Weekly discussion 14 (2/7-2/14): Scale in video games

I came across this image, and it got me thinking about the scale of video game worlds. For background there, Azeroth is the world of the Warcraft games, and the scale given there is based on measurements taken in World of Warcraft. The Raven is a kind of battleship in Eve Online, and a smartbomb is an area-effect weapon that damages everything within a certain radius of the ship. They're about the shortest-ranged weapons - the typical short/long range weapons of a Raven can hit to about 30 and 250km respectively. Despite the massively larger scale of the Eve world, the much larger scale of activity means that there's not so much of a difference in experience.

So considering both the "objective" size of a video game world and what goes on in it, how does the scale of a video game world matter to you? Does Stormwind feel bigger than Jita? Does that matter for what you do there? Or what about Mario Kart vs. F-Zero, or Pikmin vs. Super Mario?

the human ability to scale things is an amazing tool in itself, so the fact that it is stretched and played with in games is awesome to me.

the relationship is tenuous but the patterns do exist: in first person shooters, it is much easier to place importance on scale and personal affectation because the scale retains much of the typical perspective of a person. Third person games usually are less impressive with scale because you've already had to adjust to see your character, so other scale changes aren't that cool. A notable exception is Katamari Damacy, which makes you hyper aware of your sense of scale. :o

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

Why the hell is Azeroth so damned small?

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Escape will make me God.

How do you find it small?

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Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
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Their sea is less than 10km wide. That's tiny.

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Escape will make me God.

I only care about the scale in its execution, and if you lack the resources a smaller sense of scale but done well is better than miles of things that are a bit forgettable.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
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Well... I feel very out of place here... But Minecraft randomly generates a world 4x the size of earth, or so I've heard.

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I think that this affects Eve Online particularly. It has thousands of solar systems rendered at full scale, which makes it by far the largest game I know of, even compared to the size of the avatars. Like a real solar system though, the overwhelming majority of each is empty space, and most things take place near discrete spots of interest. You can travel between those spots at sublight speeds, but for practical purposes a solar system is a bunch of discrete spots people warp between. And you have to deliberately try in order to get a sense of what scale things are supposed to be. I think that sprawling games where you can wander around seamlessly have a larger feel to them.

I'd guess a compromise between factors including the space demands of the game, design costs, and hardware capacity when it was made. There seems to be a trend in making larger game worlds as a selling point, though nothing I know of approaches playable full scale modeling of a planet's surface. Minecraft possibly notwithstanding.

Weekly discussion 15 (2/15-2/22): Moore's Law and its implications for society

Moore's Law is an important part of information technology development, and the state as of a few years ago is described here. Long-term growth in world processing power is about 58% per year. Hard drive, flash memory, and network capacities are growing even faster. Currently, the Internet is subsuming other media. What happens over another twenty years as the underlying technology becomes tens or hundreds of thousands of times more powerful? The top supercomputers are reaching estimates of the processing power of the human brain, though no one knows how to program a mind. What happens when that knowledge is available and Moore's Law keeps chugging along? This is an increasingly mainstream consideration (Time ran an article on it recently), and it looks like it will be a major influence on society over the next few decades. Past then, predictions tend to break down due to things getting pretty wild.

So, what do you think is going to happen as the power of information technology keeps doubling every year or so?

less and less reasons to justify bad things needing to exist in the world, for one thing. i don't even mean this as a short-term thing, either.

however, i believe i linked information to a webcomic that summarizes my opinion of the technological singularity: even if that technology is available, it will still be a divided dream from a majority of humanity, and thus simply something else to divide people into specific groups that do more harm than good.

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

Oh, I'm sure they'll break Moore's law eventually. I say the power of immersion between what is real and what is not will change up, and no matter how far you advance in technology, humanity lags behind. How well we cope with what's to come is anyone's guess.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

Since Ray Kurzweil's already been mentioned... (I don't know why he tries to predict exact years into the future, it's not extremely important) http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_a ... rsity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_o ... rm_us.html

Weekly discussion 16 (4/28-5/5): Birtherism and politics

Obama recently released his "long form" birth certificate. End of the birther movement? Apparently not. So, what does Spam think?

1) 1/4 of Americans are retarded.
2) Retarded Americans are immune to facts.
3) President is too black for people to accept it.

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race will be an issue for as long as it takes for "reverse racism" to be discredited as an idea, which will only happen once people accept the historical precedent of SPECIFICALLY GIVING A BENEFIT TO A GROUP OF PEOPLE HISTORICALLY LACKING THAT BENEFIT in order to correct that particular social problem of inequity.

See: the denial of white privilege, the outcry against affirmative action, and really any time white americans get upset that because they personally haven't seen themselves having benefited from white privilege then the whole thing clearly never existed at all.

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

@Q.U.: Who in the mainstream media (or even FoxNews) is making any sort of argument that Obama isn't doing a good job because he's black? I think people are making the argument that he's doing a bad job because he makes a lot of promises and then doesn't keep more than a third of them.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfjLfyXYlA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ONuBBmRRpM

Hehe.


Woah, he made a million promises and didn't keep a third of them? Must be the worst-president-ever!

We may begin a discussion once you quote a source summing up how many promises did Bush realise. And how many he'd made as compared to Obama. Otherwise we have no context.

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It's not a Bush, it's a Shrubbery.



Seriously though, why do we need to compare Bush and Obama? Bush isn't Black.

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This debate is stupid.

Also


http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... /obameter/

Here ya go.

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Escape will make me God.

...Did you not notice that I JUST linked that?

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And it went alongside the other shrubbery, only slightly lower and to the right, with another administration down the middle.

And then the next shrubbery told us he was going to undo the damage caused by the last one, but then did a lot of the same things the same, decided to send more troops overseas, send more service members to Guantanamo Bay, and decided the best way to get out of a recession was to spend our way out of it. What a sap.




FHR;LAEOOwwwww. That last pun hurt ME.

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Anyway, my initial thought on the matter was that it would have been better to wait until after the primaries to release it. Let Trump and others pull the Republican base in that direction until they picked someone to run, probably with that topic in mind. Then release it during the general campaign to discredit whoever his opponent is. But maybe that overstates his estimation of the Republican base. If proxy birtherism remains a significant influence in the primaries, it might even more effectively alienate whoever runs in the general election, though (as some of Trumps statements imply) other things might take the focus.

Or, this may have been scheduled with the killing of bin Laden to undercut broader opposition, with the national security bump a few days after the birther bump to keep up momentum. The operation was apparently planned over the same time that the birth certificate was released.

AMERICA FUCK YEAH!!!!

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Weekly discussion 17 (5/11-5/18): The debt ceiling

The debt ceiling is a legal cap on how big the US federal debt can get, so if it is reached while running a deficit, various things will find themselves without sufficient funds, such as payment of interest on the national debt. It's getting pretty close now. There is some controversy over whether or not it should be raised. Not raising it would be bad.

So, thoughts from Spam?