Interesting article. I'm inclined to agree on the MMO side of things, since I often find the gear-treadmill and endless-yet-boring dailies to grind more moneyz for gear a serious indication of this bad side of the "addiction design". It plays very well into the kind of player that wants to accrue status in a social…

I'd say you're right in that you don't understand addiction in the traditional sense of the word, which means to be enslaved to something to the point where it causes trauma. A gaming binge resulting from an addictive compulsion is not a positive experience. A gaming binge resulting from you wanting to play a good…

Don't be sorry, lol xD

The funny thing is, with a game like Battlefield 3, that worth is not intrinsic. It is also heavily defined by the players. Releasing paid DLC like this will fracture the player base, making it hard to find good matches to play if you don't have all the DLC packs everybody's currently playing. So yeh, base product…

I would probably take a racing game. They seem to be the only thing I can sink loads of hours into without ever hitting that feeling of futility.

Agree completely. I think this is really just the result of a complete mismatch between the game type and platform assumptions. They assume this will work on the platform, since other games on the platform also do it (the casual games), but the game in question is completely incompatible with it, hence the immense…

However annoying it is, I do understand the reasoning behind it.

You'd be surprised how many non-accidental purchases there are of items of this value. It's a status thing. There's plenty of so-called "whales" out there that will easily spend hundreds upon thousands of dollars on a game to stand out and progress, and this compensates for the other 99% of the users that would never…

It looks pretty much identical to how the game runs outside of that first level though. The video runs at what, 24fps? And it's not as obviously a video as in other games. The compression seems lossless, which is why it could be construed as real time. I was actually looking for the so-called artifacts you mentioned,…

I tried running the game at max settings and it was fine during the opening in-game cinematic, but as soon as the game started Psycho's model was all glitched out with polygons spiking all over the place and whenever he was on screen the framerate would go from 30-40 to like 5-10 fps.

I read a book a few years back called "The Culture of Fear", which this article reminds me of. Might be a nice thing to look into. Doesn't exactly cover the same topics, but it does overlap in that it covers the routine "moral panic", and how the media and politics actually upholds this panic to their benefit.

I defer to your expertise then. Do you do the optimization yourself though? Or do you literally export it as a lower res version?

This is actually an interesting point, because proceduralism will only work to a certain point. You still want to have complete creative control over that which you create, and going too far in the direction of proceduralism (except in the case of realistic simulations) will ultimately create more of the same and…

You could do that, but the quality of that low poly model will be poor, its performance will be much worse, and if you do that for everything in the game you'd get a far worse looking/performing game. There's currently nothing that can succesfully create a proper, efficient low-poly model like that, because it's not…

Actually they do. You can't generally reduce a normal-map model to a low-poly model without having to do significant alterations (and the quality is very questionable), so usually the low-poly model is built within the polygon budget for that type of asset, and then it is sent to high-poly modellers to be turned into…

That only goes for textures. Animations are keyframed and interpolated at runtime. And with higher fidelity visuals comes a higher requirement from animators to make everything feel "real", otherwise you get a very heavy uncanny valley effect.

It'll be interesting to see what people come up with in terms of content creation. We've already seen massive leaps in tool-assisted creation where design flow is heavily improved and it thus takes far less time to do certain things. If you specialize these activities more heavily you'd get even greater gains, but at…

Imagine my surprise when a guild mate told me he was running dual GTX 690's the other day.

Yeh, I don't see why people are reading that into it. I felt it was sort of a "we did what people thought you couldn't back then", which was make a good shooter with a controller.

I get confused for lots of different things. Here in the Netherlands I often get mistaken for a Turk, Moroccan or Arab. In Turkey they thought I was an Arab when they heard me speak Dutch, but often enough they thought I was from around there before I spoke. In Spain people thought I was Spanish before they started…