I think Eberts view was along the same lines only more restricted. He refers specifically to the gamers experience and hwo that can not be considered art because you are only interested in how good the gameplay is.
Ebert considered the lack of authorial control to be a problem but why its a problem wasnt made entirely clear. This article expands on his point nicely stating that this is a problem because the experience is catering to the gamer not the artist and the artists creation.
This of course has to expand to the game content and design and in a wider view has to include some of the popcorn flicks of hollywood.
Where it gets blurry and where it bounces back is that even traditional art used to, for the large part, be about catering to others. A good chunk even today is made on comission. Over the years these pieces become valuable usually due to the artists influence within the painting and such.
For a while I considered this as a bit of a loop hole. Those paintings were made for others and games are made for others. If one is considered art then the other must be. There is however a difference. The reason comissioned works become valuable pieces of art is because the original purpose of the piece falls away. It becomes a piece of its providence rather than a part of the art and all thats left is the artists work.
This doesnt happen with games. When a games original purpose of providing a gameplay experience falls away the game pretty much vanishes. People have said that Tetris and Pacman are works of art but they are just games that have long lasting gameplay. (Which is an art in itself though not in the same sense of the word.) There were dozens if not thousands of other games produced along side them. No one remembers or puts them on a pedestool because they no longer have the gameplay of modern games, whether through being completed too many times, or just being too dated. (With the possible exception of pong, spacewar, wolfenstein and other genre starters. These are remebered for there function in the progress of games not there artistic merit.)
This is where I believe Eberts comment on how games have not achieved the heights of the work accomplished by the great artists comes from. I look back at old games for two reasons, to get some more gameplay in or for nostalgia. Nothing more.
In summary, if games are all about gameplay, and gameplay isnt art, then games arnt art.
'But I don't want to give up my humanity either.' I dont see how the people of Star Trek have in any way given up there humanity. Infact they appear to have it in abundance.
'Nor do I find it appealing to engage in utopian fantasies so divested from reality as to be laughable.' A real glass half empty kind of a guy arnt you. I dont think anyone thought it was a real possibility that the whole thing would occur but it is definately something to aspire to and becomes far more realistic when you take in to account that they have both infinite power generation and infinite resources.
'It felt much more POSSIBLE than the other Trek series.'
It attempted to have a workable monetry system in a universe that everything you could ever want is free. (See previous post and comment about B5 along with the fact that it actually makes sense.)
'The characters on TNG, in contrast, acted like automatons' The captain, a stern man with family difficulties and an unrequited love for the doctor. First officer, more gung ho, woman loving and wreckless than his captain but when it comes down to it hell pull things off just as well. Security officer, a klingon in the federation with all of the baggage that comes with it. Pasionate about his heritage but also pasionate about his work which often conflicts. Coucilor, an empath who had a relationship with the first officer which causes jealousy issues with her other relationships. Has a crazy mother.
I could go on but by now it should be clear that these people are far from automotons. They have many of the failings that every human does. Jealousy, conflicts, family trouble, relationship trouble, every problem your average human has to deal with. The difference is that theres no one that feels the need to kick someone to death, start a war, or as in DS9 become terrorists in an annoying non sensical battle on par with the petty crap we have today.
'or even particularly desirable.' (See previous post about head issues.)
Um so your saying that games that most people want to play are almost certainly going to suck?
Isnt that an oxymoron?
This, I think, is what hes talking about though. There is no such thing as a lowest common denominator with games. If a game appeals to lots of people it doesnt matter how much the quality of programming or graphics suffers. (Indeed ive seen plenty of people on here stress how little graphics and the aesthetic of a game dont mean everything.)
Art doesnt care about the majority it stands on its own an invokes whatever feelings it wants. Games cant do this if they want to succeed. You could consider any of the bottom ranked games pieces of art but they will vanish in to obscurity because, as he also points out. They dont provide the service to the gamer that they should.
Some people have called him a hipcrit for displaying art that is based on computer games but the fact is you can produce art from anything. A rock on the floor isnt art, photograph it in the right way and youll have it hanging in a gallery.
Ive bounced back and forth on the whole subject a fair bit. Though I am definately beginning to come down on the side that says games arnt art.
Oh but I do agree that plenty of Hollywood films also cant really be considered as art.
I wish the person who marked me down as a troll would have posted so that I could find out what the problem was. Some people have responded with Final Fantasy X as an example (Ive not had a chance to play it in any depth.) So in response to them and hopefully to elaborate on my point id say that FFX doesnt have issues specifically to do with the cinematics themselves.
The best example I can think of is Uwe Bolls master piece *snigger* alone in the dark. There have been a lot of films with far far more convoluted or complex plots than that film and have had the same or less time to present the ideas. That doesnt stop alone in the dark from slapping on a 5 minute reel of text telling you lots of information that is largely useless.
I.e. there is nothing wrong with films or their length. Nor is there anything wrong with introductory text. How they are set out is what counts. (Star Wars being an example of where it was pulled off very well.) This is just the same for game cinematics, like everything in a game cinematics can be good or bad, and I still maintain that they are not responsible for making or breaking a game.
To put it another way. If you have an over long cinematic how would that be any different to making an overly long trip from one place to another. (As many free roaming games do.) You dont remove the whole free roaming engine though. You should just modify the design so that it fits together better.
A last point. If he was simply saying that badly designed cinematics are the problem not infact all cinematics then its a moot point. Anything that is badly designed is a problem from graphics to AI.
Ill take interstellar star ships and utopian societies over the countless abhorant acts that occur on Earth today.
Heck you can say that you find watching a near perfect society like in Star Trek is boring, but youd need your head looking at if youd prefer to live in a world with rape, murder, poverty, illness, and a whole host of other atrocities. As opposed to a world where all of it has been abolished, whilst accomplishing even greater freedoms across the whole of humanity than we have in the best nations today.
Im not entirely sure why this is an 'insightful' comment. I dont even know what your arguing against.
His paragraph is warning any new potential bittorrent users that the vast majority of stuff on bittorrent is copyrighted. (Which is true.) That if you download it you may get sued. (Also true.) So download these things at your own risk. (Good advice, people should be aware of what they are getting in to.)
It has nothing to do with legal file sharing or sharing with your buddies because in reality thats just not what most people are coming on to bittorrent to do.
I get the feeling, from your clear view of MS and closed source, youve just taken this as an excuse to rant about what a grand old place the world would be if everyone shared everything.
He never actually says which game hes talking about.
Personally im having a hard time thinking of any game with really impressive cinematics that has turned out to be a terrible. Nor can I think of a game where the game is really good but completely destroyed by cinematics. I mean the cinematics arnt even done by the same team as the people who make the gameplay and even the most non linear worlds such as Final Fantasy 7 managed to pull off being good with cinematics. (The lack of skipping was an issue but not with the cinematics themselves.)
I just dont see cinematics as a way of judging a game whether its good or bad. Nor do I see the cinematics as damaging a game.
If a game is bad its not because of some movies. If anything the movies are the only saving grace.
(I do take his point about being forced in to situations when youd have to have your brain replaced with a small carrot to actually do the things in the movie shown to you. That isnt a cinematics problem thats a plot problem. If the plot for getting you in to the situation was spot on then you wouldnt give a crap about the cinematic being there. Indeed I enjoy watching the cinematics of a game with a decent story.)
Well the method of payment for sociolotron pretty much restricts to 18. I think my post can still apply.
Otherwise a kid would have to have a parent sign them up (I dont even want to think of how screwed up a parent would have to be to sign up a kid to a game where they can be raped.) or theyd have to nick a card from someone else and you cant exactly blame Sociolotron for the way a child has been raised.
I dont particularly agree with this game, I do think it goes to far, for similar reasons to the ones you posted. That is why I will not be signing up for it and why I hope no one else will either. Beyond that, even if I had the power to do so, I wouldnt do anything to bring the game down or censor it.
'Other Trek series treated their characters as if they were greedless, religionless, sexless robots incapable of even the slightest moral failing or ambiguity'
Well done you have completely missed the whole point of Star Trek. Its a _utopian_ society it was made to be a _utopian_ society, the whole basis of the series is that they are a _utopian_ society. The idea of each episode was to have something or other attack there values, and their _utopian_ society. Then they had to get out of it without compromising their _utopian_ ideals.
People dont watch Star Trek for its gritty realism or dysfunctional characters theres plenty of that on TV in just about every other program. Its an optimistic view of what humanity can achieve, but you appear to not be able to accept that as being possible at all. Which speaks volumes.
As for DS9 it trampled all over the ideas that made Star Trek what it was and as the seasons went on it turned in to a poor rip off of the under appreciated Babylon5. A universe within which terrorism, greed and corruption actually made sense.
Im not entirely sure, but you seem to be typing as if the people playing these games are different to the people watching movies with sex scenes.
They of course arnt and when a movie sex scene is portrayed as a valid piece of the film. (Off the top of my head Sarah Connor and Reece in Terminator.) No one was there giggling and pointing at the fact that you caught a glimpse of a boob. If games portray the subject with as much validity and maturity as that then it wont degrade it.
'Do you think being able to have sex in games would degrade the game to the point where everyone would be doing it everywhere?' Probably. Sex is not only great fun, it is, more or less, all we are built to do.
'If so, what does that say about society?' Between me and my friends in computer games we have slaughtered ooooh about 10 times the population of this planet. A good chunk were perfectly innocent people who we killed because it was hilariously funny. (Oh Carmageddon two will you ever stop bringing me to tears of laughter with your wacky slaughterfest.) What does _that_ say about society? Oh thats right. Nothing much at all.
I have to say that Opera's menues are far from the most intuitive. I like the fact I can modify more in Opera than the other browsers but finding where to modify it can be a chore sometimes.
CSS is a mess. Brilliant in theory total nightmare in practice I wrote a page in IE using CSS and then tried to modify it for firefox. I found to my annoyance that unless I redesigned the page there was no way of writing CSS that would work for both without writing browser specific code.
This is pretty much the same of any browser.
On the official side of things though Opera has some of the best CSS and DOM implementation of all the browsers. The best site I found for it is http://nanobox.chipx86.com/browser_support.php#css It shows quite clearly that Opera is more compliant than Firefox 1.0 and easily matches Firefox 1.5. IE on the other hand is famed for its poor standards implementation, something they say they are going to improve considerably in IE7 so im looking forward to that. (Oh and I looked at quite a few comparison charts Firefox and Opera were never far away from each other on any of them.)
This isnt to say your site is incorrect its just that your site is built around firefox and IE (a good choice of browsers what with the majority of the world using one or the other). If you had built it with Opera in mind it would work just as well. If you built it specifically according to the standards then it would probably be broken, to some extent, in all three browsers. (As I say CSS = messy.) Opera and Firefox would be the browsers it would break the least in.
Of course that has no real baring, web sites are built around IE and then firefox. They are the top browsers and while they are, that will and should always be the case. Arguing that another browser has better CSS implementation is pointless if the browser cant support some of the functions that allow 99% odd of web sites to function. It is, however, an explanation for why Opera may break some sites,it isnt really Opera's fault. Until CSS is properly implemented in all browsers this will stay the same. (Something made much harder by the various browsers inventing new functions, and the W3C constantly trying to update, depricate and add new functions while the old ones are only half way there as they are. Makes me glad Im not purist enough to stop using tables to arrange things.)
Well not that im entirely supporting the original post, it was a little blunt, but I do consider opera to come above firefox.
Not necessarily for its memory footprint or speed but while using opera extensively it has never once flooded my RAM like firefox does occaisionally. Its never crashed once while firefox did have an occaisional crash, mainly due to my stupidity, and a regular crash every time the feedback thingy me doo dah decided to pop up. That obviously doesnt happen to most people, but ive known more than just myself where every time it comes up the browser goes down. Opera also comes ready with a lot of features that firefox needs extensions for. Extensions which sometimes break the browser horribly. There are also features that im not sure exist even as extensions for firefox. (Though if they do see previous point.) The menu for tabs when you have too many open, the ability to remeber all web pages when you close and then reopen the browser. (Also works if you kill opera with task manager so Id assume it works in a crash.) the notes side bar, the IRC option, a better transfer manager.
Firefox isnt a bad browser I used it for a very long time but Opera just seems to be better. (Ive only been using Opera for a few weeks so that opinion may well change.)
Of course IE7 is coming and I used its beta for a fair while as well. It wasnt finished obviously so I cant say for certain how good it will be, but it did have the best tabs of all the browsers. Shrinks them to a point, then you use a button at the right hand side to cycle through them. Beats firefox's sort of just break a bit at the end of the tab bar and beats opera, because opera doenst shrink the tabs down at all. (Means opening up lots of pages will either make a wopping menu, or just fill up your entire screen with tabs, depending on which method your using.) As for IE7's other features it appeared to be just IE6. (Terrible, terrible search function included.)
If I had to choose a browser stand alone Opera comes out a little ahead of firefox. Otherwise I use IE7 beta with the Google bar and activex switched off.
Small and probably irrelevant side point. Though everyone typically knows what the acronym RAM means when they read it on some specs Harddisk memory is technically RAM as well. Just mechanical and roughly a million times slower RAM.
Appart from being much the same article this article shoots itself in the foot a bit. I think the reason why so many people have taken it seriously is because of this fact.
It details a lot of things that are different in Windows compared to Linux but his Linux alternatives all sound somewhat more complicated. From the more complex partitioning to the editing of config files and even the classic mention of recompiling the O/S. It all makes it sound like Linux is actually more complex than Windows which makes the sarcasm of the piece make a lot less sense.
Is he saying sarcastically that the daft Windows users moving to Linux articles are actually correct and it is more difficult? Or is he just stupid and genuinly believes all this stuff?
The newsforge article only mentions Linux as being totally easy it does everything for them, without mentioning command lines and command. Makes the sarcasm much more clear cut.
At times in the game, such as the battles with tanks or the really hectic battle with Troika himself, you are basically on screen shooting upwards at an enemy while shots rain down on you. Much like the boss battles in games like Ikaruga.
Getting from battle to battle though the camera comes closer in and you take on a more melee type game like final fight. Only despite the simple basis of the combat I seemed to be finding new ways of killing things right the way through the game. I still havent worked out all the tricks with the unlockable sorceress Maya.
There is even a part of the game when you have to fight a jaw droppingly huge tank and your in to R-Type like territory.
They merge the genres incredibly well, the game is very addictive and flows beautifully. Add to that the brilliant red star world and characters, and it comes up as one of the biggest losses to the gaming market ive ever seen.
'Exactly, it's something of a fanboy argument, given that ultimately every unit will get sold'
Not really, sales occur over a period of time. If Sony gives figures showing theyve sold twice as many PSP units as Nintendo this can have an effect on the retailers and buyers essentially gaining the company a lot more confidence in there product.
In reality this confidence may be ill placed as Nintendo have sold twice as many units to actual customers rather than just shops.
How your company appears at any given time is very important (Just look at the amount of investment the Phantom has managed to pull in based on looks alone.) this isnt really a bad thing its just a marketing tactic.
So yeah Sony may sell all of them eventually but bandying around those figures as if they sold them in a month rather than a year puts a nice bit of spin on how good the product is.
'If you and your "handy pocket dictionary" feel better by calling my stance a "belief" (i.e. an act of faith), so be it. It won't be any more true, of course.'
Im not calling your stance anything. This is an argument about semantics not your faith. The word atheism means that you _believe_ there is no God the whole pocket dictionary thing was trying to stress the fact that this is the very definition of the word across the board.
Atheism by _definition_ means Godless as in you have no God. There is no evidence to prove that you have no God therefore it is a belief. This is a fact. Indisputable perfectly logical fact.
If you simply believe God is impossible to prove you are not Atheist you are by _definition_ an Agnostic. You dont believe in God but neither do you believe for certain there is non. This is the _definition_ of agnostic.
Im stressing the word definition because this has nothing to do with me making myself 'feel better' this is simply the way the English language currently is. This does _not_ imply you believe in anything it implies that you arnt using the correct word.
This whole thing was never about ridiculing atheists it is simply proving that buck wild's original post is perfectly acurate. Agnostics remain the only people, by definition, that do not have a faith.
This is in response to this and the other posts on atheism.
A lack of belief in God does not necessarily mean a lack of belief in anything. You must lack belief in God in order to believe there isnt one.
Dictionary.com definition of atheism. 'Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods. The doctrine that there is no God or gods' My handy pocket dictionary backs it up.
The denial of God when there is no scientific theory nor test to disprove its existence is as much a belief as any religeous idea.
There is a get out clause in the 'disbelief' part of the definition. Disbelief can mean simple skeptisicm, however, if you look at the etymology of the word atheism it literally means Godless. Not really any room for it being just a reluctance to believe, more the outright refusal definition of disbelief. This is further backed up by the definition of agnostic that refers to an agnostic as not taking there disbelief to the same extent as a true atheist.
Of course definitions are changing all the time but I really dont think there is much doubt here. An Atheist has a belief, even if it flies in the face of the beliefs involved in religeon. (I have to say before seeing the posts around this thread all the atheists I know of are rather proud of that fact.)
Slashdot Mirror
and yet no mention of the mostly bare chested steroid guzzling super men with six packs on their six packs that accompany Ivy in Soul Calibur 2.
You, ms, are a sexist.
Well no, but I wouldnt feel uncomfortable either.
Youd have to be a fairly insecure person for it to be an issue.
I think Eberts view was along the same lines only more restricted. He refers specifically to the gamers experience and hwo that can not be considered art because you are only interested in how good the gameplay is.
Ebert considered the lack of authorial control to be a problem but why its a problem wasnt made entirely clear. This article expands on his point nicely stating that this is a problem because the experience is catering to the gamer not the artist and the artists creation.
This of course has to expand to the game content and design and in a wider view has to include some of the popcorn flicks of hollywood.
Where it gets blurry and where it bounces back is that even traditional art used to, for the large part, be about catering to others. A good chunk even today is made on comission. Over the years these pieces become valuable usually due to the artists influence within the painting and such.
For a while I considered this as a bit of a loop hole. Those paintings were made for others and games are made for others. If one is considered art then the other must be. There is however a difference. The reason comissioned works become valuable pieces of art is because the original purpose of the piece falls away. It becomes a piece of its providence rather than a part of the art and all thats left is the artists work.
This doesnt happen with games. When a games original purpose of providing a gameplay experience falls away the game pretty much vanishes. People have said that Tetris and Pacman are works of art but they are just games that have long lasting gameplay. (Which is an art in itself though not in the same sense of the word.) There were dozens if not thousands of other games produced along side them. No one remembers or puts them on a pedestool because they no longer have the gameplay of modern games, whether through being completed too many times, or just being too dated. (With the possible exception of pong, spacewar, wolfenstein and other genre starters. These are remebered for there function in the progress of games not there artistic merit.)
This is where I believe Eberts comment on how games have not achieved the heights of the work accomplished by the great artists comes from. I look back at old games for two reasons, to get some more gameplay in or for nostalgia. Nothing more.
In summary, if games are all about gameplay, and gameplay isnt art, then games arnt art.
'But I don't want to give up my humanity either.'
I dont see how the people of Star Trek have in any way given up there humanity. Infact they appear to have it in abundance.
'Nor do I find it appealing to engage in utopian fantasies so divested from reality as to be laughable.'
A real glass half empty kind of a guy arnt you. I dont think anyone thought it was a real possibility that the whole thing would occur but it is definately something to aspire to and becomes far more realistic when you take in to account that they have both infinite power generation and infinite resources.
'It felt much more POSSIBLE than the other Trek series.'
It attempted to have a workable monetry system in a universe that everything you could ever want is free. (See previous post and comment about B5 along with the fact that it actually makes sense.)
'The characters on TNG, in contrast, acted like automatons'
The captain, a stern man with family difficulties and an unrequited love for the doctor.
First officer, more gung ho, woman loving and wreckless than his captain but when it comes down to it hell pull things off just as well.
Security officer, a klingon in the federation with all of the baggage that comes with it. Pasionate about his heritage but also pasionate about his work which often conflicts.
Coucilor, an empath who had a relationship with the first officer which causes jealousy issues with her other relationships. Has a crazy mother.
I could go on but by now it should be clear that these people are far from automotons. They have many of the failings that every human does. Jealousy, conflicts, family trouble, relationship trouble, every problem your average human has to deal with. The difference is that theres no one that feels the need to kick someone to death, start a war, or as in DS9 become terrorists in an annoying non sensical battle on par with the petty crap we have today.
'or even particularly desirable.'
(See previous post about head issues.)
Um so your saying that games that most people want to play are almost certainly going to suck?
Isnt that an oxymoron?
This, I think, is what hes talking about though. There is no such thing as a lowest common denominator with games. If a game appeals to lots of people it doesnt matter how much the quality of programming or graphics suffers. (Indeed ive seen plenty of people on here stress how little graphics and the aesthetic of a game dont mean everything.)
Art doesnt care about the majority it stands on its own an invokes whatever feelings it wants. Games cant do this if they want to succeed. You could consider any of the bottom ranked games pieces of art but they will vanish in to obscurity because, as he also points out. They dont provide the service to the gamer that they should.
Some people have called him a hipcrit for displaying art that is based on computer games but the fact is you can produce art from anything. A rock on the floor isnt art, photograph it in the right way and youll have it hanging in a gallery.
Ive bounced back and forth on the whole subject a fair bit. Though I am definately beginning to come down on the side that says games arnt art.
Oh but I do agree that plenty of Hollywood films also cant really be considered as art.
I wish the person who marked me down as a troll would have posted so that I could find out what the problem was. Some people have responded with Final Fantasy X as an example (Ive not had a chance to play it in any depth.) So in response to them and hopefully to elaborate on my point id say that FFX doesnt have issues specifically to do with the cinematics themselves.
The best example I can think of is Uwe Bolls master piece *snigger* alone in the dark. There have been a lot of films with far far more convoluted or complex plots than that film and have had the same or less time to present the ideas. That doesnt stop alone in the dark from slapping on a 5 minute reel of text telling you lots of information that is largely useless.
I.e. there is nothing wrong with films or their length. Nor is there anything wrong with introductory text. How they are set out is what counts. (Star Wars being an example of where it was pulled off very well.) This is just the same for game cinematics, like everything in a game cinematics can be good or bad, and I still maintain that they are not responsible for making or breaking a game.
To put it another way. If you have an over long cinematic how would that be any different to making an overly long trip from one place to another. (As many free roaming games do.) You dont remove the whole free roaming engine though. You should just modify the design so that it fits together better.
A last point. If he was simply saying that badly designed cinematics are the problem not infact all cinematics then its a moot point. Anything that is badly designed is a problem from graphics to AI.
Ill take interstellar star ships and utopian societies over the countless abhorant acts that occur on Earth today.
Heck you can say that you find watching a near perfect society like in Star Trek is boring, but youd need your head looking at if youd prefer to live in a world with rape, murder, poverty, illness, and a whole host of other atrocities. As opposed to a world where all of it has been abolished, whilst accomplishing even greater freedoms across the whole of humanity than we have in the best nations today.
Yes but that doesnt remove the possibility and while using bittorrent you are typically uploading while downloading.
Its currently good safety in numbers but you should still be aware of the risks.
Im not entirely sure why this is an 'insightful' comment. I dont even know what your arguing against.
His paragraph is warning any new potential bittorrent users that the vast majority of stuff on bittorrent is copyrighted. (Which is true.) That if you download it you may get sued. (Also true.) So download these things at your own risk. (Good advice, people should be aware of what they are getting in to.)
It has nothing to do with legal file sharing or sharing with your buddies because in reality thats just not what most people are coming on to bittorrent to do.
I get the feeling, from your clear view of MS and closed source, youve just taken this as an excuse to rant about what a grand old place the world would be if everyone shared everything.
He never actually says which game hes talking about.
Personally im having a hard time thinking of any game with really impressive cinematics that has turned out to be a terrible. Nor can I think of a game where the game is really good but completely destroyed by cinematics. I mean the cinematics arnt even done by the same team as the people who make the gameplay and even the most non linear worlds such as Final Fantasy 7 managed to pull off being good with cinematics. (The lack of skipping was an issue but not with the cinematics themselves.)
I just dont see cinematics as a way of judging a game whether its good or bad. Nor do I see the cinematics as damaging a game.
If a game is bad its not because of some movies. If anything the movies are the only saving grace.
(I do take his point about being forced in to situations when youd have to have your brain replaced with a small carrot to actually do the things in the movie shown to you. That isnt a cinematics problem thats a plot problem. If the plot for getting you in to the situation was spot on then you wouldnt give a crap about the cinematic being there. Indeed I enjoy watching the cinematics of a game with a decent story.)
Well the method of payment for sociolotron pretty much restricts to 18.
I think my post can still apply.
Otherwise a kid would have to have a parent sign them up (I dont even want to think of how screwed up a parent would have to be to sign up a kid to a game where they can be raped.) or theyd have to nick a card from someone else and you cant exactly blame Sociolotron for the way a child has been raised.
I dont particularly agree with this game, I do think it goes to far, for similar reasons to the ones you posted. That is why I will not be signing up for it and why I hope no one else will either. Beyond that, even if I had the power to do so, I wouldnt do anything to bring the game down or censor it.
'Other Trek series treated their characters as if they were greedless, religionless, sexless robots incapable of even the slightest moral failing or ambiguity'
Well done you have completely missed the whole point of Star Trek. Its a _utopian_ society it was made to be a _utopian_ society, the whole basis of the series is that they are a _utopian_ society. The idea of each episode was to have something or other attack there values, and their _utopian_ society. Then they had to get out of it without compromising their _utopian_ ideals.
People dont watch Star Trek for its gritty realism or dysfunctional characters theres plenty of that on TV in just about every other program. Its an optimistic view of what humanity can achieve, but you appear to not be able to accept that as being possible at all. Which speaks volumes.
As for DS9 it trampled all over the ideas that made Star Trek what it was and as the seasons went on it turned in to a poor rip off of the under appreciated Babylon5. A universe within which terrorism, greed and corruption actually made sense.
Im not entirely sure, but you seem to be typing as if the people playing these games are different to the people watching movies with sex scenes.
They of course arnt and when a movie sex scene is portrayed as a valid piece of the film. (Off the top of my head Sarah Connor and Reece in Terminator.) No one was there giggling and pointing at the fact that you caught a glimpse of a boob. If games portray the subject with as much validity and maturity as that then it wont degrade it.
'Do you think being able to have sex in games would degrade the game to the point where everyone would be doing it everywhere?'
Probably. Sex is not only great fun, it is, more or less, all we are built to do.
'If so, what does that say about society?'
Between me and my friends in computer games we have slaughtered ooooh about 10 times the population of this planet. A good chunk were perfectly innocent people who we killed because it was hilariously funny. (Oh Carmageddon two will you ever stop bringing me to tears of laughter with your wacky slaughterfest.) What does _that_ say about society?
Oh thats right. Nothing much at all.
'Maybe not real to most. But children and many young adults have trouble with breaking suspension of disbelief.'
If you cant tell the difference between real and not real by the age of 21 you have bigger issues than doing terrible things in computer games.
Good lord, I though I was the only one.
I spent like 4 or 5 hours solid working on a Sims house. Spent a fair while designing the people living there as well.
2 Minutes in to the game. Got bored, killed everyone horrifically, played something else.
I have to say that Opera's menues are far from the most intuitive. I like the fact I can modify more in Opera than the other browsers but finding where to modify it can be a chore sometimes.
s It shows quite clearly that Opera is more compliant than Firefox 1.0 and easily matches Firefox 1.5. IE on the other hand is famed for its poor standards implementation, something they say they are going to improve considerably in IE7 so im looking forward to that. (Oh and I looked at quite a few comparison charts Firefox and Opera were never far away from each other on any of them.)
CSS is a mess. Brilliant in theory total nightmare in practice I wrote a page in IE using CSS and then tried to modify it for firefox. I found to my annoyance that unless I redesigned the page there was no way of writing CSS that would work for both without writing browser specific code.
This is pretty much the same of any browser.
On the official side of things though Opera has some of the best CSS and DOM implementation of all the browsers. The best site I found for it is http://nanobox.chipx86.com/browser_support.php#cs
This isnt to say your site is incorrect its just that your site is built around firefox and IE (a good choice of browsers what with the majority of the world using one or the other). If you had built it with Opera in mind it would work just as well. If you built it specifically according to the standards then it would probably be broken, to some extent, in all three browsers. (As I say CSS = messy.) Opera and Firefox would be the browsers it would break the least in.
Of course that has no real baring, web sites are built around IE and then firefox. They are the top browsers and while they are, that will and should always be the case. Arguing that another browser has better CSS implementation is pointless if the browser cant support some of the functions that allow 99% odd of web sites to function. It is, however, an explanation for why Opera may break some sites,it isnt really Opera's fault. Until CSS is properly implemented in all browsers this will stay the same. (Something made much harder by the various browsers inventing new functions, and the W3C constantly trying to update, depricate and add new functions while the old ones are only half way there as they are. Makes me glad Im not purist enough to stop using tables to arrange things.)
Well not that im entirely supporting the original post, it was a little blunt, but I do consider opera to come above firefox.
Not necessarily for its memory footprint or speed but while using opera extensively it has never once flooded my RAM like firefox does occaisionally. Its never crashed once while firefox did have an occaisional crash, mainly due to my stupidity, and a regular crash every time the feedback thingy me doo dah decided to pop up. That obviously doesnt happen to most people, but ive known more than just myself where every time it comes up the browser goes down. Opera also comes ready with a lot of features that firefox needs extensions for. Extensions which sometimes break the browser horribly. There are also features that im not sure exist even as extensions for firefox. (Though if they do see previous point.) The menu for tabs when you have too many open, the ability to remeber all web pages when you close and then reopen the browser. (Also works if you kill opera with task manager so Id assume it works in a crash.) the notes side bar, the IRC option, a better transfer manager.
Firefox isnt a bad browser I used it for a very long time but Opera just seems to be better. (Ive only been using Opera for a few weeks so that opinion may well change.)
Of course IE7 is coming and I used its beta for a fair while as well. It wasnt finished obviously so I cant say for certain how good it will be, but it did have the best tabs of all the browsers. Shrinks them to a point, then you use a button at the right hand side to cycle through them. Beats firefox's sort of just break a bit at the end of the tab bar and beats opera, because opera doenst shrink the tabs down at all. (Means opening up lots of pages will either make a wopping menu, or just fill up your entire screen with tabs, depending on which method your using.) As for IE7's other features it appeared to be just IE6. (Terrible, terrible search function included.)
If I had to choose a browser stand alone Opera comes out a little ahead of firefox. Otherwise I use IE7 beta with the Google bar and activex switched off.
Small and probably irrelevant side point. Though everyone typically knows what the acronym RAM means when they read it on some specs Harddisk memory is technically RAM as well. Just mechanical and roughly a million times slower RAM.
The original article written here http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/20 33216 and credited at the end of the posted article is just a much better send up.
Appart from being much the same article this article shoots itself in the foot a bit. I think the reason why so many people have taken it seriously is because of this fact.
It details a lot of things that are different in Windows compared to Linux but his Linux alternatives all sound somewhat more complicated. From the more complex partitioning to the editing of config files and even the classic mention of recompiling the O/S. It all makes it sound like Linux is actually more complex than Windows which makes the sarcasm of the piece make a lot less sense.
Is he saying sarcastically that the daft Windows users moving to Linux articles are actually correct and it is more difficult? Or is he just stupid and genuinly believes all this stuff?
The newsforge article only mentions Linux as being totally easy it does everything for them, without mentioning command lines and command. Makes the sarcasm much more clear cut.
At times in the game, such as the battles with tanks or the really hectic battle with Troika himself, you are basically on screen shooting upwards at an enemy while shots rain down on you. Much like the boss battles in games like Ikaruga.
Getting from battle to battle though the camera comes closer in and you take on a more melee type game like final fight. Only despite the simple basis of the combat I seemed to be finding new ways of killing things right the way through the game. I still havent worked out all the tricks with the unlockable sorceress Maya.
There is even a part of the game when you have to fight a jaw droppingly huge tank and your in to R-Type like territory.
They merge the genres incredibly well, the game is very addictive and flows beautifully. Add to that the brilliant red star world and characters, and it comes up as one of the biggest losses to the gaming market ive ever seen.
Um, thats what he means, you always round .5 up. Theres no reason why .5 shouldnt be rounded down.
Yes indeed.
4 3675888354&q=starcraft
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-66489340
I believe the players are quite famous as a result.
'Exactly, it's something of a fanboy argument, given that ultimately every unit will get sold'
Not really, sales occur over a period of time. If Sony gives figures showing theyve sold twice as many PSP units as Nintendo this can have an effect on the retailers and buyers essentially gaining the company a lot more confidence in there product.
In reality this confidence may be ill placed as Nintendo have sold twice as many units to actual customers rather than just shops.
How your company appears at any given time is very important (Just look at the amount of investment the Phantom has managed to pull in based on looks alone.) this isnt really a bad thing its just a marketing tactic.
So yeah Sony may sell all of them eventually but bandying around those figures as if they sold them in a month rather than a year puts a nice bit of spin on how good the product is.
'If you and your "handy pocket dictionary" feel better by calling my stance a "belief" (i.e. an act of faith), so be it. It won't be any more true, of course.'
Im not calling your stance anything. This is an argument about semantics not your faith. The word atheism means that you _believe_ there is no God the whole pocket dictionary thing was trying to stress the fact that this is the very definition of the word across the board.
Atheism by _definition_ means Godless as in you have no God. There is no evidence to prove that you have no God therefore it is a belief. This is a fact. Indisputable perfectly logical fact.
If you simply believe God is impossible to prove you are not Atheist you are by _definition_ an Agnostic. You dont believe in God but neither do you believe for certain there is non. This is the _definition_ of agnostic.
Im stressing the word definition because this has nothing to do with me making myself 'feel better' this is simply the way the English language currently is. This does _not_ imply you believe in anything it implies that you arnt using the correct word.
This whole thing was never about ridiculing atheists it is simply proving that buck wild's original post is perfectly acurate. Agnostics remain the only people, by definition, that do not have a faith.
This is in response to this and the other posts on atheism.
A lack of belief in God does not necessarily mean a lack of belief in anything. You must lack belief in God in order to believe there isnt one.
Dictionary.com definition of atheism.
'Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
The doctrine that there is no God or gods'
My handy pocket dictionary backs it up.
The denial of God when there is no scientific theory nor test to disprove its existence is as much a belief as any religeous idea.
There is a get out clause in the 'disbelief' part of the definition. Disbelief can mean simple skeptisicm, however, if you look at the etymology of the word atheism it literally means Godless. Not really any room for it being just a reluctance to believe, more the outright refusal definition of disbelief. This is further backed up by the definition of agnostic that refers to an agnostic as not taking there disbelief to the same extent as a true atheist.
Of course definitions are changing all the time but I really dont think there is much doubt here. An Atheist has a belief, even if it flies in the face of the beliefs involved in religeon. (I have to say before seeing the posts around this thread all the atheists I know of are rather proud of that fact.)