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Game Endings Going Out of Style? 190

Posted by Soulskill
from the to-be-continued dept.
An article in the Guardian asks whether the focus of modern games has shifted away from having a clear-cut ending and toward indefinite entertainment instead. With the rise of achievements, frequent content updates and open-ended worlds, it seems like publishers and developers are doing everything they can to help this trend. Quoting: "Particularly before the advent of 'saving,' the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place. Sure, multiplayer and arcade style games still had their place, but fond 8, 16 and 32-bit memories consist more of completion and satisfaction than particular levels or tricky moments. Over the past few years, however, the idea of a game as simply something to 'finish' has shifted somewhat. For starters, the availability of downloadable content means no story need ever end, as long as the makers think there's a paying audience. Also, the ubiquity of broadband means multiplayer gaming is now the standard, not the exception it once was. There is no real 'finish' to most MMORPGs."

Comment: Re:Chromosomes? (Score 2, Interesting) 449

by HidingMyName (#29914491) Attached to: Bad Driving May Have Genetic Basis

"People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test" You mean the double-X chromosome?

Although I'm a man, I'd have to admit I've seen some pretty bad driving from people with a Y chromosome too. In fact, very smart people can be very bad drivers (e.g. von Neumann's corner was named after a notoriously bad driver, John von Neumann who you might have heard about).

Comment: Re:Just confused? (Score 1) 517

by HidingMyName (#29462711) Attached to: Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling

Yes. That is also why jurors are not supposed to reach decisions on matters of law, only matters of fact. If the jury members need to understand the legalese someone is doing something wrong.

Actually, Juries CAN decide the matters of law, it is just frowned upon. It is called Jury Nullification, where a jury, despite of the facts, simply ignores the law.

Honestly, a lot of our really bad laws can be and should be nullified by juries, and until we get widespread informed juries, bad laws will continue to be enforced.

Jury Nullification is powerful, however it isn't always a good thing when it was used, consider for example the Emmet Till case where a (presumably) racist jury acquitted obviously guilty murderers for a racially motivated killing.

Google

Librarians express concern over Google Books->

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes "Many libraries routinely delete borrower information, and organizations such as the American Library Association have fought hard to preserve the privacy of their patrons in the face of laws such as the U.S. Patriot Act. But now, as more and more titles become available in Google Book Search, it's not clear whether digital readers will enjoy the same privacy protections they have at the library."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Been done by computer scientists already (Score 2) 121

by HidingMyName (#29073785) Attached to: A Mathematical Model For a Spreading Zombie Infestation
Perhaps the parent comment should have been rated funny, the zombie simulator at kevan.org is a model of a city where humans are getting infected. However, the work by Kephart and White is prior art which wasn't cited. However, the models used in this paper are pretty standard fare for population dynamics and epidemiological modeling, and use the classical simplifying modeling by treating the population as continuous (i.e. they aren't using a discrete individual based modeling approach). Additionally, these are homogeneous mixing models (every host can reach every other host with equal intensity). I'll need to look closer, they did ask an interesting question about how to model a system where some of the infected machines are repaired, I'm not sure that this is truly novel (Bilogists have Susceptible Infective, Susceptible Infective Removed models and Susceptible Infective Removed Susceptible models) so this may be old hat.

Comment: Re:No (Score 1) 1142

by HidingMyName (#28245559) Attached to: Ballmer Threatens To Pull Out of the US
The parent states:

The majority of the US income (taxes) *comes* from these "evil" corporations. How d you plan to support the welfare needs that are already over0burdening our tax system if these corporations no longer operate in the US?

I'm not sure that is true, if we look at the U.S. government's budget we could see that in Fiscal Year 2008, the income from Corporate Income Taxes was $304B, but individual income taxes were $1146B so individuals paid 3.76 times what corporations paid in income tax. Please present your numbers and analysis for consideration, thanks.

Entropy isn't what it used to be.