Dvorak Trashes Modern Gaming Industry 792
oskard writes "John C. Dvorak recently posted a PCMag.com rant trashing the gaming industry, predicting a complete market-meltdown in the near future. Titled 'Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?', it was interesting to see how the 3D Realms Forums reacted to the article. He claims that 'games have hardly changed since the invention of the first-person shooter.' His kids have obviously showed him too much Halo 2, and not enough Half-Life 2." From the article: "The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?"
I happen to agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Make something original.
The UT series (Score:2, Interesting)
For example: Unreal Tournament series has peaked in my opinion, the systematic annual release of UT 200x titles is starting to wear very thin, and the quality of the work and time going into the games seems to be declining.
I don't think the communities which build around playing these game titles are able to stay up to date with the releases. By the time you have bought the game, created a clan and joined a league or ladder, the next version of the game is out and you are simply supposed to discard it and move onto this years title.
Sure other areas such as the console market have done this, but the sucess of a single title now spawns a complete series of games
After Photorealism? Plot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways, theres always decent story lines, multiple realms, etc. Thats why I always enjoyed Muds (MortalRealms) because of the varied areas and the fact that new ones were always being brought online. I realize that most games can not afford to be updated to this extent (text vs complex 3d models) but still... if I wanted a photo realistic game with pain feed-back, I'd join paintball.
Storytelling will differentiate tomorrow's games (Score:5, Interesting)
HL2 (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, the cut-scene engine is excellent, the production is good, there's a semi-coherent plot and the gravity gun is a lot of fun. It's certainly a hell of a lot better than the invisible rail shitfest that is Doom 3, that's for sure.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:1, Interesting)
> There are four or five simple game categories
> and nothing really new or different.
Couldn't you say the same thing about movies and books? What's the old saying? "There are only five stories, everything else is just settings and characters." Something like that.
Photorealism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't fall for it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so quick to draw such a "cause-and-effect." I actually think that the ever-increasing realism of some particular genres will work against the games. I mean, Mortal Kombat was fun when you could rip the loser's spine from his body, and it was obviously fake blood and gore. But what will happen when it actually looks like footage of a real man, actually ripping out another man's real spine? Of course, it will still just be a simulation, but is society ready for a generation of kids who literally can't tell reality from fantasy?
It's (relatively) easy to distance yourself from video game violence when it is so obviously CG, but technology will eventually approach the point where the video will achieve startling realism. What will that do to the kids who've grown up playing these games, and who have a pretty good idea of what an actual gunshot wound looks like? People complain that kids are desensitized to violence by today's video games, but as realistic as they are, no one would ever confuse them with actual video footage of an actual murder. What sort of desensitization effect will games have when they become indistinguishable from video of actual violent acts? Will the desensitization effect rise to a new level? Are we ready for the potential implications?
Or will game makers simply shy away from the truly graphic, photorealistic violence, and save such abilities for ever more realistic non-violent games, like racing or flying simulations? Then again, maybe a photorealistic "Flight Simulator 2010" is just what Al Queda needs to properly train for their next mission?
Food for thought.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:4, Interesting)
He then held up a physics boox, and said that if you dropped it off 200 years into the past, that the ramifications would have been far reaching and nearly immediate.
And that's why books will always be around, and better tools than any video game. Let's just hope everyone else realizes that.
Re:too much Halo??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Melee attacks, for instance, are in pretty much all action games/shooters, but they're usually like the fallback knife or fists in other shooters. They're used instead of guns, not in conjuntion with.
The same is true of grenades - definately not new in a game, but in halo the left trigger is your gun and the right is the grenade. Again, used in conjunction with weapons, not instead of.
Two or three man vehicles in halo I'm not sure are done anywhere else, but as someone mentioned, tribes. In capture the flag games these get more interesting however, as the flag bearer can't drive and will need a ride from a teammate.
And only being able to carry two weapons you switch between I don't think is done anywhere else either, and it definately adds a lot.
So even if these things have been done before, the way they come together and are balanced creates very deep multiplayer gameplay I haven't seen in any other game.
Of course he is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Television now has Digital High Definition and TV still is growing.
It's called entertainment. There doesn't need to be endless advances for people to want to escape from their reality for a short bit here and there. The only thing that needs to exist is the entertainment itself.
Who needs realism in games? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't be the only person out there who prefers the 80's arcade games / MAME games over the state-of-the-art "go fight as realistic a war as possible" selections. Call me old-fashioned, but I view games as a DIVERSION from the stuff I see on the news. They're meant to be relaxing, or at least take one's mind into challenging directions away from stress.
Directions future games will take? Once they get the simulations to 100% realistic, they may do the "Total Recall" type of thing (probably moving into sexual areas), but those aren't really games, are they? Maybe they'll move back to what a game, for many of us, should be.
He may be on to something (Score:2, Interesting)
Apocalypse apoc = new Apocalypse();
apoc.cue();
Now, while I doubt the industry will suddenly implode as he asserts, I do think that it'll start to slowly asphixiate over the next decade or two before totally splitting into two separate industries with totally different philosophies and forms of presentation.
It should be mentioned that already in Japan, people are becoming increasingly bored with the state of gaming as it is, and it's for this reason Nintendo is hedging all of its bets -- the entire house of Mario trading cards -- on changing the way people interact with games, instead of just improving the graphics. Granted, Japan is the nation of pinball RPGs and other weird-ass games, so maybe their opinions don't apply to the rest of the world, haha.
Nintendo has always been a Japan-centric company, but with this trend of video-game disenchantment also starting to appear in Europe, I guess they're hoping America will eventually follow suit too. This is less likely, though, given how Americans like their media to do one thing: guarantee them an evening of vegetation until work tomorrow.
But as I mentioned, I personally think the games industry will divide: one side moving back towards the classic definition of "video game" that emphasizes a more abstract form of entertainment and focuses on gameplay; the other side will move increasingly towards movies and blend with them to create a new interactive cinematic experience.
I think when it's through, movie-games will no longer be "games" anymore, though, but something new, and a separate industry for the most part from what we consider video games today. The new industry's success will be dependent on Hollywood, so until Dvorak prognosticates the movie industry's future, who can say for sure what will happen?
Food for thought (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is relying _only_ on better graphics has worked well enough to motivate people to buy this year's 10,000 polygon game for $40 instead of last year's 5,000 polygon game for $10, or the game from 2-3 years ago for $3.
The way it works is that it creates an artiffically low supply, helping keep prices up. There are only so many games available which are up to this year's standards. It helps keep a certain ratio between supply and demand.
It's not that games from 5 years ago don't exist any more, it's that most people don't even consider them an option. When recently I bought an old city-building game, everyone I told about it was like, "why the heck do you play ancient games anyway?" Or even "eew, that thing has less polygons than a cube and smaller textures than a desktop icon" when I pointed them at the screenshots.
So artifficially everyone only considers 1-2 years worth of releases in their options.
Even better for the industry, it also addresses the other side of the equation. It raises demand too: it creates an artifficial sense of needing to "upgrade" to the latest games. Even if you have a game which you're happy with, you're told that, hey, don't you want the better graphics of a new one?
E.g.: You still like Quake 2? That's sooo old hat, you should move to the more photo-realistic newer games. You still like Gran Turismo 2? Eeew... that looks sooo pixelated, you should get GT4 instead. You still like the original Unreal? Tough luck finding many low ping servers, because everyone else moved to UT2004. Etc.
So basically this push is good for the industry at the moment.
And unless they change focus from just graphics to something else, it's coming to an end. Fast.
E.g., the game "Singles" already has 30,000 polygons per character. They look great. Doubling that won't make much difference. Even going from 30,000 to 100,000 polygons won't make the same difference that going from 300 to 1000 did.
Basically the race to make it _more_ realistic comes to an end: the point where it's _already_ photo-realistic anyway.
Which also brings an end to the above described pressure on both supply and demand. Once at that point:
1. There is not much more reason to buy the latest 100,000 polygon game, instead of a two year old 30,000 polygon game. Suddenly it creates a lot more supply and a lot more competition in the market.
2. There's a lot less reason to "upgrade" to the latest and greatest game, if you already have one you like. If you're already content with, say, a 30,000 polygon/char multiplayer FPS, there is no reason to ugrade to a newer 100,000 polygon/char one. Or not for the graphics.
That's the problem. Actually reaching the realism point will change the market a lot.
Will that mean the end of gaming? Dunno, probably not. But it will certainly _need_ a very abrupt change of focus to something else than "look, we have higher res textures this time".
No-one paid $50 for a 1970s-style game back *then* (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's bear one very important thing in mind about Tetris. There was nothing really "state of the art" about it when it first appeared in the mid-late 1980s.
Put simply, if you ignore the pretty-but-unimportant backgrounds/pictures, etc., you could write Tetris for the Atari 2600 or the Sinclair ZX81 without any change in the gameplay. In short, if you asked someone with no previous knowledge of the game (generically, not regarding a specific implementation) when it first appeared, they'd probably guess something like:-
"Pong, Breakout... Tetris. Probably not too long after Breakout, but before Space Invaders or Asteroids."
Tetris came out at around the same time as OutRun, but it doesn't feel like it.
It's worth remembering that it only became a really big hit when the Nintendo GameBoy came out in the early 1990s, and that was when it was *bundled*. No-one paid $50 for it then, and (although it got good reviews), it wasn't *that* big a smash when it was being sold as a full-price game for home computers (8 and 16-bit) in the late 1980s.
Re:In a way, he's right... (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. Not that the game industry is about to implode, but man do I feel his pain! I haven't bought a game off the shelf in a long time because they are essentially all the same (to a large degree). There will always be exceptions to that rule, but truly innovative and interesting games are becoming more and more of a minority.
I blame gamers. Yes, gamers still buy DOOM clones by the droves, and as long as that is the case, the industry will continue to thrive. I hate it, but then many aspects of reality tend to piss me off. I think what Dvorak is really doing is not saying that the industry will die, but expressing his frustration and desire for industry to die, perhaps in the hope that it will be replaced with something better.
Re:I think his agrument is off base (Score:3, Interesting)
I already have a plug for one of these games in my sig. PuzzlePirates is really an MMORPG where level of firepower is not the measure of a good player. The environment isn't hostile, it really is fun for people of all ages. The graphics are pretty, but they're not super grotesque mega-3d intensive requiring a $4,000 machine.
Perhaps even more importantly, you don't have to play every moment of every day to be a good player. Much of it has to do with the community (which is stellar), and you won't be trashed for being mediocre.
Its just a good time, every time. To my mind, this is innovative.
[for the record, I don't work for, profit from, or formally represent Three Rings]
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I'd expected the gist of it to be that the gaming industry was going to die because of the economics of it; namely the "feast and famine" nature that sees companies having massive hits, then going to the wall because they can't get funding for the next big-budget blockbuster.
That's as good a reason as any to avoid the games industry like the plague, as far as I'm concerned. That and the fact that it looks interesting from the outside (and thus attracts high numbers of applicants), but actually pushes its participants (or at least the programmers and testers) notoriously hard- doubly so when launch-time approaches- and gives them precious little creativity.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:3, Interesting)
I always ask this when it comes up, but I never get much of an answer. What has Nintendo done this generation that's particularly innovative? I think that Sony's work with the EyeToy or Microsoft's Xbox Live infrastructure has had much more of an impact than anything Nintendo's done in some time.
The GameCube is a very competent (and inexpensive) game console, no doubt, but what's so innovative about it? Maybe Nintendo's problem isn't that it's too "revolutionary," but that its customer base is outgrowing its offerings.
Hasn't this been said before?? (Score:2, Interesting)
What he says in his article could be said about the Hollywood mechanism, almost verbatim. I wonder when that industry will go belly up. The one thing that was curiously missing from Dvorak's analysis was his authority. I checked the bio, nothing... oh he has kids and buys their games for them, riiight. So read this as if a restaurant critic is writing about how bad the food is ...which he might have never tasted.
When I was working for nintendo as a game counselor (late 1980s) there was a broad range of ages in the demographic of our call base. Of course most were teen and pre-teenage, but the fact that we had parents and grandparents call for tips on how to defeat Ganon spoke volumes to me which can be summed up as a reponse to Dvorak: everyone loves to play a game at some point; be it cards, chess or pong etc. It's all in individual preference, so it would take a good deal of social engineering analysis to really make this sort of "prediction"
Lets take a trip down memory lane (Score:2, Interesting)
where will games go?
Better AI
Better Physics
Better interfaces (see Will Wright's "Spore")
novel uses of networking
Better actors (plenty of room for more realism in human expression)
The industry is in its infancy, but there are plenty of fertile areas for exploration. I think things are going to get more exciting, not less in the near future.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're wrong. Have you seen the Castlevania DS trailer? Think about this. Being a vampire, Soma (the main character) can use telekinesis. There simply was no such way of emulating that effect with a console. But now you can. This is definitely an innovation in user experience, and I think the NintendoDS will survive.
Re:Sick of hearing this kind of stuff about Ninten (Score:3, Interesting)
The DS is a bit weird and quirky, but will likely prove to be fun in a lot of different ways, in unusual ways (as well as the traditional ways).
The PSP looks pretty solid. The wide screen, delicious graphics, ooh, wanna have that. I really do. But how long will that last? Not more than a year, I think. This gets especially exaggerated with the low battery time, since I don't feel like bothering if I know I'll run out, and I don't feel like charging all the time either.
That's the trick, there. I feel like the DS will be more "useful", while the PSP will be more "mindblowing". I really like that Nintendo doesn't blow my mind all the time. I've seen so much in gaming history by now that there isn't much to blow anymore, except my nose, which is reserved for Schindler's List, so it doesn't count.
Re:First Person Shooters (Score:3, Interesting)
The objective is to create virtual worlds that are so compelling and rich that people will leave the real world for them. It already happens to an extent with games like WoW and EQ, but hey unfortunately quickly devolve in to repetitive, pointless grinds with no real point, they are atrocious time sinks. But there is still interest and color from two directions, interaction with other people and their virtual economies.
In these virtual worlds you can adopt a look and persona of your choosing and not the one you were stuck with at birth, you can be far more creative and daring than most people are in meat space. You can intereact with people from around the world and find people you like and share interests with, and some you hate too. The key point is you aren't stuck with the limited set of people you are stuck with in meat space(school, work, church, bars, mall). You are judged by intellect and creativity and not by whether you are attractive which is unfortunately how people first judge each other in meat space.
You can also take risks that most people wont normally take in the real world.
The challenge is that online games are a pointless time sink in reality. If someone can make the jump to where virtual worlds surpass the real world then they have a winner. One avenue is education, if you can create virtual worlds that educate people more effectively and in a more compelling way than schools you would have a winner. That was a central tenant of "Diamond Age" and it was a compelling one.
Another avenue is if you can move real economies in to virtual space and make them more efficient. Ebay is kind of this but its not really a compelling way to interact. I'm think for example is you move Ebay in to a virtual world where buyers and sellers have avatars and can meet, get to know one other, have conferences and meetings in virtual space etc. Its a little off the wall but I wonder if you could host a professional conference with speakers and presentations, bar room meetings etc in a virtual world so you eliminate the steep costs of traveling. How much would you lose in not having the meat space personal interaction versus how much improved efficiency would you gain in eliminating the cost and time of the meat space travel.
Not sure it will be possible to make the jump from games that are entertaining time sinks to a place where they count for something. If they stay as they will they be an entertaining diversion or will they be a massive pointless time sink draining the world of its productivity, as everyone spend more and more time in virtual worlds that have no real value.
Re:Like shooting ducks in a barrel (Score:2, Interesting)
This is well worth noting. These games are published by *businesses*; these publishers are putting out this game not because it's creative, or innovative, or even particularly good. The vast majority of publishers believe that a game will make them money and that is why they publish it. So to say that what is currently available for general purchase is somehow representative of the universe of game offerings available is at best naive, and at worse disingenuous.
Business is not always art, and art is not always business.
That said: I believe there was a similar article written about the lack of innovations in chess some 1400 years ago. ;) [wikipedia.org]
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, I thought the antiwar, and nationalist message was overemphasised,but I guess maybe I pick up on this more eaily, most people I've talked to about it never even noticed.
He's Got A Point (Score:2, Interesting)
In the begining computer games were only marketable to wealthy older people who could afford the computers and were clever enough to want to make primitive computers do something useful. There were also things known as video arcade games with which children wore the phosphor out on their parents black and white television screens playing pong - or on which drunks sat down to and attempted to hammer buttons off whilst in the persona of pac man - trapped in a maze being persued by ghosts.
So contrasting the current market with the earlier one is obviously a fairly stupid thing to do, Brittiny Spears has little in common with Aaron Copland. And the modern video arcade game computer or console is probably not significantly less human than its owner in the Turing test. Things have changed.
However it does have to be said that running around in a virtual world effectively playing paintball is a strange mismatch of activities - sitting on ones arse, eating donuts, drinking sugary soft drinks and clagging up your arteries with fat whilst pretending to lead a physically challenging adrenalin pumping existance in a virtual world is also a fairly stupid thing to do. Go and play paintball if you enjoy that sort of experience, its bloody fantastic by comparison.
The virtual environment of a computer on the other hand lends itself well to more intellectual activities which even the avid game addict has recognised by claiming that "I dont play games that have no plot".
The game industry needs to look outside its current teenage fashion market if it is to achieve the sort of respect that the film industry aspires to.
It may well be trying to do just that - but if it is, it hasnt reached crusty old farts like me who would rather configure obscure Linux server functions and occasionaly play the original demo version of Doom than buy what is on offer. A demo version that seems sufficiently representative of the last 11 years of video gaming that I doubt I have missed anything.
Give me "Zac Mckracken and the Alien mind benders" any day, that had me microwaving an egg long before the Cambridge Trojan Room Coffee Machine saw the light of day. Mind you, tell that to the youngsters of today and they wont believe you.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:1, Interesting)
That having been said, it is fairly obvious that neither device will be run into the ground by the competition. Each appeals to a differant market, for the most part, so they are not competetors per-se, but rather two enteties producing material parallel to each other without disrupting the other's fanbase.
The nintendo franchise, believe it or not, has for the past 10 years been courting the younger market more and more. The original mario game (not to be confused with Super Mario Bros, the platformer, for the nes) was intended, in Myamoto's own words as "for adults." Since than, the most recent game to feature the red-hatted plumber was where you had to guide a barney-esque dinosaur into rescuing the infintile version of that particular Italian plumber. In addition to the cult following that nintendo has attracted amoung the 6-14 demographic via Pokemon, nintendo has gone on to release more an more games, innovative and new as they might be, that are marketed primarily towards a younger audiance. (referance the GBA release page on www.gamestop.com for an example)
Sony, on the other hand, failed miserably on their ventures into this lucrative treasure-trove of juvinile entertainment back when they released their crash bandicoot series on the psx. They were popular, albeit not as much so as nintendo's platformers, for a short time, and crash was even dubbed the Playstation's unoffical mascot for a time, but there has yet to be a significan release in years. This is when sony began to court a more mature audiance with the introduction of more story-driven games (ala squaresoft, post-nintendo) and the gritter action games (ie Siphon filter). Once the ps2 fully realized its potential about 2-3 years ago, sony's venture into the adult market was solidified, and only contested by the PC and Xbox market. With a firm stranglehold on the gta franchise, it is doubtful that the playstation 2 will be seen in the eyes of the public (and outraged parents) as a system for kids.
Given the fact that microsoft has yet to submit an entry into the handheld market (pdas excluded) and with the upcoming release of a version of GTA III for the psp, it is obvious that sony's market is almost completely detatched from nintendo's.
Now, if you'll excuse me, i'm going to play a few rounds of lumins, and than fire up a game of advance wars 2 on my ds.
I agree with him (Score:2, Interesting)
Where's the Spy vs. Spy of this gaming generation?
How about the JumpMan?
M.U.L.E.?
Paradroids?
Marble Madness?
How many gamers today even know what these games are?
I like a little FPS now and then, but it saddens me greatly that today's gamers can't seem to enjoy anything but. My favorite PC games used to be the Sierra/Lucasgame adventures. Now I'm lucky if a "decent" game comes along once every two years.
What irritates me is that the game engines are there to make something more interesting. Why not make a 1st person adventure game? Not one with shooting and slashing, but one where you have an inventory and have to push things around. How about Space Quest 3D?
How about a multiplayer 3D game where the participants have to activate multiple devices in separate areas to continue in the game? (I.E., player 1 has to stand on door trigger A so player 2 can press button B that turns off a laser so player 3 can...)
Personally I think 3D has ruined gaming. It seems as though the simulation games (Starcraft, warcraft, Civ., etc.) are the only ones that get the fact that "2D" (really 3-d with the camera pointed down) is worth anything any more.
What a shame.
And it really comes down to the gun. Give me a game in 3D that doesn't involving pressing the gun trigger (don't get me wrong -- I love counterstrike) and you can probably win me over. I mean, look at the Sims! Look at DDR! You don't have to have a machine gun or a rocket launcher to get a fun game.
Are we destined to rarely see a new Dig Dug?
Ultima III?
Original Zelda?
Beach head?
Frogger? (Oh, wait, this one WAS done in 3-D, and it was pretty fun!)
Some times I think what we really need is a SourceForge team to rewrite all the classics with modern graphics and sound.
But I guess modern gamers just wouldn't get trying to take over another robot not by shooting it, but rather by maximizing your circuit takeovers from sending your energy bolts down the right branched pathways.
Oh well, I guess this officially makes me an old-fogey.
Where have all the good games gone?
Gone to bit buckets, every one.
Re:Storytelling will differentiate tomorrow's game (Score:3, Interesting)
Mods are cool, but they generally fail to tell a compelling, cinematic story.
- Mod teams can't afford professional voice actors, so until voice synthesis technology advances a few light years that will heavily detract from the immersion.
- Mod teams don't have 8-16 hours a day to work on the content, unless they're living at their parents' house without a job. So either it will take many years to make a professional quality game, or the end product will suffer because the team doesn't have enough training or maturity.
- Mod teams who make total conversions are (at least in my experience) incredibly hardcore dorks (and I say that as an incredibly hardcore dork), so if they make a story-based game it's the kind of thing that appeals to the very limited hardcore dork fanbase of whatever they're basing it on.
- Mod teams generally end up with a handful of people doing a variety of tasks that they're not specialized in, e.g. one person comes up with the basic premise, most of the script, and the basic character designs. Then they freak out and refuse to accept constructive criticism that would make it better, and you end up with a Star Wars prequel.
- Most mod teams come up with grand ideas, get = ~10% finished, and realize they'll never be able to complete the project, then the "beta" sits on their site for years.
There are some really, really cool mods I've seen for a variety of games, particularly the ships people have put into Homeworld. But that is trivial compared to making an entirely new game using that engine.
I have yet to see a single-player mod that I thought was as compelling as, say, the original Soul Reaver. This does not surprise me, given that it took ~30 people three years working overtime to make Soul Reaver, and that was on the Playstation with its primitive 3D graphics.
I see the strength of mods as building on an existing game, like adding ships to Homeworld, or weapons and maps to UT. Making an entirely new game even with an existing engine as the base is a lot of work. That's why people get paid to do it for a living. This difficulty is only going to increase as the presentation quality goes up with new consoles and computer hardware.
Maybe in 50 years there will be the Playstation 14 equivalent of Adventure Construction Set from the early 80s, where you say "ok, AI, I want a game that has a hot chick in a metal bikini as the anti-hero main character, now make it!" But not in the near future.
Disclaimer: some exceptions apply, B5 I've Found Her, there are always going to be anomalies, etc etc.
Didn't see this mentioned (Score:3, Interesting)
Sid Meir's Pirates, released by Atari.
Pirates I would say is a good mix of the adventure and sim genres. Most of it is an adventure game, with the sim part being the realistic wind and ship physics. Hell, it's almost a teaching game, as you'll learn more about sailing from playing this game than you thought possible.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, just seeing the thing would have been immensely interesting to some of the scientists active in 1805, e.g. Faraday, Ohm, Avagadro, Ampere, Coulomb. By 1805, the state of the art was almost ready to try copying the materials, at least. The timeline [regulusastro.com] would, at the least, have accelerated.
1687 Newton - Principia Mathematica
1800 Volta - chemical battery
1869 Mendeleyev - periodic table of elements
1879 Swan/Edison - light bulb
1907 Einstein - equivalence of mass and energy
It's hardly fair to ask the poor Blackberry to stack up against the impact of a book that condenses and distills all the physics discoveries of the last 200 years.
Re:He's off the mark. (Score:3, Interesting)
Master, I feel Ed Gruberman is not wholly wrong... (Score:3, Interesting)
Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Conquest, etc. are all the same. Zoo Tycoon, RollerCoaster tycoon (1, 2, 3), etc. are all the same. Diablo (1,2), the Sims (numerous), GTA (numerous), NFL, NHL, baseball.
There are very few new games...most are updates of old game ideas. The only thing that is keeping the video games industry afloat is how impressive each generation of video cards becomes. Once that slows down, people are not going to keep buying rehashes of the same old games.
And as for the movie industry...how many more Star Trek movies do you want to see? How many moe Star Wars movies? How many more Friday the 13th's, or I know what you did...still...and again. Even Pixar realized they were getting stale and hired new writers for the Incredibles.
What the gaming industry needs is some new genre's for video games...something not already done and being milked for all they're worth.
Re:Don't fall for it. (Score:3, Interesting)