The Father of Civilization: Profile of Sid Meier 208
An anonymous reader writes with a link to Kotaku's recent profile of Civilization creator Sid Meier, and includes this snippet: "One year, as [coworker John] Stealey recalls, the two men went to an electronics trade conference. On the second night of the show, they stumbled upon a bunch of arcade games in a basement. One by one, Meier beat Stealey at each of them. Then they found Atari's Red Baron, a squiggly flight game in which you'd steer a biplane through abstract outlines of terrain and obstacles. Stealey, the Air Force man, knew he could win at this one. He sat down at the machine and shot his way to 75,000 points, ranking number three on the arcade's leaderboard. Not bad. Then Meier went up. He scored 150,000 points. 'I was really torqued,' Stealey says today. This guy outflew an Air Force pilot? He turned to the programmer. 'Sid, how did you do that?' 'Well,' Meier said. 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.'"
Hmm (Score:2, Informative)
This is what Red Baron looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06vBHL51LBg
I don't think being a Air Force pilot would help a lot. The reason Sid won was because he was better (or more used to) playing computer games, including seeing patterns how the enemies arrives (from left or right etc).
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what Red Baron looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06vBHL51LBg [youtube.com]
I don't think being a Air Force pilot would help a lot. The reason Sid won was because he was better (or more used to) playing computer games, including seeing patterns how the enemies arrives (from left or right etc).
back then for most people it was a foreign idea how a plane is controlled, you know, diving, climbing... reflexes. so for the guy who didn't think of them as machines, quite limited machines, it made sense for him to think that he would be better in it.
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Looks fun. I'm off to install MAME.
Civ was a great franchise, but 2 words about Sid (Score:5, Interesting)
Railroad Tycoon
Still has never been outdone in the genre. Transport Tycoon, additional editions of RRT, not even the latest Rails, which I believe Sid lent his name to without really being involved.... none of them can hold a candle to the original Railroad Tycoon.
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the original? the original had it's flaws though.
but it was a pretty great game.
Civ is overrated (Score:4, Informative)
Now Alpha Centauri was a really good game. I wish I would see innovations like in AC instead the x remake of the same game.
AC had:
* real 3D map
* real atmosphere and a good story
* innovated combat system
* innovated diplomacy
* and in my opinion way better game then Civ III and the remakes (Civ IV, etc).
Today (Score:2)
He would have been hired to work at a high freq trading shop.
Whole thing is dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
From the childish notion that immense intellect would manifest as gaming skill to the baffling assumption that being a real-life fighter pilot would have any bearing whatsoever on playing a 2d side scroller. Sounds like the perfect kind of imbecile to be impressed with Sid Meier hype.
Re:Whole thing is dumb (Score:4, Informative)
2D side scroller? No, the whole attraction of Red Baron [wikipedia.org] was that it was full 3D perspective, in a day when real-time 3D calculations were well beyond the reach of commodity hardware. (It ran on a 6502, capable of a blazing .5 MIPS, and used custom hardware for the 3D transformations.)
I mastered Battlezone, its sister game, but the one and only Red Baron game in our town spent most of its time out of order. The joystick mechanism just wasn't durable enough to stand up to drunken teens. (On Battlezone, you'd pull the cabinet over on top of you before the joysticks would break. Don't ask me how I know this.)
Assuming that a one-joystick "flight simulator" running on 1980 hardware would have anything in common with flying an actual fighter? Yeah, that was kind of silly.
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Battlezone was a great example of perfect AI play causing a weakness. The enemy tank only fired on you when you were in it's sights. You could turn in place until you heard it's shot, then move forward causing a miss. Repeat until you are almost(but not quite) facing it, then go forward until you pass it, then back up, turn, fire. If it was changed to randomly fire in front of you or at you then it would have been a lot tougher.
Favorite Sid Meier Encounter (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, really my only Sid Meier encounter, if you don't count sitting in an audience.
So, I'm at . . . COMDEX? CES? One of those big-ass electronics trade shows. Might have been Chicago, might have been Las Vegas.
I got away from my booth for an hour, and I head for the area where computer games are being shown. I'm totally jazzed to see a dummy box and demo of Colonization. I look over the material about it, and to another totally jazzed gamer next to me say something like "Cool, it's like someone did a decent remake of Seven Cities of Gold!"
A voice at my shoulder says "Good, that's what I had in mind."
SQUEEE!
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And from there extrapolate solutions that informed his gameplay.
Of the day? (Score:3)
It's not like current game AI is really any more complex with some rare expections. Graphics are prettier, and levels are usually at least semi-3D, but the enemies are still dumb and your own allies dumber automatons.
And that's the way it's going to stay, too, since the gameplay balance depends on it.
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I can memorize the attack patterns etc of early video games. But to say "I memorized the algorithms" is a really douchey way to say "I memorized the patterns."
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The fact you don't understand the difference says even more about you than calling someone 'douchey'.
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If you can't find your ball on the golf court, it most likely bounced behind the bleachers. And if not there, try the hallway to the locker rooms.
Re:I memorized the algorith! (Score:5, Informative)
'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' The ACTUAL ALGORITHMS! Not the patterns resulting from them like a mortal man would.
I see three possibilities here:
1. Sid Meier, super genius.
2. Sid Meier, not knowing as much about computers as we though.
3. The person that say that he said 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' is an idiot.
Which one do you subscribe to?
the algorithm results in the pattern. if it's simple then yeah, he observed how the algorithms work. if you memorize how koopa troopers walk and by what rules, then you know where they will walk and then you know the algorithm(that the actual game might have more complex code than is actually necessary to complete the algorithms in the way they manifest to gameplay is of no issue to this).
if you just memorize how every enemy on the screen acts on the screen you're none the wiser in a new level. once you can guess how the pattern will go for a new level then yes, you have deduced the algorithm. this is when a game loses it's magic.
if it never deviates from it, then the quickly observed pattern is the algorithm.. look, it's not rocket science. if you notice that everytime you're in the direction D from the enemy sprite a thing X happens. they you know the algorithm.
many games even nowadays have algorithms you can guess (accurately, mind you) what they are for enemy "ai"(which is a fucking joke still). even in games like WOW - that's what instancing, pulling and all that depends on. you even have "street names" for the internal variables like aggro.
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By the way it was worded, it could, to some people, sound like a case of using a technical term in order to impress the less knowledgeable.
A: Hey Sid, how did you catch that curve ball?
B1: I memorized the physical forces acting on this particular spinning sphere traveling through the gaseous medium.
B2: I saw that the ball tended to veer up and right, so I positioned my hand close to there as a way to prepare.
Yeah, it's kind of an extreme example, but would anyone even consider response B1 over B2?
Now, I don
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He would probably watch the pitcher's body language and the way the ball was thrown to work out what the ball was going to do.
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The difference is, 75,000 points vrs. 150,000. Sid didn't just catch one curve ball, he played the analogic equivalent of a whole perfect game of baseball. He could have 'just' memorized all the levels up to 75,000 points, but he kept right on going for that other 75,000 points as well. That means he had to extrapolate from the base data, to project how the system would change at higher levels he hadn't yet seen. (Assuming the game actually kept getting harder - I've never played it, but if the difficulty s
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Perfect AI would be able to learn your behavior and adapt to it.
That way there would be no fixed behavior for you to learn, and you'd have to adapt constantly.
Saying that you can't plan if you don't know exactly how your enemy will react is kind of sad.
It's sort of like admitting that you can only follow a fixed formula yourself and that you are incapable of adapting to your opponent.
How do you deal with playing against another person? Are you unable to plan for them be
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It's sort of like admitting that you can only follow a fixed formula yourself and that you are incapable of adapting to your opponent.
How do you deal with playing against another person? Are you unable to plan for them because they might react in unexpected ways?
Or do your friends all play according to some fixed recipe?
Other people follow a rational process when acting. If you understand their process, you can predict their actions, and beat them - that's the vast majority of what tactics is. Sure, you might not get it right 100% of the time, and yeah, they might act unpredictably - but an unpredictable action is usually one that is tactically inferior (or you've made a failure in not identifying it as a tactical possibility). So yes, play against a human a bunch of times, and you will begin to understand their "algorithm
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If your opponent intentionally tries to be unpredictable, the game is no fun. Try playing chess with someone who isn't making tactical moves, but just acting unpredictably - you might lose a few games due to over-thinking, but overall, you'll probably win, and get no satisfaction out of it because chess is a highly tactical game, and an unpredictable player removes a large part of the tactical element, making the game not fun.
It works in chess as well. The randomness is just more subtle. White noise is almost never a good strategy (outside of say, "Rocks, Paper, and Scissors"), but incorporating a moderate amount of randomness can slide your game into a state that the foe hasn't seen before.
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It works in chess as well. The randomness is just more subtle. White noise is almost never a good strategy (outside of say, "Rocks, Paper, and Scissors"), but incorporating a moderate amount of randomness can slide your game into a state that the foe hasn't seen before.
It works, because chess at a certain level is all about memorized patterns. You memorize the most strategically valid positions the board is most likely to be in. If you're at that level, and you see a state you haven't memorized, it's most likely because that state is strategically inferior. However, as you say, a slight loss of strategic value might be worthwhile, if it means the opponent doesn't have a ready counter, like you do for all the patterns you've got stored. But the randomness has to be very sm
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Clearly your ignorance of chess and your dislike of it are related. Memorization is not effective. Actual chess players learn this quickly while studying chess books. There is too much information. Trying to memorize it is worthless, the subset you memorize isn't effective without all the stuff you didn't memorize. The only chance of getting better is to increase your understanding of the positional elements of the game.
And the pattern matching you have to actually employ is nothing like memorization at all
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It's somewhat effective; sure, it's not how Grand Masters play. But when I was learning chess, at a certain level, everyone was encouraged to start memorising positions and rote responses to those positions - not the underlying positional play, just "in this situation, do this". I found that boring, didn't do it, and quickly started losing. Sure, if I'd had the natural ability to skip that step and go straight to an understanding of positional play, maybe I'd have found it more enjoyable, but as it is, rote
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It works in chess as well. The randomness is just more subtle. White noise is almost never a good strategy (outside of say, "Rocks, Paper, and Scissors"), but incorporating a moderate amount of randomness can slide your game into a state that the foe hasn't seen before.
This infuriates long-time chess players, but new players don't even notice it.
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Other people follow a rational process when acting. If you understand their process, you can predict their actions, and beat them - that's the vast majority of what tactics is. Sure, you might not get it right 100% of the time, and yeah, they might act unpredictably - but an unpredictable action is usually one that is tactically inferior (or you've made a failure in not identifying it as a tactical possibility). So yes, play against a human a bunch of times, and you will begin to understand their "algorithm", they'll begin to understand yours, and that's where the fun really starts.
AIs don't have the faculty to develop their own rational processes, so they're given algorithms that mimic them. A decent AI should generally make rational, tactical actions, and they should be somewhat predictable, based on what makes tactical sense given the physics of the gameworld, the current state of play, etc.
If your opponent intentionally tries to be unpredictable, the game is no fun. Try playing chess with someone who isn't making tactical moves, but just acting unpredictably - you might lose a few games due to over-thinking, but overall, you'll probably win, and get no satisfaction out of it because chess is a highly tactical game, and an unpredictable player removes a large part of the tactical element, making the game not fun.
When you reach a level of skill in Chess where you focus on positional play(tactics still exist, but they are backing up your strategies) instead of pure tactics then your opponent's unpredictable moves will probably mean they are not defending against your long-term strategy and they are not doing anything useful. Eventually your position will be strong enough that they can't defend themselves because they have too many weaknesses and you can choose which one to exploit. For example, the opening stage focu
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do you kickban people who do unpredictable things when playing against you?
the variations into the algorithm are the salt. totally random behavior is predictable, because the you know there is no logic and can play accordingly as the ai will never be able to attain any goal. it could never win a game of doom, but if it always runs the same paths between places then again it's never going to win that way either. the point with real intelligence is that you can't troll them repeatably, or rather you can't kno
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Do you kickban people who make a sound tactical decision that you've predicted they'll do?
look, a game where you already know what the enemy is going to do with certainty is a game ALREADY PLAYED. what's the point, except maybe to demonstrate to someone else how the game works? which is what sid was doing in the story in the article.
Not necessarily - like I said, how the enemy acts is only one factor. In the simplistic game from the article, yeah, fine, once you understood the algorithm, playing was pointless. But using your WoW example: it's one thing to know that the dragon is going to breathe fire at a certain time - it's another to be able to manage your resources so you still have your defensive/movement abilities ready for that situation, to
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with wow it just boils down as a social problem of getting everyone in the place - so that becomes the actual game. it's like ballet practice every fucking saturday, the mobs lack initiative totally. that's why I stopped playing - it does a very poor simulation of going to fight a dragon, or giant or whatever.
I don't think people play tower defense games over and over again too much. ufo 1(xcom) people played over and over though.. what matters is that it is obfuscated so far that it's not obvious what tact
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So, what you're saying is that perfect AI is simply a case of using random behaviour?
A realistic AI is going to use apparently random behavior as a distraction; so will a competent human commander.
Re:I memorized the algorith! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I memorized the algorith! (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was a very clear meaning for "pattern" in a computer gaming context by 1980. In 1980 Pac-Man was first released in the US. By 1981 the word "pattern" to describe navigating the maze was so popular that the "Pac-Man Fever" album included patterns for each level [hiwaay.net].
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The word pattern has had the meaning the GP used for a very long time. It's not new lingo.
The meaning has changed, at least with the way it's used in software today. A GoF pattern includes the solution to apply - the algorithm, you might say - when the pattern is encountered. Sid Meier memorised solution techniques, a.k.a. algorithms. If he had used the word 'pattern', it would have said nothing about how he solved the situations he recognised by a pattern.
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The word Pattern certainly does have a computer connotation [wikipedia.org], and that was true in the 1980s as well [wikipedia.org].
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"Design patterns gained popularity in computer science after the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published in 1994" (my emphasis.)
1994 > 1980s
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My dad had pac-man patterns memorized up to the second apple. And he was pretty good at the game just playing from there out. I didn't memorize any of the patterns, and it was always the one video game he could beat me at.
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Which one do you subscribe to?
4. Sid Meyer said 'While you were playing, I memorized the algorithms.' for brevity since he counted on his coworker's ability to deduct that he meant "the patterns resulting from the algorithms" Smart people speaking to smart people don't need many words to say a lot. With precision.
Re:I memorized the algorith! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's (1), Sid Meier, super genius. I've spoken to the man twice, the tech side of Baltimore where we both live is pretty small. Sid is exactly the sort of guy who will stare at a game, note the patterns, and then figure out what algorithms must be driving them, all while a regular person is just playing. There is not a hint of boasting from the guy in person, he's just that good at what he does.
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Times change. Actual stuff might be less interesting or even plain bad, but the breakthrough would remain in history.
The same happens with pretty much any art. Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore (Yes, i know there are exceptions, but few and far between). However, if it was a huge success or a breakthrough (invention, innovation, something fresh, etc), it's worth mentioning
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Times change. Actual stuff might be less interesting or even plain bad, but the breakthrough would remain in history.
The same happens with pretty much any art. Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore (Yes, i know there are exceptions, but few and far between). However, if it was a huge success or a breakthrough (invention, innovation, something fresh, etc), it's worth mentioning and remembering.
Yes, they do. There's plenty of good old music, but I'd argue that the reason many don't listen to it is lack of exposure, and dramatic improvements in fidelity. Who want's to listen to something that sounds like it was played in a trash can, or old scratchy black and white movies with poor special effects? As for old art, my wife and I recently visited the Louvre, and while there was plenty of cool stuff, many of the paintings just looked the same (quickly boring). Why? Most likely because they were a
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Jazz music is played and enjoyed back to, as you suggest, the limits of recordings with any fidelity. You can really go back to the 30s, because the style for a while was very clean, elegant sound that, not coincidentally, would still sound right with the very limited recordings of the time.
I doubt Sid had much creative input into some of the recent stuff with his name on it. I can't begrudge him making a few bucks off his name that way, either.
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All my friends and myself still listen to 3 decades old music, not to mention all the blues and jazz classics that are far older.
Books don't become boring because they are old. Look at the so many movies that come out as remakes from 100 year old books.
E.g the three Musketeers (albeit the latest remake was just shit)
Re:Meh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
He's still right, though. You and your friends listen to 3 decades old music because you've stagnated, but even you won't listen to just any 30 years old record. I mean, even though it was a #1 hit close to 30 years ago, "Never Gonna Give You Up" is mostly remembered due to Rickrolling. Most music, most literature, most films and most art has always been shit; contemporary shit is just more acceptable due to being part of the zeitgeist. Old crap is forgotten, and people forget that they forget, and thus you get the popular delusion that there used to be some golden age.
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I *like* "Never Gonna Give You Up". Good song.
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I'm forced to listen to a narrow selection of that music every time somebody at work decides to have the 'Classic Rawck' station playing on the radio on his workbench.
I bought 5 Pink Floyd CDs yesterday morning at a garage sale.
The 'old stuff' isn't a be-all and end-all. My favorite album right now is David Bowie's new album that he released this spring.
My father's favorite music is the stuff that was popular a few years before he started listening to music: the big band stuff like Benny Goodman and Artie
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The best stuff from the 70s is great because it has been pre-filtered. Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin and so on are great (well, their better songs are) after many years of listening to them - they don't get old.
There are likely more bands of that quality playing today than in the 70s, but it's hard to know who yet. As the years go by the filter of time will apply itself to the bands of today, but at the moment it's a lot easier to find the best music of the 70s than the best music of the teens.
And some bands
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Billie Holiday died in 1959, The Cure had their studio début in 1979. Your sixties are longer than mine.
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If Depeche Mode and Cranberries are what you like, I doubt I'm the right person to give you advice on music. But yeah, if you can't think of one good new music group to show up the last 10 years, then you've evidently stagnated, so it turned out I was right all along. Luck, I suppose.
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Well, there might be that underground band around my corner, but in mainstream music companies like EMI, Sony etc. No: there was noting interesting the previous 20 years.
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In the woods...
They were not "famous" (as in "mainstream") but their work (especially "Omnio") is really shining.
Also Haggard, Theatre of Tragedy (up to start of 2000s), even dubstep (as a sub-genre).
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Not really a grunge person, but Nirvana was pretty good. Plenty of good rap out there too... Mostly the early stuff, and the underground stuff. 90s and 00s mainstream rap is mostly not so good. It just doesn't catch me like classic rock, but it is still good.
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Pearl Jam's album "Ten" was amazing. Pretty much everything after that was shit, though, and unfortunately they had so much inertia it ended up getting airplay.
Re: Meh.... (Score:3)
See also, survivor bias.
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Movies made from old books are outside the scope of the conversation :)
Just as well you can re-write an old book and make it current, but it's no longer the same book, is it?
Re:Meh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
No. You have it backwards. Most recent literature is crap. Then again, most of the stuff that's ever been written is also crap. The difference between the works in the canon and the stuff that's getting published today is that over time it tends to be only the worthwhile material that endures. Mainly for this reason, if you pick up a book that's still in print after a long time then it's likely to be a lot better than a random contemporary book.
The idea that nobody listens to music over twenty years old is about a dumb as it's possible to get in a syntactically valid sentence.
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It's the Law (Score:3)
Proctologist's law: EVERYTHING is crap.
You both have it wrong (Score:2)
Probably the vast majority of ANYTHING coming out - movies, music, books, etc is not very good. The stuff that survives is tried and tested good. A lot a good things are popular (Beatles, Sinatra, Nirvana, Stravinski, etc), but not all popular stuff is good (Brittany Spears, etc). The same goes for anything old, and the notion that they don't build them like they used too- well the hardy ones survived, and the crap broke.
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Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
That is not true. Most people continue to listen to the music they heard and loved during their teens, twenty something years. People trained in classical music listened to them before they turned 25. Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties. Looks like we start losing the ability to like fresh music starting from age 25-35 and by the time we reach 60s and 70s we totally lose it.
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years
Re:Meh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well
Its all the same 4 chords. [youtube.com]
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I wonder if the music executives pick the music that made superhits some 30 or 40 years ago, dress it up using modern arrangements, and disguise it well, but use the same foundation melody, scale and rhythm and try to create new hits.
I'd argue that today the execs pick the gimmick first before anything else. The quality of the music's far down the list. Pop music's always been a little bit about style over substance but acts like Lady GagMe epitomize it. Back to Sid Meier.... I haven't played the original Civ for more than a decade but I sure did when it first came out. Folks who weren't around yet or are too young to remember don't realize what an impact it had.
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Re:Meh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I despise Madonna too. Competitive with Let It Be? Competitive with Dark Side Of The Moon? Competitive with Born In The USA? Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? Elton John had the same gimmick-- dress outrageously, but he makes good music. Lady HaHa is nothing BUT an image. The music is only incidental, and it's all Autotuned.
OOOH I want to join the condescending display of knowledge. When did Pink Floyd ever write a modal melody that blossomed into florid counterpoint, or discovered a way to make the D triad follow the C# triad, through a harmonic intensification of a melodic element? (see Beethoven op 18 no 3, for example, first movement). Or when do you see anything even remotely close to the technique of taking a tune or theme and successively chipping it away to motivic nothings? Even a minor composer from 18th century Bohemia, Zdenek Fibich, showed more harmonic creativity than Bruce Springsteen. I mean, have you actually listened to "Born in the USA?" The monotonous repetitions are so tiring.
What's really tiring is people who are condescending about music, especially when the stuff they prefer is just as much trash. Lady Gaga is fun to listen to, that's why people listen to her.
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Some men.... you just can't reach. Your assertion that "Strauss Shultz-Evler Blue Danube Lhevinne Ampico" is the best piano intro
Do you have a better one? I'd love to hear it.
I seriously doubt that lady HaHa will be spoken of in the same reverent tones in 300 years.
Agreed, it's doubtful she'll be remembered even as much as Liberace. But Born in the USA? Please, the only thing interesting about that's an instrumentation that manages to be listenable on a cheap car radio.
than trying to defend GagMe.
You misunderstand, I'm not defending her, I'm mocking you.
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It's absurd to suggest that Lady Gaga has no musical ability
Local coffee shops and bars all over the world have performers "musical ability." That is an exceptionally low standard.
It is as if somebody complained about the quality of newspapers, and you pointed out, "the writers are all literate."
I'm so not impressed.
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Very few people like the music they hear first time in their fifties and sixties.
That's usually because people in their 50s and 60s have been listening almost exclusively to the same music for 30-40 years. How many people who continue to listen to new music on a regular basis end up hating it?
In my experience, most people who continue to listen to contemporary music on a regular basis find about as much new music to like each year as they did when they were in their 20s.
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IOW: you are likely to fondly recall mediocre music from certain periods in your life because it was what was playing (e.g.) the first time you got laid. As you age, you either have to develop a tolerance for listening to crap in order to find the gems, or you ha
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Actually, I disagree with your assertions about nobody listening to music from two decades ago.
Yeah, just... I didn't say that.
"Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore"
In other words, almost all music which was played on the radio 20+ years ago is completely forgotten today, except the top 50-100 or something. Sure, there are dedicated radio stations, but as far as mainstream goes, 3 years seems like a long time as well.
With that being said, I am listening to music which goes back as far as the 30s (classical music aside). Sadly, most of my acquaintances don't even know o
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>Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore (Yes, i know there are exceptions
Damn right there are exceptions. Sure, I listen to some underground hip hop, and I listen to Deadmau5 and Booka Shade and so forth. Last night I went to a Barenaked Ladies concert. But mostly I listen to music from 60s and 70s, with some 80s and a bit of 50s thrown in. I was born in 1982.
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Civilization Revolution is really great, I have had endless fun with it. It is significantly less nerdy than the mainline Civs. Sid Meier designed it personally, whereas he apparently does not have much to do with the main Civ games any more. He said it was the game he had always wanted to make.
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The Iliad is pretty bad - very little actually happens, and the gods intervene in most of the fights.
The Odyssey, OTOH, is still a good adventure story, if you don't find it too trite that most of the encounters (and the overall story) are metaphors for Ulysses's need to conquer his sexual promiscuity enough to settle down with his wife.
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There is not a single likable character in the Iliad. It is all antagonists. That is why even though people still buy it, based on the author's reputation, few people read even half of it.
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No, I actually read a scholar's edition, which aimed at keeping the exact verse pace and style. Sure, if you Hollywoodize it, it would sound much better.
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>You do realize that something 'dated' may provide insights into the time period of the piece. Or it may have fresh insight into the human condition as seen from a different era.
Sure, and those are some of the reasons to keep it around, and even read it occasionally. But that doesn't keep most of it (even the 10% that wasn't crap to begin with per Sturgeon's Law) from being boring.
Reading skills (Score:3)
That's still true today. The essence of being a skilled reader is to drop the crap within the first few pages, and move on. Try Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. More recently (but not that recent), try the Skylark series by E.E. "doc" Smith. Try Journey to the Center of the Earth. There's plenty of great stuff out there of various flavors: per Sturgeon's law, as quoted above, your job as a reader is to find the 10%. If you can't do that, it's not the materia
Re:Meh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of it depends on your definition of "dated". Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare are dated in that the language and some of the situations are anachronistic, and yet either because they're ripping good stories (like many of Doyle's Holmes stories are) or deal with universal themes (as Shakespeare's greatest plays do), the anachronisms almost fade away.
At the same time, it's true that there are no lack of out and out dated works. I watched some old Spitting Image episodes from the 1980s, and while I had a good laugh at Margaret Thatcher and Jeffrey Archer being brutally mocked, I realized that my 20 year old daughter wouldn't find it very funny at all. The humor was firmly planted in that period, so that even 25 years later, at best it's funny in a manic and nostalgic way.
There is a lot of unreadable Victorian pulp, to be sure. It was the first great age of mass market consumer publishing, when literacy levels in Europe and the Americas reached the level that one could make a living publishing trash. At the same time, once I get over the jarring hump of 19th century idiosyncrasies, I can still enjoy Austen or Dickens, and even see in their marvelous and often excruciating characters people I know today. Thus they transcend the period in which they are written and set, and become universal works.
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I love Doyle, and not only the Sherlock Holmes series. As a matter of fact, i firmly believe that the Professor Challenger stories are much, MUCH better.
But they're dated regardless. The "poisonous ether" from the "Poison Belt" story makes the whole thing dated. Still good, because I'm able to dive into suspension disbelief and focus on people's reactions and vivid end-of-the-world descriptions (which simply ROCK). But fact remains: the "ether" idea is now proven as childish.
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I love Golden Age scifi, but it's obsession with atomic power is sometimes jarring. I reread Asimov's Foundation trilogy and while it's still really damned good storytelling, you do have to get over the atom obsession of the period.
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That doesn't make it any less dated.
Yeah, it's useful for scholars, but it is valueless to Average Joe. The same Average Joe who liked it 100 years ago would not touch it with a 10 foot pole right now. It's fact.
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What does this have to do with anything?
I'm not discussing wrong or right, I'm saying times change and older products don't keep up.
this doesn't mean they don't have historical value, they simply lose mainstream value, which is a different thing.
But yeah, ad hominem attacks are cool... keep using them.
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I am far from a teenager (31), but while I agree most modern bestsellers are junk, I certainly can't say I appreciate most of the "classics" over 100 years old. There are exceptions sure, like say Don Quixote (the first sally, especially). Genre fiction, and usually not from the (general) bestseller list, is usually the best place to go if you want something good to read.
I like music a number of decades old (as well as bit of new stuff), but
>Same thing if you think classical music is boring.
Really? No. C
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Dude... I was referring to "90% of anything is shit" - and while that shit is played (or read, or listened to, or watched) while it's contemporary, it will lose value fast. The 10% which deserves it will become classic (e.g. Star Wars original trilogy) but even so, after long enough it will still lose value.
Take Dante's "Inferno", for example. It's good, but not mainstream at all. It's not even easy to read. A more extreme example is Homer's "Odyssey" which is barely readable unless you're a scholar.
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Yeah, it's sad watching him giving his name and reputation to games not deserving it.
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On behalf of the kind of guy that puts his name front and center on the hard work of a hundred talented people.. "Genius" ?
he puts it there because people pay him for the right to do so.. for some reason it's considered a brand.
I seriously doubt hundred talented people worked on any of his games though. pirates!, the first game to use it apparently had just sid doing the programming and design and a graphics guy and a third guy who I guess checked some facts for the setting - plus couple of people for box art & art included in the box.
seriously, sid was involved with at least 3 out of first 20 games I played. strike eagle I
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Lulwat? I've played that board game. It is completely unrelated to any of the Civ computer games in anything other than "both are about ancient civilizations in competition with each other". That's not really something you can "steal". Ok, so the article on the first Civ's page mentions he took some inspiration from the board game - I actually didn't know Civ the board game was the first game to have come up with the idea of tech trees, as it's been used in hundreds of board and video games since. But serio
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Well yeah, other than playing civilizations colonizing ancient earth, turning population points into additional cities, trading resources like iron and bronze between other players, starvation killing off population, the tech tree... and the bulk of the actual EFFECTS from the tech tree like astronomy letting you get across oceans, yeah, you know, totally unrelated.
In any case it was close enough that MicroProse bought the rights to it. Which means that Sid isn't a cheating scumbag, as the original game des