I played BioShock in French because the voice acting was better in French. I played STALKER in English because, for that game, the English version was better. Personally, I choose the best work, not the "native" language.
No, this is not overthinking it, this is understanding the analogy for what it's worth. The problem is the analogy itself is using the "ruleset" it was trying to keep us away from. This analogy is the modern tortoise. It's not made to make us understand, it is made to make us stop asking questions.
And by the way, no one knows the entire "ruleset". No one really knows what is gravity. So being condescending is not a good idea.
Whether the probably-small destructive effect of porn and video games warrant a rather large censoring is the question.
Before we ask ourself that question, we should try to know if the overall effect is positive or negative. It's highly possible some people will get influenced by a video game, but then it's also highly possible some people will find in violent video games a way to pass their frustration and so not use real violence. Banning violent video games might make things worse.
BTW, personally, I have a stronger emotional response to the idea of censorship than to even the most violent video game (although to be honest I'm not a big fan of "violent" video games).
How, then, did U.S. society get the money? At one time it was only a poor farming colony.
Money is an abstraction. What's important is natural resources, with the most important being food and water (Japan had that). If the land of a country is not fertile enough, if it requires a lot of work to get anything, then your potential scientists and engineers will become farmers instead.
In the case of the US, the poor farming colony was mostly left alone (instead of being abused like all good colony) because the empire was weakened and that empire preferred to allocate its own military resources for potentially more profitable colonies. It allowed the US to keep his natural resources for itself. Then slavery was a big boost for the economy. After that, the reason was mostly WW1 and WW2. Some countries, because of a lack of resources and historical hatred, decided to use war against their neighbors, they destroy each other, and then the US comes in and profit from the weakened position of everyone with only a minimal investment.
Again, that's exactly what they do! The ad says "risk an early death, just do nothing". Did you notice the "just do nothing"? If you watch the TV ad, you will see the video game is far from being the focus of the ad. The end of the ad is "maybe we should get together with our kids and eat better, move more, live longer and change for life". Why do you think this is an attack on video games? Is it because you think you can't play video games and "move more" at the same time. Anyway, you might as well say the ad is against public transportation because of the "more comfy bus" thing.
On the other hand, the fact that you seem to believe the Wii-Fit is part of the solution makes me think the ones who are really guilty of deception is the video game industry. I will agree Dance Dance Revolution can qualify as a light exercise, but the Wii-Fit cannot. Wii-Fun, maybe, Wii-Fit is a plain marketing lie.
Anyway, here's the truth : 30 years ago, there was a few hours of TV programs for kids on Saturday morning, but apart from that, the only thing kids could do to have fun and not be bored to death was to go outside and play with friends. Now, they can stay at home and play video games on a comfy couch. That's the problem.
The only problem is that the level of activity needed to improve health is actually very high. Walking for an hour or three won't help at all. Riding a bike at 25km/h won't help. Swinging a wiimote definitely won't help.
That's obviously not true. You can't ask someone who is badly out of shape to run for an hour. So what you do is you first ask him to walk for an hour. After a few weeks, these walks will improve his fitness level so now you can ask him to walk for 55 minutes and then run for 5 minutes, and so on. Any level of activity will be an improvement over not doing anything at all.
No, not end of discussion. You still don't get it. You're still wrong.
First Will Wright is the equivalent of Steven Speilberg, not Will Smith (as an actor). The equivalent of Will Smith is really Lara Croft. The fact that Lara Croft does not get paid is irrelevent. The point is that star actors are mostly about marketing. Let's be serious... Do you think Keanu Reeves deserves his salary? As an actor, absolutely not. But as a pretty face good for marketing? Sure.
If you look at games, you will see that main characters are many times what distinguish a video games from another. That's why publishers will happily spend millions to buy rights to a title. Mario, Lara Croft, Master Chief, Gordon Freeman do not get paid, but they still would cost millions to have and they still sell games. That's why both video games and movies can use the same model. No mario won't appear on the tonight show to sell a movie, but the tonight show is only a minor part of marketing which can easily be replaced with a good internet campaign.
Game publishers can also resell the same game many times. I bought some games from retail stores, some from online distribution, I got some packaged with hardware, some with magazines, I even got a few with cereal boxes!
I regularly play games which are 5 to 25 years old. I bought several games from GoG. There are still a lot of people playing pac-man. Anyway, there is only a handful of movie which can be shown for decades.
I don't care that much about stars in a movie. What will draw me to see a movie is mainly word of mouth. For example, I just watched Shaolin Soccer even if I never heard of Stephen Chow before. It's true that if I like something I might be tempted to seek other productions from the same person, but the same is true for video games. Warren Spector, Ken Levine, Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto as well as a lot of others are stars. Most people don't know those names simply because video games are too new from a cultural point of view. As video games will become more known, the general public will begin to care too about those names.
A lot of games doesn't require much programming skills. Making an adventure game requires more writing and artistic skills than programming skills. Also, a lot of games are made with licensed engines. If you look at the modern AAA title, there are a few programmers and a lot of artists. Anyway, movies are not just a cameraman and a bunch of actors. There are more technical people than actors for the production of a movie.
Very few games have more than 3 hours of content. What video games do is simply repetition. You do the same thing over and over. It's true it makes video games more akin to mini series than movie, but I believe the next step of casual gaming will be shorter version of what we call now "hardcore" game.
With your (bad) analogy, you did not steal the material which is part of the car, but you "stole" the knowledge necessary to make the car. As for the definition of "stealing", I'm not good with the English language, but I thought the expression "stealing an idea" was common usage since very a long time. I even looked up in the dictionary and the very broad and vague definition of stealing in there certainly do apply to copyright infrigement. From a common language point of view, copyright infringmenent is under the broad category of stealing.
The controversy with XP was mostly Windows 2000 owners and they didn't like XP's activation anti-piracy measure
Personally, I didn't like XP not because of activation, but because it was extremely buggy. Unavailable network printers, lost connections to NT4 servers, Office 2000 causing error messages regularly... At first I was asking every users to report to me any problems they saw, but after a few weeks I just asked them to click "YES" on the window asking if they wanted to send a report of the crash to Microsoft. XP was a complete piece of crap when released (compared to Win2K). It took at least a year before XP was somewhat usable and it became stable only with SP2.
I always viewed stories in game more like a reward than part of the gameplay. It's really like having some cake after doing your chores. So I agree it is out of place, it doesn't "make sense", but it doesn't have to.
Also, as a side note, "extremely frustrating battles with high-end enemies"? What do you mean with that?
I'd say the link shows more the evil of people who give too much value to ideology (in this case, following a internal and arbitrary policy) over common sense.
Just out of curiosity, why didn't you download the demo instead of pirating the full version?
Re:Do people really use these, on a regular basis?
on
The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
To each his own. I run from 3 to 6 hours a week (plus a few hours of biking, mainly to go to work) and I have nothing against a game which would allow me to do some fun activities.
"there's no question that gaming has very much become more a social activity than a solitary one"
I wonder how old is the guy who made that comment. When I was a kid, video games were mostly a social activity. I don't remember going much to the arcade alone and most console games were fun only when played against someone else or at least trying to beat his high score. With games like Baseball or Sea Battle for the Intellivision there was no single player mode at all!
I play almost exclusively single player games. I have no interest for on-line gaming. The only exception was with a game called Trackmania and some PBeM I played in the 80s and early 90s. I never played an RTS on-line (although I did play Warcraft 2 on a local network), I never played an FPS on-line (again, only on a local network) and I never played any on-line RPG. I just don't see what's fun with on-line gaming.
I'm not saying your idea is not good for a few games, but the truth is a lot of people never play on-line. Most people I know play video games, but very few play on-line. For the game Trackmania, the only one I played on-line, it was only a small percentage of people owning the game who ended up trying the on-line mode. I really don't think it would be a good idea for most game to use this business model.
I rarely disobeyed my parents. Sometimes I stretched a bit the time I had to come back home, I sometimes hide some truth about school or other subjects, but that's about it. I never took drugs, not even cigarettes or alcohol, I never stole... And I can remember being hit only once (for something I didn't do) so obviously physical violence is not a necessity for everyone.
That does not mean that's the case for every kids. I don't have kids, but it's obvious some of the kids a see only respect strength and violence.
And could you give me an example of real power a parent has over his child without being accused of mistreatment?
Again, with most child you can get your way out by simply threatening them, manipulating them or stop rewarding them (as long as the parent has enough resources to reward them in the first place), with some you can even reason with them, but there are a significant number of kids nowadays who know your actions are limited to words. They know the law protects them, no matter what they do.
It's funny... I just saw a another kid making a scene in a store because his parent didn't want to buy him a candy bar. It certainly happens frequently (which is not surprising since candy bars are always near the cashier, where kids have all the leisure to see them).
The truth is, with some kids, "no" is not enough. You also have to use a bit of physical violence to make them understand that the "no" is final. Unfortunately, parents do not have that right anymore. The worst is kids know this and so know their parents have no real power.
What Linux lacks is not only drivers, but also (legal) codec and, more importantly, honesty from the "community". Too many times I read reviews saying how good a piece of software was, then tested it and realized it was too buggy to be really usable and with a with a very bad user interface. The truth is there are far too many zealots in the open source community and this hurts a lot more than what Microsoft do.
As for me, a few years ago, I was a strong supporter of Linux and OpenOffice. Now, I still do install linux servers, but I don't put it on desktops anymore and I almost completely abandoned OpenOffice, except for my own personal use (for example all the documentation I give to my clients is done with OpenOffice). In fact, I now use OpenOffice as some sort of bogeyman against piracy : "if you don't pay for MS Office, I will install OpenOffice"... and it works!
As the wikipedia article says, the first sale doctrine is only valid as long as you buy a good and not a license to use. Right now publishers still use the term "buy a game", but if they simply used "buy a license to play the game", then the first sale doctrine won't be applicable.
What about digital distribution? I bought Portal on Steam so I don't own a physical copy. Should I still have the right to sell what I bought to someone else or is it just for physical media?
Do you think movie theaters are abusing when they don't allow you to resell your ticket or share it with your bother once you saw the movie?
Personally I think the solution would be to do exactly like movies. The first six months, games should be "sold" like movie theater tickets. As a "one play only" policy is not enforceable, I guess the best model would be, let's say a three month renting through digital distribution. After that, they should be sold like movie DVD. As for the price, what about $15 for renting and $45 for buying the media and a transferable right to use. Would you find this acceptable?
What are your basis for saying that loaning the game to your brother or selling it are perfectly reasonable things to do? Not that I necessarily disagree, but I'd like to know how you justify it.
Slashdot Mirror
I played BioShock in French because the voice acting was better in French. I played STALKER in English because, for that game, the English version was better. Personally, I choose the best work, not the "native" language.
No, this is not overthinking it, this is understanding the analogy for what it's worth. The problem is the analogy itself is using the "ruleset" it was trying to keep us away from. This analogy is the modern tortoise. It's not made to make us understand, it is made to make us stop asking questions.
And by the way, no one knows the entire "ruleset". No one really knows what is gravity. So being condescending is not a good idea.
Whether the probably-small destructive effect of porn and video games warrant a rather large censoring is the question.
Before we ask ourself that question, we should try to know if the overall effect is positive or negative. It's highly possible some people will get influenced by a video game, but then it's also highly possible some people will find in violent video games a way to pass their frustration and so not use real violence. Banning violent video games might make things worse.
BTW, personally, I have a stronger emotional response to the idea of censorship than to even the most violent video game (although to be honest I'm not a big fan of "violent" video games).
How, then, did U.S. society get the money? At one time it was only a poor farming colony.
Money is an abstraction. What's important is natural resources, with the most important being food and water (Japan had that). If the land of a country is not fertile enough, if it requires a lot of work to get anything, then your potential scientists and engineers will become farmers instead.
In the case of the US, the poor farming colony was mostly left alone (instead of being abused like all good colony) because the empire was weakened and that empire preferred to allocate its own military resources for potentially more profitable colonies. It allowed the US to keep his natural resources for itself. Then slavery was a big boost for the economy. After that, the reason was mostly WW1 and WW2. Some countries, because of a lack of resources and historical hatred, decided to use war against their neighbors, they destroy each other, and then the US comes in and profit from the weakened position of everyone with only a minimal investment.
when they should actually be 'get more exercise'.
Again, that's exactly what they do! The ad says "risk an early death, just do nothing". Did you notice the "just do nothing"? If you watch the TV ad, you will see the video game is far from being the focus of the ad. The end of the ad is "maybe we should get together with our kids and eat better, move more, live longer and change for life". Why do you think this is an attack on video games? Is it because you think you can't play video games and "move more" at the same time. Anyway, you might as well say the ad is against public transportation because of the "more comfy bus" thing.
On the other hand, the fact that you seem to believe the Wii-Fit is part of the solution makes me think the ones who are really guilty of deception is the video game industry. I will agree Dance Dance Revolution can qualify as a light exercise, but the Wii-Fit cannot. Wii-Fun, maybe, Wii-Fit is a plain marketing lie.
Anyway, here's the truth : 30 years ago, there was a few hours of TV programs for kids on Saturday morning, but apart from that, the only thing kids could do to have fun and not be bored to death was to go outside and play with friends. Now, they can stay at home and play video games on a comfy couch. That's the problem.
The only problem is that the level of activity needed to improve health is actually very high. Walking for an hour or three won't help at all. Riding a bike at 25km/h won't help. Swinging a wiimote definitely won't help.
That's obviously not true. You can't ask someone who is badly out of shape to run for an hour. So what you do is you first ask him to walk for an hour. After a few weeks, these walks will improve his fitness level so now you can ask him to walk for 55 minutes and then run for 5 minutes, and so on. Any level of activity will be an improvement over not doing anything at all.
No, not end of discussion. You still don't get it. You're still wrong.
First Will Wright is the equivalent of Steven Speilberg, not Will Smith (as an actor). The equivalent of Will Smith is really Lara Croft. The fact that Lara Croft does not get paid is irrelevent. The point is that star actors are mostly about marketing. Let's be serious... Do you think Keanu Reeves deserves his salary? As an actor, absolutely not. But as a pretty face good for marketing? Sure.
If you look at games, you will see that main characters are many times what distinguish a video games from another. That's why publishers will happily spend millions to buy rights to a title. Mario, Lara Croft, Master Chief, Gordon Freeman do not get paid, but they still would cost millions to have and they still sell games. That's why both video games and movies can use the same model. No mario won't appear on the tonight show to sell a movie, but the tonight show is only a minor part of marketing which can easily be replaced with a good internet campaign.
All your points are wrong.
Game publishers can also resell the same game many times. I bought some games from retail stores, some from online distribution, I got some packaged with hardware, some with magazines, I even got a few with cereal boxes!
I regularly play games which are 5 to 25 years old. I bought several games from GoG. There are still a lot of people playing pac-man. Anyway, there is only a handful of movie which can be shown for decades.
I don't care that much about stars in a movie. What will draw me to see a movie is mainly word of mouth. For example, I just watched Shaolin Soccer even if I never heard of Stephen Chow before. It's true that if I like something I might be tempted to seek other productions from the same person, but the same is true for video games. Warren Spector, Ken Levine, Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto as well as a lot of others are stars. Most people don't know those names simply because video games are too new from a cultural point of view. As video games will become more known, the general public will begin to care too about those names.
A lot of games doesn't require much programming skills. Making an adventure game requires more writing and artistic skills than programming skills. Also, a lot of games are made with licensed engines. If you look at the modern AAA title, there are a few programmers and a lot of artists. Anyway, movies are not just a cameraman and a bunch of actors. There are more technical people than actors for the production of a movie.
Very few games have more than 3 hours of content. What video games do is simply repetition. You do the same thing over and over. It's true it makes video games more akin to mini series than movie, but I believe the next step of casual gaming will be shorter version of what we call now "hardcore" game.
The economics of the two are very similar.
With your (bad) analogy, you did not steal the material which is part of the car, but you "stole" the knowledge necessary to make the car. As for the definition of "stealing", I'm not good with the English language, but I thought the expression "stealing an idea" was common usage since very a long time. I even looked up in the dictionary and the very broad and vague definition of stealing in there certainly do apply to copyright infrigement. From a common language point of view, copyright infringmenent is under the broad category of stealing.
If the only way for you to have liberty is with being anonymous, then obviously you don't live in a free country. Hiding is not freedom.
The controversy with XP was mostly Windows 2000 owners and they didn't like XP's activation anti-piracy measure
Personally, I didn't like XP not because of activation, but because it was extremely buggy. Unavailable network printers, lost connections to NT4 servers, Office 2000 causing error messages regularly... At first I was asking every users to report to me any problems they saw, but after a few weeks I just asked them to click "YES" on the window asking if they wanted to send a report of the crash to Microsoft. XP was a complete piece of crap when released (compared to Win2K). It took at least a year before XP was somewhat usable and it became stable only with SP2.
I always viewed stories in game more like a reward than part of the gameplay. It's really like having some cake after doing your chores. So I agree it is out of place, it doesn't "make sense", but it doesn't have to.
Also, as a side note, "extremely frustrating battles with high-end enemies"? What do you mean with that?
I'd say the link shows more the evil of people who give too much value to ideology (in this case, following a internal and arbitrary policy) over common sense.
Just out of curiosity, why didn't you download the demo instead of pirating the full version?
To each his own. I run from 3 to 6 hours a week (plus a few hours of biking, mainly to go to work) and I have nothing against a game which would allow me to do some fun activities.
"there's no question that gaming has very much become more a social activity than a solitary one"
I wonder how old is the guy who made that comment. When I was a kid, video games were mostly a social activity. I don't remember going much to the arcade alone and most console games were fun only when played against someone else or at least trying to beat his high score. With games like Baseball or Sea Battle for the Intellivision there was no single player mode at all!
I play almost exclusively single player games. I have no interest for on-line gaming. The only exception was with a game called Trackmania and some PBeM I played in the 80s and early 90s. I never played an RTS on-line (although I did play Warcraft 2 on a local network), I never played an FPS on-line (again, only on a local network) and I never played any on-line RPG. I just don't see what's fun with on-line gaming.
I'm not saying your idea is not good for a few games, but the truth is a lot of people never play on-line. Most people I know play video games, but very few play on-line. For the game Trackmania, the only one I played on-line, it was only a small percentage of people owning the game who ended up trying the on-line mode. I really don't think it would be a good idea for most game to use this business model.
I rarely disobeyed my parents. Sometimes I stretched a bit the time I had to come back home, I sometimes hide some truth about school or other subjects, but that's about it. I never took drugs, not even cigarettes or alcohol, I never stole... And I can remember being hit only once (for something I didn't do) so obviously physical violence is not a necessity for everyone.
That does not mean that's the case for every kids. I don't have kids, but it's obvious some of the kids a see only respect strength and violence.
And could you give me an example of real power a parent has over his child without being accused of mistreatment?
Again, with most child you can get your way out by simply threatening them, manipulating them or stop rewarding them (as long as the parent has enough resources to reward them in the first place), with some you can even reason with them, but there are a significant number of kids nowadays who know your actions are limited to words. They know the law protects them, no matter what they do.
It's funny... I just saw a another kid making a scene in a store because his parent didn't want to buy him a candy bar. It certainly happens frequently (which is not surprising since candy bars are always near the cashier, where kids have all the leisure to see them).
The truth is, with some kids, "no" is not enough. You also have to use a bit of physical violence to make them understand that the "no" is final. Unfortunately, parents do not have that right anymore. The worst is kids know this and so know their parents have no real power.
What Linux lacks is not only drivers, but also (legal) codec and, more importantly, honesty from the "community". Too many times I read reviews saying how good a piece of software was, then tested it and realized it was too buggy to be really usable and with a with a very bad user interface. The truth is there are far too many zealots in the open source community and this hurts a lot more than what Microsoft do.
As for me, a few years ago, I was a strong supporter of Linux and OpenOffice. Now, I still do install linux servers, but I don't put it on desktops anymore and I almost completely abandoned OpenOffice, except for my own personal use (for example all the documentation I give to my clients is done with OpenOffice). In fact, I now use OpenOffice as some sort of bogeyman against piracy : "if you don't pay for MS Office, I will install OpenOffice"... and it works!
As the wikipedia article says, the first sale doctrine is only valid as long as you buy a good and not a license to use. Right now publishers still use the term "buy a game", but if they simply used "buy a license to play the game", then the first sale doctrine won't be applicable.
What about digital distribution? I bought Portal on Steam so I don't own a physical copy. Should I still have the right to sell what I bought to someone else or is it just for physical media?
Do you think movie theaters are abusing when they don't allow you to resell your ticket or share it with your bother once you saw the movie?
Personally I think the solution would be to do exactly like movies. The first six months, games should be "sold" like movie theater tickets. As a "one play only" policy is not enforceable, I guess the best model would be, let's say a three month renting through digital distribution. After that, they should be sold like movie DVD. As for the price, what about $15 for renting and $45 for buying the media and a transferable right to use. Would you find this acceptable?
What are your basis for saying that loaning the game to your brother or selling it are perfectly reasonable things to do? Not that I necessarily disagree, but I'd like to know how you justify it.