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The Player's Bill of Rights
Gamasutra has a Designer's Notebook column up this week offering up a Player's Bill of Rights. Written by Ernest Adams, the article decries the many indignities that we as players should never be forced to suffer. From the article: "The Right to Feedback: The player has a right to know how she's doing, and in particular, to some means of determining if she's in danger of losing the game. If the player doesn't get feedback, she can't adjust her strategy, and the outcome will feel random. Players need to know whether their approach is working or not."
No. If you RTFA, you'll see that the author alternates between "he" and "she". It's called "inclusive language", and it's currently the best solution to the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun in English - though with the rise of singular "they" it will hopefully become extinct soon enough.
I was given a copy of Pirates! for my birthday. I put the cd into my computer to install it, and the machine crashed. I tried again, it crashed again. Returning the game got me another copy, which also crashed my computer. In the end I took an older CDROM drive I had laying around and crammed it into my computer to give it a try. Magically, the game worked using this drive. Now, if I were a typical computer user, I wouldn't have had that drive laying around. I'd have had to spend another $40 or so on a new drive just to get the program to work (which, according to the listed requirements, should have worked with my existing hardware). That, or the game my friend bought for me would have actually been a couple of $20 coasters. According to store policy, this broken product was not returnable for a refund. This sort of thing is the reason most people want to be able to return games to the store, and the reason why so much software gets pirated nowadays: why should consumers risk their money on a product that the producers aren't willing to guarantee will even function properly, let alone provide an enjoyable play experience?
It's possible that the author simply hasn't sat in a writing class in a few years. About 8 to 10 years ago, the MLA standard for a personal pronoun that referred to an indefinite person was "she." The MLA created this situation to rectify what was seen as the discriminatory use of "he" for years, and most style handbooks advised alternating between "he" and "she" when writing a lengthy discourse involving indefinite subjects.
I can remember being taught in English classes that "she" was the correct way to approach a situation such as this Bill of Rights.
Of course, after only a few years, it dawned on the members of the MLA that "she" was equally discriminating. Thus, the correct approach is now "he or she" in situations such as this, though it is very common for writers to erroneously use "they."
The sole exception, as far as I know, was Space Quest 2, where in the first room you needed to pick up something that you needed near the end of the game, and that was deliberate, those bastards.
And if you got attacked by the alien you had an alien burst out of your chest later on, but I laugh at people who complain about that. First, it was five minutes of gameplay you lost, and second, um, duh. What did you think would happen?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You seem to define "deffective" as in "the CD was physically unreadable", which is just about the only thing that would be solved by giving someone another copy. What if the software itself is broken and deffective? Because that's the actual product I bought there, and the CD was just the medium it comes on.
E.g., the german version of Victoria threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of a new campaign. Yes, you've read that right. Not a crash to desktop, not some graphics glitch, _nothing_ even remotely blamable on my hardware or drivers. A script _syntax_ error. That game couldn't work as released on _any_ hardware.
E.g., a german version again, Everquest 2 was released with a completely broken translation, which actually did impact gameplay. NPCs and items would be named completely differently in the quest text and in the actual game, making it literally impossible to do what you were told. The NPC you were told to kill simply didn't even exist in the game. (And generally, you know it's bad when even the few fans tell you to try translating it word-for-word back into English, to figure out some texts.)
E.g., Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst doesn't seem to be able to connect at all on my XP machine, although it works flawlessly on my Windows 2000 machine. (So, no, it's not a case of ports being blocked by the router or ISP.) Mind you, I needed to dig through tech support faqs even just to get it to the point it would try to connect: first it didn't even let me input my name and password. No, literally, typing anything in those input boxes was a futile exercise. The only key they accepted was basically escape to cancel it.
E.g., to take an older game, take The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. The collision detection was so bad, that you'd fall into the void even when running on flat groud, or when teleporting back to town. I'm picking on it, instead of newer ones, because it's a clear-cut case of deffective software, and can't be blamed on drivers or hardware. It took many _months_ for Bethesda to try to fix it, and eventually they gave up and made a cheat code to teleport you back to the beginning of the map if you fell into the void.
E.g., Morrowind was shipped with a pretty nasty race condition that resulted in a crash to desktop when zoning. But as is usually the case with race conditions, on different PCs it produced wildly different results. On some you had a crash every couple of hours, but some people couldn't even leave the starting ship at all, because the game would crash when they went through the hatch. I'm not even going into the aspect that a game that crashes at all _is_ deffective, but the fact remains that some people just couldn't play it as shipped.
Etc.
So giving them a replacement CD is gonna solve... what? No, seriously.
Yeah, they were sooo trying to rip you off, by not accepting a game they couldn't run at all. Not. Geesh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
One can also use the Spivak pronouns if one doesn't want to come off as sounding like a bit of a toff. :)
Try playing on a smaller monitor.
Motion sickness is caused when the feedback to your eyes contradicts the feedback of your inner ear (which is where you sense of balance comes from.)
I can play Quake for hours and hours on a 20" monitor with no problem, but HALO on my big-screen TV is another matter. A half-hour of driving the Warthog ("Puma", whatever) and I need to stop playing and go for a walk outside or something.
It's becoming a common enough problem that it seems there may be an opening here for arcades (which have almost all disappeared in the US since the rise of FPS, MMORPG, and the latest console generation): Build game machines which tilt to off-set this problem when playing the newest first-person shooters. Most people can't afford such elaborate contraptions at home, so you might get a few bucks a week out of them so they can play at your arcade/bar/bowling alley/etc.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.