141–148 of 148 posts
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You don't win in Utilitarianism. Both paths are losing paths, just one loses with more meaningless points than the other does.
The game itself presents the text "You lose" or "You win" depending on which path you take.
This is delightful. I only wish that someone would put it into a nondescript arcade cabinet in a hallway somewhere, so that people could stumble across it unprepared. Edit: Naturally, it turns out that Mr. Barr has a PhD in this sort of thing, and that his thesis has to do with how we demonstrate our values during the course of playing video games. http://www.pippinbarr.com/academic/Pippin_Barr_PhD_Thesis.pd...
> Compare, for example, the ubiquitous software application PowerPoint [171] and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas [211]. We can identify four key differences in interaction which help to characterise video game play as distinct. First, in using PowerPoint, a user’s primary objective is the creation of a presentation and the interaction is a means to this end. In playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, however, a player’s…
His point is that games are NOT means to an end, they are things where the whole point IS to interact with them (Minecraft creative mode is a perfect example of this).
To put it another way: The ideal way to make a powerpoint presentation would be to think of it and have it instantly materialize. On the other hand, what's the ideal implementation of GTA? As much as we say that the point of the game is to "beat it", if we just showed you the victory screen, then it would ruin it.
The same goes for Dwarf Fortress, Human Resource Machine, CS:GO, etc. If you just jump straight to the end result, you miss the entire point: the interaction itself.
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But maybe after learning there would be subtle difference in play between different players, based on their values. Just like after you learn the rules of the world and are an adult, you act differently. So for example I really just cannot bring myself to play a "dick" character in games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, Mass Effect, etc, but I know plenty of people who delight in it.
See - this isn't what they're discussing at all, it seems to be what they're trying to imply with the naming, but it's not actually that at all. They're discussing game mechanics that force you to say - shoot some cops. Is it dickish to shoot cops in GTA? I don't think people's real world values have much if any influence on their play style. Ultimately playing Skyrim and Fallout for stealth and one hit kills will di…
It's funny like the parent I cannot bring myself to do that to "innocents" in games like Skyrim, even if the game reward it, I need to really force myself to roleplay to start letting my values step back
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JavaScript, probably. More serious answer: it's using HTML5 canvas, which is quite inefficient as rendering APIs go. For example, if you use n colours when rendering a frame, and your game runs at m frames per second, you are invoking the browser's CSS parser n×m times a second, because CSS colour strings are the only way to express colours, and it is an exclusively immediate-mode API. The engine in use might be laye…
If you're willing to forgo the built-in drawing primitives, you can get access to the underlying buffer and draw directly to that. That way you avoid the CSS parser. Edit: in particular, getImageData and putImageData.
If you want to do anything serious, WebGL's your only option.
I guess I don't know enough philosophy to understand some of the jokes. Anthropomorphism: the apple moves like the snake, man was made to the image of god and so on. Apocalypticism: the game just ends after a few moves without notice. Asceticism: the game ends if you eat the apple, you are supposed to be like a faquir. Capitalism: you start the game with 50, spend 10 each apple you eat - when you are broke you can't…
I guess I don't know enough philosophy to understand some of the jokes. Anthropomorphism: the apple moves like the snake, man was made to the image of god and so on. Apocalypticism: the game just ends after a few moves without notice. Asceticism: the game ends if you eat the apple, you are supposed to be like a faquir. Capitalism: you start the game with 50, spend 10 each apple you eat - when you are broke you can't…