My June 2007 article in the online gaming magazine The Escapist about the 2005 "New Game Enhancements" that pretty much destroyed Star Wars Galaxies: "Blowing Up Galaxies"
Uh-huh. And in the two years the professional CoH designers and coders were thinking daily about this problem, in their two years of doubtless intensive meetings, not one of them ever once considered your idea. Right? The only possible alternative is that perhaps your two-minute inspiration isn't a perfect solution -- that it may even have unsuspected shortcomings. Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.
It's fine that Adobe recommends disabling JavaScript in Acrobat, but it would be nice if, once you disable JavaScript, Acrobat didn't thereupon constantly nag you to re-enable it "from now on for all documents" every time you open a.PDF. "It looks like you've disabled JavaScript! Can we please turn it back on forever, you poor ignorant dimwitted user you?"
Don't know if anyone saw this post yesterday by Steve Pavlina on his "Personal Development for Smart People" blog. At the end of a long postmortem about his recent "juice feast" experiment, he described a vivid dream he'd had the week before:
I had a dream that I was taking a class at some school. This school was having budget challenges, so they decided to sell advertising to raise more money. There was an ad network, similar to Google Adsense (actually it could have been Adsense), that placed context-sensitive ads on school assignments. So the teacher of any class could upload an exam to this ad network, the exam would be scanned, and context-sensitive ads would be provided to be printed on the exam. Then the school would get some money based on how many students were in the class to see these ads. For placing a single ad on an exam or assignment, the classroom might earn an extra $5 for its budget. So over the course of a year, each class could earn well over $100 in ad revenue for the school. These are fairly non-intrusive logo/branding ads, so the students wouldn't be overly distracted from seeing ads on their exams and other assignments. [...]
If this dream vision catches on the real world -- there's no reason it can't be done with today's technology -- you might see a little note at the top of your biology exam that says, "Sponsored by Scientific American." Or maybe you're taking a computer programming class, and one of your assignments includes a student discount coupon for a popular programming library. [...].
Would you tolerate context-sensitive ads on your class assignments? What if it meant you paid lower tuition -- or all your textbooks were free? What if it meant your school could afford better educational resources? What if it meant your teachers were better compensated? And what if the department chairs and/or teachers had the discretion of being able to accept or reject individual ads, so they never approved anything they felt was inappropriate?
You know⦠this doesn't sound like such a crazy idea after all.
For my November 2006 Escapist article "StarForce Must Die," I asked blogger Bill Harris to present a "DRM Bill of Rights" that resembles Brad Wardell's list. Really, in a sensible world that recognized our right to control the information stored on our own computers, this would all be common sense.
Honestly, the best and most practical path forward in today's game market is to create and market the game yourself. Though the indie space is constantly changing (for instance, the casual-game portal market that thrived as little as two years ago has now turned stagnant), there are still many opportunities for independent creative thinkers.
Indie designer Jonathan Blow, whose inventive puzzle platformer Braid just launched on Xbox Live Arcade, speaks eloquently about the indie viewpoint in his keynote speech at the Free Play 2007 conference in Melbourne. The video of his speech is compelling and inspirational. Look up his many interviews and then go on from there to learn about other indie designers. It's a tricky path but exciting and potentially rewarding.
Let's be fair about number three, that's a problem with the gaming industry in general. Almost every game reinvents its own UI, on pretty much all platforms, anywhere.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Part of the fun of playing a game is mastering its interface, and a unique interface can encourage unique new kinds of fun. Anyway, how would it work if every game had to use the same interface -- if you had to be able to play Halo, SimCity 4, Command & Conquer, Tetris, Line Rider, bridge, backgammon, and parcheesi on a standard chessboard?
Indie and casual game designers are discussing the Popcap interview at great length at the Indie Gamer forums. As I remarked there, many people have observed that the current syndrome of blatant, rampant plagiarism is dangerous to the casual game market's long-term health -- and whenever someone does observe this, the plagiarizers move immediately to smear that speaker's reputation. By demonstrating the speaker isn't a pure and saintly exemplar of all things holy, the plagiarizers believe they prove their arrant plagiarism represents no danger to the market. It's nothing but an unhelpful and short-sighted diversionary tactic.
It's been well over a week since I last got to plug one of my Escapist articles, so let me mention "Red vs. Blue Makes Green" from issue #68. I also wrote another machinima-related article (not about RvB, though), "The French Democracy," in issue #88. (Both links go to the plain HTML text version of the articles.)
For the second time in two days, I get to plug one of my Escapist articles: "Uwe Boll and the German Tax Code," which answers the perennial question "Why do people keep giving Boll money to make movies?" (Link goes to HTML text version.)
I surveyed the surprisingly large field of Lego games a few weeks ago in an article in The Escapist #97, forthrightly titled "Lego Games." (Link goes to plain-vanilla HTML text version.)
Scribus will probably be hot stuff in three to five years, but for now, it's low-end desktop publishing, only a couple of steps above Word. In particular, Scribus currently offers only rudimentary support for tables, which was a dealbreaker for me.
There's LaTeX, of course, but I'm not yet ready to drink that particular ocean. LaTeX is oriented toward document design, whereas I need page design. I need to move the illo on page 43 two picas to the right, and then I need to look at it and decide to move it back. Dipping in and out of a config file to do that isn't appealing.
For my current DTP project, I had to move from Linux back to WinXP just so I could use InDesign. InDesign is a great program, but even so... groan.
You, ah, ARE aware that the Constitution sets up three branches of government, and explicitly grants the Courts a rough third of aggregate power, right? And since they're the only branch that has no say in amending the Constitution, letting them be the ones that determine what the words mean sounds reasonably fair.
Your phrasing is ambiguous in that you make it sound like the Constitution explicitly grants the judiciary the power of judicial review -- the ability to determine a law's constitutionality. This is incorrect; judicial review is not enunciated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court claimed the power in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison.
They used to just give it to whoever was the most important person of that year or changed the world the most. In the past this has included people who changed the course of world history like Stalin and Hitler. These days they would never put someone like that up as their person of the year. They seem to be focused on picking a choice which is either feel good patriotic (like the president if it happens to be a year when his approval rating is high) or gimicky (like this) in the past decade or so. I
We saw this quite clearly in 1999/2000 when Time chose its "Person of the Century" -- not Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, but Albert Einstein. That issue then included a two-page essay full of incoherent waffling about why they didn't pick Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. But if you establish the basis of the award as "the individual who had the greatest influence on history, for good or ill," there's no rational way to exclude the world-class jerks.
I wrote the article Red Blindness (link goes to text version) for The Escapist issue #49. It's about China's fast-developing MMOG scene, the quality issues they're wrestling with, and the prospects for future improvement. The article lists some of the online games made by Shanda, NetEase, and The9.
I can't believe these obituaries for Ray Noorda highlight his supposed business skill, when he rode Novell straight into the ground and singlehandedly destroyed both Digital Research and WordPerfect. Noorda's Novell bought WordPerfect for $855 million in June 1994, when its word processor, formerly the industry standard, was struggling and needed smart management. After Noorda left the company, Novell promptly sold WordPerfect to Corel in January 1996 for 10 million shares of Corel stock and $11 million in cash -- that's right, an $800 million loss in 18 months. Meanwhile, WordPerfect's market share had totally collapsed.
An October 2000 article in Computer Business Review Online, "Why Companies Fail", discusses Noorda's reign:
"[M]anagement monomania is perhaps the most insidious and avoidable trap. The company that has shown damagingly obsessive behaviour has been network operating system company, Novell. CEO and founder Ray Noorda, after failed takeover talks with Microsoft, became obsessed with the fact that Microsoft was trying to destroy his company - a focus that became so intense, ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrvold dubbed him 'Captain Ahab' in 1993.
"Even though Novell had successfully fought off Microsoft in its core network operating system business for five years, Noorda decided that he had to take direct aim at the industry's Moby Dick. He bought 20 companies, including Digital Research (an operating systems company), Unix System Laboratories and office suite developer WordPerfect (subsequently sold to equally mismanaged Corel) over a three-year period. Even after Noorda retired in 1994, and his successor had divested most of his acquisitions, Novell was damaged beyond repair. [...] Novell fatally lost direction under Noorda, let its core products lapse and ceded market dominance. Since then it has suffered a steady decline."
Of course, Noorda also found the Canopy Group, of which the less said the better.
Noorda achieved some great things, but for much of his latter career he was a force for chaos and destruction.
I wrote a similar article for The Escapist online gaming magazine, "Red Blindness". (The link goes to the HTML text version of the article, for those who hate the Escapist graphic approach.)
One of the most interesting DVD filmmaker commentaries I've ever heard was for a bad movie. On the Lost in Space movie DVD, the filmmakers went into detail about what they'd aimed for in a given scene, why it didn't work, and what they originally planned -- which always sounded more interesting than what made it onscreen. That commentary told as much about the realities of filmmaking as do the commentaries you hear on far better films.
I'm not talking about an MST3K-style lampoon of terrible films, but more an analysis and discussion of what went wrong and why. I see that the Sharecrows site links to a Gigli commentary, which I suspect must be played for laughs. But that's not the only way to bring utility to a bad film.
For the last couple of years I've been packaging the support line for the current edition of PARANOIA, the RPG of a darkly humorous future. The new line now has a dozen supplements (see the Mongoose Publishing PARANOIA page) and an enthusiastic and growing fan base at the leading fan site, Paranoia-Live.net. The reviews of the new line have been so congratulatory, even The Computer would approve. If you remember the glory days of PARANOIA from the early 1980s, or if you want to understand what all those old grognards mean when they say "The Computer is your friend," check out the current line at your friendly local game store or online.
Slashdot Mirror
My June 2007 article in the online gaming magazine The Escapist about the 2005 "New Game Enhancements" that pretty much destroyed Star Wars Galaxies: "Blowing Up Galaxies"
I wrote about the Gygax Memorial effort last year in the online gaming magazine The Escapist, Issue 251 (April 27, 2010): "The Tower of Gygax : Honoring the man who started everything."
I wrote about the disastrous Star Wars Galaxies "New Game Enhancements" in my June 2007 Escapist article "Blowing Up Galaxies."
Took me 2 minutes to come up with that.
Uh-huh. And in the two years the professional CoH designers and coders were thinking daily about this problem, in their two years of doubtless intensive meetings, not one of them ever once considered your idea. Right? The only possible alternative is that perhaps your two-minute inspiration isn't a perfect solution -- that it may even have unsuspected shortcomings. Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.
It's fine that Adobe recommends disabling JavaScript in Acrobat, but it would be nice if, once you disable JavaScript, Acrobat didn't thereupon constantly nag you to re-enable it "from now on for all documents" every time you open a .PDF. "It looks like you've disabled JavaScript! Can we please turn it back on forever, you poor ignorant dimwitted user you?"
The newest article posted on Ninjalistics (your leading supplier of ISO 9000-compliant corporate espionage and assassination services) is, "Six additional political operatives die in separate accidents unrelated to Karl Rove."
Don't know if anyone saw this post yesterday by Steve Pavlina on his "Personal Development for Smart People" blog. At the end of a long postmortem about his recent "juice feast" experiment, he described a vivid dream he'd had the week before:
For my November 2006 Escapist article "StarForce Must Die," I asked blogger Bill Harris to present a "DRM Bill of Rights" that resembles Brad Wardell's list. Really, in a sensible world that recognized our right to control the information stored on our own computers, this would all be common sense.
Honestly, the best and most practical path forward in today's game market is to create and market the game yourself. Though the indie space is constantly changing (for instance, the casual-game portal market that thrived as little as two years ago has now turned stagnant), there are still many opportunities for independent creative thinkers.
Indie designer Jonathan Blow, whose inventive puzzle platformer Braid just launched on Xbox Live Arcade, speaks eloquently about the indie viewpoint in his keynote speech at the Free Play 2007 conference in Melbourne. The video of his speech is compelling and inspirational. Look up his many interviews and then go on from there to learn about other indie designers. It's a tricky path but exciting and potentially rewarding.
Let's be fair about number three, that's a problem with the gaming industry in general. Almost every game reinvents its own UI, on pretty much all platforms, anywhere.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Part of the fun of playing a game is mastering its interface, and a unique interface can encourage unique new kinds of fun. Anyway, how would it work if every game had to use the same interface -- if you had to be able to play Halo, SimCity 4, Command & Conquer, Tetris, Line Rider, bridge, backgammon, and parcheesi on a standard chessboard?
Indie and casual game designers are discussing the Popcap interview at great length at the Indie Gamer forums. As I remarked there, many people have observed that the current syndrome of blatant, rampant plagiarism is dangerous to the casual game market's long-term health -- and whenever someone does observe this, the plagiarizers move immediately to smear that speaker's reputation. By demonstrating the speaker isn't a pure and saintly exemplar of all things holy, the plagiarizers believe they prove their arrant plagiarism represents no danger to the market. It's nothing but an unhelpful and short-sighted diversionary tactic.
I wrote about the cloning phenomenon in The Escapist issue #34, "Attack of the Parasites."
It's been well over a week since I last got to plug one of my Escapist articles, so let me mention " Red vs. Blue Makes Green" from issue #68. I also wrote another machinima-related article (not about RvB, though), "The French Democracy," in issue #88. (Both links go to the plain HTML text version of the articles.)
For the second time in two days, I get to plug one of my Escapist articles: "Uwe Boll and the German Tax Code," which answers the perennial question "Why do people keep giving Boll money to make movies?" (Link goes to HTML text version.)
I surveyed the surprisingly large field of Lego games a few weeks ago in an article in The Escapist #97, forthrightly titled "Lego Games." (Link goes to plain-vanilla HTML text version.)
Scribus will probably be hot stuff in three to five years, but for now, it's low-end desktop publishing, only a couple of steps above Word. In particular, Scribus currently offers only rudimentary support for tables, which was a dealbreaker for me.
There's LaTeX, of course, but I'm not yet ready to drink that particular ocean. LaTeX is oriented toward document design, whereas I need page design. I need to move the illo on page 43 two picas to the right, and then I need to look at it and decide to move it back. Dipping in and out of a config file to do that isn't appealing.
For my current DTP project, I had to move from Linux back to WinXP just so I could use InDesign. InDesign is a great program, but even so... groan.
Your phrasing is ambiguous in that you make it sound like the Constitution explicitly grants the judiciary the power of judicial review -- the ability to determine a law's constitutionality. This is incorrect; judicial review is not enunciated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court claimed the power in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison.
They used to just give it to whoever was the most important person of that year or changed the world the most. In the past this has included people who changed the course of world history like Stalin and Hitler. These days they would never put someone like that up as their person of the year. They seem to be focused on picking a choice which is either feel good patriotic (like the president if it happens to be a year when his approval rating is high) or gimicky (like this) in the past decade or so. I
We saw this quite clearly in 1999/2000 when Time chose its "Person of the Century" -- not Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, but Albert Einstein. That issue then included a two-page essay full of incoherent waffling about why they didn't pick Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. But if you establish the basis of the award as "the individual who had the greatest influence on history, for good or ill," there's no rational way to exclude the world-class jerks.
I wrote the article Red Blindness (link goes to text version) for The Escapist issue #49. It's about China's fast-developing MMOG scene, the quality issues they're wrestling with, and the prospects for future improvement. The article lists some of the online games made by Shanda, NetEase, and The9.
I can't believe these obituaries for Ray Noorda highlight his supposed business skill, when he rode Novell straight into the ground and singlehandedly destroyed both Digital Research and WordPerfect. Noorda's Novell bought WordPerfect for $855 million in June 1994, when its word processor, formerly the industry standard, was struggling and needed smart management. After Noorda left the company, Novell promptly sold WordPerfect to Corel in January 1996 for 10 million shares of Corel stock and $11 million in cash -- that's right, an $800 million loss in 18 months. Meanwhile, WordPerfect's market share had totally collapsed.
An October 2000 article in Computer Business Review Online, "Why Companies Fail", discusses Noorda's reign:
Of course, Noorda also found the Canopy Group, of which the less said the better.
Noorda achieved some great things, but for much of his latter career he was a force for chaos and destruction.
I wrote a similar article for The Escapist online gaming magazine, "Red Blindness". (The link goes to the HTML text version of the article, for those who hate the Escapist graphic approach.)
One of the most interesting DVD filmmaker commentaries I've ever heard was for a bad movie. On the Lost in Space movie DVD, the filmmakers went into detail about what they'd aimed for in a given scene, why it didn't work, and what they originally planned -- which always sounded more interesting than what made it onscreen. That commentary told as much about the realities of filmmaking as do the commentaries you hear on far better films.
I'm not talking about an MST3K-style lampoon of terrible films, but more an analysis and discussion of what went wrong and why. I see that the Sharecrows site links to a Gigli commentary, which I suspect must be played for laughs. But that's not the only way to bring utility to a bad film.
For the last couple of years I've been packaging the support line for the current edition of PARANOIA, the RPG of a darkly humorous future. The new line now has a dozen supplements (see the Mongoose Publishing PARANOIA page) and an enthusiastic and growing fan base at the leading fan site, Paranoia-Live.net. The reviews of the new line have been so congratulatory, even The Computer would approve. If you remember the glory days of PARANOIA from the early 1980s, or if you want to understand what all those old grognards mean when they say "The Computer is your friend," check out the current line at your friendly local game store or online.
Dang, why didn't the link go through? The URL for "Read Game": http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/7/12
For The Escapist issue 7, I wrote " > Read Game," a similar article about the history of text adventures and current trends in interactive fiction.
"Wal-Mart Rules" (text version)