Wil and others have given a lot of press to user-made content, with games like Spore and Second Life usually given as prime examples. But frankly, I don't think user-made content will take over gaming any more than fanfics have taken over literature, or blogs have taken over journalism.
The fact is, populism aside, there are some people who are simply a lot better at creating content. And if we're just relying on them to create content for a lark in their spare time, we're really hurting the community. Those people SHOULD be paid, cultivated, and allowed to grow in their craft. Having the most popular spaceship model in Spore would be nice for the creator and all, but wouldn't it be even better to have the creator working for a game studio full-time, honing his abilities and working with other pros?
As for the idea of AI gamemasters that can improvise the story to fit your whims... not going to happen ANYTIME soon. It's hard for an intelligent human to improvise cooperative storytelling with satisfactory results, much less a computer.
David Cross has seen remarkable success in his business model of eating barbeque pork ribs and describing the experience to Orthodox Jews.
"Mmm, this is delicious! Falling off the bone! Too bad your God won't let you eat this, mine doesn't give a crap!"
Seriously. I want to PLAY THE GAME, not watch some media guy play the game (and almost certainly ruin the plot for me in the process). What kind of masochist would watch this?
...when he brings up classic Google as a paradigm example of an "ugly" webpage.
A huge part of Google's appeal is that it looks much BETTER than the busy, cluttered designs of "portals" like Yahoo. It's not sacrificing functionality for form; it is IMPROVING functionality by simplifying the form. Back when I had dialup, the difference in page load time between Google and Yahoo was amazing, purely because Google wasn't crammed with 100k of links and ads I didn't want.
Of course any portable game system MS makes would be hyped as a DS/GBA/PSP killer; those are the competing products in that category. The MS marketing department would have to be pretty braindead NOT to claim that their as-yet-unreleased system is better than the stuff that's currently on the market.
That leaves "iPod killer" as the only questionable assertion. Well, here's how I read it: the system will have either a hard drive or a decent amount of flash memory. This would be great on a portable for all sorts of reasons (e.g., you could download the games to the system rather than carrying around 50 tiny cartridges). A WMA/MP3 player would only be one fairly simple app on such a system, so they may as well stick it in there and add another tick on the checklist.
Will it be a better MP3 player than an iPod? No, but who cares? The PS2 is a pretty terrible DVD player (low quality, clunky controls, noisy as heck), but it was that feature that convinced me to buy it over a GameCube.
I tend to agree. 90% of consumers are probably still watching non-hi-def TV's, and won't see any huge improvement in the clarity of next-gen DVD's. All they'll get out of this transition is more frustrating previews and ads they can't fast forward, etc.
I'm guessing when they get their shit together and decide on a format, the studios will start releasing the "deluxe" DVDs (with special features, commentary, etc.) ONLY on the new hi-def format. After a couple years, they'll start offering some entire movies only on high-def DVD. In other words, they'll force the transition on us.
1. Duck down on the silver platform on level 3 of the first world for a few seconds, then sprint behind the level's end-screen.
2. Fly above the door towards the end of the mid-level key castle in the first world.
3. Use the first whistle to get to the Warp Zone, then use the second whistle while you're at the Warp Zone world map to get straight to the eighth world.
The NY Times article I linked said explicitly that "PlayStation 3 will also include... Linux operating software." I didn't know about the 10-point breakdown thing, which apparently contradicts the Times; that was added by Zonk.
If you're looking for thematically deep and nuanced games, look more to RPGs. Planescape: Torment is a good nominee, as mention in TFA. Most recent Bioware games, like KotOR and Jade Empire, aren't bad either. And Chrono Trigger is still the best thing ever.
But is this even the type of criterion we should be looking at? A still-life painting is art, and it doesn't have a whole lot to tell us (explicitly) about the human condition. Expecting the EXACT same type of aesthetic experience from a game as you would from a movie probably isn't the right way of looking at things.
It would be awesome if they could somehow incorporate player-controlled and/or player-created "modules" into the game, a la NWN. But if they did this, they'd basically have to abandon the concept of slow character development, because a generous DM could just hand out rewards out of proportion to the difficulty of the encounters.
In other words, I think they have to make a choice between user-created content and structured character advancement.
I also think the game may well stink, because Bioware's biggest strength is storytelling, which is NOT a strong point of the MMO genre.
Well, the Xbox 360 was around first, so that's got to be the Father. Its wrath is terrible to behold, and I hear it attracts locusts.
I'm gonna go ahead and say the PS3 is Jesus, because Sony's press reports lead me to believe the Cell processor will enable it to turn water into wine and walk on water.
And that makes Revolution the Holy Ghost - it will have no physical form, but will rather be the heart of gaming enjoyment that lives in each of us. (Which is unfortunate, because I was looking forward to some swordfighting action with that new controller.)
Imagine my surprise when I saw him whip out the PlayStation at our family reunion and then strap on the goofy-looking helmet...
Seriously, he's got adult ADHD, and he's pretty happy about the treatment. Basically, the helmet is part of a special controller, which you can hook into a normal PS2. The more focused your brain waves show you to be, the harder the controller presses the X button for you - so it's ideal for racing games. And if your attention drifts, the controller outputs randomly so your car spins out or crashes. He plays on the long, boring timed tracks, and tries to beat his time records. (He sure as heck didn't get a new high score when we were all watching him and pestering him about the system!)
He says the most expensive part of the whole thing is the sterilized water he has to buy for the sponges on the probes. (I'm assuming that hefty price tag for the system itself was covered by health insurance.) He also says that the data researchers have collected on the system shows that after (I believe) six months of regular use, you are able to adjust your brain waves enough that medication is often no longer necessary. Awesome news if it pans out!
(By the way, my cousin isn't just a hyperactive kid. He's a smart guy, and a senior at a good college. He's always had problems with focus and concentration, though, to his own frustration. While I'm skeptical about a lot of reported cases of ADD/ADHD, especially among younger kids, in his case it seems like the real deal.)
The downside of this kind of "honest" preview is that it makes it less likely that devs are going to be willing to hand over ANY kind of preview before it's completely done.
Think about it. Do moviemakers send out clips of their films before they're (more or less) done for any kind of REAL editorial preview? DO novelists mail out their first drafts to the New York Times so that the book editors have something juicy to print about the Next Big Novel? Of course not. The REASON it's a preview and not a review is that the item in question isn't done yet. It's not ready for a real critical analysis.
Hard-hitting reviews, I'm all for. But when it comes to PREVIEWS, I think it's a bit much to ask for anything more than the highlights the PR departments are gonna put out. If anything, game journalists should just keep their enthusiasm to a minimum and make sure they separate THEIR opinions from the spin they're getting from press releases. E.g., "X Software says that Joe Bob's Grand Adventure will revolutionize the genre. And while we haven't seen enough to know that they'll live up to that promise, X's track record gives us reason to hope."
This may not be representative of most users' experiences, but here's how my Adventure with OSs (tm) went:
To get my Windows desktop on my new wireless network, I plugged a PCI wireless card, followed the instructions on the driver install CD, and it worked.
To get the same box onto my wireless network via Ubuntu, I tried the built-in network wizard thing and it didn't recognize my card. I spent a couple hours messing around with ndis wrappers and online faqs and console commands I didn't understand, and although eventually I got the system to recognize the card, it STILL won't go online. (We're not talking about some esoteric card, either; it's a Linksys 802.11g PCI card connecting to a Linksys router with "excellent" signal reception.) So now, I have a pretty, stable, and fast OS that's utterly useless because I can't get it on the internet. And since I can't find a way to change the default OS on the boot-selector thingy, I have to sit in front of my computer every time it boots, waiting for that five-second time window where I can scroll down to Windows and load that instead.
To get my Powerbook on the wireless network, I turned it on.
I'd say that if this was a quote from Gates, any Slashdot summary almost certainly WOULD come with a statement about bias. If it didn't, it would be assumed because the/. crowd is so generally anti-Bill.
And hey, I'm a liberal and proud of it, but you're going to have to explain to me how smaller pay increases for workers who are already in the top 5% of earners is going to cause the collapse of our economy. People are complaining that $75k a year starting salary for a new graduate are too LOW? A schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an M.A. doesn't make nearly that much. You really can't start moralizing without looking silly when you're talking about the rich and priveleged vs. the extremely rich and priveleged. If you're going to argue that Microsoft employees deserve to be in the top 4% rather than merely the top 5%, your argument should probably be grounded in economics rather than moralizing.
I do agree that right-wingers are always the first to cry "bias," and that it's probably made the media a bit gun-shy when it comes to truly objective coverage. But that seems to be a separate issue.
It's my understanding that thus far, Apple has been intentionally downplaying their system's security because they don't want to be seen as taunting hackers. A "security czar" might be seen by Apple as just such a misstep. The last thing they want is a guy standing up at an Apple podium exclaiming how their security is invincible, because that's one sure way to make themselves a bigger target.
I dunno, I think the author is actually fairly clear when you RTFA. The open-source guys are the liberal rennaissance types in his analogy, and Stallman is the crazy book-burner who's trying to shut them down.
It makes some sense to me. Many programmers and companies see open source as an appealing solution for profit-driven and nonprofit projects alike. IBM, Sun, and Google, for example, all see some potential financial gain in promoting a strong open-source community. The advantages of open source include broader standards, "many eyes" to help catch bugs and security flaws, and the possibility of programmers from competing companies working together towards a mutual goal.
"Free-source" guys like Stallman don't seem to like this so much. They seem to think of their software as a crusade, and consider it perfectly justified to try to strong-arm people into abandoning DRM, patents, and of course copyright for their software. Stallman would undoubtably love it if there simply WAS no protection for any kind of "intellectual property." But that makes him a bit impractical, IMO, since the profit motive is the only reason a LOT of good programs get made. (Not to mention art, music, movies, books...)
In other words, Stallman is trying to tear down the burgeoning open source/corporate alliances on ideological grounds, and I don't think the article writer is totally off base in his analogy. Although of course he's hyperbolizing quite a bit.
The US government wants Google to help them censor the web (by providing user info). The US government is also criticizing Google for helping the Chinese government censor the web (by restricting search results).
I don't have to consider political dissidence morally equivalent to pornography (NOT child porn, as others have pointed out) in order to object to this. All I need is a healthy regard for the principle of free speech, which famously protects American pornographers and Neo-Nazis alike.
The government is appealing to the ideal free speech in its criticism of Google's China shenanigans. At the same time, the government is discounting that same ideal in its pursuit of anti-porn laws. Thus the charge of hypocrisy.
Am I finally gonna have to shell out for an antivirus program for my PowerBook?
I've been holding off so far because there's isn't anything critical on there, and because Macs haven't been hit by any serious viruses. But if I start seeing real, dangerous, honest-to-God in-the-wild viruses that DON'T require me to be an idiot and type in my password to install, the time of innocence is passed.
Of course, Windows computers are still far worse in this regard. But once the "annoyance threshold" of buying/installing an antivirus program is crossed, a big advantage to Mac convenience is lost. And for most Joe Sixpack types, I'd guess that convenience is a bigger concern than security when it comes to viruses and virus-protection.
"When the PC market comes out with something that's worth playing, I'll probably be first in line. Where are the X-Coms, or the RTSes that actually break new ground? Where are the adventure games with their beautiful story arcs?"
They didn't sell very well, so game companies stopped making them.
If you are in possession of some strange new marketing scheme that would allow game companies to dig their way out of debt by making more of these fun but unprofitable games, I'd love to hear it.
This thing may be about the size of a matchbox, but remember that it's monochrome. I would assume you need to add red and blue lasers for the full-color support they hope to implement. Wouldn't that make the projector up to three times as big?
Don't get me wrong, this is still a really cool thing. The size, weight, temperature, lack of fan noise, and infinite focus all sound like excellent benefits for a no-hassle projector. But it sounds a little too big to be built in to laptops, let alone cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
Wil and others have given a lot of press to user-made content, with games like Spore and Second Life usually given as prime examples. But frankly, I don't think user-made content will take over gaming any more than fanfics have taken over literature, or blogs have taken over journalism.
The fact is, populism aside, there are some people who are simply a lot better at creating content. And if we're just relying on them to create content for a lark in their spare time, we're really hurting the community. Those people SHOULD be paid, cultivated, and allowed to grow in their craft. Having the most popular spaceship model in Spore would be nice for the creator and all, but wouldn't it be even better to have the creator working for a game studio full-time, honing his abilities and working with other pros?
As for the idea of AI gamemasters that can improvise the story to fit your whims... not going to happen ANYTIME soon. It's hard for an intelligent human to improvise cooperative storytelling with satisfactory results, much less a computer.
David Cross has seen remarkable success in his business model of eating barbeque pork ribs and describing the experience to Orthodox Jews.
"Mmm, this is delicious! Falling off the bone! Too bad your God won't let you eat this, mine doesn't give a crap!"
Seriously. I want to PLAY THE GAME, not watch some media guy play the game (and almost certainly ruin the plot for me in the process). What kind of masochist would watch this?
...when he brings up classic Google as a paradigm example of an "ugly" webpage.
A huge part of Google's appeal is that it looks much BETTER than the busy, cluttered designs of "portals" like Yahoo. It's not sacrificing functionality for form; it is IMPROVING functionality by simplifying the form. Back when I had dialup, the difference in page load time between Google and Yahoo was amazing, purely because Google wasn't crammed with 100k of links and ads I didn't want.
Of course any portable game system MS makes would be hyped as a DS/GBA/PSP killer; those are the competing products in that category. The MS marketing department would have to be pretty braindead NOT to claim that their as-yet-unreleased system is better than the stuff that's currently on the market.
That leaves "iPod killer" as the only questionable assertion. Well, here's how I read it: the system will have either a hard drive or a decent amount of flash memory. This would be great on a portable for all sorts of reasons (e.g., you could download the games to the system rather than carrying around 50 tiny cartridges). A WMA/MP3 player would only be one fairly simple app on such a system, so they may as well stick it in there and add another tick on the checklist.
Will it be a better MP3 player than an iPod? No, but who cares? The PS2 is a pretty terrible DVD player (low quality, clunky controls, noisy as heck), but it was that feature that convinced me to buy it over a GameCube.
I tend to agree. 90% of consumers are probably still watching non-hi-def TV's, and won't see any huge improvement in the clarity of next-gen DVD's. All they'll get out of this transition is more frustrating previews and ads they can't fast forward, etc.
I'm guessing when they get their shit together and decide on a format, the studios will start releasing the "deluxe" DVDs (with special features, commentary, etc.) ONLY on the new hi-def format. After a couple years, they'll start offering some entire movies only on high-def DVD. In other words, they'll force the transition on us.
1. Duck down on the silver platform on level 3 of the first world for a few seconds, then sprint behind the level's end-screen.
2. Fly above the door towards the end of the mid-level key castle in the first world.
3. Use the first whistle to get to the Warp Zone, then use the second whistle while you're at the Warp Zone world map to get straight to the eighth world.
The NY Times article I linked said explicitly that "PlayStation 3 will also include... Linux operating software." I didn't know about the 10-point breakdown thing, which apparently contradicts the Times; that was added by Zonk.
If you're looking for thematically deep and nuanced games, look more to RPGs. Planescape: Torment is a good nominee, as mention in TFA. Most recent Bioware games, like KotOR and Jade Empire, aren't bad either. And Chrono Trigger is still the best thing ever.
But is this even the type of criterion we should be looking at? A still-life painting is art, and it doesn't have a whole lot to tell us (explicitly) about the human condition. Expecting the EXACT same type of aesthetic experience from a game as you would from a movie probably isn't the right way of looking at things.
Because our DRM is SO EFFECTIVE that NOBODY could ever crack it, even with the supercomputers of a thousand years hence!
Congratulations, you've just described a PvE server on World of Warcraft!
It would be awesome if they could somehow incorporate player-controlled and/or player-created "modules" into the game, a la NWN. But if they did this, they'd basically have to abandon the concept of slow character development, because a generous DM could just hand out rewards out of proportion to the difficulty of the encounters. In other words, I think they have to make a choice between user-created content and structured character advancement. I also think the game may well stink, because Bioware's biggest strength is storytelling, which is NOT a strong point of the MMO genre.
Well, the Xbox 360 was around first, so that's got to be the Father. Its wrath is terrible to behold, and I hear it attracts locusts.
I'm gonna go ahead and say the PS3 is Jesus, because Sony's press reports lead me to believe the Cell processor will enable it to turn water into wine and walk on water.
And that makes Revolution the Holy Ghost - it will have no physical form, but will rather be the heart of gaming enjoyment that lives in each of us. (Which is unfortunate, because I was looking forward to some swordfighting action with that new controller.)
Imagine my surprise when I saw him whip out the PlayStation at our family reunion and then strap on the goofy-looking helmet...
Seriously, he's got adult ADHD, and he's pretty happy about the treatment. Basically, the helmet is part of a special controller, which you can hook into a normal PS2. The more focused your brain waves show you to be, the harder the controller presses the X button for you - so it's ideal for racing games. And if your attention drifts, the controller outputs randomly so your car spins out or crashes. He plays on the long, boring timed tracks, and tries to beat his time records. (He sure as heck didn't get a new high score when we were all watching him and pestering him about the system!)
He says the most expensive part of the whole thing is the sterilized water he has to buy for the sponges on the probes. (I'm assuming that hefty price tag for the system itself was covered by health insurance.) He also says that the data researchers have collected on the system shows that after (I believe) six months of regular use, you are able to adjust your brain waves enough that medication is often no longer necessary. Awesome news if it pans out!
(By the way, my cousin isn't just a hyperactive kid. He's a smart guy, and a senior at a good college. He's always had problems with focus and concentration, though, to his own frustration. While I'm skeptical about a lot of reported cases of ADD/ADHD, especially among younger kids, in his case it seems like the real deal.)
The downside of this kind of "honest" preview is that it makes it less likely that devs are going to be willing to hand over ANY kind of preview before it's completely done.
Think about it. Do moviemakers send out clips of their films before they're (more or less) done for any kind of REAL editorial preview? DO novelists mail out their first drafts to the New York Times so that the book editors have something juicy to print about the Next Big Novel? Of course not. The REASON it's a preview and not a review is that the item in question isn't done yet. It's not ready for a real critical analysis.
Hard-hitting reviews, I'm all for. But when it comes to PREVIEWS, I think it's a bit much to ask for anything more than the highlights the PR departments are gonna put out. If anything, game journalists should just keep their enthusiasm to a minimum and make sure they separate THEIR opinions from the spin they're getting from press releases. E.g., "X Software says that Joe Bob's Grand Adventure will revolutionize the genre. And while we haven't seen enough to know that they'll live up to that promise, X's track record gives us reason to hope."
This may not be representative of most users' experiences, but here's how my Adventure with OSs (tm) went:
To get my Windows desktop on my new wireless network, I plugged a PCI wireless card, followed the instructions on the driver install CD, and it worked.
To get the same box onto my wireless network via Ubuntu, I tried the built-in network wizard thing and it didn't recognize my card. I spent a couple hours messing around with ndis wrappers and online faqs and console commands I didn't understand, and although eventually I got the system to recognize the card, it STILL won't go online. (We're not talking about some esoteric card, either; it's a Linksys 802.11g PCI card connecting to a Linksys router with "excellent" signal reception.) So now, I have a pretty, stable, and fast OS that's utterly useless because I can't get it on the internet. And since I can't find a way to change the default OS on the boot-selector thingy, I have to sit in front of my computer every time it boots, waiting for that five-second time window where I can scroll down to Windows and load that instead.
To get my Powerbook on the wireless network, I turned it on.
I'd say that if this was a quote from Gates, any Slashdot summary almost certainly WOULD come with a statement about bias. If it didn't, it would be assumed because the /. crowd is so generally anti-Bill.
And hey, I'm a liberal and proud of it, but you're going to have to explain to me how smaller pay increases for workers who are already in the top 5% of earners is going to cause the collapse of our economy. People are complaining that $75k a year starting salary for a new graduate are too LOW? A schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an M.A. doesn't make nearly that much. You really can't start moralizing without looking silly when you're talking about the rich and priveleged vs. the extremely rich and priveleged. If you're going to argue that Microsoft employees deserve to be in the top 4% rather than merely the top 5%, your argument should probably be grounded in economics rather than moralizing.
I do agree that right-wingers are always the first to cry "bias," and that it's probably made the media a bit gun-shy when it comes to truly objective coverage. But that seems to be a separate issue.
It's my understanding that thus far, Apple has been intentionally downplaying their system's security because they don't want to be seen as taunting hackers. A "security czar" might be seen by Apple as just such a misstep. The last thing they want is a guy standing up at an Apple podium exclaiming how their security is invincible, because that's one sure way to make themselves a bigger target.
I dunno, I think the author is actually fairly clear when you RTFA. The open-source guys are the liberal rennaissance types in his analogy, and Stallman is the crazy book-burner who's trying to shut them down.
It makes some sense to me. Many programmers and companies see open source as an appealing solution for profit-driven and nonprofit projects alike. IBM, Sun, and Google, for example, all see some potential financial gain in promoting a strong open-source community. The advantages of open source include broader standards, "many eyes" to help catch bugs and security flaws, and the possibility of programmers from competing companies working together towards a mutual goal.
"Free-source" guys like Stallman don't seem to like this so much. They seem to think of their software as a crusade, and consider it perfectly justified to try to strong-arm people into abandoning DRM, patents, and of course copyright for their software. Stallman would undoubtably love it if there simply WAS no protection for any kind of "intellectual property." But that makes him a bit impractical, IMO, since the profit motive is the only reason a LOT of good programs get made. (Not to mention art, music, movies, books...)
In other words, Stallman is trying to tear down the burgeoning open source/corporate alliances on ideological grounds, and I don't think the article writer is totally off base in his analogy. Although of course he's hyperbolizing quite a bit.
I've seen newspapers quoting figures like a BILLION dollars in revenue for the year.
To put that in perspective, it's about $999,985,000 more than I expect to earn this year.
It's both a cheat AND a timesaver.
If I want to play in a world where the rich kids get all the cool toys without putting in any effort... I'll go outside.
The US government wants Google to help them censor the web (by providing user info). The US government is also criticizing Google for helping the Chinese government censor the web (by restricting search results).
I don't have to consider political dissidence morally equivalent to pornography (NOT child porn, as others have pointed out) in order to object to this. All I need is a healthy regard for the principle of free speech, which famously protects American pornographers and Neo-Nazis alike.
The government is appealing to the ideal free speech in its criticism of Google's China shenanigans. At the same time, the government is discounting that same ideal in its pursuit of anti-porn laws. Thus the charge of hypocrisy.
Am I finally gonna have to shell out for an antivirus program for my PowerBook?
I've been holding off so far because there's isn't anything critical on there, and because Macs haven't been hit by any serious viruses. But if I start seeing real, dangerous, honest-to-God in-the-wild viruses that DON'T require me to be an idiot and type in my password to install, the time of innocence is passed.
Of course, Windows computers are still far worse in this regard. But once the "annoyance threshold" of buying/installing an antivirus program is crossed, a big advantage to Mac convenience is lost. And for most Joe Sixpack types, I'd guess that convenience is a bigger concern than security when it comes to viruses and virus-protection.
Can the government really go after Google for aiding Chinese censorship and for NOT aiding US censorship AT THE SAME TIME?
"When the PC market comes out with something that's worth playing, I'll probably be first in line. Where are the X-Coms, or the RTSes that actually break new ground? Where are the adventure games with their beautiful story arcs?"
They didn't sell very well, so game companies stopped making them.
If you are in possession of some strange new marketing scheme that would allow game companies to dig their way out of debt by making more of these fun but unprofitable games, I'd love to hear it.
This thing may be about the size of a matchbox, but remember that it's monochrome. I would assume you need to add red and blue lasers for the full-color support they hope to implement. Wouldn't that make the projector up to three times as big?
Don't get me wrong, this is still a really cool thing. The size, weight, temperature, lack of fan noise, and infinite focus all sound like excellent benefits for a no-hassle projector. But it sounds a little too big to be built in to laptops, let alone cell phones.