It's not just voice acting and marketing, it's stuff like story/script, texturing, level design, modelling, animation and testing. Also, have you actually played any games with poor voice acting, or do you just prefer your games not to have voices in them? The second is acceptable in some types of games, the first just breaks your immersion from the game. You don't have to spend millions to get good voice actors either. If you're paying millions you're doing it for the name, not the talent.
I suppose by "big budget", I mean anything that can't be done by a small group of guys in their spare time, something that you actually need to pay people wages on so that they can devote the time they need to the project. Maybe "big budget" was the wrong term to use. Let's rephrase the question to: do you think that nobody should make games professionally? And stuff like putting advertising in only works for a limited number of game types.. sports sims and modern day city settings.
Okay, so what you are saying is, you think nobody should ever make big budget games any more because they shouldn't be allowed to sell them and can't make their money back? Likewise nobody should make big budget movies or try to sell their music?
If you don't like my car analogy, how about me saying "this is like someone copying your personal information off your hard drive while your computer is in for repair" or something along those lines? The point was not to do with the stealing, but to demonstrate that if it may have been a leak at the publisher's or by a tester, and in that case Crytek had no way of avoiding it.
Only one? What about those who are designing the levels, character animations, textures/shaders etc and need to test them in game, those who write the AI and need to test it in game, those who do any part of the game, and need to test it? Then of course, you have the quality testers.
He didn't say anything against any of what you said, he only said that he hoped whoever was responsible for the leak gets punished. Because they are clearly not acting in the interests of Crytek as a "private company". The guy likely doesn't work for Crytek, otherwise he'd just be shooting himself in the foot by doing this (hence why RogueyWon mentioned the "supply chain"). Saying this is Crytek's responsibility is like blaming someone for having their car stolen while it was being repaired at a garage.
You are awfully quick to defend yourself even when no accusation is being made - guilty conscience much?
Okay, I agree that they'll probably spend more overall than a poor person, at least when it comes to luxuries, but I think you're aiming a bit high.
They make $100,000 per year and spend 90% of it (and that is conservative)
Maybe I just don't know the right rich people, but the majority of the people I know who make that much money or more, are overall sensible with it. Of 6 of the Directors in our company, 2 are allegedly wasteful, and the rest are quite sensible. Of course they'll all have some fun every now and then, have nice cars, etc (though they're usually company cars so it doesn't really cost them anything other than company car tax), but they certainly are not spending 90% of their pay every month. It wouldn't be impossible for them to do that in the same way that it literally must be near impossible for Bill Gates to spend all of his earnings, but they honestly have no need to spend that much to live well. I don't even spend 90% of my pay each month despite buying loads of gadgets and expensive food - and I'm only making around half that.
the idea of "consciousness" is akin to the idea of "four". It's a property of the particular arrangement of the matter in our bodies, an abstract quality that we made up to describe some interesting aspect of that arrangement.
It's not just matter - it's also energy flow between neurons. A brain that loses that energy dies and can't be reanimated.
I do see consciousness as something that needs to be perpetuated to work. Energy is physical so I suppose it is physical. If you let that energy die out, the consciousness is gone. If you're using a simulation or a magical copying machine, then you can perhaps create duplicate consciousness, but the original cogent experience that was going on in the first place has gone. That self has died, even if there is a copy of it somwhere. I know the self will act the same as the original, but that is not the point. It's like making a copy of the Mona Lisa in a Star Trek style Replicator. Collectors are still only going to want to pay for the original (though there may not be a way to tell which is the original anymore, if the Replicator is advanced enough).
I was thinking similar things too - Terry Pratchett often injects fun ilttle things like that into his writing, like a broom that has its handle and bristles replaced many times, while remaining the same broom.
I especially liked this part: "what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship?".
Seeing as a sailing ship doesn't have an on or off state though, it seems fundamentally different to things like brains and computers, so I think the computer analogy works well here.
It's funny how some people don't seem to understand what we mean when we say "you", "self", etc. He doesn't mean that the original won't act like the real you would. He probably doesn't even mean that they wouldn't have a "soul or whatever", as he's referring to consciousness. He just means that they will be separate consciousnesses, and not the original. Replacing part by part is much preferable to creating a copy and destroying the original.
Hah, I forgot to read the rest of your comment because the start was so funny.
Never mind that the copy's enjoyment and experience are by definition the original's + n > the original's
You have such a strange detached notion of life. Would you be happy to have all your family and friends killed, if you knew that copies would come back the next day, all with amazing new experiences programmed into them? Bleh. The results are not all that matters, or everyone would just kill themselves to get the inevitable results out of the way.
The duration is what makes it acceptable or not?
Frankly, yes. Read "The Bicentennial Man" (by Asimov, who wrote many interesting stories questioning things like consciousness), or just watch the movie if you can't be bothered. People are creeped out by the idea of immortal beings, not to mention that it's just unsustainable while we only have one planet worth of space and resources.
At this point I resent having you "forced" on my world for your life span. Did that sound stupid? It should.
No. A lot of people are afraid of dying. You however said:
I'd rather, paradoxical though it may be, "die" in one form in order to not die in another, than just to die altogether.
So, you make it sound an awful lot like you don't care about dying, as long as there is something out there that acts like you. Even though the copy would act exactly the same as you, and think it was you, the original you would be dead. Which is why everybody else finds the idea repulsive and scary. Of course, it won't be scary if you don't exist any more, but I still find the overall idea quite sad. A consciousness just winking out of existence.
Imagine a a server. This server has hot swappable power supplies, RAM, hard drives, even processors. If you replace only one part at a time, you keep the server running.
You could just replace all the hardware at once, but that would require taking the system offline. You could start it up again, but it was definitely offline and all the processes have to start again from scratch.
Since consciousness doesn't appear to come from only one part of the brain (that we know of), and the brain has plenty of redundancy built in - as observed by people recovering from brain damage - then things should just keep ticking along as if nothing happened, and the same consciousness will still be running on the system. Maybe it just wouldn't work though. Maybe there is a part of the brain where consciousness is seated, and you would end up destroying and restarting it all anyway. Who knows. I think it could work though, and if you never have to shut the whole system down simultaneously, maybe the same consciousness can continue. I don't know if we'll ever understand the nature of consciousness though. I always say I wouldn't believe it was possible, if I weren't already experiencing it myself.
Oh, I forgot the most obvious example: the one that applies to me.
If I were rich, I could easily afford the deposit on getting a loan to buy my own house (or just buy the house outright if I were really rich of course). But as it is, I've not been saving as wisely as I could, and so it's taking a while to get the deposit. Plus, I just hate the idea of having the responsibility of having a large loan hanging over my head. Anyway, in reality all of this time, I'm bleeding money in rent that I could otherwise be investing in my own property (and paying interest of course, but it's still saving more money than just paying rent..). When you're rich, there are more ways to save and make money than if you are always struggling to even pay the bills. You can buy multiple properties and rent them out to people, so you're not even paying the mortgage, basically making free money.
Not all, but probably quite a lot. Even a lot of "middle class" types would balk at buying £100 shoes. How many poor people do you know that buy high quality food, expensive shoes and well made clothes? How many poor people do you know that waste lots of money on cigarettes, lottery tickets and booze, or worse?
You could apply the same logic to anyone buying a car. I bought an old car that died after a couple of months, wasted me a lot of money. Maybe not even as much as I'd have lost in depreciation if I had bought a new car, but still, if I could have afforded to buy a car that was in better condition, I'd have been better off. (I don't like being in debt though so I don't take out loans to buy cars, and thankfully my current car is much more reliable).
Turns out it was released on Mac - a couple of years after the Xbox version, probably even after the Windows version. I tried the Windows version and thought it was crap. Reminded me of the Unreal single player, which in a post Half-Life world, isn't a good thing.
They might. When I buy a £100 pair of trail running shoes, they last until the sole wears through - but cheaper shoes I've had in the past have sometimes only lasted a few weeks. I'm sure this applies to more than just shoes. When you can afford quality products, you don't have to buy stuff so often. Being rich means you can buy stuff more often if you wish to of course, but then again, I'm sure some rich people are now rich because they have saved, then invested wisely.
I'd rather, paradoxical though it may be, "die" in one form in order to not die in another, than just to die altogether.
I think this is probably even more narcissistic than just wanting to live forever - not caring that the current you won't be around to enjoy life and new experiences, but being happy knowing that an immortal copy of you will be forced indefinitely upon others.. of course I guess it's just letting your biological urges control your thinking, in the same way that a lot of people would die if they knew it would help their kids.
You're completely missing the concept of consciousness here. The copy may be convinced it has consciousness (and maybe it does - nobody can define consciousness so far, all an individual knows is that it experiences it), but it would be an entirely new consciousness that isn't being experienced by you. We're not talking about self worth or anything like that, we're simply talking about experience, sentience. If "you" is only going to live on in a separate copy, rather than replacing your brain piece by piece, you're effectively committing suicide.
Places like Qatar and Abu Dhabi have demonstrated that they have more money than sense for decades, building one extravagant, useless building after another.
I agree with what you're saying, but that particular part just makes it sound like the rich guys in Qatar and Abu Dhabi care quite a lot about art.
Yeah, I rather dislike RTSes and RPGs so I forgot about them:p These days you'd have to say that they're the best Mac games developer, or at least the most profitable.
I'm quite happy with that, I'm talking about my apparently unbroken stream of consciousness, not the body that results in that consciousness. Creating a copy and destroying the current stream may not give any noticeable difference to outsiders, but it sure as hell would be annoying for the current me, if I were still around to be annoyed about it.
Still, I'm happy with my brain being replaced piece by piece, as I continue being me. If you create a copy and destroy the original, I will no longer be me. Me will be a different I. This I wants to stay in existence while it can. If you only think of yourself in terms of you external actions that's fine, you can be happy destroying your current consciousness and letting a different consciousness continue to be you. Of course if you believe in things like souls then you probably don't really care what state your body takes.
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It's not just voice acting and marketing, it's stuff like story/script, texturing, level design, modelling, animation and testing. Also, have you actually played any games with poor voice acting, or do you just prefer your games not to have voices in them? The second is acceptable in some types of games, the first just breaks your immersion from the game. You don't have to spend millions to get good voice actors either. If you're paying millions you're doing it for the name, not the talent.
I suppose by "big budget", I mean anything that can't be done by a small group of guys in their spare time, something that you actually need to pay people wages on so that they can devote the time they need to the project. Maybe "big budget" was the wrong term to use. Let's rephrase the question to: do you think that nobody should make games professionally? And stuff like putting advertising in only works for a limited number of game types.. sports sims and modern day city settings.
Okay, so what you are saying is, you think nobody should ever make big budget games any more because they shouldn't be allowed to sell them and can't make their money back? Likewise nobody should make big budget movies or try to sell their music?
If you don't like my car analogy, how about me saying "this is like someone copying your personal information off your hard drive while your computer is in for repair" or something along those lines? The point was not to do with the stealing, but to demonstrate that if it may have been a leak at the publisher's or by a tester, and in that case Crytek had no way of avoiding it.
Only one? What about those who are designing the levels, character animations, textures/shaders etc and need to test them in game, those who write the AI and need to test it in game, those who do any part of the game, and need to test it? Then of course, you have the quality testers.
He didn't say anything against any of what you said, he only said that he hoped whoever was responsible for the leak gets punished. Because they are clearly not acting in the interests of Crytek as a "private company". The guy likely doesn't work for Crytek, otherwise he'd just be shooting himself in the foot by doing this (hence why RogueyWon mentioned the "supply chain"). Saying this is Crytek's responsibility is like blaming someone for having their car stolen while it was being repaired at a garage.
You are awfully quick to defend yourself even when no accusation is being made - guilty conscience much?
Okay, I agree that they'll probably spend more overall than a poor person, at least when it comes to luxuries, but I think you're aiming a bit high.
They make $100,000 per year and spend 90% of it (and that is conservative)
Maybe I just don't know the right rich people, but the majority of the people I know who make that much money or more, are overall sensible with it. Of 6 of the Directors in our company, 2 are allegedly wasteful, and the rest are quite sensible. Of course they'll all have some fun every now and then, have nice cars, etc (though they're usually company cars so it doesn't really cost them anything other than company car tax), but they certainly are not spending 90% of their pay every month. It wouldn't be impossible for them to do that in the same way that it literally must be near impossible for Bill Gates to spend all of his earnings, but they honestly have no need to spend that much to live well. I don't even spend 90% of my pay each month despite buying loads of gadgets and expensive food - and I'm only making around half that.
the idea of "consciousness" is akin to the idea of "four". It's a property of the particular arrangement of the matter in our bodies, an abstract quality that we made up to describe some interesting aspect of that arrangement.
It's not just matter - it's also energy flow between neurons. A brain that loses that energy dies and can't be reanimated.
I do see consciousness as something that needs to be perpetuated to work. Energy is physical so I suppose it is physical. If you let that energy die out, the consciousness is gone. If you're using a simulation or a magical copying machine, then you can perhaps create duplicate consciousness, but the original cogent experience that was going on in the first place has gone. That self has died, even if there is a copy of it somwhere. I know the self will act the same as the original, but that is not the point. It's like making a copy of the Mona Lisa in a Star Trek style Replicator. Collectors are still only going to want to pay for the original (though there may not be a way to tell which is the original anymore, if the Replicator is advanced enough).
I was thinking similar things too - Terry Pratchett often injects fun ilttle things like that into his writing, like a broom that has its handle and bristles replaced many times, while remaining the same broom.
I especially liked this part: "what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship?".
Seeing as a sailing ship doesn't have an on or off state though, it seems fundamentally different to things like brains and computers, so I think the computer analogy works well here.
It's funny how some people don't seem to understand what we mean when we say "you", "self", etc. He doesn't mean that the original won't act like the real you would. He probably doesn't even mean that they wouldn't have a "soul or whatever", as he's referring to consciousness. He just means that they will be separate consciousnesses, and not the original. Replacing part by part is much preferable to creating a copy and destroying the original.
Hah, I forgot to read the rest of your comment because the start was so funny.
Never mind that the copy's enjoyment and experience are by definition the original's + n > the original's
You have such a strange detached notion of life. Would you be happy to have all your family and friends killed, if you knew that copies would come back the next day, all with amazing new experiences programmed into them? Bleh. The results are not all that matters, or everyone would just kill themselves to get the inevitable results out of the way.
The duration is what makes it acceptable or not?
Frankly, yes. Read "The Bicentennial Man" (by Asimov, who wrote many interesting stories questioning things like consciousness), or just watch the movie if you can't be bothered. People are creeped out by the idea of immortal beings, not to mention that it's just unsustainable while we only have one planet worth of space and resources.
At this point I resent having you "forced" on my world for your life span. Did that sound stupid? It should.
I'm not sure why. Did you not mean it?
Wow, you're an ass.
Sometimes, yes :)
Wanting to live is narcissistic?
No. A lot of people are afraid of dying. You however said:
I'd rather, paradoxical though it may be, "die" in one form in order to not die in another, than just to die altogether.
So, you make it sound an awful lot like you don't care about dying, as long as there is something out there that acts like you. Even though the copy would act exactly the same as you, and think it was you, the original you would be dead. Which is why everybody else finds the idea repulsive and scary. Of course, it won't be scary if you don't exist any more, but I still find the overall idea quite sad. A consciousness just winking out of existence.
Why isn't replacing the last neuron suicide
Imagine a a server. This server has hot swappable power supplies, RAM, hard drives, even processors. If you replace only one part at a time, you keep the server running.
You could just replace all the hardware at once, but that would require taking the system offline. You could start it up again, but it was definitely offline and all the processes have to start again from scratch.
Since consciousness doesn't appear to come from only one part of the brain (that we know of), and the brain has plenty of redundancy built in - as observed by people recovering from brain damage - then things should just keep ticking along as if nothing happened, and the same consciousness will still be running on the system. Maybe it just wouldn't work though. Maybe there is a part of the brain where consciousness is seated, and you would end up destroying and restarting it all anyway. Who knows. I think it could work though, and if you never have to shut the whole system down simultaneously, maybe the same consciousness can continue. I don't know if we'll ever understand the nature of consciousness though. I always say I wouldn't believe it was possible, if I weren't already experiencing it myself.
Oh, I forgot the most obvious example: the one that applies to me.
If I were rich, I could easily afford the deposit on getting a loan to buy my own house (or just buy the house outright if I were really rich of course). But as it is, I've not been saving as wisely as I could, and so it's taking a while to get the deposit. Plus, I just hate the idea of having the responsibility of having a large loan hanging over my head. Anyway, in reality all of this time, I'm bleeding money in rent that I could otherwise be investing in my own property (and paying interest of course, but it's still saving more money than just paying rent..). When you're rich, there are more ways to save and make money than if you are always struggling to even pay the bills. You can buy multiple properties and rent them out to people, so you're not even paying the mortgage, basically making free money.
"Buy this car to drive to work. Drive to work to pay for this car."
Not all, but probably quite a lot. Even a lot of "middle class" types would balk at buying £100 shoes. How many poor people do you know that buy high quality food, expensive shoes and well made clothes? How many poor people do you know that waste lots of money on cigarettes, lottery tickets and booze, or worse?
You could apply the same logic to anyone buying a car. I bought an old car that died after a couple of months, wasted me a lot of money. Maybe not even as much as I'd have lost in depreciation if I had bought a new car, but still, if I could have afforded to buy a car that was in better condition, I'd have been better off. (I don't like being in debt though so I don't take out loans to buy cars, and thankfully my current car is much more reliable).
Turns out it was released on Mac - a couple of years after the Xbox version, probably even after the Windows version. I tried the Windows version and thought it was crap. Reminded me of the Unreal single player, which in a post Half-Life world, isn't a good thing.
Actually I suppose I just adapted it. Love Discworld :)
They might. When I buy a £100 pair of trail running shoes, they last until the sole wears through - but cheaper shoes I've had in the past have sometimes only lasted a few weeks. I'm sure this applies to more than just shoes. When you can afford quality products, you don't have to buy stuff so often. Being rich means you can buy stuff more often if you wish to of course, but then again, I'm sure some rich people are now rich because they have saved, then invested wisely.
I'd rather, paradoxical though it may be, "die" in one form in order to not die in another, than just to die altogether.
I think this is probably even more narcissistic than just wanting to live forever - not caring that the current you won't be around to enjoy life and new experiences, but being happy knowing that an immortal copy of you will be forced indefinitely upon others.. of course I guess it's just letting your biological urges control your thinking, in the same way that a lot of people would die if they knew it would help their kids.
You're completely missing the concept of consciousness here. The copy may be convinced it has consciousness (and maybe it does - nobody can define consciousness so far, all an individual knows is that it experiences it), but it would be an entirely new consciousness that isn't being experienced by you. We're not talking about self worth or anything like that, we're simply talking about experience, sentience. If "you" is only going to live on in a separate copy, rather than replacing your brain piece by piece, you're effectively committing suicide.
Or getting a job..
Places like Qatar and Abu Dhabi have demonstrated that they have more money than sense for decades, building one extravagant, useless building after another.
I agree with what you're saying, but that particular part just makes it sound like the rich guys in Qatar and Abu Dhabi care quite a lot about art.
It doesn't make the current me unhappy, because it doesn't notice.
Yeah, I rather dislike RTSes and RPGs so I forgot about them :p These days you'd have to say that they're the best Mac games developer, or at least the most profitable.
I'm quite happy with that, I'm talking about my apparently unbroken stream of consciousness, not the body that results in that consciousness. Creating a copy and destroying the current stream may not give any noticeable difference to outsiders, but it sure as hell would be annoying for the current me, if I were still around to be annoyed about it.
Still, I'm happy with my brain being replaced piece by piece, as I continue being me. If you create a copy and destroy the original, I will no longer be me. Me will be a different I. This I wants to stay in existence while it can. If you only think of yourself in terms of you external actions that's fine, you can be happy destroying your current consciousness and letting a different consciousness continue to be you. Of course if you believe in things like souls then you probably don't really care what state your body takes.