[Kolgena]

I forgot, it was funny that the Escapist clip had World of Goo as an example of easy accessibility. I can concur with that. It is original and vivid game with a non-existent learning curve.

But it was also too short and too easy. In this case (oh the irony), I hope they make a longer and slightly harder sequel.

So wait, you got the OCDs for every one of them within a reasonable time frame?

[General Battuta]

Logic tells me that the published books had to be better earlier. The reason is simple: it took a lot more work to write one. So yes, there has probably been many bad books before, but the ratio between good and bad ones is becoming worse nowadays.

See above for demolition.

[Mobius]

I demand stats regarding books.

[Mika]

Stats here from my country:
http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/huhtikuu_en.html

I'll reply tomorrow for the "demolition". Early wakeup on morning, so gotta go to sleep.

[Mobius]

Personal opinion about the overall quality of books:

It's dropping because everyone can write a book nowadays... it didn't use to be a common practice for the gross majority of the population until a few decades ago (probably less). The profile of the typical writer has changed a lot.

[StarSlayer]

I'll admit my zest for gaming is on a down turn.  Not because of any real or imagined drop in quality of gaming, but rather I simply enjoy doing other things more nowadays.  My week's booked with martial arts, horseback riding, running and cooking.  I really don't have much time for it, and even when I do find the time it generally only holds my interest for an hour or so.  To be honest I don't much care for television either.  Aside from the news, football and Castle the TV remains off most of the week.  I dunno, for me there's more interesting things to accomplish right now then gaming.

[General Battuta]

Personal opinion about the overall quality of books:

It's dropping because everyone can write a book nowadays... it didn't use to be a common practice for the gross majority of the population until a few decades ago (probably less). The profile of the typical writer has changed a lot.

No. If anything getting published by a real house has become harder. Writing no longer pays any money for 95% of writers.

[Mongoose]

Back to gaming then, what should we think of the new players who find Freespace too complex? Do you think it is so?

I think it could certainly be considered as such, from a certain point of view.  Keep in mind that FreeSpace represents a type of control interface that simply isn't all that common anymore.  Flight sims have always been something of a niche genre, and we know that space sims are all but extinct.  Even the more complicated of PC titles today, like your MMOs and regular RPGs, have much of the control interface handled via on-screen menus and prompts.  In contrast, FS requires handling a wide array of keyboard controls (unless you have an uber HOTAS setup, but who does?), and for someone who isn't used to that, I can imagine it seeming very overwhelming at first.  I had the benefit myself of playing Descent before I found FS, but even that was a decent step up in control complexity.

Also, going along with the video I posted, I don't think FS's tutorial system is all that ideal in the grand scheme of things.  There are several very useful ship functions that never get touched on in the training missions, while a few commands that don't come up all that much are explained.  (I know I've just about never used match speed outside of the tutorial mission. ) To add to that, the tutorials are, quite frankly, intensely boring, as they're completely removed from the storyline and comprise three missions in a row of drudgery.  They're essentially the anti-Portal, as it were.  If were making FS today, I think the tutorial system is something that they'd definitely revisit.

[Ransom]

Personal opinion about the overall quality of books:

It's dropping because everyone can write a book nowadays... it didn't use to be a common practice for the gross majority of the population until a few decades ago (probably less). The profile of the typical writer has changed a lot.

Your statement works against itself. It's true that there are more people writing books these days, but like Battuta said that only makes things harder. Publishing a book isn't a small endeavour; between editing, typesetting, advertising, printing and probably other costs I don't know about, publishers have a ceiling for the number of works they can feasibly publish in a given year. More submissions means more competition. If anything the standard has risen, not lowered.

Which brings us to Mika's earlier remark about modern authors only writing to stay alive, which - given how wildly difficult it is to even make a living writing fiction, let alone a decent living - is probably the most ridiculous idea this thread has produced yet. It was actually far more plausible about a century ago.

[Topgun]

Before this thread turns into a thread about books, let me just say that I sort off agree that games aren't as innovative as they used to be.


Also I got neverwinter nights off gog.

[MP-Ryan]

Logic tells me that the published books had to be better earlier. The reason is simple: it took a lot more work to write one. So yes, there has probably been many bad books before, but the ratio between good and bad ones is becoming worse nowadays.

Are you kidding me?  Look at classic literature - in the days of Swift, Doyle, Wilde, Austen, and others, virtually anyone could get virtually anything published if their work was even moderately worth reading.  For one, a lot fewer people could even read and write to begin with, which narrowed your audience somewhat.  Second, most published works came out in series in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals - true novels, in the 500+ page sense of the word, are a relatively new invention (even religious texts were frequently published in parts).

At any given time, there are literally thousands of authors with material worth reading in circulation - yet historically, we remember perhaps only a few dozen authors from each era.  And as others have mentioned, there is a good reason for that - only those with works that stood the test of time have survived to present day.

Your reference point is the problem here.  There was a lot less published in terms of overall volume in the past than in the present, but publishing was open to a much wider proportion of the population, and publishers tended to be more prolific in their sense of variety (fewer copies, a great deal more material).  But, relatively little of the sheer volume of authors has survived - that which history deems worthy of passing down.

Your quote just indicates to me that you have a pretty poor grasp of the history of the written word in general.

[Dark Hunter]

For one, a lot fewer people could even read and write to begin with [...] but publishing was open to a much wider proportion of the population...

Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here?

[Scotty]

Yes.

Audience lower, but more comparatively more people could publish.  The terms are not related except by the trade in which they are employed.

[bobbtmann]

Finding a good sci-fi book requires time, patience, and a library card. I'll usually read (or start reading) five or six book before I find one that sticks with me. The hardest part is not judging the book by its cover, since that's all I'm doing when I pick it off the shelf.

As for video games, if you get tired of playing them then build them. Modding provides an something engaging that playing them doesn't.

[General Battuta]

There's a possibly-true factoid whispered about at workshops - writers today make the exact same amount they did in 1910, not adjusted for inflation. If you made ten cents then, you make ten cents now for the same amount of work.

Considering what ten cents was worth then vs. what it's worth now...yeah, that's why writing doesn't pay.

[bobbtmann]

That statement could probably be extended towards most forms of art. I expect most serious artists live at or around the poverty line.

[Mika]

Seriously(!) guys,

I don't even know how to begin with. Thinking how to even start this post was demanding.

Let me start by asking you a very simple question: how many of you have written more than 100 pages with a typewriter? Or, say, more than twenty pages by hand, taking meticulous care of the linguistics? Or written a letter by hand for someone you don't know very well, yet you felt that you had something that worth wile to say that the letter was more than justified in your eyes? What I think is that if you haven't done any of that, you can't possibly understand the amount of work required. How could you? The other thing to consider is that the typewriters were not exactly cheap either. If you go even further back in the history, the amount of people who were able to read and write was lower, and being able to do so usually signified higher education, and getting through that also happened to require being able to produce stylized and clear text. And as like in the Army, some things in the Education don't die quickly. Even I had to take such a test in order to demonstrate that I really can write linguistically correct, clear and understandable Finnish text with good amount of information content. It would be a serious blow for me if such tests are not any more instated elsewhere. There was even one incident that I just recalled, back then when I was sitting as a student chair in the faculty of Science, there was a close call for a hand written Maturity Test being rejected due to bad language skills. I can assure you that the older professors were and still are a lot more strict on what it comes to the correctness of language and even stylistic issues.

The next point is that you think that yesterday authors were lucky to live in a situation where they could publish almost anything. Not so, at least in here. Have you ever read the corrections for the texts written in 1950s? Or the required stylistic changes by the editors? I recall that the United States of America banned one novel that I mentioned earlier because it contained "too graphic content"; the content being close to a medical description of the work of an Egyptian embalmer, and how to prepare the late Pharaoh for the rest of eternity. This kind of banning simply does not happen today in Western Countries. But if nowadays books were sent to past, I think not many of them would ever be published without significant changes. And to take the thought a little bit further, how would those much toted cyberpunk books survive had the strong words and violence been neutered?

Then let's discuss about the publishers themselves. You are talking about books being expensive to publish and that there is natural selection pressure that will favor good books due to large amount of hopeful writers. This is not true, and it would be clear to you had you lead the thought even a little bit further. Even in the statistics link I posted it is clearly stated that the expenses caused by book publishing are less than they used to be, a clear written statement which should be quite visible and I expect of you that you do not miss such an important sentence next time. I confess I can't possibly imagine how valuable a book was in the 1600s. The second point to understand is that the publishing companies focus on the books that they think will sell well, which is not by itself any sort of guarantee of quality. Personally, I think that almost guarantees the opposite, for it is controversy, scandals, mudslinging and revelations that are quite popular today.

So, writing earlier was definitely not easy because of the technology, publishing was much more expensive and the average readers were used to and required higher literature standards - be it novels or non-fiction books. And one should add on top of that the rather high censoring policy of the publishers. What it comes to earlier writers getting more money, writing has never been a kind of job where everybody gets rich - which sometimes is just being at the right place at the right time. My personal opinion is that if writer cannot nowadays get his work published, his writing, to put it bluntly, sucks.

Just because something looks simple and sounds reasonable, the reality might still beg to differ. While throwing rather heated comments about the stupidity of mine, take a look at the this text and think again if it could have been written by a stupid, ignorant person. Now, I have taken my time to enjoy you with this reply and expect similar standards from you. I'm eagerly awaiting for your hate mail, but with great sorrow I have to say I likely will not be able to respond until tomorrow evening or the day after tomorrow. Last thing to mention is that I'm fully aware that different people think that different kinds of books are good. We go by the majority and that has started to cause problems for me in finding books that I consider good, which is the original topic in this thread.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, I feel everything you asserted in that post is superficially reasonable but ultimately not applicable to the realities of publishing. Industries are shrinking, standards are up, getting published is harder and unlike in the days of yore you can't make a living selling by volume any more. This post makes the point nicely. The statistics you linked do nothing to contradict any of it.

I'll summarize your argument for ya:

-Writing on a typewriter is hard! Indeed. Thank goodness we have improved technology today so we can spend effort on things that actually matter, instead of painstaking technical hurdles. The laborious nature of writing on a typewriter or by hand does not guarantee any increase in quality; if anything it is responsible for many of the difficulties older manuscripts faced.

-There was more censorship in the past! Indeed. Lucky we don't have to deal with that **** any more. Also lucky that good authors were still able to talk about very disturbing things if they needed to. Censorship is anathema to good literature.

-Costs of publishing are down! Maybe, but irrelevant when the revenue is shrinking faster. The American SF publishing industry is contracting in most sectors; literature and literary SF and fantasy are both far more selective. It's harder to get published by a legitimate, reputable house these days. I don't know how it's working out for the British School.

-Readers had higher standards! Not so, judging by the trash that got published back then. Sturgeon's Law holds then as it did now. In fact almost every book in the SF sector published in the era between the 1900s and the...1970s, I'd say at a guess, would be a laughingstock today. The survivors of that era are what you hold up as classics, but you're ignoring the enormous morass of crap that was produced by the 'Golden Age'.

In fact, authors today have such higher standards that they famously attacked a publisher which claimed to have quality standards but didn't, simply by writing intentional crap in the mold of old pulp.

You provided a nice refutation of your own points right here:

What it comes to earlier writers getting more money, writing has never been a kind of job where everybody gets rich - which sometimes is just being at the right place at the right time. My personal opinion is that if writer cannot nowadays get his work published, his writing, to put it bluntly, sucks.

Indeed. Unlike in the past, people who suck find it hard to get published these days. This is why the rejection rate for would-be authors is up so high; standards have improved. This is why the self-publishing industry has had such success. This is also why the general quality of SF lit at the elite level has increased. Failures or the mediocre now go into media SF or to specialty houses like Baen.

The brutal fact is that people looking to go into SF or fantasy publication are taught to expect 350-400 rejections before selling a single short story. Just one. That kind of rejection rate was not as commonplace back in the gee-whiz nuclear-rockets 40s and 50s.

I understand your argument, that submission volume is up, but I think you're out of touch with the realities of the publishing industry. It is a shrinking sector that only allows a few elites to survive and presents massive barriers to entry. The only way to get in is either to be really good, really lucky, or to go into media tie-ins or paranormal romance. As a result, the ratio of **** to gold is probably better than it has been in some time.

Make no mistake: in general the industry is dying, and only the strong survive. When I spend time at SFWA functions, most of the old guard are writers who would never be published in today's climes. The rare newcomers are young, strong writers (Ted Chiang; Cat Valente; many others) who are several cuts above.

All in all what I think we have here is a classic case of the 'good old days' bias. Summed up nicely by our subject:

Personally, I think that almost guarantees the opposite, for it is controversy, scandals, mudslinging and revelations that are quite popular today.

The most superficial grasp of history would tell you that this is exactly how things have been for decades. Centuries, really.

[StarSlayer]

Yeah I gotta agree with battuta, the difficulties inherent with typewriters and or manual pen and ink writing, coupled with grammar OCD does not superior writing make.  Writing code in Fortran with punchcards was certainly difficult, and also required a extreme level of correctness, but that certainly doesn't form any basis for arguing it as being  superior to the capabilities of current programing languages.

[General Battuta]

I'm kind of despondent right now because I've been banging out a manuscript for a month and now I realize that it's unusably long.   Anything over 100k gets tossed out immediately by slush readers, and I'm bumping up on 90 without making a significant dent in the plot.

****.