It's the new Green...

By now, I've been 5 and half years here on a SIM I play. Its about horse racing. I've gone from Arizona to Georgia to Oklahoma in that time come to think on it. 6 years come this November and I started on the SIM the last 2 or 3 weeks of year 25 and its year 40 now. I've seen amazing fake horses come and go along with my own. I've had my losses and wins in that time. I still have my issues to resolve. 

I haven't pointed this out to talk about myself, just giving a timeline. I've always written stories and it always interested me how someone weaves words together to form something beautiful in my opinion. Yet people remain the same, the bullying is not as bad as it use to be on the SIM. Though someone took it too far and bullied back.  

The SIM is a lot of things. It’s The Steward's digital love child(yes I can hear some of you laughing). It is other's SIM-crack addiction. And for others its brings them closer to a sport they love. Some have it easy and others scrimp and scrape to make it. The SIM is a world community of different personalities that we find examples of in everyday life. 

I do not expect accolades for what I write, its not why I write at all. Its because I find something I care to write about. I might use some lead way when I write but don't mistake that as anything but me lightening up a situation a bit. I wrote about someone's horse once, I liked the filly a lot and I was trying to give my best effort to that. It didn't happen like that, I got called out publicly on it and picked on. It hurt a lot and I haven't written but maybe 2 articles for the sim since. Why waste my effort on people that will tear it down because they can? 

Recently I've been made aware of scattered incidents happening all over the country. It’s a really bad thing called Swatting. Swatting means to call the cops on someone to the point they send no holds barred group into the address and in the most efficiently but brutal way possible, they get everyone down on the ground like a real situation. Problem is, these people who are being swatted are streamers, those that play and make money doing something they love. 

These people take Twitch and use it as a tool. Some people watch because they've never played the game before and want to see it. It gives publicity to the games being shown and might even get new users in. It’s a profession now, someone can make a lot of money like this from donations or actually subscriptions. Its their livelihood and yet there are those random jealous people out there that want to hurt them and because of the anonymity of the internet, they can do just that. 

State and Federal laws are in effect for those that would use the local 911 as a prank. Its to prevent people from using it unless there is an emergency. It keeps things safe for all of us here. Using it for the proper purpose is fine but these jealous people, these hackers or pseudo-hackers want to hurt others and because they are a unknown, they can and have. 
Its not that hard to find someone's address if you know their name. Its scary what there is out there on the internet. You search your real name and see all the past addresses come up. That sort of freaked me out that it was out there for free.  That needs to be curtailed because that is just one easy piece a stalker needs to find you. These companies on the internet, I never gave them permission to broadcast my past living locations. What gives them the right to do this? 

Its because there most likely isn't a law to prevent this that this happens. It’s a minor piece but it gives those so called hackers and stalkers a easy way to get what they want. One of my favorite authors, she can not even go out in public for fear of a stalker. I never understood why someone gets fixated on another like that. I guess there is something wrong in their brains that makes them act like that. It’s the same reason I don't understand hackers.  

Don't get me wrong. There are at least 2 groups of hacker types in my opinion. You have those malicious hackers who want to hurt others and then you got those hackers that might want something not publicly available. Neither is good but like any tool its not you but how you use it that defines the good or evil of it. For example, guns. This is a big topic of argument. Is a gun evil? No, it’s a object. Objects are not evil. Its how it is used that can be defined as evil. Kill someone with it? Was it in your own defense or was it because you had it and could do that? See? Is it evil to use a gun in defense? If you said yes, then I'd probably say you need to dig a hole in the sand and bury your head. 

Anyways, back to Swatting. Normally a Swat team is there as a first line assault when you get the extremist, those people that might have something going on in their heads that prevents them from having morals. That’s the nice way of putting it. These Swat teams are there for our protection when something really bad happens. Its to prevent more casualties from happening in the future.  

When someone swats another, they spoof their number and call the local, for their target, 911 and call in pretending something bad is going on. Like they are going to kill their family and the like. Its hard to figure out of this is true or not so they go in as it being a live situation. Problem happens is that one of these times the cops are going to go in and someone is going to get killed because of a mistake or incident that gives them no choice but to protect themselves from harm first then ascertain whether that was the truth. 

In the end someone's been hurt because of that. I've seen live incidences of this recorded on YouTube. Some handle it differently from others. One guy was upset because the cops had aimed their guns at his little brother. Another knew what was happening and had this air of incredulity about it that it was happening to him. He couldn't quite understand it. From my understanding there are about 400 incidents like this a year now and I can bet you that it will grow. 

By nature humans, like animals, will pick on the weak. At least with animals picking on the weak is natural and selective. Unfortunately us humans do it to make ourselves feel better more than anything. To have power over someone and make they feel worthless. It's caused the bullied people to lash out in unexpected ways. If we can hurt someone for no reason but because we can, well that’s like the reasoning Manson killed those women, because he could. Its no different from being a murderer or a bully in my opinion. 

So I will leave you with this... my thoughts on things currently that I found myself thinking of. Is it right to bully others? Is it right to Swat someone because you don't like them or because you want them out of the way during a game competition? Is it right to hurt others because you can do it? Think on that and just maybe things will start to change a little. 

Movies that are related to video games, how ugly can it get?

For the most part when you think of video games adapted into movies you think oh hell no. That is... if you actually follow what most think. Me, a lot of the movies that were adapted from video games are in two categories. A., games I've played and B., games I've not played.
BoxOfficeMojo has complied a list of movies converted from video games and the one that tops them is the original Laura Croft: Tomb Raider. I adored this movie, never played the games at all, but adored the stuffing out of it. I found that I loved the main character's attitude and stances. They were something I could agree with. The movie, itself, grossed over 131 million at the box office world wide. I loved the movie so much I have it on dvd.
For the sake of brevity, i am going to look at the top 10 games turned into movies. This refines down into 5 different series. Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, Pokemon, Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Tomb Raider had 2 entries that totaled over 232.9 million in revenue between the games and movies. What I included in all the titles was total games and their revenue and all movies and their revenue in the top 10 based off Top 10 Movie titles.
While this amount is massive and unthinkable to us, to them, after you add all the revenue up and take away the movie budget left the Tomb Raider franchise with almost 49 million in revenue. Still a hefty amount. This doesn't take into account the budgets of making the games and some of the games came out before VGChartz.com actually started compiling statistics.
These movies are not blockbusters like the Lord of the Rings series but they are not B rated movies. Well I take that back, the Pokemon might have reached that sort of notoriety considering the age range that it targeted. All those poor parents made to suffer. I am shuddering that I missed that bullet myself. The one thing that I couldn't find very easily is the actual copies sold of games. Boo!
What sites I did comb through were The-Numbers.com, BoxOfficeMojo.com and VGChartz.com to find all this information right at my fingertips. The first two gave me the total sales and budget of each movie and the later at least gave me sales in millions of what each series sold.
After compiling all the information into a spreadsheet, I started making charts to see what was happening. After comparing everything I noticed one thing, apparently the Prince of Persia series was failing pretty hard. Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie but when you add up all games sales and movie sales and then take away the budget, they were in the hole for 96 million. Ouch. Not very popular when you look at it that way. See below.

Pokemon on the other hand was a barn burner. A wildfire that parents ran in panic to get away from. I don't blame them, I find the Pokemon phenomena rather annoying but its not targeted at some 30+ year old woman, its targeted at age 15 and under kids. There is a lot of those around world wide so its no wonder after the sales of games plus the 2 movies that they would still rack up about 302 million in profit. They are truly the winners here and I applaud the money making machine they are. One would wonder how much money MTG would have raked in if someone decided to put that game into the movies. Come to think on it, its not too late... honest!
So when you look at the 5 series you find 1 children targeted movie/game, 2 adult(woo boy Angelina Jolie and Jake Gyllenhaal/Gemma Arterton body) movie/games, and two basically horror game/movies. What I know of people is basic common sense. You are going to get the fan boys and girls for the sexy, sexy actors to drool over, you are going to get the horror fanatics for the horror movie/games and then you have the kids cry and screaming about wanting to see Pokemon. Again, if you have kids, and they did that, I am sooooo sorry.
Anyways, going back to the breakdown, why are these movies top 10 in games adapted to movies? Well Angelina Jolie is a good reason for the Tomb Raider series, even I will admit that. Prince of Persia movies? Not quite sure, might be the leading actor and actress but while Jake Gyllenhaal is really nice to look at, I don't really remember the movie as anything more than a good action/adventure. I like action/adventures.
Pokemon is relatively simple to figure out... its for the kids and they rule because otherwise millions of parents would have been hearing whining all over the place and its easier to keep the midgets happy by throwing a few bucks at a movie that will keep them quiet, or not.
Resident Evil inherently is a horror genre game. Its a zombie apocalypse, end of the world type of game. I've not played it much but if you like the Left 4 Dead games, then you will like the Resident Evil ones too. The movie itself, well it did have a babe as the lead actress. Who can not admire Milla Jovovich for not only being a very sexy woman but also a kickass heroine? That here is why many boys flocked to the movie and got it to earn over 219 million after sales of the movies and games. More than that but only 3 of the movies hit the top 10 and there is a final chapter coming out in the future.
Silent Hill is almost in its own little room. It is a true horror along the lines of 13 Ghost of the more recent horror movie. Its dark, scary and only ones that would actually go see it are the game's fans. Of all 5 series, it made the lowest revenue at a tad less than 55 and a half million dollars. In fact if you take the revenue of the games and movies and remove the movie budget from it, they only got about 5 million out of the series at all. And considering the game dev budget, I am sure its in the red.
So basically what I can see of this all is the fact that movies adapted from games is not such a good idea. The trend tends to say that games turned into movies virtually almost always fail to make money. At the same time, there are rare gems that will generate so much money they make Scrooge McDuck look like a pauper. Most of the complaints I've heard about the movies converted from games is the fact they totally go off the reservation and commit the biggest sin of gamers. That sin is to change how the game is see entirely. To me, maybe that's a idea to think about because if you take a game in its entirety and make it into a movie its going to boring because you know what is going to happen from playing the game. Take that piece and chew a while on it.

Sources:

IMDB.com(2014), Search for titles taken from www.imdb.com

BoxOfficeMojo(2014), Video Game Adaptation, taken from http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?view=main&id=videogameadaptation.htm&p=.htm

Thompson, Mike(September8, 2010), Ranked: Best and Worst Movies Based on Videogames. Taken from http://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-and-worst-movies-based-on-videogames

The Numbers(2014), Movie Budgets taken from http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

VGChartz(2014), Game Database of Sales taken from http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb

Stancil, Chris(October 24, 2014) Spreadsheet and Charts https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lqzxK_n-iHGF_LId_U6RSUJWsrcJFjK8WK9G8CLh6Fc/edit?usp=sharing

Today's random thoughts...

You know, in the last month its become a lot more difficult to see good anywhere. You have ISIS, you have Obama literally screwing things up(in my opinion), you have this Solar Flare(0mg y2k anyone?) and people in general. Then I have to mention, I reallly, reaaaalllly, reallllllalllallalallly hate math. There, got that one out of the way. Phew. *wipes brow*

Now lets start with the first one. ISIS. We've( the world in general ) have known all along how intolerant religion is in general. Crusades anyone? Jihad? Its like watching a bunch of little boys get upset at each other and start flailing about some times. Don't get me wrong now, if you perscribe to any religion that is fine with me. I don't care honestly. What you believe is what you believe and it doesn't bother me as long as I don't make some faux pas by accident to piss you off. I have no right to demand of you to only be one religion. Whether Christian, Muslim or Buddhist.
Right now I can't actually see religion with ISIS at all. I see a dictator much like Hitler, stomping down their foot in a tantrum and pointing a finger at the United States in general. Hey, don't point that thing at me, I live here, doesn't mean I, or anyone else, agrees with what's going on. Most of us are sick of the crap that's been slung around by our Commander and Chief(whom I am not even sure I can grace him with that name).
I agree with what Bush did, fighting against Bin Laden. They came here, they killed our people and killed other nations people to make a statement. Yea well buddy, that statement brought our foots up to your rear with a hard kick. If you really want intolerant, that would be our troops mass burying every dead Muslim with pig carcasses. That is intolerant. We have yet to do that. And yet ISIS thinks its fun to kill innocent people, cut their heads off. Keep doing it, our next prezzie will not be the coward.
Yea its going to be 2 years from now probably but hey, I am patient, I can wait that long to see hell rain down. And my last thought on that is one that I will not voice only because I am sure millions are already thinking it. Just remember, we are not Australia or Britain and about every redneck johnboy, hick stevie, cowboy carl around carries a gun and some of them are most likely 50 cals that can take you out from a mile away. Nuff said on that.
I can't like Obama. A lot of corporations saw what he was before he came to office. I lost my job basically because of him. Granted my temperament at the time did not help but I was in a bad place at that point. Problem is, in the 4 years since then, I've only had 5 jobs. Desperation didn't help. I spent a year and half after moving from that last job and on unemployment before I got another job.
I was so desperate for it I didn't take into consideration things before hand. Such a bad mistake to make but hey, it was a job. Till I kept getting sick from people's lack of hygiene. Got the flu twice in 3 weeks time. I had to leave that job. I regret leaving but I was going to continue to get sick and miss work to the point they would have fired me. Not my fault but that doesn't help rectify my feelings.
I had another job, it was doing tech support via the internet. I liked that job but felt like I wasn't helping the business at all. Maybe even at that point I didn't believe in myself at all enough to prosper. That's just a learning experience for me.
My last job, I was ok with it. I got to work on time, i was there for my appointed shift unless someone rescheduled it and didn't notify me. Didn't happen often. Unfortunately at the beginning of the year I got sick of working for minimum wage and decided to go back to college for something I liked instead of something I knew wouldn't get me anywhere. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed the time to do the online class work. Almost failed a class because of that. Managed to pull it up to a C from the F I was getting in the last week.
I resigned that job but it doesn't make me feel any better that I was forced to basically quit. I was forced out. Here's the kicker, since the start of my newest adventure into college I've had to constantly ask the managers to schedule me less. It never helped so 4 months later I left. I was sad about that and I'm still jobless because I feel like resigning my job is just a black mark on me. Discriminated because I felt that my college was more important than a 7.35/hour job. Go figure. Go Obama, bring this country to its figurative knees.
Solar storms. Interesting concept and sometimes really pretty with the Aura Borealis. Only issue is it screws up every electronic thing in the world. One of these days we are going to take a direct hit with all our tech and everything is going to go into the can. I can only imagine the things that kind of chaos will cause. I hope I never live to see it. Not much to say on it, just a interesting tidbit.
And then there are people. Brief flickers in the dark or raging fires that light up the sky. Most of my life was filled with brief flickers and pitiful campfires I tried to huddle around. I could barely make friends. Got real use to being used and stepped on and then one day I had enough and lets just say at that point people were a waste of space. Frankly I can barely find one redeeming quality to hold on to. People are fickle and most of them are real asses. It's the ones that are not like that, those are the ones that you can barely find and keep hold of. At this point I've given up. If there is a few like that and I met them, well ok. If not, well ok.
And let me leave you with this last bit of opinion. I really, really, really, really hate math. It's the devil.

Trends of Game Development

There are so many developments in games lately and in the past few years and just as there are that, there are many trends and developments that are akin to a scientist having the freedom to do what ever they way. In a way that scares me as much as what I see from reading. I am a woman, what real chance do I have in a male dominated industry where big breasted woman are the main 'female' characters?

Nada, zero, zip, nothing. That's how I feel when I read these articles about current developments. As gamers and future developers we need to pay attention to not only our imaginary worlds but also to the real world and its trends. So in saying this, I consider the most important thing for the future to be open source or SDK development. If you do a search on the net for free SDK you will find a dozen different ones to play with and enjoy.

Unreal released their game engine for free download with a clause that you can use it fully but when you start to make money, there will be a certain percentage taken out after the first 50k. For a developer, 50K might not be a lot but with a engine that birthed UT03, Borderlands and Gears of War how can anyone go wrong? And they are not the only ones. Valve has one, CryEngine has one and there are many others. I haven't looked closely at the others because I was already super impressed with Unreal's engine to begin.

Allowing developers, those underdogs, a chance to use a top engine to create a game will bring new light into the industry. Whether it is a first person shooter or a RPG, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that there are dreamers out there wanting to see their dreams made into reality even if its on a TV or monitor. Its the ideas created that keeps the industry running, not the new fabrications that arrive though they help keep things impressive.

A development we should all see coming out soon is the impressive Oculus Rift 3d headset. I can't help but think that VR is not just a sci-fi thing anymore(Holo Deck anyone?) but also a path we have just started on. Think of all that came out of sci-fi story. Star Wars, Star Trek... both have given those dreamers ideas to step towards and finally someone, through current tech, has realized the potential of VR using relatively inexpensive parts.

While this has been around since motion  pictures at least, 3d was too expensive to make it something public. But it will be here within a year or so, it won't be pretty at first, it won't be smooth but it will be here and I can not see any reason for it to up and disappear at all. People want more reality in gaming, they want to see games just as we all see real life. That takes hardware, software and talent to get to this point. As they say, our future is here and now.

 Resources:

Poh, Michael(2013) Future of Gaming: 5 Exciting Emerging Trends http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/future-of-gaming/

The tech that gave PC's a foothold in gaming - In the Beginning...

Tech being as it is and was, there's been some very unique advancements that drove games from being console only into the PC which I favor so much that I'm dancing! With Nintendo being the big dog back in the late 80's and early 90's it was hard for anything to compete with them. They were the masters and we all were the slaves, just throwing money at them happily. So what was the advancements that changed this all?

First you had Creative Labs, back in 1989 they came out with the much loved, very first Sound Blaster card. It was advance for the time frame and had 8-bit mono and C/MS which was still a bit of a step up from consoles at that point. What Creative also did was give it all the support that people needed which made it very popular. A+ there! They kept improving it and I have to say, till the Z series,  which I have now, I loved them all. This Z series sucks plainly right now. I wont go into it.

Next was 3d graphics. The first game to use it and use it well was Doom. But if you look back, it was the advent of OpenGL that caused 3d graphics to boom. Silicon Graphics(SGI) focused on 3d computer graphics and created IRIS GL. Because it was such a proprietary item other companies were closing in on them. What they did was clean IRIS up and release it as OpenGL to the public. And to this day its still the standard that it was back in the early 90s.

The last that comes to mind is shareware  Andrew Fluegleman and Jim Knopf can be named the father of shareware but Apogee took it a bit further with games. You have a bit of a taste and then boom, pay for the rest. id Software separated Wolfenstein 3-D into 3 sections, Apogee tossed out the first part, in essence, for free, left you wanting more and gave you all the information you needed to get the rest. The next year, they(id Software) basically did the same with Doom and as they say... the rest is history.

Now consoles are scrambling to keep up with PCs and failing because of key components. CD-ROMs were a recent addition to consoles. Better graphics cards, recent and still behind addition to consoles. Games. That's a wide open debate because the feel of games going from console to PC is really odd. Its the controllers that caused it. Mouse is a lot smoother than controllers when playing which is why you will never see a open world where any platform can play.