If these sites used a network television model, they would have intimate relationships with the advertisers and would work together to provide less offensive and more effective ads.
If they followed a network television model, they would also be held more responsible for the content of the advertising on their sites. I don't work in network television, but my partner does -- coming home from work all the time with *facepalm* stories. They have to be very cognizant of what they put, where, and most especially when. If they've got inappropriate advertising -- bad juxtaposition, or vastly inappropriate content -- they may face trouble from the FCC. And more importantly: they lose money.
You know, I can't believe this sentence is actually coming out of my (virtual, pixellated) mouth, but in this instance I almost wish the 'net worked more like network TV. (Almost.)
That's my thought, too. It's a courtesy, not a requirement, that you tell your current employer where you're heading. At my current job, I'm on great terms with my boss and my HR manager and they know that I'm planning to leave in the spring. I'm actually moving to another state, so they'll be kept in the loop about where I end up going. (And our company doesn't so much do "cake" as "open bar parties," so I'm on board with that.;) )
But at my last job? They were horrible people and I didn't owe them a thing. An employee can give notice at any time for any reason and doesn't have to justify it if s/he doesn't want to.
Because of the warehouse distribution model they use.
Warehouse has 1000 copies of Game X for distribution to all the area stores. Store A has 150 pre-orders, so they get 200 copies. Store B has 12 pre-orders, so they get 15 copies. Store C has 247 pre-orders, so they get 350 copies.
I don't know if it's changed since the merger, but that's how it worked back when I worked at GameStop. Pre-orders are construed as "local area interest," and so in a store with low pre-orders, no extra games. It's a self-perpetuating cycle sort of thing.
Have you ever tried to explain to a well-meaning and perfectly intelligent grandparent what a Wii is?
My grandmothers are both smart, literate ladies. They're up on current events and they read books and newspapers and they even each have an e-mail address. One of them has latched onto the concept that the shiny white box with the white remote, that I have in my apartment, is a Game. I can easily see her getting mixed up with the two items in a store, because she's simply entirely unfamiliar with the Wii and probably wouldn't even know where to begin game console research. And there may be helpful Wal-Mart employees in the world, but there sure as hell aren't near where she lives...
First time I've ever wished I still had mod points, and said so. +1 for truth.
I was that kid, too. (Lucky for my parents I loved books best, and at least library sales are more likely to provide something valuable than Wal-Mart crap aisles.)
The state of PC gaming bugs me, too. The presence on retail shelves is more or less nil, except for a few dozen copies of WoW (and every store, for some reason, has one EverQuest expansion from like six years ago.)
On the other hand, Steam and GameTap keep, well, picking up steam -- and I wonder if those services are even registering. If I play Overlord on my PC through GameTap, I didn't buy it. But it's still making money and I'm still enjoying it. And the charts don't ahve much to say about that.;)
I wonder if it's also the nature of PC gaming. I have a couple dozen DS games, because they're easy to buy and sell and finish and so on. I move through each with relative quickness and move on to the next. But my PC gaming tends to be open-ended, replayable games (Civ IV, Pirates!, MMORPGs) that I'd buy fewer of anyway.
Anyway, this has all been idle gazing from the "PC Gamer For Life" navel. I would like to know what the actual market is, too, for curiosity's sake if nothing else.
This was just on the cusp of being A Potential Big Deal when I was doing my master's in film school (finished in 2005). But honestly, the failure of most amateur and professional narrative (fiction -and- nonfiction) films is not the framing or the filming or the colors or the shots or the material. The failure is that not nearly as many people are as funny or as clever as they think they are. They don't have good senses of timing, of editing, of rhythm, or of narrative structure.
Over the coming next few years it'll be really interesting to see what *does* happen with more technology and less expense in the hands of amateurs and of professionals and of the "aspiring" class stuck between the two. But for now, YouTube ahoy.
You absolutely must look after their safety, but if you can't know where they are once out of the house, then you can't let them out of the house. On the other hand, if you sit them down and say you can leave the house, you can do whatever, but I have to be able to find you, then you can give them freedom that you couldn't have before.
And what about all of the generations that grew up before tracking? I was 21 before I or anyone I knew had cell phones. And even then I just had one because I was driving a 14-year-old P.O.S. car with 114,000 miles on it back and forth across the state, by myself (at night. Often).
For every child born before, oh, 1980 or 1985, we did things like saying, "I'm going to ride my bike to Jenny's house," and our parents would say things like, "be home by dinner, we're eating at 5:30." In 2007 that looks inexplicably naive and irresponsible, but how many generations were raised that way?
Our parents knew where we were because there was a bond of trust and we were expected to tell the truth. And being discovered to be lying, yes, cost us the freedom to go out of the house. ("Grounded for TWO WEEKS?! But moooooooom!")
I seem to have turned out to be a responsible, trustworthy, competent adult, and so do my friends and co-workers and peers. Sure, there are jerks and idiots and people who will sleep with anything with a pulse, but that's always true. In any generation. And the experiences where I pushed boundaries and sometimes got caught seem, in the long run, to have been more memorable for me.
I have many, many things for which to thank my parents, but I think the one I'm most grateful for is that they allowed me to make many small mistakes, so that as I grew up I'd have learned and internalized, on my own, not to make the big ones.
Remember when personal taste, and not legal research, determined who we listened to?
I happen to be very lucky that for well over a year now, one of my favorite artists to listen to has been Jonathan Coulton, who is both talented AND digital-media savvy. I also like a lot marginally popular music -- classical and film scores and things -- so I'm a small enough market that no-one really gives a rodent's rear end what I do.
But a musician creating music, recording it, and releasing it publicly has done just that: released it to the public. And while reproducing art, including music, in a commercial way without permission is and should remain unlawful... music is music. When there's something you like, it crawls into your head and stays there. And aren't the arts, at their core, supposed to stay with you in some way? Aren't you supposed to be a participant in an experience that alters your perceptions, or some such? Goodness knows they demanded that of us enough in film school.:-P
Happily for me, I don't care one bit about Prince's songs and could happily live forever without them. However, I attended five weddings in 2007 and I think at least one Prince song was played at four of them. I imagine that if the DJ's and friends' playlists had to be discussed legally and approved in advance, I would have had a lot more Bridezilla friends than I actually do.
In fact, the Weighted Companion Cube chamber is one of the most cleverly emotionally manipulative media moments I've ever come across. I mean, Hollywood's got emotion-manipulating down to an art and science but that room in Portal blew right past it.
Because, of course, who would ascribe thought or emotion to the cube if GLaDOS didn't tell you not to? And would you mind incinerating the cube as much if she didn't tell you to "euthanize" it? I genuinely pouted at my computer when I had to put the cube in the fire. The Weighted Companion Cube is, after all, your first ally in the game. And Portal manages to make you feel iffy about sacrificing an inanimate object for your own gain.
I also got chills the first time I heard one of the shooting turret things tell me, "I don't blame you."
It's about time some common sense is applied to the problem and cell phones are allowed as they should be. If some guy next to you is annoying, just ask him nicely to not be.
Which is, in fact, what I do.
It doesn't work.
Years of customer service work have taught me how to ask something while being perfectly polite and perhaps even a bit ingratiating. When I tried, "Excuse me sir, but could you move your arm?" on a man who was sleeping across two seats on a flight -- including the seat occupied by me -- I got a rant about how I was a racist and he had every right to be on the same plane I was.
I live in New York City, and before that, in Boston. That means a lot of time on crowded transportation. You ever tried asking a teenager to keep it down? How about a group of them? And that was when I was college-student and grad-student aged. If you even LOOK like you might know 30, forget about asking them ANYTHING.
And then, of course, there are the passengers who hit up the airport bar first, or the ones who apparently bathe in garlic and use onion powder for deodorant, or the ones who don't care that their child is an unholy menace. (Youg babies crying? I don't like it but I accept and understand it. A kid under 2 is probably overtired, stressed out, cooped up, and really not comfortable with the sensations of the flight, and has no other way to express it. A second-grader throwing things? Not so much.)
So, yeah. Flying is hell because probably 10% of passengers are just born assholes, another 30% of passengers have no respect or consideration for ANYONE, and another 15% make spectacles of themselves by complaining about the first 40%, and then they all drag the rest of us down with. Interestingly, the subway is hell for the same reason. At least planes don't tend to have rodents.
Just like the MPAA the ESRB is using an anonymous group of individuals with no clearly defined lines between ratings to effectively censor content (since many consoles will not even play AO content similar to many major studios refusing to release NC-17 content).
The de facto censoring, however, is on the retail end of the system, and not the ratings end of the system. I believe that the raters do the right thing, in general, rating what they're given. What needs to change, in order to make the system viable, is the concept that no game should be rated AO, and the concept that AO games should not be manufactured or sold.
Frankly, they should. Some things are NOT for children (as Slashdot recently discussed) and the ideal change would be for mainstream society and retail outlets to recognize that, and to be willing to cater to ALL the age spectrum, not just the white-and-hispanic-males-ages-14-to-25 demographic that seems to be the GameStop Ideal.
As for anonymity, I interviewed at the ESRB for one of the raters positions, and after the illuminating and entertaining discussions I had with the staff there, I think the anonymity of the raters themselves (and they indeed sign many confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements) is essential to the process. Frankly, it makes them harder to intimidate, bully, or bribe. I'm sure the counter to that will be that it removes individual accountability as well, but the raters are accountable to each other and to the ESRB, and the fruits of their labor are not only not hidden, they are specifically advertised. Whatever consensus the raters come to on a game, the world knows what it is.
The days of moral panic about the contents of comics seem to be long gone, though. 2000AD used to upset our moral guardians back in the eighties, when kids started coming home with Judge Dredd instead of Desperate Dan. But since then... Well, there's been Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, Lucifer, and God knows what else. These make the old 'Tales from the Crypt' comics that caused so much upset look feeble, but nobody minds because they're plainly intended for adults, and that idea's more or less got through now.
I would agree with you, mostly, except that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund still has plenty of work to do. I will agree, though, that there have been leaps and bounds there in the last twenty years. It's almost -- ALMOST -- a non-issue.
This may sound like a strange argument, but I think that what's going to bring society-at-large around on gaming is going to be getting the women more involved. And there's progress there, slowly. (Disclosure: speaking a an adult female gamer, myself.) But the "won't somebody think of the children" argument against media (or against anything), though hardly exclusively female (Jack Thompson, shut your trap) is historically either dominated by or geared towards mothers. Mamas, protect your babies from scum and filth!
Indeed, in the world as it stands now, its my female peers who think less of me for gaming. In men, the unspoken theory runs, it's acceptable because theirs is the domain of all things immature, juvenile, and boorish -- the category into which gaming inevitably falls. Why don't you know better?
But then, there was no pink DS Lite in the 1970s or 1980s. And there was no Nintendo console specifically generating widespread advertising featuring non-traditional (parents, the elderly) gamers. And there wasn't a computer in most homes, let alone more than one per person. The times, they are indeed a-changing and I am pretty confident that by the time I have grandkids, 30 or 40 years from now, the gaming world will have had the same transition that film, comics, and television have had, and the concept of "material in this medium for grown-ups only" will be well understood.
That's the thing. Consumers don't want BC. Or at least, they don't care.
Unless the average consumer has changed a great deal in the last two years, yes s/he does.
I worked for GameStop when the XBox 360 was released, and for a time thereafter. I still go back and touch base with the guys there every couple of months. And when the 360 was released, and up until roughly two or three months ago, I'd say over 75% of the people considering buying a 360 asked us, "Can I play my XBox games on it?
The PS2 has a HUGE library of games. Absolutely enormous. And there are more released every week -- good, popular ones that will be in vogue for quite some time to come. So if I'm considering consoles, and I like my copies of Shadow of the Colossus and God of War and Katamari Damacy, among others, and there's no killer app for the PS3 and won't be for quite some time... I'm pretty willing to skip the PS3 entirely. I have a Wii and I can get my HD-gaming fix on the 360. *shrug* Seems a lot of other customers say the same.
This is exactly my issue. I have two computers -- a laptop and a desktop. The laptop is just for portable functioning and runs basically open-source everything. But the desktop is my gaming rig. Not going to install an OS on it that can't run games. I hate Microsoft, but I hate losing my hobbies more. *shrug*
No. I just flew cross country (JFK/LAS) twice in the last four days. The speech says that anything with an internal transmitter must have that transmitter disabled but the devices themselves are allowed. In fact I was playing MarioKart on my DS Lite most of the way back from Vegas (and my boyfriend was playing Phoenix Wright on his).
Plus you can't buy new games there without pre-ordering them. They act like you *need* to pre-order and can't just go over the local Best Buy, which will happily sell you one of the dozens of unreserved copies they've got on the shelf.
It's because of the way they work internally. Unreserved copies of a new game go to the stores that have had the most pre-orders. So no pre-orders = barely any off-the-shelf copies to sell. So you plug the pre-orders not only to get the game-reserving customers their copies, but also to have a bigger slice of the pie, as it were, to sell to the walk-ins.
I think the bottom line is that a lot of people who don't play games, but do pay attention to art, don't want to imagine that they're not trained to appreciate a particular art form. Better to deny its potential as being art at all. The real question is -- why should gamers care?
Games are really paralleling film history right now. The answer to anyone invested in it (say, someone who went to film school and now writes about video games and spends spare time on Slashdot) is, "of course they're art, stupid." But the new media ALWAYS meet resistance.
Novelists met resistance. Photography met resistance. Film met resistance. Television still has its residual resistance. And now gaming is next. This is no surprise; it's the way sociaty takes its new media. That's all.
Gamers should care because the future of their art is at stake. Of course, that's a melodramatic way to put it; art will out, and it will mainstream, and it doesn't matter what Critic X says. When a child who was born in a home with an XBox360 in it is going to college and to grad school, the concept that "games cannot be art" will be as foreign to her as the idea that "film can't be art" is to a child born in the era of the VCR.
That actually has to do with the central distribution. If the company gets, say, 2000 copies of Title X, and they have demonstrated intrest for 800 units at Store A, and interest for 500 units at Store B, and interest in 20 units at Store C, then stores A and B are getting all the extra and Store C is hosed. So managers and employees plug the pre-orders, because then not only do they get the available reserved copies of the game, but also they get a bigger slice of the non-reserved copies.
(And Store C's manager is also getting fewer allowed employee-hours for Store C, which means fewer people working less money to pay them with.)
Not all GameStops are awful. The one I worked in was excellent, actually. But I'll still make a point of going five miles out of my way to shop where I used to work, because the one nearest where I live and work now is a wretched hole staffed by teenage potheads.
I was sitting there logged into EQ2, running an instance, while the episode ran for the first time on the TV behind me. I had to log as quickly as possible, heh -- felt dirty.;)
The Bush administration has long supported "faith-based initiatives." Essentially, they're contracting social services out to churches by giving "faith-based and community initiatives" grants for educational, charitable, and other programs. While in terms of infrastructure there may be some redeeming value in the idea (after all, a parochial school does know how to provide an education, and one hopes that most religious institutions know how to distribute food and alms), that does basically mean tax dollars are supporting churches. And of course, only certain ones.
From what I've seen, there isn't age verification software for either of the others. I've never purchased alcohol online, but I do know that a lot of places will not ship directly to your door, but instead ship to a local liquor store for pickup. Age verification is performed there.
I purchase groceries from an online service from time to time (I live in a city, where cars aren't the norm, and the quality is good enough and prices competitive enough that it's worthwhile not walking thirty blocks with a month's worth of food on my back) and this can include wine. They make you check a little tickbox that says "I am over 21" and that's it. The wine comes, along with all the other groceries, directly to my door and kitchen.
So, a little tickbox for video games saying "I am over 17" sounds like about all the "age verification" software that's in order here. Fabulous!
I'd be interested to know how the ESRB comes to ratings conclusions. I mean I know "Violence" or "Sexual Situations" but I'd like to know how they judge them.
By consensus. At least, they used to. They're hiring more full-time raters -- and have been since the job position was slashdotted at the beginning of the year -- and that's changing how they work.
Raters watch the footage provided by the publisher (and there are all kinds of contracts and legal documents about what the developer / publisher MUST put in the video footage), as well as play some games. They work together, in groups, to determine what they've seen and discuss it. If you've ever been in a seminar class where footage is routinely watched and discussed at length (I went to grad school for film, so that was two solid years of my life) it's like that.
What traits did you really enjoy and admire in previous (or current) managers of yours?
What traits did you really hate and were you frustrated by in previous (or current) managers of yours?
Emulate the former and avoid the latter. Most of the best managers I've had have managed with as much common sense as the company in question would allow, because you're right: a book, even a good one, on how to manage projects and people can only take you so far.
Slashdot Mirror
If these sites used a network television model, they would have intimate relationships with the advertisers and would work together to provide less offensive and more effective ads.
If they followed a network television model, they would also be held more responsible for the content of the advertising on their sites. I don't work in network television, but my partner does -- coming home from work all the time with *facepalm* stories. They have to be very cognizant of what they put, where, and most especially when. If they've got inappropriate advertising -- bad juxtaposition, or vastly inappropriate content -- they may face trouble from the FCC. And more importantly: they lose money.
You know, I can't believe this sentence is actually coming out of my (virtual, pixellated) mouth, but in this instance I almost wish the 'net worked more like network TV. (Almost.)
That's my thought, too. It's a courtesy, not a requirement, that you tell your current employer where you're heading. At my current job, I'm on great terms with my boss and my HR manager and they know that I'm planning to leave in the spring. I'm actually moving to another state, so they'll be kept in the loop about where I end up going. (And our company doesn't so much do "cake" as "open bar parties," so I'm on board with that. ;) )
But at my last job? They were horrible people and I didn't owe them a thing. An employee can give notice at any time for any reason and doesn't have to justify it if s/he doesn't want to.
Because of the warehouse distribution model they use.
Warehouse has 1000 copies of Game X for distribution to all the area stores. Store A has 150 pre-orders, so they get 200 copies. Store B has 12 pre-orders, so they get 15 copies. Store C has 247 pre-orders, so they get 350 copies.
I don't know if it's changed since the merger, but that's how it worked back when I worked at GameStop. Pre-orders are construed as "local area interest," and so in a store with low pre-orders, no extra games. It's a self-perpetuating cycle sort of thing.
Have you ever tried to explain to a well-meaning and perfectly intelligent grandparent what a Wii is?
My grandmothers are both smart, literate ladies. They're up on current events and they read books and newspapers and they even each have an e-mail address. One of them has latched onto the concept that the shiny white box with the white remote, that I have in my apartment, is a Game. I can easily see her getting mixed up with the two items in a store, because she's simply entirely unfamiliar with the Wii and probably wouldn't even know where to begin game console research. And there may be helpful Wal-Mart employees in the world, but there sure as hell aren't near where she lives...
First time I've ever wished I still had mod points, and said so. +1 for truth.
I was that kid, too. (Lucky for my parents I loved books best, and at least library sales are more likely to provide something valuable than Wal-Mart crap aisles.)
The state of PC gaming bugs me, too. The presence on retail shelves is more or less nil, except for a few dozen copies of WoW (and every store, for some reason, has one EverQuest expansion from like six years ago.)
;)
On the other hand, Steam and GameTap keep, well, picking up steam -- and I wonder if those services are even registering. If I play Overlord on my PC through GameTap, I didn't buy it. But it's still making money and I'm still enjoying it. And the charts don't ahve much to say about that.
I wonder if it's also the nature of PC gaming. I have a couple dozen DS games, because they're easy to buy and sell and finish and so on. I move through each with relative quickness and move on to the next. But my PC gaming tends to be open-ended, replayable games (Civ IV, Pirates!, MMORPGs) that I'd buy fewer of anyway.
Anyway, this has all been idle gazing from the "PC Gamer For Life" navel. I would like to know what the actual market is, too, for curiosity's sake if nothing else.
This was just on the cusp of being A Potential Big Deal when I was doing my master's in film school (finished in 2005). But honestly, the failure of most amateur and professional narrative (fiction -and- nonfiction) films is not the framing or the filming or the colors or the shots or the material. The failure is that not nearly as many people are as funny or as clever as they think they are. They don't have good senses of timing, of editing, of rhythm, or of narrative structure.
Over the coming next few years it'll be really interesting to see what *does* happen with more technology and less expense in the hands of amateurs and of professionals and of the "aspiring" class stuck between the two. But for now, YouTube ahoy.
You absolutely must look after their safety, but if you can't know where they are once out of the house, then you can't let them out of the house. On the other hand, if you sit them down and say you can leave the house, you can do whatever, but I have to be able to find you, then you can give them freedom that you couldn't have before.
And what about all of the generations that grew up before tracking? I was 21 before I or anyone I knew had cell phones. And even then I just had one because I was driving a 14-year-old P.O.S. car with 114,000 miles on it back and forth across the state, by myself (at night. Often).
For every child born before, oh, 1980 or 1985, we did things like saying, "I'm going to ride my bike to Jenny's house," and our parents would say things like, "be home by dinner, we're eating at 5:30." In 2007 that looks inexplicably naive and irresponsible, but how many generations were raised that way?
Our parents knew where we were because there was a bond of trust and we were expected to tell the truth. And being discovered to be lying, yes, cost us the freedom to go out of the house. ("Grounded for TWO WEEKS?! But moooooooom!")
I seem to have turned out to be a responsible, trustworthy, competent adult, and so do my friends and co-workers and peers. Sure, there are jerks and idiots and people who will sleep with anything with a pulse, but that's always true. In any generation. And the experiences where I pushed boundaries and sometimes got caught seem, in the long run, to have been more memorable for me.
I have many, many things for which to thank my parents, but I think the one I'm most grateful for is that they allowed me to make many small mistakes, so that as I grew up I'd have learned and internalized, on my own, not to make the big ones.
Remember when personal taste, and not legal research, determined who we listened to?
:-P
I happen to be very lucky that for well over a year now, one of my favorite artists to listen to has been Jonathan Coulton, who is both talented AND digital-media savvy. I also like a lot marginally popular music -- classical and film scores and things -- so I'm a small enough market that no-one really gives a rodent's rear end what I do.
But a musician creating music, recording it, and releasing it publicly has done just that: released it to the public. And while reproducing art, including music, in a commercial way without permission is and should remain unlawful... music is music. When there's something you like, it crawls into your head and stays there. And aren't the arts, at their core, supposed to stay with you in some way? Aren't you supposed to be a participant in an experience that alters your perceptions, or some such? Goodness knows they demanded that of us enough in film school.
Happily for me, I don't care one bit about Prince's songs and could happily live forever without them. However, I attended five weddings in 2007 and I think at least one Prince song was played at four of them. I imagine that if the DJ's and friends' playlists had to be discussed legally and approved in advance, I would have had a lot more Bridezilla friends than I actually do.
Yes. Very, very yes.
In fact, the Weighted Companion Cube chamber is one of the most cleverly emotionally manipulative media moments I've ever come across. I mean, Hollywood's got emotion-manipulating down to an art and science but that room in Portal blew right past it.
Because, of course, who would ascribe thought or emotion to the cube if GLaDOS didn't tell you not to? And would you mind incinerating the cube as much if she didn't tell you to "euthanize" it? I genuinely pouted at my computer when I had to put the cube in the fire. The Weighted Companion Cube is, after all, your first ally in the game. And Portal manages to make you feel iffy about sacrificing an inanimate object for your own gain.
I also got chills the first time I heard one of the shooting turret things tell me, "I don't blame you."
It's about time some common sense is applied to the problem and cell phones are allowed as they should be. If some guy next to you is annoying, just ask him nicely to not be.
Which is, in fact, what I do.
It doesn't work.
Years of customer service work have taught me how to ask something while being perfectly polite and perhaps even a bit ingratiating. When I tried, "Excuse me sir, but could you move your arm?" on a man who was sleeping across two seats on a flight -- including the seat occupied by me -- I got a rant about how I was a racist and he had every right to be on the same plane I was.
I live in New York City, and before that, in Boston. That means a lot of time on crowded transportation. You ever tried asking a teenager to keep it down? How about a group of them? And that was when I was college-student and grad-student aged. If you even LOOK like you might know 30, forget about asking them ANYTHING.
And then, of course, there are the passengers who hit up the airport bar first, or the ones who apparently bathe in garlic and use onion powder for deodorant, or the ones who don't care that their child is an unholy menace. (Youg babies crying? I don't like it but I accept and understand it. A kid under 2 is probably overtired, stressed out, cooped up, and really not comfortable with the sensations of the flight, and has no other way to express it. A second-grader throwing things? Not so much.)
So, yeah. Flying is hell because probably 10% of passengers are just born assholes, another 30% of passengers have no respect or consideration for ANYONE, and another 15% make spectacles of themselves by complaining about the first 40%, and then they all drag the rest of us down with. Interestingly, the subway is hell for the same reason. At least planes don't tend to have rodents.
Just like the MPAA the ESRB is using an anonymous group of individuals with no clearly defined lines between ratings to effectively censor content (since many consoles will not even play AO content similar to many major studios refusing to release NC-17 content).
The de facto censoring, however, is on the retail end of the system, and not the ratings end of the system. I believe that the raters do the right thing, in general, rating what they're given. What needs to change, in order to make the system viable, is the concept that no game should be rated AO, and the concept that AO games should not be manufactured or sold.
Frankly, they should. Some things are NOT for children (as Slashdot recently discussed) and the ideal change would be for mainstream society and retail outlets to recognize that, and to be willing to cater to ALL the age spectrum, not just the white-and-hispanic-males-ages-14-to-25 demographic that seems to be the GameStop Ideal.
As for anonymity, I interviewed at the ESRB for one of the raters positions, and after the illuminating and entertaining discussions I had with the staff there, I think the anonymity of the raters themselves (and they indeed sign many confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements) is essential to the process. Frankly, it makes them harder to intimidate, bully, or bribe. I'm sure the counter to that will be that it removes individual accountability as well, but the raters are accountable to each other and to the ESRB, and the fruits of their labor are not only not hidden, they are specifically advertised. Whatever consensus the raters come to on a game, the world knows what it is.
The days of moral panic about the contents of comics seem to be long gone, though. 2000AD used to upset our moral guardians back in the eighties, when kids started coming home with Judge Dredd instead of Desperate Dan. But since then... Well, there's been Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, Lucifer, and God knows what else. These make the old 'Tales from the Crypt' comics that caused so much upset look feeble, but nobody minds because they're plainly intended for adults, and that idea's more or less got through now.
I would agree with you, mostly, except that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund still has plenty of work to do. I will agree, though, that there have been leaps and bounds there in the last twenty years. It's almost -- ALMOST -- a non-issue.
This may sound like a strange argument, but I think that what's going to bring society-at-large around on gaming is going to be getting the women more involved. And there's progress there, slowly. (Disclosure: speaking a an adult female gamer, myself.) But the "won't somebody think of the children" argument against media (or against anything), though hardly exclusively female (Jack Thompson, shut your trap) is historically either dominated by or geared towards mothers. Mamas, protect your babies from scum and filth!
Indeed, in the world as it stands now, its my female peers who think less of me for gaming. In men, the unspoken theory runs, it's acceptable because theirs is the domain of all things immature, juvenile, and boorish -- the category into which gaming inevitably falls. Why don't you know better?
But then, there was no pink DS Lite in the 1970s or 1980s. And there was no Nintendo console specifically generating widespread advertising featuring non-traditional (parents, the elderly) gamers. And there wasn't a computer in most homes, let alone more than one per person. The times, they are indeed a-changing and I am pretty confident that by the time I have grandkids, 30 or 40 years from now, the gaming world will have had the same transition that film, comics, and television have had, and the concept of "material in this medium for grown-ups only" will be well understood.
That's the thing. Consumers don't want BC. Or at least, they don't care.
Unless the average consumer has changed a great deal in the last two years, yes s/he does.
I worked for GameStop when the XBox 360 was released, and for a time thereafter. I still go back and touch base with the guys there every couple of months. And when the 360 was released, and up until roughly two or three months ago, I'd say over 75% of the people considering buying a 360 asked us, "Can I play my XBox games on it?
The PS2 has a HUGE library of games. Absolutely enormous. And there are more released every week -- good, popular ones that will be in vogue for quite some time to come. So if I'm considering consoles, and I like my copies of Shadow of the Colossus and God of War and Katamari Damacy, among others, and there's no killer app for the PS3 and won't be for quite some time... I'm pretty willing to skip the PS3 entirely. I have a Wii and I can get my HD-gaming fix on the 360. *shrug* Seems a lot of other customers say the same.
This is exactly my issue. I have two computers -- a laptop and a desktop. The laptop is just for portable functioning and runs basically open-source everything. But the desktop is my gaming rig. Not going to install an OS on it that can't run games. I hate Microsoft, but I hate losing my hobbies more. *shrug*
No. I just flew cross country (JFK/LAS) twice in the last four days. The speech says that anything with an internal transmitter must have that transmitter disabled but the devices themselves are allowed. In fact I was playing MarioKart on my DS Lite most of the way back from Vegas (and my boyfriend was playing Phoenix Wright on his).
Plus you can't buy new games there without pre-ordering them. They act like you *need* to pre-order and can't just go over the local Best Buy, which will happily sell you one of the dozens of unreserved copies they've got on the shelf.
It's because of the way they work internally. Unreserved copies of a new game go to the stores that have had the most pre-orders. So no pre-orders = barely any off-the-shelf copies to sell. So you plug the pre-orders not only to get the game-reserving customers their copies, but also to have a bigger slice of the pie, as it were, to sell to the walk-ins.
At least, that's how I left it in March '06.
I think the bottom line is that a lot of people who don't play games, but do pay attention to art, don't want to imagine that they're not trained to appreciate a particular art form. Better to deny its potential as being art at all. The real question is -- why should gamers care?
Games are really paralleling film history right now. The answer to anyone invested in it (say, someone who went to film school and now writes about video games and spends spare time on Slashdot) is, "of course they're art, stupid." But the new media ALWAYS meet resistance.
Novelists met resistance. Photography met resistance. Film met resistance. Television still has its residual resistance. And now gaming is next. This is no surprise; it's the way sociaty takes its new media. That's all.
Gamers should care because the future of their art is at stake. Of course, that's a melodramatic way to put it; art will out, and it will mainstream, and it doesn't matter what Critic X says. When a child who was born in a home with an XBox360 in it is going to college and to grad school, the concept that "games cannot be art" will be as foreign to her as the idea that "film can't be art" is to a child born in the era of the VCR.
The job position got slashdotted about a year ago. They're in midtown Manhattan and as far as I know they're still hiring. :-P
That actually has to do with the central distribution. If the company gets, say, 2000 copies of Title X, and they have demonstrated intrest for 800 units at Store A, and interest for 500 units at Store B, and interest in 20 units at Store C, then stores A and B are getting all the extra and Store C is hosed. So managers and employees plug the pre-orders, because then not only do they get the available reserved copies of the game, but also they get a bigger slice of the non-reserved copies.
(And Store C's manager is also getting fewer allowed employee-hours for Store C, which means fewer people working less money to pay them with.)
Not all GameStops are awful. The one I worked in was excellent, actually. But I'll still make a point of going five miles out of my way to shop where I used to work, because the one nearest where I live and work now is a wretched hole staffed by teenage potheads.
I was sitting there logged into EQ2, running an instance, while the episode ran for the first time on the TV behind me. I had to log as quickly as possible, heh -- felt dirty. ;)
The Bush administration has long supported "faith-based initiatives." Essentially, they're contracting social services out to churches by giving "faith-based and community initiatives" grants for educational, charitable, and other programs. While in terms of infrastructure there may be some redeeming value in the idea (after all, a parochial school does know how to provide an education, and one hopes that most religious institutions know how to distribute food and alms), that does basically mean tax dollars are supporting churches. And of course, only certain ones.
The department's web site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci/
From what I've seen, there isn't age verification software for either of the others. I've never purchased alcohol online, but I do know that a lot of places will not ship directly to your door, but instead ship to a local liquor store for pickup. Age verification is performed there.
I purchase groceries from an online service from time to time (I live in a city, where cars aren't the norm, and the quality is good enough and prices competitive enough that it's worthwhile not walking thirty blocks with a month's worth of food on my back) and this can include wine. They make you check a little tickbox that says "I am over 21" and that's it. The wine comes, along with all the other groceries, directly to my door and kitchen.
So, a little tickbox for video games saying "I am over 17" sounds like about all the "age verification" software that's in order here. Fabulous!
I'd be interested to know how the ESRB comes to ratings conclusions. I mean I know "Violence" or "Sexual Situations" but I'd like to know how they judge them.
By consensus. At least, they used to. They're hiring more full-time raters -- and have been since the job position was slashdotted at the beginning of the year -- and that's changing how they work.
Raters watch the footage provided by the publisher (and there are all kinds of contracts and legal documents about what the developer / publisher MUST put in the video footage), as well as play some games. They work together, in groups, to determine what they've seen and discuss it. If you've ever been in a seminar class where footage is routinely watched and discussed at length (I went to grad school for film, so that was two solid years of my life) it's like that.
What traits did you really enjoy and admire in previous (or current) managers of yours?
What traits did you really hate and were you frustrated by in previous (or current) managers of yours?
Emulate the former and avoid the latter. Most of the best managers I've had have managed with as much common sense as the company in question would allow, because you're right: a book, even a good one, on how to manage projects and people can only take you so far.