Uh, what? You've never heard someone say that somebody has "a solid understanding" of a subject? It's a pretty common expression to refer to knowledge in that way, as if it were a physical thing - ie. to make your knowledge or understanding more tangible.
If you read any of the articles about Fallout 3 you'll know they've gone out of their way to make it very playable from 3rd person view and apparently the camera can be set so it can be played from an isometric viewpoint ("2D") too .
Missile Command is supposed to compete with Super Mario Bros. 2 and Ecco the Dolphin?! Sucks to be Xbox Arcade. I know which one I still play from time to time 15 years after my first encounter with it. And the one I'll probably still be playing 15 years on. Hint: It isn't Mario or Ecco.
I'm sure Mario and Ecco will probably perform better than Missile Command at least at first, but provided it's a decent Missile Command conversion that's the one which has the more timeless gameplay. It's definitely the one you're more likely to go to for a 20 minute gaming burst, which is the kind of situation these games should be targetting.
Remember that Wikipedia is an encylopedia, it can contain no original research and therefore any good articles (ie. the kind that you would expect from a government-trained team of experts) will be full of citations, meaning that anyone questioning the accuracy or authenticity of any points in those articles need only look at the referenced material.
With that in mind, and given that Wikipedia is often being the first place people look online for information these days it seems like a very good way of tying in all the information available online onto a single web page. Wikipedia allows the research and data regarding these topics to be relayed in a way that shows the whole story instead of just bits and peices of individual research as you're likely to find it elsewhere.
i dont see libraries having an adequate supply of candles lying around. Well of course not. You kids today and your new-fangled candles, you don't know you're born! In the event of a power outage a library shelf should be broken up into kindling and used to create a fire. Relying on candles only means you'll never survive should there be a long-term wax shortage, like back in '69.
I wouldn't worry. That'll be handled by the same magic that does all the other stuff the bullshit artist from TFA has completely hand-waved over without mentioning a single reliable method capable of doing what he's claiming.
but it was my understanding that there are 32 quantum states of electrons, not just on/off (1/0) like in the binary computer world. So, if we now have a quantum NOT gate, doesn't that mean there are 32 possible states of the NOT gate? Well, yes and no...
*ba-dum-tsch* Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.
Not outlawing privacy as such. More like outlawing anonymity, althouh there's plenty of privacy-infringing stuff in there too. It's a pretty easy sell to government ministers, basically anyone who goes against it can be rebuffed by saying that people should be held accountable for their actions. Which of course is true to an extent but doesn't tell the whole story of why at least a reasonable degree of anonymity is also necessary to ensure the continuation of things like freedom of speech.
Your website's ccTLD suggests you're in Switzerland though. In which case your neutrality saves you once again.
I know that's a joke but in reality there's almost certainly some truth in that. Not just Poland of course, but all of the EU. Germany is one of the most influential members of the EU in terms of forming EU law. If this law gets passed in Germany it's only a matter of time before they try and push it on the rest of the continent.
Yeah, because now that everyone here on/. has seen it sales will go through the roof.
As I type this I'm on the phone with Sun ordering a $500,000 portable data centre off the back of an article I read via slashdot. Finally something that can run Aero!
I agree though, this is a shameless plug. It's a growing trend unfortunately. Remember just last year the/. sellout editors were trying to hawk their advertisers' wares with a slashvertisement for Spaceship One. I was helpless to resist their blatant advertising and now I've got Spaceship's Two and Three just sitting in the garage. I never even use them. Curse you/. editors and your evil advertising!
The thing is that we don't really have an equivalent to the American's AO rating here in the UK. Basically most of the stuff that gets an 18 Certificate here gets a "17+ Mature" rating in the US. I think there's only around 20 or so games that have ever received the AO rating, I believe most often it's for pornographic content rather than violence. In the UK I guess we have a more relaxed/apathetic view towards sexual content so it's all given 18 Certs here anyway.
It's not a matter of putting yourself in the place of the protagonist or not, or otherwise fantasising about performing violent acts, it's the ability to know the difference between fantasy and reality. The violence itself is not something we should fear imagining or worry about being desensitized to, it's the consequences of that violence which we must remain wary of. If you punch someone in the face in real life the problem is not the action of the punch itself but the fact that you hurt someone in the process. A computer game has no such consequence and so punching a computer generated character in the face needn't be considered some kind of balancing act between entertainment and murderous insanity but rather a situation where you can release certain fantasies. As long as the player understands that the game has no consequences while real life does, there is no problem. It could be argued that violent games are therapeutic and if anything just might stave off real life violence in people who might otherwise have no other outlet for those tendencies.
I'm aware they don't owe it to anyone. But that doesn't mean we have to accept what they're doing and it certainly means that anyone who cares about these issues should take action. Even if that action is simply not buying those consoles or those companies' other products, or even if it's just arguing the case on/. of why these companies are absolute shits for doing this. Will a handful of people on/. not buying consoles be anyone's downfall? Probably not. But at least those people will know they did what they could. That's more than most people can say.
Well you're assuming that games can desensitize someone to violence or murder. I'd say that if you were capable of being desensitized to those things by a computer game it would be because of some underlying mental instability or flaw - ie. the inability to separate reality for imagination.
Even if computer games did desensitize people in that way it still doesn't explain why those two situations (crotch sawing vs face shooting) should be treated differently. Surely you wouldn't want people desensitized to either of those experiences?
I'm not aware of a console developer ever having been taken to court over the games someone else developed for their system. Not even Jack Thompson has tried to stretch the limits of culpability that far. So your reasoning lacks any basis. The legal system may be wrong, but as far as I'm aware it isn't wrong in this partcular to way this particular extent.
Even if I am wrong and a console manufacturer has been taken to court in this way, I assume they won? Otherwise I doubt anyone would even be developing 18 certificate games. Assuming they won then there's legal precedent meaning it's even less likely to happen again in the future.
Like I said to the other replier, Manhunt 2 is the second game to be refused classification by the BBFC. Carmageddon was the first and the ban was revoked on appeal. I have a sneaking suspicion there are more than two games that have been given an AO rating in the US.
If the government are dictating the rules I see no reason why companies should play any part in the situation. If the government wants to make bans certain things it should be forced to come out and do it. The companies that either refuse to sell adult games or allow them to be developed on their console are doing one of three things: - Trying to impose their morality on people - Being patsies for their government to avoid them having to issue bans and risk the wrath of censorship groups and a possible public backlash - Playing a cheap marketing trick to try and win over the morally self-righteous demographic of the public, with the undermining of freedom of expression simply a non-profit-making side-issue that can be ignored
I don't see a single thing on that list which shouldn't earn each of these companies the contempt of every person who gives even the slightest of shits about freedom of expression and censorship.
As a side-note the BBFC is a non-government organisation.
Give over. I'm certainly in favour of using censorship very sparingly indeed, but this seems to definitely be a game deserving of being the first computer game ever banned in my own country, Ireland. It is entirely sensible for a government to decide that it's not particularly good for society if some adults let alone kids play a computer game where they pretend to use "a saw blade to cut upward into a foe's groin and buttocks, motioning forward and backward with the Wii remote as you go". In fact, it would probably better for them to allow people to buy this and keep tabs on people who are happy to be entertained by such violence.
Let this go and what happens when something worse again is published? What about the time after that? Is it perfectly fine to allow society to go in a direction where such "freedom" is allowed? The ultimate end would be the destruction of society. We're already on the road to that - people still have strong values concerning protection of children for example, but for how long? Already much of the public are allowing commercial forces to deliberately market sex fashion to lower and lower age groups. I'm sorry I see a complete absence of logic here.
What's the difference between a game that allows you to cut into someone's groin and one that allows you to shoot someone in the face? I don't see one. The idea that extreme or sadistic violence is any more dangerous to the player than "clean" and gore-reduced mechanised killing seems absurd to me. Either you're mature and mentally stable enough to deal with these games or you're not.
If you're an adult you are responsible for your own actions and if you're allowed out on your own it's assumed you are mentally capable and can tell fiction from reality. If you cannot do either of those things there's a failing in the system to identify a mentally unwell person. That failing should be addressed of course. Assuming that those failings exist (which inevitably they do), if that unstable person plays a game where they methodically shoot people (something that is generally accepted to not be banworthy) why would they not respond to that if they would then respond poorly to a game like Manhunt?
Even if you subscribe to the idea that games can turn stable people into vicious killers the same rule applies. Why is some digital murder OK but extreme murder not? Either way the person *becomes* a murderer, right?
With that in mind I can only see two camps for the concept of digital violence: Those who think it's all fine, or those who think it should all be banned. By taking some murky middle road the BBFC is providing no logical attitude to the idea of digital violence. Given that violent computer games have been around for decades without the "destruction of society" and given that there has been no conclusive evidence to suggest that digital violence affects adult minds, I can't see any reason to decide that a game should be banned on the grounds of violent content, no matter what the extremity of that violence may be.
Stick BBFC in Wikipedia and what do you get? "British Board of Film Classification" Stick BBFC in Google and what do you get? "British Board of Film Classification" x1000
I "arrogantly assumed" people would know what it stood for because there was a/. article on the subject of this exact game being banned by the BBFC not more than two days ago.
Well originally it was green blood in the UK with an 18 Cert after the BBFC refused classification of the red blood version. SCi took their case to court and won using the EU Convention on Human Rights which requires that any banned material must be proved to have a "devastating effect on society". I imagine that Rockstar could do exactly the same thing if they wanted to.
This specific game, yes. That's the second one ever. The first one was was Carmageddon, which was overturned on appeal. Hopefully the same thing will be happening this time too.
You're assuming that the moral majority situation you have in the US applies to the rest of the World. It doesn't. In Britain at least I'm not aware of any major games retailer who doesn't distribute 18 Certs (no such thing as AO here) and I'll bet it's the same in just about any other country too.
So first we've got the BBFC and now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo who have decided that adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game. That's gotta be the most patronising thing I've come across in quite a while. "Oh sure you can go out and die for your country, but we've decided this game isn't suitable for you. We think this is for the best". Thank God we've got NGOs and multi-national corporations to protect us from this immoral world of mature themes.
Yes but do you "correct information" when it would put Apple in a bad light*? Being objective is a two way street. If you only provide information in Apple's favour then yes, you are in fact a fanboy/girl/person. Just because what you say is correct doesn't mean you're not one. I'm not saying you are, and I'm sure as hell not about to check your posts to find out. It's just something to consider.
*: Any response to the effect of "Apple never does anything that puts itself in a bad light" would be an instant confirmation of fanism. Every company, person, organisation, and thing has negatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, what? You've never heard someone say that somebody has "a solid understanding" of a subject? It's a pretty common expression to refer to knowledge in that way, as if it were a physical thing - ie. to make your knowledge or understanding more tangible.
If you read any of the articles about Fallout 3 you'll know they've gone out of their way to make it very playable from 3rd person view and apparently the camera can be set so it can be played from an isometric viewpoint ("2D") too .
It's currently slated for Q4 2008. So odds are it'll be early 2009.
I'm sure Mario and Ecco will probably perform better than Missile Command at least at first, but provided it's a decent Missile Command conversion that's the one which has the more timeless gameplay. It's definitely the one you're more likely to go to for a 20 minute gaming burst, which is the kind of situation these games should be targetting.
Remember that Wikipedia is an encylopedia, it can contain no original research and therefore any good articles (ie. the kind that you would expect from a government-trained team of experts) will be full of citations, meaning that anyone questioning the accuracy or authenticity of any points in those articles need only look at the referenced material.
With that in mind, and given that Wikipedia is often being the first place people look online for information these days it seems like a very good way of tying in all the information available online onto a single web page. Wikipedia allows the research and data regarding these topics to be relayed in a way that shows the whole story instead of just bits and peices of individual research as you're likely to find it elsewhere.
I wouldn't worry. That'll be handled by the same magic that does all the other stuff the bullshit artist from TFA has completely hand-waved over without mentioning a single reliable method capable of doing what he's claiming.
*ba-dum-tsch* Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.
Not outlawing privacy as such. More like outlawing anonymity, althouh there's plenty of privacy-infringing stuff in there too. It's a pretty easy sell to government ministers, basically anyone who goes against it can be rebuffed by saying that people should be held accountable for their actions. Which of course is true to an extent but doesn't tell the whole story of why at least a reasonable degree of anonymity is also necessary to ensure the continuation of things like freedom of speech.
Your website's ccTLD suggests you're in Switzerland though. In which case your neutrality saves you once again.
I know that's a joke but in reality there's almost certainly some truth in that. Not just Poland of course, but all of the EU. Germany is one of the most influential members of the EU in terms of forming EU law. If this law gets passed in Germany it's only a matter of time before they try and push it on the rest of the continent.
Yeah, because now that everyone here on /. has seen it sales will go through the roof.
/. sellout editors were trying to hawk their advertisers' wares with a slashvertisement for Spaceship One. I was helpless to resist their blatant advertising and now I've got Spaceship's Two and Three just sitting in the garage. I never even use them. Curse you /. editors and your evil advertising!
As I type this I'm on the phone with Sun ordering a $500,000 portable data centre off the back of an article I read via slashdot. Finally something that can run Aero!
I agree though, this is a shameless plug. It's a growing trend unfortunately. Remember just last year the
OK, fine. It stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Welcome to the Internets.
The thing is that we don't really have an equivalent to the American's AO rating here in the UK. Basically most of the stuff that gets an 18 Certificate here gets a "17+ Mature" rating in the US. I think there's only around 20 or so games that have ever received the AO rating, I believe most often it's for pornographic content rather than violence. In the UK I guess we have a more relaxed/apathetic view towards sexual content so it's all given 18 Certs here anyway.
It's not a matter of putting yourself in the place of the protagonist or not, or otherwise fantasising about performing violent acts, it's the ability to know the difference between fantasy and reality. The violence itself is not something we should fear imagining or worry about being desensitized to, it's the consequences of that violence which we must remain wary of. If you punch someone in the face in real life the problem is not the action of the punch itself but the fact that you hurt someone in the process. A computer game has no such consequence and so punching a computer generated character in the face needn't be considered some kind of balancing act between entertainment and murderous insanity but rather a situation where you can release certain fantasies. As long as the player understands that the game has no consequences while real life does, there is no problem. It could be argued that violent games are therapeutic and if anything just might stave off real life violence in people who might otherwise have no other outlet for those tendencies.
I'm aware they don't owe it to anyone. But that doesn't mean we have to accept what they're doing and it certainly means that anyone who cares about these issues should take action. Even if that action is simply not buying those consoles or those companies' other products, or even if it's just arguing the case on /. of why these companies are absolute shits for doing this. Will a handful of people on /. not buying consoles be anyone's downfall? Probably not. But at least those people will know they did what they could. That's more than most people can say.
Well you're assuming that games can desensitize someone to violence or murder. I'd say that if you were capable of being desensitized to those things by a computer game it would be because of some underlying mental instability or flaw - ie. the inability to separate reality for imagination.
Even if computer games did desensitize people in that way it still doesn't explain why those two situations (crotch sawing vs face shooting) should be treated differently. Surely you wouldn't want people desensitized to either of those experiences?
I'm not aware of a console developer ever having been taken to court over the games someone else developed for their system. Not even Jack Thompson has tried to stretch the limits of culpability that far. So your reasoning lacks any basis. The legal system may be wrong, but as far as I'm aware it isn't wrong in this partcular to way this particular extent.
Even if I am wrong and a console manufacturer has been taken to court in this way, I assume they won? Otherwise I doubt anyone would even be developing 18 certificate games. Assuming they won then there's legal precedent meaning it's even less likely to happen again in the future.
Like I said to the other replier, Manhunt 2 is the second game to be refused classification by the BBFC. Carmageddon was the first and the ban was revoked on appeal. I have a sneaking suspicion there are more than two games that have been given an AO rating in the US.
If the government are dictating the rules I see no reason why companies should play any part in the situation. If the government wants to make bans certain things it should be forced to come out and do it. The companies that either refuse to sell adult games or allow them to be developed on their console are doing one of three things:
- Trying to impose their morality on people
- Being patsies for their government to avoid them having to issue bans and risk the wrath of censorship groups and a possible public backlash
- Playing a cheap marketing trick to try and win over the morally self-righteous demographic of the public, with the undermining of freedom of expression simply a non-profit-making side-issue that can be ignored
I don't see a single thing on that list which shouldn't earn each of these companies the contempt of every person who gives even the slightest of shits about freedom of expression and censorship.
As a side-note the BBFC is a non-government organisation.
Let this go and what happens when something worse again is published? What about the time after that? Is it perfectly fine to allow society to go in a direction where such "freedom" is allowed? The ultimate end would be the destruction of society. We're already on the road to that - people still have strong values concerning protection of children for example, but for how long? Already much of the public are allowing commercial forces to deliberately market sex fashion to lower and lower age groups. I'm sorry I see a complete absence of logic here.
What's the difference between a game that allows you to cut into someone's groin and one that allows you to shoot someone in the face? I don't see one. The idea that extreme or sadistic violence is any more dangerous to the player than "clean" and gore-reduced mechanised killing seems absurd to me. Either you're mature and mentally stable enough to deal with these games or you're not.
If you're an adult you are responsible for your own actions and if you're allowed out on your own it's assumed you are mentally capable and can tell fiction from reality. If you cannot do either of those things there's a failing in the system to identify a mentally unwell person. That failing should be addressed of course. Assuming that those failings exist (which inevitably they do), if that unstable person plays a game where they methodically shoot people (something that is generally accepted to not be banworthy) why would they not respond to that if they would then respond poorly to a game like Manhunt?
Even if you subscribe to the idea that games can turn stable people into vicious killers the same rule applies. Why is some digital murder OK but extreme murder not? Either way the person *becomes* a murderer, right?
With that in mind I can only see two camps for the concept of digital violence: Those who think it's all fine, or those who think it should all be banned. By taking some murky middle road the BBFC is providing no logical attitude to the idea of digital violence. Given that violent computer games have been around for decades without the "destruction of society" and given that there has been no conclusive evidence to suggest that digital violence affects adult minds, I can't see any reason to decide that a game should be banned on the grounds of violent content, no matter what the extremity of that violence may be.
Stick BBFC in Wikipedia and what do you get? "British Board of Film Classification"
/. article on the subject of this exact game being banned by the BBFC not more than two days ago.
Stick BBFC in Google and what do you get? "British Board of Film Classification" x1000
I "arrogantly assumed" people would know what it stood for because there was a
Well originally it was green blood in the UK with an 18 Cert after the BBFC refused classification of the red blood version. SCi took their case to court and won using the EU Convention on Human Rights which requires that any banned material must be proved to have a "devastating effect on society". I imagine that Rockstar could do exactly the same thing if they wanted to.
This specific game, yes. That's the second one ever. The first one was was Carmageddon, which was overturned on appeal. Hopefully the same thing will be happening this time too.
You're assuming that the moral majority situation you have in the US applies to the rest of the World. It doesn't. In Britain at least I'm not aware of any major games retailer who doesn't distribute 18 Certs (no such thing as AO here) and I'll bet it's the same in just about any other country too.
So first we've got the BBFC and now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo who have decided that adults aren't capable of deciding if they can play a game. That's gotta be the most patronising thing I've come across in quite a while. "Oh sure you can go out and die for your country, but we've decided this game isn't suitable for you. We think this is for the best". Thank God we've got NGOs and multi-national corporations to protect us from this immoral world of mature themes.
Yes but do you "correct information" when it would put Apple in a bad light*? Being objective is a two way street. If you only provide information in Apple's favour then yes, you are in fact a fanboy/girl/person. Just because what you say is correct doesn't mean you're not one. I'm not saying you are, and I'm sure as hell not about to check your posts to find out. It's just something to consider.
*: Any response to the effect of "Apple never does anything that puts itself in a bad light" would be an instant confirmation of fanism. Every company, person, organisation, and thing has negatives.