Translation: "Now that non-geeks are playing games, we'll have to do actual customer service, instead of just throwing things onto the shelf as we had in the past."
Maybe they can also start firing the employees who tell clueless Mom's that "Mario is coming out on the Xbox, but it is going to be a cooler version than the Gamecube with better graphics. Don't buy a Gamecube, it's lame. Nintendo is going out of business soon." (System names can be rearranged based on employee biases...)
Ok, a lot of what I'm reading here is in terms of this being a legal defense. Well, it's not supposed to be a legal defense because Sony doesn't need a legal defense. They don't have to recall their game or give a percentage of the profits to the Church of England, and they won't have to. They "won" basically (Church of England didn't have a leg to stand on, so their was never any chance of them losing), but said they won't do it again for public releations reasons.
The article is an artistic defense of the game. How to explain. Okay, years ago, some German Expressionists decided to make a film version of Dracula called Nosferatu. This film is considered to be one of the high points of Expressionist film making, a work of art.
However, the film makers made it without permission or compensation to Bram Stoker's widow, and she was within her legal rights to have every copy of the film destroyed. Which she tried to do. It is only because she was unsuccessful that copies survive to this day.
A defense of the film as a work of art might have been made not to the courts, but to Mrs. Stoker. An uninterested party could have made a critical judgement of the work and said, "I understand you were ripped off, but don't destroy the film. It is a powerful work of art. It would be a shame to rob the world of this."
Sony didn't make an artist defence of Resistance because they don't care about it as a work of art, only as a product in their catalog.
Um, I doubt he cares about taxes in the United States:
The news of the contents of the encyclical follows a determined crackdown on tax evasion by the Italian government lead by Romano Prodi, a devout Catholic. Prodi has called on the Church to speak out on tax evasion. -- Pope to criticise tax evasion as 'socially unjust'
Basically, he's just listening to one of his lobbyists. What, you don't think the Pope has lobbyists? Trust me, Henry VIII's annulment case would have gone a lot differently if he hadn't wanted to annul his marriage to the aunt of Emperor Charles V.
Frankly, we have an amusingly corrupt, incompetent and German Pope. The old Pope, I felt whatever his faults, was a true believer. Probably why the commies wanted to kill him. This one? I don't think they'd have bothered even if he were East German.
I really wish that some one would mod the parent post up. Reading the posts attached to this article, I see a lot of people just don't understand German law.
It kind of reminds me of the people who don't understand that when Britain bans a game or a movie, it is actually banned. They think because you can't legally do that in the U. S. that its just some kind of extra restriction. Then I usually have to bring up Video Nasties, etc...
Also, the people who are for this law, probably don't have to worry. I expect this measure to become law, and for video games to become even more restricted in Germany than they are now. I assume Crytek is not kidding about leaving either, since they don't want to once again experience the fun of German Stormtroopers... er, S.W.A.T. teams invading their offices again. I just don't understand why they haven't already left, but then my family saw the writing on the wall back when Bismark was in charge.
Well, I knew it was a philosophical difference with Locke, I still think "and the Pursuit of Happiness" is a little vague for my taste. Maybe if it was "and the Pursuit of Property" I'd like it better. But then, icewater runs in my veins and I have a cold, metallic miser's heart at my core. (Well, actually I wish I did, I like the ladies a little too much... but I don't think "and the Pursuit of Women" would go over too well even with all the hound dogs at the signing.)
I think first of all that Childhood is growing, like the red gelatin in that movie "The Blob." In fact, currently, I think there's an assumption that Childhood ends not at 18, but at 21. After 4 years of college, and at "drinking age."
What's the purpose of this? Well, partly because since the state has decided it has a particular interest in raising children, it gives the state more power. Also, it warehouses people for longer, keeping them useless and out of the workforce and decreasing the number of people competing for jobs.
I was particularly sickened when the media started looking at whether Seung Hui Cho's rampage was brought on by violent video games. I shouldn't be surprised though, considering the distorted story of James Dallas Eggbert was used to hammer Dungeons and Dragons.
Not to be nitpicking, but I was once a teaching assistant in a Shakespeare course (my first professional job!). So, I have some professional experience with this....
Actually, Shakespeare also isn't Middle English. You like Middle English? Try untranslated Chaucer:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr; (ll. 1-4)
Shakespeare is basically archaic modern English, and I tend to think that people who complain about him are lazy. Seriously, what's hard about:
When shall we three meet again, in Thunder, Lightening or in Rain?
When the Hurley-Burley's done, when the battles lost, and won,
That will be ere the set of sun.
Where's the place?
Upon the heath, there to meet with Macbeth
I'm sorry, people who find that difficult are poorly educated in the English language. It makes me sad.
Occasionally, he'll throw up some obscure word that can't be gotten from context... but tons of writers do that. (H. P. Lovecraft, I'm looking at you, here.)
That's stupid. The movies are sold in the exact same stores as video games, by the exact same people. In a department store, they are usually sold in the same section of the store as the videogames. The usually come in the same sized packaging and on a similar type of disk media. If anything, the most common format, DVDs, will play in more players than videogames.
I understand your point, but up until the ESRB broke under the political pressure and inappropriately started rating mainstream games AO for content that would not recieve and X/NC-17 in a film, this wasn't a problem. AO games were previously sold in venues appropriate for X rated material, such as X rated video shops and the Internet, not at Wal-Mart.
This is why it was such a huge failure of the ESRB when the ESRB rerated San Andreas as AO. Suddenly, mainstream stores found themselves carrying an AO title (even if only for a short period while they scrambled to get it off the shelves) and it was material far tamer than the latest from Ms. Audrey Hollander and her peers. However, if you are completely ignorant about games and their contents, you might believe that the two things are similar. Those are the really politically dangerous people, the ones who think someone hid a Jenna Jameson movie as an easter egg on GTA: San Andreas.
How could the ESRB have handled this better? Well, they could have issued some sort of recall notice stating that games with unrated material were on store shelves and therefore were not allowed to display the ESRBs copyrighted 'M' rating on the box. If the stores wanted to continue to sell the title, black sharpies to black out the ESRB rating along with warnings to all customers that "This title is unrated by the ESRB" would have sufficed.
Or they could have reviewed the content and said that it still fell withing the 'M' rating. (More courageous and accurate, but probably not politically wise.)
Most likely, Rockstar and Take Two would have done the same thing that they ended up doing (recalling and reissuing the game with the non-rated content excised) and the ESRB wouldn't have ended up with a watered down AO rating that is now pretty meaningless. (Seriously, no one is going to stock AO - San Andreas along with that game Asia Carrera did unless it is an Internet retailer that stock mainstream titles along with adult fare.)
The fact of the matter is if mainstream retailers are expected to handle AO titles, and AO titles are going to cover a spectrum from PG - XXX there is indeed a huge can of worms with obscene content laws. But that's a problem with laws that are already on the books, not with new laws which if they dealt only with obscene content would be redundant and which if they deal with non-obscene are unconstitutional.
That's stupid. The movies are sold in the exact same stores as video games, by the exact same people. In a department store, they are usually sold in the same section of the store as the videogames. The usually come in the same sized packaging and on a similar type of disk media. If anything, the most common format, DVDs, will play in more players than videogames.
And this sort of thing is the reason companies are afraid of GPL.
Well, yeah, it's a legal document. People who plan on violating it are supposed to be afraid of it. If they aren't, then it might as well have no license at all.
Will that slow adoption of GPL software by large corporations? I'm sure it will, much like large corporations don't install free copies of Adobe Photoshop on all their workstations, thus "slowing adoption" of Photoshop.
Of course, some of what will slow adoption is FUD, but there's no cure for FUD, it's black propaganda based on lies. Rolling over for license violators won't eliminate FUD.
The 3D Realms one is even more interesting and troubling than the Manhunt 2 one, in my opinion. In the case of Manhunt 2, ESRB was following it's mandate, which is to prevent bad publicity for the video game industry from leading to government regulation. I don't agree with it, and I think it was probably also partly to punish Rockstar because of their irreverant attitude but it makes a kind of sense. (If you believe that caving into the hard right is the sensible way for the video game industry to protect itself.)
The 3D Realms, issue on the other hand, was punished for a purely technical violation of terms and conditions, see the following article, ESRB Picks on 3D Realms' 'Antiquities'. Because it was very important that 3D Realms update the rating for Duke Nukem 3d. (Hmm, what about game stores selling old games with out of date ratings on the boxes? I just bought Braindead 13 from an obscure web retailer, no doubt if I pointed them out to the ESRB, they'd be punished and fined as well. This is the ESRB acting as a cartel's hit squad, not doing anything remotely useful.
Hmm, in other industries, what do we call it when major players cozy up to each other and they create a governing body that enforces rules on "rogue elements" of the industry?
Oh, that's right, a cartel. Eventually, cartels always act to stifle their competition.
The government likes cartels, because cartels embiggen business, and Big Business is a great source of graft and legal graft (campaign contributions). Small business gets crushed under the weight of unfunded mandates and "well meaning" rules that have the of course unintended side effect of making it harder for small businesses to compete.
It reminds me of an old Russian saying, "Every business in the United States has it's own Mafia."
I'm not sure why so many people on Slashdot are in a rush to defend the creation of a robust video game cartel.
At some point, it becomes really, really obvious that t his is what we actually call "government pork." Delicious, nutritious, government pork! The only question left is, who is being fed by this unfunded mandate?
More concerning is the new anti-TV violence rules. I really don't want to go back to the days of the A-Team where you could have machine guns as long as they never hit anyone.
Well, the product we were supposed to be developing should have made money, eventually, if they would let us work on completing something that worked. It wasn't a Pets.com kind of thing, this was a decent business plan. (There were some things that needed to be ironed out, but it had a lot of potential. Ahead of it's time, maybe, but a valuable Web based product.)
Honestly, the problem was that we had some very shady people in upper management who weren't interested in letting it succeed on its merits, and we had an internal struggle going on between the scam artists and the people who were trying to build a decent product.
This was my first real job, I was making more money than I ever had in my life, and for all I knew all companies were like this. Certainly it was better than my previous jobs, like working at Radio Shack (shudder)....
Exactly. When I was involved in a Dot.Com, it was pretty obvious to all of us on the inside that management wasn't interested in such pedestrian things such as "products" or "revenue." Revenue? That was something you got from investors. Products? Those were smoke and mirror displays, "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain," that impressed investors with more money than sense.
In fact, one of the big political battles we had was between the part of management that only cared about smoke and mirror displays and treated investment as revenue, and the red-headed step child part of the company (that I was in) that actually thought we should make sure that are current customers were kept happy and satisfied with our level of performance. In the end, the smoke and mirror people drifted away on golden parachutes, and we were asked to take stock in lieu of pay for a little while while we worked essentially for free (none of us were dumb enough to take that deal).
It was exciting though, I'll give it that. In an "oh god, oh god, we're all going to die" sense.
Unfortunately, I think there is a general weakness in the economy currently that may end up causing me just as much hardship eventually, but I don't see this as Dot.Com II, the Quickening.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they can also start firing the employees who tell clueless Mom's that "Mario is coming out on the Xbox, but it is going to be a cooler version than the Gamecube with better graphics. Don't buy a Gamecube, it's lame. Nintendo is going out of business soon." (System names can be rearranged based on employee biases...)
o/~ I woke up this morning, and got myself a gun o/~
I kept hoping they'd play it on the show... no such luck... too late now.
The article is an artistic defense of the game. How to explain. Okay, years ago, some German Expressionists decided to make a film version of Dracula called Nosferatu . This film is considered to be one of the high points of Expressionist film making, a work of art.
However, the film makers made it without permission or compensation to Bram Stoker's widow, and she was within her legal rights to have every copy of the film destroyed. Which she tried to do. It is only because she was unsuccessful that copies survive to this day.
A defense of the film as a work of art might have been made not to the courts, but to Mrs. Stoker. An uninterested party could have made a critical judgement of the work and said, "I understand you were ripped off, but don't destroy the film. It is a powerful work of art. It would be a shame to rob the world of this."
Sony didn't make an artist defence of Resistance because they don't care about it as a work of art, only as a product in their catalog.
Not, KITT, KARR ("The Knight Automated Roving Robot")
Basically, he's just listening to one of his lobbyists. What, you don't think the Pope has lobbyists? Trust me, Henry VIII's annulment case would have gone a lot differently if he hadn't wanted to annul his marriage to the aunt of Emperor Charles V.
Frankly, we have an amusingly corrupt, incompetent and German Pope. The old Pope, I felt whatever his faults, was a true believer. Probably why the commies wanted to kill him. This one? I don't think they'd have bothered even if he were East German.
God's 'aving us on 'e is.
Which Europe do you mean, Sarkozy Europe or Blair Europe? (Oh, and I shouldn't leave out Nightmare Germany Europe, but that place scares me.)
It kind of reminds me of the people who don't understand that when Britain bans a game or a movie, it is actually banned. They think because you can't legally do that in the U. S. that its just some kind of extra restriction. Then I usually have to bring up Video Nasties, etc...
Also, the people who are for this law, probably don't have to worry. I expect this measure to become law, and for video games to become even more restricted in Germany than they are now. I assume Crytek is not kidding about leaving either, since they don't want to once again experience the fun of German Stormtroopers... er, S.W.A.T. teams invading their offices again. I just don't understand why they haven't already left, but then my family saw the writing on the wall back when Bismark was in charge.
Well, I knew it was a philosophical difference with Locke, I still think "and the Pursuit of Happiness" is a little vague for my taste. Maybe if it was "and the Pursuit of Property" I'd like it better. But then, icewater runs in my veins and I have a cold, metallic miser's heart at my core. (Well, actually I wish I did, I like the ladies a little too much... but I don't think "and the Pursuit of Women" would go over too well even with all the hound dogs at the signing.)
I've heard a disturbing meme being propagated by Nanny Statists as well. They say, "the brain continues to develop until the age of 25," implying that childhood ought to be extended until then.
What's the purpose of this? Well, partly because since the state has decided it has a particular interest in raising children, it gives the state more power. Also, it warehouses people for longer, keeping them useless and out of the workforce and decreasing the number of people competing for jobs.
I was particularly sickened when the media started looking at whether Seung Hui Cho's rampage was brought on by violent video games. I shouldn't be surprised though, considering the distorted story of James Dallas Eggbert was used to hammer Dungeons and Dragons.
I blame Thomas Jefferson. "You know, I think it would be nicer if it was Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," damn hippy.
Actually, Shakespeare also isn't Middle English. You like Middle English? Try untranslated Chaucer:
Shakespeare is basically archaic modern English, and I tend to think that people who complain about him are lazy. Seriously, what's hard about:
I'm sorry, people who find that difficult are poorly educated in the English language. It makes me sad.Occasionally, he'll throw up some obscure word that can't be gotten from context... but tons of writers do that. (H. P. Lovecraft, I'm looking at you, here.)
Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools
Experimenting on Someone Else's Children
Yu Gi Oh the Abridged Series
This is why it was such a huge failure of the ESRB when the ESRB rerated San Andreas as AO. Suddenly, mainstream stores found themselves carrying an AO title (even if only for a short period while they scrambled to get it off the shelves) and it was material far tamer than the latest from Ms. Audrey Hollander and her peers. However, if you are completely ignorant about games and their contents, you might believe that the two things are similar. Those are the really politically dangerous people, the ones who think someone hid a Jenna Jameson movie as an easter egg on GTA: San Andreas.
How could the ESRB have handled this better? Well, they could have issued some sort of recall notice stating that games with unrated material were on store shelves and therefore were not allowed to display the ESRBs copyrighted 'M' rating on the box. If the stores wanted to continue to sell the title, black sharpies to black out the ESRB rating along with warnings to all customers that "This title is unrated by the ESRB" would have sufficed.
Or they could have reviewed the content and said that it still fell withing the 'M' rating. (More courageous and accurate, but probably not politically wise.)
Most likely, Rockstar and Take Two would have done the same thing that they ended up doing (recalling and reissuing the game with the non-rated content excised) and the ESRB wouldn't have ended up with a watered down AO rating that is now pretty meaningless. (Seriously, no one is going to stock AO - San Andreas along with that game Asia Carrera did unless it is an Internet retailer that stock mainstream titles along with adult fare.)
The fact of the matter is if mainstream retailers are expected to handle AO titles, and AO titles are going to cover a spectrum from PG - XXX there is indeed a huge can of worms with obscene content laws. But that's a problem with laws that are already on the books, not with new laws which if they dealt only with obscene content would be redundant and which if they deal with non-obscene are unconstitutional.
That's stupid. The movies are sold in the exact same stores as video games, by the exact same people. In a department store, they are usually sold in the same section of the store as the videogames. The usually come in the same sized packaging and on a similar type of disk media. If anything, the most common format, DVDs, will play in more players than videogames.
See you at the party, Richter! (not work safe!)
I get the impression of a guy hacking down a locked door with a big axe.. not the impression I think the article meant to give.
Will that slow adoption of GPL software by large corporations? I'm sure it will, much like large corporations don't install free copies of Adobe Photoshop on all their workstations, thus "slowing adoption" of Photoshop.
Of course, some of what will slow adoption is FUD, but there's no cure for FUD, it's black propaganda based on lies. Rolling over for license violators won't eliminate FUD.
The 3D Realms, issue on the other hand, was punished for a purely technical violation of terms and conditions, see the following article, ESRB Picks on 3D Realms' 'Antiquities'. Because it was very important that 3D Realms update the rating for Duke Nukem 3d. (Hmm, what about game stores selling old games with out of date ratings on the boxes? I just bought Braindead 13 from an obscure web retailer, no doubt if I pointed them out to the ESRB, they'd be punished and fined as well. This is the ESRB acting as a cartel's hit squad, not doing anything remotely useful.
Oh, that's right, a cartel. Eventually, cartels always act to stifle their competition.
See the movie, The Aviator for examples of cartels in action. Or this article on the milk cartel, Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System
The government likes cartels, because cartels embiggen business, and Big Business is a great source of graft and legal graft (campaign contributions). Small business gets crushed under the weight of unfunded mandates and "well meaning" rules that have the of course unintended side effect of making it harder for small businesses to compete.
It reminds me of an old Russian saying, "Every business in the United States has it's own Mafia."
I'm not sure why so many people on Slashdot are in a rush to defend the creation of a robust video game cartel.
Hmm... the V-Chip might actually have some utility if it allows smart kids to protect their moms from Law and Order...
More concerning is the new anti-TV violence rules. I really don't want to go back to the days of the A-Team where you could have machine guns as long as they never hit anyone.
Honestly, the problem was that we had some very shady people in upper management who weren't interested in letting it succeed on its merits, and we had an internal struggle going on between the scam artists and the people who were trying to build a decent product.
This was my first real job, I was making more money than I ever had in my life, and for all I knew all companies were like this. Certainly it was better than my previous jobs, like working at Radio Shack (shudder)....
In fact, one of the big political battles we had was between the part of management that only cared about smoke and mirror displays and treated investment as revenue, and the red-headed step child part of the company (that I was in) that actually thought we should make sure that are current customers were kept happy and satisfied with our level of performance. In the end, the smoke and mirror people drifted away on golden parachutes, and we were asked to take stock in lieu of pay for a little while while we worked essentially for free (none of us were dumb enough to take that deal).
It was exciting though, I'll give it that. In an "oh god, oh god, we're all going to die" sense.
Unfortunately, I think there is a general weakness in the economy currently that may end up causing me just as much hardship eventually, but I don't see this as Dot.Com II, the Quickening.