I think your jumping the gun there on Natal. I'm not trying to be a hater, but nobody has any idea if Natal will work well when it's released and even if it does, what it will mean for VR. All Natal is is another way to experience a 2D or 3D game on a flat surface. My Wii doesn't give me an incredible sense of depth, and if I wasn't holding the controller it would do even less. The whole point of VR is to immerse yourself in something that isn't real but is tangible. Playing a game without a controller is just that, nothing more. Additionally I think a lot of people won't be drawn to the idea of NOT using a controller because your playing a game. A controller is something that helps connect you to that that world, and taking it away will just create another form of dissonance between gamers, much like the Wii has. I think the Wii is great, but I don't play it as much as my PS3 or 360. As a core gamer I think the idea of motion controls are ludicrous, and no controller at all is even worse. It's one thing to play a fighting sim without a controller in your hands and your body is that method, but driving games, FPS', TPS', sports games would be fine. But your still playing a game inside your living room, and that's where the actual problem lies. If Microsoft(or any console manufacturer) can take away the living room, then there truly is no need for a controller and Natal will be much more effective. Otherwise it's just going to water down the experience of gaming for 99.99% of core gamers and that's pretty much everyone who owns a 360 or PS3. And that's assuming that Natal works incredibly well on ALL it's games. Until it's relased and there are more than simulated, pre-recorded(sometimes) tech showings, that's all it is. I hope for the sake of future gaming its the most extraordinary thing ever to help get that push but it probably won't be, and it will way too expensive.
I didn't get a chance to try out the more advanced E3 builds but I've had access to a devkit for the past few months. Like Wii remotes, the Balance Board, light guns, analog sticks, triggers, and having more than two face buttons, the success of Natal is inextricably linked to whether game developers embrace it as a gimmick or a legitimate control scheme.
Since almost nothing has been written ground-up for Natal, it's important to remember that most of the demonstrated usages have been shoe-horning Natal's control scheme into games that were designed to be played with controllers.
This is analogous to the early days of the Wii, where many games simply replaced a button push with a waggle. And, like with the Wii, I predict that the first batch of games to come out will exploit the novelty of non-traditional control without focusing on designing programs that fit. Established companies are terrified of being upstaged by anything perceived as "disruptive." Professionally speaking, some of the people designing Wii games simply don't have the creativity or ability to adapt to full leverage the platform. They just can't ignore such a huge installed base.
"As a core gamer I think the idea of motion controls are ludicrous, and no controller at all is even worse."
As a core gamer, I think this attitude hinders progress. Some games, though admittedly not many yet, are better controlled by motion, the difficulty is both capturing the input precisely as well as managing expectations of "core" gamers. Analog stick skills do not translate perfectly to motion control, just like mouse & keyboard FPS skills didn't translate 1:1 to consoles back when Halo first came out.
"Welcome to the online executive meeting of Hawaiian Punch Inc. We're trying something new to save on travel costs, and we were told this is totally secure...
HOLY SHIT!!! How did KoolAidMan get in here and what is he doing to poor punchy?!"
Shit. I'm disappointed that Linden clamped down on the sexi-trade because there is nothing that sez professional who cares about his job and respect for his company than attending a "virtual" meeting "wearing" an avatar of the Kool Aid guy with a giant wang.
First: self-censoring your own content is not a violation of first amendment rights. Not how free speech works!
Second: I'm more worried about polling their users about "adult content." Down that path lies the strong possibility of deciding that someone declaring themselves gay is "adult content." SEE ALSO AMAZONFAIL.
Yep. Good old unregulated money markets. Anyone who didn't see it as a thinly-veiled pyramid scheme deserved to have their play monies taken from them. Like 419 victims, it's hard to feel sorry for them.
"Hey! You should put your Lindens in this here bank." alot of my slower witted (but cute) friends said.
I tried to explain. I even put on my Captain Obvious suit, but they didn't listen.
Months later when Ginko folded, I whapped them upside the head with a flippy pink appendage attachment and said "Told you so, dumbass!"
It used to be a sucker was born every minute. I think now it's more like 15 seconds.
The world birth rate is around 20 births per 1000 people per year, which gives us 120,000,000 births a year, or 328,767 births per day, 13,699 births an hour, 228 births a minute.
A very generous estimate would say that there are 227 suckers born every minute.
@ManchuCandidate: you're assuming the currency won't be worthless by 2045 which isn't necessarily a given. it is fundamentally harder for the currency to fail than an individual bank to fail simply due to the scales at issue so SS has that going for it, i guess.
@tetracycloide: how could i have forgotten to mention that participation in SS is also compulsory by threat of incarceration. if everyone in the nation were required to invest a portion of their income in citibank i'm sure they'd have been solvent for a while longer too.
Depends on your views of what Libertarianism means. If I had to offer a serious one, it would be the one as pushed hard by the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist.
Individual Liberty via Limited Regulations? Check
Reliance on Free Markets aka Blind Faith in the Invisible Hand not ass raping society? Check.
@ManchuCandidate: most mechanisms of significance in second life have been regulated by the laws that exist in the real world. second life does not exist in a vacumn and therefor does not stand up to scrutiny as an accurate model of limited regulations or reliance on free markets.
@braak: Most economist majors I knew in college came from very rich families, spent a lot of money on blow, and were the best women to spend time with between real girlfriends.
I think the real problem with economics is that it's opinions touted as fact. There are still economists out there that claim "trickle down theory" works because of the economic boom in the '90s many years later. Nevermind the rich got that way by saving money...
@Paul_Is_Drunk: the problem with economics is two fold:
1. to prove a theory works an economist must simply set up a reasonable set of assumptions under which the theroy holds. the end result is that most predicitons are made by arguments that beg the question. this is further compounded by the fact that we do not know enough about the real economy to even accuratly discribe what questions are being begged. without full knowledge of intimite details for every party involved, often times without the party in question even realizing it had any baring on the decision, most predictive models are rough estimates at best.
2. the underlying assumption for every economic model in existance is that people will always take the information they have available and act rationally with it. this assumption is rather flawed in rather obvious ways. the problem is there's no a lot anyone can do about it. once the restriction is lifted there's no way to build predictive models for anything.
@tetracycloide: Someone should invent a kind of science dedicated to figuring out what percentage of the time people behave irrationally, and what ways they'll do it.
I know it's kind of crazy to say "predict how people will be irrational," but I wonder if we didn't look closely at it for long enough, would we discover that mostly people be have irrationally in the same three or four different ways?
@braak: psychology works that way to some degree. when you are human and have study human mental processes and behavior it is possible to gain enough understanding that you can occasionally provide insights as to why someone may or may not be doing something.
this brings up another inherent problem. predictive models are inevitably data driven because they must be aggregated over large sample sizes, to large for a single human being to draw any direct analysis from. if human understanding is required to evaluate human behavior then we are at am impasse because we lack the programming language to fully describe the data points involved in quantifying human behavior. arguably statistics and computer science were created because human thought processes and behaviors so often conflicted with actual logic that a set of rules and theorems needed to be outlined that defined what 'logical' behavior even was.
why do people still think second life is highly populated and well done? its just a place for furries and social retards. if they really wanted good data they would take it to WoW.... the military already knows this!
06/13/09
In SL, perhaps it's more apt to say that you choose your own goals - there are roleplaying game experiences within the virtual world, tho.
I gotta let Pathfinder know one of his pics made it to io9! :D
06/12/09
06/12/09
06/12/09
06/15/09
I didn't get a chance to try out the more advanced E3 builds but I've had access to a devkit for the past few months. Like Wii remotes, the Balance Board, light guns, analog sticks, triggers, and having more than two face buttons, the success of Natal is inextricably linked to whether game developers embrace it as a gimmick or a legitimate control scheme.
Since almost nothing has been written ground-up for Natal, it's important to remember that most of the demonstrated usages have been shoe-horning Natal's control scheme into games that were designed to be played with controllers.
This is analogous to the early days of the Wii, where many games simply replaced a button push with a waggle. And, like with the Wii, I predict that the first batch of games to come out will exploit the novelty of non-traditional control without focusing on designing programs that fit. Established companies are terrified of being upstaged by anything perceived as "disruptive." Professionally speaking, some of the people designing Wii games simply don't have the creativity or ability to adapt to full leverage the platform. They just can't ignore such a huge installed base.
"As a core gamer I think the idea of motion controls are ludicrous, and no controller at all is even worse."
As a core gamer, I think this attitude hinders progress. Some games, though admittedly not many yet, are better controlled by motion, the difficulty is both capturing the input precisely as well as managing expectations of "core" gamers. Analog stick skills do not translate perfectly to motion control, just like mouse & keyboard FPS skills didn't translate 1:1 to consoles back when Halo first came out.
06/01/09
HOLY SHIT!!! How did KoolAidMan get in here and what is he doing to poor punchy?!"
"OHH YEAAAHHHH"
06/01/09
06/01/09
04/15/09
It's like taking the war out of World of Warcraft.
04/15/09
Second: I'm more worried about polling their users about "adult content." Down that path lies the strong possibility of deciding that someone declaring themselves gay is "adult content." SEE ALSO AMAZONFAIL.
04/15/09
04/15/09
There was an AmazonFail, but that guy had nothing to do with it. It was all internal.
04/15/09
Plus, a thong/beanie combo isn't all that hot, really.
04/15/09
04/15/09
04/15/09
Really!
04/15/09
Teenagers, I guess.
11/24/08
"Hey! You should put your Lindens in this here bank." alot of my slower witted (but cute) friends said.
I tried to explain. I even put on my Captain Obvious suit, but they didn't listen.
Months later when Ginko folded, I whapped them upside the head with a flippy pink appendage attachment and said "Told you so, dumbass!"
It used to be a sucker was born every minute. I think now it's more like 15 seconds.
11/24/08
There's over 6,000,000,000 people in the world.
The world birth rate is around 20 births per 1000 people per year, which gives us 120,000,000 births a year, or 328,767 births per day, 13,699 births an hour, 228 births a minute.
A very generous estimate would say that there are 227 suckers born every minute.
11/24/08
The suckers are from all sides of the political spectrum, too. Social Security is a pyramid scheme, for example.
-Kle.
11/24/08
But won't collapse till 2045 unlike say Citibank which fell apart in less than a week.
11/24/08
11/24/08
11/24/08
11/24/08
11/24/08
Depends on your views of what Libertarianism means. If I had to offer a serious one, it would be the one as pushed hard by the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist.
Individual Liberty via Limited Regulations? Check
Reliance on Free Markets aka Blind Faith in the Invisible Hand not ass raping society? Check.
11/24/08
11/24/08
11/24/08
11/24/08
it's a cycle, it will happen again, and who is president when it happens certainly won't make much difference. it never really has.
11/24/08
"Oh, look at me, I'm an economist! I just discovered that this problem was predicted by something that happened years ago!"
Mutter mutter mutter.
11/24/08
11/24/08
(I am postulating that this reason is that economists have boring sex.)
11/24/08
I think the real problem with economics is that it's opinions touted as fact. There are still economists out there that claim "trickle down theory" works because of the economic boom in the '90s many years later. Nevermind the rich got that way by saving money...
11/24/08
11/24/08
1. to prove a theory works an economist must simply set up a reasonable set of assumptions under which the theroy holds. the end result is that most predicitons are made by arguments that beg the question. this is further compounded by the fact that we do not know enough about the real economy to even accuratly discribe what questions are being begged. without full knowledge of intimite details for every party involved, often times without the party in question even realizing it had any baring on the decision, most predictive models are rough estimates at best.
2. the underlying assumption for every economic model in existance is that people will always take the information they have available and act rationally with it. this assumption is rather flawed in rather obvious ways. the problem is there's no a lot anyone can do about it. once the restriction is lifted there's no way to build predictive models for anything.
11/24/08
I know it's kind of crazy to say "predict how people will be irrational," but I wonder if we didn't look closely at it for long enough, would we discover that mostly people be have irrationally in the same three or four different ways?
11/24/08
this brings up another inherent problem. predictive models are inevitably data driven because they must be aggregated over large sample sizes, to large for a single human being to draw any direct analysis from. if human understanding is required to evaluate human behavior then we are at am impasse because we lack the programming language to fully describe the data points involved in quantifying human behavior. arguably statistics and computer science were created because human thought processes and behaviors so often conflicted with actual logic that a set of rules and theorems needed to be outlined that defined what 'logical' behavior even was.
11/16/08
11/16/08