I download TV illegally. But, first, let me explain what I won't do:
a) I'm not paying for shitty cable and for a TiVo when I already have computer hooked to my TV. Hell, technically, I do have free basic cable, and it's so poor I don't even have it actually hooked to my TV.
b) I don't really have enough bandwidth to stream. I get about 150kps download. That's really the lowest quality I can stand, too, so it works out to a minute of downloading per minute of video...which means that all streaming jumps to a lower quality, because that's too close to comfort. And forget about the higher quality stuff.
c) I want to control the entire thing with my remote control, and the streaming sites seem intent on not functioning in any HTPC interface anyway. (And I'm not sure how hacking hulu to watch in Boxee is somehow more 'moral' than just downloading the show.)
d) I am not paying for my TV shows in cash, hence I won't use iTunes. I will, like the rest of the world, pay in for TV in commercials. (When I pay in cash, I expect DVDs.) I won't promise to buy anything, but that never was part of the deal. And I'm really too lazy to bother with skipping them.
I'm not trying to morally justify anything, or claim I have the right to TV, I'm simply stating my situation, and stating as a member of the American people, I will watch TV. So I can either download TV illegally, or I can...um...hmmm...have no TV.
You give me a torrent I can download legally, I'm there.
I'd especially be there if you'd encrypt the episodes so I could download them in advance, and give me the key when they aired. I just mention that because that's how they should attract current illegal downloaders. Right now, it's end of episode+10 minutes+download time to watch. Let people have a download list, let them download the previous night, and then give them the key at the moment of airing. Unlike DRM, that actually could work with reasonable encryption, and lets people watch very high quality stuff even over bad connections. (Hell, you could technically watch about 5 hours a week over dialup, which would be helpful for people with basic cable who want to watch one or two other shows.)
But all this is, of course, crazy talk. If they provide digital downloads that people can actually download, why, people will download them, cut the commercials out, and redistribute them. (Which is a bit like worrying about someone breaking into your car by picking the trunk lock, when all actual thieves spend 30 seconds with a slim jim and get in from the doors.)
If a computer program crashes, and someone relies on something they were doing when it crashed, without even looking at it, you know whose fucking fault that is?
Hint: It's not the computer's.
The most important part of your comment is 'it was skipped due to understaffing'. And then ask yourself why the person inputting the program didn't check after the crash.
Hint: They probably had to go change bedpans or something and didn't want to fall farther behind in their workload.
You want less mistakes in medical procedures, you need to hire more fucking people, so people can do their job carefully.
Tn this case, the already made mistake by someone inputting data (relying on something that returned an error as they did it.) could have been caught, but that won't help if something else is wrong.
Did you know the most common form of 'poisoning', higher than drug abuse, higher than suicide, higher than anything else, the most common form of 'death by chemicals', is incorrect prescriptions? That kills ten thousand times as many people as 'broken radiation machines'.
The reason we have so many mistakes is that we've started operating medicine like it's a goddamn NASCAR pit. (Except operated with normal people, not a perfectly synchronized team.)
It is great (in principle) if you want to send a packet from an IPv6 host to an IPv4 host.
In 'principle', whatever. The problem is that this does not, in fact, fucking work, as I've ranted about here every time this has come up.
The problem is said idiotic 'dual stack', and the goddamn idiotic way the entire thing was built.
What should have happened is that, by now, 90% of the devices on the planet should be using IPv6 to communicate using IPv4 addresses. Everyone should be talking IPv6, and when it hit an IPv4 only network, it got converted if it's in the IPv4 range. All devices should only speak one thing in each direction. If the other end, or the other devices on the network, spoke IPv6, it spoke IPv6, otherwise, it not only would speak IPv4, it would convert other traffic.
No damn tunnels, no damn 'dual stack', no damn confusion. You plug the device in, it uses link-level negotiation to say 'IPv4 or IPv6', and picks IPv6 if it can, and converts things back and forth as needed. You get one IP, and if it's in the IPv6 range, you can't use it over IPv4-only networks, so everyone stays with the IPv4 ranges until they're sure there aren't a lot of IPv4-only networks.
At some point, we'd hit high enough percentage IPv6 traffic that we could safely start selling IPv6-only addresses. Eventually, companies would start trading their IPv4 in. We could leave that address space as a slightly more expensive option, so that people with hardware that can't ever be upgraded to do IPv6 could keep using it. (Because the traffic would be transparently converted.)
Instead we got a damn rollout of IPv6 on OSes...no consumer routers or anything, and no one is actually using it anyway, so we're going to run into a metric shitload of problems when we actually try to switch over.
Why did we do that that way, instead of the sane way? (The way we, in fact, changed TCP from single byte addressing to four byte addressing.)
Well, it was slightly cheaper to have a dual stack device than a converter device. Maybe. In actuality, of course, everyone just kept making goddamn IPv4-only devices.
I'm also allowing for the fact that politicians are not all knowing, and with the right education, they can be persuaded to view things differently. In that situation, money is only incidental because it only allowed access to educate the politician, it didn't sway the opinion, the facts (opinions) as presented did.
This is just flatly idiotic on the face of it.
You constantly say 'I see things how I want to see them.' Well, you know what? Giving someone money so you're allowed to talk to them and 'change their opinion' is bribery.
You can stand there and argue all you want, but I'm not actually trying to convince you, you are a rather well-known political loon. I think I've pretty much convinced everyone else reading.
In the bill gates scenario I gave, you would loose because Gates is simply more popular then you are. With any limits at all, you could not realistically overcome that disadvantage no matter how popular or important your message was. Without limit's, you can find people who will back you, people who will give as much as they can, and with proper management of those funds, you can and will have a chance to defeat Gates' popularity and make it about the issues that gained you the support and not who is most or worst liked.
So your solution to the 'Bill Gates' nonsensical problem you presented is remove all spending limits, and if I want to get elected, I can find some other rich guy to suck up to? And this is presented as some sort of actual rebuttal to the problem?
You know what? Fuck you. Yeah, just fuck you. This conversation is over.
While, as nerds, everyone here leaps to 'computer error'(And everyone mentions that Therac-25 disaster we all learned about in comp sci 101.), computers aren't really responsible for a brain cancer patient getting treatment for breast cancer.
A computer might say where to aim the machine, but someone who was even slightly familiar with the case would say 'Um...the breasts? No, that can't be right.'.
What is responsible is the constant reduction in the amount of staff at medical facilities, and consequently, the inability for any actual checking or familiarity with patients.
Read the horrific description of what happened to Jerome-Parks, please notice that it was people trying program crashing machines, machines that were obviously screwed up, and no one bothering to actually look at the result. And then doing it twice more because no one bothered to look into the obvious mistake.
Essentially, the problem here isn't the Therac-25 one, where a shitty user interface resulted in the screen saying one thing and doing another. Note that in every described situation, the machine clearly described what it was doing. It wasn't 'doing something else besides what it said', it was doing what it had, incorrectly, been told to do. It said it was doing it, it did it. The machine worked perfectly.
It is equivalent of being a newspaper reporter, and Word crashes while I save my article...but I submit it anyway, and the front page of the newspaper is filled with gibberish. You know whose fault that is? Sure as hell not Word. It's my fault, it's the editor's fault, it's the guy doing the final check before the print run. If I were to claim the solution to this constantly happening was 'crash-proof software', I'd get laughed out of society.
Oh, but newspapers actually, you know, pay people to check that before spending thousands of dollars doing a print run. If only someone's life was worth more than that.
Yes, we can argue the machine should have fail safes to stop them from working in obvious stupid situations, but this just stops obviously stupid situations, and only overdoses. What is that is a perfectly reasonable dose...aimed at entirely the wrong spot, for someone with an entire different type of cancer?What if it's 100x what you should be getting, but still within the bounds of reasonable for certain extreme types of cancer? What if that is, in fact, practically no dose at all, so you die of a fucking treatable cancer because you got not treatment?
More to the point, why are we worried about this, when drug errors kill ten thousand times as many people? (Because machines often do have failsafes, unlike prescriptions.)
If only we had a system where all the money wasn't sucked out of the system by insurance companies, one where we actually paid to have competent medical staff who could actually watch what was going on, instead of spending ten damn seconds a patient.
Are you really asserting they can't vote collectively solely because we have a secret ballot?
First of all, I will point out that you cannot deny someone the vote because they cannot vote secretly.
In fact, some people already have to vote non-secretly: The very feeble and disabled. Some of them can't operate a pencil or touch screen. Someone like Steven Hawkings cannot vote 'secretly'. He has to have someone help him, who will know who he voted for. (He's British, but you get the point. There are people in the US like him.)
Inability to cast a secret ballot does not, and can not, render you unable to vote. We try to reduce amount of non-secret ballots with technology, but there's always going to be someone who just got blinded and can't read braille yet, or someone who can only move their eyes, or whatever, who needs help with voting, and those people not only deserve the right to vote, we are required constitutionally to give them someone to help them vote.
Secondly, you're assuming some sort of publicly-owned corporations, where they, indeed, would have to make who they voted for known, I guess.
But it's entirely possible to have a privately-owned corporation and have it vote, you know, privately. Um, duh. If you want to assert 'multiple people' seeing it makes it unprivate, nothing stops the voting from being done by a single officer designated to do that, or even that the entire corporation is owned by a single person.
The whole 'not a secret ballot' objection is not a sane argument about why corporations cannot vote. Perhaps you should try again.
I think you might be falling into a false dichotomy. There is a lot of middle ground you seem to be missing there.
Um, no. It's a dichotomy because the results are dichotomies.
All corporate spending must be towards the end of providing profit to the shareholders. There's not any middle ground there...it is either legitimate corporate spending, or it is not.
The only way it can be legitimate corporate spending is if it alters something, in some way, to make it more favorable to the corporation.
What if the purpose of giving the money isn't even related to a vote but to a position the candidate takes in which the company finds favor in for what ever reason. This could be something as strong as supporting an issue or being totally silent on it when an opposing candidate stands harshly against that position. That's why giving money is speech.
If the money does not alter the corporation's fiscal position, it is MALFEASANCE.
Now, you're trying to argue the already used loophole, in that corporate money doesn't change politician behavior, it simply help politicians who already behave a certain way get elected.
This, of course, is, and has been, utter nonsense from the start. It's akin to lawyers helping judges pay for their parking each morning, and claiming it's legal because it doesn't 'bribe' anyone to make decisions in their favor, it just helps judges get to work. It's total nonsense. It's obvious nonsense.
It might, might, might be possible to argue that specific support to a specific candidate really was legal. Occasionally, yes, a race will be close, between two people, one of whom is obviously better than the other, and some sort of case could be argued that such a donation was legal. And they should be happy to argue that to both the SEC (that their donate was an attempt to help the company) and the FEC (That their donation was not any sort of bribe.) At the same time.
That doesn't change the fact that 99% of them are bribes, that are not attempts to alter the race at all, but simply payment to the politician. The guy slipping the politician a wad of cash under the restroom door might also be someone paying off a legit gambling debt, but we should probably investigate.
And donations to competing candidates, which is what usually happens, are so obviously bribery attempts that corporate officers should just be arrested immediately. What is even the theory there that could possibly make their behavior legal? They want both candidates elected?
This is enforced when it really happens, it can be enforced in a number of ways, two of which being lawsuits brought about by the shareholders or complaints to governing boards that enforce. Another way to address this is for the shareholders to replace the board of directors and instruct the new board to clean house of the bad elements.
Yeah, because that happens so much.
Bill Gates is probable more popular then you are, he could easily get more signatures then you could, would you want his stardom dictating that he get 200 times more money to run his campaign then you?
Erm, as opposed to now, where the entire resources of Microsoft can back him? (Yes, yes, MS still can't 'donate' to him, but it could, instead, run their own campaign to have him elected.)
Or even opposed to before this court ruling, in which the rules operated exactly how I said, with the sole difference you were using your own money, and not the government money.
I.e., you could only donate X amount of money to someone's campaign, but only if you had it to start with. And you could do it to as many people as possible. (So you could pay off opposing candidates.)
Do you even know how the rules work at all? Because your objection applies a billion times more to the current system. What I suggested only lets each person donate the exact same amount of money in total, regardless of how rich they are, which is a hell of a l
He said that two conglomerate's of wealthy men were dividing the dough and sweat of 99% of them.
Is it too much to ask basic reading comprehension here? He at no point indicated how much of the 'dough and sweat' of these 99% were being divided up.
As long as one dollar (and the corresponding metaphorical sweat) of each person ended up in the pocket of said men, he is correct.
I personally think that, strictly speaking, he's wrong, because there's more than 1% who don't do any 'sweating' at all, and hence the result of their sweat cannot end up anywhere.
If that '99%' is changed to '95% or so', and the 'two conglomerate's of wealthy men' was changed to 'a few thousand people', I'd be behind it 100%.
Yeah, the whole 'rich and powerful unions' meme has been a hard one to dispell, so let's just go with it.
In the real world, all the most powerful union can do is protect itself and its members. (And, yes, sometimes said members don't deserve protecting.)
Unions barely ever manage to step outside that and actually do anything that would affect anyone else. They influence things things that affect their members, and the companies that employ them, and that's it.
Compared to corporations, which do things that affect them and their customers.
I.e., a union might manage to get everyone 30 minute paid breaks every two hours, which is awesome for the union members, and sucky for the company they work for, and that's about it. Anyone who complains how 'powerful' this union is has been brainwashed by corporations. It like some random guy complaining how 'powerful' you are in your marriage compared to your spouse. WTF business is it of his how you divide up the decision making?
A corporation, OTOH, might lobby to make it legal for them, and their competitors, to slightly poison everyone who buys that sort of product, which has repercussions on essentially everyone.
Erm, because one of those is 'parent company' and one of those is 'investor'?
I mean, it's right there in your own words.
News corporations do not report that they're reporting on 'their major investors'. They do report that they're reporting on themselves or their employees.
And GE Capital has not actually taken any taxpayer funds, so reporting on them at the same time as companies that have, in the same context, would be rather irrational.
GE Capital has simply forced its way into the FDIC program, where it should not be, and that is certainly newsworthy...although I'm not actually seeing any news stations report on that, not just the GE owned ones.
I suspect it will be rather newsworthy if they go under, though, and FDIC has to pay out because GE Capital lost all their money on bad loans.
Of course, this is the court that decided that a television news organization was just exercising free speech when it decided to air a falsified story in order to benefit a sponsor.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because almost no one is connecting the dots.
As of fairly recently, it became legal to air whatever you want, (barring slander) as news, at least on cable. It is not illegal to deliberately present outright falsehoods as news as long as they aren't defamatory.
And, now, it's legal for corporations to spend as much money as they want airing anything they want, without disclosing the funding.
Ergo, it is now legal for a corporation to buy time on a 'cable news network', and present fake news that says whatever it wants (Again, as long as it doesn't defame anyone.)
A candidate in trouble because he had an affair? Ah, that has an easy solution...buy five minutes on CNN, put in some fake reporters talking about how the entire issue is overblown, that there's no evidence of it, etc. Put in fake interviews with supposed government officials saying this was a lie. (You cannot defame the government in general, only specific people in it, so as long as you make up their names and titles, you're fine.)
There are people right now who just read that and thought 'CNN would never do that'. Well, no. CNN probably wouldn't do that now, because it has actual reporters who would complain.
It is, however, legal for them to do. (And note while I specifically said you can't defame people with said lies, that's slander, but slander laws about public officials are fairly lax.)
'Corporations' shouldn't even have protection against 'injustice'.
Individual shareholders already have a constitutional protection against their property being arbitrarily seized or devalued. This automatically protects companies, which are their property, from that.
The whole thing is a lot easier if we stop ascribing human-like behavior to corporations. Think of it as your house. Your house has no damn right to anything at all. Because you are, presumably, a person, you have the right to use your property for free speech, or free press, or freedom of assemble, or whatever. This does not imbue your house with such rights, even if you commonly say things like 'The House of AdamThor wants you to vote for X' out loudspeakers on the top of the house.
I know it seems a minor point, but be very careful how you say things, as phrasing exactly like yours got us into this mess in the first place, where the rights of the shareholders somehow got abstracted so far they became rights of the corporation. Likewise, 'punishing corporations' became, somehow, punishing them as people, instead of what it actually is...punishing the owners.
Normally, looking as 'group rights' would be fine of shareholders, we actually do have those, like the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, and the courts have held that 'free speech and press' imply a right for groups of people to read and listen to you...but be sure to say 'The shareholders each have rights, and the group of the shareholders have general abstract rights we might want to protect. The corporation, however, is not relevant to this discussion. We cannot punish the owners for things the owners, or their employees, say.'
It's amazing how many people look at 'Corporations should not be people' and, at the exact same time, ascribe to them the properties of people. Think of them as houses and the issue becomes a lot more clear what the government can and cannot do. They are things we own, and can use to exercise our rights, but do not have any rights of their own, or even behavior of their own.
Except the problem is that corporations were just given unlimited campaign contribution ability, whereas people are actually limited in what they can give.
If each group out there was limited to only giving what its members could give, in total, which would also require restricting each member (So they couldn't give individually), that would be one thing.
Look at this way. There is free ice cream. Everyone gets three bowls a day.
Except that I have asserted that I'm a 'group', and have a few members, apparently, and thus I get as many bowls as I want. Not 'I get as many bowls as members of my group would get, minus the amount they got individually', just unlimited bowls, period.
People have the right to assembly, and collectively decide where their campaign contributions go. If I join a 'John Smith for Congress' campaign, and we all sit down and write $500 campaign contribution checks, I have no problem with that. (Although I'd much rather that each person get, say, $2000 pretend money a year from the government, and they can give it out to any candidate they want...and that's all.) I don't even have a problem with a group collecting those from us, and sending those in, as long as everything is clearly labeled.
The problem is that corporations have somehow gained an additional right on top of this. If corporations are collections of people, presenting the shareholder interests, why, I'd have no problem if they sent a letter to all shareholders, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, asking them to send money to a certain candidate. That would be the group actually attempting to voice the member's opinion. (Of course, the shareholders would be rightly pissed at the waste of resources, but that's between them and their company.)
But, no, somehow corporations have some right to speech outside of the rights of individual people.
Either giving money to candidate alters their vote, or not.
If it does not, it is corporate malfeasance and fraud on the shareholders to do it.
If it does, it more than likely is bribery. In fact, almost all large donations to politicians are bribery.
Likewise, it is still malfeasance if the altered vote does not make more profit for the shareholders. Corporations lobbying, with their own money, to have less control by their shareholders, is ipso facto illegal.
No one even slightly bothers to enforce any of this, of course.
The real problem is that donating money to get people elected should be illegal, period. Candidates should get spending money from the government based on how many people they can get to sign onto their campaign, and that's it.
I think Fallout 3 is probably the best FPS/RPG there is. They managed to merge RPG skills into a fairly fun good FPS in a useful way.
Which is, of course, only relevant if you like that mixed genre. I can see why people who like straight FPSs would dislike, as, yes, a lot of skill was replaced with luck.
For those of us who've never had a lot of skill at FPSs, though, it was pretty nice.
Oblivion tried to do the same thing (Or, rather, it tried to do it first.) but I thought it failed...but, then again, I'm not a big fan of melee combat, and I couldn't seem to get very good at ranged combat in it.
So it was a pretty unsatisfying experience, especially when combined with the confusing and near nonsensical leveling system. It's sad, because I like the premise of 'What you use during gaining a level should be discounted when you gain the next level', that actual used skill should be increased faster.
Sadly, the way Oblivion did it, was basing leveling on each skill, and often required you to grind a skill before leveling, and often you got an advantage by not leveling. Also, because leveling was based on skills, you had to make sure your major skill weren't skills you used all the time, or you'd level too fast...it was crazy, and made no sense to me. Perhaps this was some 'Elder Scrolls' thing, but this was the first Elder Scrolls game I played, and I couldn't figure it out.
Hell, I read 'strategy guides' before making a character, and thought I selected right...but by the time I was level 5 or so, I was regularly getting beat by single enemies. Apparently, I had screwed up and wasn't powerful enough for that level. Now, with RPGs, you do need to level a character in a sane manner, or you will start getting beaten by scaled enemies, but I've never had problems with that in any other game.
A much more sane way to do that would be something like 'Every time you use a sword 100 times, you get an extra sword point next level, up to 1000, at which point you get half a point, etc' or something. That would actually make sense. But Oblivion managed to take that promising concept and screw it up.
Comparing the two, and how close they are, it's honestly amazing to me that Fallout 3 is right up there in my 'top five games of all time', and my 'game to get stuck on a desert island with', and Oblivion is at least in the bottom 25%.
People free-form roleplay all over the internet through various mediums and they don't have stats, skills or traits.
Yes, I know that. Roleplaying doesn't require any of that. I've been playing on fricking MUSHes for over a decade, I know what roleplaying is.
Roleplaying games, however, do require that. Here, let me quote Wikipedia as to what a 'game' is: 'Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction.'.
See that 'rules'? And 'challenges'? Yeah.
People can freeform roleplay all they want. I've got no problem with it.
A roleplaying game, however, requires a challenge to overcome, either against other people or nature, like all games, and thus requires some set of rules to determine if the challenge was overcome, like all games. There's a difference between dribbling a basketball and playing a game of basketball, a difference between shuffling playing cards and playing the game of solitary, and a difference between roleplaying and playing a roleplaying game.
Roleplaying games are distinguished by the fact that the only skill the player needs is intelligence. (And luck.) Unlike 'action' games, you can play them without any physical dexterity at all, and you usually have all the time in the world to make decisions.
However, there are other video game genres that require only intelligence (and luck) also, and give you as much time as you need to do something, like puzzle games, board games, adventure games, and card games (I mean like MtG, but ones like poker also count.)
What distinguished a RPG from those things is that an RPG has a character (Which excludes puzzle, board, and card) that gains user-selected skill based on almost every random thing they have done. And that said skills are used to determine the odds of things working or not.
This distinguishes from from adventure games, which, if any ability are gained, are at scripted points, and generally can't be selected between, and things either work or not.
The perspective has zero bearing on its genre. What has a bearing on the genre is what is happening in the game itself and unless the choices you make can actually have an effect on the gameworld, whatever role you choose is meaningless and it isn't a roleplaying game.
I love this rather crazy idea that there are computer games where the world isn't altered by the end. There isn't a single computer game with a 'world' that you don't 'affect the world' in.
All games have some sort of configuration, and you make decisions to change the configuration. It's basic premise of interacting with the computer. FPS, adventure games, you change 'the world' to make things happen. You just essentially described all games.
The sole exceptions would be straight up quiz games, which don't really have a world at all. Hell, you arguably even 'change the world' in Tetris, although the world doesn't really resemble ours, consisting solely of blocks. But you sure change it. The world was empty, it starts to fill, you embark on a quest to keep it empty as long as you can.
But forget puzzle games. Let's look at adventure games. The only difference between adventure games and RPGs are how skills and abilities are defined and used. In adventure games, you worry about collecting items to use a few times to do specific things, and everyone playing the game collects roughly the same thing in the same way, whereas in RPGs you gain generic skills by doing generic things, and you can use them in a lot of places, and often can use different skill in one place depending on the character build.
But without reference to the gameplay mechanics, please explain the difference between whatever CRPG you accept as a 'real' RPG, and, for example, King's Quest.
I didn't say there was anything better made since, you loon. I actually called it 'the best dogfighting game ever made', although I probably should amend that with the word 'space'.
People do not actually read on this site.
I was responding to the concept 'there's been nothing like [it] made since.', in the context of 'determining which games gets made'. I.e., not a discussion of quality, but a discussion of type of games made.
Which is just flatly stupid. There's been nothing as good as it made since, but there were plenty of things like it.
The person I was responding to, and I have no idea if that's you, was acting like the entire damn genre of it, and X-COM, just disappeared after those games. When, in reality, probably more games were made in an attempt to replicate those games than were actually needed. (Especially X-COM, which managed to hit a graphical sweet spot that was almost instantly overtaken by FPSs, yet people continued to try to replicate it.)
Hell, X-Wing, and the followup TIE Fighter, were essentially just a clone of the Wing Commander series, which ran though the entire decade. TIE Fighter just managed to be better than any of them.
By that logic, any game you're playing is not an RPG. Because how well the character does is based on the skill of the player.
Ladies and gentlemen, the only true RPG: Progress Quest.
Perhaps what you mean is 'What matter is the intelligence of the player, not the reflexes of the player', but that stops being some obvious conclusion from the term 'role-playing', and instead is obviously what it is: An unsubstantiated assertion that doesn't really have anything do with anything.
As I said, the genre of adventure games requires intelligence, and the genre of action adventure requires that, plus reflexes. Likewise, the genre of RPGs require intelligence, and the genre that additionally requires reflexes should logically be called 'action RPG' or 'real time RPG' or something. It's a mix of the RPG and action genres, and should be called such.
But, regardless, call it whatever you want. Although I will point out that if you remove MMORPGs from 'RPGs', the amount of RPGs sold would probably be reduced by three-fourths...good luck getting manufacturers to produce more RPGs with those sales numbers. You're shooting yourself in the face there with your definition.
Just don't call it action adventure, because that's taken by adventure games with action elements.
OTOH, if we could convince game manufacturers that WoW was an adventure game...hey, wait, forget what I just said. Please please run around asserting that that people have bought 10s of millions of adventure games, which would probably octuple the total sales and revitalize the genre. Go ahead, I formally withdrawn my objection, and I ask that you just call them straight out 'adventure' games instead of 'action adventure'.
"A roleplaying game is a game where the players actions and choices have a meaningful and lasting effect on the game world and that world changes as a response to it"
While that sounds all clever and all, it's fairly idiotic when you actually think about it. That's not what a RPG is currently, and it's not what an RPG ever was. The fact that such a definition include SimCity is not a condemnation of current RPGs, it's a condemnation of a damn stupid definition. There's never been a requirement that 'the world change', nor that it be 'lasting'. Just making up things doesn't make them true.
The definition of a roleplaying game is where players have a character with various self-selected skills and traits they start with and that grow as the game progresses, and they can use these different skills in different ways, usually in a non time-sensitive manner. (I.e., they get the time to actually think about what they're doing.) There is some sort of known mathematical model to figure out how well those skill work for what they tried to do.
Often there are other characters with different skills, played by either them, other players, or the computer/DM.
That's it. That's a 'role playing game', either a video game or a pen and paper one. Pen and paper ones are obviously more flexible in what can happen, but the premise is the same. Anything with those traits is an RPG, anything without is not.
Now, over time, this has often been simplified merely to merely combat and combat skills, and that is, perhaps, a shame, but that doesn't change the fact they're RPGs. You could have an RPG that was entirely combat. You could have one that had no combat at all.
Oh, and in computer games, genres are defined by the mechanics. Period. You can have a FPS with a certain plot, and an adventure game with the same plot, and a RPG with the same plot. All in different genres.
Anyone asserting anything else is, flatly, someone who doesn't know anything about how games are classified. There are no game genres based on content, or plot, or 'how much you change the world'.
Now, it's arguably that 'genre' is the wrong word for this, that normally that means 'type of story'...but, OTOH, in TV and movies, 'sci-fi' manages to be a genre, when that's just a _setting_, so asking people use genre 'correctly' is a losing battle. If you want to talk about the 'RPG classification' instead of the 'RPG genre', whatever. RPG still defines a gameplay mechanism no matter what you call it.
What this 'Desslock' thinks is 'RPG' would actually be better called 'epic', and isn't a genre of video games at all.
Mass Effect is the same as NWN...you can have auto-pausing under combat each round. Actually, it's closer to KOTOR style-leveling, if you've played that, including the 'three starting classes, and three more classes later'. Note all three of those games are by Bioware.
There's also Dragon Age, which just came out from Bioware, which is the same way. If you like NWN's RPG combat style, just keep buying Bioware games. (And don't forget NWN2, which is not by Bioware, but keeps the same system.)
Fallout 3, OTOH, is a FPS with RPG leveling. It is near identical to Oblivion, except that Fallout 3 has a 'pause the game, target someone, and shoot them' screen called VATS. Which is not based on round, but on the action points you mentioned, which slowly refill. In any moderately difficult battle, you'll run out, and have to shoot manually.
You can, however, improve your character to the point that you're killing 75% of the things you need to kill simply by sneaking around, pulling up VATS, and headshotting them.
Put it this way: I'm a fan of RPGs and adventure games, and not so much a twitch gamer. I didn't enjoy Oblivion, I get a few hours in and I lose interest in beating the crap out of yet another mook so I can level, but I have played and beaten Fallout 3...three times. (Which is a near record for me.) And all the DLCs but one.
The first point you make is simply a generalized point: Gaming genres are increasingly blending as makers attempt to sell to a broader market.
You won't find many pure adventure games, either, or pure FPSs.
I'm not entirely sure why this is is, and I don't really like it, but thinking it's solely about, and happening to, RPGs, show some sort of weird RPG tunnel vision.
Hell, it happened to adventure games in the 90s. They all got action elements, and FPS started incorporating adventure elements willy-nilly, like Half-Life did.
Um, no. It's an action RPG game. or 'real time RPG', or 'FPS RPG'.(1)
An action adventure game where problem solving skills, not just combat, are needed to get around. And it also requires 'combat', or at least real time stuff.
An action game (Specifically, an FPS) with enough problem solving required to be 'action adventure' is Half Life. An adventure game with enough action sequences to be 'action adventure' is 'The Indigo Prophesy'.
I know you're some sort of RPG purist, but there is, in fact, a genre of games called 'adventure' and a mixed genre called 'action adventure' that introduces real-time elements to the adventure genre, and people are fans of those games, and we'd appreciate it if you didn't try to stick blended genre RPGs in it.
Incidentally, I have to laugh at the 'real time' complaint. I've got several RPGs, and most of them will pause when combat starts, if you so want. All games by Bioware, one of the major RPG producers, will do it. It's just the MMORPGs that won't do that, because they have no pause at all.
So if your complaint is solely that, it's sorta stupid. Yes, they no longer sell games that require 'turn-based walking around', because 99% of the population finds that very annoying. But many of them let you do turn-based combat. (Perhaps it's worth mentioning that non-computer RPGs like D&D don't care much about 'turns' except in combat or other time sensitive situations, either.) Likewise, the reason they don't have turned-based MMORPGs is that people won't put up with the delay waiting for their turn. (Those people are all over playing Civ 4.)
If you want to argue that 'RPG', by itself, means turn-based RPG, and non-turned-based ones should be called 'action RPGs' or something, fine, I got no problem with that. Don't try to stick them in with action adventure games, though. And arguing non-turned-based ones aren't RPGs at all is just silly.
1) 'Action' games are 'reflex based' games, or 'real time' games, where you have to do things in a critical amount of time or you lose. Some people consider FPSs and platformers and whatnot a sub-genre of this, some people arguing that those are rightfully genres by themselves, and 'action' is whatever is left over. This argument isn't very important, I'm just mentioning what I use 'action' to mean.
That's just an argument to randomize stuff somewhat, not against character development. I though Oblivion's model was cool, where you develop traits you use, but that was crippled by an idiotic system of leveling.
And almost every game has some sort of 'You have progressed, now you can do more'. As you go along, you get more abilities. In SimCity, it's by getting more money, in Civ 4 it's with research. It's a basic attribute of computer games.
The sole exception I can think of would be adventure games, where you're often just dumped into new environments with the same skills as before. Every other game genre I can think of, you get more 'powerful' as you go along.
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I will second this completely.
I download TV illegally. But, first, let me explain what I won't do:
a) I'm not paying for shitty cable and for a TiVo when I already have computer hooked to my TV. Hell, technically, I do have free basic cable, and it's so poor I don't even have it actually hooked to my TV.
b) I don't really have enough bandwidth to stream. I get about 150kps download. That's really the lowest quality I can stand, too, so it works out to a minute of downloading per minute of video...which means that all streaming jumps to a lower quality, because that's too close to comfort. And forget about the higher quality stuff.
c) I want to control the entire thing with my remote control, and the streaming sites seem intent on not functioning in any HTPC interface anyway. (And I'm not sure how hacking hulu to watch in Boxee is somehow more 'moral' than just downloading the show.)
d) I am not paying for my TV shows in cash, hence I won't use iTunes. I will, like the rest of the world, pay in for TV in commercials. (When I pay in cash, I expect DVDs.) I won't promise to buy anything, but that never was part of the deal. And I'm really too lazy to bother with skipping them.
I'm not trying to morally justify anything, or claim I have the right to TV, I'm simply stating my situation, and stating as a member of the American people, I will watch TV. So I can either download TV illegally, or I can...um...hmmm...have no TV.
You give me a torrent I can download legally, I'm there.
I'd especially be there if you'd encrypt the episodes so I could download them in advance, and give me the key when they aired. I just mention that because that's how they should attract current illegal downloaders. Right now, it's end of episode+10 minutes+download time to watch. Let people have a download list, let them download the previous night, and then give them the key at the moment of airing. Unlike DRM, that actually could work with reasonable encryption, and lets people watch very high quality stuff even over bad connections. (Hell, you could technically watch about 5 hours a week over dialup, which would be helpful for people with basic cable who want to watch one or two other shows.)
But all this is, of course, crazy talk. If they provide digital downloads that people can actually download, why, people will download them, cut the commercials out, and redistribute them. (Which is a bit like worrying about someone breaking into your car by picking the trunk lock, when all actual thieves spend 30 seconds with a slim jim and get in from the doors.)
Uh, no.
If a computer program crashes, and someone relies on something they were doing when it crashed, without even looking at it, you know whose fucking fault that is?
Hint: It's not the computer's.
The most important part of your comment is 'it was skipped due to understaffing'. And then ask yourself why the person inputting the program didn't check after the crash.
Hint: They probably had to go change bedpans or something and didn't want to fall farther behind in their workload.
You want less mistakes in medical procedures, you need to hire more fucking people, so people can do their job carefully.
Tn this case, the already made mistake by someone inputting data (relying on something that returned an error as they did it.) could have been caught, but that won't help if something else is wrong.
Did you know the most common form of 'poisoning', higher than drug abuse, higher than suicide, higher than anything else, the most common form of 'death by chemicals', is incorrect prescriptions? That kills ten thousand times as many people as 'broken radiation machines'.
The reason we have so many mistakes is that we've started operating medicine like it's a goddamn NASCAR pit. (Except operated with normal people, not a perfectly synchronized team.)
Actually, it's more like your phone company disconnecting you for repeatedly making prank calls.
Which, in fact, they will.
It is great (in principle) if you want to send a packet from an IPv6 host to an IPv4 host.
In 'principle', whatever. The problem is that this does not, in fact, fucking work, as I've ranted about here every time this has come up.
The problem is said idiotic 'dual stack', and the goddamn idiotic way the entire thing was built.
What should have happened is that, by now, 90% of the devices on the planet should be using IPv6 to communicate using IPv4 addresses. Everyone should be talking IPv6, and when it hit an IPv4 only network, it got converted if it's in the IPv4 range. All devices should only speak one thing in each direction. If the other end, or the other devices on the network, spoke IPv6, it spoke IPv6, otherwise, it not only would speak IPv4, it would convert other traffic.
No damn tunnels, no damn 'dual stack', no damn confusion. You plug the device in, it uses link-level negotiation to say 'IPv4 or IPv6', and picks IPv6 if it can, and converts things back and forth as needed. You get one IP, and if it's in the IPv6 range, you can't use it over IPv4-only networks, so everyone stays with the IPv4 ranges until they're sure there aren't a lot of IPv4-only networks.
At some point, we'd hit high enough percentage IPv6 traffic that we could safely start selling IPv6-only addresses. Eventually, companies would start trading their IPv4 in. We could leave that address space as a slightly more expensive option, so that people with hardware that can't ever be upgraded to do IPv6 could keep using it. (Because the traffic would be transparently converted.)
Instead we got a damn rollout of IPv6 on OSes...no consumer routers or anything, and no one is actually using it anyway, so we're going to run into a metric shitload of problems when we actually try to switch over.
Why did we do that that way, instead of the sane way? (The way we, in fact, changed TCP from single byte addressing to four byte addressing.)
Well, it was slightly cheaper to have a dual stack device than a converter device. Maybe. In actuality, of course, everyone just kept making goddamn IPv4-only devices.
I'm also allowing for the fact that politicians are not all knowing, and with the right education, they can be persuaded to view things differently. In that situation, money is only incidental because it only allowed access to educate the politician, it didn't sway the opinion, the facts (opinions) as presented did.
This is just flatly idiotic on the face of it.
You constantly say 'I see things how I want to see them.' Well, you know what? Giving someone money so you're allowed to talk to them and 'change their opinion' is bribery.
You can stand there and argue all you want, but I'm not actually trying to convince you, you are a rather well-known political loon. I think I've pretty much convinced everyone else reading.
In the bill gates scenario I gave, you would loose because Gates is simply more popular then you are. With any limits at all, you could not realistically overcome that disadvantage no matter how popular or important your message was. Without limit's, you can find people who will back you, people who will give as much as they can, and with proper management of those funds, you can and will have a chance to defeat Gates' popularity and make it about the issues that gained you the support and not who is most or worst liked.
So your solution to the 'Bill Gates' nonsensical problem you presented is remove all spending limits, and if I want to get elected, I can find some other rich guy to suck up to? And this is presented as some sort of actual rebuttal to the problem?
You know what? Fuck you. Yeah, just fuck you. This conversation is over.
While, as nerds, everyone here leaps to 'computer error'(And everyone mentions that Therac-25 disaster we all learned about in comp sci 101.), computers aren't really responsible for a brain cancer patient getting treatment for breast cancer.
A computer might say where to aim the machine, but someone who was even slightly familiar with the case would say 'Um...the breasts? No, that can't be right.'.
What is responsible is the constant reduction in the amount of staff at medical facilities, and consequently, the inability for any actual checking or familiarity with patients.
Read the horrific description of what happened to Jerome-Parks, please notice that it was people trying program crashing machines, machines that were obviously screwed up, and no one bothering to actually look at the result. And then doing it twice more because no one bothered to look into the obvious mistake.
Essentially, the problem here isn't the Therac-25 one, where a shitty user interface resulted in the screen saying one thing and doing another. Note that in every described situation, the machine clearly described what it was doing. It wasn't 'doing something else besides what it said', it was doing what it had, incorrectly, been told to do. It said it was doing it, it did it. The machine worked perfectly.
It is equivalent of being a newspaper reporter, and Word crashes while I save my article...but I submit it anyway, and the front page of the newspaper is filled with gibberish. You know whose fault that is? Sure as hell not Word. It's my fault, it's the editor's fault, it's the guy doing the final check before the print run. If I were to claim the solution to this constantly happening was 'crash-proof software', I'd get laughed out of society.
Oh, but newspapers actually, you know, pay people to check that before spending thousands of dollars doing a print run. If only someone's life was worth more than that.
Yes, we can argue the machine should have fail safes to stop them from working in obvious stupid situations, but this just stops obviously stupid situations, and only overdoses. What is that is a perfectly reasonable dose...aimed at entirely the wrong spot, for someone with an entire different type of cancer?What if it's 100x what you should be getting, but still within the bounds of reasonable for certain extreme types of cancer? What if that is, in fact, practically no dose at all, so you die of a fucking treatable cancer because you got not treatment?
More to the point, why are we worried about this, when drug errors kill ten thousand times as many people? (Because machines often do have failsafes, unlike prescriptions.)
If only we had a system where all the money wasn't sucked out of the system by insurance companies, one where we actually paid to have competent medical staff who could actually watch what was going on, instead of spending ten damn seconds a patient.
Are you really asserting they can't vote collectively solely because we have a secret ballot?
First of all, I will point out that you cannot deny someone the vote because they cannot vote secretly.
In fact, some people already have to vote non-secretly: The very feeble and disabled. Some of them can't operate a pencil or touch screen. Someone like Steven Hawkings cannot vote 'secretly'. He has to have someone help him, who will know who he voted for. (He's British, but you get the point. There are people in the US like him.)
Inability to cast a secret ballot does not, and can not, render you unable to vote. We try to reduce amount of non-secret ballots with technology, but there's always going to be someone who just got blinded and can't read braille yet, or someone who can only move their eyes, or whatever, who needs help with voting, and those people not only deserve the right to vote, we are required constitutionally to give them someone to help them vote.
Secondly, you're assuming some sort of publicly-owned corporations, where they, indeed, would have to make who they voted for known, I guess.
But it's entirely possible to have a privately-owned corporation and have it vote, you know, privately. Um, duh. If you want to assert 'multiple people' seeing it makes it unprivate, nothing stops the voting from being done by a single officer designated to do that, or even that the entire corporation is owned by a single person.
The whole 'not a secret ballot' objection is not a sane argument about why corporations cannot vote. Perhaps you should try again.
I think you might be falling into a false dichotomy. There is a lot of middle ground you seem to be missing there.
Um, no. It's a dichotomy because the results are dichotomies.
All corporate spending must be towards the end of providing profit to the shareholders. There's not any middle ground there...it is either legitimate corporate spending, or it is not.
The only way it can be legitimate corporate spending is if it alters something, in some way, to make it more favorable to the corporation.
What if the purpose of giving the money isn't even related to a vote but to a position the candidate takes in which the company finds favor in for what ever reason. This could be something as strong as supporting an issue or being totally silent on it when an opposing candidate stands harshly against that position. That's why giving money is speech.
If the money does not alter the corporation's fiscal position, it is MALFEASANCE.
Now, you're trying to argue the already used loophole, in that corporate money doesn't change politician behavior, it simply help politicians who already behave a certain way get elected.
This, of course, is, and has been, utter nonsense from the start. It's akin to lawyers helping judges pay for their parking each morning, and claiming it's legal because it doesn't 'bribe' anyone to make decisions in their favor, it just helps judges get to work. It's total nonsense. It's obvious nonsense.
It might, might, might be possible to argue that specific support to a specific candidate really was legal. Occasionally, yes, a race will be close, between two people, one of whom is obviously better than the other, and some sort of case could be argued that such a donation was legal. And they should be happy to argue that to both the SEC (that their donate was an attempt to help the company) and the FEC (That their donation was not any sort of bribe.) At the same time.
That doesn't change the fact that 99% of them are bribes, that are not attempts to alter the race at all, but simply payment to the politician. The guy slipping the politician a wad of cash under the restroom door might also be someone paying off a legit gambling debt, but we should probably investigate.
And donations to competing candidates, which is what usually happens, are so obviously bribery attempts that corporate officers should just be arrested immediately. What is even the theory there that could possibly make their behavior legal? They want both candidates elected?
This is enforced when it really happens, it can be enforced in a number of ways, two of which being lawsuits brought about by the shareholders or complaints to governing boards that enforce. Another way to address this is for the shareholders to replace the board of directors and instruct the new board to clean house of the bad elements.
Yeah, because that happens so much.
Bill Gates is probable more popular then you are, he could easily get more signatures then you could, would you want his stardom dictating that he get 200 times more money to run his campaign then you?
Erm, as opposed to now, where the entire resources of Microsoft can back him? (Yes, yes, MS still can't 'donate' to him, but it could, instead, run their own campaign to have him elected.)
Or even opposed to before this court ruling, in which the rules operated exactly how I said, with the sole difference you were using your own money, and not the government money.
I.e., you could only donate X amount of money to someone's campaign, but only if you had it to start with. And you could do it to as many people as possible. (So you could pay off opposing candidates.)
Do you even know how the rules work at all? Because your objection applies a billion times more to the current system. What I suggested only lets each person donate the exact same amount of money in total, regardless of how rich they are, which is a hell of a l
Um, no one said 99% of their money.
He said that two conglomerate's of wealthy men were dividing the dough and sweat of 99% of them.
Is it too much to ask basic reading comprehension here? He at no point indicated how much of the 'dough and sweat' of these 99% were being divided up.
As long as one dollar (and the corresponding metaphorical sweat) of each person ended up in the pocket of said men, he is correct.
I personally think that, strictly speaking, he's wrong, because there's more than 1% who don't do any 'sweating' at all, and hence the result of their sweat cannot end up anywhere.
If that '99%' is changed to '95% or so', and the 'two conglomerate's of wealthy men' was changed to 'a few thousand people', I'd be behind it 100%.
Yeah, the whole 'rich and powerful unions' meme has been a hard one to dispell, so let's just go with it.
In the real world, all the most powerful union can do is protect itself and its members. (And, yes, sometimes said members don't deserve protecting.)
Unions barely ever manage to step outside that and actually do anything that would affect anyone else. They influence things things that affect their members, and the companies that employ them, and that's it.
Compared to corporations, which do things that affect them and their customers.
I.e., a union might manage to get everyone 30 minute paid breaks every two hours, which is awesome for the union members, and sucky for the company they work for, and that's about it. Anyone who complains how 'powerful' this union is has been brainwashed by corporations. It like some random guy complaining how 'powerful' you are in your marriage compared to your spouse. WTF business is it of his how you divide up the decision making?
A corporation, OTOH, might lobby to make it legal for them, and their competitors, to slightly poison everyone who buys that sort of product, which has repercussions on essentially everyone.
Erm, because one of those is 'parent company' and one of those is 'investor'?
I mean, it's right there in your own words.
News corporations do not report that they're reporting on 'their major investors'. They do report that they're reporting on themselves or their employees.
And GE Capital has not actually taken any taxpayer funds, so reporting on them at the same time as companies that have, in the same context, would be rather irrational.
GE Capital has simply forced its way into the FDIC program, where it should not be, and that is certainly newsworthy...although I'm not actually seeing any news stations report on that, not just the GE owned ones.
I suspect it will be rather newsworthy if they go under, though, and FDIC has to pay out because GE Capital lost all their money on bad loans.
Of course, this is the court that decided that a television news organization was just exercising free speech when it decided to air a falsified story in order to benefit a sponsor.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because almost no one is connecting the dots.
As of fairly recently, it became legal to air whatever you want, (barring slander) as news, at least on cable. It is not illegal to deliberately present outright falsehoods as news as long as they aren't defamatory.
And, now, it's legal for corporations to spend as much money as they want airing anything they want, without disclosing the funding.
Ergo, it is now legal for a corporation to buy time on a 'cable news network', and present fake news that says whatever it wants (Again, as long as it doesn't defame anyone.)
A candidate in trouble because he had an affair? Ah, that has an easy solution...buy five minutes on CNN, put in some fake reporters talking about how the entire issue is overblown, that there's no evidence of it, etc. Put in fake interviews with supposed government officials saying this was a lie. (You cannot defame the government in general, only specific people in it, so as long as you make up their names and titles, you're fine.)
There are people right now who just read that and thought 'CNN would never do that'. Well, no. CNN probably wouldn't do that now, because it has actual reporters who would complain.
It is, however, legal for them to do. (And note while I specifically said you can't defame people with said lies, that's slander, but slander laws about public officials are fairly lax.)
'Corporations' shouldn't even have protection against 'injustice'.
Individual shareholders already have a constitutional protection against their property being arbitrarily seized or devalued. This automatically protects companies, which are their property, from that.
The whole thing is a lot easier if we stop ascribing human-like behavior to corporations. Think of it as your house. Your house has no damn right to anything at all. Because you are, presumably, a person, you have the right to use your property for free speech, or free press, or freedom of assemble, or whatever. This does not imbue your house with such rights, even if you commonly say things like 'The House of AdamThor wants you to vote for X' out loudspeakers on the top of the house.
I know it seems a minor point, but be very careful how you say things, as phrasing exactly like yours got us into this mess in the first place, where the rights of the shareholders somehow got abstracted so far they became rights of the corporation. Likewise, 'punishing corporations' became, somehow, punishing them as people, instead of what it actually is...punishing the owners.
Normally, looking as 'group rights' would be fine of shareholders, we actually do have those, like the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, and the courts have held that 'free speech and press' imply a right for groups of people to read and listen to you...but be sure to say 'The shareholders each have rights, and the group of the shareholders have general abstract rights we might want to protect. The corporation, however, is not relevant to this discussion. We cannot punish the owners for things the owners, or their employees, say.'
It's amazing how many people look at 'Corporations should not be people' and, at the exact same time, ascribe to them the properties of people. Think of them as houses and the issue becomes a lot more clear what the government can and cannot do. They are things we own, and can use to exercise our rights, but do not have any rights of their own, or even behavior of their own.
Except the problem is that corporations were just given unlimited campaign contribution ability, whereas people are actually limited in what they can give.
If each group out there was limited to only giving what its members could give, in total, which would also require restricting each member (So they couldn't give individually), that would be one thing.
Look at this way. There is free ice cream. Everyone gets three bowls a day.
Except that I have asserted that I'm a 'group', and have a few members, apparently, and thus I get as many bowls as I want. Not 'I get as many bowls as members of my group would get, minus the amount they got individually', just unlimited bowls, period.
What you pointed out first is really the problem.
People have the right to assembly, and collectively decide where their campaign contributions go. If I join a 'John Smith for Congress' campaign, and we all sit down and write $500 campaign contribution checks, I have no problem with that. (Although I'd much rather that each person get, say, $2000 pretend money a year from the government, and they can give it out to any candidate they want...and that's all.) I don't even have a problem with a group collecting those from us, and sending those in, as long as everything is clearly labeled.
The problem is that corporations have somehow gained an additional right on top of this. If corporations are collections of people, presenting the shareholder interests, why, I'd have no problem if they sent a letter to all shareholders, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, asking them to send money to a certain candidate. That would be the group actually attempting to voice the member's opinion. (Of course, the shareholders would be rightly pissed at the waste of resources, but that's between them and their company.)
But, no, somehow corporations have some right to speech outside of the rights of individual people.
Here's the real issue:
Either giving money to candidate alters their vote, or not.
If it does not, it is corporate malfeasance and fraud on the shareholders to do it.
If it does, it more than likely is bribery. In fact, almost all large donations to politicians are bribery.
Likewise, it is still malfeasance if the altered vote does not make more profit for the shareholders. Corporations lobbying, with their own money, to have less control by their shareholders, is ipso facto illegal.
No one even slightly bothers to enforce any of this, of course.
The real problem is that donating money to get people elected should be illegal, period. Candidates should get spending money from the government based on how many people they can get to sign onto their campaign, and that's it.
Yeah, it never felt like an FPS to me.
However, in my case, that's why I liked it. Heh.
I think Fallout 3 is probably the best FPS/RPG there is. They managed to merge RPG skills into a fairly fun good FPS in a useful way.
Which is, of course, only relevant if you like that mixed genre. I can see why people who like straight FPSs would dislike, as, yes, a lot of skill was replaced with luck.
For those of us who've never had a lot of skill at FPSs, though, it was pretty nice.
Oblivion tried to do the same thing (Or, rather, it tried to do it first.) but I thought it failed...but, then again, I'm not a big fan of melee combat, and I couldn't seem to get very good at ranged combat in it.
So it was a pretty unsatisfying experience, especially when combined with the confusing and near nonsensical leveling system. It's sad, because I like the premise of 'What you use during gaining a level should be discounted when you gain the next level', that actual used skill should be increased faster.
Sadly, the way Oblivion did it, was basing leveling on each skill, and often required you to grind a skill before leveling, and often you got an advantage by not leveling. Also, because leveling was based on skills, you had to make sure your major skill weren't skills you used all the time, or you'd level too fast...it was crazy, and made no sense to me. Perhaps this was some 'Elder Scrolls' thing, but this was the first Elder Scrolls game I played, and I couldn't figure it out.
Hell, I read 'strategy guides' before making a character, and thought I selected right...but by the time I was level 5 or so, I was regularly getting beat by single enemies. Apparently, I had screwed up and wasn't powerful enough for that level. Now, with RPGs, you do need to level a character in a sane manner, or you will start getting beaten by scaled enemies, but I've never had problems with that in any other game.
A much more sane way to do that would be something like 'Every time you use a sword 100 times, you get an extra sword point next level, up to 1000, at which point you get half a point, etc' or something. That would actually make sense. But Oblivion managed to take that promising concept and screw it up.
Comparing the two, and how close they are, it's honestly amazing to me that Fallout 3 is right up there in my 'top five games of all time', and my 'game to get stuck on a desert island with', and Oblivion is at least in the bottom 25%.
People free-form roleplay all over the internet through various mediums and they don't have stats, skills or traits.
Yes, I know that. Roleplaying doesn't require any of that. I've been playing on fricking MUSHes for over a decade, I know what roleplaying is.
Roleplaying games, however, do require that. Here, let me quote Wikipedia as to what a 'game' is: 'Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction.'.
See that 'rules'? And 'challenges'? Yeah.
People can freeform roleplay all they want. I've got no problem with it.
A roleplaying game, however, requires a challenge to overcome, either against other people or nature, like all games, and thus requires some set of rules to determine if the challenge was overcome, like all games. There's a difference between dribbling a basketball and playing a game of basketball, a difference between shuffling playing cards and playing the game of solitary, and a difference between roleplaying and playing a roleplaying game.
Roleplaying games are distinguished by the fact that the only skill the player needs is intelligence. (And luck.) Unlike 'action' games, you can play them without any physical dexterity at all, and you usually have all the time in the world to make decisions.
However, there are other video game genres that require only intelligence (and luck) also, and give you as much time as you need to do something, like puzzle games, board games, adventure games, and card games (I mean like MtG, but ones like poker also count.)
What distinguished a RPG from those things is that an RPG has a character (Which excludes puzzle, board, and card) that gains user-selected skill based on almost every random thing they have done. And that said skills are used to determine the odds of things working or not.
This distinguishes from from adventure games, which, if any ability are gained, are at scripted points, and generally can't be selected between, and things either work or not.
The perspective has zero bearing on its genre. What has a bearing on the genre is what is happening in the game itself and unless the choices you make can actually have an effect on the gameworld, whatever role you choose is meaningless and it isn't a roleplaying game.
I love this rather crazy idea that there are computer games where the world isn't altered by the end. There isn't a single computer game with a 'world' that you don't 'affect the world' in.
All games have some sort of configuration, and you make decisions to change the configuration. It's basic premise of interacting with the computer. FPS, adventure games, you change 'the world' to make things happen. You just essentially described all games.
The sole exceptions would be straight up quiz games, which don't really have a world at all. Hell, you arguably even 'change the world' in Tetris, although the world doesn't really resemble ours, consisting solely of blocks. But you sure change it. The world was empty, it starts to fill, you embark on a quest to keep it empty as long as you can.
But forget puzzle games. Let's look at adventure games. The only difference between adventure games and RPGs are how skills and abilities are defined and used. In adventure games, you worry about collecting items to use a few times to do specific things, and everyone playing the game collects roughly the same thing in the same way, whereas in RPGs you gain generic skills by doing generic things, and you can use them in a lot of places, and often can use different skill in one place depending on the character build.
But without reference to the gameplay mechanics, please explain the difference between whatever CRPG you accept as a 'real' RPG, and, for example, King's Quest.
I didn't say there was anything better made since, you loon. I actually called it 'the best dogfighting game ever made', although I probably should amend that with the word 'space'.
People do not actually read on this site.
I was responding to the concept 'there's been nothing like [it] made since.', in the context of 'determining which games gets made'. I.e., not a discussion of quality, but a discussion of type of games made.
Which is just flatly stupid. There's been nothing as good as it made since, but there were plenty of things like it.
The person I was responding to, and I have no idea if that's you, was acting like the entire damn genre of it, and X-COM, just disappeared after those games. When, in reality, probably more games were made in an attempt to replicate those games than were actually needed. (Especially X-COM, which managed to hit a graphical sweet spot that was almost instantly overtaken by FPSs, yet people continued to try to replicate it.)
Hell, X-Wing, and the followup TIE Fighter, were essentially just a clone of the Wing Commander series, which ran though the entire decade. TIE Fighter just managed to be better than any of them.
By that logic, any game you're playing is not an RPG. Because how well the character does is based on the skill of the player.
Ladies and gentlemen, the only true RPG: Progress Quest.
Perhaps what you mean is 'What matter is the intelligence of the player, not the reflexes of the player', but that stops being some obvious conclusion from the term 'role-playing', and instead is obviously what it is: An unsubstantiated assertion that doesn't really have anything do with anything.
As I said, the genre of adventure games requires intelligence, and the genre of action adventure requires that, plus reflexes. Likewise, the genre of RPGs require intelligence, and the genre that additionally requires reflexes should logically be called 'action RPG' or 'real time RPG' or something. It's a mix of the RPG and action genres, and should be called such.
But, regardless, call it whatever you want. Although I will point out that if you remove MMORPGs from 'RPGs', the amount of RPGs sold would probably be reduced by three-fourths...good luck getting manufacturers to produce more RPGs with those sales numbers. You're shooting yourself in the face there with your definition.
Just don't call it action adventure, because that's taken by adventure games with action elements.
OTOH, if we could convince game manufacturers that WoW was an adventure game...hey, wait, forget what I just said. Please please run around asserting that that people have bought 10s of millions of adventure games, which would probably octuple the total sales and revitalize the genre. Go ahead, I formally withdrawn my objection, and I ask that you just call them straight out 'adventure' games instead of 'action adventure'.
"A roleplaying game is a game where the players actions and choices have a meaningful and lasting effect on the game world and that world changes as a response to it"
While that sounds all clever and all, it's fairly idiotic when you actually think about it. That's not what a RPG is currently, and it's not what an RPG ever was. The fact that such a definition include SimCity is not a condemnation of current RPGs, it's a condemnation of a damn stupid definition. There's never been a requirement that 'the world change', nor that it be 'lasting'. Just making up things doesn't make them true.
The definition of a roleplaying game is where players have a character with various self-selected skills and traits they start with and that grow as the game progresses, and they can use these different skills in different ways, usually in a non time-sensitive manner. (I.e., they get the time to actually think about what they're doing.) There is some sort of known mathematical model to figure out how well those skill work for what they tried to do.
Often there are other characters with different skills, played by either them, other players, or the computer/DM.
That's it. That's a 'role playing game', either a video game or a pen and paper one. Pen and paper ones are obviously more flexible in what can happen, but the premise is the same. Anything with those traits is an RPG, anything without is not.
Now, over time, this has often been simplified merely to merely combat and combat skills, and that is, perhaps, a shame, but that doesn't change the fact they're RPGs. You could have an RPG that was entirely combat. You could have one that had no combat at all.
Oh, and in computer games, genres are defined by the mechanics. Period. You can have a FPS with a certain plot, and an adventure game with the same plot, and a RPG with the same plot. All in different genres.
Anyone asserting anything else is, flatly, someone who doesn't know anything about how games are classified. There are no game genres based on content, or plot, or 'how much you change the world'.
Now, it's arguably that 'genre' is the wrong word for this, that normally that means 'type of story'...but, OTOH, in TV and movies, 'sci-fi' manages to be a genre, when that's just a _setting_, so asking people use genre 'correctly' is a losing battle. If you want to talk about the 'RPG classification' instead of the 'RPG genre', whatever. RPG still defines a gameplay mechanism no matter what you call it.
What this 'Desslock' thinks is 'RPG' would actually be better called 'epic', and isn't a genre of video games at all.
Mass Effect is the same as NWN...you can have auto-pausing under combat each round. Actually, it's closer to KOTOR style-leveling, if you've played that, including the 'three starting classes, and three more classes later'. Note all three of those games are by Bioware.
There's also Dragon Age, which just came out from Bioware, which is the same way. If you like NWN's RPG combat style, just keep buying Bioware games. (And don't forget NWN2, which is not by Bioware, but keeps the same system.)
Fallout 3, OTOH, is a FPS with RPG leveling. It is near identical to Oblivion, except that Fallout 3 has a 'pause the game, target someone, and shoot them' screen called VATS. Which is not based on round, but on the action points you mentioned, which slowly refill. In any moderately difficult battle, you'll run out, and have to shoot manually.
You can, however, improve your character to the point that you're killing 75% of the things you need to kill simply by sneaking around, pulling up VATS, and headshotting them.
Put it this way: I'm a fan of RPGs and adventure games, and not so much a twitch gamer. I didn't enjoy Oblivion, I get a few hours in and I lose interest in beating the crap out of yet another mook so I can level, but I have played and beaten Fallout 3...three times. (Which is a near record for me.) And all the DLCs but one.
The first point you make is simply a generalized point: Gaming genres are increasingly blending as makers attempt to sell to a broader market.
You won't find many pure adventure games, either, or pure FPSs.
I'm not entirely sure why this is is, and I don't really like it, but thinking it's solely about, and happening to, RPGs, show some sort of weird RPG tunnel vision.
Hell, it happened to adventure games in the 90s. They all got action elements, and FPS started incorporating adventure elements willy-nilly, like Half-Life did.
Um, no. It's an action RPG game. or 'real time RPG', or 'FPS RPG'.(1)
An action adventure game where problem solving skills, not just combat, are needed to get around. And it also requires 'combat', or at least real time stuff.
An action game (Specifically, an FPS) with enough problem solving required to be 'action adventure' is Half Life. An adventure game with enough action sequences to be 'action adventure' is 'The Indigo Prophesy'.
I know you're some sort of RPG purist, but there is, in fact, a genre of games called 'adventure' and a mixed genre called 'action adventure' that introduces real-time elements to the adventure genre, and people are fans of those games, and we'd appreciate it if you didn't try to stick blended genre RPGs in it.
Incidentally, I have to laugh at the 'real time' complaint. I've got several RPGs, and most of them will pause when combat starts, if you so want. All games by Bioware, one of the major RPG producers, will do it. It's just the MMORPGs that won't do that, because they have no pause at all.
So if your complaint is solely that, it's sorta stupid. Yes, they no longer sell games that require 'turn-based walking around', because 99% of the population finds that very annoying. But many of them let you do turn-based combat. (Perhaps it's worth mentioning that non-computer RPGs like D&D don't care much about 'turns' except in combat or other time sensitive situations, either.) Likewise, the reason they don't have turned-based MMORPGs is that people won't put up with the delay waiting for their turn. (Those people are all over playing Civ 4.)
If you want to argue that 'RPG', by itself, means turn-based RPG, and non-turned-based ones should be called 'action RPGs' or something, fine, I got no problem with that. Don't try to stick them in with action adventure games, though. And arguing non-turned-based ones aren't RPGs at all is just silly.
1) 'Action' games are 'reflex based' games, or 'real time' games, where you have to do things in a critical amount of time or you lose. Some people consider FPSs and platformers and whatnot a sub-genre of this, some people arguing that those are rightfully genres by themselves, and 'action' is whatever is left over. This argument isn't very important, I'm just mentioning what I use 'action' to mean.
That's just an argument to randomize stuff somewhat, not against character development. I though Oblivion's model was cool, where you develop traits you use, but that was crippled by an idiotic system of leveling.
And almost every game has some sort of 'You have progressed, now you can do more'. As you go along, you get more abilities. In SimCity, it's by getting more money, in Civ 4 it's with research. It's a basic attribute of computer games.
The sole exception I can think of would be adventure games, where you're often just dumped into new environments with the same skills as before. Every other game genre I can think of, you get more 'powerful' as you go along.