Media scare-mongering has nothing to do with those of us who feel the US has had an irresponsible energy policy for decades now - completely relying on foreign oil production while shunning home-grown alternatives. This includes wind, solar, biofuels, and other 'green' sources, but it's also stupid to overlook our own domestic oil production, such as off-shore drilling in the gulf and in Alaska. We're still very much reliant upon oil, a fact which is not likely to change for the next 20-40 years no matter what our current intentions are, or what investments we make in alternative sources of energy. Additionally, there's natural gas production, coal (we have the technology to produce clean-burning coal plans now), and nuclear power which are all real, viable power production systems that we could start building tomorrow.
Sales taxes and incentives will not solve a fundamental supply issue on such a massive scale, so I don't see a point with punishing consumers even more than the current gas prices are already doing. No, I don't believe people are under the delusion that this will be solved immediately, but given that it's going to take a while to actually get fixed, I can see why people are anxious to see a real energy plan get underway instead of political pandering to various constituency groups to which politicians are beholden to (extreme environmentalists on one side, and big oil on the other).
We're developing an MMO, so there are obviously some things that are not exposed to the client at all, such as damage tables or any fundamental gameplay altering data. Technically speaking, our game has the ability to load XML file directly. This way, the iteration process is much quicker than having to export, restart, reload, repeat. This is what we do for development versions of the games, but this would likely not be compiled into the final release binary.
I'm not sure if we're ever going to officially open up our file formats. Generally speaking, the XML is more of a means to an end from our perspective, and there aren't really plans to use then except internally. Still, who knows what the future holds?
Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn't work well for them. They have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it. And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no biggie. Good for them, I don't begrudge that decision.
I'm actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I'll speak to XML's use as a file format in general. Here's a few points regarding our use of XML:
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too inefficient and verbose to use in the final game - all our XML data is packed into our own proprietary binary data format. * We also only use it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance, we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in XML format. We're not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML's value to us is in how well it can glue large pieces of our game together. * All our latest tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our development platform, of course). It's astoundingly easy to serialize data structures to XML using.NET libraries - just a few lines of code. * Because it's a text-based format and human readable, if a file breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what changed, and why it's breaking.
I'll make a concession that I've heard of some pretty awful uses of XML. But those who dismiss XML as a valuable tool in the toolchest are equally as foolish as those who believe it's the end-all and be-all of programming (I'm not saying that's true of you, just pointing out foolishness on both sides). Like any tool, it's most valuable when used in it's optimal role, not when shoehorned into projects as a solution to everything.
What I was saying, is that unless something major was changed to naturally prevent online play like a server address change or a protocol change or whatever, Sony shouldn't prevent people from going online. I'm not saying anything of what Sony did.
Do you remember how crappy Sony's initial online store offering was? What they've been doing is moving more and more of the functionality to the client-side. While this drastically improves the user experience (see Xbox Live / Marketplace), it requires careful coordination between the client and server software. In general, it's simply far fewer headaches for Sony in order to ensure there's only one current PS3 operating system to deal with online.
Note: I'm not trying to excuse this f!-up, just trying to explain Sony's reasoning for trying to ensure someone going online is always up to date.
I've never heard this definition used to define a role-playing game. I don't think too many would agree with it, because it effectively eliminates all single-player games from the genre.
I'd say the defining characteristic of an RPG is "directed character growth". That is, the player makes decision during gameplay that significantly alters the abilities / role of the player in the game. Japanese RPGs focus more on growth, while US/European games often focus more on customization. It's a different experience than actual "role playing" with other real people, but just because they share a name, I don't think they necessarily have to provide the exact same experience.
I don't think you're going to have too much luck trying to convince too many people that Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like are not role-playing games.
Two more words: Hate Crimes I'll completely agree with you regarding your disdain of hate crime laws. The problem with this type of law is that it classifies crimes based on the victim rather than the actions of the accused. Is it a more heinous crime to assault a gay man than a straight one, or a black man versus a white man? Justice is supposed to be blind, but hate crime laws lift that blindfold and set a dangerous precedent. Think about how this could be applied in reverse, and you can see the damage these types of laws could do.
Real censorship is truly chilling. Only it is called POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. Political correctness is as unsightly to me as it is to many, but calling it "real censorship" is a bit of a stretch. In most countries with a guaranteed freedom of expression, you don't have a threat of imprisonment or worse hanging over your head. What's the worst that would happen if you said something politically incorrect? The consequences likely range from your co-workers and friends looking at you funny to actually losing your job in extreme cases (no, I'm not trivializing that). And nowadays, it's not all that hard to create a pseudonym on the 'net and spout off about anything you want to. . Call me crazy, but I'd rather put up with a societally-imposed politically correctness than a government-imposed suppression of my actual right to free speech. I think some of those that constantly cry censorship and oppression might have a different impression if they lived under a truly oppressive regime (insert Bush joke here for +funny/+insightful). I liken it to middle-class suburban kids who actually think they have it rough growing up. It's simply that they lack a broader perspective to appreciate how good they actually have it relative to most others, and unfortunately, many of those kids grow up into similarly-minded adults. . Also, why do my paragraphs munge together unless I put a character between them? I'm posting in text mode...
Self-documenting code. If you read my code, you can understand whats going on just by the code. There are very few comments, because very few are needed. I've heard this espoused before, but I think there are a lot of caveats. Generally speaking, my experience is that comments are needed in direct proportion to the complexity of the code. Code can't always be simplified. For example:
a) What you're trying to do is extremely complex (i.e. physics simulation code) b) It needs to be highly optimized, which often comes at the expense of readability c) The language itself is not highly readable in the first place (assembly is inherently difficult to read, while C# reads almost like English)
I find myself writing much more verbose comments whenever I tackle somewhat complex problems. Comments are not only useful in describing "how", they're important in describing "why". Code simply can't inform a reader why a particular algorithm was used in place of another. It can't describe various things to look out for the next person to modify the code which you yourself may have run into. And, it can't give nice high-level overviews of expected usage patterns. These are most crucial in your most complex code.
It's absolutely impossible to avoid complexity at some level when you're trying to produce complex results. Perhaps it's the case where comments are largely unnecessary based on the language and type of code you're producing, but a lack of comments would be a real hindrance in the environment I work in.
it is absolutely not eastern washington Sorry, but if it's east of the Cascades, then it's "Eastern Washington" (at least to those of us on the wet side of the state).;-)
Anyways, pretty cool to see where I grew up getting into the news. Well, the last time my home town (Mount Vernon, WA) was in the national news was because some whack-job took off all his clothes, ran out onto the freeway, and climbed up onto a semi-truck that had stopped because of him. This is decidedly cooler than that.
I'd say it's probably because there are conflicting overarching goals in any monthly-fee-based MMO. Of course the developers wants to make a game that's fun for players, but in order to make money, they have to keep them as monthly subscribers. It's far too difficult (well, basically impossible) to make new content at the rate a typical player can consume it. Thus, the developer must slow down the player's consumption of content in some way in order to keep players subscribed on a limited budget of content as long as possible, without making it so tedious that players simply get discouraged and give up.
Trying to satisfy both goals is a pretty fine balancing act that's obviously not easy to accomplish, and I'd guess it also accounts for the sometimes schizoid gameplay-design decisions.
Not all MMOs require massive numbers of on-screen spells. Everquest provides 8 spell slots (if I remember correctly), and Guild Wars only allows 8 skill slots at a time as well. Part of the strategy in these games is choosing a subset of your available firepower that will work well for a particular mission or area. WoW is obviously optimized for a PC platform with a mouse and keyboard input. So, yeah, a straight port of WoW would probably be pretty awful. But it's certainly possible to design a compelling game that doesn't require 60 icons on the screen at once.
I was largely speculating about a particular demographic, not arguing with your overall conclusions. I certainly won't dispute that illegal game copying and distribution is rampant - the evidence is overwhelmingly there to see. It seems probable that it's largely responsible for the shrinking / marginalization of the PC gaming market. Why else would MMOs be the only (comparatively) significant genre left, which co-incidentally also happens to be server-based, and thus much more difficult to pirate?
College students are probably not a typical demographic. They generally have little to no extra spending money (at least I didn't). As such, for such a technically savvy and reasonably intelligent market, their time is disproportionally less valuable than their money, and copying games would seem to be fairly attractive proposition. I wonder how many of those same college students will purchase games legitimately after they get decent paying jobs. In addition to obtaining extra spending money, I think having a job also creates more sympathy with the game developers trying to earn a living from software sales. I've heard from many people that claimed to have downloaded lots of warez in their younger days, and then started purchasing games legitimately when they got older.
Not defending the rampant copying or anything - just an observation...
I think you misunderstand my intention and objection. It's not from a moralistic standpoint, simply an issue of standards. I couldn't care less whether someone does or doesn't think this is a good or bad thing - that's obviously culturally dependent. In countries with more open nudity, this would not be a big deal. However, this is the English wikipedia we're talking about, which indicate a largely American audience (among many others of course). I think an encyclopedia can inform while adhering to some of the cultural sensitivities of the audience, that's all. Wikipedia would be in no way diminished if those images were not displayed. It took me all of 5 seconds to find the picture elsewhere on the net.
Regarding autofellatio, exactly why is it necessary to show a photo AND an illustration of the act? (sigh, yes, I went to the Wikipedia site to see for myself) Is the English language insufficient to describe it accurately?
Honestly, I'd guess that most of this stuff is just flamebait at its finest. Getting others riled up is a common Internet past-time, but I guess I'd just rather not see Wikipedia used as the medium for this purpose.
I obviously can see the censorship issues in the first article. We're talking about an individual trying to use the legal system to squelch her deservedly bad reputation in business dealings. Welcome to the information age, lady. News of bad deals travels fast now.
On the other hand, I can't say I disapprove of the deletion of nude underage children in sexual contexts on Wikipedia, or of the decisions of moderators to override group votes on such manners. (Note the "group vote" was likely by music fans in regard to a specific album cover. What do you *think* their vote would be? Duh.) I'm not a prude or anything, but there's no real need to show some of the images they discussed. If you want those images, they're likely just a few clicks away elsewhere on the net anyhow. It seems that Wikipedia should cater to a wide audience, with content appropriate for all ages. Even the most adult of subjects can be handled in a way that makes it appropriate for all ages of the audience without diminishing its usefulness as a research tool.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight a war on malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care rather than a war on 'terror'.. As much as I appreciate the idealistic sentiments of what you're saying, I can't agree with how you dismissively put 'terror' in quotes. The collapse of the WTC towers and crashing of those planes was undoubtedly pretty damn terrifying to those trapped inside. A bomb exploding on a train, or bus, or at a nightclub is undoubtedly terrifying as well. These were all real events that happened to real people, and they were perpetrated deliberately by others with a political or religious agenda.
I'm not saying I agree with everything that's happened since, but please don't belittle the actual issue. There *are*, in fact, a group of fanaticals that would love to kill both you and me, preferably by sawing off our heads on-camera. Should that dominate our lives and our politics? Of course not. But it also shouldn't be casually dismissed as irrelevant, simply because it hasn't happened again recently, or not to you or anyone close to you.
Bring on the baseball hat wearing disses A sideways baseball cap says to the world: "I will never be anyone's boss!" A backwards baseball cap adds: "Me too!...except for that idiot wearing his cap sideways!"
See, that's the thing, though... Can we ever be 100% certain that there is no bio-mechanical advantage? I can't think of an absolute way of determining that - it's very likely that we're simply hearing (albeit an expert's) opinion. Maybe someone can think of a way of determining this that I can't - the article was sketchy on details. Essentially, one expert says yes, one says no, and the committee picked which one they wanted to listen to.
I think it's important to acknowledge the difference between accommodations in, say, the workplace or public facilities, versus competing in the Olympics. As it turns out, *most* people in the world are simply not physically qualified to participate in those events - they are by nature elite events. It seems a bit of a stretch to complain about disqualification because of a physical disability when physical competition is the entire the focus of the games. It seems a little like complaining that a person with an average IQ is being discriminated against when attempting to acquire his Ph.D. in neurosurgery. It would be a sad day when we pretend that everyone can compete equally at everything.
Still, despite my misgivings, I don't think I'll begrudge this guy's chance to compete (not like I have a say in it anyhow). Potentially a tricky precedence and all, but it's still hard not to root for the guy.
So why can't PC game publishers they sell one SKU "for Windows XP" and one "for Windows Vista"? It wouldn't be entirely correct... And there's the rub. It might create more confusion than is really solves. And developers / publishers are likely not in a hurry to further fragment an already fragile (and potentially confusing) market. While Vista (with it's gaming score) might help to alleviate some confusion about performance requirements, it will likely take a while before that OS is ubiquitous enough to make this a reliable benchmarking tool.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that publishers have determined that there's simply not enough of a potential market to justify the considerable expense of doing a downward port, and I'm afraid I'd agree too. I've actually worked on a project similar to that - reusing assets saved a lot of work, but it's certainly not all roses.
You'll notice that your two "lower-end" examples of consoles (Wii and PS2) are both extremely successful products with large installed bases. As such, it makes sense to tap into an existing market like that. But PCs are a smaller market to begin with, and targeting the low-end of those seems pretty risky - I'm guessing people who don't bother with a gaming PC are more likely to enjoy console gaming anyhow.
So if a game engine can scale down to the Wii, why can't it scale down to low-end PCs? It most certainly can. I've heard so many people say things like "Oh, the xxx engine can't do this or that fast, etc..." More often than not, it's the content, not the engine, that kills performance. At my last company, our in-house engine (which was then making Xbox, PS2, and GameCube titles) was ported to the PSP. It did a fine job, too. That same engine is being used now for all current-gen platforms (360, PS3), and they're still making PSP games with it. There's a limit though - it wouldn't be efficient to scale it down to the Nintendo DS - they have an engine for that which is optimized specifically for low-memory platforms.
It's not always an issue of just the engine, though. There are lots of issues with scaling a game. If you have an extremely CPU-intensive AI system that runs fine on the Xbox or PS3's multiple cores, how do you affect this without substantially impacting gameplay? If all your art is shader-based, and relying on shaders that simply don't exist on the Wii, then what? There's not always a practical way to scale down the number of bones a character has - that's another scaling problem for you.
At some point, it becomes easier to simply rework the game for the lower-end platform than to port the game. Likewise, the gap between the highest end PC and lowest end of the current market seems to be substantially larger than it used to be.
The game my company is currently developing requires hardware with shader 2.0 support at a minimum. All of our assets are being developed with this hardware in mind. Should we create two sets of assets, one for shader 2.0 hardware and one using simple blended textures? Lighting, another shader-dependent beast, would end up looking completely different for the two systems. While this is possible, you end up making significant compromises in the look of the game.
It's all great to say "scale it down to low-end PCs", but we're making version two of a successful online PC game. Our players will be expecting a game that looks and plays significantly better than the first version. So while we're not going to require ridiculous specs, we still have to compete with the screenshots and videos of other PC games. There's a pretty significant difference between a Tetris game and what we're producing.
You're correct in that the term "slave" is probably undeserved hyperbole, especially in the case of China. I was speaking in more general terms, and I can see how that would be wrongly applied to the more specific case of which I was also talking. Note that I use the term "authoritarian" to describe China's government rather than the harsher "totalitarian".
I actually have very high hopes for China's future. I can see as they embrace some capitalist ideals, they're going to have to deal with an influx of (to them) radical political ideals as well. I hope their leaders are wise enough to lead them on a path forward rather than backward, even if slowly. I've heard it said that, as a people, the Chinese have a long view of history, and tend to be more patient than those of us in the west.
Russia (and Iraq) have demonstrated that capitalism and political freedom certainly come with their own set of problems, and can be messy at times. Ultimately though, I think it will prove the superior system in the global arena of ideas.
I'll let you get the last word on this. Thanks for an interesting discussion. Although I disagree profoundly with some of your views, I believe, if nothing else, that we at least share common good *intentions*. You should create a Slashdot account so more people can see your posts without having to browse at level 0. Cheers!
You're talking in a culturally specific view of rights. No, I'm rejecting the notion that basic human rights are culturally specific. I believe that there are certain fundamental principles that transcend cultural traditions, religions, and philosophies. Yes, of course culture influences the nuances and application of those ideals, but there is a common core.
It's also worth mentioning that traditionally, someone who recognizes no right and wrong in discussions and dealings is praised as being reasonable and having good humor, and being somewhat like a wise and unassailable god who can always be trusted to speak the truth. You speak of the "Middle Way", perhaps? I'm not sure you are interpreting this correctly. I believe this refers to a lack of extremes, not a lack of morality. Contrary to this, it seems as though Buddhism certainly does have a view on morality. A poster on Slashdot should certainly know this term: Karma. The view that all living creatures are ultimately responsible for their actions, good or evil.
Anyway, the practical path forward is to treat them with respect and speak honestly. If you challenge yourself to find mutual agreement with them, you will still retain enough of a different perspective for it to get through to them, and they will agree. They are generally very reasonable people, but they do not like to be talked down to. I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how I view the Chinese people. I have no desire to treat them disrespectfully or to impose my western views on them. It's simply my view that an authoritarian government is much less desirable for a society than a representative government, and I see no compelling reason why I should adjust that view.
Ultimately, this is the problem with such relativistic platitudes: it allows one to justify any abhorrent behavior, all because the one committing the offense may be acting within locally acceptable cultural norms. As such, any behavior, no matter repugnant to globally accepted human mores, is only measured against a specific societal norm, and not against a broader standard.
You bring up some good points. Our company happens to be busy developing version 2 of our MMO, and while these devices could presumably not be used to play the game we're developing proper (obviously we have min specs for our main game), I could see specific aspects of the game ported to these devices.
Technically speaking, we're very careful to isolate OS-specific code in our library. That is, although we're Windows-only now, it's certainly possible for us to branch to other platforms in the future. We're pretty busy with our main project right now, but if we see an emerging gaming market develop for these devices, it would be good to be ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Media scare-mongering has nothing to do with those of us who feel the US has had an irresponsible energy policy for decades now - completely relying on foreign oil production while shunning home-grown alternatives. This includes wind, solar, biofuels, and other 'green' sources, but it's also stupid to overlook our own domestic oil production, such as off-shore drilling in the gulf and in Alaska. We're still very much reliant upon oil, a fact which is not likely to change for the next 20-40 years no matter what our current intentions are, or what investments we make in alternative sources of energy. Additionally, there's natural gas production, coal (we have the technology to produce clean-burning coal plans now), and nuclear power which are all real, viable power production systems that we could start building tomorrow.
Sales taxes and incentives will not solve a fundamental supply issue on such a massive scale, so I don't see a point with punishing consumers even more than the current gas prices are already doing. No, I don't believe people are under the delusion that this will be solved immediately, but given that it's going to take a while to actually get fixed, I can see why people are anxious to see a real energy plan get underway instead of political pandering to various constituency groups to which politicians are beholden to (extreme environmentalists on one side, and big oil on the other).
We're developing an MMO, so there are obviously some things that are not exposed to the client at all, such as damage tables or any fundamental gameplay altering data. Technically speaking, our game has the ability to load XML file directly. This way, the iteration process is much quicker than having to export, restart, reload, repeat. This is what we do for development versions of the games, but this would likely not be compiled into the final release binary.
I'm not sure if we're ever going to officially open up our file formats. Generally speaking, the XML is more of a means to an end from our perspective, and there aren't really plans to use then except internally. Still, who knows what the future holds?
Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn't work well for them. They have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it. And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no biggie. Good for them, I don't begrudge that decision.
I'm actually a game developer, not a web developer, so I'll speak to XML's use as a file format in general. Here's a few points regarding our use of XML:
* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too inefficient and verbose to use in the final game - all our XML data is packed into our own proprietary binary data format. .NET platform (Windows is our development platform, of course). It's astoundingly easy to serialize data structures to XML using .NET libraries - just a few lines of code.
* We also only use it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance, we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in XML format. We're not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML's value to us is in how well it can glue large pieces of our game together.
* All our latest tools are written in C# and using the
* Because it's a text-based format and human readable, if a file breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what changed, and why it's breaking.
I'll make a concession that I've heard of some pretty awful uses of XML. But those who dismiss XML as a valuable tool in the toolchest are equally as foolish as those who believe it's the end-all and be-all of programming (I'm not saying that's true of you, just pointing out foolishness on both sides). Like any tool, it's most valuable when used in it's optimal role, not when shoehorned into projects as a solution to everything.
The Xbox does just work. All I do is power it on...
Pot, meet kettle.
What I was saying, is that unless something major was changed to naturally prevent online play like a server address change or a protocol change or whatever, Sony shouldn't prevent people from going online. I'm not saying anything of what Sony did.
Do you remember how crappy Sony's initial online store offering was? What they've been doing is moving more and more of the functionality to the client-side. While this drastically improves the user experience (see Xbox Live / Marketplace), it requires careful coordination between the client and server software. In general, it's simply far fewer headaches for Sony in order to ensure there's only one current PS3 operating system to deal with online.
Note: I'm not trying to excuse this f!-up, just trying to explain Sony's reasoning for trying to ensure someone going online is always up to date.
I've never heard this definition used to define a role-playing game. I don't think too many would agree with it, because it effectively eliminates all single-player games from the genre.
I'd say the defining characteristic of an RPG is "directed character growth". That is, the player makes decision during gameplay that significantly alters the abilities / role of the player in the game. Japanese RPGs focus more on growth, while US/European games often focus more on customization. It's a different experience than actual "role playing" with other real people, but just because they share a name, I don't think they necessarily have to provide the exact same experience.
I don't think you're going to have too much luck trying to convince too many people that Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and the like are not role-playing games.
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Call me crazy, but I'd rather put up with a societally-imposed politically correctness than a government-imposed suppression of my actual right to free speech. I think some of those that constantly cry censorship and oppression might have a different impression if they lived under a truly oppressive regime (insert Bush joke here for +funny/+insightful). I liken it to middle-class suburban kids who actually think they have it rough growing up. It's simply that they lack a broader perspective to appreciate how good they actually have it relative to most others, and unfortunately, many of those kids grow up into similarly-minded adults.
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Also, why do my paragraphs munge together unless I put a character between them? I'm posting in text mode...
a) What you're trying to do is extremely complex (i.e. physics simulation code)
b) It needs to be highly optimized, which often comes at the expense of readability
c) The language itself is not highly readable in the first place (assembly is inherently difficult to read, while C# reads almost like English)
I find myself writing much more verbose comments whenever I tackle somewhat complex problems. Comments are not only useful in describing "how", they're important in describing "why". Code simply can't inform a reader why a particular algorithm was used in place of another. It can't describe various things to look out for the next person to modify the code which you yourself may have run into. And, it can't give nice high-level overviews of expected usage patterns. These are most crucial in your most complex code.
It's absolutely impossible to avoid complexity at some level when you're trying to produce complex results. Perhaps it's the case where comments are largely unnecessary based on the language and type of code you're producing, but a lack of comments would be a real hindrance in the environment I work in.
I'd say it's probably because there are conflicting overarching goals in any monthly-fee-based MMO. Of course the developers wants to make a game that's fun for players, but in order to make money, they have to keep them as monthly subscribers. It's far too difficult (well, basically impossible) to make new content at the rate a typical player can consume it. Thus, the developer must slow down the player's consumption of content in some way in order to keep players subscribed on a limited budget of content as long as possible, without making it so tedious that players simply get discouraged and give up.
Trying to satisfy both goals is a pretty fine balancing act that's obviously not easy to accomplish, and I'd guess it also accounts for the sometimes schizoid gameplay-design decisions.
Not all MMOs require massive numbers of on-screen spells. Everquest provides 8 spell slots (if I remember correctly), and Guild Wars only allows 8 skill slots at a time as well. Part of the strategy in these games is choosing a subset of your available firepower that will work well for a particular mission or area. WoW is obviously optimized for a PC platform with a mouse and keyboard input. So, yeah, a straight port of WoW would probably be pretty awful. But it's certainly possible to design a compelling game that doesn't require 60 icons on the screen at once.
I was largely speculating about a particular demographic, not arguing with your overall conclusions. I certainly won't dispute that illegal game copying and distribution is rampant - the evidence is overwhelmingly there to see. It seems probable that it's largely responsible for the shrinking / marginalization of the PC gaming market. Why else would MMOs be the only (comparatively) significant genre left, which co-incidentally also happens to be server-based, and thus much more difficult to pirate?
College students are probably not a typical demographic. They generally have little to no extra spending money (at least I didn't). As such, for such a technically savvy and reasonably intelligent market, their time is disproportionally less valuable than their money, and copying games would seem to be fairly attractive proposition. I wonder how many of those same college students will purchase games legitimately after they get decent paying jobs. In addition to obtaining extra spending money, I think having a job also creates more sympathy with the game developers trying to earn a living from software sales. I've heard from many people that claimed to have downloaded lots of warez in their younger days, and then started purchasing games legitimately when they got older.
Not defending the rampant copying or anything - just an observation...
I think you misunderstand my intention and objection. It's not from a moralistic standpoint, simply an issue of standards. I couldn't care less whether someone does or doesn't think this is a good or bad thing - that's obviously culturally dependent. In countries with more open nudity, this would not be a big deal. However, this is the English wikipedia we're talking about, which indicate a largely American audience (among many others of course). I think an encyclopedia can inform while adhering to some of the cultural sensitivities of the audience, that's all. Wikipedia would be in no way diminished if those images were not displayed. It took me all of 5 seconds to find the picture elsewhere on the net.
Regarding autofellatio, exactly why is it necessary to show a photo AND an illustration of the act? (sigh, yes, I went to the Wikipedia site to see for myself) Is the English language insufficient to describe it accurately?
Honestly, I'd guess that most of this stuff is just flamebait at its finest. Getting others riled up is a common Internet past-time, but I guess I'd just rather not see Wikipedia used as the medium for this purpose.
I obviously can see the censorship issues in the first article. We're talking about an individual trying to use the legal system to squelch her deservedly bad reputation in business dealings. Welcome to the information age, lady. News of bad deals travels fast now.
On the other hand, I can't say I disapprove of the deletion of nude underage children in sexual contexts on Wikipedia, or of the decisions of moderators to override group votes on such manners. (Note the "group vote" was likely by music fans in regard to a specific album cover. What do you *think* their vote would be? Duh.) I'm not a prude or anything, but there's no real need to show some of the images they discussed. If you want those images, they're likely just a few clicks away elsewhere on the net anyhow. It seems that Wikipedia should cater to a wide audience, with content appropriate for all ages. Even the most adult of subjects can be handled in a way that makes it appropriate for all ages of the audience without diminishing its usefulness as a research tool.
I'm not saying I agree with everything that's happened since, but please don't belittle the actual issue. There *are*, in fact, a group of fanaticals that would love to kill both you and me, preferably by sawing off our heads on-camera. Should that dominate our lives and our politics? Of course not. But it also shouldn't be casually dismissed as irrelevant, simply because it hasn't happened again recently, or not to you or anyone close to you.
A backwards baseball cap adds: "Me too!
Was that ok?
See, that's the thing, though... Can we ever be 100% certain that there is no bio-mechanical advantage? I can't think of an absolute way of determining that - it's very likely that we're simply hearing (albeit an expert's) opinion. Maybe someone can think of a way of determining this that I can't - the article was sketchy on details. Essentially, one expert says yes, one says no, and the committee picked which one they wanted to listen to.
I think it's important to acknowledge the difference between accommodations in, say, the workplace or public facilities, versus competing in the Olympics. As it turns out, *most* people in the world are simply not physically qualified to participate in those events - they are by nature elite events. It seems a bit of a stretch to complain about disqualification because of a physical disability when physical competition is the entire the focus of the games. It seems a little like complaining that a person with an average IQ is being discriminated against when attempting to acquire his Ph.D. in neurosurgery. It would be a sad day when we pretend that everyone can compete equally at everything.
Still, despite my misgivings, I don't think I'll begrudge this guy's chance to compete (not like I have a say in it anyhow). Potentially a tricky precedence and all, but it's still hard not to root for the guy.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that publishers have determined that there's simply not enough of a potential market to justify the considerable expense of doing a downward port, and I'm afraid I'd agree too. I've actually worked on a project similar to that - reusing assets saved a lot of work, but it's certainly not all roses.
You'll notice that your two "lower-end" examples of consoles (Wii and PS2) are both extremely successful products with large installed bases. As such, it makes sense to tap into an existing market like that. But PCs are a smaller market to begin with, and targeting the low-end of those seems pretty risky - I'm guessing people who don't bother with a gaming PC are more likely to enjoy console gaming anyhow.
It's not always an issue of just the engine, though. There are lots of issues with scaling a game. If you have an extremely CPU-intensive AI system that runs fine on the Xbox or PS3's multiple cores, how do you affect this without substantially impacting gameplay? If all your art is shader-based, and relying on shaders that simply don't exist on the Wii, then what? There's not always a practical way to scale down the number of bones a character has - that's another scaling problem for you.
At some point, it becomes easier to simply rework the game for the lower-end platform than to port the game. Likewise, the gap between the highest end PC and lowest end of the current market seems to be substantially larger than it used to be.
The game my company is currently developing requires hardware with shader 2.0 support at a minimum. All of our assets are being developed with this hardware in mind. Should we create two sets of assets, one for shader 2.0 hardware and one using simple blended textures? Lighting, another shader-dependent beast, would end up looking completely different for the two systems. While this is possible, you end up making significant compromises in the look of the game.
It's all great to say "scale it down to low-end PCs", but we're making version two of a successful online PC game. Our players will be expecting a game that looks and plays significantly better than the first version. So while we're not going to require ridiculous specs, we still have to compete with the screenshots and videos of other PC games. There's a pretty significant difference between a Tetris game and what we're producing.
You're correct in that the term "slave" is probably undeserved hyperbole, especially in the case of China. I was speaking in more general terms, and I can see how that would be wrongly applied to the more specific case of which I was also talking. Note that I use the term "authoritarian" to describe China's government rather than the harsher "totalitarian".
I actually have very high hopes for China's future. I can see as they embrace some capitalist ideals, they're going to have to deal with an influx of (to them) radical political ideals as well. I hope their leaders are wise enough to lead them on a path forward rather than backward, even if slowly. I've heard it said that, as a people, the Chinese have a long view of history, and tend to be more patient than those of us in the west.
Russia (and Iraq) have demonstrated that capitalism and political freedom certainly come with their own set of problems, and can be messy at times. Ultimately though, I think it will prove the superior system in the global arena of ideas.
I'll let you get the last word on this. Thanks for an interesting discussion. Although I disagree profoundly with some of your views, I believe, if nothing else, that we at least share common good *intentions*. You should create a Slashdot account so more people can see your posts without having to browse at level 0. Cheers!
Ultimately, this is the problem with such relativistic platitudes: it allows one to justify any abhorrent behavior, all because the one committing the offense may be acting within locally acceptable cultural norms. As such, any behavior, no matter repugnant to globally accepted human mores, is only measured against a specific societal norm, and not against a broader standard.
You bring up some good points. Our company happens to be busy developing version 2 of our MMO, and while these devices could presumably not be used to play the game we're developing proper (obviously we have min specs for our main game), I could see specific aspects of the game ported to these devices.
Technically speaking, we're very careful to isolate OS-specific code in our library. That is, although we're Windows-only now, it's certainly possible for us to branch to other platforms in the future. We're pretty busy with our main project right now, but if we see an emerging gaming market develop for these devices, it would be good to be ready.