I'm kinda mixed about this. I can see the point -- that we could end up saying that certain other segments of society are of more use as body parts, thus we can kill the elderly or the retarded or comatose. Think of all the organ "donations" (for example) that we could get by merely taking the demented 95 year olds out of nursing homes. And frankly, from a purely scientific standpoint, there's no reason that we couldn't get useable organs that way. But when it comes to morals, it's a horrible thing to do. Something that should be inconceivable, even though it would work.
On the other hand, this technology could save thousands of lives. We could regrow body parts, replace dead brain cells and so on. The blind could see, the deaf could hear, the lame could walk. We could extend lifespans past 100 to maybe 120. who knows.
I wish there was a way to get stem cells without killing embryos. I don't know that adult cells can do the same or not.
Well, because of the greifers in an MMO, I CAN'T play the game for very long. I get to an area to try to play the game -- level up my character, get some money to upgrade armour, etc. The problem is that in some of these games it hard to do. I get killed by griefers, or in some MMOs, a bunch of high-level players sit around the spawn point of a creature that drops something valuable (so no one else gets a chance to fight it).
It makes the game a lot less fun for those of us who don't necessarily WNAT to fight other players. I don't like having to reload my game evey 10 minutes + have a nice exp loss (and possibly losing a sword or armour that took you three or four MONTHS to get). I get that griefers aren't necessarily breaking the rules, but when it gets to the point of making the game practically unplayable for the people getting greifed, stolen from, etc., it's a problem. Especially when I'm paying to play the game, because I can't get my money's worth from a game that I'm getting greifed on constantly.
Halo or counterstrike are different matters entirely. Those games are BASED ON killing other players. That's why people play Halo online. You aren't playing to build up a character, or to explore a permanent world. You're playing to compete with other players. That's what Halo IS. That's not what Everquest, WoW, or other MMORPGs are.
Well, yeah, but it can get to the point where you can't play for the constant griefing. I used to play MMOs, and one thing that did bug me was greifers who'd kill me 8-10 times in an hour. Now, I useually play freeware games, so I'm just losing time, but if I was paying a monthly fee, I AM losing money, because I can't enjoy the game I'm paying for. That's why people get pissed over griefers and theifs. They can't enjoy the game, and they're losing the money they're paying for it.
It could work, but you'd want a single standard over 4-5 years. One of the things that makes console gaming so attractive is that any game you pick up for the console is pretty well gaurenteed to work (barring disk scratches or damage).
Add to that the idea of a console being fairly easy to use. Up until XBOX you never needed to install anything. That simplicity makes it attractive to noncomputer-nerds. The more plug-n-play the system is, the better.
But another thing is that the resulting console (and probably the dev kids) ought to be cheap enough to be reasonably purchased as a kid's console. The games themselves should probably be reasonably close to "kid's allowance" in price range. That way, buying a game can be a sort of "impulse buy" like a magazine or a dvd. Unless a consumer can buy a game the same way they buy a magazine, I don't see them wanting to risk buying a game that they aren't sure they'll like.
For the love of god and the devil, they aren't going to put *industrial* robots in nursing homes, your house, hotels or anything else. At the most, they'll be the Assimo type robots, but more likely a roomba, or maybe a roomba lawnmower. We aren't going to have a huge mechanical arm putting granny in a grinder. Maybe the evil robot will hit her ankles while vaccuuming the floor, but nothing fatal.
Maybe in 100 years or so we really will have robots with positronic brains running around with the strength to kill or severely injure a human. We need to think about it, and maybe have some hard-wired rules (in the chips themselves preferably), but even so, it's probably a problem we have a good long time to think about the "rules".
What happened is that a worker ignored the safety rules -- pretty willfully. He was stupid to ignore the safety regs, but that doesn't mean that we need to worry about robots on a rampage. Its sensationalistic journalism.
I think the solution would be to get a fourth console, a cheap open source console that anyone could program a game for and distribute. No pre-approval, no $2000 dev kits. I think Linux and Ruby or Python might do the job.
If a console like that existed and was cheap enough, it might encourage the experimentation that Carpenter wants. The problem right now is that there are so many gatekeepers (Console Approval, Game Company itself, retailers, etc) that if a new concept comes out, chances are pretty good that it will get crushed long before it ever gets mentioned publicly (including GDC). What you need is a stable homebrew that doesn't have all the gatekeeping and hoopjumping before you get approved. Game Companies right now don't have the dough to withstand a flop, so risky games are axed before they get to development.
I think this is the meat of the problem -- it costs too dang much to make a game, and too much to buy a game.
When you spend $50 million to make a game, exactly how much can you innovate? If the game flops, you're out almost all that money. That could easily bankrupt even a fairly large company. So they don't take risks making something that isn't a pretty sure thing. So they make a new sequel of last years big game, or if they didn't make last year's big game, they make a knock off with just enough changes to avoid a lawsuit. It's possible to make a new game type -- If you work for a company that is already a big dog (Katamari Damancy i.e. is released by Namco, the same Namco pretty well known for sequelizing any game until players want to scream -- see Megaman). Other than that, you can't really release a new groundbreaking title unless you're willing to lose your company and your shirt.
On the player side, the high price actually encourages genre loyalty. I might give an interesting movie a go if it gets good reviews, or if it looks interesting. The same with a book -- I might see one and think the premise sounds interesting and buy it. But the difference is that a paperback is $10, and a movie ticket (per person) is $10 as well. A new game will cost 5 times that -- $50. $50 for most people isn't an impulse purchase. Most people don't buy a new game unless they're pretty sure that they'll like it.
So it's a double bind. Companies can't afford a flop, so they make a bunch of knock-offs and sequels. The games cost a lot, so players either buy used or buy a sequel of a game that they already played. That's probably why there are so many movie games -- people buy 'em because they recognize the movie, so it's less risky than making a new title.
It seems to me that the only way to get more original titles is to make it cheaper to make a game. That way it isn't company-threatening to risk on a new type of game. Plus, if the company charges less -- $15 instead of $50, people would be more inclined to try a new franchise, or a new genre, or just a new game that sounds interesting.
I think space is possible. I think we can have the mars colony AND the moon colony. But not if we take the attitude of "I don't see it happening". Ask someone in 1491 if he thought that the New World was really an achieveable goal. It worked fine. And really it wasn't the end of conflicts, it was the start of new conflicts.
Ok, with inflation I can see the point. But the on topic point was that games just aren't mainstream. The Greatest Hits (PS2) or Platnum (XBOX) are supposed to be best sellers. But in order to make greatest hits, you don't have to sell all that many games
http://ps2.gamezone.com/news/02_28_02_07_00PM.htmTHQ's RED FACTION TO BE RE-LAUNCHED UNDER PLAYSTATION 2 "GREATEST HITS" COLLECTION
Critically Acclaimed Action Game to be Available April 1 for $24.99; Highly Anticipated Sequel Red Faction 2, Scheduled to Ship Winter 2002
CALABASAS HILLS, Calif. - February 28, 2002 - THQ Inc. (NASDAQ NMS: THQI) today announced its critically acclaimed Red Faction(TM) for the PlayStation® 2 computer entertainment system will be re-launched this spring as part of Sony Computer Entertainment America's "Greatest Hits" collection. Beginning April 1, Red Faction will be available for the manufacturers suggested retail price of $24.99 at retail outlets nationwide.
Red Faction is one of the first third-party titles to be included in the PlayStation 2 "Greatest Hits" collection. Each game considered for the collection must have been available at retail for more than nine months and boast sales in excess of 400,000 units. Red Faction will also be re-released across Europe as one of only five third-party games in Sony's PS2® 'Platinum' collection.
400,000/9 months = 44,444 games a month. at $50 (new release, pre-GH) it has to make somewhere in the range of $2 million. Or $20 million over 9 months. Go back to the movies list -- for movies $20 million in sales isn't an achievement -- it's a flop. Even Jumanji managed $100 million just at the box office. And movies aren't at the box office for very long -- maybe a month or two.
Now even if the sales of GH games are somewhat hampered by being PS2 exclusive, they are still FAR FAR below even fairly mediocre movies. Not to say that they have no influence at all, just that the reason "mainstream media" doesn't cover games is the same reason it doesn't cover indie films, sci-fi, documentaries or Anime -- they have a small audience. Until there's a large mainstream audience for video games -- until as many people know Amano as know Peter Jackson, or know Katamari from Calamari, I don't expect to read much about games in the press.
But for most applications, stardard web pages are just fine. You don't need 3D to read the newspaper, or an article on the internet. Being able to surf the news on the Iraq war in 3D doesn't ADD to the experience, and might detract. It's harder to read that way, for one thing, and for another it's hard to navigate.
With the standard interface, I can read the article and click on names or whatever when I need more explanation. I just don't see 3D as an improvement over 2D for things that can be done in text. If the current technology works for most applications, I don't see much use for change. Going from a book (old tech, all 2D) to a 3D format would make the book unuseable. It would take 3x as long to use audio technology to listen to the book to find that one fact/passage again. And with video, unless the DVD has chapters, you have to wait again while the movie plays on to the section you want -- plus the scenery shots. Those kinds of things make no sense in the context of a nonfiction book read for information. It would simply be too inconvienient even with a DVD skip feature to skip directly to that equation of concept that you need. It's far easier to simply remember that the Schodinger's Cat paradox is on pg. 215 and open the book to that page than to watch a movie and try to skip to the right section.
There are some things that movies do better than books. A movie can give you a picture of what an object looks like. It can show you what a certain bird looks like, how it moves, what it does. You can't do that with a book. You can show the entire street of a city as people walk up and down that street. That's what we use nonfiction movies for. We don't use it as general reference because it wouldn't work very well. We don't use it for more than gerneral introductions to new products because it's not suited to that. We don't use it for math and physics equations because it doesn't work well.
I think that many game designers are ignoring the one point that makes VG better than TV. CHOICE. TV never gets you thinking about other possibilities. OTOH, a game is based around that possibility.
But that means you can't follow the same old plots. Future games have to give both a choice and a consequence. And you have to see the consequence. I think it would be great to have the posibility of making a wrong move and thus killing off an entire city. Or maybe take a separate path that makes you hated and feared, yet helps people. Things like that. Or in the traditional Jrpg, raiding a chest may give you a kewl sword, yet it might close off entire areas, because they think you're a theif.
Gaming isn't really mainstream like movies/TV are. Everyone knows the most popular TV show, the basic plot of said TV show, probably one or two actors on the TV show etc. That isn't true of gaming -- at least not yet. Try it yourself. Go to a mall in the county and stand outside a Sears or Dillard's and ask them who Peter Maleneux or Sakaguichi or Kojima are. As long as you don't cheat and stand outside EB Games or Radio Shack, I'll bet that the number of people who know even what industry those folks are in would be maybe 15-20%. Ask them about Peter Jackson, George Lucas, Angelina Jolie, and Kiefer Sutherland -- you're probably in the 75% range of people who know who they are and what they do. Probably even for actors without much face-time or name recognition would be more likely to be recognized than game designers.
It's just not mainstream. Outside of the hard-core, Johnny Exreme balls-to-the wall type gamers, it just doesn't get name recognition. Besides that, you have a small percentage of the total population buying most of the games. Sci-fi is in the same boat IMO. They have a rabid fanbase loyal to one series or another, having Inet debates about whether Darth Vader could pwn Captain Kirk. The problem is that the same people are buying all the Sci-fi. The same people who watch Star Trek went and camped out in line for "Revenge of the Sith", and are likely the same ones that are actively campaigning for the return of Firefly. If you look at the numbers for any one show, it's pretty small.
If you look at the numbers, Passion of the Christ beats Empire Strikes Back, but if you looked around slashdot, more people were excited for Empire than Passion. I know that more people here saw The Voyage Home (ST4) than little mermaid.
Same with games -- a small portion of the population are the ones argueing about Wii,PS3, and Xbox (and will likely end up with all three). My guess is that less than 20% of the population of the US owns more than 10 games total. They may be vocal, but the number is tiny compared to 100% of the population that owns a TV, and 95% that sees a movie either in theaters or on DVD.
For things like sales, you want an employee that's somewhat like the people you're selling to. You don't want a frat-party-going, heavy-drinking, womanizer doing corprate sales. If that personality comes out (and eventually it will), the company could lose sales, and possibly get a bad rep in the industry, or even bad press if your womanizing/drinking makes the local paper. That will ultimately hurt the company -- most of the time corprate culture is pretty conservative (somewhat in the political sense, but mostly in the social sense), and they want college grads who can fit in.
It also matters in highly professional positions. What would you think of a lawyer or doctor who spends his free time drinking? What if the lawyer about to defend you admits to spending most of his free time playing HALO online? Can you honestly tell me that you'd feel great about your chances if the guy came in to the first day of trial bragging to you about how he fragged an 8-year-old last night? For most people, they'd look elsewhere for a doctor or lawyer.
Maybe for a few positions excentric behavior is valued -- advertising, movies, tv, music, video games, possibly some high tech research -- but for most jobs you'll get, excentricity is a liability both to you professionaly AND to the employer. They need someone who fits into corprate culture and can act proffesional.
Reading myspace or facebooks and blogs may be going a bit far. I think you should have someplace to vent, without fear of it hurting you proffessionaly. Maybe just a journal (offline), or a blog that's in no way connected to your real name.
Well, there are some things that make sense to be presented in 3D. Say I.e building a 3d model of a biological system. Fly through the body via 3D rendered graphics, observing the structures (possibly moving as though they're working) find some body part, click on it, and see information about it. then pull back and continue to travel through the body.
Or do the same with a mechanical device.
Point being that in some cases you would want to see both how one part fits into another, AND be able to pull up information on how each part works. 3D would be great for that type of application. It may not make sense when talking about standard webpages -- but for some things it would be a vast improvement.
I think FF7 is overrated. It's not bad, but it isn't a great game. It's pretty mediocre IMO.
First, Materia is seriously flawed. It made every character identical except for "limit breaks". If you couldn't play with Cloud for a time, no problem. Just put all Cloud's materia on Tifa, and other than the limit break, you'll never notice the difference. At least link the character's ability to use a spell that they never used before to a stat, or maybe to how often they use materia period.
The storyline is uneven. up until you leave Midgar, yeah, it's a pretty good story. But after that, it goes downhill like an out-of-control bobsled. For the next 4-5 hours, all you do is chase Sephoroth. Chase Sephiroth to the coast of Junon. Chase him across the ocean. Chase him to the Temple. Chase him, chase him, chase him. Other than Aeris dying, the next big event is the Huge Materia Quest, and the Weapon attacks. Aeris' death might be surprising, but it wasn't all that well done. I never really cared about her. There didn't seem to be much personality to Aeris at all. Barret dying would have made more impact, or maybe Tifa.
I actually like Suikoden III and V better than FF7.
I'm glad they're going with ATB. The gambit thing is just retarded. Imagine battles soooo lame that even the designer doesn't want you to have to play them. That's my take of gambits. It's like having a platform game with jumps that the game designer hates and thinks are waay too boring. So the cheap and easy solution is to give the player the ability to program the computer to *jump for them*.
No, it's retarded. People pick RPGs for the strategic combat and the story -- or at least that's why I do. So if your combat is so dumbed down that it seems like auto-battle (esp. as the default option) is a good idea -- fix the friggin' combat. Make it hard enough that the player wants to play the combat. Make the combat fun. Do the work rather than trying to hide behind an automated system. I play games to play them, not to watch as AI fights for me.
Hopefully, we'll never be subjected to auto-battleH^H^H^H^H^Gambits again.
I never said I wanted to keep adults away from M or Ao games -- just underaged kids. And yes, we should be doing the same with music and movies, and possibly comics/graphic novels. I just don't see the problem here. ESRB, MPAA, and other industry groups are declaring point blank that a game or movie is intended for adults, and yet a six year old can walk into Wal-Mart or EB and walk out with M rated games. I think that adds fuel to the anti-game crowd as well as being bad for the 6-year old.
The movements to censor and ban games have always started with the argument that "kiddy's" are buying violent games. If they can't buy GTA or MG:Solid or other M rated games, they can't say that the attempt to censor games will protect 6 year olds.
It's worked with alcohol and cigarettes. No one wants to ban them because kids can't walk into a 7-11 and walk out with a package of smokes or a bottle of rum. It's acceptable to sell it because it's known to be for adults only.
In defense of parents, not all of them are working for that all important plasma screen. A good number are working because they need to pay the bills, particularly single parents. I think we need better enforcement of current laws to keep kids away from the really bad stuff.
And there is a good bit of bad stuff out there. I'm all in favor of adults having the ability to buy GTA and shag/whack virtual hookers all night long. The problem is that it's not very hard for 6-year-olds to get the same game and have the same virtual hooker shagging/whacking experience. The problem is that a 6-7 year old doesn't process information the same way as a 22-year old. I watch a violent movie -- and I know that 90% of the action on the screen is CG, and wasn't even in the original shot. I recognize the actors perhaps, and therefore it's pretty obvious that he survived the experience. Kids don't look at it the same way.
If you add that to the fact that not all parents can be around 24/7, many times through no fault of their own, well you can see the need for some reasonable way to keep Blood Rayne and Hot-CoffeeGTA:San Andreas etc., away from small children. At minimum it should be like cigarettes or alcohol. Yes you can buy it, if you're over 18. Other than that, no dice. That isn't censorship. Censorship would mean that GTA, Bloodrayne, Japanese Dating Sims, and other M/Ao games couldn't be produced.
I'd like to see an XM type TV option. You pay the fee, you get channels, all commericial free -- and probably organized by show type.
so you could have
Redneck Channel
Scifi Channel
News -- Republican
News -- Democrat
Spanish
International
Soccer
Baseball
Football
Horse Racing
Oldie Movie
Oldie TV
etc.
If it works for XM, why not XTV?
it should be two layers of gameplay
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I think easter eggs and unlockables have their place. But it shouldn't be the meat of the game. Unlockables and extras should be used to add difficulty for those hard-core types with enough free time and mad skills to do them.
actually one of the better examples is FFx-2. You can play through the whole game -- you'll get the basic experience, kill the final boss, save the universe, etc. You'll play about 60% of the gameplay available, but it still takes ~40 hours. Or if you're a hardcore, you can play all the little sidequests, then you can. Or you could only do the ones you like. Hate the button press "adjust the towers" -- you don't have to play them. Pick and choose, and do only the ones you like. If you really really have to see the perfect ending -- then you do have to do all that stuff, but for most of the non-uber-hardcore, you can see and do most things in the game. Or D/L it off youtube.
That's what they should do with other easter eggs -- you can get 75% of the content without having to spend hours on sidequests and redoing levels. The hardcore could still have their 1337 uber car in the racing game, but the average non-hardcore player could still get pretty nice cars and rims and other stuff.
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On the other hand, this technology could save thousands of lives. We could regrow body parts, replace dead brain cells and so on. The blind could see, the deaf could hear, the lame could walk. We could extend lifespans past 100 to maybe 120. who knows.
I wish there was a way to get stem cells without killing embryos. I don't know that adult cells can do the same or not.
It makes the game a lot less fun for those of us who don't necessarily WNAT to fight other players. I don't like having to reload my game evey 10 minutes + have a nice exp loss (and possibly losing a sword or armour that took you three or four MONTHS to get). I get that griefers aren't necessarily breaking the rules, but when it gets to the point of making the game practically unplayable for the people getting greifed, stolen from, etc., it's a problem. Especially when I'm paying to play the game, because I can't get my money's worth from a game that I'm getting greifed on constantly.
Halo or counterstrike are different matters entirely. Those games are BASED ON killing other players. That's why people play Halo online. You aren't playing to build up a character, or to explore a permanent world. You're playing to compete with other players. That's what Halo IS. That's not what Everquest, WoW, or other MMORPGs are.
Well, yeah, but it can get to the point where you can't play for the constant griefing. I used to play MMOs, and one thing that did bug me was greifers who'd kill me 8-10 times in an hour. Now, I useually play freeware games, so I'm just losing time, but if I was paying a monthly fee, I AM losing money, because I can't enjoy the game I'm paying for. That's why people get pissed over griefers and theifs. They can't enjoy the game, and they're losing the money they're paying for it.
Add to that the idea of a console being fairly easy to use. Up until XBOX you never needed to install anything. That simplicity makes it attractive to noncomputer-nerds. The more plug-n-play the system is, the better.
But another thing is that the resulting console (and probably the dev kids) ought to be cheap enough to be reasonably purchased as a kid's console. The games themselves should probably be reasonably close to "kid's allowance" in price range. That way, buying a game can be a sort of "impulse buy" like a magazine or a dvd. Unless a consumer can buy a game the same way they buy a magazine, I don't see them wanting to risk buying a game that they aren't sure they'll like.
yehah! I think this could work.
Maybe in 100 years or so we really will have robots with positronic brains running around with the strength to kill or severely injure a human. We need to think about it, and maybe have some hard-wired rules (in the chips themselves preferably), but even so, it's probably a problem we have a good long time to think about the "rules".
What happened is that a worker ignored the safety rules -- pretty willfully. He was stupid to ignore the safety regs, but that doesn't mean that we need to worry about robots on a rampage. Its sensationalistic journalism.
If a console like that existed and was cheap enough, it might encourage the experimentation that Carpenter wants. The problem right now is that there are so many gatekeepers (Console Approval, Game Company itself, retailers, etc) that if a new concept comes out, chances are pretty good that it will get crushed long before it ever gets mentioned publicly (including GDC). What you need is a stable homebrew that doesn't have all the gatekeeping and hoopjumping before you get approved. Game Companies right now don't have the dough to withstand a flop, so risky games are axed before they get to development.
When you spend $50 million to make a game, exactly how much can you innovate? If the game flops, you're out almost all that money. That could easily bankrupt even a fairly large company. So they don't take risks making something that isn't a pretty sure thing. So they make a new sequel of last years big game, or if they didn't make last year's big game, they make a knock off with just enough changes to avoid a lawsuit. It's possible to make a new game type -- If you work for a company that is already a big dog (Katamari Damancy i.e. is released by Namco, the same Namco pretty well known for sequelizing any game until players want to scream -- see Megaman). Other than that, you can't really release a new groundbreaking title unless you're willing to lose your company and your shirt.
On the player side, the high price actually encourages genre loyalty. I might give an interesting movie a go if it gets good reviews, or if it looks interesting. The same with a book -- I might see one and think the premise sounds interesting and buy it. But the difference is that a paperback is $10, and a movie ticket (per person) is $10 as well. A new game will cost 5 times that -- $50. $50 for most people isn't an impulse purchase. Most people don't buy a new game unless they're pretty sure that they'll like it.
So it's a double bind. Companies can't afford a flop, so they make a bunch of knock-offs and sequels. The games cost a lot, so players either buy used or buy a sequel of a game that they already played. That's probably why there are so many movie games -- people buy 'em because they recognize the movie, so it's less risky than making a new title.
It seems to me that the only way to get more original titles is to make it cheaper to make a game. That way it isn't company-threatening to risk on a new type of game. Plus, if the company charges less -- $15 instead of $50, people would be more inclined to try a new franchise, or a new genre, or just a new game that sounds interesting.
Don't look at Scifi, look at history.
http://ps2.gamezone.com/news/02_28_02_07_00PM.htm THQ's RED FACTION TO BE RE-LAUNCHED UNDER PLAYSTATION 2 "GREATEST HITS" COLLECTION Critically Acclaimed Action Game to be Available April 1 for $24.99; Highly Anticipated Sequel Red Faction 2, Scheduled to Ship Winter 2002 CALABASAS HILLS, Calif. - February 28, 2002 - THQ Inc. (NASDAQ NMS: THQI) today announced its critically acclaimed Red Faction(TM) for the PlayStation® 2 computer entertainment system will be re-launched this spring as part of Sony Computer Entertainment America's "Greatest Hits" collection. Beginning April 1, Red Faction will be available for the manufacturers suggested retail price of $24.99 at retail outlets nationwide. Red Faction is one of the first third-party titles to be included in the PlayStation 2 "Greatest Hits" collection. Each game considered for the collection must have been available at retail for more than nine months and boast sales in excess of 400,000 units. Red Faction will also be re-released across Europe as one of only five third-party games in Sony's PS2® 'Platinum' collection.
400,000/9 months = 44,444 games a month. at $50 (new release, pre-GH) it has to make somewhere in the range of $2 million. Or $20 million over 9 months. Go back to the movies list -- for movies $20 million in sales isn't an achievement -- it's a flop. Even Jumanji managed $100 million just at the box office. And movies aren't at the box office for very long -- maybe a month or two.
Now even if the sales of GH games are somewhat hampered by being PS2 exclusive, they are still FAR FAR below even fairly mediocre movies. Not to say that they have no influence at all, just that the reason "mainstream media" doesn't cover games is the same reason it doesn't cover indie films, sci-fi, documentaries or Anime -- they have a small audience. Until there's a large mainstream audience for video games -- until as many people know Amano as know Peter Jackson, or know Katamari from Calamari, I don't expect to read much about games in the press.
With the standard interface, I can read the article and click on names or whatever when I need more explanation. I just don't see 3D as an improvement over 2D for things that can be done in text. If the current technology works for most applications, I don't see much use for change. Going from a book (old tech, all 2D) to a 3D format would make the book unuseable. It would take 3x as long to use audio technology to listen to the book to find that one fact/passage again. And with video, unless the DVD has chapters, you have to wait again while the movie plays on to the section you want -- plus the scenery shots. Those kinds of things make no sense in the context of a nonfiction book read for information. It would simply be too inconvienient even with a DVD skip feature to skip directly to that equation of concept that you need. It's far easier to simply remember that the Schodinger's Cat paradox is on pg. 215 and open the book to that page than to watch a movie and try to skip to the right section.
There are some things that movies do better than books. A movie can give you a picture of what an object looks like. It can show you what a certain bird looks like, how it moves, what it does. You can't do that with a book. You can show the entire street of a city as people walk up and down that street. That's what we use nonfiction movies for. We don't use it as general reference because it wouldn't work very well. We don't use it for more than gerneral introductions to new products because it's not suited to that. We don't use it for math and physics equations because it doesn't work well.
But that means you can't follow the same old plots. Future games have to give both a choice and a consequence. And you have to see the consequence. I think it would be great to have the posibility of making a wrong move and thus killing off an entire city. Or maybe take a separate path that makes you hated and feared, yet helps people. Things like that. Or in the traditional Jrpg, raiding a chest may give you a kewl sword, yet it might close off entire areas, because they think you're a theif.
It's just not mainstream. Outside of the hard-core, Johnny Exreme balls-to-the wall type gamers, it just doesn't get name recognition. Besides that, you have a small percentage of the total population buying most of the games. Sci-fi is in the same boat IMO. They have a rabid fanbase loyal to one series or another, having Inet debates about whether Darth Vader could pwn Captain Kirk. The problem is that the same people are buying all the Sci-fi. The same people who watch Star Trek went and camped out in line for "Revenge of the Sith", and are likely the same ones that are actively campaigning for the return of Firefly. If you look at the numbers for any one show, it's pretty small.
IMDB Top 100
If you look at the numbers, Passion of the Christ beats Empire Strikes Back, but if you looked around slashdot, more people were excited for Empire than Passion. I know that more people here saw The Voyage Home (ST4) than little mermaid.
Same with games -- a small portion of the population are the ones argueing about Wii,PS3, and Xbox (and will likely end up with all three). My guess is that less than 20% of the population of the US owns more than 10 games total. They may be vocal, but the number is tiny compared to 100% of the population that owns a TV, and 95% that sees a movie either in theaters or on DVD.
For things like sales, you want an employee that's somewhat like the people you're selling to. You don't want a frat-party-going, heavy-drinking, womanizer doing corprate sales. If that personality comes out (and eventually it will), the company could lose sales, and possibly get a bad rep in the industry, or even bad press if your womanizing/drinking makes the local paper. That will ultimately hurt the company -- most of the time corprate culture is pretty conservative (somewhat in the political sense, but mostly in the social sense), and they want college grads who can fit in.
It also matters in highly professional positions. What would you think of a lawyer or doctor who spends his free time drinking? What if the lawyer about to defend you admits to spending most of his free time playing HALO online? Can you honestly tell me that you'd feel great about your chances if the guy came in to the first day of trial bragging to you about how he fragged an 8-year-old last night? For most people, they'd look elsewhere for a doctor or lawyer.
Maybe for a few positions excentric behavior is valued -- advertising, movies, tv, music, video games, possibly some high tech research -- but for most jobs you'll get, excentricity is a liability both to you professionaly AND to the employer. They need someone who fits into corprate culture and can act proffesional.
Reading myspace or facebooks and blogs may be going a bit far. I think you should have someplace to vent, without fear of it hurting you proffessionaly. Maybe just a journal (offline), or a blog that's in no way connected to your real name.
Or do the same with a mechanical device.
Point being that in some cases you would want to see both how one part fits into another, AND be able to pull up information on how each part works. 3D would be great for that type of application. It may not make sense when talking about standard webpages -- but for some things it would be a vast improvement.
I think FF7 is overrated. It's not bad, but it isn't a great game. It's pretty mediocre IMO. First, Materia is seriously flawed. It made every character identical except for "limit breaks". If you couldn't play with Cloud for a time, no problem. Just put all Cloud's materia on Tifa, and other than the limit break, you'll never notice the difference. At least link the character's ability to use a spell that they never used before to a stat, or maybe to how often they use materia period. The storyline is uneven. up until you leave Midgar, yeah, it's a pretty good story. But after that, it goes downhill like an out-of-control bobsled. For the next 4-5 hours, all you do is chase Sephoroth. Chase Sephiroth to the coast of Junon. Chase him across the ocean. Chase him to the Temple. Chase him, chase him, chase him. Other than Aeris dying, the next big event is the Huge Materia Quest, and the Weapon attacks. Aeris' death might be surprising, but it wasn't all that well done. I never really cared about her. There didn't seem to be much personality to Aeris at all. Barret dying would have made more impact, or maybe Tifa. I actually like Suikoden III and V better than FF7.
No, it's retarded. People pick RPGs for the strategic combat and the story -- or at least that's why I do. So if your combat is so dumbed down that it seems like auto-battle (esp. as the default option) is a good idea -- fix the friggin' combat. Make it hard enough that the player wants to play the combat. Make the combat fun. Do the work rather than trying to hide behind an automated system. I play games to play them, not to watch as AI fights for me.
Hopefully, we'll never be subjected to auto-battleH^H^H^H^H^Gambits again.
I never said I wanted to keep adults away from M or Ao games -- just underaged kids. And yes, we should be doing the same with music and movies, and possibly comics/graphic novels. I just don't see the problem here. ESRB, MPAA, and other industry groups are declaring point blank that a game or movie is intended for adults, and yet a six year old can walk into Wal-Mart or EB and walk out with M rated games. I think that adds fuel to the anti-game crowd as well as being bad for the 6-year old. The movements to censor and ban games have always started with the argument that "kiddy's" are buying violent games. If they can't buy GTA or MG:Solid or other M rated games, they can't say that the attempt to censor games will protect 6 year olds. It's worked with alcohol and cigarettes. No one wants to ban them because kids can't walk into a 7-11 and walk out with a package of smokes or a bottle of rum. It's acceptable to sell it because it's known to be for adults only.
I'd hate to set the precident that humans created in the lab are less valueable than the ones that are already born.
I just wish there was a way to harvest stemcells without destroying the embryo. it has to be possible... somehow.
And there is a good bit of bad stuff out there. I'm all in favor of adults having the ability to buy GTA and shag/whack virtual hookers all night long. The problem is that it's not very hard for 6-year-olds to get the same game and have the same virtual hooker shagging/whacking experience. The problem is that a 6-7 year old doesn't process information the same way as a 22-year old. I watch a violent movie -- and I know that 90% of the action on the screen is CG, and wasn't even in the original shot. I recognize the actors perhaps, and therefore it's pretty obvious that he survived the experience. Kids don't look at it the same way.
If you add that to the fact that not all parents can be around 24/7, many times through no fault of their own, well you can see the need for some reasonable way to keep Blood Rayne and Hot-CoffeeGTA:San Andreas etc., away from small children. At minimum it should be like cigarettes or alcohol. Yes you can buy it, if you're over 18. Other than that, no dice. That isn't censorship. Censorship would mean that GTA, Bloodrayne, Japanese Dating Sims, and other M/Ao games couldn't be produced.
If it works for XM, why not XTV?
I think easter eggs and unlockables have their place. But it shouldn't be the meat of the game. Unlockables and extras should be used to add difficulty for those hard-core types with enough free time and mad skills to do them. actually one of the better examples is FFx-2. You can play through the whole game -- you'll get the basic experience, kill the final boss, save the universe, etc. You'll play about 60% of the gameplay available, but it still takes ~40 hours. Or if you're a hardcore, you can play all the little sidequests, then you can. Or you could only do the ones you like. Hate the button press "adjust the towers" -- you don't have to play them. Pick and choose, and do only the ones you like. If you really really have to see the perfect ending -- then you do have to do all that stuff, but for most of the non-uber-hardcore, you can see and do most things in the game. Or D/L it off youtube. That's what they should do with other easter eggs -- you can get 75% of the content without having to spend hours on sidequests and redoing levels. The hardcore could still have their 1337 uber car in the racing game, but the average non-hardcore player could still get pretty nice cars and rims and other stuff.