While I certainly agree with the general conclusions drawn in the article about large groups or meetings in the traditional sense, I find that a single person working alone can sometimes also be fairly unable to come up with new ideas due to working from only a single perspective. Unless of course they meant have these people working alone for the brainstorming, and then have them come together and pick the best ideas and implementations from the bunch.
I think there may be a certain critical mass where enough (creative) people are in the room to come up with ideas from different perspectives, and enough cooperation and teamwork is in the room for the best ideas to rise above the ones that are simply said with the most volume and frequency. Of course I think the likelihood of getting the right sorts of people together with the right amount of self-awareness and ego to be able to admit when they don't have the best idea, is probably nothing short of a minor miracle for a company. I know there are people with whome we are more creative as a team than separately, but that is due to our experience and already established compatibility. The chances of us ever finding ourselves in the same company at this point are pretty slim.
Certainly the groups one finds in a typical office meeting are not the slick and well-tuned creative machines that me and my friends have developed on our own, and certainly those sorts of meetings are the bane of all intelligent and productive people's corporate existences.
People are quick to make sweeping generalizations about the entire city of Boston and its residents, but the fact is these things were in place for a while and obviously the vast majority of people who encountered them paid them no mind. It wasn't until one person out there saw this, didn't know what a mooninite was, and called the cops. After that the cops probably should have known better after seeing the device, but until at least one of them had been recovered there isn't really any way to tell what it may have been. So long as you don't know what the images depicted were, you have the option of either ignoring it and risk being called negligent if anything goes wrong later, or you can treat it as a worst case scenario and risk being called overly cautious. When in a law-enforcement position, being overly cautious is generally a better label to strive for than negligence.
Anyway, the point is, all it took was one person who didn't know a mooninite from an IED, and then when you call the cops screaming about bombs throughout the city, it's pretty predictable how they'll react. The vast majority of the residents of Boston clearly could have cared less. If anything, I think this shows the need for mandatory screenings of the movie as a public service, to prevent this sort of tragedy from ever happening again.
Well, IANAL either, but my guess is his defence pertains directly to the case at hand: that being whether or not the RIAA really represents a monopoly and whether or not what they are doing is in fact extorsion. This would determine whether or not they even should have the legal right to sue anyone at all, or to act on behalf of any group of organizations that should be legally required to operate in competition with each other. If his claims are found legally true (I think it's pretty obvious that they are true, but from a legal standpoint does that hold water?) then their lawsuits are technically illegal themselves.
If these five separate companies were actually acting individually, and not as a monopolistic cartel, then they should each have conducted their own investigations of wrongdoing, and each have filed their own separate lawsuits for the individual violations of their IP. But them all acting together as one big organization kind of gives the game away and removes any doubt that these are saparate companies only as a mere formality. They are acting as a single entity with no free-market competition in mind while holding these proceedings. But that's just my layman's view of the situation, and I just hope the common sense I hope I applied to this analysis parallels the actual law in some way.
I just don't know if you can come up with a more textbook definition of monopoly (and all the reasons why they are bad) than what the RIAA seems to represent.
This works specifically in the Total War series because every battle already has all the units it will ever display for that battle already rendered when it starts. There is an upper limit to the number of troops you and any number of other armies can bring to a fight (notice you can only have about 20 or so full units of troops in a single army, maxing the number of soldiers you can field at any one time out at around 1500). Once they're all on the battle field, they're already costing all the system resources they're going to for that battle. So leaving the bodies piled on the field is fine (and one of my favorite details about the games), because it's not costing anything extra. I'm pretty impressed with the ammount of optimization they put in to get that many moving and fully animated objects on screen at once, but I've seen the upper limit that my own gaming rig can handle (1 army defending a city against 3 simultaneous invading mongolian horde armies, all at about 1000 soldiers each).
This doesn't work so well for other RTS's, where you can generate new units directly on the battle field. As you do that, even if there is some sort of unit-cap instituted, then eventually you're going to have some terrible framerate issues as the persistent bodies pile up each time you recruit new units to replace your fallen ones.
It's nice that this will be less and less of an issue in games though, because disappearing bodies, even if generally accepted, always seems just unusual or unrealistic for whatever reason.
I noticed that most of the posts in this are griping about how much they hate WoW or how glad they are to have kicked the habit. I have a feeling that's because everyone else is playing Wow.
Not to go too far OT, but Hip hop and Rap are actually the same thing as far as the actual pop-cultural relation to them are concerned. To be technical, Hip Hop refers to the entire culture, including things one might not generally think of such as fashion and speach. We used to refer to the four elements of hip hop: graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, and MCing (a.k.a. rapping), which in its early forms was actually subservient to DJing. Nowadays, MCing has moved overwhelmingly to the forefront, as the other elements have become more diluted, diversified, and hybridized (beatboxing could be seen as a more recently formalized and popularized hybrid of MCing and DJing, though it's generally been around for almost as long as hip hop itself). Now Hip Hop dance includes a lot more than just breakdancing, graffiti is much less popular (probably because it's not quite so marketable being illegal in nature).
Since Rap has taken such a dominant role, nowadays whenever someone says "hip hop" they're generally talking about Rap, but to refer to the two things as though they were different musical genres is a fallacy. People think that the subject matter of the songs determines the genre (rap being the sole property of gangster rappers, and all other forms falling under some other umbrella of "hip hop"). In truth, they're all hip hop, and rapping is what they all do. It's just a matter of what they rap about that determines the subgenre (gangster, etc.).
I find the people who try to argue that Hip Hop and Rap are different are generally people who don't listen to it much, or only listen to 3 or 4 artists and then declare themselves expert.
What you have listed there are not musical genres in order of their influence, but probably more in order of your own personal preference or encounterance (which is self-select no doubt, and very much anecdotal). You get outside of the US and Germany, and you'll find Metal drops off the list fairly quickly (and even within those countries, I doubt you'd ever find it that high on any list). Country barely has an influence the farther in any direction you go from midwestern or Southern America before you even hit the borders, much less outside the country. Disco, come on, really? And whatever "Movie Classical" is. But, you go anywhere in the world from as far back as the mid to early 90's, and hip hop was already ubiquitous, from the American brand that gets exported in abundance to the various local flavors that grew up on their own. We're talking from France to Japan to Zimbabwe here I might add.
But listing music in order of influence is also kind of fallacious, since all music is generally organic, and all genres have influenced and been influenced by others. If Disco has a great influence on modern hip hop, and hip hop is very popular, is it fair to say that Disco is the genre that's truly influential or hip hop itself? What if you could say the same for any other musical genre's influence on hip hop and vice-versa? Hip hop, at its very roots, is an assimilator, and has been growing due to its ability to absorb other musical genre's influences into itself seamlessly. From the earliest DJs mixing and remixing established Pop, Disco, and R&B tracks on turntables, to the modern mashups, this has always been a core element of Hip Hop.
Quite frankly, the competition of "my genre of choice is more popular/influential than yours" is a bit ridiculous, because it's not like popularity is the sole legitimizer of an art form. In most cases, it means the destruction of creativity in favor of formulaic nonsense and posers taking over and steering the future of the genre, which is what has happened to most of modern popular hip-hop. One should be happy while their genre or artist of choice remains in relative obscurity, because that is the place where they can enjoy the most creativity; even if it means other more popular and successful performers end up sampling or outright stealing their work.
I think you're going to have to show some evidence of this sort of thing actually happening before you can even begin to justify making nebulous laws to regulate it. Even then, that wouldn't condemn the "art" itself, just the illegal use of it in this hypothetical "grooming" you pulled directly from your ass. Just about anything can be used in an illegal manner if you want it to, just as you can't blame and regulate forks if someone were to stab people with them. In this situation of grooming you speak of, the people involved could just as easily (if not more so) use already illegal real child porn they made themselves, rather than some cartoons. What they're doing is already illegal (seducing children), so how would illegalizing the cartoon child porn they're using help prevent it? "oh we can't do that now, the cartoons are illegal,"
The production companies can't really do much about it. You'd have to send the messages and emails to the publishers who largely decide production schedules, budgets, and make all the unrealistic demands on the developers that force corner cutting or feature dropping and the pushing of unfinished games out to market to hit their target dates.
Game developers always want to make the best and most complete game to their abilities, naturally because they love games too and it's generally their reputation on the line (not saying publishers don't love games, but the stakes are different for them). Publishers are the ones who pay for the game though and thus make the decisions they see as most cost effective. If they figure they can still make their money off of trekkies and holiday shoppers who see the title "Star Trek" and think "hey, I liked star trek," then they aren't usually going to pay extra for stuff like superfluous cutscenes and story exposition when the majority of gamer surveys say that gamers don't care about that stuff anyway (which is obviously bullshit, but why the hell do gamers keep saying it then?). Now obviously for a franchise like Star Trek, and for this game in particular that was a mistake, where the whole point of this game was to tie the eras all together, but if they see their projected returns on investment then they'll see these decisions as justified.
But sometimes, it's just not cost effective, any way you look at it, and satisfying the nerds who will buy the game anyway don't make up enough of a market to justify doubling production costs (outsourcing cutscenes and adding more prime voice acting is very expensive). It probably simply wasn't cost effective enough to try to launch the game later and not hit the holiday shopping crowd (which adds significantly higher revenue to the lifetime of sales of the average game verses those released at other points in the year). In the end, it's all a cost-benefit analysis for the sake of the bottom line. All stuff which developers would generally rather do without, but stuff that publishers live and die by.
Well, my question, and the title certainly seems to suggest though I don't see how it's possible, is whether or not these will be readable in regular dvd players. If that's the case, then I think that's what they were referring to. If not then I don't see what the summary, title, and article have to do with DVD's at all, other than as a misleading example of a similar medium.
The article makes reference to data storage cubes as an alternative possibility, and that's something that I deffinitely know won't fit in my dvd drive, so does this mean that the disks are similarly incompatible? I'm just concerned about yet another proprietary media player/recorder on the horizon while we still haven't even gotten fully started with the current batch of too-similar-to-decide hd players.
Sorry, but as compelling as the argument posed in this book may be, there is a fundamental psychological difference between realistically simulating violence for the purposes of training killers, and realistically simulating violence for the purposes of entertainment. The big psychological difference is context. When you go to the military, and they sit you down in front of a violent simulator and ask you to imagine killing real people, your state of mind will be placing real people in those pixels and in those silhouettes (another one of the big revolutions in raising the firing rate in military training by the way, switching to silhouette targets verses the traditional circular bullseyes). While you are mentally preparing yourself to kill people while playing the games or running the simulations, your brain is hard at work associating those images with real people you will eventually be facing with real lives, and learning to dessociate them from actual consequences of violence.
However, when you're playing a videogame for purely entertainment purposes, you could be going through exactly the same motions, but your state of mind is different. You're not thinking about how you'll have to be doing this for real, and you're not mentally preparing yourself to eventually have to kill real people. To you, all the simulated violence you're participating in is just that, a meaningless and inconsequential simulation. All the simulated "people" you're killing don't have real lives, jobs, and families to worry about. You're causing no real pain to empathize with. When the game turns off, all the digital world resets and no real or permanent harm is done. Only when training to be a professional killer do you deliberately consider these things while participating in these excercises (or learn to suppress these questions when participating in the real thing).
Unless of course you're already depraved, and you are deliberately playing games to "train" yourself to be a killer. But if you're already at that point, then you were messed up long before videogames got a hold of you. There are things in life that cause people to want to cause real pain, suffering, and death that are far more influential than anything designed for entertainment can do.
It looks interesting, but I wonder if it can be pressure sensetive (i.e. can detect how hard one is pressing on the surface based on the vibrations). I'm thinking of the artistic applications for this as a way to replace expensive Wacom tablets that come in set sizes of just a few inches with a single product that can be set up to simulate a canvas of any size. But in order for that to be a practical replacement for most artists, it would need to be able to sense the force being applied to the surface (for lighter and darker shades or textures to be applied in the brushstrokes).
I wonder if this would also then allow different tools such as actual paint-brushes (which I presume have a different acoustic profile than say, a stylus or a finger) to be used as different inputs to get different brushstrokes. I also wonder what the effective range of these tools could be, as in do they lose detail or accuracy outside a certain distance, or could they be placed at the four corners of a room to track footsteps? Lots of different applications I can think of, but the one most useful to me is the artistic tablet replacement. My keyboard works just fine, and my desk gets a bit too cluttered to want to devote its entirety to becoming a UI system (at least not all the time), but if this tool could be developed to replace the keyboard, mouse, and tablet all at once (and cost-effectively) then I think they could be on to something I'd defintely be interested in.
IANAL but I believe there are also some Fair Use protections that allow for you to use copywrited material for purposes of parody, and in some cases satire. A pretty good breakdown of it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and _parody/
So long as you're using the machinima for comedic purposes, you're usually good. You're safer if you're using it to make fun of the game itself, but so long as the company that owns the product in question isn't particularly letigious you're usually in good shape either way. There's a growing culture of machinima use, and there hasn't been any trouble with it thus far. So I wouldn't be too too worried about the legal ramifications with a whole culture of supporters and Fair Use backing you up.
I'm not too sure but the article seems to say that this method still requires invasive (i.e. surgical) techniques to extract the brain signals used to interface with the system. It did suggest that using EEG as a non-invasive alternative for getting those same signals, but I don't think they elaborated on why they didn't use it (I don't know much about either technique, so if someone more informed could enlighten me). I'm just wondering if there is a possibility of a cost-effective "thinking-cap" of some sort in the future that could provide the proper signals for gaming or other electronic activities, to avoid invasive brain plugs ala Matrix or Ghost in the Shell style interfaces.
I'm just speculating about the possibilities and have no real knowledge of the practicality or viability for either of these techniques in the near future. For people looking to opperate prosthetic limbs and such, a permanent surgical plug of sorts seems like a fine solution, but for people who don't want to have to upgrade that plug each time the technology advances, a non-invasive system seems like a more ideal solution.
I'd say pretty much anyone who actually buys the PS3 is going to say it's awesome (and obnoxious fanboys and Sony's arrogance aside, it probably will be) and people who don't bother will say it's eh. The question really is is it $600 awesome? Is it really $200 to $300 more awesome than the competition? Some people will think it is, and some won't. Just how many is what we're all waiting to see, but it seems most of the savvy and informed people are pretty apprehensive, and most of the people who don't care (a set which includes the vast majority of consumers) are either unworried or excited.
Really, if price weren't an issue, would you not get a PS3 over a 360? So if you're not the one buying (e.g. "Hey son, whatchu want for Christmas?") then which would you get? Well, I know I'll be getting myself a Wii, but I can afford one of those myself anyway. If some rich benefactor wanted to buy me a PS3 because he heard it was teh roxxors I wouldn't exactly say no thanks. I still probably wouldn't recommend it to one of my less informed friends though.
But that's retailers fault more than Sony's. Even if Sony supplies enough quantity, and it does what they say it will, Gamestop and EB have been selling the short game, what they have on their shelves, all year long, and as a result, consumers have been hearing mostly baseless FUD about a potential $600 purchase.
Yeah that makes sense. Because retailers have a habit of downplaying hype for products they hope to sell for potentially huge profits. For no reason. Gamestop are just more sony-haters. They're still mad over the success of the PS2 and all the profits it made for them so now they're spreading baseless fud. riiight.
In addition to that, Microsoft fucked up whatever trust the retailers ever had in suppliers int he industry.
Yeah, cause the retailers hate MS too now. Which is why they're praising the HD-DVD format over the relatively unprepared Blu-Ray showings. That'll teach those untrustworthy MS folks.
Neither of your cases apply to the ESRB, which is the topic of discussion and the target of the bill. They appropriately rated Vice City for the content it had. They didn't give it a lower rating than they were shooting for, and none of the content in the game went beyond anything you might find in a similarly rated movie. Whether you agree with or find that content appropriate for a mature audience or not is now your own problem.
As for Hot Coffee, even being able to play through the complete content of the game on the disk, it wouldn't be possible for them to have found the Hot Coffee content without having either found and downloaded the patches that made it accessible (which only became available thanks to the modding community after the game's release , and thus after the game had to be rated) or would have had to have been able to disect aaaall the code compiled on the disks. Now if just playing through all the game content on every game released ever is impossible, parsing through all of their code is downright astronomical.
Any game regulation policy must absolve the regulatory body of any responsibility for content that is created or altered by individuals after the game has been rated and released. Even the developers themselves can only be held moderately accountable for content they include in a disk but is only accessible through modification of the code.
Basically, if there is no way to access content out of the box that is inappropriate then the companies have fulfilled their responsibility to the consumers. If it requires additional steps and third party modifications or tools not available in the disk itself to access content beyond what was rated by the ESRB, then that implies willful tampering on the part of the user, and can hardly be used to hold the developers or the ESRB responsible.
This idea that developers are trying to sneak inappropriate material into their games to corrupt children for some nefarious game-industry plot is outright ridiculous. Usually if a game has that kind of content they've got it front and center at the head of their marketing campaign. Games like GTA celebrate their inappropriate, anti-social, or politically incorrect content, and anyone who buys it for their kids expecting rainbows and ponies should just turn in their voter registration cards because they're hurting America.
The entire premise of this legislation is bullshit because it doesn't address the issues that got us to this stage in the first place. Regardless of whether you think the current system is insufficient, no solution we can propose would appease these critics. Even if it were humanly possible to play through %100 of the material available in a game to give an accurate appraisal of its content, there is no way to account for material that can be added or unlocked by third party mods. And the conflict of interest argument doesn't fly with me either, because we've seen how much trouble you can get into if you do attempt to mislead the ESRB and fake a lower rating for your game, and most companies would want to avoid that. I would say that this is all a conspiracy to eventually hand control of game-censorship over to the government (see penny-arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/02 ), but frankly that seems like giving these incompetent government hacks a bit too much credit.
On the very small plus side, if this does pass, the ESRB is going to have to do some serious hiring to handle all the game content they'll have to review, which means the non-competetive professional gamer career just became a possibility.
Well, in spite of what they may say, I'd say Sony is very much aware and very much reactionary to the competition. They've tried to mimic the Wii's functionality as quickly as they could after they learned of it, and they're trying to replicate Xbox Live's services.
If I had to guess, they're just playing right out of the Art of War rulebook: When strong, appear weak, and when weak, appear strong. They have to exhibit an air of confidence because they know they're vulnerable and taking a big risk this round. If they don't show confidence in their own product at this stage in the game (and they are very much behind) then they're not going to rally the support they need from consumers or third parties. At this point, they've been dealt all the cards they have to play, and it's poker face time, except it's up to consumers to place their bets for them from here on.
Personally, I'm going to be betting on the Wii this hand, and wait till the stakes are a bit lower before I throw any more money down on something more expensive.
The point isn't so much that temperatures are currently at levels we've seen or estimate to have existed in the past, the point is that the rate of change we're seeing in approaching those levels is far more rapid than one should expect to be happening naturally. If we're experiencing 10,000 or however many years worth of global climate change in a matter of decades, then what happens if the temperature climb doesn't stop when it reaches previous peaks? And what sort of ramifications will these rapid changes have on delicate ecosystems that don't have the usual thousands of years to adjust to the otherwise gradually shifting climates?
Sure environmentalist arguments may at times be hyperbolic or sensationalist (not all of them are, but the ones that are invariably get lumped in with the ones that aren't), and we may not be seeing temperatures that are completely unheard of in our planet's history. But that does not mean that the man-made industrial contribution to climate change is negligible, and it doesn't mean that arguments for more polution control are without merit. No rational environmentalist is clamoring for the tearing down of the establisment in the name of the environment (they are called radicals for a reason). Most arguments are for practical regulation and oversight, and pushing for shifts towards technology that doesn't rely on non-renewable power sources and the creation of lots of potentially harmful greenhouse gasses. This may not be what the free-market would naturally do right now while oil is still relatively abundant, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea to try and push for that kind of technology now rather than later when we have no choice in the matter.
But as soon as some people see the words "global warming" they automatically jump to "oh no, they're coming to take my humscalade," or "There is no global warming because these temperatures existed before there were cars. Even if they were heading in the opposite direction," I guess you're holding out till you see the headline "Never before seen global temperatures" before you're willing to say "ok, something might be going on here." Or will the response be "That's ridiculous because how could they possibly know that?" Basically, my question is, how much evidence would it take to convince you that something abnormal may be going on and that it might warrant our concern? What if by the time that level of evidence is available it's too late to do anything to reverse it?
Either 'art' makes a difference to people or it doesn't.
Either it is a light froth which doesn't have an effect on people's behavior (good or bad).
Or it influences people.
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I think in the 50's psycho boy would be made- maybe get into a fist fight. But since he hadn't seen how to blow people away, that is as far as it goes. I think people who are prone to bad things find ways to express themselves when they see a demonstration of how to do it.
I think some people who would be okay are corrupted by things they would not have been able to see in the past.
Clearly a baseless claim. People have been blowing each other away, stabbing each other with swords, bludgeoning with whatever large blunt object they can get a hold of, strangling, beating, and otherwise killing each other long before any form of media "showed" them how. There have been murderers and psycho's going as far back as we have recorded history to report on them. Art imitates life; the first murder story wasn't written until well after humans had been murdering each other. Violence came before the videogame, the movie, the book, the written word, and even language, and will still be here when the next form of entertainment rises and we're all blaming it for those darn kids.
Art can influence and inspire, without removing control (and therefore responsibility) from a person over their own actions. At best one could say a person who intended to do violence to begin with was inspired to do it in a way that mimiced his favorite game, movie, song, or book, but that hardly is enough to condemn his entertainment for his actions. Just so, one could say someone who was on the path to rising up against an unjust society or government may have been inspired by and rallied behind a revolutionary song, story, or symbol. Clearly it was the social and political conditions that lead to the revolution, not the art.
Since these cases are so rare, that in itself should show that art is not the cause of violence, and whatever influence it does have (it seems at best only able to flavor the event, not to trigger it) is vastly overshadowed by some other serious social and mental factors on the part of the individual.
As pointed out repeatedly in the prequel to this article, these guys were making their mod using the C&C engine, which is EA property. So while even if these guys had no intention of distributing it for profit, and even if it turned out to be a success, it would be impossible for MS to officially capitalize on the promotion of their IP because it is based on software that doesn't belong to them.
And then people are ignoring the fact that if MS hadn't tanked this project first for using their IP on someone else's software, EA probably would have for using their software to promote someone else's IP. There is no way either of these two entities would be able to compromise on a project like this, and it would be naive to presume that both companies would lay down their arms to allow these guys to do their thing (as holding-hands-around-the-world beautiful as that might be).
My question, which I doubt the guys involved in this project can answer, is whether or not the same outcome would have happened if they had used an MS owned RTS engine (there are some out there, Rise of Nations comes to mind). I would be very surprised if MS were less willing to approach these guys with some kind of deal if the project had started out using entirely MS owned products from the outset. And if they would have still killed the project, my guess would be it's either because it planned to significantly diverge from Bungie's intended continuity or brand direction, or they have plans brewing as we speak to develop a Halo based RTS in house and they didn't want a potentially popular, free competitor out there months to years ahead of their own product.
Now I'm no fan of MS, but I always try to be fair, usually willing to give people (and companies, even the big evil ones) the benefit of the doubt, and generally consider if I wouldn't do the same thing if I were in the same position. Given the conflicting IP issue with the game engine, I don't see too many options for MS to resolve this issue that doesn't have them either shut the project down, or have them restart the entire thing using one of their own engines. Given those choices, I think I can guess which one is easier and cheaper (and arguably shortsighted, but so is just assuming a big company would be ok with you using their IP to do anything).
To be clear I am sorry to hear the project was killed, sounds like it might have been a fun project. I would have preferred to see MS take a different route, but I'm not going to use this as an example of how MS is any more evil or greedy than any other company out there.
Games incorporate so many different elements that it is difficult to come up with hard categories that can encompass all the known games without significant exceptions, overlaps, or omissions. I think what gives games so much power and potential is their natural resistance to such pigeonholing and ability to fluidly and organically incorporate so many different elements.
So I think using a series of tags that can be freely applied where necessary can help describe and generalize games without trying to nail the outliers and hybrids and unique games into categories they don't necessarily belong. I would say it is best to apply the series of tags in a standardized order, where a game can incorporate multiple tags from their different categories if applicable: e.g. it isn't necessary to add "real time" to a game with the "1st person" and "shooter" categories since that is generally implied. However you would have to add "turn based" to such a game if necessary since that is generally not typical of 1st person shooters. The tags should be (and generally are) applied in roughly the following order:
Narrative style (if applicable): Linear
Branching
Sandbox (open ended?)
Setting: Sci Fi
Fantasy
Historical
Modern
Sports
Dimensions/Perspective: 3D
2D (sidescroller, static, etc.)
1st person
3rd person (implying camera anchored to player's avatar)
"god" (or "bird's eye," implying camera free roaming over a map)
Text based
Gameplay Progression (can be implied by gameplay type): Real Time
Turn Based
Avatar(s): Solo
Team (a.k.a. squad, or party-based)
Army
Gameplay Element(s): Shooter
Brawler
Racer
Tournament fighter
Puzzle
Strategy
Tactics
RPG (or some other form of character ability progression)
Sim
Exploration
Beat-matching
Obviously the Gameplay Elements category has the most descriptors and is still the least complete of all the categories, but you get the idea. By taking and applying all the necessary elements above to any game you can think of you can generally paint a fairly clear picture of what type of game it is relative to other games that may be similar or different. Not all the tags are necessary, and in most cases are left off because they're either obvious or implied, but for the sake of completeness in archival purposes they can help distinguish subtle differences between very similar but fundamentally different games. The "Avatars" category is one I've never actually seen applied to any games, but I think it's useful in describing some fundamental differences between games that have the player using a single character or pawn, as opposed to commanding multiple characters or entire squads/armies in various types of games.
For example, Baldurs Gate would fall under Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real time, party-based, RPG. Whereas NeverWinter Nights I would generally categorize as Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real-time, solo, RPG when describing the single-player campaigns at least (although you could take on a henchman at times, this was not necessary to play through or complete the game, so I would count that as an optional tag). Final Fantasy, or other Japanese RPG's would generally fall under Fantasy, Linear, 3rd person, turn based, party-based, RPG. Oblivion would be Fantasy, Branching, 1st person, real time, solo, RPG. So here we have 4 very different games that would previously all be described simply as RPG's are now much more clearly fleshed out with this system.
Multiplayer games are a whole other beast and in many cases should probably deserve their own list of categories to describe adequately. Splinter Cell's multiplayer consists of both 3rd person and 1st person perspectives, depending on which team you're playing on. A game which is designed as a solo campaign that can become a party-based campaign wh
I read her defense of the study, and straight from the horse's mouth:
"In particular, the severity of the portrayal of injuries and suffering is often what people think of when saying that one game is more "violent" than another (which is more relevant from a developmental psychology perspective for games rated T and M). For example, does the game contain minor auditory or visual representations of injury and pain that primarily serve to notify the player that a character has been injured (e.g., characters like Mario grunt or flash red when injured), or does the game contain graphic representations of injury and pain that serve to exaggerate or focus attention on suffering (e.g., characters screaming in agony or bleeding excessively when injured or when otherwise physically tortured)?"
She freely admits that this study is not about those aspects of violence which most people would think of when thinking about this subject. So the numbers, if taken at face value, are just plain misleading.
Her defense of this method is that these particular games in question (where the ratings ring obviously false) are rated E and that children below a certain age are incapable of discerning the difference between violence abstracted to the level of Pac Man and reality. But if they apply the same methodology to other games with more mature depictions of violence, but comparatively less gametime spent on it, then you come out with numbers that at least on the surface would suggest that they are less violent. This is either a flawed system that is not appropriately scaleable with the depictions or nature of violence in a game (which I think most parents would be more concerned with), or it is a misleading system which uses an obscure and non-mainstream definition of the word "violence".
As I said before, their definition of violence in this case is so broad and all encompassing that it would include what most would probably think of as just competition due to the level of abstraction involved. Chess would probably be rated 100% violent by their standards, but what good does that do in informing a parent about the content or nature of Chess, or whether or not it would be an appropriate game for their infant child (which is her own stated purpose of these studies to begin with).
Slashdot Mirror
I think I have what you're looking for: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=227
While I certainly agree with the general conclusions drawn in the article about large groups or meetings in the traditional sense, I find that a single person working alone can sometimes also be fairly unable to come up with new ideas due to working from only a single perspective. Unless of course they meant have these people working alone for the brainstorming, and then have them come together and pick the best ideas and implementations from the bunch.
I think there may be a certain critical mass where enough (creative) people are in the room to come up with ideas from different perspectives, and enough cooperation and teamwork is in the room for the best ideas to rise above the ones that are simply said with the most volume and frequency. Of course I think the likelihood of getting the right sorts of people together with the right amount of self-awareness and ego to be able to admit when they don't have the best idea, is probably nothing short of a minor miracle for a company. I know there are people with whome we are more creative as a team than separately, but that is due to our experience and already established compatibility. The chances of us ever finding ourselves in the same company at this point are pretty slim.
Certainly the groups one finds in a typical office meeting are not the slick and well-tuned creative machines that me and my friends have developed on our own, and certainly those sorts of meetings are the bane of all intelligent and productive people's corporate existences.
People are quick to make sweeping generalizations about the entire city of Boston and its residents, but the fact is these things were in place for a while and obviously the vast majority of people who encountered them paid them no mind. It wasn't until one person out there saw this, didn't know what a mooninite was, and called the cops. After that the cops probably should have known better after seeing the device, but until at least one of them had been recovered there isn't really any way to tell what it may have been. So long as you don't know what the images depicted were, you have the option of either ignoring it and risk being called negligent if anything goes wrong later, or you can treat it as a worst case scenario and risk being called overly cautious. When in a law-enforcement position, being overly cautious is generally a better label to strive for than negligence.
Anyway, the point is, all it took was one person who didn't know a mooninite from an IED, and then when you call the cops screaming about bombs throughout the city, it's pretty predictable how they'll react. The vast majority of the residents of Boston clearly could have cared less. If anything, I think this shows the need for mandatory screenings of the movie as a public service, to prevent this sort of tragedy from ever happening again.
Well, IANAL either, but my guess is his defence pertains directly to the case at hand: that being whether or not the RIAA really represents a monopoly and whether or not what they are doing is in fact extorsion. This would determine whether or not they even should have the legal right to sue anyone at all, or to act on behalf of any group of organizations that should be legally required to operate in competition with each other. If his claims are found legally true (I think it's pretty obvious that they are true, but from a legal standpoint does that hold water?) then their lawsuits are technically illegal themselves.
If these five separate companies were actually acting individually, and not as a monopolistic cartel, then they should each have conducted their own investigations of wrongdoing, and each have filed their own separate lawsuits for the individual violations of their IP. But them all acting together as one big organization kind of gives the game away and removes any doubt that these are saparate companies only as a mere formality. They are acting as a single entity with no free-market competition in mind while holding these proceedings. But that's just my layman's view of the situation, and I just hope the common sense I hope I applied to this analysis parallels the actual law in some way.
I just don't know if you can come up with a more textbook definition of monopoly (and all the reasons why they are bad) than what the RIAA seems to represent.
This works specifically in the Total War series because every battle already has all the units it will ever display for that battle already rendered when it starts. There is an upper limit to the number of troops you and any number of other armies can bring to a fight (notice you can only have about 20 or so full units of troops in a single army, maxing the number of soldiers you can field at any one time out at around 1500). Once they're all on the battle field, they're already costing all the system resources they're going to for that battle. So leaving the bodies piled on the field is fine (and one of my favorite details about the games), because it's not costing anything extra. I'm pretty impressed with the ammount of optimization they put in to get that many moving and fully animated objects on screen at once, but I've seen the upper limit that my own gaming rig can handle (1 army defending a city against 3 simultaneous invading mongolian horde armies, all at about 1000 soldiers each).
This doesn't work so well for other RTS's, where you can generate new units directly on the battle field. As you do that, even if there is some sort of unit-cap instituted, then eventually you're going to have some terrible framerate issues as the persistent bodies pile up each time you recruit new units to replace your fallen ones.
It's nice that this will be less and less of an issue in games though, because disappearing bodies, even if generally accepted, always seems just unusual or unrealistic for whatever reason.
I noticed that most of the posts in this are griping about how much they hate WoW or how glad they are to have kicked the habit. I have a feeling that's because everyone else is playing Wow.
Yes, I'm quite aware, but I wrote that summary for the benefit of people who probably wouldn't know what b-boying (or "writing" for that matter) is.
Not to go too far OT, but Hip hop and Rap are actually the same thing as far as the actual pop-cultural relation to them are concerned. To be technical, Hip Hop refers to the entire culture, including things one might not generally think of such as fashion and speach. We used to refer to the four elements of hip hop: graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, and MCing (a.k.a. rapping), which in its early forms was actually subservient to DJing. Nowadays, MCing has moved overwhelmingly to the forefront, as the other elements have become more diluted, diversified, and hybridized (beatboxing could be seen as a more recently formalized and popularized hybrid of MCing and DJing, though it's generally been around for almost as long as hip hop itself). Now Hip Hop dance includes a lot more than just breakdancing, graffiti is much less popular (probably because it's not quite so marketable being illegal in nature).
Since Rap has taken such a dominant role, nowadays whenever someone says "hip hop" they're generally talking about Rap, but to refer to the two things as though they were different musical genres is a fallacy. People think that the subject matter of the songs determines the genre (rap being the sole property of gangster rappers, and all other forms falling under some other umbrella of "hip hop"). In truth, they're all hip hop, and rapping is what they all do. It's just a matter of what they rap about that determines the subgenre (gangster, etc.).
I find the people who try to argue that Hip Hop and Rap are different are generally people who don't listen to it much, or only listen to 3 or 4 artists and then declare themselves expert.
What you have listed there are not musical genres in order of their influence, but probably more in order of your own personal preference or encounterance (which is self-select no doubt, and very much anecdotal). You get outside of the US and Germany, and you'll find Metal drops off the list fairly quickly (and even within those countries, I doubt you'd ever find it that high on any list). Country barely has an influence the farther in any direction you go from midwestern or Southern America before you even hit the borders, much less outside the country. Disco, come on, really? And whatever "Movie Classical" is. But, you go anywhere in the world from as far back as the mid to early 90's, and hip hop was already ubiquitous, from the American brand that gets exported in abundance to the various local flavors that grew up on their own. We're talking from France to Japan to Zimbabwe here I might add.
But listing music in order of influence is also kind of fallacious, since all music is generally organic, and all genres have influenced and been influenced by others. If Disco has a great influence on modern hip hop, and hip hop is very popular, is it fair to say that Disco is the genre that's truly influential or hip hop itself? What if you could say the same for any other musical genre's influence on hip hop and vice-versa? Hip hop, at its very roots, is an assimilator, and has been growing due to its ability to absorb other musical genre's influences into itself seamlessly. From the earliest DJs mixing and remixing established Pop, Disco, and R&B tracks on turntables, to the modern mashups, this has always been a core element of Hip Hop.
Quite frankly, the competition of "my genre of choice is more popular/influential than yours" is a bit ridiculous, because it's not like popularity is the sole legitimizer of an art form. In most cases, it means the destruction of creativity in favor of formulaic nonsense and posers taking over and steering the future of the genre, which is what has happened to most of modern popular hip-hop. One should be happy while their genre or artist of choice remains in relative obscurity, because that is the place where they can enjoy the most creativity; even if it means other more popular and successful performers end up sampling or outright stealing their work.
I think you're going to have to show some evidence of this sort of thing actually happening before you can even begin to justify making nebulous laws to regulate it. Even then, that wouldn't condemn the "art" itself, just the illegal use of it in this hypothetical "grooming" you pulled directly from your ass. Just about anything can be used in an illegal manner if you want it to, just as you can't blame and regulate forks if someone were to stab people with them. In this situation of grooming you speak of, the people involved could just as easily (if not more so) use already illegal real child porn they made themselves, rather than some cartoons. What they're doing is already illegal (seducing children), so how would illegalizing the cartoon child porn they're using help prevent it? "oh we can't do that now, the cartoons are illegal,"
The production companies can't really do much about it. You'd have to send the messages and emails to the publishers who largely decide production schedules, budgets, and make all the unrealistic demands on the developers that force corner cutting or feature dropping and the pushing of unfinished games out to market to hit their target dates.
Game developers always want to make the best and most complete game to their abilities, naturally because they love games too and it's generally their reputation on the line (not saying publishers don't love games, but the stakes are different for them). Publishers are the ones who pay for the game though and thus make the decisions they see as most cost effective. If they figure they can still make their money off of trekkies and holiday shoppers who see the title "Star Trek" and think "hey, I liked star trek," then they aren't usually going to pay extra for stuff like superfluous cutscenes and story exposition when the majority of gamer surveys say that gamers don't care about that stuff anyway (which is obviously bullshit, but why the hell do gamers keep saying it then?). Now obviously for a franchise like Star Trek, and for this game in particular that was a mistake, where the whole point of this game was to tie the eras all together, but if they see their projected returns on investment then they'll see these decisions as justified.
But sometimes, it's just not cost effective, any way you look at it, and satisfying the nerds who will buy the game anyway don't make up enough of a market to justify doubling production costs (outsourcing cutscenes and adding more prime voice acting is very expensive). It probably simply wasn't cost effective enough to try to launch the game later and not hit the holiday shopping crowd (which adds significantly higher revenue to the lifetime of sales of the average game verses those released at other points in the year). In the end, it's all a cost-benefit analysis for the sake of the bottom line. All stuff which developers would generally rather do without, but stuff that publishers live and die by.
Well, my question, and the title certainly seems to suggest though I don't see how it's possible, is whether or not these will be readable in regular dvd players. If that's the case, then I think that's what they were referring to. If not then I don't see what the summary, title, and article have to do with DVD's at all, other than as a misleading example of a similar medium.
The article makes reference to data storage cubes as an alternative possibility, and that's something that I deffinitely know won't fit in my dvd drive, so does this mean that the disks are similarly incompatible? I'm just concerned about yet another proprietary media player/recorder on the horizon while we still haven't even gotten fully started with the current batch of too-similar-to-decide hd players.
Sorry, but as compelling as the argument posed in this book may be, there is a fundamental psychological difference between realistically simulating violence for the purposes of training killers, and realistically simulating violence for the purposes of entertainment. The big psychological difference is context. When you go to the military, and they sit you down in front of a violent simulator and ask you to imagine killing real people, your state of mind will be placing real people in those pixels and in those silhouettes (another one of the big revolutions in raising the firing rate in military training by the way, switching to silhouette targets verses the traditional circular bullseyes). While you are mentally preparing yourself to kill people while playing the games or running the simulations, your brain is hard at work associating those images with real people you will eventually be facing with real lives, and learning to dessociate them from actual consequences of violence.
However, when you're playing a videogame for purely entertainment purposes, you could be going through exactly the same motions, but your state of mind is different. You're not thinking about how you'll have to be doing this for real, and you're not mentally preparing yourself to eventually have to kill real people. To you, all the simulated violence you're participating in is just that, a meaningless and inconsequential simulation. All the simulated "people" you're killing don't have real lives, jobs, and families to worry about. You're causing no real pain to empathize with. When the game turns off, all the digital world resets and no real or permanent harm is done. Only when training to be a professional killer do you deliberately consider these things while participating in these excercises (or learn to suppress these questions when participating in the real thing).
Unless of course you're already depraved, and you are deliberately playing games to "train" yourself to be a killer. But if you're already at that point, then you were messed up long before videogames got a hold of you. There are things in life that cause people to want to cause real pain, suffering, and death that are far more influential than anything designed for entertainment can do.
It looks interesting, but I wonder if it can be pressure sensetive (i.e. can detect how hard one is pressing on the surface based on the vibrations). I'm thinking of the artistic applications for this as a way to replace expensive Wacom tablets that come in set sizes of just a few inches with a single product that can be set up to simulate a canvas of any size. But in order for that to be a practical replacement for most artists, it would need to be able to sense the force being applied to the surface (for lighter and darker shades or textures to be applied in the brushstrokes).
I wonder if this would also then allow different tools such as actual paint-brushes (which I presume have a different acoustic profile than say, a stylus or a finger) to be used as different inputs to get different brushstrokes. I also wonder what the effective range of these tools could be, as in do they lose detail or accuracy outside a certain distance, or could they be placed at the four corners of a room to track footsteps? Lots of different applications I can think of, but the one most useful to me is the artistic tablet replacement. My keyboard works just fine, and my desk gets a bit too cluttered to want to devote its entirety to becoming a UI system (at least not all the time), but if this tool could be developed to replace the keyboard, mouse, and tablet all at once (and cost-effectively) then I think they could be on to something I'd defintely be interested in.
IANAL but I believe there are also some Fair Use protections that allow for you to use copywrited material for purposes of parody, and in some cases satire. A pretty good breakdown of it here:d _parody/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_an
So long as you're using the machinima for comedic purposes, you're usually good. You're safer if you're using it to make fun of the game itself, but so long as the company that owns the product in question isn't particularly letigious you're usually in good shape either way. There's a growing culture of machinima use, and there hasn't been any trouble with it thus far. So I wouldn't be too too worried about the legal ramifications with a whole culture of supporters and Fair Use backing you up.
I'm not too sure but the article seems to say that this method still requires invasive (i.e. surgical) techniques to extract the brain signals used to interface with the system. It did suggest that using EEG as a non-invasive alternative for getting those same signals, but I don't think they elaborated on why they didn't use it (I don't know much about either technique, so if someone more informed could enlighten me). I'm just wondering if there is a possibility of a cost-effective "thinking-cap" of some sort in the future that could provide the proper signals for gaming or other electronic activities, to avoid invasive brain plugs ala Matrix or Ghost in the Shell style interfaces.
I'm just speculating about the possibilities and have no real knowledge of the practicality or viability for either of these techniques in the near future. For people looking to opperate prosthetic limbs and such, a permanent surgical plug of sorts seems like a fine solution, but for people who don't want to have to upgrade that plug each time the technology advances, a non-invasive system seems like a more ideal solution.
I'd say pretty much anyone who actually buys the PS3 is going to say it's awesome (and obnoxious fanboys and Sony's arrogance aside, it probably will be) and people who don't bother will say it's eh. The question really is is it $600 awesome? Is it really $200 to $300 more awesome than the competition? Some people will think it is, and some won't. Just how many is what we're all waiting to see, but it seems most of the savvy and informed people are pretty apprehensive, and most of the people who don't care (a set which includes the vast majority of consumers) are either unworried or excited.
Really, if price weren't an issue, would you not get a PS3 over a 360? So if you're not the one buying (e.g. "Hey son, whatchu want for Christmas?") then which would you get? Well, I know I'll be getting myself a Wii, but I can afford one of those myself anyway. If some rich benefactor wanted to buy me a PS3 because he heard it was teh roxxors I wouldn't exactly say no thanks. I still probably wouldn't recommend it to one of my less informed friends though.
Yeah that makes sense. Because retailers have a habit of downplaying hype for products they hope to sell for potentially huge profits. For no reason. Gamestop are just more sony-haters. They're still mad over the success of the PS2 and all the profits it made for them so now they're spreading baseless fud. riiight.
Yeah, cause the retailers hate MS too now. Which is why they're praising the HD-DVD format over the relatively unprepared Blu-Ray showings. That'll teach those untrustworthy MS folks.
Neither of your cases apply to the ESRB, which is the topic of discussion and the target of the bill. They appropriately rated Vice City for the content it had. They didn't give it a lower rating than they were shooting for, and none of the content in the game went beyond anything you might find in a similarly rated movie. Whether you agree with or find that content appropriate for a mature audience or not is now your own problem.
As for Hot Coffee, even being able to play through the complete content of the game on the disk, it wouldn't be possible for them to have found the Hot Coffee content without having either found and downloaded the patches that made it accessible (which only became available thanks to the modding community after the game's release , and thus after the game had to be rated) or would have had to have been able to disect aaaall the code compiled on the disks. Now if just playing through all the game content on every game released ever is impossible, parsing through all of their code is downright astronomical.
Any game regulation policy must absolve the regulatory body of any responsibility for content that is created or altered by individuals after the game has been rated and released. Even the developers themselves can only be held moderately accountable for content they include in a disk but is only accessible through modification of the code.
Basically, if there is no way to access content out of the box that is inappropriate then the companies have fulfilled their responsibility to the consumers. If it requires additional steps and third party modifications or tools not available in the disk itself to access content beyond what was rated by the ESRB, then that implies willful tampering on the part of the user, and can hardly be used to hold the developers or the ESRB responsible.
This idea that developers are trying to sneak inappropriate material into their games to corrupt children for some nefarious game-industry plot is outright ridiculous. Usually if a game has that kind of content they've got it front and center at the head of their marketing campaign. Games like GTA celebrate their inappropriate, anti-social, or politically incorrect content, and anyone who buys it for their kids expecting rainbows and ponies should just turn in their voter registration cards because they're hurting America.
The entire premise of this legislation is bullshit because it doesn't address the issues that got us to this stage in the first place. Regardless of whether you think the current system is insufficient, no solution we can propose would appease these critics. Even if it were humanly possible to play through %100 of the material available in a game to give an accurate appraisal of its content, there is no way to account for material that can be added or unlocked by third party mods. And the conflict of interest argument doesn't fly with me either, because we've seen how much trouble you can get into if you do attempt to mislead the ESRB and fake a lower rating for your game, and most companies would want to avoid that. I would say that this is all a conspiracy to eventually hand control of game-censorship over to the government (see penny-arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/02 ), but frankly that seems like giving these incompetent government hacks a bit too much credit.
On the very small plus side, if this does pass, the ESRB is going to have to do some serious hiring to handle all the game content they'll have to review, which means the non-competetive professional gamer career just became a possibility.
Well, in spite of what they may say, I'd say Sony is very much aware and very much reactionary to the competition. They've tried to mimic the Wii's functionality as quickly as they could after they learned of it, and they're trying to replicate Xbox Live's services.
If I had to guess, they're just playing right out of the Art of War rulebook: When strong, appear weak, and when weak, appear strong. They have to exhibit an air of confidence because they know they're vulnerable and taking a big risk this round. If they don't show confidence in their own product at this stage in the game (and they are very much behind) then they're not going to rally the support they need from consumers or third parties. At this point, they've been dealt all the cards they have to play, and it's poker face time, except it's up to consumers to place their bets for them from here on.
Personally, I'm going to be betting on the Wii this hand, and wait till the stakes are a bit lower before I throw any more money down on something more expensive.
The point isn't so much that temperatures are currently at levels we've seen or estimate to have existed in the past, the point is that the rate of change we're seeing in approaching those levels is far more rapid than one should expect to be happening naturally. If we're experiencing 10,000 or however many years worth of global climate change in a matter of decades, then what happens if the temperature climb doesn't stop when it reaches previous peaks? And what sort of ramifications will these rapid changes have on delicate ecosystems that don't have the usual thousands of years to adjust to the otherwise gradually shifting climates?
Sure environmentalist arguments may at times be hyperbolic or sensationalist (not all of them are, but the ones that are invariably get lumped in with the ones that aren't), and we may not be seeing temperatures that are completely unheard of in our planet's history. But that does not mean that the man-made industrial contribution to climate change is negligible, and it doesn't mean that arguments for more polution control are without merit. No rational environmentalist is clamoring for the tearing down of the establisment in the name of the environment (they are called radicals for a reason). Most arguments are for practical regulation and oversight, and pushing for shifts towards technology that doesn't rely on non-renewable power sources and the creation of lots of potentially harmful greenhouse gasses. This may not be what the free-market would naturally do right now while oil is still relatively abundant, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea to try and push for that kind of technology now rather than later when we have no choice in the matter.
But as soon as some people see the words "global warming" they automatically jump to "oh no, they're coming to take my humscalade," or "There is no global warming because these temperatures existed before there were cars. Even if they were heading in the opposite direction," I guess you're holding out till you see the headline "Never before seen global temperatures" before you're willing to say "ok, something might be going on here." Or will the response be "That's ridiculous because how could they possibly know that?" Basically, my question is, how much evidence would it take to convince you that something abnormal may be going on and that it might warrant our concern? What if by the time that level of evidence is available it's too late to do anything to reverse it?
Art can influence and inspire, without removing control (and therefore responsibility) from a person over their own actions. At best one could say a person who intended to do violence to begin with was inspired to do it in a way that mimiced his favorite game, movie, song, or book, but that hardly is enough to condemn his entertainment for his actions. Just so, one could say someone who was on the path to rising up against an unjust society or government may have been inspired by and rallied behind a revolutionary song, story, or symbol. Clearly it was the social and political conditions that lead to the revolution, not the art.
Since these cases are so rare, that in itself should show that art is not the cause of violence, and whatever influence it does have (it seems at best only able to flavor the event, not to trigger it) is vastly overshadowed by some other serious social and mental factors on the part of the individual.
As pointed out repeatedly in the prequel to this article, these guys were making their mod using the C&C engine, which is EA property. So while even if these guys had no intention of distributing it for profit, and even if it turned out to be a success, it would be impossible for MS to officially capitalize on the promotion of their IP because it is based on software that doesn't belong to them.
And then people are ignoring the fact that if MS hadn't tanked this project first for using their IP on someone else's software, EA probably would have for using their software to promote someone else's IP. There is no way either of these two entities would be able to compromise on a project like this, and it would be naive to presume that both companies would lay down their arms to allow these guys to do their thing (as holding-hands-around-the-world beautiful as that might be).
My question, which I doubt the guys involved in this project can answer, is whether or not the same outcome would have happened if they had used an MS owned RTS engine (there are some out there, Rise of Nations comes to mind). I would be very surprised if MS were less willing to approach these guys with some kind of deal if the project had started out using entirely MS owned products from the outset. And if they would have still killed the project, my guess would be it's either because it planned to significantly diverge from Bungie's intended continuity or brand direction, or they have plans brewing as we speak to develop a Halo based RTS in house and they didn't want a potentially popular, free competitor out there months to years ahead of their own product.
Now I'm no fan of MS, but I always try to be fair, usually willing to give people (and companies, even the big evil ones) the benefit of the doubt, and generally consider if I wouldn't do the same thing if I were in the same position. Given the conflicting IP issue with the game engine, I don't see too many options for MS to resolve this issue that doesn't have them either shut the project down, or have them restart the entire thing using one of their own engines. Given those choices, I think I can guess which one is easier and cheaper (and arguably shortsighted, but so is just assuming a big company would be ok with you using their IP to do anything).
To be clear I am sorry to hear the project was killed, sounds like it might have been a fun project. I would have preferred to see MS take a different route, but I'm not going to use this as an example of how MS is any more evil or greedy than any other company out there.
Games incorporate so many different elements that it is difficult to come up with hard categories that can encompass all the known games without significant exceptions, overlaps, or omissions. I think what gives games so much power and potential is their natural resistance to such pigeonholing and ability to fluidly and organically incorporate so many different elements.
So I think using a series of tags that can be freely applied where necessary can help describe and generalize games without trying to nail the outliers and hybrids and unique games into categories they don't necessarily belong. I would say it is best to apply the series of tags in a standardized order, where a game can incorporate multiple tags from their different categories if applicable: e.g. it isn't necessary to add "real time" to a game with the "1st person" and "shooter" categories since that is generally implied. However you would have to add "turn based" to such a game if necessary since that is generally not typical of 1st person shooters. The tags should be (and generally are) applied in roughly the following order:
Narrative style (if applicable):
Linear
Branching
Sandbox (open ended?)
Setting:
Sci Fi
Fantasy
Historical
Modern
Sports
Dimensions/Perspective:
3D
2D (sidescroller, static, etc.)
1st person
3rd person (implying camera anchored to player's avatar)
"god" (or "bird's eye," implying camera free roaming over a map)
Text based
Gameplay Progression (can be implied by gameplay type):
Real Time
Turn Based
Avatar(s):
Solo
Team (a.k.a. squad, or party-based)
Army
Gameplay Element(s):
Shooter
Brawler
Racer
Tournament fighter
Puzzle
Strategy
Tactics
RPG (or some other form of character ability progression)
Sim
Exploration
Beat-matching
Obviously the Gameplay Elements category has the most descriptors and is still the least complete of all the categories, but you get the idea. By taking and applying all the necessary elements above to any game you can think of you can generally paint a fairly clear picture of what type of game it is relative to other games that may be similar or different. Not all the tags are necessary, and in most cases are left off because they're either obvious or implied, but for the sake of completeness in archival purposes they can help distinguish subtle differences between very similar but fundamentally different games. The "Avatars" category is one I've never actually seen applied to any games, but I think it's useful in describing some fundamental differences between games that have the player using a single character or pawn, as opposed to commanding multiple characters or entire squads/armies in various types of games.
For example, Baldurs Gate would fall under Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real time, party-based, RPG. Whereas NeverWinter Nights I would generally categorize as Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real-time, solo, RPG when describing the single-player campaigns at least (although you could take on a henchman at times, this was not necessary to play through or complete the game, so I would count that as an optional tag). Final Fantasy, or other Japanese RPG's would generally fall under Fantasy, Linear, 3rd person, turn based, party-based, RPG. Oblivion would be Fantasy, Branching, 1st person, real time, solo, RPG. So here we have 4 very different games that would previously all be described simply as RPG's are now much more clearly fleshed out with this system.
Multiplayer games are a whole other beast and in many cases should probably deserve their own list of categories to describe adequately. Splinter Cell's multiplayer consists of both 3rd person and 1st person perspectives, depending on which team you're playing on. A game which is designed as a solo campaign that can become a party-based campaign wh
I read her defense of the study, and straight from the horse's mouth:
"In particular, the severity of the portrayal of injuries and suffering is often what people think of when saying that one game is more "violent" than another (which is more relevant from a developmental psychology perspective for games rated T and M). For example, does the game contain minor auditory or visual representations of injury and pain that primarily serve to notify the player that a character has been injured (e.g., characters like Mario grunt or flash red when injured), or does the game contain graphic representations of injury and pain that serve to exaggerate or focus attention on suffering (e.g., characters screaming in agony or bleeding excessively when injured or when otherwise physically tortured)?"
She freely admits that this study is not about those aspects of violence which most people would think of when thinking about this subject. So the numbers, if taken at face value, are just plain misleading.
Her defense of this method is that these particular games in question (where the ratings ring obviously false) are rated E and that children below a certain age are incapable of discerning the difference between violence abstracted to the level of Pac Man and reality. But if they apply the same methodology to other games with more mature depictions of violence, but comparatively less gametime spent on it, then you come out with numbers that at least on the surface would suggest that they are less violent. This is either a flawed system that is not appropriately scaleable with the depictions or nature of violence in a game (which I think most parents would be more concerned with), or it is a misleading system which uses an obscure and non-mainstream definition of the word "violence".
As I said before, their definition of violence in this case is so broad and all encompassing that it would include what most would probably think of as just competition due to the level of abstraction involved. Chess would probably be rated 100% violent by their standards, but what good does that do in informing a parent about the content or nature of Chess, or whether or not it would be an appropriate game for their infant child (which is her own stated purpose of these studies to begin with).