the reason gamers are skewed toward male is because women are too busy doing housework? wtf.
i'm pretty sure when i started playing games as a little kid my sister had exactly as much free time as i did.
when i was in college playing videogames, my girlfriend wasn't off ironing my shirts in some dungeon.
there are many valid reasons that women may have played less videogames than men, but men being magically less busy than women is not one of them.
disney's a company that mines almost all of its ideas from the public domain, but also a company that repeatedly has new copyright laws made to prevent any of their characters from ever entering the public domain.
hypocrites all.
i'd second this as well. i didn't come up through qa but have seen a few people enter devteams from qa in the past year (to engineering and production).
a few of the bigwigs i know, such as head development director, executive producer, lead producer, have started in qa. however i don't see it as something that's happening nearly as much as it used to.
generally it seems like the people who join up from qa aren't even people i ever met before, but they made the most of their connections as castar mentions, and got out when they had the opportunity.
however, this illustrates the point that all you need to get a game job is a friend with a game job. if you already have one or some, you're probably good to go. if you don't know a single person in the industry, a qa job could be a good way to meet some.
can we please stop acknowledging these articles?
on
PC Games On the Rebound
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· Score: 2, Interesting
i really wish slashdot was above forwarding on the constant stream of "the game industry is dying!" "consoles will put pc out of business!" "pcs will put consoles out of business!" "the game industry is thriving!" bullshit articles. nothing reeks more of a slow news day.
it's all spin and idle speculation. i swear these guys write these articles based on what they had their stock broker do the day before. =|
if you look at sims games, particularly sims2, you'll notice that while the designers fought for the possibility of homosexual relationships, there aren't any gay sims that actually ship with the game.
it's not as much of a statement as would be nice to see in games, but it's as close as it can come to outwardly being pro-gay without actually pissing people off and getting pulled from walmart.
i think a lot of games can improve the world without actively and blatantly fighting for freedom. it was a long time ago now, but i remember when i played The Longest Journey i was really struck with how good a job they did putting you in the shoes of the female protagonist.
i really enjoyed the parts where the sleazy guy was always following her around trying to get a date. "oh, so that's what that feels like." small realizations like that can build up to be big things.
for example, if altair from Assasin's Creed turns out to be a well-formed and symphathetic protagonist, who also happens to be from the middle east, that's quite a big deal in today's world (as made obvious by the ignorant posts at the top of this thread).
hard to get too excited about this feature when halflife one had it.
we should be mad at games for not having basic features like this, rather than excited when the third installment of a game finally gets around to adding it.
What an awful article. It's disgusting how they managed to go four pages without ever mentioning QUALITY of the games.
So all I need to make a great game is:
1) SWEET 3D GRFX!
2) MULTIPLAYER PWNAGE!
It really makes me sad that people think Design-By-Checkbox is a valid strategy. As we've all seen, it's very easy to make a 3d game that has openended driving and missions, but very hard to make GTA. It's very easy to make a simple puzzle game with pieces to line up, but very hard to make Tetris.
I can't imagine any faster way to kill the franchise I work on than trying to shoehorn in some innapropriate multiplayer or online aspect.
These guys are also constantly contradicting themselves. Are they trying to say that 3d and complexity and realism and multiplayer are what keep games going strong, or that adding those things are what killed pacman?
Clearly you can't make these decisions based on some rule you read in a badly written article. You need GAME DESIGNERS that know and care about the franchise to steward over it and not allow some well-intentioned idiot to "improve" it to death.
Finally, somebody should explain to these gentlemen the difference between realism and believability. Ugh. How did this thing even get slashdotted?
"In my case, it actually wasn't the MMORPG that was the problem though. Like any addiction, it was a method to fill a void in my life. I was suffering from depression due to some undesirable situations in my personal life, and I turned to the game as a substitute for real life."
I think that's a very important point that people very often overlook. I've got an addictive personality myself, and had problems with games (Team Fortress) a few years back. Eventually I cut back and started working out a lot. What I realize now, but didn't then, is that I ended up just replacing one addiction with another. I was blowing off social events and schoolwork etc so I could spend more time in the gym.
As Shashi hints at, most forms of addiction, whether alcohol, games, drugs, film, sex, seem to have one thing in common: escapism.
It really bothers me when I think back to people yelling at me for playing games so much, but not noticing when I became addicted to something that was "good for me," which had similar negative side effects on my life.
Anyway, it's important to remember how complex and subtle these things can be, and that stopping playing videogames doesn't necessarily mean everything is fine.
"A game that only offers perfectly modeled bullet paths or the ability to murder beautiful women is a waste of talent and a blight upon our industry."
I find the implication that it'd be ok to kill an ugly woman a little strange.
I refuse to even play free games with in-game advertising. You can't put a price on immersion.
In-game ads might be perfectly find if they were properly shaded and placed into the game by artists, so they actually at least looked like in-game ads, rather than these uberbright jarring portals to another world.
To me it makes the difference between someone holding a coke can in a movie and just compositing a can of coke onto a table with no regard for making it look like part of the world. It'd be incredibly jarring.
their company NCSoft is one of the five companies they see succeeding?
if somebody from a small indie mmo developer had been speaking, i'm sure they would have pointed out that there are more smallscale commercial mmos than ever before, which i'm sure would also be correct.
they're just hoping to make a self fulfilling prophesy, i think.
i seem to remember a very similar article a few weeks ago in which an EA exec was saying the same thing, which people seemed to think was a bit biased.
"those that grind constantly still have a significant edge in arms and armor, and it is this issue that must be addressed."
i guarantee you that any game in which a casual player can do as well as a hardcore grinder would be out of business faster than you can spit:
1- all the hardcore players get pissed off when they realize their uncle Ed has the same set of armor that they do, and quit for a Real Game.
2- the semi-hardcore players are now the closest thing there is to hardcore, and they have the same realization, then quit.
3- all that's left on the server are the casual players, who like the fact that they don't ever have to log in to get all the phat l00t.
4- whenever one of them actually comes online, they get pissed off at the fact that there's nobody in the world to interact with, because all the hardcore and semi-hardcore players have quit, and all the other casual players log in once a week to buy a new skill. so they quit too.
5- stock plummets, lead designer kills himself, world is shut down.
Slashdot Mirror
the reason gamers are skewed toward male is because women are too busy doing housework? wtf. i'm pretty sure when i started playing games as a little kid my sister had exactly as much free time as i did. when i was in college playing videogames, my girlfriend wasn't off ironing my shirts in some dungeon. there are many valid reasons that women may have played less videogames than men, but men being magically less busy than women is not one of them.
wow already has casual classes. they're called hunter and warlock.
disney's a company that mines almost all of its ideas from the public domain, but also a company that repeatedly has new copyright laws made to prevent any of their characters from ever entering the public domain. hypocrites all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7tzPuRYwok
norris
i'd second this as well. i didn't come up through qa but have seen a few people enter devteams from qa in the past year (to engineering and production). a few of the bigwigs i know, such as head development director, executive producer, lead producer, have started in qa. however i don't see it as something that's happening nearly as much as it used to. generally it seems like the people who join up from qa aren't even people i ever met before, but they made the most of their connections as castar mentions, and got out when they had the opportunity. however, this illustrates the point that all you need to get a game job is a friend with a game job. if you already have one or some, you're probably good to go. if you don't know a single person in the industry, a qa job could be a good way to meet some.
i really wish slashdot was above forwarding on the constant stream of "the game industry is dying!" "consoles will put pc out of business!" "pcs will put consoles out of business!" "the game industry is thriving!" bullshit articles. nothing reeks more of a slow news day. it's all spin and idle speculation. i swear these guys write these articles based on what they had their stock broker do the day before. =|
if you look at sims games, particularly sims2, you'll notice that while the designers fought for the possibility of homosexual relationships, there aren't any gay sims that actually ship with the game.
it's not as much of a statement as would be nice to see in games, but it's as close as it can come to outwardly being pro-gay without actually pissing people off and getting pulled from walmart.
i think a lot of games can improve the world without actively and blatantly fighting for freedom. it was a long time ago now, but i remember when i played The Longest Journey i was really struck with how good a job they did putting you in the shoes of the female protagonist.
i really enjoyed the parts where the sleazy guy was always following her around trying to get a date. "oh, so that's what that feels like." small realizations like that can build up to be big things.
for example, if altair from Assasin's Creed turns out to be a well-formed and symphathetic protagonist, who also happens to be from the middle east, that's quite a big deal in today's world (as made obvious by the ignorant posts at the top of this thread).
hard to get too excited about this feature when halflife one had it.
we should be mad at games for not having basic features like this, rather than excited when the third installment of a game finally gets around to adding it.
this shouldn't be news.
So all I need to make a great game is:
1) SWEET 3D GRFX!
2) MULTIPLAYER PWNAGE!
It really makes me sad that people think Design-By-Checkbox is a valid strategy. As we've all seen, it's very easy to make a 3d game that has openended driving and missions, but very hard to make GTA. It's very easy to make a simple puzzle game with pieces to line up, but very hard to make Tetris.
I can't imagine any faster way to kill the franchise I work on than trying to shoehorn in some innapropriate multiplayer or online aspect.
These guys are also constantly contradicting themselves. Are they trying to say that 3d and complexity and realism and multiplayer are what keep games going strong, or that adding those things are what killed pacman?
Clearly you can't make these decisions based on some rule you read in a badly written article. You need GAME DESIGNERS that know and care about the franchise to steward over it and not allow some well-intentioned idiot to "improve" it to death.
Finally, somebody should explain to these gentlemen the difference between realism and believability. Ugh. How did this thing even get slashdotted?
I think that's a very important point that people very often overlook. I've got an addictive personality myself, and had problems with games (Team Fortress) a few years back. Eventually I cut back and started working out a lot. What I realize now, but didn't then, is that I ended up just replacing one addiction with another. I was blowing off social events and schoolwork etc so I could spend more time in the gym.
As Shashi hints at, most forms of addiction, whether alcohol, games, drugs, film, sex, seem to have one thing in common: escapism.
It really bothers me when I think back to people yelling at me for playing games so much, but not noticing when I became addicted to something that was "good for me," which had similar negative side effects on my life.
Anyway, it's important to remember how complex and subtle these things can be, and that stopping playing videogames doesn't necessarily mean everything is fine.
"A game that only offers perfectly modeled bullet paths or the ability to murder beautiful women is a waste of talent and a blight upon our industry." I find the implication that it'd be ok to kill an ugly woman a little strange.
I refuse to even play free games with in-game advertising. You can't put a price on immersion. In-game ads might be perfectly find if they were properly shaded and placed into the game by artists, so they actually at least looked like in-game ads, rather than these uberbright jarring portals to another world. To me it makes the difference between someone holding a coke can in a movie and just compositing a can of coke onto a table with no regard for making it look like part of the world. It'd be incredibly jarring.
their company NCSoft is one of the five companies they see succeeding? if somebody from a small indie mmo developer had been speaking, i'm sure they would have pointed out that there are more smallscale commercial mmos than ever before, which i'm sure would also be correct. they're just hoping to make a self fulfilling prophesy, i think. i seem to remember a very similar article a few weeks ago in which an EA exec was saying the same thing, which people seemed to think was a bit biased.
"those that grind constantly still have a significant edge in arms and armor, and it is this issue that must be addressed."
i guarantee you that any game in which a casual player can do as well as a hardcore grinder would be out of business faster than you can spit:
1- all the hardcore players get pissed off when they realize their uncle Ed has the same set of armor that they do, and quit for a Real Game.
2- the semi-hardcore players are now the closest thing there is to hardcore, and they have the same realization, then quit.
3- all that's left on the server are the casual players, who like the fact that they don't ever have to log in to get all the phat l00t.
4- whenever one of them actually comes online, they get pissed off at the fact that there's nobody in the world to interact with, because all the hardcore and semi-hardcore players have quit, and all the other casual players log in once a week to buy a new skill. so they quit too.
5- stock plummets, lead designer kills himself, world is shut down.