Tell the truth, I was actually aiming for "funny", not "insightful". If you believe some various writers on the subject, there's perhaps a dozen dramatic devices total, but if you make your brush broad enough, you could probably boil it down to even less as long as you're willing to skip over the details. But yeah, some games, especially MMOG's are grinds exactly like killing the same cyclops over and over. Thing is, unlike single player CRPG's, choosing to kill the same boss over and over is the player's choice. Good stories, like all good things, have an ending.
But it wouldn't be complete without the elves leaving across the sea, and the hobbits returning to the Shire, and so on.
Denouement is important to any dramatic climax -- but in a game, it should be a cutscene. And at the risk of offending those who venerate a certain author beyond any idea of fault, I felt that the Scouring of the Shire was a clumsy ill-fitting appendix that never should have survived the editor's pen.
Despite Jak II and III having a "sandbox" feel to them, they're still largely action games. BG&E got its rhythm in a more narrative way as well as alternating the types of missions -- fighting, sneaking, racing. I'm not saying all games have the same rhythm, but games based on progression of your main character's abilities certainly do.
That said, I'd love to see more games made like BG&E, even if they don't all sport anthropomorphic barnyard animals. Leveling is a really worn-out device, as you illustrated with your examples (though Square-Enix does do a pretty good job at coming up with new and weird ways to level)
A lot of that list can be summed up as "rhythm", it's a progression you can chart as a line, where a higher line means a greater challenge.
* As your character progresses in abilities, enemies rise to match, and typically outpace you. This is however a "hilly" graph, because your abilities should at least for a time overpower the weaker opponents that were giving you trouble.
* Occasionally throw some of the older opponents from long previous at you so you can mow them down with laughable ease
* Occasionally create a big dip in your strength by taking away all your toys and powers temporarily.
* End with a sharp crescendo of a challenge.
This sort of upward spiraling tension/resolution should be familiar to any dramatic writer, because it's basically the same thing. A good game is not fundamentally different of a writing challenge than good literature.
> Spielberg's banged-up, worn out world breathed life into an otherwise unbelivable story.
Spielberg had virtually nothing to do with Star Wars, other than picking Jon Williams for the score. Lucas does some pretty good work with sets. He should have been a set designer. God only knows why people think he can direct.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (and its sequels) was their big collaboration.
> they have a hard time grasping the *meaning* of multiplication
I had to memorize the "times tables" in grade school. I came away from my education grasping about as much meaning as the kid with a calculator. All the finger-wagging old farts have been fucking up math education for more than a hundred years, so I can hardly see how technology could do more damage.
> If TiVo wants to use new versions of the GNU userland after the move to GPLv3, TiVo is going to need to quit with the lockout chip business model.
So is gcc now going to apply the GPLv3 to its output?
Whether you like GPLv3 or not, Linux isn't changing its license. TiVo has nothing to be concerned about except that maybe they'll be locked out of the HURD.
Welcome to coffee talk, I'll give you a topic: The traveling salesman problem is neither about traveling, nor salesmen. Discuss.
It's about optimal coverage of a weighted graph. In fact "optimal coverage/filling/allocation" problems all tend to be the same NP-complete problem -- that's why a solution for one works for all of them.
Optimum register allocation, for example, is NP-complete.
There are a few other movie studios too. Even if I conservatively and arbitrarily looked at only half the revenue being from movies, I still don't see anything that comes close to substantiating the claim about the game industry.
> You mean the industry that rakes in more than the movie and music industries... COMBINED?
I keep seeing this figure tossed about, but I simply do not believe it. Just to compare, Disney's Net income for 2006 was bigger than EA's entire gross revenues.
It's not a breakthrough, it's simply a vertical database design, and it will accellerate SOME kinds of queries, and not do so well on others. It's great for the kind of data mining where you're going to vertically slice the data anyway, not so good for OLAP and decision support where you usually want the whole record at once. You replicate to one of these databases, you don't usually primarily enter data into it -- with trading data being one notable exception. Financial apps love using kx, which is blindingly fast and has a programming languages drawing from APL, including its awesome terseness. I'm told that kx doesn't do so hot once you need to hit the disk though.
Oracle is able to do this with vertical partitions too, though partitions are a rather large-grained thing, so I imagine there are some limits to doing it that way.
I think I've karma-whored enough for one post:p
Re:did yall check the whois for groklaw?
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1
> Expect some real fireworks soon when shareholders discover liquidity necessary to exit is gone and a "bank run" occurs.
It also has a mind-boggling 34% short ratio, and they haven't been able to run up a short squeeze yet because everyone going short believes the worst is yet to come. That's right, over a third of the stock is held by people with an interest in SCOX's failure.
You want to run an application, is that okay? You want to copy a file, is that okay? You want to change your desktop background, is that okay? You want to copy text from IE7, is that okay? You want to turn your machine into a child porn and warez server, is that okay? You want to delete an old text file, is that okay? You want to paste text into a form field in IE7, is that okay?
One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song?
Hell, I more than doubled my performance on my filesystem-heavy loads going from RHEL4 to RHEL3. The syscall overhead went through the roof in EL4, even with SELinux off. I got tired of trying to compile a kernel (hey vendors, would it kill you to ship a config that doesn't panic when I compile using it without changing anything?) so I just retrograded. The next move will most likely be lateral, to another vendor.
I think that basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp."
Yeah, because they have ASP.NET, which pretty much blows the doors off of most other things productivity-wise.
Oh yeah and Sun pushes this little thing called Java. It's also pretty productive once you use a proper framework like Spring or Seam. There's a few Ruby developers who also aren't part of this "in crowd" I guess. In fact, the "AMP Camp" is starting to look pretty darned old and tired. But keep shaking those pom-poms.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell the truth, I was actually aiming for "funny", not "insightful". If you believe some various writers on the subject, there's perhaps a dozen dramatic devices total, but if you make your brush broad enough, you could probably boil it down to even less as long as you're willing to skip over the details. But yeah, some games, especially MMOG's are grinds exactly like killing the same cyclops over and over. Thing is, unlike single player CRPG's, choosing to kill the same boss over and over is the player's choice. Good stories, like all good things, have an ending.
But it wouldn't be complete without the elves leaving across the sea, and the hobbits returning to the Shire, and so on.
Denouement is important to any dramatic climax -- but in a game, it should be a cutscene. And at the risk of offending those who venerate a certain author beyond any idea of fault, I felt that the Scouring of the Shire was a clumsy ill-fitting appendix that never should have survived the editor's pen.
Despite Jak II and III having a "sandbox" feel to them, they're still largely action games. BG&E got its rhythm in a more narrative way as well as alternating the types of missions -- fighting, sneaking, racing. I'm not saying all games have the same rhythm, but games based on progression of your main character's abilities certainly do.
That said, I'd love to see more games made like BG&E, even if they don't all sport anthropomorphic barnyard animals. Leveling is a really worn-out device, as you illustrated with your examples (though Square-Enix does do a pretty good job at coming up with new and weird ways to level)
A lot of that list can be summed up as "rhythm", it's a progression you can chart as a line, where a higher line means a greater challenge.
* As your character progresses in abilities, enemies rise to match, and typically outpace you. This is however a "hilly" graph, because your abilities should at least for a time overpower the weaker opponents that were giving you trouble.
* Occasionally throw some of the older opponents from long previous at you so you can mow them down with laughable ease
* Occasionally create a big dip in your strength by taking away all your toys and powers temporarily.
* End with a sharp crescendo of a challenge.
This sort of upward spiraling tension/resolution should be familiar to any dramatic writer, because it's basically the same thing. A good game is not fundamentally different of a writing challenge than good literature.
Just one head? Not a quick way to level. How about this one?
It's obvious: IBM is a front for Pamela Jones!
> Spielberg's banged-up, worn out world breathed life into an otherwise unbelivable story.
Spielberg had virtually nothing to do with Star Wars, other than picking Jon Williams for the score. Lucas does some pretty good work with sets. He should have been a set designer. God only knows why people think he can direct.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (and its sequels) was their big collaboration.
> it seems like so many quests in games, especially MMORPGs, are just "go here, kill this, pick up item, return".
Beowulf: Kill the end-boss.
The Iliad: Fetch Helen. Kill lots of Trojans first. Lots of long speech cutscenes.
The Labors of Hercules: Lots and lots of fetch quests.
The Ring Cycle: Fedex quest, total Lotr ripoff.
> they have a hard time grasping the *meaning* of multiplication
I had to memorize the "times tables" in grade school. I came away from my education grasping about as much meaning as the kid with a calculator. All the finger-wagging old farts have been fucking up math education for more than a hundred years, so I can hardly see how technology could do more damage.
> TiVo almost certainly uses more GPL software than just a kernel, you know!
It hardly seems like the sort of thing they're going to have to keep extremely current, and I hardly imagine they're losing a wink of sleep over it.
> Are you sure TiVo has never made patches to the kernel that got accepted?
They've made modifications anyway. Get them here.
> If TiVo wants to use new versions of the GNU userland after the move to GPLv3, TiVo is going to need to quit with the lockout chip business model.
So is gcc now going to apply the GPLv3 to its output?
Whether you like GPLv3 or not, Linux isn't changing its license. TiVo has nothing to be concerned about except that maybe they'll be locked out of the HURD.
> he acknowledged there is some uncertainty
Well duh, it is a quantum computer after all.
(drum fill)
Welcome to coffee talk, I'll give you a topic: The traveling salesman problem is neither about traveling, nor salesmen. Discuss.
It's about optimal coverage of a weighted graph. In fact "optimal coverage/filling/allocation" problems all tend to be the same NP-complete problem -- that's why a solution for one works for all of them.
Optimum register allocation, for example, is NP-complete.
There are a few other movie studios too. Even if I conservatively and arbitrarily looked at only half the revenue being from movies, I still don't see anything that comes close to substantiating the claim about the game industry.
> You mean the industry that rakes in more than the movie and music industries ... COMBINED?
I keep seeing this figure tossed about, but I simply do not believe it. Just to compare, Disney's Net income for 2006 was bigger than EA's entire gross revenues.
Yikes, I actually meant to say OLTP, since I contrasted it with data warehousing. I just choked on my alphabet soup a little. Thanks :)
It's not a breakthrough, it's simply a vertical database design, and it will accellerate SOME kinds of queries, and not do so well on others. It's great for the kind of data mining where you're going to vertically slice the data anyway, not so good for OLAP and decision support where you usually want the whole record at once. You replicate to one of these databases, you don't usually primarily enter data into it -- with trading data being one notable exception. Financial apps love using kx, which is blindingly fast and has a programming languages drawing from APL, including its awesome terseness. I'm told that kx doesn't do so hot once you need to hit the disk though.
:p
Oracle is able to do this with vertical partitions too, though partitions are a rather large-grained thing, so I imagine there are some limits to doing it that way.
I think I've karma-whored enough for one post
Especially if he shows up in a red dress.
> Expect some real fireworks soon when shareholders discover liquidity necessary to exit is gone and a "bank run" occurs.
It also has a mind-boggling 34% short ratio, and they haven't been able to run up a short squeeze yet because everyone going short believes the worst is yet to come. That's right, over a third of the stock is held by people with an interest in SCOX's failure.
I like Bruce Schneier's aphorism: trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.
The sad realization for me is that Apple's quicktime player for the PC is still a broken piece of nagware crap that can't play that movie.
You want to run an application, is that okay? You want to copy a file, is that okay? You want to change your desktop background, is that okay? You want to copy text from IE7, is that okay? You want to turn your machine into a child porn and warez server, is that okay? You want to delete an old text file, is that okay? You want to paste text into a form field in IE7, is that okay?
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
Hell, I more than doubled my performance on my filesystem-heavy loads going from RHEL4 to RHEL3. The syscall overhead went through the roof in EL4, even with SELinux off. I got tired of trying to compile a kernel (hey vendors, would it kill you to ship a config that doesn't panic when I compile using it without changing anything?) so I just retrograded. The next move will most likely be lateral, to another vendor.
I think that basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp."
Yeah, because they have ASP.NET, which pretty much blows the doors off of most other things productivity-wise.
Oh yeah and Sun pushes this little thing called Java. It's also pretty productive once you use a proper framework like Spring or Seam. There's a few Ruby developers who also aren't part of this "in crowd" I guess. In fact, the "AMP Camp" is starting to look pretty darned old and tired. But keep shaking those pom-poms.
Actually that's @{&$shudder->()} to you fella ;)