"'get my fix' through gaming" hahahahahahahaha... yeah right. Totally lame argument there buddy. First, you're not going to "get your fix" on meat by pretending to cook it. You want to taste it. Additionally, Freud's old idea of "catharsis" has basically been disproven: the idea that if you "take out your anger" by hitting a pillow, you'll be less likely to react angrily to someone. On the contrary, if you hit a pillow when you're angry, you're training yourself to enact that response... in other words, you get angry, you want to hit something (or someone). Rehearsing a response makes that response more likely.
What you need to do is realize that these people can't be argued with, and there's no point in arguing with them. Just go slaughter some tasty animals and smile. It's all you can do.
It may also prove of some use in girding us for reactions from an intelligent alien species, should we ever come across any.
Not really. The primary issues with intelligent alien species would be not understanding their language/culture/technology, and possibly not understanding their anatomy or their mode of communication. With a neanderthal clone child that we raised ourselves, we'd be talking about a species that is almost identical to our own, and the only culture or technology he would possess would be whatever he could glean from us.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun or interesting, but that's a weak justification.
The idea here is to run your applications on the SSD drive and all of your less-central media files (work documents, movies, game backups, etc.) on your HDD drives. That way the HDD only spins up when you are loading something, and if you have enough RAM, it will basically just spin up to load that data into the RAM for your applications to access (which are conveniently on the super-fast SSD drive).
Taking it from that approach, you could easily put your operating system on the SSD drive, along with a few games, keep your old harddrives, and call it good.
But yeah, the OP's insinuation that 64gb is enough "total" is ridiculous. I use 380gb on my home machine, and I still feel like I don't have enough room. I'm constantly forced to delete things.
At work we use almost 2TB to archive video files, along with another 1-2TB for backup.
P.S. I never suggested anything about excising experience. But you should be able to gain experience in a freeform system from practicing your skills... and maybe they could be diverse skills, including things like architecture and agriculture, as well as your usual sword & shield & backstabbing & magic fireball skills. Everybody's favorite MMO crack "World of Warcraft" doesn't even let you attack NPCs in your own faction on a whim, much less other players. And forget about building cities, or actually dealing with the realistic struggles of day-to-day life in a medieval setting ("How will I make food? How can I protect my farm from the hungry bandits?" etc). And the game NEVER gives you the impression that anyone is threatened with mortality. Big boss baddies conveniently respawn for the next wave of adventurers. Every wave of adventurers also respawns in order to challenge him again, over and over, until they are successful. Even on the off chance that someone from an ENEMY faction kills say, your storekeep, an identical storekeep will replace him within an hour.
I'm not suggesting replacing one grind for another, I'm suggesting that the current flavor of grind should actually make a wee attempt to live up to the "role playing" part of RPG. If they did, it'd be a lot better. Unfortunately it seems like all of the games today try to reach "the widest audience possible," and thus we get RPGs with permanent training wheels attached.
To anybody born after 1980, the words "film" and "video" sound like synonyms. I didn't figure out what the difference was until I started working for the Distance Learning Center at my university, a job where I deal with video constantly. You're just in a tizzy because you can remember a time when film was actually relevant, and therefore the distinction was more important to maintain... yeah, whoever wrote this is obviously unaware of the distinction, but it isn't a "blatant lie" like you so indignantly trumpet, the writer was just mistaken. There IS a difference, you know.
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" It's ridiculous to think that we now have to archive all of our correspondence "just in case" we have to defend ourselves in court. People need to re-read (or read for the first time) Kafka's "The Trial."
Yeah, but it won't "fall," we'll just use our plasma rifles to cleanse the world of the unruly, starving plebes once and for all! Then it will be much more pleasant.
The overarcing quest is that if you don't feed the orphan, he turns up dead the next day of cold and starvation...
The best way to provide what the OP wants is to allow the players to create their own quests. Lots of people loved "Morrowind" even though it was rather simplistic. It just gave them a lot of hands-off freedom.
Also, on "was always the best..." you're just nitpicking at my words. I've got a bookshelf of tabletop RPG material, so you can eat shit. How could you get from me agreeing with you over an aspect of tabletop play's advantages, to inferring that I've never seen tabletop or played it?
The fact of the matter is that what you're thinking of is probably more detail than is required for the OP to feel satisfied in his desires for a "different" kind of game. Emergent, unscripted scenarios based on AI scripts is the best way (that I can think of) to create quests that are unique and not handed to every player by an NPC with a glowing exclamation point over his head.
I'm proposing that maybe the sea walrus guy wants the moose because he's worried about dying of starvation, and that's why he'll pay gold for the food. I'm also proposing that maybe that sea walrus could die permanently... either if he runs out of moose to eat after several days, or if someone (likely a PC) kills him...
There certainly must be ways that GMs could lend a personal touch to the proceedings... writing NPCs while offline, and minor plot scenarios, then dropping them into the server... and you could likely create a setting that provided an explanation for the influx of people on a regular basis... maybe by, for instance, making your setting a small frontier town with lots of "gold rush" style immigration, and a high turnover rate due to mortalities?
If you had just said "it would be hard," I wouldn't have chimed in to say anything. I totally agree with you - as the market stands now. But you didn't say that. Instead, you said it can't be done, and made it a bullshit little advertisement for your favorite genre of game. You're like some of the folks in the 1950's and 1960's who said Artificial Intelligence could never be a possibility. That's hardly the consensus now.
Someday, somebody will create an engaging "reality simulator" that gives the OP the sort of game experience he's looking for. Tabletop games have their place but that's no reason not to ignore the future and chant "it can't be done."
You don't have kids do you? She is a teacher in charge of a classroom. When confronted with the problem of sexual images on the computer, she should have shut off the monitor and called the vice principal IMMEDIATELY, but what this woman did was stand there dumbfounded and let kids stare at some pretty graphic porn.
Yet another case of someone assuming others hold the same values that they do. Listen, sex is how kids are brought into this world, knowledge of it isn't going to "traumatize" them. The "you don't have kids do you" question implies that the person you're responding to, if they had kids, would OF COURSE keep them entirely ignorant and sheltered from the world, just like you do.
You don't realize that some people don't think a little porno is the end of the world, do you?
Restrictive contracts and policies are examples of a masculine philosophy that many business leaders erroneourly believe in, the idea that business is a kind of war.
Sexist.
That aside... you obviously don't know that much about economics if you can't conceive of fiat money as being true wealth. It represents the labor that can be purchased with it, and true wealth can be created through effective management of labor.
and, as free and open-source software demonstrates, creativity and wealth-creation is much more easier when people collaborate together
Does it really demonstrate that? I'm unconvinced. If I dumped 200-300 hours into a software project, I'd want more in return for my work than just the comforting knowledge that someone else out there, somewhere, might also decide to publish their work as open source and let me access it. No, I'd like to get paid, so I can buy food for myself and my family. If you think that open-source software development can produce food for you, you've got another thing coming. No, there must be someone willing to pay you for your work and your product if you mean to profit in any meaningful and efficient way, either in fiat money or in food as barter.
You can't feed yourself as an open-source software programmer if the only payment you ever receive for your work is more open-source programs.
The camera won't catch everything. What if the cop leaves his car to go inside an apartment on a drug bust, or something? At best you'll see videos attached to each police report.
Now just throw in the option for "hardcore" servers which don't allow player characters to respawn, and allow open PVP, and I think you've got a game that would appeal to ye olde hardcore tabletop RPG crowd. It'd be truly immersive if any actor in the simulation could die permanently, either to a sword in the belly or just from the lack of an adequate food supply.
Surely it wouldn't be easy, but you're just a stick in the mud. You could do this. The first step would be having a system without explicit questgivers, just goals that AI entities and the player characters must fulfill to survive -- IE, not getting too hot and burning to death, not getting too cold and dying of hypothermia, not running out of food to eat daily, etc.
Now quests are "unique" not in the sense that nobody has done what you've done before (stealing food from an NPC king to feed a dying NPC orphan, hoeing a plot of land to grow food for yourself, killing the hungry goblin NPCs who terrorize the town for it's food which they also need to survive), but they're unique in the sense that each player comes up with the idea to do the quest himself, and he does so for more tangible reasons than "I need xp." His actions will affect the course of events with these NPCs.
And if you think about it, it shouldn't be that hard to incorporate live gamemasters into an MMO format. The scale of economy should be large enough that you could have a single GM for every 100 to 1000 players or so come online for a few hours a day and manage NPCs (remove corpses, spawn new NPCs) in order to create interesting, dynamic, emergent situations in the gameworld that seem like "quests" to the players.
In short, we need a game that mimics reality more than the current vanilla-brand fetch quest MMOs do. Tabletop was always the best for that, it was it's strength, I agree with you. But you're just a damn pessimist and there's certainly no easier way to be wrong faster than saying something can "never" be done.
While it's nothing like what we've been discussing, "Hinterland" has been seizing a lot of my time over the past couple of days.
Slashdot Mirror
"'get my fix' through gaming" hahahahahahahaha ... yeah right. Totally lame argument there buddy. First, you're not going to "get your fix" on meat by pretending to cook it. You want to taste it. Additionally, Freud's old idea of "catharsis" has basically been disproven: the idea that if you "take out your anger" by hitting a pillow, you'll be less likely to react angrily to someone. On the contrary, if you hit a pillow when you're angry, you're training yourself to enact that response ... in other words, you get angry, you want to hit something (or someone). Rehearsing a response makes that response more likely.
What you need to do is realize that these people can't be argued with, and there's no point in arguing with them. Just go slaughter some tasty animals and smile. It's all you can do.
You heard me. Yes, it's ironic. Yes, that's the point. You dumbass.
If you are not incompetent, you don't have to spend your life running from the shit you did yesterday.
There, fixed that up for you.
Only the male ones.
It may also prove of some use in girding us for reactions from an intelligent alien species, should we ever come across any.
Not really. The primary issues with intelligent alien species would be not understanding their language/culture/technology, and possibly not understanding their anatomy or their mode of communication. With a neanderthal clone child that we raised ourselves, we'd be talking about a species that is almost identical to our own, and the only culture or technology he would possess would be whatever he could glean from us.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun or interesting, but that's a weak justification.
The idea here is to run your applications on the SSD drive and all of your less-central media files (work documents, movies, game backups, etc.) on your HDD drives. That way the HDD only spins up when you are loading something, and if you have enough RAM, it will basically just spin up to load that data into the RAM for your applications to access (which are conveniently on the super-fast SSD drive).
Taking it from that approach, you could easily put your operating system on the SSD drive, along with a few games, keep your old harddrives, and call it good.
But yeah, the OP's insinuation that 64gb is enough "total" is ridiculous. I use 380gb on my home machine, and I still feel like I don't have enough room. I'm constantly forced to delete things.
At work we use almost 2TB to archive video files, along with another 1-2TB for backup.
If I send you a message on facebook, is that not e-mail? Granted it doesn't fit certain standard protocols, but it's still an online message, right?
P.S. I never suggested anything about excising experience. But you should be able to gain experience in a freeform system from practicing your skills ... and maybe they could be diverse skills, including things like architecture and agriculture, as well as your usual sword & shield & backstabbing & magic fireball skills. Everybody's favorite MMO crack "World of Warcraft" doesn't even let you attack NPCs in your own faction on a whim, much less other players. And forget about building cities, or actually dealing with the realistic struggles of day-to-day life in a medieval setting ("How will I make food? How can I protect my farm from the hungry bandits?" etc). And the game NEVER gives you the impression that anyone is threatened with mortality. Big boss baddies conveniently respawn for the next wave of adventurers. Every wave of adventurers also respawns in order to challenge him again, over and over, until they are successful. Even on the off chance that someone from an ENEMY faction kills say, your storekeep, an identical storekeep will replace him within an hour.
I'm not suggesting replacing one grind for another, I'm suggesting that the current flavor of grind should actually make a wee attempt to live up to the "role playing" part of RPG. If they did, it'd be a lot better. Unfortunately it seems like all of the games today try to reach "the widest audience possible," and thus we get RPGs with permanent training wheels attached.
Dude, the person who wrote the ARTICLE SUMMARY said it was dirty.
Of course, since the space station inhabitants drink recycled urine, I'm still not totally convinced that I would want to try that cup.
What the hell do you think they do with the urine you shoot into your toilet, you bloody cod?
To anybody born after 1980, the words "film" and "video" sound like synonyms. I didn't figure out what the difference was until I started working for the Distance Learning Center at my university, a job where I deal with video constantly. You're just in a tizzy because you can remember a time when film was actually relevant, and therefore the distinction was more important to maintain ... yeah, whoever wrote this is obviously unaware of the distinction, but it isn't a "blatant lie" like you so indignantly trumpet, the writer was just mistaken. There IS a difference, you know.
That seems like the sensible thing to do to me. Making things too complicated is a waste of time.
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" It's ridiculous to think that we now have to archive all of our correspondence "just in case" we have to defend ourselves in court. People need to re-read (or read for the first time) Kafka's "The Trial."
Or if you're the software engineer who programs the automated combine harvester.
Yeah, but it won't "fall," we'll just use our plasma rifles to cleanse the world of the unruly, starving plebes once and for all! Then it will be much more pleasant.
"Oh no! Look, Billy! The sky is breaking apart!"
True. Would suck if someone enterprising hacked their wifi signal, though, and used it to stage an ambush.
The overarcing quest is that if you don't feed the orphan, he turns up dead the next day of cold and starvation ...
The best way to provide what the OP wants is to allow the players to create their own quests. Lots of people loved "Morrowind" even though it was rather simplistic. It just gave them a lot of hands-off freedom.
Also, on "was always the best ..." you're just nitpicking at my words. I've got a bookshelf of tabletop RPG material, so you can eat shit. How could you get from me agreeing with you over an aspect of tabletop play's advantages, to inferring that I've never seen tabletop or played it?
The fact of the matter is that what you're thinking of is probably more detail than is required for the OP to feel satisfied in his desires for a "different" kind of game. Emergent, unscripted scenarios based on AI scripts is the best way (that I can think of) to create quests that are unique and not handed to every player by an NPC with a glowing exclamation point over his head.
I'm proposing that maybe the sea walrus guy wants the moose because he's worried about dying of starvation, and that's why he'll pay gold for the food. I'm also proposing that maybe that sea walrus could die permanently ... either if he runs out of moose to eat after several days, or if someone (likely a PC) kills him ...
There certainly must be ways that GMs could lend a personal touch to the proceedings ... writing NPCs while offline, and minor plot scenarios, then dropping them into the server ... and you could likely create a setting that provided an explanation for the influx of people on a regular basis ... maybe by, for instance, making your setting a small frontier town with lots of "gold rush" style immigration, and a high turnover rate due to mortalities?
If you had just said "it would be hard," I wouldn't have chimed in to say anything. I totally agree with you - as the market stands now. But you didn't say that. Instead, you said it can't be done, and made it a bullshit little advertisement for your favorite genre of game. You're like some of the folks in the 1950's and 1960's who said Artificial Intelligence could never be a possibility. That's hardly the consensus now.
Someday, somebody will create an engaging "reality simulator" that gives the OP the sort of game experience he's looking for. Tabletop games have their place but that's no reason not to ignore the future and chant "it can't be done."
You don't have kids do you? She is a teacher in charge of a classroom. When confronted with the problem of sexual images on the computer, she should have shut off the monitor and called the vice principal IMMEDIATELY, but what this woman did was stand there dumbfounded and let kids stare at some pretty graphic porn.
Yet another case of someone assuming others hold the same values that they do. Listen, sex is how kids are brought into this world, knowledge of it isn't going to "traumatize" them. The "you don't have kids do you" question implies that the person you're responding to, if they had kids, would OF COURSE keep them entirely ignorant and sheltered from the world, just like you do.
You don't realize that some people don't think a little porno is the end of the world, do you?
Restrictive contracts and policies are examples of a masculine philosophy that many business leaders erroneourly believe in, the idea that business is a kind of war.
Sexist.
That aside ... you obviously don't know that much about economics if you can't conceive of fiat money as being true wealth. It represents the labor that can be purchased with it, and true wealth can be created through effective management of labor.
and, as free and open-source software demonstrates, creativity and wealth-creation is much more easier when people collaborate together
Does it really demonstrate that? I'm unconvinced. If I dumped 200-300 hours into a software project, I'd want more in return for my work than just the comforting knowledge that someone else out there, somewhere, might also decide to publish their work as open source and let me access it. No, I'd like to get paid, so I can buy food for myself and my family. If you think that open-source software development can produce food for you, you've got another thing coming. No, there must be someone willing to pay you for your work and your product if you mean to profit in any meaningful and efficient way, either in fiat money or in food as barter.
You can't feed yourself as an open-source software programmer if the only payment you ever receive for your work is more open-source programs.
The camera won't catch everything. What if the cop leaves his car to go inside an apartment on a drug bust, or something? At best you'll see videos attached to each police report.
Now just throw in the option for "hardcore" servers which don't allow player characters to respawn, and allow open PVP, and I think you've got a game that would appeal to ye olde hardcore tabletop RPG crowd. It'd be truly immersive if any actor in the simulation could die permanently, either to a sword in the belly or just from the lack of an adequate food supply.
Surely it wouldn't be easy, but you're just a stick in the mud. You could do this. The first step would be having a system without explicit questgivers, just goals that AI entities and the player characters must fulfill to survive -- IE, not getting too hot and burning to death, not getting too cold and dying of hypothermia, not running out of food to eat daily, etc.
Now quests are "unique" not in the sense that nobody has done what you've done before (stealing food from an NPC king to feed a dying NPC orphan, hoeing a plot of land to grow food for yourself, killing the hungry goblin NPCs who terrorize the town for it's food which they also need to survive), but they're unique in the sense that each player comes up with the idea to do the quest himself, and he does so for more tangible reasons than "I need xp." His actions will affect the course of events with these NPCs.
And if you think about it, it shouldn't be that hard to incorporate live gamemasters into an MMO format. The scale of economy should be large enough that you could have a single GM for every 100 to 1000 players or so come online for a few hours a day and manage NPCs (remove corpses, spawn new NPCs) in order to create interesting, dynamic, emergent situations in the gameworld that seem like "quests" to the players.
In short, we need a game that mimics reality more than the current vanilla-brand fetch quest MMOs do. Tabletop was always the best for that, it was it's strength, I agree with you. But you're just a damn pessimist and there's certainly no easier way to be wrong faster than saying something can "never" be done.
While it's nothing like what we've been discussing, "Hinterland" has been seizing a lot of my time over the past couple of days.
There's nothing stopping us
Well, that just goes to show how little I know about broadcast and cable TV ;)