I'd say games can be either art or hype. Call of Duty is not art, really, it's hype. In the same way that no one thinks Marvel films are moving film forward, but they are hugely popular. GTA is somewhere in the middle, being mostly hype driven, but based on solid "art" in good gameplay. Indie games tend to be art over hype.
Microsoft can't do the art because it's too big, too safe, and it can't do the hype because it's not cool.
Agreed, it's not just about the Eastern Front. The Chinese Theater is possibly just as interesting and full of stories worth telling.
I'm not sure the Pacific War gets that much less attention. There are plenty of American-made games set in it (Call of Duty, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2, etc) and shows, most noticeably "The Pacific", and movies (e.g. "Letters from Iwo Jima"). This is the theater where the only atomic bombs were ever used in anger, so there's also that making it famous.
Igor, This is a subject area that seems like it would be a good starter learning project and doable but really its not.
There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts).
Game design often also is multidisciplinary and requires knowledge of psychology, storytelling, music, and art.
Kids simply don't have the life experience, to put something together for this and have it turn out in a satisfying completed project.
Additionally, even when you are an expert, the experts don't play their own games most times. The vast majority of the fun and allure comes from the discovery of not knowing everything about the game and discovering it. This is why writing games for yourself is often doomed to failure.
Additionally, most games today have subtle manipulations and embedded addiction triggers. These aren't things they can just pick up and use. As an example of this, Call of Duty and Battlefield (FPS), have headshot audio triggers that associate through pavlovian conditioning headshots ingame with the dopamine hit sound cha-ching.
The ability to control addiction is in a part of the brain that doesn't usually develop fully until your 20s, and this stuff is in most modern games. There is a framework called the Octalysis Framework, it provides common methods to embed dark patterns in a way people don't perceive. It is based on some earlier work based in thought reform (torture), and later psychology experiments identifying key drivers to enable manipulation. This is extremely subtle stuff similar to what Pixar & Disney do in their movies (i.e. the handsome guy is always the villain, the preacher is always crazy...lot more).
Robert Cialdini wrote a book covering some of this precursor material. The book is called Influence, and it lays out all our natural perceptual blindspots, and how to exploit them. These are blindspots not even grown adults will notice most of the time without training.
I think you will be better served by starting them on something educationally constructive that is more suited for their age. If you are looking for something math related, Cosmic Calculator series has shortcuts that let you do math amazingly fast. Storytelling for writing authors may be good as well, or just focus on getting them to read for pleasure.
Descartes Rules of Method were particularly useful around that age as well as logic and reasoning (which public education will not teach them), since they are only just starting to be able to discern lies from truths, and that is a major developmental milestone.
Other activities might include Piano lessons, or art lessons.
The current gaming landscape is unhealthy, and can't be vetted by an 11-yo and even platforms designed to make this no-code easier, you have to worry about them suggesting and influencing in ways that will diminish them, or mislead, or creating interference and frustration, or something more directly harmful like TikTok and their recommendations to the Blackout Challenge (kids have literally died).
Some who don't have children might think this is overblown but there are no trusted platforms out there that will safeguard kids appropriately.
Google "Roblox kids scandal" and you'll see what I mean; and they've been recommended here in more than a few other comments.
Update: Sometimes I find it really surprising where others priorities are here on HN. You'd think protecting children would be paramount, but voting paints a very different picture, -3 for mentioning tiktok or the roblox scandal...
I grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market are things like Call of Duty where you blast people away with automatic machine guns and sniper rifle head shots.
It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
Your video game comment made me think: maybe the modern equivalent of the art scenario I mentioned is in commercial art like video games or movies, both of which still have genres and are often directly compared to each other – "Call of Duty is a better FPS than Medal of Honor," and so on.
Yeah but that was never a distinguishing property. All gaming journalism was pretty bad at the time and continues to be bad. This is why the fig leaf of "ethics in games journalism" was so attractive to anyone not paying close attention to GG: it was an open secret that many game reviews were either outright paid by publishers or written by journalists held on a tight leash with exclusive early access privileges implied to be contingent on positive review scores. I grew up in the 90s and 00s and I very much recall the boiling hatred for EA for buying out successful developers, restructuring them and leaving empty husks that churn out infinite sequels until the IP ran dry. People used to make fun of games like Call of Duty for boiling down all narrative mechanics to quick time events while railroading you through a third rate movie.
Kotaku ended up being singled out over the allegations regarding Depression Quest where it pretty much became ground zero for GG. The allegations themselves were mostly fueled by a cultural backlash of "true gamers" against "walking sims", the derogatory label for projects using games as medium for interactive narratives and experiences, which they saw as a threat to traditional gaming and gamer culture (which makes more sense if you compare it with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and see it as a precursor to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory especially popularised by Jordan Peterson).
Heck, even the affiliation was shaky at best: a person claiming to be the ex of the person who created Depression Quest accused a journalist writing for Kotaku to have given Depression Quest positive coverage while they were in a relationship. So at worst the argument was that the developer used a friend to create attention for the game by writing about it without disclosing their (at the time non-romantic) relationship. Compared to what every major gaming journalist was doing with triple-A publishers at the time this was a nothing burger - except GGers disliked what the game represented (i.e. progressives using games as a medium for interactive art pieces) and who was behind it (women and queer folk, i.e. people with "political" genders/ethnicities/orientations rather than straight-passing white-passing cis-passing men).
It’s Call of Duty so there is a linear singleplayer that is like an interactive movie, and then an online multiplayer which is the part that people actually play.
The campaign in Call of Duty is not a open world campaign where you get to do whatever you want and the environment reacts appropriately in most situations. It's basically a interactive movie where you get to practice sneaking and shooting sometimes, in the style of a Michael Bay movie.
Expecting what you write about in the third paragraph is a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to be.
Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
And if they do go somewhere else, what's the downside? Seattle lost its NBA team a while back, which was a bummer for basketball fans, obviously, but otherwise what was the harm to the city or region?
Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in. Sports team stadiums could easily go the same way.
edit:
Okay, obviously I should've picked different world cities as examples, but even taking those: Tokyo's pro sports teams don't have anywhere close to the foreign popularity that London's EPL teams do. Does that seem to hurt it?
I think I did a poor job in highlighting the meat of my response from the rest. The point is not about what I would do, or could do, in a situation like that. The point was that people don't behave rationally in situations like that; not because they're fools, or weak, or immature; it's because they are having a physiological response to extreme emotional trauma. If they don't, they are textbook sociopaths, or have been put through large amounts of emotional conditioning.
Read through your comment:
"I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation. So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish"
This point of view is speculative, it doesn't come from experience (or even a basic psychological understanding). People do NOT function that way. Maybe they do when playing Call of Duty or watching a Die Hard movie, but not in real life. I can't really impart what it feels like in that sort of situation, but I hope you never have to experience it. You end up needing therapy.
I think call of duty in many ways makes sense when viewed as a singleplayer game (which in recent years it hasn't been). When I buy it, I am not looking for "innovative gameplay, etc". I am instead looking for the gaming equivalent of a Movie. I typically like the story, and with around 6 to 8 hours of gameplay this works out to around 4 movies which is coincentally about the same price when viewed in terms of tickets.
There are many types of videogames with many different audiences, similar to movies. You can argue that videogames aren't art by pointing to Call of Duty, just as I can argue that movies aren't art by pointing to Suicide Squad. If you argue that movies are art by pointing to Citizen Kane, I'll point to Spec Ops: The Line or the Stanley Parable.
I also think you're conflating "art" and "visual design".
Why is every time I see this law referred to people seem to have only read the first clause, not the following clauses
> a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
> (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
> (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
So no, it's not just things you did at home on your own time and own equipment. They must also not be related to your employer's business etc ....
What's related would be up to a court/judge if it came to that but there's certainly a spectrum. You work on Call of Duty 27 and try to make an FPS at home. Certainly related. You work on Call of Duty and try to make a Candy Crush Clone at home. Probably related (seems like it would be considered competition for game market). You work on Call of Duty and try to write your own game engine at home. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You work on Call of Duty and try to make a Tinder clone at home. Now , maybe we're getting in the unrelated territory? You work on Call of Duty and sell baked goods at home. Probably not an issue.
If you work at a giant company like Sony that does ISPs, Health Insurance, Movies, TVs, Cameras, Video Games, Batteries, Music, LCD displays, etc etc well then you're probably going to have a lot of things that are in that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ spectrum
Of course IANAL.
If you want to do something outside of work that's even possibly in any way shape or form remotely related to your company's line of business get them to sign a contract saying they won't claim any rights in your project. If they won't consider working for a better company.
> I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years.
I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing.
A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior.
Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce.
To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.
I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.
I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).
The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.
It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I suspect this would be a technical and political minefield. Sure, you can recognise certain types of abuse images, but then what about content like that in fiction? It's very logical that something seems as problematic in real life would be fine in say, a Call of Duty game or a blockbuster movie or some other form of fiction.
Heck, there have been cases where scenes in movies and games have been 'reappropriated' as real life military or terrorist events by clueless nations and groups. For example:
So your system would have to figure out not just whether something is seen as 'offensive' or 'against the rules', but whether its from a fictional work that might be allowed on the site.
Funnily enough, as jingoistic and inadequate as educational tools the most popular FPSs are, I think the first Call of Duty gave me the first glimpse of the importance of the USSR soldiers in defeating the Third Reich - while most of the TV and film media emphasized the UK and USA and the school textbooks were way too "high level", talking more about the meetings than the actual battles.
In the last campaign one plays as Corp. Alexei Voronin and it starts with a vivid exemplification of Order Nº 227 ("Not one step back!") and ends the game with you waving the Victory Banner over the Reichstag.
I've read and heard actual historical works as I got older, and it only increased my respect for IW.
Games are pretty new, I'd cut them slack on that one. Also, I've been a gamer all my life, and many games are bad, and are getting worse in terms of "artistic expression" as the production values go up and up. I'm sure we can look up a few indie games on Steam, and point to the great visuals, but a lot of those games are just boring. The game developer must always sacrifice whatever message, or aesthetic, or meaning they hope to convey for improved gameplay - the game must be fun. There's just not much art in games for that reason, the same way there isn't much art in web apps. If you want to point at the visuals, or music, we can do that obviously.
Anyway, this one seems like a recent game that proves me wrong:
http://www.stanleyparable.com/
Games like Half Life 2 and Call of Duty try to mimic films in
a very theme-park ride way, something many gamers have pointed out. The gaming community hasn't exactly figured this one out yet, so I'll let college humanities departments get a pass on this one.
Films are pretty new too, and academia has more or less embraced it.
>If Apple can position the AppleTV as a console (maybe open it up to developers) or build something more along the lines of a traditional console, they will crush.
This opinion is pushed around a lot, however I cannot really see it happening, and I doubt Apple will ever pursue such a strategy.
For Apple to enter the console market, they would have to compete with the big boys, meaning if it can't push 100 million polygons at 1080p it will never get great adoption (who will want develop for a console with graphics out of 2005, and who will buy a console that doesn't have Call of Halo 7?). This means they have to create a modern console platform AND sell it at the price of an iPad. I'm not sure how the ghost of Jobs will take the news once he finds out Apple is selling hardware at a loss.
Next I doubt they would have anything to gain other than "you can now play CoD on the Apple ecosystem." They would lose money on the hardware, they wouldn't make much on the software if App Store profits mean anything (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-11/tech/29964545_1_app-store-gene-munster-apple reports they may have made ~$300 million). It just doesn't seem like a good idea finically. As far as the game console ecosystem goes I don't think MS/Sony/Nintendo will ever have to worry about Apple.
All in all, I am not really convinced that the App Store market will work for any of them. I strongly believe only Valve has the resources (and direction* ) to transition into the digital delivery era, at the expense of introducing yet another company into my living room. Still the question is how do you effectively deliver a magic box capable of playing Call of Duty at 1080p at the price of current consoles sustainably/profitably. Vavle's success so far doesn't worry about hardware. Their customers are either willing to spend $1000+ on a gaming every couple years, or just suck it up and blame Dell/HP for why their laptop can't play CoD.
* If Sony got their shit together, you are right, I believe they would take over the living room. They almost did it with PS2, and if the PS2 had come a bit later, or the PS3 was able to sell as much they might have done it. I think Sony could have built an Apple level brand loyalty (in the sense of having a Sony Computer, Phone, Laptop, Console) and (if they got much better at software development), they could have built a Sony store to manage your content on all those devices (after all they already own most of the movies and music). In another universe Sony may have been a Google + Hardware.
I'm not sure what you were referring to, but to be fair, the software equivalents of Avatar are big blockbuster video games. Like Call of Duty, Gears of War, Skyrim... They're awfully similar to big, blockbuster computer animated films.
They are competing services. You can really only watch one TV show at a time, so HBO is necessarily in competition with every other thing you could be watching right now.
Heck, HBO is also in competition with Call of Duty, Carcassonne, and Canondale, to varying extents.
That depends on what you mean by "interactive movie". I've seen some games that rely too heavily on cutscenes, and other games that keep the character pretty strictly on rails (e.g. Call of Duty and Half-Life series), and I generally detest both of those.
I like to get into high tactics, if not strategy, in the FPSes I play, which means I like games that have the scope and openness for emergent action. Typical examples would be Far Cry and Far Cry 2 (but not Crysis, being spoiled by the suit's power). These aren't really what I'd call interactive movies, because even though they have plot to keep the character moving along, the main meat of the game is in how you tackle "action bubbles" - but those action bubbles are nice and broad that there's plenty of scope for deception, diversion, distraction, improvisation with explosives in the environment, and an openness to lots of different approaches that linear games like Half-Life (particularly 2 and episodes) can never really match.
Hacker Cinema
25 comments on Hacker News
> It's more art than engineering
I'd say games can be either art or hype. Call of Duty is not art, really, it's hype. In the same way that no one thinks Marvel films are moving film forward, but they are hugely popular. GTA is somewhere in the middle, being mostly hype driven, but based on solid "art" in good gameplay. Indie games tend to be art over hype.
Microsoft can't do the art because it's too big, too safe, and it can't do the hype because it's not cool.
Agreed, it's not just about the Eastern Front. The Chinese Theater is possibly just as interesting and full of stories worth telling.
I'm not sure the Pacific War gets that much less attention. There are plenty of American-made games set in it (Call of Duty, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2, etc) and shows, most noticeably "The Pacific", and movies (e.g. "Letters from Iwo Jima"). This is the theater where the only atomic bombs were ever used in anger, so there's also that making it famous.
Igor, This is a subject area that seems like it would be a good starter learning project and doable but really its not.
There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts).
Game design often also is multidisciplinary and requires knowledge of psychology, storytelling, music, and art.
Kids simply don't have the life experience, to put something together for this and have it turn out in a satisfying completed project.
Additionally, even when you are an expert, the experts don't play their own games most times. The vast majority of the fun and allure comes from the discovery of not knowing everything about the game and discovering it. This is why writing games for yourself is often doomed to failure.
Additionally, most games today have subtle manipulations and embedded addiction triggers. These aren't things they can just pick up and use. As an example of this, Call of Duty and Battlefield (FPS), have headshot audio triggers that associate through pavlovian conditioning headshots ingame with the dopamine hit sound cha-ching.
The ability to control addiction is in a part of the brain that doesn't usually develop fully until your 20s, and this stuff is in most modern games. There is a framework called the Octalysis Framework, it provides common methods to embed dark patterns in a way people don't perceive. It is based on some earlier work based in thought reform (torture), and later psychology experiments identifying key drivers to enable manipulation. This is extremely subtle stuff similar to what Pixar & Disney do in their movies (i.e. the handsome guy is always the villain, the preacher is always crazy...lot more).
Robert Cialdini wrote a book covering some of this precursor material. The book is called Influence, and it lays out all our natural perceptual blindspots, and how to exploit them. These are blindspots not even grown adults will notice most of the time without training.
I think you will be better served by starting them on something educationally constructive that is more suited for their age. If you are looking for something math related, Cosmic Calculator series has shortcuts that let you do math amazingly fast. Storytelling for writing authors may be good as well, or just focus on getting them to read for pleasure.
Descartes Rules of Method were particularly useful around that age as well as logic and reasoning (which public education will not teach them), since they are only just starting to be able to discern lies from truths, and that is a major developmental milestone.
Other activities might include Piano lessons, or art lessons.
The current gaming landscape is unhealthy, and can't be vetted by an 11-yo and even platforms designed to make this no-code easier, you have to worry about them suggesting and influencing in ways that will diminish them, or mislead, or creating interference and frustration, or something more directly harmful like TikTok and their recommendations to the Blackout Challenge (kids have literally died).
Some who don't have children might think this is overblown but there are no trusted platforms out there that will safeguard kids appropriately.
Google "Roblox kids scandal" and you'll see what I mean; and they've been recommended here in more than a few other comments.
Update: Sometimes I find it really surprising where others priorities are here on HN. You'd think protecting children would be paramount, but voting paints a very different picture, -3 for mentioning tiktok or the roblox scandal...
I grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market are things like Call of Duty where you blast people away with automatic machine guns and sniper rifle head shots.
It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
Your video game comment made me think: maybe the modern equivalent of the art scenario I mentioned is in commercial art like video games or movies, both of which still have genres and are often directly compared to each other – "Call of Duty is a better FPS than Medal of Honor," and so on.
Yeah but that was never a distinguishing property. All gaming journalism was pretty bad at the time and continues to be bad. This is why the fig leaf of "ethics in games journalism" was so attractive to anyone not paying close attention to GG: it was an open secret that many game reviews were either outright paid by publishers or written by journalists held on a tight leash with exclusive early access privileges implied to be contingent on positive review scores. I grew up in the 90s and 00s and I very much recall the boiling hatred for EA for buying out successful developers, restructuring them and leaving empty husks that churn out infinite sequels until the IP ran dry. People used to make fun of games like Call of Duty for boiling down all narrative mechanics to quick time events while railroading you through a third rate movie.
Kotaku ended up being singled out over the allegations regarding Depression Quest where it pretty much became ground zero for GG. The allegations themselves were mostly fueled by a cultural backlash of "true gamers" against "walking sims", the derogatory label for projects using games as medium for interactive narratives and experiences, which they saw as a threat to traditional gaming and gamer culture (which makes more sense if you compare it with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and see it as a precursor to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory especially popularised by Jordan Peterson).
Heck, even the affiliation was shaky at best: a person claiming to be the ex of the person who created Depression Quest accused a journalist writing for Kotaku to have given Depression Quest positive coverage while they were in a relationship. So at worst the argument was that the developer used a friend to create attention for the game by writing about it without disclosing their (at the time non-romantic) relationship. Compared to what every major gaming journalist was doing with triple-A publishers at the time this was a nothing burger - except GGers disliked what the game represented (i.e. progressives using games as a medium for interactive art pieces) and who was behind it (women and queer folk, i.e. people with "political" genders/ethnicities/orientations rather than straight-passing white-passing cis-passing men).
It’s Call of Duty so there is a linear singleplayer that is like an interactive movie, and then an online multiplayer which is the part that people actually play.
The campaign in Call of Duty is not a open world campaign where you get to do whatever you want and the environment reacts appropriately in most situations. It's basically a interactive movie where you get to practice sneaking and shooting sometimes, in the style of a Michael Bay movie.
Expecting what you write about in the third paragraph is a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to be.
Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
And if they do go somewhere else, what's the downside? Seattle lost its NBA team a while back, which was a bummer for basketball fans, obviously, but otherwise what was the harm to the city or region?
Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in. Sports team stadiums could easily go the same way.
edit:
Okay, obviously I should've picked different world cities as examples, but even taking those: Tokyo's pro sports teams don't have anywhere close to the foreign popularity that London's EPL teams do. Does that seem to hurt it?
I think I did a poor job in highlighting the meat of my response from the rest. The point is not about what I would do, or could do, in a situation like that. The point was that people don't behave rationally in situations like that; not because they're fools, or weak, or immature; it's because they are having a physiological response to extreme emotional trauma. If they don't, they are textbook sociopaths, or have been put through large amounts of emotional conditioning.
Read through your comment: "I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation. So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish"
This point of view is speculative, it doesn't come from experience (or even a basic psychological understanding). People do NOT function that way. Maybe they do when playing Call of Duty or watching a Die Hard movie, but not in real life. I can't really impart what it feels like in that sort of situation, but I hope you never have to experience it. You end up needing therapy.
I think call of duty in many ways makes sense when viewed as a singleplayer game (which in recent years it hasn't been). When I buy it, I am not looking for "innovative gameplay, etc". I am instead looking for the gaming equivalent of a Movie. I typically like the story, and with around 6 to 8 hours of gameplay this works out to around 4 movies which is coincentally about the same price when viewed in terms of tickets.
There are many types of videogames with many different audiences, similar to movies. You can argue that videogames aren't art by pointing to Call of Duty, just as I can argue that movies aren't art by pointing to Suicide Squad. If you argue that movies are art by pointing to Citizen Kane, I'll point to Spec Ops: The Line or the Stanley Parable.
I also think you're conflating "art" and "visual design".
Call of Duty's (and Battlefield's) single player campaigns are more akin to a Michael Bay movie than a video game.
That's not to say I don't enjoy playing them, but I do sort of miss the days when games actually had deep single player gameplay.
Why is every time I see this law referred to people seem to have only read the first clause, not the following clauses
> a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
> (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
> (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
So no, it's not just things you did at home on your own time and own equipment. They must also not be related to your employer's business etc ....
What's related would be up to a court/judge if it came to that but there's certainly a spectrum. You work on Call of Duty 27 and try to make an FPS at home. Certainly related. You work on Call of Duty and try to make a Candy Crush Clone at home. Probably related (seems like it would be considered competition for game market). You work on Call of Duty and try to write your own game engine at home. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You work on Call of Duty and try to make a Tinder clone at home. Now , maybe we're getting in the unrelated territory? You work on Call of Duty and sell baked goods at home. Probably not an issue.
If you work at a giant company like Sony that does ISPs, Health Insurance, Movies, TVs, Cameras, Video Games, Batteries, Music, LCD displays, etc etc well then you're probably going to have a lot of things that are in that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ spectrum
Of course IANAL.
If you want to do something outside of work that's even possibly in any way shape or form remotely related to your company's line of business get them to sign a contract saying they won't claim any rights in your project. If they won't consider working for a better company.
> I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years.
I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing.
A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior.
Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce.
To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.
I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.
I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).
The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.
It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I suspect this would be a technical and political minefield. Sure, you can recognise certain types of abuse images, but then what about content like that in fiction? It's very logical that something seems as problematic in real life would be fine in say, a Call of Duty game or a blockbuster movie or some other form of fiction.
Heck, there have been cases where scenes in movies and games have been 'reappropriated' as real life military or terrorist events by clueless nations and groups. For example:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/93359/footage-of-six-isis-soldiers-killed-by-sniper-is-really-from-medal-of-honor
So your system would have to figure out not just whether something is seen as 'offensive' or 'against the rules', but whether its from a fictional work that might be allowed on the site.
Funnily enough, as jingoistic and inadequate as educational tools the most popular FPSs are, I think the first Call of Duty gave me the first glimpse of the importance of the USSR soldiers in defeating the Third Reich - while most of the TV and film media emphasized the UK and USA and the school textbooks were way too "high level", talking more about the meetings than the actual battles.
In the last campaign one plays as Corp. Alexei Voronin and it starts with a vivid exemplification of Order Nº 227 ("Not one step back!") and ends the game with you waving the Victory Banner over the Reichstag.
I've read and heard actual historical works as I got older, and it only increased my respect for IW.
There's a reason why the games on the front page of GOG are Deus Ex and Beyond Good and Evil, and not the latest edition of Call of Duty.
GOG sells old games, which are much past their prime time, and people don't play old games nearly as much as they watch old films and even shows.
Not that Netflix doesn't have influence, of course, but it's still far from being their decision.
Games are pretty new, I'd cut them slack on that one. Also, I've been a gamer all my life, and many games are bad, and are getting worse in terms of "artistic expression" as the production values go up and up. I'm sure we can look up a few indie games on Steam, and point to the great visuals, but a lot of those games are just boring. The game developer must always sacrifice whatever message, or aesthetic, or meaning they hope to convey for improved gameplay - the game must be fun. There's just not much art in games for that reason, the same way there isn't much art in web apps. If you want to point at the visuals, or music, we can do that obviously.
Anyway, this one seems like a recent game that proves me wrong: http://www.stanleyparable.com/
Games like Half Life 2 and Call of Duty try to mimic films in a very theme-park ride way, something many gamers have pointed out. The gaming community hasn't exactly figured this one out yet, so I'll let college humanities departments get a pass on this one.
Films are pretty new too, and academia has more or less embraced it.
>If Apple can position the AppleTV as a console (maybe open it up to developers) or build something more along the lines of a traditional console, they will crush.
This opinion is pushed around a lot, however I cannot really see it happening, and I doubt Apple will ever pursue such a strategy.
For Apple to enter the console market, they would have to compete with the big boys, meaning if it can't push 100 million polygons at 1080p it will never get great adoption (who will want develop for a console with graphics out of 2005, and who will buy a console that doesn't have Call of Halo 7?). This means they have to create a modern console platform AND sell it at the price of an iPad. I'm not sure how the ghost of Jobs will take the news once he finds out Apple is selling hardware at a loss.
Next I doubt they would have anything to gain other than "you can now play CoD on the Apple ecosystem." They would lose money on the hardware, they wouldn't make much on the software if App Store profits mean anything (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-11/tech/29964545_1_app-store-gene-munster-apple reports they may have made ~$300 million). It just doesn't seem like a good idea finically. As far as the game console ecosystem goes I don't think MS/Sony/Nintendo will ever have to worry about Apple.
All in all, I am not really convinced that the App Store market will work for any of them. I strongly believe only Valve has the resources (and direction* ) to transition into the digital delivery era, at the expense of introducing yet another company into my living room. Still the question is how do you effectively deliver a magic box capable of playing Call of Duty at 1080p at the price of current consoles sustainably/profitably. Vavle's success so far doesn't worry about hardware. Their customers are either willing to spend $1000+ on a gaming every couple years, or just suck it up and blame Dell/HP for why their laptop can't play CoD.
* If Sony got their shit together, you are right, I believe they would take over the living room. They almost did it with PS2, and if the PS2 had come a bit later, or the PS3 was able to sell as much they might have done it. I think Sony could have built an Apple level brand loyalty (in the sense of having a Sony Computer, Phone, Laptop, Console) and (if they got much better at software development), they could have built a Sony store to manage your content on all those devices (after all they already own most of the movies and music). In another universe Sony may have been a Google + Hardware.
I'm not sure what you were referring to, but to be fair, the software equivalents of Avatar are big blockbuster video games. Like Call of Duty, Gears of War, Skyrim... They're awfully similar to big, blockbuster computer animated films.
Ultimately I think this is just a bad analogy.
They are competing services. You can really only watch one TV show at a time, so HBO is necessarily in competition with every other thing you could be watching right now.
Heck, HBO is also in competition with Call of Duty, Carcassonne, and Canondale, to varying extents.
> You will naturally learn your countries history albeit not to the point where you can become a history professor
How? Through video game blockbusters like Call of Duty or summer movie hits like Saving Private Ryan?
That depends on what you mean by "interactive movie". I've seen some games that rely too heavily on cutscenes, and other games that keep the character pretty strictly on rails (e.g. Call of Duty and Half-Life series), and I generally detest both of those.
I like to get into high tactics, if not strategy, in the FPSes I play, which means I like games that have the scope and openness for emergent action. Typical examples would be Far Cry and Far Cry 2 (but not Crysis, being spoiled by the suit's power). These aren't really what I'd call interactive movies, because even though they have plot to keep the character moving along, the main meat of the game is in how you tackle "action bubbles" - but those action bubbles are nice and broad that there's plenty of scope for deception, diversion, distraction, improvisation with explosives in the environment, and an openness to lots of different approaches that linear games like Half-Life (particularly 2 and episodes) can never really match.