I thought it was just the nature of people who have an aptitude for tech that we tend to make informed purchases, based on a thorough examination of our needs. Many of us don't value marketing because we've convinced ourselves that we don't respond to/fall for it. When I see ads for "Windows 7 computers" I smirk knowing Windows 8 will totally obsolete it; that Microsoft have already moved on to the next product and anyone trying to sell me Windows 7 is being disingenuous. At the same time, I am a Windows 7 user who needed a 64-bit OS's ability to use larger amounts of memory during 3D rendering, so marketing played little role in my purchase. (If I worked at the company whether I held a low opinion of marketing or hailed this as heroes would always depend on my feeling about the product.)
I just assumed most geeks were meritocratic and so would often see marketing as a consumer of a disproportionately large amount of company funds. I wasn't going to bring up Asperger or autism, but I can see how some people could completely miss the point of an ad that was all flash or pathos while responding well to those speaking in percent improvements in performance, specific improvements in design, or advantages over competing products.
Imagine the outcry if they had decided to replace the Green Goblin with a character who is a half-black, half-Latino teen, and whose creators haven't ruled out that he might be gay. Whenever the hero is changed it's lauded as a reflection of our diversity, if it were the villain being changed it would be called a throwback to old negative attitudes.
The reasoning, even if flawed, is pretty simple. Most people go through life without ever committing a murder. Most people also eventually have sex at some point. Violence in games and films can be cathartic, and it's not been proven to cause a person to become a violent. Even when violent acts are linked to games, it has not been proven that the players did not already have violent tendencies. On the other hand, we expect our children will have sex. We just don't want them to be doing it at irresponsibly or illegally young ages. The more obscene the violence depicted, the more of a disconnect there is between it and reality for most people. I have killed countless people in Mortal Kombat, but have never wanted to kill an actual person. Seeing an attractive naked woman, in any media, is almost always going to remind me that I would indeed like to be having sex.
Yet it is no less true that someone reading that statement may indeed hold that opinion. I've always found it very interesting... How else might we ever develop human/animal translators?
Interactive movies are actually what I want. I don't play games for the challenge, I play them for the escape. I don't enjoy open ended multi-player games because I am simply not that competitive. Resident Evil 4, for me, was a high point in game design because I could not wait to see what kind of strange place I might end up in or what abomination I would face next. I liked my character, and I thought the NPCs were well done also (and I feel similarly about Just Cause 2 which I am still playing). I just want to explore while advancing a story to completion at my own pace.
Why is resolution still the measure of realism? I remember the FUD during the transition from 16 to 32 bit consoles that would have had people believe graphic quality was limited by the NTSC television standard. Isn't it apparent that any old live action television show still looks far more realistic than any modern game? Compare "L.A. Noire" in HD to an episode of, say, the "Rockford Files" running in 320x240 and tell me the latter isn't far more realistic. Clarity does not equal quality.
The terms graphics race seems to be used around here to refer to little more than number of pixels pushed and the complexity of the lighting model used. There are countless ways that graphics could be improved that have nothing to do with either. I think physics, when it's not part of the game mechanic, is largely graphical. I am looking forward to a generation of consoles that can render hair that doesn't clip into a figure's body, clothing that actually covers a figure rather than being modeled onto it, body masses that jiggle subtly and believably, object damage that isn't canned, buildings with visible interiors... None of those things require more pixels or a radically different shading pipeline.
Oh, I know! The worst is when they scream "get it out!" when you snag one with the grappling hook. I have to tell myself that they are the same bastards holding citizens at gunpoint at traffic stops...
Maybe more realism would snap us out of feeling the need to engage in such violent activities in depressing locales. I still play Just Cause 2 frequently, because I think they did an excellent job of making Panau a beautiful place to escape to. I would like to see rain that formed reflecting puddles, snow that accumulates, just generally more realism in all of the parts of the game I find pleasant. I would not particularly care to see more gruesome deaths or depictions of the dead.
Because, as a Catholic, he would be under papal authority and would likely consider the Pope infallible. Having a president that took directions from Rome was a legitimate concern yet was a non-issue with previous Protestant presidents who merely had preachers advising or counseling them.
I just had the never-ending evolution/creation debate with a fundamentalist friend. It is amazing how much sense the Bible makes if you throw out what you think you know, as I found when I chose to refute his points using scripture. Noah was "perfect in his generations"... God would "multiply (one's) seed... Jesus wilted the tree that bore no fruit... If you can look past the usage of the term "days" in Genesis, it clearly states life was "created" in the order science says it would have been, with plants appearing long before fish and birds, and animals and man showing up most recently. If there's anything they seemed to have understood, it would be the effect of introducing undesirable traits into a line of stock.
It wasn't exactly the physics I noticed, but the abrupt handling. I really expected a higher level of realism, not just to the graphics but to the vehicles. The truck stopped, started, and reversed much quicker than a driver would maneuver an actual vehicle. And that high 3rd person camera might be best for playing, but I'd rather it had been mounted lower as if on the vehicle, or were less precise as if being filmed from the air. Old game conventions stand out more as realism increases.
"Inventor Lee DeForest, known as one of the 'fathers of the electronic age,' declared TV a commercial and financial impossibility, a sentiment that was shared by 20th Century Fox exec Darryl Zanuck"
Is that an actual opinion or spin?
I could never tell the difference between my computer's CLI and a text adventure anyway. Maybe I don't want a useful, productive OS... why not make a game of keeping it working? Think of the downloadable content you could offer!
Then it would just be Facebook. I would do the precise opposite, but then I quite enjoyed having Myspace friends like Zombie Lincoln, CARtoons magazine, the color blue etc.
I never understood why Myspace wants to be Facebook so badly. I'd always viewed Facebook as a social networking tool to stay in touch with friends, family, and associates. Myspace always seemed like more of a shrine to my personal interests, such as bands, books, movies etc. If it were mine, I'd take a cue from second life and allow users to make actual "myspaces", or 3D rooms we could decorate with clickable posters and pictures of our interests. The backgrounds would then become wallpaper and the music player could be a user-chosen device like a jukebox or iPod. It's a shame to see it failing so fast, in some ways I enjoyed using Myspace more 3 years ago than I do using Facebook now.
"You've built a device with about a 5-degree usable viewing angle, and you've put motion control in the blasted thing. I know Nintendo has a long history of throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and quickly abandoning whatever doesn't stick, but really?"
It can't be any worse than those driving games for the iPod/iPhone that use tilt to steer and force you to crane your neck 45 degrees to negotiate a turn. (I have no idea why the developers don't counter-rotate the screen to keep it level.) It would seem to me that a truly engaged player would be moving with the unit and should be able to maintain the 3d effect.
I always thought of Gamestop as that company that screwed the industry by undercutting new game sales with used game sales, while simultaneously screwing the consumer by selling used games at too high a price yet giving their customers shite deals on trade-ins. Never thought they were good for the industry any more that your shady local/regional vending machine company that forces all their competition out of some given area but only owns no more than a handful of decrepit arcade machines rotating among every small business in their area. ("Hey Shady's replaced sped-up Ms. Pac-Man with Time Killers! Awesome!")
So it would be cool IMHO to see them take a real stake in things. Please, Gamestop, make your own gaming tablet. (WTF do you know about that anyway?)
My advice? Take a pinch of N-gage, a dash of 3DO and burn a black turtleneck.
"Personally, I think the real problem is that there are people who feel a moral obligation to "cure" people of being gay."
It seems to me the target audience would be an individual who, for whatever reason, wishes they themselves were not gay. "Cure" is obviously the word here causing the problem. Let's say it that someone did make an app that could reliably change the orientation of a person. Maybe it makes you gay, but that's beside the point. Who are a bunch of petitioners to tell someone that they must remain the way they are, and never ever think about changing? Is it because the app does not or can not work, or because if it does work it could weaken their political agenda and reduce their numbers. I've heard many gay people say they would never choose to be gay, but what if they could choose not to be? Should that not be a right?
Religion is simply an expression of belief. I can believe Jesus was born of a divinely impregnated virgin and still stay home to watch football. I could also go to church every Sunday of my life and never develop a sense of conviction or reverence for the tenets of Christian faith. You choose how observant to be based on things ranging from whether you like associating with groups to whether you think ritual serves a purpose. But your beliefs, those things that seem plausible and important to you, are largely a product of your worldview, education, intellectual capacity and overall disposition.
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Good that we value the second more than the first, or we'd have been a short lived species.
I thought it was just the nature of people who have an aptitude for tech that we tend to make informed purchases, based on a thorough examination of our needs. Many of us don't value marketing because we've convinced ourselves that we don't respond to/fall for it. When I see ads for "Windows 7 computers" I smirk knowing Windows 8 will totally obsolete it; that Microsoft have already moved on to the next product and anyone trying to sell me Windows 7 is being disingenuous. At the same time, I am a Windows 7 user who needed a 64-bit OS's ability to use larger amounts of memory during 3D rendering, so marketing played little role in my purchase. (If I worked at the company whether I held a low opinion of marketing or hailed this as heroes would always depend on my feeling about the product.) I just assumed most geeks were meritocratic and so would often see marketing as a consumer of a disproportionately large amount of company funds. I wasn't going to bring up Asperger or autism, but I can see how some people could completely miss the point of an ad that was all flash or pathos while responding well to those speaking in percent improvements in performance, specific improvements in design, or advantages over competing products.
A truly advanced civilization would have discovered free energy, eliminated scarcity and would need no money. Have you ever seen Star Trek?
Imagine the outcry if they had decided to replace the Green Goblin with a character who is a half-black, half-Latino teen, and whose creators haven't ruled out that he might be gay. Whenever the hero is changed it's lauded as a reflection of our diversity, if it were the villain being changed it would be called a throwback to old negative attitudes.
The reasoning, even if flawed, is pretty simple. Most people go through life without ever committing a murder. Most people also eventually have sex at some point. Violence in games and films can be cathartic, and it's not been proven to cause a person to become a violent. Even when violent acts are linked to games, it has not been proven that the players did not already have violent tendencies. On the other hand, we expect our children will have sex. We just don't want them to be doing it at irresponsibly or illegally young ages. The more obscene the violence depicted, the more of a disconnect there is between it and reality for most people. I have killed countless people in Mortal Kombat, but have never wanted to kill an actual person. Seeing an attractive naked woman, in any media, is almost always going to remind me that I would indeed like to be having sex.
Yet it is no less true that someone reading that statement may indeed hold that opinion. I've always found it very interesting... How else might we ever develop human/animal translators?
Interactive movies are actually what I want. I don't play games for the challenge, I play them for the escape. I don't enjoy open ended multi-player games because I am simply not that competitive. Resident Evil 4, for me, was a high point in game design because I could not wait to see what kind of strange place I might end up in or what abomination I would face next. I liked my character, and I thought the NPCs were well done also (and I feel similarly about Just Cause 2 which I am still playing). I just want to explore while advancing a story to completion at my own pace.
Why is resolution still the measure of realism? I remember the FUD during the transition from 16 to 32 bit consoles that would have had people believe graphic quality was limited by the NTSC television standard. Isn't it apparent that any old live action television show still looks far more realistic than any modern game? Compare "L.A. Noire" in HD to an episode of, say, the "Rockford Files" running in 320x240 and tell me the latter isn't far more realistic. Clarity does not equal quality.
The terms graphics race seems to be used around here to refer to little more than number of pixels pushed and the complexity of the lighting model used. There are countless ways that graphics could be improved that have nothing to do with either. I think physics, when it's not part of the game mechanic, is largely graphical. I am looking forward to a generation of consoles that can render hair that doesn't clip into a figure's body, clothing that actually covers a figure rather than being modeled onto it, body masses that jiggle subtly and believably, object damage that isn't canned, buildings with visible interiors... None of those things require more pixels or a radically different shading pipeline.
Oh, I know! The worst is when they scream "get it out!" when you snag one with the grappling hook. I have to tell myself that they are the same bastards holding citizens at gunpoint at traffic stops...
Maybe more realism would snap us out of feeling the need to engage in such violent activities in depressing locales. I still play Just Cause 2 frequently, because I think they did an excellent job of making Panau a beautiful place to escape to. I would like to see rain that formed reflecting puddles, snow that accumulates, just generally more realism in all of the parts of the game I find pleasant. I would not particularly care to see more gruesome deaths or depictions of the dead.
Because, as a Catholic, he would be under papal authority and would likely consider the Pope infallible. Having a president that took directions from Rome was a legitimate concern yet was a non-issue with previous Protestant presidents who merely had preachers advising or counseling them.
I just had the never-ending evolution/creation debate with a fundamentalist friend. It is amazing how much sense the Bible makes if you throw out what you think you know, as I found when I chose to refute his points using scripture. Noah was "perfect in his generations"... God would "multiply (one's) seed... Jesus wilted the tree that bore no fruit... If you can look past the usage of the term "days" in Genesis, it clearly states life was "created" in the order science says it would have been, with plants appearing long before fish and birds, and animals and man showing up most recently. If there's anything they seemed to have understood, it would be the effect of introducing undesirable traits into a line of stock.
It wasn't exactly the physics I noticed, but the abrupt handling. I really expected a higher level of realism, not just to the graphics but to the vehicles. The truck stopped, started, and reversed much quicker than a driver would maneuver an actual vehicle. And that high 3rd person camera might be best for playing, but I'd rather it had been mounted lower as if on the vehicle, or were less precise as if being filmed from the air. Old game conventions stand out more as realism increases.
"Inventor Lee DeForest, known as one of the 'fathers of the electronic age,' declared TV a commercial and financial impossibility, a sentiment that was shared by 20th Century Fox exec Darryl Zanuck" Is that an actual opinion or spin?
I could never tell the difference between my computer's CLI and a text adventure anyway. Maybe I don't want a useful, productive OS... why not make a game of keeping it working? Think of the downloadable content you could offer!
Then it would just be Facebook. I would do the precise opposite, but then I quite enjoyed having Myspace friends like Zombie Lincoln, CARtoons magazine, the color blue etc.
I never understood why Myspace wants to be Facebook so badly. I'd always viewed Facebook as a social networking tool to stay in touch with friends, family, and associates. Myspace always seemed like more of a shrine to my personal interests, such as bands, books, movies etc. If it were mine, I'd take a cue from second life and allow users to make actual "myspaces", or 3D rooms we could decorate with clickable posters and pictures of our interests. The backgrounds would then become wallpaper and the music player could be a user-chosen device like a jukebox or iPod. It's a shame to see it failing so fast, in some ways I enjoyed using Myspace more 3 years ago than I do using Facebook now.
"You've built a device with about a 5-degree usable viewing angle, and you've put motion control in the blasted thing. I know Nintendo has a long history of throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and quickly abandoning whatever doesn't stick, but really?" It can't be any worse than those driving games for the iPod/iPhone that use tilt to steer and force you to crane your neck 45 degrees to negotiate a turn. (I have no idea why the developers don't counter-rotate the screen to keep it level.) It would seem to me that a truly engaged player would be moving with the unit and should be able to maintain the 3d effect.
It's not converting the country that's the problem, it's simultaneously converting all 50 states.
Could be anything from "Prezz-e-dent" to "Prehs-uh-duhnt". There are a lot of rednecks in this country, and we don't all talk the same.
Which continuity has this happening?
I always thought of Gamestop as that company that screwed the industry by undercutting new game sales with used game sales, while simultaneously screwing the consumer by selling used games at too high a price yet giving their customers shite deals on trade-ins. Never thought they were good for the industry any more that your shady local/regional vending machine company that forces all their competition out of some given area but only owns no more than a handful of decrepit arcade machines rotating among every small business in their area. ("Hey Shady's replaced sped-up Ms. Pac-Man with Time Killers! Awesome!") So it would be cool IMHO to see them take a real stake in things. Please, Gamestop, make your own gaming tablet. (WTF do you know about that anyway?) My advice? Take a pinch of N-gage, a dash of 3DO and burn a black turtleneck.
"Personally, I think the real problem is that there are people who feel a moral obligation to "cure" people of being gay." It seems to me the target audience would be an individual who, for whatever reason, wishes they themselves were not gay. "Cure" is obviously the word here causing the problem. Let's say it that someone did make an app that could reliably change the orientation of a person. Maybe it makes you gay, but that's beside the point. Who are a bunch of petitioners to tell someone that they must remain the way they are, and never ever think about changing? Is it because the app does not or can not work, or because if it does work it could weaken their political agenda and reduce their numbers. I've heard many gay people say they would never choose to be gay, but what if they could choose not to be? Should that not be a right?
Religion is simply an expression of belief. I can believe Jesus was born of a divinely impregnated virgin and still stay home to watch football. I could also go to church every Sunday of my life and never develop a sense of conviction or reverence for the tenets of Christian faith. You choose how observant to be based on things ranging from whether you like associating with groups to whether you think ritual serves a purpose. But your beliefs, those things that seem plausible and important to you, are largely a product of your worldview, education, intellectual capacity and overall disposition.