support that idea, at least, since I don't want my lv. 97 Superlative Love Ninja to heal up by drinking Sprite--then that'll prompt game creators (or maybe I should say publishers and developers) to set more games in modern/semi-future times in order to make more money.
We'll see more Madden NFL games and fewer Fallouts. More GTA knockoffs (and not Vice City, either) and fewer Final Fantasy knockoffs. More Counterstrikes and fewer HL2s.
From what I understand, the imperfections are _everywhere_ over the document. I guess they'd do their little speckle-counting thing over six or ten different square inches (or centimeters, or whatever) of the document, and then folding doesn't matter. Besides, if the surface profile can survive scorching and abrasion, I think folding might not be a huge deal, and pressing certainly not.
I've worked with speckle-based systems, and I'm skeptical about this, since there's a _lot_ of variance when you're dealing with laser speckle. I don't really know how their imaging system could quickly and efficiently discriminate between hundreds of little dots, average their sizes, statistics, etc.
Any OE-s around that specialize in speckle to clear this up?
Well, when this McCarthy went after what should've been his Army, this Army basically just shrugged and called him a hack, and then this hack went on with his baseless accusations.
Why didn't EA sue this guy for libel, or slander, or just for being Jack Thompson? I mean, it'd be a _popular_ decision, for once, by putting this shameful and stupid saga to an end--it's not like they'd have to scrape together the lawyer's fees. Would EA and other developers _want_ the hassle of dealing with a stronger, more buraucratic, government-run software ratings board? IANAL, so can I get one to guess at this?
Maybe at that time we still weren't sure if the bombs would ignite the atmosphere... dropping it in hilly terrain would help limit the effects if it proved more powerful than we thought, whereas dropping it over a body of water would vaporize a hell of a lot of seawater.
A mere century ago, the usual age for marraige in most cultures was 12 to 16. Can you explain to me what has changed from that time, besides the views of society?
Hate to nitpick, but I imagine that it's safer for a fully-developed (but less than over-the-hill) woman to have children than for a still-developing girl. Probably goes both for parent and child. Figuring that out might've changed things--I don't know.
Ah, the proud tradition of the American 2-party Happy Time Switchup. Democrats become Republicans, Republicans become Crazy, and, as always, the people lose in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
That really is a pretty good MMO idea. Two factions in a game: one tries to run around and commit as many crimes as possible, the other tries to stop them however possible.
You could get more complex than that. The "good guys" could be composed of a loose organization, rather than just one group (ala CoH). Some could choose to use detective work, to wear light armor and carry a little revolver since they're probably not going to get shot at very often. These guys are PIs, and they catch their criminal PCs with the intent of jailing them. Another group of good guys could be Judge Dredd-type vigilantes, who get more heavily penalized than the PIs if they arrest criminals without a rap sheet (and even more heavily so if they kill them) because they have more freedom to do so.
Someone would, of course, get the idea that the criminal's game is more to rack up crime points than to outwit the PIs and outshoot the vigiliantes, so you'd have problems with good guy characters being attacked on the server level and crap, but maybe not more so than in other PvP MMOs. Of course, the Children's Crusaders (Protect the Children! is their war cry) would hate it, and would say that you could plot real crimes using the game as an engine. Well, you sure could, and you'd end up with plans that include calling in a stolen Osprey helicopter to hold off Judge Fredd.
Doctors get paid the big bucks because they know the secret of leading the cells before they shoot rockets--I mean, laser spots.
The real question is this: will researchers soon be able to join a different research group if they can't get a good ping to the one they're working with at the moment? It's an important issue for many reasons. Nothing's worse than some 14 year old scientist getting into your research group and spamming crap like "LOL Nd:YAG? more liek Nd:FAG!!!"
I can't wait until companies stop the pretense and just say, "You can support (whatever) by just complying with whatever unreasonable demand we can foist on you via the law." It'll happen. Before it does, someone better write a book about it so we cal all laugh and comment on how unlikely it is that'll ever actually happen.
parent doubleletter ungood indic possible twitch possible crimethink, reread antecomment.
(Remember: Any deviation, no matter how slight, may indicate a thought criminal. I'm not a petty grammar Nazi, I'm watching your back!)
Every time I try that, it just starts fires.
Technically, I guess burning down the problem is like of solving it.
Damn skippy! Down with reading. I say that on the front of the box, we need graphic and detailed images of exactly what kind of nudity, violence, and animal molestation we can expect from a video game!
(No, really. Maybe if you put a picture of a faceless guy in a leather jacket splitting a prostitute's skull with a golf club on the front of a GTA box, parents will finally realize that the game _contains violence._)
"There are various good technical reasons to include clandestine data within a game, such as ... laziness"
Wow.
I'd like to see a press release touting nothing more than a game's "amazing, breathtaking plot and involving, even charming characters!" that turns out to be a tech demo for a novel, rather than a movie showing how much more realistic is the shine in some nameless girl's eye. Maybe instead of graphics engines and physics engines, developers should focus on generating some kind of "plot engine."
This is just another way direction in which game budgets are inflating, pushing out smaller developers/publishers/etc. who can't afford huge music budgets and the detailed development of thousand gigabyte player meshes.
I don't know what it's called, but I'm sure there's some clever and elegant phrase to describe seeing more of a certain event or object because you've become involved with it somehow--like buying a new Honda, and then suddenly noticing all the other Hondas on the road. I've seen that here with the gaming section. Before I registered and started looking more often at the headlines, I didn't see so many posts about gaming as I do now. I suspect this is because I've started looking for these posts now, rather than there simply being more gaming news than before.
Anyway, my point is that the gaming news items always seem to have fewer posts than other items, except when they touch on Slashdot hot-buttons like censorship and inter-platform performance. I don't know if that's because people are becoming bored with all the gaming news, if gaming news is less interesting, or if there's just not so much for the gamer nerds here to add to these articles.
One critical direction for games at this point is the multiplayer bent. You don't really _get to have_ any character development there. I shouldn't even have to get into multiplayer FPS-es, where your character development is limited to a two-sentence blurb in the game's manual that nobody reads.
Co-op doesn't count, because I can't think of a game that's substantially different in the storyline when you have more than one player working towards the goal--I mean, basically where you play an entirely/substantially different story based on the number of people in your "party." Wait, there was that co-op themed Half-Life game, which I think was for a console. Unfortunately, I haven't played that one, and it's more of a tangentially-related plot than a real digression of the standard plot. Can you imagine what Half-Life would've been like if you could play through with one OR two scientists? What if one of the two was female? What if Gordon fell in love with her, even though she's played by your pasty white room mate? How would HL2 be differnent if Valve had to deal with two different scenarios: one where Gordon escapes alone, and one where he escapes with a lover?
Let's discuss MMOs (and by that I mean I'm going to talk at you about it now). There's a delicate balance in multiplayer games--specifically MMOs--when it comes to the player. Since _everyone_ in an MMO usually gets a chance to complete a quest, you can't do much to tailor the enounter (usually between NPC and players) without leaving some groups of players out--you can't give seven dialog options for every encounter in the game if you want to complete it in a reasonable amount of time (what EA considers reasonable). If you force the PC to say anything at all, you're branding that character with that reaction, so unless it's totally generic you ruin any role-playing the player might happen to be trying to enact--it's not likely that the people playing characters such as Sefiroth and xXSePHIROthXx and SeFiR0f are trying to role play, but maybe once in a while you'll find someone who cares about that little-seen but important MMO aspect. It's important to them, at least. However, if you don't have any tailoring, then there's little to no real interaction in the encounter--and I don't mean between player and NPC, I mean between PC and NPC. The encounter is hollow, like listening to an answering machine message.
In many MMOs, I think this point is moot anyhow. Most players play MMOs for the social environment, and so the NPCs are generic, and the PCs provide the interaction. But that comes at the cost of a substantial plot: unless your players are heavily into role-playing, it's hard to support a plot driven by the characters. If the plot is driven by the hollow NPCs, you come to the problems mentioned above, where the whole world rests on the shoulders of a king with as much in-game dialog as one of those "Welcome to Corneria!" guards.
The industry is producing many games that are solely online (think Enemy Territory 2), and many that have interesting settings with very little story (you see very elaborate character designs and settings in some Korean MMOs and Multiplayer FPS-es with almost zero backstory in-game), so I suppose that these lessons, sadly, apply more to single-player games, your Metroids and your Halos. I would love to see a game with a mutable story based on the number of people playing. Imagine a game that offered one of the players the chance to backstab the others and take a completely different story line. Imagine the final battle of that game, where the Good guys have to fight their Evil Overlord room mate, who not only betrayed them but took the last Dr. Pepper. That would be one for the gaming history books.
I've played FF games since the first one on the Nintendo, and I fondly remember many of those characters. Some I remember for having interesting stories (Freya Crescent, for one, underdeveloped as she was), some I remember for just being interesting for other reasons (the Psycho Cyan bug!)--
Well, we also had MC Kids for the NES (which wasn't half bad), and some game about Cheetos for the SNES... Chester Cheetah?
Those aside, I can't remember any other glaring examples offhand. I like to think that sort of thing died with the early 90's. Maybe you can count some sports games and that sort of thing in there since they're basically _made_ so that you're simulating playing football with actual players, driving real cars, etc. The people who buy those games, though, don't need to see NFL or McLaren (or whatever) ads--they're suffused with the former, and can't afford the latter. You could only succeed with this sort of ad cum game by pitching it to people who can afford it--sell popular junk food and junk TV to teens who're too brain-dead to realize they're not actually playing one big ad, but are doing so in essence. Throw it on top of the piles of ads in the uninspired TV they watch, the vapid magazines they read, the movies they watch at the theater; all the nonsense that people who don't buy crap because they saw it in between Big Brother and the nightly news put up with on an increasing basis.
I'm off-subject. Unless they come to dominate the genre, I'm not afraid of entire games devoted to promoting a product in this day and age. I'm afraid of the subtle infiltration of ads into other games, that I'll have to sit through three minutes of commercials while FFMCMXLI loads, or click through Sony ads whenever I die in Counter-Strike: Substance, or dine in GTA4 at Taco Bell. I don't want to see real-life ads in my video games, because I don't play video games to emulate real life. I don't want to play as cheeky pop-culture caricature Bingo Protagonist, siding with McDonald's or Burger King in between missions. I'd love to see more clever spoofs of real-world ads and corporations as much as I'd hate for the industry to be infiltrated by actual corporate advertising.
An Eldrich Gun-Fu Shotgun Dancer healing with a can of Sprunk could even be funny, under the right conditions.
While I'm at it: we've been seeing product placement in movies for years. Does that mean we don't see as many movies set in 3000 AD or 3000 BC because of lucre?
No. Greed makes us have to sit through a quarter hour of ads (more if you arrive early) before the previews if we'd like to see a movie in a theater. Why can't they plaster game boxes with ads and package sixty little fliers in with the games? Although I guess what I'm suggesting is more along the lines of adding fifteen minutes of ads before the unskippable "EA GAMES OWNS YOU" and "NVIDIA THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY ON YOUR ATI BOX" segue videos we have to put up with today. That's a scary thought, too.
Mein Thirsten!
Man, that's still funny. Thirsten.
This was _three years ago._ Are we through fighting this spectre, or are we in for the second round? Why didn't EA keep up with this sort of thing? _EA_ of all people/companies.
That's a pretty disturbing thought. If the ads are germane to the setting of the game--I support that idea, at least, since I don't want my lv. 97 Superlative Love Ninja to heal up by drinking Sprite--then that'll prompt game creators (or maybe I should say publishers and developers) to set more games in modern/semi-future times in order to make more money.
We'll see more Madden NFL games and fewer Fallouts. More GTA knockoffs (and not Vice City, either) and fewer Final Fantasy knockoffs. More Counterstrikes and fewer HL2s.
In Asia?
From what I understand, the imperfections are _everywhere_ over the document. I guess they'd do their little speckle-counting thing over six or ten different square inches (or centimeters, or whatever) of the document, and then folding doesn't matter. Besides, if the surface profile can survive scorching and abrasion, I think folding might not be a huge deal, and pressing certainly not.
I've worked with speckle-based systems, and I'm skeptical about this, since there's a _lot_ of variance when you're dealing with laser speckle. I don't really know how their imaging system could quickly and efficiently discriminate between hundreds of little dots, average their sizes, statistics, etc.
Any OE-s around that specialize in speckle to clear this up?
Well, when this McCarthy went after what should've been his Army, this Army basically just shrugged and called him a hack, and then this hack went on with his baseless accusations.
Why didn't EA sue this guy for libel, or slander, or just for being Jack Thompson? I mean, it'd be a _popular_ decision, for once, by putting this shameful and stupid saga to an end--it's not like they'd have to scrape together the lawyer's fees. Would EA and other developers _want_ the hassle of dealing with a stronger, more buraucratic, government-run software ratings board? IANAL, so can I get one to guess at this?
Maybe at that time we still weren't sure if the bombs would ignite the atmosphere... dropping it in hilly terrain would help limit the effects if it proved more powerful than we thought, whereas dropping it over a body of water would vaporize a hell of a lot of seawater.
I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance!
...
What?
Given the way the US is going, rather than building better space shuttles, we'll just blow up everyone else's "Weapons of Mass Exploration."
Sorry. It's just a tax on _porn,_ not on _whores._
A mere century ago, the usual age for marraige in most cultures was 12 to 16. Can you explain to me what has changed from that time, besides the views of society?
Hate to nitpick, but I imagine that it's safer for a fully-developed (but less than over-the-hill) woman to have children than for a still-developing girl. Probably goes both for parent and child. Figuring that out might've changed things--I don't know.
Ah, the proud tradition of the American 2-party Happy Time Switchup. Democrats become Republicans, Republicans become Crazy, and, as always, the people lose in the end.
There's a link called "Read" near the bottom of each article's text. Clicking it takes you to the pages they describe.