If it was in Star Trek then it’s the future Wednesday, Dec 31 2008

I was reflecting on the Amazon Kindle earlier. I kept thinking that it was ridiculous and overpriced but now that I found out what it actually does aside from being a glorified text viewer I just think it’s ridiculous. I would also say in general that something isnt overpriced if people are willing to buy enough of it for it to be constantly sold out. Isn’t that what they call market demand? Well whatever.

The main focus of my reflections was whether or not the likes of the Kindle was the future of books. I really want to say no because I have a lot of issues with things that are proprietary (is there some other term for this concept of things being proprietary? propriation? propriatariness? propriating?) but considering the fact that the iPod and video game consoles are still going strong I guess I’m the only one. Although it would be more ideal for there to be freer distribution and consumption methods the reality is that even if you have an inferior standard it is so much simpler to have one because there’s not a lot you can do with chaos.

So the future for digital books is the same as that for digital music: inferior devices dedicated to one given service or the other that are liable to go defunct due to the nature of the free market. My god I wish I had a back-lit calculator. Actually I don’t know how the hell these readers work, if you can plonk any given types of textual media in them and get them to work or not. But I can see greater obstacles to file conversion than what you face with audio/visual files where it’s more a matter of quality than it would be of actual usability/formatting. In that case some kind of media standardization would be more convenient than hardware and service standardization (which would be a monopoly) but there isn’t an incentive to present distributors for that even though there is for content producers and possibly consumers. Yeah I really shouldn’t write about things I know nothing about but it’s kind of fun to speculate and be way off base don’t you think?

Something I am curious about is the comparative environmental impact and resource usage of the likes of kindle compared with a book. One is inclined to think that it would be less waste but aside from clearly using less space and physical resources I’m tempted to think that the nature of the waste from production and the energy usage for the service and the device make things a lot closer. Comparative monetary cost for the consumer is also a curious matter considering that digitalization basically destroys the potential for contemporary secondary distribution (used books) which will ultimately drive up the average cost for media. One also wonders about the future role and value of libraries but that’s beyond the scope of today’s crappy post.

One last thing I need to say is that for the love of god they need to start either backlighting or using OLEDs (at that rate they need to make better OLED technology) or the likes on all screens for all handheld devices. If we all had screens that we could actually see without shining light all over them then maybe we wouldn’t need as much environmental lighting?

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desires most black Friday, May 16 2008

Well as the comment on my most recent post points out, the japanese word for gold is kin and gin means silver. This is a mistake I constantly make when romanizing, I can actually tell the difference between the kanji. Although if I’m not mistaken the kanji for gin is made up of the kanji used for kin and something else (the kanji ryo?) so it’s just confusing either way. For the record I meant to entitle it “kin for the win” and had I not included the translation note no one would have ever noticed I messed up since gin is a shougi piece as well so if I ever looked back I’d have though I meant to do it all along. I’m not quite sure what to say about that so I won’t say anything.

Recently while aimlessly watching tv as people are prone to do I happened to catch the start of a certain movie. The only thing that was remarkable about this was that they waited about a half hour before going to commercial break for the first time. Frankly it was pretty difficult to abandon the channel during the break after hanging on for that long. I did anyway of course but it got me to thinking: who the hell realized that was a good idea? I guess I’m not sure that it is, I still didn’t watch the commercials after all, but it was a lot better than the usual break every 10-15 minutes during a movie; which is the main reason I don’t bother watching movies on tv most of the time. Anyway that’s just something to pay attention to. You might not have realized it but tv shows are actually shorter now than they used to be in the (distant enough) past to some extent. The difference is more apparent among hour long programming than half hour programming, a lot of shows used to be upwards of 50 minutes and are now less than 45. I think half hour programming has only gone from 25 to 22 or so. This is part of the reason why a lot of the older shows aren’t in syndication anymore, demand is of course another reason but that’s another story. So that’s just something to think about.

Another thing I was thinking about is that it’s not like developers didn’t make split screened content in games until Nintendo put out their dual screened Nintendo DS. A lot of the games on the system typically use the off screen to show either a/the map, some kind of status screen or menu, or a dialog box. All things that you can find in regular console games. If there’s a difference it’s that you’ve always got two screens with the DS but a regular game screen might only ever show one thing at a time. In the end of course people can only spread their attention out so much so to have you try and play on two screens at once would be beyond most people. There is something to be said of the stylus letting you select exactly what you want to without having to cycle through things like with a game controller, or drag the cursor like with a mouse, but that isn’t necessarily something that required two screens either. I imagine that you can do similar things with the Wii and its remote on a tv screen. Did they come out with those retinal sensors for computers yet? I’m pretty sure they have motion detectors for you to do stuff with your hands but I think they still work like a typical mouse. I’ve never really seen one in use. It might be worth looking into.

As to what the thing I’m most interested in right now would be, probably not dying from what could be a pandemic. They’re pretty quick to declare “possible pandemic” these days but after evading genocide from way back when until now I’d just as soon not get wiped out en masse in the end anyway. I don’t necessarily have a problem with dying from a disease, it’s not ideal but it’s a death, but I’ve always been the type to prefer not to do what everyone else is doing if given the choice. Not that a pandemic is the same as a fad. Probably. I suspect that people that get the same diseases are broadly doing the same things. Like breathing and drinking water. Or more cynically drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. If you drink and smoke and then get cancer then you probably deserve it. Yeah, I went there.

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全てな生きては薔薇色の地獄 Friday, May 9 2008

You know what your rights are first and foremost as a writer? To write utter nonsense, to mangle whatever languages you can get your hands on, and then in the end say you did it out of artistic liberty even though the reality is you just fucked up.

The only thing that I want to say today is that when you’re playing a game you might as well take advantage of all facets of the game to succeed. It depends on what your priorities are. If you want to challenge yourself then perhaps you shouldn’t reset the moment things go wrong, but if you just want to do the best that you can then you might as well take advantage of being able to start over.

Unfortunately you can’t save and reset in life, though people do try, but you can take advantage of a number of things to improve your chances of success. Unfortunately being successful today sometimes means having no success for 10 years but that’s pretty vague. The main thing to make use of to try and be more successful is other people. People don’t necessarily want to help people out in general, but there have been a few that kicked their weight around and set up places for you to go and try and get help for most conceivable issues in the majority of forward-thinking countries. You want to start a business? There’s someone to talk to. Your business isn’t successful? There’s someone to talk to. You’ve gone out of business? There’s someone to talk to etc.

I would say that in general people dig themselves their deepest holes with education even though you can by and far receive almost constant aid and attention if you attempt to do so. Whether any of this assistance will actually be a benefit or not I can’t say, but at least it will be something else going on. But as to education being the biggest hole, if you get stuck with something and never get out it can potentially influence the course of the rest of your life. Maybe if you’d have stuck with that College, or algebra, or biology, or whatever, then things would have been totally different. Maybe you wouldn’t be a miserable office worker but instead a miserable geologist or exterminator?

So actually even if you are an idiot, or just acting like one, there are people who will try and give you some aid and all you have to do is ask. The reasons not to ask are myriad as well but if you’re stuck and you don’t want to be it could be your only option aside from giving up.

Wait a minute didn’t I just say from the start that you should go ahead and give up and start over again? Damn. You know I just found out that a short essay I wrote (ironically on the effects that the sophistication of computer technology has had on our daily lives) was evaluated favorably; by a program. Humans really have obsoleted themselves if they’re not even the ones saying what’s good and bad anymore. You know this reminds me of some article I linked a while back about a computerized (what does that even mean anymore, really?) coffee tasting device that would measure quality based on comparative values presumably identified by the tastes of some asscap or another who liked or disliked certain coffee made certain ways.

Well just remember that jesus still loves you and I’d rather be drinking.

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The kind of ideas you only get after a taxing day and a stupid life Thursday, Apr 10 2008

For a long time now there has been an idea that hopefully if we (humanity) sent data (mostly audio signals) out towards space then an alien race would pick it up and it would be like Star Trek or something. Another hope is that the information (mostly satelite signals) that’s streaming around the planet would travel the cosmos for eternity and so even if people died out or the world was destroyed humans would leave a legacy.

However there has recently been speculation, I am not familiar enough with the topic to know if this can be confirmed or is just theoretical, that within a distance of a few light years these signals would just break down into presumably indecipherable noise. This is supposed to be news to make fatalists like myself despair that when it’s over for humans it’s all over. However it occurred to me just a moment ago that if what I’ll refer to as “clear” data (there is probably an actual term for original complete signals) breaks down into noise over a certain distance, it should also be possible to utilize some sort of scrambling or encryption in order to do the reverse. That is, if a signal breaks down into static you should be able to send out a type of static that will eventually turn into a signal. Or something like that, my point is to reverse the process somehow. This would probably be complicated and is possibly beyond current technology. But I think it should eventually be possible.

In truth there are probably too many factors involved in long range data transmission/communication, and the usefulness of such things at this time is debatable. I am personally a lot more inclined to believe that if there’s alien life out there it’s more apt to enslave and or destroy us than become our best friend. Call me a pessimist but if we indiscriminately kill creatures that are “below” us (insects) and raise others for the sole purpose of eating them (cattle) then I can only imagine that the most likely life forms we contact will behave in a similar matter. In fact the best we could hope for would be that there’s nothing else out there. Back on target though, devising ways to get data to remain clear, or to clear up when sent over vast distances (if I recall a light year is like 1 billion km or something) seems to me to be something that wouldn’t have many other applications. If you could control the phenomenon over select distances it would be a useful intelligence technology, a sort of encryption method. You could possibly even just use it for private telecommunications. However I don’t see how it could work easily like that, or I’m just talking about encrypted communication as it is now in the first place. I’m not really that interested in looking into the matter.

But if you want to contact aliens and rain doom upon us all, or if you’re interested in creating human posterity then you might look into it: sending out noise which will eventually assemble into a clear signal.

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Keeping a bad idea down Sunday, Mar 16 2008

Q: “what are some other games like Dragon Force?” A: Honestly I can’t think of one. There are plenty of other real time strategy games that then stop the world time for battles (actually the possibly defunct Ogre Battle series is the only such one that comes to mind that I’ve played myself, supposedly Soul Nomad used a more interactive battle system that was similar to OB) and have RPG elements if you look around for them. But I can not think of a single other game, besides presumably Dragon Force 2 presumably which I never played (I wonder if they’ll ever remake that for the Sega AGES PS2 series? They seemed to have such a hard time with the original that they might not but DF sold out everywhere so you’d think that they would give it a try), which has the same “let 100 troops melee against another 100 troops while palate swapped generals cast not even palate swapped spells until one or the other side falls” battle gameplay. Maybe the similarly defunct Langrisser series was a bit similar, I only ever played the first one and that was a looooooonnnnnnggggg time ago now. The Langrisser series arguably morphed into the Growlanser series (at least both have art by Satoshi Urushihara) but that’s a pretty normal RTSRPG (real time strategy role playing game) if there is such a thing. Anyway if if you know of a game that’s really similar to dragon force, mostly the boring as hell battles, then please write in, I’d be very curious. I have however endeavored to come up with possibly similar games using a complicated scientific method that consisted of going to the website of an online game retailer, typing “dragon force” into the search box and seeing what results came up and whether or not they were any kind of SRPGs (it gets confusing when some use strategy for the s and simulation for the s, DF was probably more of the latter). For the most part it was normal rpgs like entries in the breath of fire and dragon quest series but a variety of games that I’ve never played came up which seemed like possibilities. They were ASH: Archaic Sealed Heart for the Nintendo DS that probably isn’t any good since it’s by Hironobu Sakaguchi; all kinds of games from Idea Factory like the PS2 Spectral Force and Rebirth Moon series, one of which is on Xbox 360; Dragon Shadow Spell from Flight Plan (developers of the Summon Night series which was published by Banpresto who has now been nominally absorbed by Bandai Namco games) which is probably a normal strategy rpg though I heard it was really good (and sold out) {edit: I managed to track down a copy, it’s an addictive game but I was right that it’s nothing like Dragon Force and more of a typical SRPG}; Grim Grimoire for PS2 which I’m pretty sure is a more or less normal RTS game; Operation Darkness for Xbox 360 which can’t possibly be any good; and possibly the Kessen series for PS2 which really wasn’t great but is the only one I’ve mentioned that I actually played and now occurs to me that it probably was pretty similar, only 3d, more interactive, and almost fully real time. By the way I had heard in the past that Idea Factory games were similar or otherwise related to Dragon Force in some respect, maybe they have someone prominent from that series at that company I’m really not sure. Maybe I’m just remembering that when I pre-ordered the limited edition of the dragon force PS2 remake it came up. I think one of the Spectral Force games might have been up for pre-order at the same time, or it came up in the search results then as it did now. Thinking about it a bit that’s probably what it is.

Game I had no idea about but want to play because I’m a Shadow Hearts fan: Chaos Wars. Game series that isn’t really very good but I enjoy it anyway: Summon Night. Series I have been a big fan of and sunk possibly over a thousand hours into but might never buy another game from again; Super Robot Taisen/Wars. [edit: later in the year I went on to buy SRT Original Generations and OG Gaiden on the PS2 as well as W on the DS, Z is on the horizon now and I’ll probably buy that] Next Generation game console I’m most likely to buy if I ever get around to buying one: a Japanese PS3.

With that out of the way, for the record, even though I played Dragon Force to death and it was a really great game when it came out, I do not think that it’s battle system was ideal. If anything it was well below ideal which is probably why it hasn’t been massively emulated and you don’t see games like it unlike the Shining Force series (which is now dead apparently and you have to wonder when SEGA will follow since they don’t make good games anymore). Anyway the battle system does have a big novelty factor but it gets pretty damn boring to just sit around waiting to cast a spell every 15 seconds or so. You can actually use the troop commands to give yourself a huge advantage over the shitty AI (like dispersing your troops every time the enemy is about ready to use a spell or surrounding the general with mages so that they get shot two times in a row and can’t attack back) but this gets really tedious too. So frankly to improve upon the system you would need more intricate commands and possibly direct control. I think that adding direct control to Dragon Force games would basically result in Dynasty Warriors where you have one supreme character mowing through fodder with a limited accompaniment… I think that series might have tapered off. I could imagine a dragon force esque game that used the prioritized automatic command system called “gambits” of FFXII. Something like “hold defensive position if: enemy out numbers you” followed by “advance on enemy formation if: you outnumber enemy” and ending with “when no enemy troops remain: move in on enemy general” etc. where the part followed by: would be somewhat variable actions (the gambits in FF12 were mostly targeting commands and then you’d choose the action). I think that kind of system, which could of course be overridden by direct commands, would suit an srpg more than a normal rpg. But just like my main complaint of how it’s pointless to play FF12 because you aren’t really playing it would be the same with such a game as this. hmph…. Never in all my years of gaming did I think that the evolution of video games would be games that played themselves like interactive demos of arcade games. But so it goes.

To take a different tack for a moment, humans have obsoleted themselves quite a bit already but it’s only going to be possible to make human action more and more unnecessary as time goes by. Already it’s possible for machines to produce things, including food, with very limited human input. If you created some kind of algorithm to create variances in the production process and then another that tried to improve efficiency and quality (I’m not sure if that’s possible, it would require a huge amount of base data and storage capacity that just isn’t something that’s a part of of manufacturing systems at this time, right now they just have settings that act as instructions) then you’d really obsolete humans for all but entertainment purposes. I mean hell they already are capable of creating automated combat machines and execution systems so people don’t even really need to kill each other anymore.

You know, I really enjoy the comforts of technology. Probably if things weren’t this way I wouldn’t even still be alive for various reasons. But I can’t help but wonder if technology might not be the worst thing to happen not only to the world in general, but people in particular. Of course you could argue that what has been created by humans isn’t separate from humans. Humans being the worst thing to happen to humans is probably about right anyway though. Well, perhaps it’s not too late in my life for me to start setting up technology that will eventually save the world. I can’t remember how long it is theorized to take for the heat death of existence but, if humans manage to survive until remotely close to that time, and assuming that matter doesn’t ever disappear, just convert, then it should be possible to avoid that.

How I went from writing about dragon force to preaching about how the worst thing people could come up with is true artificial intelligence (it will just kill us all, there’s no other way around it, people aren’t farsighted enough to come up with every possible safeguard) and how there’s probably no point to our existence but there it is. Really the only thing I can imagine people possibly contributing to the world in the face of all their destruction of it is if they come up with ways to save the whole world, or possibly the universe, from extinction. It should be possible. Well maybe not the “whole” part, you’d feasibly need to use up some sort of material in order to do something like that. Kind of like in Gunbuster where they set off BM3 in the center of the galaxy (or was it universe? I never remember the destinction) to destroy the STMC. Something like that is the only chance humanity has at redeeming themselves to their world. The rest of the universe might be pissed though don’t you think? Oh well. Self before love, love before family, family before clan, clan before city, city before nation, nation before continent, continent before world, world before galaxy, galaxy before universe. Or something like that, I needed to have thrown “species” and “existence” in there somewhere.

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The pen is all dried up Wednesday, Feb 27 2008

I say the pen is the greatest human invention which allowed science to flourish but who cares?

Not that long ago I replayed the classic super famicom/snes  game “Chrono Trigger” and found that it had held up pretty well over the years. Yes the game is 13 years old now and it’s still a good RPG. It might be my favorite game of all time. Might be. I’m not going to say it’s the best game of all time, that’s bullshit. But it is one of the better rpgs of all time, and possibly the best game available on the system it was on.

So going through some things the other day I came across my copy of “Chrono Cross” which is more or less the sequel to Chrono Trigger. For those not familiar with either game, the basic premise of Chrono Trigger (hereby CT) was saving the by traveling through time. The basic premise of Chrono Cross (hereby CC) on the other hand is saving the world by traveling between two parallel worlds. I think they said “dimensions” in the game but you know…

Anyway, of all things even though it came out almost 5 years after the first game (a third game is nowhere in sight) I don’t think that CC has aged as well. I attribute this mostly to how horrid the original Playstation is. The game looks awful. CT won’t wow you with its graphics now but it looks OK. The load times suck, there’s slowdown, all that kind of crap.

Now the interesting thing about CC compared to CT is that it’s a lot more dynamic and there are a lot more characters (43 compared to 7). Character development is questionable but to be fair it was in CT as well. The thing that CC does, keeping in with its two world dynamic, is that for the most part there are two ways to go about anything. Early in the game you have 3 choices of how to get into viper manor but most of the other times just give you two choices. Ultimately you’re in the same places doing the same things, but with different characters and for different reasons.

Now that’s a game. In fact those kinds of options are what I was talking about in my last post about games. You feel more like you’re playing a game when you’re actually making meaningful decisions about what’s going on, when the outcome can actually change. On the other hand in a really straight forward role playing  game like oh… Final Fantasy X, the experience is closer to watching a movie than playing a game.

So about the gameplay, CC uses kind of an interesting battle system which combines various concepts from various games and introduces a few new ones. Some of them have not been re-used or emulated to this point that I’m aware of. I was going to say that the “field element” system, in which you use an ability and that element builds up in the battle, hasn’t been used since but I realized that’s not true. It hasn’t been used exactly in that form, and it’s not necessarily always paired with a concept of “elemental properties”, but it has been used. Only being able to use a particular ability/spell once per battle unless you equip multiple instances of it is sort of interesting too. It doesn’t necessarily make any sense, but at least it introduces an element of strategy that isn’t too oppressive (as compared to like Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga Avatar Tuner (1+2) where you are constantly shuffling around your equipped abilities and have to do things just so to succeed at times). I’m not sure that I’m a big fan of the attack system, it’s kind of time consuming. I’m also torn as to whether or not I like the necessity of connecting with attacks to charge up energy to use abilities. I’d much rather just level the enemy with one move. But again it adds an extra dimension of strategy to the game’s battles.

The other thing it has you doing that I like, which is actually the oldest of old-school, is actually using items to interact with other characters. Most of the time you’ll select things and nothing will happen, or there will be little point to the responses you get, but it shows good attention to detail. Which is really the hallmark of a great game, and which a lot of games these days are lacking as they’ve slowly become less like games and more like movies where you are moving the main character. I’m especially talking about RPGs here since that’s mostly what I play but it applies somewhat to other games as well.

fuu so anyway, aside from technical limitations which are really glaring 8 years later I would say that the plot of CC is the weak link. Or maybe the plot execution anyway. The game is somewhat confusing, and a lot of the things that go on are questionable at best. Character development is also rather limited, for the most part the various characters that join up and stay with you do so with no true motivation after you give them something or go look for something with them. And at that rate the characters are pretty much interchangeable which has been a continuous knock against Square (now Square Enix) games. Of course the flip-side of interchangeability is customization. Almost any character can use almost any elemental ability as opposed to the traditional fire hero or water mage archetypes. Exceptions are, if I remember correctly, some of the more powerful spells being only equipable by characters of the same element. There are variations in character stats that make you more inclined to focus on attacking as opposed to casting elements or vice versa with some characters. But for the most part those end out being pretty trivial in the end too. Ah speaking of stats, I am not a big fan of the… well lack of a level up system. Sometimes some of your stats rise after some battles and you’re never given an indication as to whether fighting will or won’t increase your stats. After every “boss” fight you will get a star and your stats will increase, after that point you can count on at least getting some more HP if you battle. But it’s debatable how worth it is to “level”. Again the flip side of this is that you can pretty much go straight through the game without leveling, which is annoying but at the same time that’s what makes an RPG rather than an action or adventure game. I suppose there’s no real reason why that must be the case.

Perhaps I should muse on the validity of the experience system in rpgs some other time though and finish this. Well CC is a game that’s generally well regarded, but I’ve never known anyone to say it’s better than CT or that they prefer it to CT. When top 10 games or rpgs come up, I never see CC on the list. To this date CT characters will pop up in popularity polls, but I’ve never seen that with CC. I could go on, probably, but I think you get my point. CC is a good game, it’s probably close to being a great game, but it just doesn’t quite have the same character as CT did.

One last note: CC has a “new game+” system like CT did. I am an advocate of this kind of system in games with multiple endings by the way, CT was the first game I can think of that made use of it and it’s arguably the most emulated characteristic of that game. For the most part it’s the endings you can see in new game+ that develop the plot of various characters, or frankly give any kind of ending to these characters. But considering how many characters there were, I think there should have been more endings, or at least all of the characters should have been represented in an ending. Probably getting them all wouldn’t have been worth it if there was actually an ending per character, which is how I felt about the ridiculous amount of variations on the ending present in Star Ocean 2 (there was a trick to doing it in star ocean 3 that meant you only really had to play through the game twice though so I did it in that game), but the difference is that the characters in SO2 were developed in the course of the game. Most games don’t have that many characters for a reason. Hell most fiction doesn’t. I think that games give you the best medium for fully representing characters but most productions don’t take advantage of that.

Well anyway, it’s debatable how much point there is to writing about an 8 year old game. I think that games are in a uniquely bad position as far as the passage of time goes. Game systems will keep working for a really long time, all of mine still do as far as I know, the media that games are on will hold up for a long time if properly taken care of (I think that disc games are pretty fragile and most people get them all scratched up but if you don’t they’re fine) as well. However games are only available for a relatively limited amount of time, produced in comparatively small runs. The works of Shakespeare have been around over 400 years, you could go out and get them in almost any country of the world at your whim. Conversely Persona 3 was available for a matter of months. There was a fairly wide window (game wise) for Chrono Cross since it had a large enough initial release and was later re-released at a reduced price. I want to say that you had a matter of years to get a copy new if you wanted one. Of course the other problem is that as technology advances it becomes harder and harder to justify playing old games. This has more to do with overall presentation than visuals. The era of CD games stands out the weakest to me, even more so than the first generation of video games back in the 70s. Those games just suck compared to what’s available now, cd games and systems actually perform really poorly. Perhaps by the time the PS4 comes out I’ll think the same thing about PS2 games and the dvd era but I am not as sure about that. I’m still waiting for them to be able to make computers that don’t require ridiculously loud fans. Which of course will translate to game systems that don’t make noise, again. Or failing them not making noise, (which is impossible as long as you have moving parts, which comparing storage capacity of flash memory to optical media is somewhat unlikely) making them with some kind of noise insulation. I mean really. Shit.

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Maturity is usually just cowardice Tuesday, Feb 26 2008

I was reading an article about the future of the video game industry, and at one point it said something like “as the video game industry has matured and become more mainstream”. Now from a business perspective this is true. From a creative perspective this is not necessarily the case. I would say that right now the focus of the game industry in general is “let’s make games that lots of people will be able to have fun with so that we can make a lot of money” and guess what, that’s what the industry focus was right at the start. The alternative would be “let’s make games that are really interesting” or “let’s make games that are really deep and challenging”. Let me be the first one to tell you that challenging games are not fun at all.

I could go on with this all day but let me sum up where I’m going this way: Relative to what you can actually do in the games available for them, the Sony PS3 is a “next generation” video game console, the Nintendo Wii isn’t even a first generation console. I mean seriously some of the shit they have you do in Nintendo Wii games is the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s with their Game and Watch series. To be a little more generous, the “wii sports” package is pretty much the same gameplay wise as the old NES/famicom sports titles, maybe even worse in some cases. The only differences are graphics that are a bit sharper and more sophisticated motion sensing capabilities.

So saying, what would I consider maturation for video games? I think that games need to focus more on letting you control stories and less on showing you stories that you get the most minimal of input into. In other words free-form everything. Action, plot, endings, expansions, and especially controls. Games continually fall back to limiting you artificially. Like not being able to jump/climb in RPGs when and where you want to but instead only in fixed areas or sometimes not at all. Similarly you are not allowed to interact with everything in the game world. There are three reasons for this, to control the way you progress through the game, system/media limitations, and the fact that a single studio doesn’t have the time, effort or resources to code shoveling and pencil sharpening into FPS games. Somewhere along the line when deciding which direction to head in with a game they do actually have to prioritize “well do we want people to have a bunch of guns and blow stuff up or do we want them to have a handwriting interface?”. So, I think that the fewer the limitations the more the industry would mature. Right now more than anything the two biggest obstacles are media limitations and controllers. Ah well part of the controller thing might actually be the limitations of humans in the first place. I mean at the most you only expect people to be able to move their ten fingers and to only be capable of so much action at a time. Whatever else changes that isn’t going to. I’ve heard speculation that eventually game controls will just be a variety of sensors. Not even virtual reality, that too is too limiting. But things like monitoring the motion of your eyes to make selections and change displays and having each little wiggle of an appendage being a different command. Walking in real life to walk in a video game isn’t playing, it’s walking. Shifting your pinkie and having your on screen avatar start walking as a few sideways motions of your opposite ring finger start singling out destinations while the side to side motion of your eyes shifts the on-screen display… That is playing a game.

So that’s what I’m saying, that’s the direction games need to be headed in to mature. That’s playing a video game.  Dancing games, music games, sports games, those are all just pale imitations. But adventure games? Platformers? Shooters? Now those are video games. Dammit. Fuck.

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The value is 70 Saturday, Feb 16 2008

People mumble about the economy and the job market but the simple truth of the matter is that people have progressively been obsoleting others and themselves for decades ever since the advent of the computer. Is this a good time to mention that I do not trust various scientific attempts like true artificial intelligence?

Anyway, when a machine can tell you if something tastes good or not, it’s only a matter of time until machines tell you everything. Ah actually isn’t it already that time? I mean what are you doing right now? So machines already tell us everything (you probably didn’t know this but at the least they are telling us whether our water is supposedly safe to drink or not and probably have been for 20 years), I guess what really is only a matter of time would be when we are all ourselves machines (there must be some portion of people that are mechanical if not necessarily computerized already).

That reminds me of a severely autistic girl I knew who was a big “transhumanism” advocate. As a foot note while I don’t imagine that everyone with Asperger syndrome is a transhumanist, or that vice-versa everyone that’s enthusiastic about transhumanism has some aspect like that, this person certainly knew quite a few who were. Personally I think that it would be better for humans to disappear than to only be able to live on as cyborgs. But at the same time if someone offered me a new body on my deathbed I’d probably take it.

Because you know, it’s not really that humans want to live forever. It’s just that they don’t want to disappear.

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