FMs to be distributed exclusively through Eidos? (LOOK OUT! IT'S A PRANK!)

ZylonBane on 1/4/2005 at 22:18

I say it's time to turn the "joke" around by dragging this thread down into a horrid flamewar of epic proportions!

Aja on 1/4/2005 at 22:49

Zylon I am so sick of your bullshit. If I wanted sarcasm and stupid dialogue I'd watch television.

Why don't you just shut the hell up and do us all a favour by NOT posting here!!!

ps - !!!

SneaksieDave on 1/4/2005 at 22:50

OOH, great idea! So what shall it be;

1. outright flaming (Focus: "No, YOUR mom!")
2. religious debate (Subtopics include: radical Islam, abortion, pedophilic priests, and more!)
3. which country is best (Subtopic: "America, Home of the Brave, Land of the Free, Love it or Leave it, blah, blah, etc.")
4. WMDs and the President of teh World
5. SPORTS (Focus: NY Yankees vs. Everyone)
6. pornography (Subtopics *censored*)
7. ~~Ireland~~ ~~China!~~ Ireland

ZylonBane on 1/4/2005 at 22:52

Kenneth, what is the frequency?!?!

Karl Stader on 1/4/2005 at 22:54

This may or may not be useful.

I ran both GBM’s preamble and the supposed Eidos letter through Gender Genie:

(http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html)

…because, as a function of it’s gender-guessing algorithm, GG creates word usage stats. I’ve found something interesting: To make the proverbial long story short, incidences and word usage between the two text samples are rather strikingly similar, despite the fact that the algorithm concluded (not by much) that the genders are different. The rankings for usage of the words “with”, “if”, “are”, “me”, and “what” are identical between the two text samples, and most of the rest of the rankings don’t vary too greatly.

For what it’s worth, I dumped each result to .pdf for comparison and posted them here:

(http://mercury.walagata.com/w/farkus/Eidos_Letter_-_The_Gender_Genie.pdf)
(http://mercury.walagata.com/w/farkus/s_Preamble_-_The_Gender_Genie.pdf)

Perhaps somebody knows of a better tool for this.

jermi on 1/4/2005 at 23:00

This is much better than "The Bold and the Beautiful" or the Gulf War live on CNN. Well, I wasn't really looking forward to playing TDS FMs anyway, I'd much rather just watch this drama unfold.

If it is an april fools joke, it doesn't suck too badly, it's even quite plausible. Regardless of whether the ownership of Eidos is settled or not, there might be a need to maximize the company's value on paper right now. The Flesh engine + editor can be written down on paper as a big potential asset. So there might be a need to control the distribution of the editor and the FMs created with that editor. To be more precise, the need to state legally that such control exists - even though it doesn't exist in practice.

Even the annual FM collection by Eidos sounds almost plausible as a first draft of a corporate plan. It's not a bad plan, mind you, as an additional distribution channel. As the only distribution channel for FMs, it would kill the FM community as we know it.

Jakeyboy on 1/4/2005 at 23:30

Nice prank par on last year.

Gestalt on 1/4/2005 at 23:31

Quote Posted by Karl Stader

I ran both GBM’s preamble and the supposed Eidos letter through Gender Genie...

The Gender Genie is arse, though. I checked a bunch of old posts I made with it, and it came up female way more often than it should've. The girliest girl I know got the highest "male" score out of all my friends.

money on 1/4/2005 at 23:35

Assuming for the moment that this were for real, by what logic would Eidos have any rights to levels created with the editor? Does Microsoft have rights to text files I create with notepad?
I don't need permission to use a piece of software I've legally downloaded. Eidos chose to distribute it, and they *could* have chosen to include a EULA that imposed restrictions on usage, but they didn't. Too bad for them.

Karl Stader on 1/4/2005 at 23:44

Quote Posted by Gestalt

The Gender Genie is arse, though.

I realize it's none too deadly, but I wasn't really concerned with it's gender prognostications, only the word usage breakdown that I knew it would generate. I've heard of more useful and accurate writing analysis tools on the ‘net, but this is the best I could muster at the moment.