Game design: Down the tubes.
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Can anyone explain to me the theroy of Schodigers (or what ever his name is) cat? I mean it sounds so simple. The cat will live or die on a 50% chance if the gider counter goes off due to the radiation and the poison gets released. What's so hard about understanding that? What's this thing about the cat is live AND dead? I'm missing something.
its a bunch of random words.PurpleRain said:
Its a long, incorrect way to say: "We do not, and can not know everything."
At least thats how it seemed to me.
I always thought it was because you can't unkill a cat. If the particle exists in both states simultaneously, then the cat dies no matter what... As soon as the switch flips it'll kill the cat forever and ever. The switch doesn't ask, what state is the particle in, it asks, has it ever been in this state?PurpleRain said:
And even if the switch was designed to trigger on (state 1 = true)&&(state 2 != true), then the cat would NEVER die. The cat's life is decided by the switch manufacturer, not Schrodinger's thought experiment. GRAHHH! DAMN YOU NON-NEWTONIAN PHYSICS!
Thank you Doctor. You ruined my mind. I'll get it one day but for now I guess I'll go with Knight Templar's theory; it sounds easy.Dr Faust said:
So he just wanted to show the craziness (use of better word maybe) of quantum machanics and the maths to the quantum levels. And so he just used this state of both death and undeath of a cat in a box to prove it? Basically, we can't know at all if the cat's alive or dead until we open the box to see.
He's actually calling for more text-based gaming. By listing his chief disappointment with modern gaming design (no text), he's saying that there has been too much of a focus on the aesthetic design, and is calling for a renaissance in text-gaming.
Also, you have been eaten by a grue.
Also, you have been eaten by a grue.
By way of procedural generation based on a user's choice, ala Pandora, etc, we might one day, hopefully, end up with text-based games that evolve the stories we want based on how we play. Wouldn't that be quite the coup? Modern technology advancing old gameplay that was only there due to a lack of technology.Hey Joe said:
Perhaps I am like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind and have a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost or more likely I am simply a colossal moron, but I want to see if we can bring this topic back to the original idea as suggested by the topic line: "Game design: Down the tubes."
Assuming this is an opinion poll, I believe this question has two one-word answers. The first answer is a gigantic, gaudy Vegas-style neon sign: "No." The second is an even bigger and tackier neon sign with animation and a choreographed water fountain performing in front of it: "Yes."
"No," because over the years, game design has been refined. When making games, some things work, some things don't, and enough trial and error has occurred that we have a pretty good idea what does or doesn't work and not focus has been on making what does work better.
"Yes," because such rock-hard belief in some things working leads to a flood of games with alarming similarity. You look around and it's hard to not notice how samey games have become since a handful of game design types have proven successful so publishers don't bother trying to innovate and just keep churning out the same god damned thing.
I give both answers because both answers are true. Innovation is becoming more an more difficult to come by, but this may simply be because games have matured out of the primordial ooze a bit and has heaved itself out of the sea, newly evolved lung taking its first gasping breaths. We don't have the wonderful and at times frightening diversity in game designs as we did back in the 80's, but we also have games larger than a kilobyte so we don't have to pretend that dot is a barbarian warlord.
Maybe I am simply a crusty curmudgeon, but during those halcyon days, innovation was key to success. You had to come up with some kind of unique play experience or you were dead in the water. Nowadays, it seems like all you need to do is take your Duke Nuk'em game engine and slap "Clive Barker's Star Trek" on the cover and it'll sell.
Actually, I am definitely a bitter pill when it comes to that sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, games are a business and the point of producing games is to make money. But I think there is a crucial difference between "Hey, this is a fun game design we've come up with. Let's sell it to people!" and "Hey, I've just bought the rights to Lindsay Lohan's underpants. We can stick it on our generic shooter and sell it to people!"
But then, all of this doesn't quite answer the question, does it? If game design is down the tubes, the above suggests that the tubes have been made narrower since game design in general is hobbled by being forced into a handful of already proven genres.
This means, at best, you can make a game like some other game only "better." "Better" being the tricky part because what actually constitutes a better game is hotly debated and usually land in the land of lowest common denominator where "Bioshock 2: Now With More Blowjobs" is awarded game of the year.
While at worst, game design becomes categorically lazy, merely retreading what has been done before and somehow managing to completely screw it up. This sort of thing is the poster child for the quick-buck game publishing. It seems ironic that as gaming has progressed, the bar has been set so high that most publishers are content to simply go under it than to bother trying to clear it.
But, all of this is nothing new, either. Like in the afore-mentioned 80's, there were scads of Space Invaders and Pac-Man rip-offs with dodgey controls, piss-poor game play, and all of the imagination and charm of overcooked bean and lentil soup. So saying that game design is going down the tubes is a bit of a Chicken Little complex, I suppose. In the end, it's Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." So shitty games are as old as the medium itself. It's when the 10% that isn't crap turns out to be mediocre that we should start worrying.
Assuming this is an opinion poll, I believe this question has two one-word answers. The first answer is a gigantic, gaudy Vegas-style neon sign: "No." The second is an even bigger and tackier neon sign with animation and a choreographed water fountain performing in front of it: "Yes."
"No," because over the years, game design has been refined. When making games, some things work, some things don't, and enough trial and error has occurred that we have a pretty good idea what does or doesn't work and not focus has been on making what does work better.
"Yes," because such rock-hard belief in some things working leads to a flood of games with alarming similarity. You look around and it's hard to not notice how samey games have become since a handful of game design types have proven successful so publishers don't bother trying to innovate and just keep churning out the same god damned thing.
I give both answers because both answers are true. Innovation is becoming more an more difficult to come by, but this may simply be because games have matured out of the primordial ooze a bit and has heaved itself out of the sea, newly evolved lung taking its first gasping breaths. We don't have the wonderful and at times frightening diversity in game designs as we did back in the 80's, but we also have games larger than a kilobyte so we don't have to pretend that dot is a barbarian warlord.
Maybe I am simply a crusty curmudgeon, but during those halcyon days, innovation was key to success. You had to come up with some kind of unique play experience or you were dead in the water. Nowadays, it seems like all you need to do is take your Duke Nuk'em game engine and slap "Clive Barker's Star Trek" on the cover and it'll sell.
Actually, I am definitely a bitter pill when it comes to that sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, games are a business and the point of producing games is to make money. But I think there is a crucial difference between "Hey, this is a fun game design we've come up with. Let's sell it to people!" and "Hey, I've just bought the rights to Lindsay Lohan's underpants. We can stick it on our generic shooter and sell it to people!"
But then, all of this doesn't quite answer the question, does it? If game design is down the tubes, the above suggests that the tubes have been made narrower since game design in general is hobbled by being forced into a handful of already proven genres.
This means, at best, you can make a game like some other game only "better." "Better" being the tricky part because what actually constitutes a better game is hotly debated and usually land in the land of lowest common denominator where "Bioshock 2: Now With More Blowjobs" is awarded game of the year.
While at worst, game design becomes categorically lazy, merely retreading what has been done before and somehow managing to completely screw it up. This sort of thing is the poster child for the quick-buck game publishing. It seems ironic that as gaming has progressed, the bar has been set so high that most publishers are content to simply go under it than to bother trying to clear it.
But, all of this is nothing new, either. Like in the afore-mentioned 80's, there were scads of Space Invaders and Pac-Man rip-offs with dodgey controls, piss-poor game play, and all of the imagination and charm of overcooked bean and lentil soup. So saying that game design is going down the tubes is a bit of a Chicken Little complex, I suppose. In the end, it's Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap." So shitty games are as old as the medium itself. It's when the 10% that isn't crap turns out to be mediocre that we should start worrying.
Hey Joe said:
We might be closer to that than you think. I believe the Escapist did a few articles mentioning Inform before... http://www.inform-fiction.orgFenixius said:
The hurdle that today's games have with portraying wondrous worlds... is asset development. You have to make graphics and animation to satisfy every possible situation. Text adventures don't suffer from that "limitation" so Inform allows you to create a database to handle your world with a nontechnical, natural language. You create objects and places and just write out the possible relationships that objects could potentially share.
I have to admit, I've never actually made a game with Inform, but damn... after reading what it can do and looking through some tutorials, I can see the most dynamic worlds and characters created in text.