Oh what fun, a debate about "what is art". It is not like people have argued about this for over a hundred years without coming to a conclusion that all can agree on....
Ebert's defenition, at least for meaningful art, seemed to be that it brought up issues of the human condition. I believe Planescape:Torment is a good example of this. Pac Man is not. Call me literary minded, but for me conversations is an important part of this. I haven't played it, but appearently some people find ICO a very touching game even though all the communication between the main characters are non-verbal.
By this rationale almost any video game can be called art. Would Pac Man really want to be immortal? What can he do besides eat and run?
I think the difference is that in Planescape you actually live through the consequences of immortality as a human being and discuss the moral choices with other sentinent beings. Although this is all in a fantasy setting, so there is some suspension of disbelieve required.
You would have some difficulties forming emotional attatchments to Pacman and grieve for his death, but most who play the game seem to have some emotions for Nameless and his companions.
I had written a LONG post, but Firefox crashed... Second and much shorter attempt:
I agree with him for most games (99% or so), but there are some notable exceptions. Planescape:Torment for instance, that whole game is centered around questions such as "Can anything change the nature of a man? Would you REALLY want to be immortal? What is a valid philosophy of life (Dustmen, Godsmen, Sensates)?"
When I was asked the question "What can change the nature of a man?", with along list of possible answers such as "love, death, faith, regret, nothing", I froze. I had to go for a long walk before I could answer that question.
That if anything goes deeply into what it means to be a human, and it did it in ways few other media or artform could.
Some other games that, while maybe not asking such big questions about life, have touched me emotionally: Final Fantasy 7 Grim Fandango Longest Journey Fallout Knights of the Old Republic 2 (would have been even better without the butchered ending(s)).
Morrowind in fact had three different attack moves. Probably considered to complex for console players but there is no reason it couldn't have been an option in Oblivion.
I played Morrowind, and as I recalled it there was only one attack move, and if you hit or miss was all down to your stats. Blocking was automatic.
In Oblivion as contrast, the attacks do different things depending on which movement key you combine it with. There is a much greater sense of effective distance between weapons such as great axes and daggers. You can time your blocks and attacks to stagger opponents, and once you start to raise your skills you can do stuff like jump dodges and power attacks that can knock down opponents or knock the weapons out of their hands.
So I would like to play a game with more realistic combat, not to realistic offcourse (just as I can pause GPL for a bathroom break and don't actually have to fit enough to handle a high performance car) but giving me a real challenge in actually having to do some fighting and not just push a button.
What I would like to see is a game where you are suspended in a cyclotron with a full body suit and complete VR immersion. Want to run somewhere? Move your legs. Want your avatar to kick and punch, or maybe dance? You have to do it yourself. Resistance in the suit could be increased both to increase immersion and give you exercise. A fit and agile person would get an advantage in games with this UI. The advantage is that geeks might get real fit (ala Dance Dance Revolution). Drawback is that many of us play as escapism, and with this we would risk getting beaten in games by jocks.:-)
I hate the control system too. While the UI that controls maps, inventory, quests, character is an exercise in minimalism, it sure is a pain in the arse to use.
You should download BTMod, it makes life much more pleasant for PC players of Oblivion. It gives you larger maps and inventory/spell screens, works great.
I haven't had any problem with the voices (maybe because I'm not a native speaker), but one thing that ruins immersion for me is the way opponents level. I understand why, it makes balancing much easier and keeps the game challenging and fun througout. But it takes some of the tension out of exploring - you know you will always be able to take out anything you bump into when you enter a cave, you will never accidentally stumble into the dread lair of the dead God while you are at level one. So neither do you get the sense of accomplishment of levelling your character and coming back later for some "who is the tough guy NOW, eh?".
It also constantly makes me wonder at later levels, if a group of bandits all have legendary elven weapons and magical armor, why don't they sell it and buy a luxury house with servants to take care of them the rest of their lives, instead of lurking in a cold and dank sewer all day waiting for a passerby to rob for scraps?? I'm considering downloading the mod that makes high level weapons and armor much more rare.
Still, amazing game though. The radiant AI is a bit wonky sometimes, but you occassionally get some really jaw-dropping stuff. For instance, when I killed one bandit his magic sword fell clattering down a mine, and another bandit dropped her lousy iron knife, picked up his sword and ran at me!
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
Yes... the little difference is that the scientists have science to back these claims. You know, facts and those things.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway?
A nice debunking of this claim in all its permutations is available here.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
Could you show us some proof that they are wrong please? Haven't you considered that a possible reason you don't see any debunking "follow up" reports is no a conspiracy, but rather that no one manages to prove them wrong?
* Since Mars has no oceans and a thin atmosphere, the thermal inertia is low, and Martian climate is easily perturbed by external influences, including solar variations. [...] * Globally, the mean temperature of the Martian atmosphere is particularly sensitive to the strength and duration of hemispheric dust storms, (see for example [...]here). Large scale dust storms change the atmospheric opacity and convection; as always when comparing mean temperatures, the altitude at which the measurement is made matters, but to the extent it is sensible to speak of a mean temperature for Mars, the evidence is for significant cooling from the 1970's, when Viking made measurements, compared to current temperatures. However, this is essentially due to large scale dust storms that were common back then, compared to a lower level of storminess now.[...] * The shrinkage of the Martian South Polar Cap is almost certainly a regional climate change, and is not any indication of global warming trends in the Martian atmosphere. Colaprete et al in Nature 2005 (subscription required) showed, using the Mars GCM, that the south polar climate is unstable due to the peculiar topography near the pole, and the current configuration is on the instability border; we therefore expect to see rapid changes in ice cover as the regional climate transits between the unstable states.
In short - you can't use Mars as proof/disproof of global warming on Earth.
You have to pay for the OS to run the virtualisation server on, you have to register to download it, and then you have to follow the usual licences- i.e (From MS own Virtual Server 2005 Technical Overview White Paper): * you may not transfer original OEM server licenses from one computer to another, * Each installed copy of Windows Server must be separately licensed. This means, for example, that if you are setting up four virtual machines within Virtual Server 2005 to run one instance of Windows 2000 Server and three instances of Windows NT Server 4.0 concurrently, you will need one Windows 2000 Server license and three Windows NT Server 4.0 licenses, in addition to the Windows Server 2003 host license running Virtual Server 2005. * Each additional licence such as for IIS or databases have to be paid for each virtual machine... and so on.
I think you're referring to the ozone hole. That was the LAST Impending Global Catastrophe. Keep up with the times.
That was averted thanks to swift international response thankfully. For instance, British prime minster Margaret Thatcher who was a university chemistry major realised the dangers and she was a driving force in creating a London conference about this, and a fund to help developing countries introduce substitutes for CFCs. It is rumored she helped convince Reagan to take action too.
There was a real and very urgent problem, and it was solved with a lot of effort by scientists and governments, and now you and other dickheads are going. "Haha, see, nothing happened, it was all just scaremongering. Ignore global warming".
When are we going to see some real in-depth reviews of released operating systems on Slashdot? As usual, most of the "review" is a bunch of screenshots, mostly of the installation and the startup. Is that going to persuade anyone to stay or switch?
How about once posting a review that include some mentions of - security - stability (including doing some major upgrading) - hardware support - performance as: server, office workstation, development environment, multimedia/htpc
I realise it is difficult to go in-depth on all these topics, especially with a recently released OS version. But perhaps we could set the standards a little higher than a few "ooh, shiny" screenshots?
I'm 31 and have recently started doing a lot of maths in my spare time so that I can get a real computer science and engineering degree one day (I have a degree, but it is CS light... now that I work as a programmer I know how much I'm really lacking), so it is nice to see that at least for some people the old saying by Hardy, "mathematics is a young man's game" isn't true. Carleson is 78 today, and around 40 back when he did the main breakthroughs he is honored for today.
Hardy's saying is a bit of slight against all female mathematicians too, come to think of it...
A lot of companies and open source projects seem to have a focus now on making things faster and using less resources recently, which I think is great news. I just updated Suse 10.0 on my laptop to a new KDE and Qt version (3.5 and 3 repectively, I believe), and things are really faster and more responsive now. I'm eager to download the Gnome live CD too and test.
for us, hardcore stealth games players one thing is important in the ad: new Hitman is out.
Hah, I scoff in your general direction! REAL stealth-game players play only Thief, a series of games that does stealth gameplay and level design better. They dared to make a more mature game that doesn't try to titilate with tits and gore. On harder levels, you are requred NOT to kill, knock out or even get spotted by anyone to succeed.
If the ad makes you stop and look at it, they win.
I'm beginning to think some ad agencies are populated by sociopaths...
In Sweden 6 months ago or so, stickers with "free x" popped up in many places, they were similar to posters by for instance the Red Cross or Amnesty international calling for the humane treatment and release of political prisoners. Only this person x (forgot the name) on the stickers was the character in a PS2 game, it was a promo by the publishers using peoples concern about real issues of torture and imprisonment by dictatorships to draw attention to a fucking game. Real tasteful!
I'm not calling for a ban here, I'm just wondering out loud if they are completely void of empathy and human feelings. Pretty timely article too, today news organizations in Europe are reporting that one ad agency used a convicted paedophile to jokingly advertise for childrens' theatre tickets...
But, given choice of the lesser of two evils, I'd definitely go with almost ANYONE over Sony.
Yeah, same here. The only exception? Microsoft... who just happen to support HD DVD.
If HD DVD wins, Microsoft are going to control your living room just like they control most PCs today. With Bluray, we have a chance to get some good open source tools for hacking the Java based software and menues.
I love it in Java land, where creating something scalable inevitably means exciting things like building a single JVM that runs on multiple machines, or wrapping things in five layers of EJB so that they can work across multiple machines.
No, it doesn't inevitably mean that. You can make an application more scalable by moving from threads and blocking sockets to non-blocking IO channels for instance. What you are talking about is clustering. Those are two possible approaches with Java, but there are plenty more.
I'm turned off by the fact that development in Rails is like a gimpy version of development in Lisp. I
Hehe... yes, speaking of fanatic evangelists, no one has even gotten close to beat the Lisp people. I don't know, maybe it is a FANTASTIC language. it is just... all this smug superiority pisses me off.:-)
Re:In a comparison, Ruby suffers for one big reaso
on
Exploring Active Record
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Java though, treats people who want to use UTF-32 as second-class citizens.
Java has support for Unicode 4 since Java 5, released september 2004.
Has anyone else played with Rails and been turned off?
I've seen one or two... here for instance. I've yet to try it myself, but I'm looking forward to it... when things have calmed down a bit on my current project. I've been a bit turned off by the constant one-sided evangelizing by some of the enthusiasts though.
Or just reading a good book every once in a while. That'll do far more good than anything as worthless as a liberal arts college.
A good liberal arts college will actually make you read a lot of really good books, and also discuss them in-depth.
Games are approaching works of art, but face it, it's only pop culture art. I'm hoping one day we might se a game that not only entertains but actually changes the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh what fun, a debate about "what is art". It is not like people have argued about this for over a hundred years without coming to a conclusion that all can agree on....
Ebert's defenition, at least for meaningful art, seemed to be that it brought up issues of the human condition. I believe Planescape:Torment is a good example of this. Pac Man is not. Call me literary minded, but for me conversations is an important part of this. I haven't played it, but appearently some people find ICO a very touching game even though all the communication between the main characters are non-verbal.
By this rationale almost any video game can be called art. Would Pac Man really want to be immortal? What can he do besides eat and run?
I think the difference is that in Planescape you actually live through the consequences of immortality as a human being and discuss the moral choices with other sentinent beings. Although this is all in a fantasy setting, so there is some suspension of disbelieve required.
You would have some difficulties forming emotional attatchments to Pacman and grieve for his death, but most who play the game seem to have some emotions for Nameless and his companions.
I had written a LONG post, but Firefox crashed... Second and much shorter attempt:
I agree with him for most games (99% or so), but there are some notable exceptions. Planescape:Torment for instance, that whole game is centered around questions such as "Can anything change the nature of a man? Would you REALLY want to be immortal? What is a valid philosophy of life (Dustmen, Godsmen, Sensates)?"
When I was asked the question "What can change the nature of a man?", with along list of possible answers such as "love, death, faith, regret, nothing", I froze. I had to go for a long walk before I could answer that question.
That if anything goes deeply into what it means to be a human, and it did it in ways few other media or artform could.
Some other games that, while maybe not asking such big questions about life, have touched me emotionally:
Final Fantasy 7
Grim Fandango
Longest Journey
Fallout
Knights of the Old Republic 2 (would have been even better without the butchered ending(s)).
The story sounds plausable, but look at the posting history of Timecop and the URL he provides... This is GNAA troll fishing for mod points.
Morrowind in fact had three different attack moves. Probably considered to complex for console players but there is no reason it couldn't have been an option in Oblivion.
:-)
I played Morrowind, and as I recalled it there was only one attack move, and if you hit or miss was all down to your stats. Blocking was automatic.
In Oblivion as contrast, the attacks do different things depending on which movement key you combine it with. There is a much greater sense of effective distance between weapons such as great axes and daggers. You can time your blocks and attacks to stagger opponents, and once you start to raise your skills you can do stuff like jump dodges and power attacks that can knock down opponents or knock the weapons out of their hands.
So I would like to play a game with more realistic combat, not to realistic offcourse (just as I can pause GPL for a bathroom break and don't actually have to fit enough to handle a high performance car) but giving me a real challenge in actually having to do some fighting and not just push a button.
What I would like to see is a game where you are suspended in a cyclotron with a full body suit and complete VR immersion. Want to run somewhere? Move your legs. Want your avatar to kick and punch, or maybe dance? You have to do it yourself. Resistance in the suit could be increased both to increase immersion and give you exercise. A fit and agile person would get an advantage in games with this UI. The advantage is that geeks might get real fit (ala Dance Dance Revolution). Drawback is that many of us play as escapism, and with this we would risk getting beaten in games by jocks.
I hate the control system too. While the UI that controls maps, inventory, quests, character is an exercise in minimalism, it sure is a pain in the arse to use.
You should download BTMod, it makes life much more pleasant for PC players of Oblivion. It gives you larger maps and inventory/spell screens, works great.
I haven't had any problem with the voices (maybe because I'm not a native speaker), but one thing that ruins immersion for me is the way opponents level. I understand why, it makes balancing much easier and keeps the game challenging and fun througout. But it takes some of the tension out of exploring - you know you will always be able to take out anything you bump into when you enter a cave, you will never accidentally stumble into the dread lair of the dead God while you are at level one. So neither do you get the sense of accomplishment of levelling your character and coming back later for some "who is the tough guy NOW, eh?".
It also constantly makes me wonder at later levels, if a group of bandits all have legendary elven weapons and magical armor, why don't they sell it and buy a luxury house with servants to take care of them the rest of their lives, instead of lurking in a cold and dank sewer all day waiting for a passerby to rob for scraps?? I'm considering downloading the mod that makes high level weapons and armor much more rare.
Still, amazing game though. The radiant AI is a bit wonky sometimes, but you occassionally get some really jaw-dropping stuff. For instance, when I killed one bandit his magic sword fell clattering down a mine, and another bandit dropped her lousy iron knife, picked up his sword and ran at me!
And all the great books...
1. Pour gasoline on hands.
2. Ignite said hands.
3. ????
4. Profit!
My guess is that step three involves a lot of screaming and flailing around.
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Actually, try 650 000 years of data.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
Yes... the little difference is that the scientists have science to back these claims. You know, facts and those things.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway?
A nice debunking of this claim in all its permutations is available here.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
Could you show us some proof that they are wrong please? Haven't you considered that a possible reason you don't see any debunking "follow up" reports is no a conspiracy, but rather that no one manages to prove them wrong?
Sure, here you go.
A few cut and pasted highlights:
In short - you can't use Mars as proof/disproof of global warming on Earth.
Psst yourself.
You have to pay for the OS to run the virtualisation server on, you have to register to download it, and then you have to follow the usual licences- i.e (From MS own Virtual Server 2005 Technical Overview White Paper):
* you may not transfer original OEM server licenses from one computer to another,
* Each installed copy of Windows Server must be separately licensed. This means, for example, that if you are setting up four virtual machines within Virtual Server 2005 to run one instance of Windows 2000 Server and three instances of Windows NT Server 4.0 concurrently, you will need one Windows 2000 Server license and three Windows NT Server 4.0 licenses, in addition to the Windows Server 2003 host license running Virtual Server 2005.
* Each additional licence such as for IIS or databases have to be paid for each virtual machine... and so on.
Yeah, that sounds like an awesome deal.
I think you're referring to the ozone hole.
That was the LAST Impending Global Catastrophe. Keep up with the times.
That was averted thanks to swift international response thankfully. For instance, British prime minster Margaret Thatcher who was a university chemistry major realised the dangers and she was a driving force in creating a London conference about this, and a fund to help developing countries introduce substitutes for CFCs. It is rumored she helped convince Reagan to take action too.
There was a real and very urgent problem, and it was solved with a lot of effort by scientists and governments, and now you and other dickheads are going. "Haha, see, nothing happened, it was all just scaremongering. Ignore global warming".
When are we going to see some real in-depth reviews of released operating systems on Slashdot? As usual, most of the "review" is a bunch of screenshots, mostly of the installation and the startup. Is that going to persuade anyone to stay or switch?
How about once posting a review that include some mentions of
- security
- stability (including doing some major upgrading)
- hardware support
- performance as: server, office workstation, development environment, multimedia/htpc
I realise it is difficult to go in-depth on all these topics, especially with a recently released OS version. But perhaps we could set the standards a little higher than a few "ooh, shiny" screenshots?
I'm 31 and have recently started doing a lot of maths in my spare time so that I can get a real computer science and engineering degree one day (I have a degree, but it is CS light... now that I work as a programmer I know how much I'm really lacking), so it is nice to see that at least for some people the old saying by Hardy, "mathematics is a young man's game" isn't true. Carleson is 78 today, and around 40 back when he did the main breakthroughs he is honored for today.
Hardy's saying is a bit of slight against all female mathematicians too, come to think of it...
A lot of companies and open source projects seem to have a focus now on making things faster and using less resources recently, which I think is great news. I just updated Suse 10.0 on my laptop to a new KDE and Qt version (3.5 and 3 repectively, I believe), and things are really faster and more responsive now. I'm eager to download the Gnome live CD too and test.
.Net world perhaps?
Java 1.5 and upcoming 1.6 have improved startup speeds, GUI rendering (single threaded Open GL) and cut down on real and precieved memory usage too.
Does anyone else have any more examples? Windows and
for us, hardcore stealth games players one thing is important in the ad: new Hitman is out.
Hah, I scoff in your general direction! REAL stealth-game players play only Thief, a series of games that does stealth gameplay and level design better. They dared to make a more mature game that doesn't try to titilate with tits and gore. On harder levels, you are requred NOT to kill, knock out or even get spotted by anyone to succeed.
If the ad makes you stop and look at it, they win.
I'm beginning to think some ad agencies are populated by sociopaths...
In Sweden 6 months ago or so, stickers with "free x" popped up in many places, they were similar to posters by for instance the Red Cross or Amnesty international calling for the humane treatment and release of political prisoners. Only this person x (forgot the name) on the stickers was the character in a PS2 game, it was a promo by the publishers using peoples concern about real issues of torture and imprisonment by dictatorships to draw attention to a fucking game. Real tasteful!
I'm not calling for a ban here, I'm just wondering out loud if they are completely void of empathy and human feelings. Pretty timely article too, today news organizations in Europe are reporting that one ad agency used a convicted paedophile to jokingly advertise for childrens' theatre tickets...
prayer based security?
I agree with the AC above, check out Psychonauts if you love Tim Schaefer. I've gushed about it here on Slashdot before.
But, given choice of the lesser of two evils, I'd definitely go with almost ANYONE over Sony.
Yeah, same here. The only exception? Microsoft... who just happen to support HD DVD.
If HD DVD wins, Microsoft are going to control your living room just like they control most PCs today. With Bluray, we have a chance to get some good open source tools for hacking the Java based software and menues.
I love it in Java land, where creating something scalable inevitably means exciting things like building a single JVM that runs on multiple machines, or wrapping things in five layers of EJB so that they can work across multiple machines.
No, it doesn't inevitably mean that. You can make an application more scalable by moving from threads and blocking sockets to non-blocking IO channels for instance. What you are talking about is clustering. Those are two possible approaches with Java, but there are plenty more.
I'm turned off by the fact that development in Rails is like a gimpy version of development in Lisp. I
:-)
Hehe... yes, speaking of fanatic evangelists, no one has even gotten close to beat the Lisp people. I don't know, maybe it is a FANTASTIC language. it is just... all this smug superiority pisses me off.
Java though, treats people who want to use UTF-32 as second-class citizens.
Java has support for Unicode 4 since Java 5, released september 2004.
Has anyone else played with Rails and been turned off?
I've seen one or two... here for instance. I've yet to try it myself, but I'm looking forward to it... when things have calmed down a bit on my current project. I've been a bit turned off by the constant one-sided evangelizing by some of the enthusiasts though.
I'm amazed, a whole article by Bruce and not a single anecdote about kayaking. His writing is improving. :-)
Or just reading a good book every once in a while. That'll do far more good than anything as worthless as a liberal arts college.
A good liberal arts college will actually make you read a lot of really good books, and also discuss them in-depth.
Games are approaching works of art, but face it, it's only pop culture art. I'm hoping one day we might se a game that not only entertains but actually changes the world.