It seems to me not that painters were made irrelevant or obsolete, merely the method in which they applied their skills were made obsolete. That is to say, skilled painters were not rendered immaterial by the development of photography--representative paintings were rendered immaterial. Impressionism, cubism, surrealism, dada, the entirety of the modernist art movement can be glimpsed as a move away from representation and toward something photography could never capture, no matter how skilled the photographer.
Ultimately as it relates to film actors, until we find some way to surpass the uncanny valley effect of near-photorealism I'm not sure this will really be that large an issue. As some other commenters have pointed out, is there some deeper "sincerity" in an analogue falsehood than a digital one? I'm not sure there is, unless your paycheck depends upon it.
The reply brings up the doctrine of first sale because it controls in your specious "slippery slope" example but not the original scenario. The reason first sale does not apply to the sale of virtual goods or characteres is because control of those virtual goods or characters is granted only under a license and not by a bill of sale. That is to say, when you buy World of Warcraft, you buy the physical artifact in the box, but you do not buy what you are logging on to. The characters, world, and all items are still Blizzard's, so you never owned them in the first place, and thus can't re-sell them. You can do that with a CD, or anything else on Half.com, because what you're selling is the physical artifact, and not the rights to reproduce the music on that CD. I'm stumped that you can tell the respondent to RTFA without understanding that your initial "precedent" is irrelevant.
As a completely random aside, those "ghost boxes" are from matte painting composition and film cutting. Matte painting compositing is mixing film with what are known as matte paintings and the two are composited together to give the appearance of actors moving through a space that they could not build a set for (nor had the computer power to simulate). For instance, in Empire Strikes Back, the gang climbs off the Millennium Falcon and walks toward the Cloud City. There's a long crane shot of the actors moving down the walkway with Bespin behind them. There's a difference in visual quality between Bespin and the actors because the Cloud City is a backdrop or a matte that they painted and then cut into the film stock of the actors moving along a gangway.
Often the "ghost boxing" effect is produced through compositing by the technical impossibility of perfectly matching exposure and grain of one stock with the characteristics of the other stock you're compositing with.
Hearing a tune in your mind and switching on the radio, only to find that tune playing, is more likely a factor of the media conglomerates that control the recording and broadcasting industry as opposed to ESP. Hell, with a Clear Channel station, it's hard not to predict what's coming on--they only play about 20 different songs a day.
We need to redefine the words because the words are important. Attaching labels is a matter of the socialization process. That there is so much resistance to applying the word "marriage" equally is proof of the point--that the word transmits status, that the word is what is special.
It wasn't enough to repeal the laws that enshrined segregation as a concept, we had to redefine our vocabulary, as well. Prior to the end of segregation, there were colored folk, and then there were folk. If they were white, you didn't need to mention it, because white was the construct that applied to the majority (or at least the empowered). Whiteness was the background against which coloredness stood out, and so the label became a stigma and a means of differentiation.
It's become the same scenario with homosexuals. Excluding homosexuals from marriage is just that, a means of exclusion, and the word "marriage" has now become the term by which to connote special privileged status. And because marriage is no longer solely a religious institution, but instead one involving benefits extended by the state to married persons, then I don't see there being reasonable ground for objection to the proper extension of marriage to all citizens.
If marriage should be restricted to certain groups of individuals, and denied to others, as a symbol of social status, then marriage should be removed from legal recognition. Do what another poster had said--get married in a church if you want, but if you're after insurance benefits and the rest, go file for a certificate of civil partnership in the state courthouse. In the States, at least, the 14th Amendment doesn't provide a legal leg to stand on for blocking the extension of marriage to homosexuals without already redefining marriage.
Common-law couples have similar obligations in the event of dissolution, but I'm not entirely sure if the same benefits are enjoyed without a state-sanctioned marriage certificate. In any case, I would suggest the majority of the common-law couples that exist have no problems with not having a typical "marriage" because they didn't want one to begin with.
("Male" and "female" aren't genders, by the way, they're sexes. "Masculine" and "feminine" are the adjectives that describe gender.)
You said it yourself: They wanted equal rights, and the government attempted to force a compromise. The US legal standard that seems apropos (though odds are not to Canadians, but given my grasp of Canadian case law is utterly pathetic, it's what I've got): Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, "Separate but equal is inherently unequal."
So all picto- and ideographic languages are incorrect? The Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, and the Hebrews (whose written language supplants vowels for diacritical marks) just did it wrong?
The theory is Aristotelian--the idea that of katharsis, originally applied to drama. The thought was that tragedies allow the exercise of negative emotion as a kind of psychological outlet; people in contemporary (to him) Greek society were no longer faced with the same struggles and spectrum of experiences, but the emotions were a part of being human. So tragedy became popular because it was the only place for those negative emotions to find expression. Filling an ecological niche, as it were.
Looking Glass Studios dissolved, but the programmers and the team responsible for SS2 are at work on a sequel, whose working title is "BioShock," I think. You can check Gamespot's coverage.
The first being Clive Barker's Undying. A great example of a way to incorporate the more visceral "popcorn scare" with the deeper, psychological brain-twiddling you'd expect from Barker. (Or not, depending on how much you liked Hellraiser...)
The other, which I'm playing now, and while not quite so old as Undying is still a good one: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. When I read Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos short stories, the somewhat different rhythms of his early 20th century work created an unnecessary distance in the material. When you replace his stilted descriptions and florid prose with the experience of losing your grasp on reality, it becomes a much different animal entirely.
One of the creepier moments in Undying involves your Scrye spell. When you can peer into some forgotten trauma, you hear whispers and faint voices telling you "Look," and if you cast Scrye in the bedroom of a long dead woman, old matted blood appears on the sheets and you hear the yowling of a newborn.
The entire "Attack of the Fishmen" chapter of Dark Corners of the Earth is enough to make you wet yourself if you play it at night. Your character, a PI, goes to an inn in a little shanty town. If you forget to bolt the doors, then a bunch of cultist fishermen kick the door in and tear you apart. If you actually bolt the doors, then it starts a frantic chase where you have to run from room to room bolting the doors behind you and hoping you can outrun these screaming bug-eyed lunatics with cleavers and shotguns. The engine alters your perceptions to match your character's mental state, as well, so you hear the pounding of your heart and every heavy blown breath, your vision blurs and your hands twitch.
Those were two of the good ones, and they didn't make it very far at retail, unfortunately.
The progression of the plot provides us a reason for Fry not to clone his dog. It isn't a revival, it isn't a resurrection, it's cloning. The dog he knew was in every sense of the word already dead. Cloning his dog won't get his dog back. It's the same pattern but a different animal. That the actual biology of the situation reinforces what Fry already believes to be true is the setup for the kick in the gut. He would have gotten a representation of it; and it was the idea that his dog loved him that drove his desire for the representation, and a misguided desire at that.
But the kick in the gut is that the dog lived on, waiting for Fry's return, while to Fry it looks as if he was abandoned. The dog is Fry's nascent wish to return to the life he had, to return to "the way things were" as you scornfully put it, but that wish is nothing more than delusion. He can never return to the way things were. When a family member dies, if you were given the option NOT of having them back, but of having a simulacrum of that loved one again, what would you choose? What would be psychologically healthier? To continue to believe that this stranger is the person you loved who is never returning, or to accept that there are things you cannot and will never change?
And "death-affirming"? It's an inexorable part of existence that living things die. Part of growing up is accepting that fact, because to rail against the inevitable is simply a waste of the short amount of time you've got. If Fry cloned his dog, what would he have? Would he have his dog back? No. He'd have a pale representation of his old dog in a new form. The episode isn't "death-affirming." It's about Fry learning to cope with the basic reality of being human. At some point you have to turn away from mindlessly gazing back into your memory and deal with what's in front of you.
Fry didn't kill the dog. Fry just didn't clone the dog. He was already dead--hell, he was already a fossil, almost entirely dolomite. To create a new life as your own mnemonic device or to fuel your delusions is a horrible act. What Fry does is what everyone must do to heal from grief.
Flickr generates income from, at the very least, selling pro memberships. While the prints, DVDs, calendars, etc. are done by other companies, I imagine they get referral fees or a percentage of the purchase price for every user who purchases goods or services from them through Flickr.
They also have the money of Yahoo! behind them, which should provide a good day, two days' worth of emergency cash, I'd think.
Most of my registrations have been with Registerfly--private registration service free with domain names and you can nab $2.95.nets. Their support is even pretty good. They were updating their UI and I couldn't change my nameservers, so I sent them a ticket at 3:30 in the morning on a Thursday and they'd made the changes for me in twenty minutes.
Or possibly "up" and "down." I don't know about you, but the CD-tagging I'm used to (mostly MusicMatch, before I stopped buying CDs) always returns more than one result. Perhaps there's a preview for what CD it think you've got in, so you can make sure your tagging is correct?
*sigh* Unless you're playing FFXI, Final Fantasy does not have a multiplayer component. Which is the whole purpose of LAN parties. How about you list every other console RPG ever made, and let us know how many LAN parties you've seen for those? And how LAN parties are the ultimate determination of every franchise ever?
The prevalence of postmodernism in the universities is the cause for attacking people's motives? Have you not been paying attention for the past several thousand years?
It has absolutely nothing to do with postmodernism. Take one of the extremely early examples that we have on historical record: the trial of Socrates. Rather than refuting his arguments about instruction, pedagogy, and the role of the philosopher in society, his opponents simply claimed he was "corrupting the youth" and attempting to revolt. They attacked his motives, not his arguments.
To argue that postmodernism has anything to do with it is insane. The ad hominem attack is one of the oldest logical fallacies known to mankind and has existed since disagreement.
Er, Caspar was Akagi's mother as a woman, so that left Balthasar and Melchior as the aspects of her as a scientist and mother? I want to say Balthasar was Akagi's mother as mother, but I'm not sure. I've seen the thing 3 times, but some of the details kind of slip away...
Yes! The dreaded moire effect, or if it's happening simply because you're looking at an incredibly busy illustration with your own eyes, visual rotation. With CRTS on film you can actually see the scanline running down the face of the monitor, because the refresh rate of the CRT is out-of-sync with the framerate of the film or digital CMOS sensor (starting near 60mHz for the screen and hitting 24fps--or Hz, if you want--with film). Just wanted to throw that out there.
Unfortunately it also raises privacy issues. While you're talking about implementing the quasi-steganographic approach for a limited subset of camera models (I'm assuming here we're talking about the CCDs used to photograph off microscope feeds) I'm sure it wouldn't be too long until the watermarks started appearing in consumer camera models.
A little less tinfoil-ish consideration is that any watermarking done to the image is necessarily a manipulation of the image, and doing it on the hardware level prevents the photographer from seeing the actual, unaltered photographic image. That is, if you change pixels before you've ever seen those pixels, you might unintentionally alter necessary pixels. And while steganography has gotten pretty adept at changing imagery in ways that do not affect the visible image, odds are the risk of an inaccurate image like the ones that appear in scientific journals is too high to be acceptable.
Further it's a bit drastic of a solution to what is, hopefully, not that widespread a problem.
There are a couple of issues at play here. The first to sprout here in the comments is a debate between whether stories are important or are trivial. (Generally taking the shape of "Who plays these things for the story?" vs. "Who doesn't?") I'm not sure this is really a debate that's going to come to a finite end, much like the graphics vs. gameplay debate that has been bitterly fought since, well, the beginning of games.
The second issue, I guess, regards the purpose of the game itself. Should the game have a narrative driving it, or should it merely be a vector through which an experience is delivered to you, devoid of context or interpretation? I think the gamers that favor the latter opinion are those who enjoy feeling in control of their experiences, much like the shaky narrative framework of the Grand Theft Auto games is really only a suggestion to an otherwise decision-empowered player. Perhaps this is an offshoot of the reality of life against the conditions of the gamespace--we are rarely in command of our own destinies in the real world, with bosses, parents, the government telling us what to do; why should a game designer tempt us with an escape to a different world when we wind up with yet another telling us what to do?
As I mentioned in a prior comment, everything we engage in has a narrative, regardless of whether we're conscious of it or not. The sandbox style of gameplay might be interesting to some, but give me the heavily narrative Planescape: Torment over GTA any day. It isn't simply a matter of playing style, either--over the weekend I ran through F.E.A.R. because of its strong narrative hooks, much like I've played and replayed Monolith's prior games, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2. (With stronger narratives than F.E.A.R., I might add.)
Maybe we should consider this antinarrative backlash as a direct consequence of the popularity of multiplayer FPSes. How many people are still playing Halo 2 for its Halo 1.5 storyline, and how many people still play it for its commanding multiplayer? For that matter, consider Quake 3 Arena--there was the barest of storylines there, as with most any ID game these days, and yet its multiplayer capabilities made it popular. There are people who enjoy a strong singleplayer campaign, myself included, and then there are those who don't give a rat's ass about singleplayer because they just want to frag their buddies as much as possible. Any distraction from either viewpoint might be considered a detriment to either constituency (of course the dichotomy is not absolute; there are plenty of people who enjoy both equally well).
For another factor, consider the game review sites. It's been a regular occurrence that I'll check Gamespot's ratings to see how they've examined a new game, and in the "pros" section they mention a great story, wonderful aesthetic presentation, and strong voice acting. But they decide to graft an 8.0 to an otherwise 9-worthy game with the "con" of a lack of multiplayer. That's a slightly different topic, but I wonder if the prevalence of multiplayer capability is affecting what we consider to be the purpose of games.
Video games are stories. They are stories that you are actually a part of, and that's the difference between Hollywood and the game industry (EA excepted).
Everything you do requires a narrative framework in which to do it, otherwise you have a nihilistic sandbox with no victory condition. Games require rules, victory conditions, and the ability to act in regard to the rules, else it's not a game by definition. Whether you recognize it or not, the idea of the game is simply a narrative in motion.
If plot was truly unimportant to the game process, companies wouldn't bother injecting even a half-ass story into their work. They'd just leave it out because putting any time into a segment of the game requires valuable, life-giving money. The fact that some developers, and ID is mostly responsible here, put so little effort into anything that might resemble a story really late after 4 beers is because they know they can't get away with not doing so.
To rephrase your initial statement, games are places that you go. Without a story, there's no damn reason to ever go there in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me not that painters were made irrelevant or obsolete, merely the method in which they applied their skills were made obsolete. That is to say, skilled painters were not rendered immaterial by the development of photography--representative paintings were rendered immaterial. Impressionism, cubism, surrealism, dada, the entirety of the modernist art movement can be glimpsed as a move away from representation and toward something photography could never capture, no matter how skilled the photographer. Ultimately as it relates to film actors, until we find some way to surpass the uncanny valley effect of near-photorealism I'm not sure this will really be that large an issue. As some other commenters have pointed out, is there some deeper "sincerity" in an analogue falsehood than a digital one? I'm not sure there is, unless your paycheck depends upon it.
The reply brings up the doctrine of first sale because it controls in your specious "slippery slope" example but not the original scenario. The reason first sale does not apply to the sale of virtual goods or characteres is because control of those virtual goods or characters is granted only under a license and not by a bill of sale. That is to say, when you buy World of Warcraft, you buy the physical artifact in the box, but you do not buy what you are logging on to. The characters, world, and all items are still Blizzard's, so you never owned them in the first place, and thus can't re-sell them. You can do that with a CD, or anything else on Half.com, because what you're selling is the physical artifact, and not the rights to reproduce the music on that CD. I'm stumped that you can tell the respondent to RTFA without understanding that your initial "precedent" is irrelevant.
Hara kiri, actually, is the transliteration, though in Japan you'd say seppuku.
Often the "ghost boxing" effect is produced through compositing by the technical impossibility of perfectly matching exposure and grain of one stock with the characteristics of the other stock you're compositing with.
It's analogous to the A-side/B-side system with music singles.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, I think, is where it comes from.
Deleted emails?
Instead of "PlusNet," they should probably go for "MinusNet."
*Sigh* sometimes you've got to roll your own.
Hearing a tune in your mind and switching on the radio, only to find that tune playing, is more likely a factor of the media conglomerates that control the recording and broadcasting industry as opposed to ESP. Hell, with a Clear Channel station, it's hard not to predict what's coming on--they only play about 20 different songs a day.
We need to redefine the words because the words are important. Attaching labels is a matter of the socialization process. That there is so much resistance to applying the word "marriage" equally is proof of the point--that the word transmits status, that the word is what is special.
It wasn't enough to repeal the laws that enshrined segregation as a concept, we had to redefine our vocabulary, as well. Prior to the end of segregation, there were colored folk, and then there were folk. If they were white, you didn't need to mention it, because white was the construct that applied to the majority (or at least the empowered). Whiteness was the background against which coloredness stood out, and so the label became a stigma and a means of differentiation.
It's become the same scenario with homosexuals. Excluding homosexuals from marriage is just that, a means of exclusion, and the word "marriage" has now become the term by which to connote special privileged status. And because marriage is no longer solely a religious institution, but instead one involving benefits extended by the state to married persons, then I don't see there being reasonable ground for objection to the proper extension of marriage to all citizens.
If marriage should be restricted to certain groups of individuals, and denied to others, as a symbol of social status, then marriage should be removed from legal recognition. Do what another poster had said--get married in a church if you want, but if you're after insurance benefits and the rest, go file for a certificate of civil partnership in the state courthouse. In the States, at least, the 14th Amendment doesn't provide a legal leg to stand on for blocking the extension of marriage to homosexuals without already redefining marriage.
Common-law couples have similar obligations in the event of dissolution, but I'm not entirely sure if the same benefits are enjoyed without a state-sanctioned marriage certificate. In any case, I would suggest the majority of the common-law couples that exist have no problems with not having a typical "marriage" because they didn't want one to begin with.
("Male" and "female" aren't genders, by the way, they're sexes. "Masculine" and "feminine" are the adjectives that describe gender.)
You said it yourself: They wanted equal rights, and the government attempted to force a compromise. The US legal standard that seems apropos (though odds are not to Canadians, but given my grasp of Canadian case law is utterly pathetic, it's what I've got): Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, "Separate but equal is inherently unequal."
So all picto- and ideographic languages are incorrect? The Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, and the Hebrews (whose written language supplants vowels for diacritical marks) just did it wrong?
The theory is Aristotelian--the idea that of katharsis, originally applied to drama. The thought was that tragedies allow the exercise of negative emotion as a kind of psychological outlet; people in contemporary (to him) Greek society were no longer faced with the same struggles and spectrum of experiences, but the emotions were a part of being human. So tragedy became popular because it was the only place for those negative emotions to find expression. Filling an ecological niche, as it were.
Looking Glass Studios dissolved, but the programmers and the team responsible for SS2 are at work on a sequel, whose working title is "BioShock," I think. You can check Gamespot's coverage.
The first being Clive Barker's Undying. A great example of a way to incorporate the more visceral "popcorn scare" with the deeper, psychological brain-twiddling you'd expect from Barker. (Or not, depending on how much you liked Hellraiser...)
The other, which I'm playing now, and while not quite so old as Undying is still a good one: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. When I read Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos short stories, the somewhat different rhythms of his early 20th century work created an unnecessary distance in the material. When you replace his stilted descriptions and florid prose with the experience of losing your grasp on reality, it becomes a much different animal entirely.
One of the creepier moments in Undying involves your Scrye spell. When you can peer into some forgotten trauma, you hear whispers and faint voices telling you "Look," and if you cast Scrye in the bedroom of a long dead woman, old matted blood appears on the sheets and you hear the yowling of a newborn.
The entire "Attack of the Fishmen" chapter of Dark Corners of the Earth is enough to make you wet yourself if you play it at night. Your character, a PI, goes to an inn in a little shanty town. If you forget to bolt the doors, then a bunch of cultist fishermen kick the door in and tear you apart. If you actually bolt the doors, then it starts a frantic chase where you have to run from room to room bolting the doors behind you and hoping you can outrun these screaming bug-eyed lunatics with cleavers and shotguns. The engine alters your perceptions to match your character's mental state, as well, so you hear the pounding of your heart and every heavy blown breath, your vision blurs and your hands twitch.
Those were two of the good ones, and they didn't make it very far at retail, unfortunately.
The progression of the plot provides us a reason for Fry not to clone his dog. It isn't a revival, it isn't a resurrection, it's cloning. The dog he knew was in every sense of the word already dead. Cloning his dog won't get his dog back. It's the same pattern but a different animal. That the actual biology of the situation reinforces what Fry already believes to be true is the setup for the kick in the gut. He would have gotten a representation of it; and it was the idea that his dog loved him that drove his desire for the representation, and a misguided desire at that. But the kick in the gut is that the dog lived on, waiting for Fry's return, while to Fry it looks as if he was abandoned. The dog is Fry's nascent wish to return to the life he had, to return to "the way things were" as you scornfully put it, but that wish is nothing more than delusion. He can never return to the way things were. When a family member dies, if you were given the option NOT of having them back, but of having a simulacrum of that loved one again, what would you choose? What would be psychologically healthier? To continue to believe that this stranger is the person you loved who is never returning, or to accept that there are things you cannot and will never change? And "death-affirming"? It's an inexorable part of existence that living things die. Part of growing up is accepting that fact, because to rail against the inevitable is simply a waste of the short amount of time you've got. If Fry cloned his dog, what would he have? Would he have his dog back? No. He'd have a pale representation of his old dog in a new form. The episode isn't "death-affirming." It's about Fry learning to cope with the basic reality of being human. At some point you have to turn away from mindlessly gazing back into your memory and deal with what's in front of you. Fry didn't kill the dog. Fry just didn't clone the dog. He was already dead--hell, he was already a fossil, almost entirely dolomite. To create a new life as your own mnemonic device or to fuel your delusions is a horrible act. What Fry does is what everyone must do to heal from grief.
Flickr generates income from, at the very least, selling pro memberships. While the prints, DVDs, calendars, etc. are done by other companies, I imagine they get referral fees or a percentage of the purchase price for every user who purchases goods or services from them through Flickr.
They also have the money of Yahoo! behind them, which should provide a good day, two days' worth of emergency cash, I'd think.
Most of my registrations have been with Registerfly--private registration service free with domain names and you can nab $2.95 .nets. Their support is even pretty good. They were updating their UI and I couldn't change my nameservers, so I sent them a ticket at 3:30 in the morning on a Thursday and they'd made the changes for me in twenty minutes.
Or possibly "up" and "down." I don't know about you, but the CD-tagging I'm used to (mostly MusicMatch, before I stopped buying CDs) always returns more than one result. Perhaps there's a preview for what CD it think you've got in, so you can make sure your tagging is correct?
*sigh* Unless you're playing FFXI, Final Fantasy does not have a multiplayer component. Which is the whole purpose of LAN parties. How about you list every other console RPG ever made, and let us know how many LAN parties you've seen for those? And how LAN parties are the ultimate determination of every franchise ever?
The prevalence of postmodernism in the universities is the cause for attacking people's motives? Have you not been paying attention for the past several thousand years? It has absolutely nothing to do with postmodernism. Take one of the extremely early examples that we have on historical record: the trial of Socrates. Rather than refuting his arguments about instruction, pedagogy, and the role of the philosopher in society, his opponents simply claimed he was "corrupting the youth" and attempting to revolt. They attacked his motives, not his arguments. To argue that postmodernism has anything to do with it is insane. The ad hominem attack is one of the oldest logical fallacies known to mankind and has existed since disagreement.
Er, Caspar was Akagi's mother as a woman, so that left Balthasar and Melchior as the aspects of her as a scientist and mother? I want to say Balthasar was Akagi's mother as mother, but I'm not sure. I've seen the thing 3 times, but some of the details kind of slip away...
Yes! The dreaded moire effect, or if it's happening simply because you're looking at an incredibly busy illustration with your own eyes, visual rotation. With CRTS on film you can actually see the scanline running down the face of the monitor, because the refresh rate of the CRT is out-of-sync with the framerate of the film or digital CMOS sensor (starting near 60mHz for the screen and hitting 24fps--or Hz, if you want--with film). Just wanted to throw that out there.
Unfortunately it also raises privacy issues. While you're talking about implementing the quasi-steganographic approach for a limited subset of camera models (I'm assuming here we're talking about the CCDs used to photograph off microscope feeds) I'm sure it wouldn't be too long until the watermarks started appearing in consumer camera models.
A little less tinfoil-ish consideration is that any watermarking done to the image is necessarily a manipulation of the image, and doing it on the hardware level prevents the photographer from seeing the actual, unaltered photographic image. That is, if you change pixels before you've ever seen those pixels, you might unintentionally alter necessary pixels. And while steganography has gotten pretty adept at changing imagery in ways that do not affect the visible image, odds are the risk of an inaccurate image like the ones that appear in scientific journals is too high to be acceptable.
Further it's a bit drastic of a solution to what is, hopefully, not that widespread a problem.
The second issue, I guess, regards the purpose of the game itself. Should the game have a narrative driving it, or should it merely be a vector through which an experience is delivered to you, devoid of context or interpretation? I think the gamers that favor the latter opinion are those who enjoy feeling in control of their experiences, much like the shaky narrative framework of the Grand Theft Auto games is really only a suggestion to an otherwise decision-empowered player. Perhaps this is an offshoot of the reality of life against the conditions of the gamespace--we are rarely in command of our own destinies in the real world, with bosses, parents, the government telling us what to do; why should a game designer tempt us with an escape to a different world when we wind up with yet another telling us what to do?
As I mentioned in a prior comment, everything we engage in has a narrative, regardless of whether we're conscious of it or not. The sandbox style of gameplay might be interesting to some, but give me the heavily narrative Planescape: Torment over GTA any day. It isn't simply a matter of playing style, either--over the weekend I ran through F.E.A.R. because of its strong narrative hooks, much like I've played and replayed Monolith's prior games, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2. (With stronger narratives than F.E.A.R., I might add.)
Maybe we should consider this antinarrative backlash as a direct consequence of the popularity of multiplayer FPSes. How many people are still playing Halo 2 for its Halo 1.5 storyline, and how many people still play it for its commanding multiplayer? For that matter, consider Quake 3 Arena--there was the barest of storylines there, as with most any ID game these days, and yet its multiplayer capabilities made it popular. There are people who enjoy a strong singleplayer campaign, myself included, and then there are those who don't give a rat's ass about singleplayer because they just want to frag their buddies as much as possible. Any distraction from either viewpoint might be considered a detriment to either constituency (of course the dichotomy is not absolute; there are plenty of people who enjoy both equally well).
For another factor, consider the game review sites. It's been a regular occurrence that I'll check Gamespot's ratings to see how they've examined a new game, and in the "pros" section they mention a great story, wonderful aesthetic presentation, and strong voice acting. But they decide to graft an 8.0 to an otherwise 9-worthy game with the "con" of a lack of multiplayer. That's a slightly different topic, but I wonder if the prevalence of multiplayer capability is affecting what we consider to be the purpose of games.
Everything you do requires a narrative framework in which to do it, otherwise you have a nihilistic sandbox with no victory condition. Games require rules, victory conditions, and the ability to act in regard to the rules, else it's not a game by definition. Whether you recognize it or not, the idea of the game is simply a narrative in motion.
If plot was truly unimportant to the game process, companies wouldn't bother injecting even a half-ass story into their work. They'd just leave it out because putting any time into a segment of the game requires valuable, life-giving money. The fact that some developers, and ID is mostly responsible here, put so little effort into anything that might resemble a story really late after 4 beers is because they know they can't get away with not doing so.
To rephrase your initial statement, games are places that you go. Without a story, there's no damn reason to ever go there in the first place.