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I was recently playing the 1995 space exploration game Ascendancy. One of the structures that you can build on a planet is an internet. The effect of building t

by jordigh 11y ago

I was recently playing the 1995 space exploration game Ascendancy. One of the structures that you can build on a planet is an internet. The effect of building this on a planet was to double a planet's total research output. That's how the internet was viewed in 1995 by starry-eyed game developers. I wish we returned to that 1995-era optimism of what the internet was about. An internet should have made traditional journals obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long.

beloch 11y ago
I remember that game... I think I still have the original box in a closet! The art was amazing. The music incredible. The 3D systems were very cool for the time. I sank dozens of hours into it and then realized the AI was utterly and hopelessly broken. I had pissed off an alien civilization and had absolutely no defense up in a system they were adjacent to. They sent a massive armada to that system, but then that armada just sat on an uninhabited planet doing nothing. This armada was so massive that it could have steamrolled every one of my planets, but it just sat there getting bigger as more ships joined it. Eventually, I gave up on building an armada big enough to dislodge it, ignored it, and wiped the aliens out with my own ships. I never did get a hold of the patch that was supposed to fix the AI. How does it play (I assume you are playing with the patch)?
ktRolster 11y ago
> An internet should have made traditional journals > obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long. The futurists failed to see the negative value points of advertising, and how it drags everything down into a pit where "you won't believe what happens next."
- brianclements 11y ago
  For every starry-eyed and future creating technologist, who really does see the best-case scenario for what current and near-future technologies can accomplish, they need to always be shadowed by a team of altruistic business/PR/advertising-savvy advocates who can remind them how the worst among us are going to screw it all up so that our hero-geniuses can bake safeguards into the systems they create from the onset.

by jordigh 11y ago

beloch 11y ago

I remember that game... I think I still have the original box in a closet! The art was amazing. The music incredible. The 3D systems were very cool for the time. I sank dozens of hours into it and then realized the AI was utterly and hopelessly broken. I had pissed off an alien civilization and had absolutely no defense up in a system they were adjacent to. They sent a massive armada to that system, but then that armada just sat on an uninhabited planet doing nothing. This armada was so massive that it could have steamrolled every one of my planets, but it just sat there getting bigger as more ships joined it. Eventually, I gave up on building an armada big enough to dislodge it, ignored it, and wiped the aliens out with my own ships. I never did get a hold of the patch that was supposed to fix the AI. How does it play (I assume you are playing with the patch)?

ktRolster 11y ago

> An internet should have made traditional journals > obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long. The futurists failed to see the negative value points of advertising, and how it drags everything down into a pit where "you won't believe what happens next."

brianclements 11y ago
For every starry-eyed and future creating technologist, who really does see the best-case scenario for what current and near-future technologies can accomplish, they need to always be shadowed by a team of altruistic business/PR/advertising-savvy advocates who can remind them how the worst among us are going to screw it all up so that our hero-geniuses can bake safeguards into the systems they create from the onset.