singlespace
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Posts posted by singlespace
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PAX Demo will be streamed live at 2PM PST / 5PM EDT:
Hopefully the audio will be a bit better this time around.
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Everytime I check on what's going on, it seems like it becomes increasingly insane and depressing.
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Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus was just officially announced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRLy0QQI6xU#t=5310
Higher res than DK2, because it's Samsung, no positional tracking, wireless since you slot a Note 4 into it.
Carmack talks a bit later in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRLy0QQI6xU#t=5570
Verge takes a look, but there's not much to their first look:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/3/6101247/samsung-gear-vr-hands-on
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Wild speculation time, but what if they take the reference design approach that's often used in hardware (think NVIDIA, AMD, ARM, Android, etc.)? OVR does all the hard work of figuring out not only what the input systems and APIs should look like, but also release reference games that show how to use them properly along with source code to developers. Not examples, but rather full fledged excellent games in the same way that a first party reference designs from NVIDIA or ARM are full fledged chips and boards that are so well fleshed out that partners typically will only tweak or slightly customize the reference designs for their own products.
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All of this stuff is super cool, but the biggest problem coming from a developer stand point is who is going to have all this crap to take advantage of it for a game?
Presumably you'd want something like this integrated into the standard package directly from OVR, hence it wouldn't be a peripheral (i.e. every CV1 or CV2 or whatever has the input hardware integrated).
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That. Would. Be. Amazing. It would be like piloting around an ordinary person!
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Yeah, that's what I meant... I don't know how they could track all the disparate IR signals. Particularly if the goal of the ones built into Crystal Cove are meant for very specific positional tracking where any inaccuracy could cause some serious head movement desync and induce motion sickness. It would definitely be interesting if they could pull it off, though.
I'm not familiar with what kind of hardware is out there for IR. The actual physical spectrum is much wider than visible, so I guess if they can make a wide variety of IR LEDs and sensors on the cheap, then separating by frequency band (i.e. chromaticity) with multiple cameras might solve a lot of the issues. For all I know it might be as simple as throwing some filters in front of the sensor and coating the LEDs.
I wonder how they would handle movement in the case of something like the Leap Motion though: how would you walk forward?
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Yeah, the Leap probably won't be compatible with the consumer (latest publicly shown version code named 'Crystal Cove') version because they've shown it having IR emitters that will contribute positional information that will improve the general VR experience.
I view it more as a proof of concept more than anything else. Even if the Leap Motion could be mounted without covering any of the IR LEDs, I'm sure there would issues to be worked out when using multiple sets of IR sources with multiple cameras aimed in a variety of directions.
What I'd like to see is some interesting input techniques demonstrated by OVR themselves. It would be pretty great to see this kind of thing integrated into a DK3 or CV1.
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I seem to remember reading that the consumer version of the Rift is probably going to have a similar feature. Seeing it in the video makes the idea look like a great solution for user input.
Crystal Cove and DK2 has positional tracking via a grid of 40 IR LEDs mounted in the casing, but I don't recall any primary input method being officially discussed yet though there's a lot of speculation. It's kind of crazy how well Kinect style projected grids can work when implemented with a more limited scope (i.e. higher granularity, faster response, closer range, etc).
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Suddenly a really compelling use of Leap:
It's pretty easy to imagine a setup where you could have multiple high precision IR setups just for hand tracking in addition to the lower granularity setups already used. The headmount gives you a lot of sensor mount options that would otherwise be awkward.
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Look at the scandal the geniuses have uncovered now. Where will the corruption end?
What's the claimed potential downside? I don't understand the logic behind that one.
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Sounds more sarcastic than anything.
A bit of A, a bit of B. Win, win?
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I think she pushed to get it added back in so that people don't give her shit about it. Not that it's likely to stop them.
Ah, that makes sense: pragmatic.
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It appears they decided they were in error given it now reads:
Update: Jenn Frank has purchased and is a supporter of Zoë Quinn’s work, although this is the first article she has written on the developer. Frank has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian.
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The argument for uniform and ubiquitous disclosure makes a lot of sense to me, though some of the points leading to that conclusion seem a bit contentious.
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What I meant is, if someone paid 10,000 for a retail disc I'd feel the same way. Or 60 dollars to whatever. Or 400 dollars for a console. I don't feel like it being a Kickstarter is the relevant bit.
Ah, I gotcha, so it's more about the actual value as opposed to the different avenues of contribution.
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I don't believe it would be more of an influence than buying a retail game for 60 dollars, for example. And that I believe has less influence than getting a game for free.
Then there should be no exception for $10,000 spaceships.
EDIT: I guess I should elaborate: it's cool if you don't think that there is any impact, but it doesn't make sense to say that an exception should be made for $10,000 Internet spaceships because there is an impact while also saying that there is no appreciable impact.
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I'll make an exception for 10,000 spaceships but I wouldn't base a policy around that.
Well, if there is an issue at $10,000 then there is an issue at some value of contribution, hence wouldn't it be threshold question rather than an issue of whether or not there is a problem with contributing to Patreon and Kickstarter? If there is a problem at $10,000, it's likely that there will be a lesser problem at $9,000, and a lesser problem at $8,000, and so on and hence is a continuous function. If that's the case then isn't this a question of establishing an appropriate threshold when a contribution potentially becomes too much of an influence?
I personally don't think that even contributing $10,000 is an issue, even if it is guaranteed to have major impact on the writer's disposition, as long as the association is disclosed, and disclosure of this sort only costs a sentence.
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It seems to me that you're saying that extreme cases of sunk costs will yield obvious and detectable results. But what I was talking about it non-extreme cases with undetectable but probably still measurable results. I don't really know how anything you said is relevant minus the very first paragraph, to which I respond that I don't really think that Patreon/Kickstarter is all that different than, for instance, preorders and alpha/beta tests. At least they're not all that different in terms of the actual exchange (sunk costs -> higher perceived value) that is happening, minus the minutiae.
I feel that preorders and things like Kickstarter and Patreon are very different simply by virtue of experience having participated in a good number of Kickstarters and Patreons (maybe on the order of 40 - 50 now). Sample size of one, but to me the degree of vested interested is quite a great deal higher than something like a preorder. With a preorder I don't feel like I'm actually contributing towards the creation of something: I'm putting down money towards a purchase, with Kickstarter and Patreon I feel like I'm helping someone achieve their dreams in life, like I'm actually helping make something happen, and that's a very different thing.
If you talked to people who have thrown down tens of thousands of dollars towards Star Citizen, it's pretty clear that there is good cause to believe there is a correlation between irrational belief in the success and worth of Star Citizen and how much you've contributed towards Star Citizen. Is it causal? Kind of hard to tell without giving it serious investigation, but having seen people go from, "Hey Star Citizen is kind of cool, I hope they succeed" to "Star Citizen will be the best game ever made and there is nothing that happens which will ever dissuade me of this opinion" in the space of a thousand dollars or more, makes me believe there is a good chance that it is causal.
With the other paragraphs, I'm just saying that there is an immense spectrum of factors that bias and affect our opinions, but the ones that warrant explicit guidelines of disclosure are those which are difficult to detect, are outside of our expectation, and have a reasonable chance of having a non-trivial impact on our opinions.
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There are any number of examples that are congruent to that one, whether it's the sequel factor where the sunk cost is time or the actual price of a game where the sunk cost varies due to pricing. These are all issues not always directly disclosed or mentioned organically in reviews, but they could potentially have a bias effect that would presumably affect the outcome much like a Patreon contribution might.
Patreon is not a typical source of bias though. The vast majority of readers will not be contributing to a project or developer via something like Kickstarter or Patreon, hence it's alien to their experience and unexpected. We generally expect things like playing the predecessor of a game, or purchasing a game, or all sorts of mundanity: those are things we do ourselves and understand.
We know that the experience of someone who really into a series or genre is going to be quite different than someone who's playing a game for the first time. In the most extreme examples like Lords Managements or competitive shooters, the difference between how a person who has poured thousands of hours into a game, versus a couple hours, will be immense, but we understand the difference between those two experiences by virtue of having seen the differences before.
On the ownership and usage of consoles, another extreme example would be Dan Ryckert who has spent most of gaming hours with old school consoles, especially on the Nintendo side, with almost no experience at all on the PC side. Sometimes his opinion on games is so alien that it might as well have come from an alternate dimension and it's clear that this is because his background with games has been so different than many of his audience's, but this is something that we can grasp pretty quickly.
If there are aspects that would be outside of our expectations, that would be difficult to detect, then I don't see why they there wouldn't be some benefit from treating them in the same vein as Patreon or Kickstarter. If a writer is playing the Super Uber Limited Collector's Ultimate Edition of a game that they threw down $500 to grab, it's probably worth noting at least, or better still, looking at the standard version that 99% of their readership would be playing instead.
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There's a difference between mentioning it for practical purposes versus requiring disclosure of it for ethical reasons.
I wonder about whether there's so much difference between moral and practical question in ethics. Isn't it reasonable to look at ethics from a rational perspective rather than an aesthetic one? The problem of a husband writing about a wife is both that it is potentially unfair and also that it runs the risk of the writing becoming irrational by virtue of how someone in a relationship perceives their partner. That is a good practical consideration if you want to have writing that is useful.
It is useful to know how an author relates to the subject of their writing. Things like mentioning that they've played the predecessor in a series, what the gameplay reminds them of, how they've experienced similar games in the past, and many other such points provide us with useful points of reference to calibrate and understand the experience they're relating to us. Authors will provide much of this as a matter of course because it allows their readers to better understand the experience they're trying to share and that's good.
The problem with a wife writing about a husband isn't just that it's potentially biased, but rather that this potential bias can pass undetected by readers producing a skewed perspective on the subject being written about. Something like Patreon falls into the same type of potential influence: one that can go unnoticed even though it's present. That being said, for a good volume of video game writing potential influences all the way from something as small as Patreon to as large as being someone's spouse do not matter in the least.
My initial response to Patreon being undisclosed was that it should be, and I still feel the same way. From personal experience, I've found that materially funding a developer or project produces a more vested interest than not. I won't reiterate my justifications further than that because what it boils down to is personal opinion from colloquial experience and that's not much better than speculation: the same is true about those dismissing the potential influences. There is simply insufficient evidence to walk around proclaiming that Patreon has this or that effect, but there is a good degree of concern so I feel it merits consideration though I find Kotaku's decision to ban Patreon outright to be premature and excessive.
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If you believe that playing games can affect your investment in reviewing a sequel and that disclosure is the answer, do you think that reviewers should thusly disclose if they played the previous games in a review of a sequel?
They pretty much always disclose that in the actual article anyways.
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@MadJackalope
Ignoring the appallingly tasteless & off-base Ferguson analogy and the comment that 'OF COURSE' Patreon is an investment, as though that were settled or uncontroversial, you just think that there should be more disclosure? How much more? Polygon & Kotaku have already updated their policies in regards to Patreon, the Kotaku one in particular being pretty stringent.
Perhaps too stringent I think: Kotaku's blanket ban on all Patreon usage seems like overkill, while Polygon's stance allows for contributions towards projects their staff are interested in, but still gives fair warning there is some association.
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I haven't listened yet, but I'm assuming this is about Zoe Quinn and everything. Short version is that an Internet goonsquad whipped up a hate maelstrom against her because an ex posted a giant manifesto about what a horrible person she is. Anita Sarkeesian released her next Tropes vs Women episode this week, which fed fuel to the hate fire that was already raging. The Feminism thread has a ton of discussion about it starting here.
There was also Phil Fish exploding at the whole mess then having the worst doxxing in recent memory which drove Fish to quit the industry entirely and put Polytron up for sale.
David Lynch's Josh Brolin's Campo Santo's Fire Watch With Me: A Motion Picture Event
in Video Gaming
Posted
Those aren't demographics or percentages: it's just a weighted index based on aggregate scores from surveys, which means it just says that many African Americans have rated it a goodish to mediocre place of employment based on various answers on a survey. The actual questions were:
But seriously, if you didn't bother to take the time to read the page and just posted it, that pretty much means you made up your mind that you were correct before you even looked at the evidence and that's not a good thing.