Apple

It has been a few years since I got a phone and its time to upgrade. I've been watching the new phones get announced the last few months and I have been excitedly waiting for a cool Windows Phone 8 device. WP8 is a gorgeous platform. So far we have seen a few good phones that utilize WP8, but all are heavy and bulky with large screens. /Sigh. I really like my 3.7" Droid screen. I don't want to 'upgrade' to something that is larger and weighs more. The Lumia 920 looks awesome. I love its features, I love its look. I would recommend it to others. Yet I am almost certain when I hold it in my hand next month I will hate its size. That leaves me with the iPhone 5. Oh Apple, how many hours has your terrible iTunes program wasted of my time? How many iPods have broke shortly after purchase, to be returned broken to me after warranty replacement? 4. That is how many. I have had bad experiences with Apple, their excessive marketing annoys me, their culture of greed annoys me, and the way people look up to Steve Jobs (a rather bad person) annoys me.

That being said, I recently bought some Apple stock and will probably buy an iPhone 5 this holiday season (to my possible regret). Why?

Stock
Their stock resembles a bubble, but even when it bursts the company will continue making phones, tablets, TV boxes, and computers. The company will survive. How much longer the bubble has left is hard to say; it might never pop as long as things continue the way they are now.

Phones
With phones, Apple doesn't have to innovate anymore. It is the standard. This quarter, innovations from other phones just seem like gimmicks. Features like NFC, image stabilization and wireless charging are just not important enough to people and won't be until Apple joins in. The Nokia Lumia 920 is awesome, but Apple controls the playing field, and this years rules are that we don't need new features all we need is a nice slim phone.

Apples competitors don't seem to be able to compete directly with the iphone. There is no AAA 3.7"-4.3" phones coming this season except the 4.3" HTC phone, which is much larger and heavier than Apples phone. Apple has obviously invested in making their phones small and light while competitors fail to keep up and/or choose to add bulk with new features. But Apple tells consumers what features (if any) are important, so Apple will continue to dominate the phone market during the next 2-3 years until competitors compress their devices.

Intel vs ARM
Right now Intel is on the path to building smaller, faster chips than ARM by around 2014. ARM is investing in the next thing in microprocessing. Intel is investing in the thing after the next thing. When this happens, if Apple is not an early adapter of these new chips, there will be a huge opportunity for Apple to lose control of the market. Or maybe intel will never make a comeback, but that is unlikely.

Tablets
Meanwhile in the tablet market, iOS as is is no match for Windows RT as a productivity and consumption platform, and I am interested to see where that goes. It is so hard to tell though, because Microsoft has so many hurdles to pass (start screen pushback on W8, lack of RT apps, lack of tablet branding, new interface people don't want to learn) despite having an amazing product. In the end the branding could make this a huge struggle for Microsoft. Everyone thinks apple 'just works'. Even if RT works better, there is always a learning curve when switching to new devices and almost everyone has used iOS and gets it now.

TV
Finally, Apple is likely to release a new iTV product and if they can wrestle good deals with cable networks the way they have dominated deals with the music industry and wireless carriers (Carriers give Apple a $400 subsidy for every phone, compared with just $250-$300 given to other smartphones) then iTV could be really popular. Right now there are some good TV devices out, but none that are truely polished and well known. There is a lot of opportunity. It is prime for Apples strategy of placing their brand on an emerging market and pushing their excellent marketing until their brand is synonymous with that market. I wish Microsoft would re-brand xbox more completely into a media center and add more cable network deals to their xbox service and they could prevent iTV from being Apples next big product, but they probably will not. Xbox is a great media center right now for TVs but it is still seen as a gaming console. The next media centers (iTV) will be seen as a REPLACEMENT to CABLE.

What does this have to do with programming multiplayer RPGs? Not much. I do think that the future of gaming relies heavily on Windows RT tablets and these TV/media center boxes though. As for my game, I have not had time to work on it over the summer.

Lss

Commentary on Zelda Series

In this post, I want to draw some attention to an article by Tevis Thompson about the Zelda series or the evolution of RPGs then its worth the read or skim:

http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/

If you can't tell yet, WORG is meant to be an open world action RPG, which is the sort of game I like, which is why I mostly agree with this article.

I do not especially agree that Zelda should be 'harder', because the difficulty of modern games has been dictated by the modern player: We want easy games. I am annoyed by it too sometimes, but it is something we have to come to terms with for big titles like Zelda.

But what I got most out of his article was from this paragraph:

Modern Zeldas are translations of their 2D forbearers; they’ve never been fundamentally reconceived in 3D from the ground up. In choosing what elements made Zelda fundamentally Zelda, Nintendo chose poorly. They took the puzzles instead of the action, the conventions instead of the world, the items instead of the spirit.

You may feel insulted by his article because in your opinion, the fundemental Zelda is puzzles. Telon notes, Zelda I and II were devoid of puzzles. This is where a contention may created between old and new fans of the series, because older Zelda fans like myself see Zelda fundementally as an action open-world RPG with endless secrets and interests... But that just isn't the direction the series went.

Although Zelda is doing well financially still, I agree with the article that it would be doing better and be a higher quality game if it had stuck to its original fundementals. But that is difficult to tell...

Also arguably the technology/design saavy just was not there to make OoT more action centric like we see in action RPG's today... Which in my opinion explains the direction that Zelda has taken as a 'puzzle' and 'fetch quest' game.

Lss

How Not to Create a World

Yesterday I was playing on my favorite surivival minecraft server, and a new player to the server got killed twice in a row by another player. His kill logs popped up first, and then the complaining started.

"Why didn't I see the PKer on dynmap?? He isn't on the map." "Because he is a donator, he can hide himself from the map" "That's not fair he is giving $$ to be more powerful" "If you don't think its fair then you should donate too and he won't be able to find you to kill you" "He is contibuting to the server, he deserves it"

About 3-4 people on the server put in their 2 cents, telling the new player to deal with it and that donations "are to help the server". I was the only person who told him that I agree, but put a disclaimer to him that this server isn't nearly as bad as many others. Which was true, I know because I spent weeks looking for a minecraft server that fits all my personal specifications, and I found myself right back where I started. A good half of the servers I visited during those weeks have donator incentives that make them god-like (sometimes literally), admin powers, and unlimited items/blocks.

The next day I visited the forum of my minecraft server to see that the same newbie complaining about donators being able to make themselves invisible on the minimap had posted 2 threads asking to be unbanned. One thread was created after the other one was locked; it was locked after he mentioned donator incentives being unfair. Apparently, he had been 'whining' too much. Sorta true, I thought to myself... When I was online the day before he was going on about it quite a bit more than I would... And he must have continued doing that because I was not there when he was banned.

So why does this bother me so much? Maybe it is because I am a little jaded, having spent 5-10 years casually programming websites and multiplayer video games myself from scratch yet making only $25 or so a month despite all this work, which I put back into advertising the game, whereas a minecraft server has more advertising outlets like server listings. I see my minecraft server raking in $50 every few days and it makes me cringe. Maybe I feel bad for the original creator of minecraft, who is seeing none of the money (like many, this server is a cracked server, meaning you can play it with or without a purchased copy of minecraft) while some random guy is 'raking it in'. Maybe it is because I have run servers before for first person shooters, and I run servers for my own multiplayer games now, and I know that a lot of the time these are being hosted off of our home computers and are costing us $0 but making us gods in our own little world. I see people playing on this minecraft server and tip-toeing around the owner and moderators, kissing up to them, etc and think to myself, they don't really deserve this. The work they have put in does not deserve the reward they have been given (not that this is unusual in the U.S.). I wonder if maybe I should open my own server (I know it takes a lot less time than some of the players say it does), but it would be difficult being so bogged down with grad school, so I don't open one yet. I am far beyond getting thrills out of being 'powerful' in a game community anyways, so I would just be doing it for the $$ and enjoyment of playing with some new software. And I keep playing on this server, and I donate myself because I need those perks to enjoy the game to its fullest, but I feel a tinge of guilt knowing that I am contributing to something twisted. That leads me here to rant about it because we all know that if I posted this on my servers community forum that it would be ridiculed and locked.

I am not arguing against a free-to-play structure, but against original games being exploited for money by players hosting multiplayer servers. This is only worsened by the pay-to-win attitude that comes a long with many of these servers, which I am also strongly against.

Lss