Actually, with WoW they added parental controls a while back.
I imagined someone would have thought of that. Cool.
If only Blizzard had tastes as refined as their game engines, I'd be buying their products. As it is, the voice acting, the general goofy fantasy setting... Meh. It was all sort of cute, but wearing, back with Warcraft II. (The Myth series and Bungie pre-MS sort of showed me that it could be done with some class, and I haven't been back Blizzard's way since.)
You say: Sony guy answers to that along the lines of "well, we _can't_ start selling games for $99, because people expect games to be between $39 at the low end and $59 at the high end."
The way I read it, Sony's rep says, to quote from the article:
"Generally speaking, over the past twelve years or so, there has been a consumer expectation that disc based games are maybe $59 on the high end to $39 on the low end. So, what I can say now is, I think it would be a bit of a stretch to think that we could **suddenly** turn around and say 'PS3 games now $99.99'."... ...Hirai continued his answer by saying, "I don't think consumers expect software pricing to **suddenly** double."
(My emphases.)
Both the/. summary and the article have that word "suddenly" in there; the Sony guy uses it twice. In your paraphrase, the emphasis would seemingly need to be on "start" instead of "can't," seemingly. Because it sure does sound like Sony's saying it's going to happen eventually; they just don't think the market's ready now.
(The Nintendo counterstrategy is worth thinking about again. Yeah, production costs for these new games are climbing, and a big part of the costs are to do with HD development supposedly. Companies are more and more conservative about the types of games they release because of that -- another WWII shooter, anyone? Except, whoops, the Nintendo platform is supposedly going to cost significantly less. I don't remember Nintendo talking about developers with pitchforks demanding $100 games, either...)
My kids developed a pretty serious Animal Crossing thing with their new DS a while ago, and I had to institute an allowance of time and some prerequisites (homework and instrument practice first) in order to play.
As the very sort of person who sees the problem being acted on here, I would deeply resent any attempt by Tipper Gore, Jack Thompson, or any politician to impose even the standards by which my kids were judged, let alone the specific measures to enforce them. That'd be every bit as likely to introduce unintended consequences as the consoring of library internet connections using government-chosen filtering software. It's sure less effective than what I did, too.
That said, it wouldn't hurt me at all to see game companies doing stuff like selling accounts at different thresholds of time, or giving me tools within the game, to cap time spent at different levels. Give me the tools in a way that works with the game, make it easier for me to choose this stuff. At the client end, this is a fine idea.
When life is so force-fed and censored as it can be in China, outlets like MMORPG's are the only form of "freedom" and people flock to them... so much so that it is an epidemic.
Er, personally I know a handful of people in the US who've gotten seriously hooked on MMORPGs. The ratio of people I know with a gaming "problem" on that scale to people I know with a drug or alcohol problem is -- well, let's say there are more gamers and leave it there.
What does that mean about the U.S., based on your "escape into gaming" explanation?
I'm not seeing concrete evidence that things are worse in China. Given the terms of labor there, it seems likely the time spent per user is greater in America just based on our comparatively greater leisure time... Not that we're so loaded with time off next to other Western powers.
If we had real numbers about this, I'm going to guess that the US and Japan would rank very high in "obsessive" MMORPG by whatever criteria we chose, and that European societies with greater leisure time (vacations, fewer hours worked a week) wouldn't show the same thing. Just a guess, though. (And none of that's an argument for governmental intervention.)
One good thing: it helps keep those MMORPG kiddies who play 12 hours a day from having such a huge advantage over gamers who only play a few hours a day and never get a chance to level up the same way. And it reduces the load on the gaming companies from those 12 hour a day players, who never free up resources for others to play on the same servers.
Let's have game companies make calculations about how to appeal to the most players and how to manage their resources to serve games. The advantages you suggest may be there -- they sound plausible, and as a casual player of a few games I have to say MMORPGs have never really appealed to me largely because of exactly the sort of people you're talking about.
Government intervention only imposes arbitrary standards for compliance with the law, preventing exactly the sorts of balancing you're talking about, though. Suddenly instead of "How do we serve our customers better?" it's "How do we obey the letter of this law some hair-sprayed politico cooked up in her utter ignorance of how games work?" Unintended consequences and ways to game the system will surely result.
(Speaking of the U.S. "No Child Left Behind" standards for schools.)
For a second though, just flip it around (to my position): you have a new HDTV. Are you really going to want to throw down money for a console that will never actually use the full resolution of that TV?
Old post, but my reaction is: That's exactly why we didn't buy an HDTV when I got the itch a while back. The thing is, you pony up $1500 and then you're stuck with something that actually looks worse for a lot of sources of video. To get the satisfaction of a true HD image, you're paying tons more than my cheapie cable connection... The costs start to mount. That's one of those treadmills I've learned I don't want to step onto. Not yet.
Obviously we all know that not all people -- or in my case not all men -- do wash their hands. For that to be true, we've all got to have witnessed people not doing it. Forget the eyes on the wall, these people have ignored actual witnesses.
(I've seen salespeople slapping each other's backs and shaking hands in the rest room -- without washing. Egh. Smarmy handshakes are awful even when they're hygenic.)
This has been around for a while, but it's an even better example -- they improved it over time by moving the fly's image slightly off center. The image of a fly on the bottom of a urinal cut "spillage" by 80 percent:
(In answer to the post I'm linking to, there, a black dot or target wasn't as effective as the not-quite-realistic fly. Men didn't aim for a truly real-looking fly, either.)
The PS3 is going to (probably) cost too much; the X360 relies heavily on Live! for value and has no standard HD; and the Wii can't do HD.
You're right, this generation's not even here yet. But POV of a parent here: both the 360 and the PS3 seem to be fatally flawed in price. People with a regular TV -- me -- aren't going to think the 360 or the PS3 are worth the cost. It's not just the consoles, it's the HD monitor cost that puts me well above a grand before there's a game popped in there.
A huge increase in market penetration for HD monitors is what Sony and MS are banking on. I dunno. I do know three families with big HD screens, at least -- and none of those happens to be in the market for what the game companies are selling. (One of them actually had an original X-Box, bought by two sons who shared the cost: the 360 is out of their price range, they say. So the console price alone alienated previous buyers, there. [The broken original X-Box maybe contributed some to that too.])
At worst Nintendo's lack of HD is a wash. They're pitching for a market that exists, and their system is significantly cheaper because of that choice. Pool of people with a TV > Pool of people with an HDTV, by many times, and the greater than sign isn't going to flip over for a long, long time.
That, in a nutshell, is why the Democratic Party can't make any headway in "red states". (Which, by the way, used to be blue states. Do you think the population of Texas changed in any measurable way when they swung from Democrat to Republican? No.)
It's all very well to talk about "education" as opposed to "condescension." I don't really even disagree with you putting my post in with the latter... It's the truth, this sort of bill is blatant demagoguery, but I could easily have said it with less political troll to it.
But, getting to Texas, if you don't think the "used to be blue state" part has anything to do with the Civil Rights movement, you are plain kidding yourself. That's what Nixon's "southern strategy," mentioned in my parent, is all about: playing to racial fears in the south so the Republicans could win all those formerly "Dixiecrat" states.
Take a good long look at Zell Miller and his speech at the Republican convention last time around. That's the old Democrat, fomenting about "agitators." Recognize that Carter and Clinton have been the only Dems to win national elections since 1968, and that John Edwards ran last time largely on his ability to win "talkin' like this."
I have Southern Baptist relations who live in Oklahoma. You don't know how hard the "educate them" part can be; these people think putting numeric digits on our coinage would be a sign of impending world government. No kidding.
One could just as easily say "Ach, mein Fuerher, too bad the actual scientific possibilities of eugenics were overshadowed by a bunch of moral concerns."
Nice toss-in of the Hitler reference, there. Nothing subtle about that. It's not like this is an area where moral people might differ; people who think embryonic stem cells from infertility procedures are even a grey area are to be equated with Hitler's willing sycophantic minions, period. So it seems.
You go on to dismiss "a lot of Slashdot posters" for their straw man willingness to junk "whatever moral notions they have about the dignity of the human person." That's interesting. It's precisely my unwillingness to dismiss my own notions about human dignity which lead me to think this might be a little more complicated than any authoritarian or absolutist stance. Same with abortion, on much the same lines.
(By the by, despite all sorts of noisiness about birth control, for the most part America's religious communities were pretty sympathetic with the eugenics movement. Take a look at "Evangelical Engagements With Eugenics, 1900-1940":
"(E)vangelicals often accepted eugenics as a part of a progressive, reformist vision that uncritically fused the Kingdom of God with modern civilization."
The same people who today take questions like stem cells as set in stone were quite willing to entertain eugenics. I've got a book in the basement at home that phrases eugenics in very religious terms, handed down to me by the Missouri Synod Lutheran side of the family. It's a very weird read.)
Anyone with two neurons to rub together knew the legislation was BS.
Which tells you, in case you'd missed it, exactly whom this legislation was meant to appeal to: fearful idiots.
Now we'll get the next phase in the fearful idiot plan, in which those who passed the legislation tell us scary, black robed judges are dictating our society to us. Does any of this sound at all familiar?
All these social wedge issues are microcosms of the "Southern Strategy" that's been winning the Republican Party national elections since 1968. Don't scoff. It's like the old moment with Adlai Stevenson. Told he had the support of all thinking voters, Stevenson replied: "That's not enough, I need a majority." Fearful idiots have a narrow majority in this country. Hence: thinly-veiled "race cards," our latest attempt to make immigration a hot button issue, the supposed gay marriage crisis, and so on.
Your point about the med school funding -- I'm considering med school, so I know whereof you speak -- is well taken.
I did have a friend in the Navy, though, who underwent a nightmarish wisdom tooth extraction. The Navy dentist gave him conscious sedation (a narcotic) instead of a general anesthetic, and then proceeded to perform an extraction that would have given any Civil War surgeon pause. My friend described the fear very effectively. Said he never slept on his back after that, because it reminded him of the surgery chair somehow.
In general the reputation of the military's medical services was that of a poor-to-middling staff model HMO, based on my friend's description of the general situation. Maybe that reflected all the young doctors doing their five years and gaining experience, maybe not.
But at the end of the day I know that I can see - with my glasses.
At the end of the day, people with laser surgery can basically see. Some have problems with glare, and some develop vision problems that can't be corrected even with glasses, but the procedure basically works for most people despite the risks.
That's at the end of the day. How about at the end of the decade, or of your lifetime, though? This thing has only been done for a short while now, and the longitudinal studies aren't in, by definition.
Military organizations, again, have done studies over shorter periods. Eighteen months is not the measure of this surgery, though. It's performed on a sensitive organ that already has problems with deterioration with age. Given that, I'm not exactly jumping to get it done because of the deals on those special ads that come with the Sunday funnies in my paper.
Are contact lenses such a problem? I can see it for jet pilots, okay, maybe. But for everyday people, what -- you absolutely can't wear goggles when you swim?
Biologists themselves admit that "species" has no universally accepted, absolute definition. In fact all levels of taxonomy are subjected to constant scrutiny, and major revisions are entirely possible. To wit: in the last 15 years or so the "domain," a level above "kingdom," has become commonly accepted. We're talking about the highest level of the taxonomy changing due to persuasive new arguments. And yet you're telling me scientists never change due to their egotism?
In part, this reflects the problem in biology that different organisms, even some closely related types, display a remarkable and bewildering number of ways of reproducing. For example, animals that reproduce unisexually (parthenogenetically) do not interbreed at all, yet they produce viable offspring. Nevertheless, all the individuals in such a population of parthenogenetic organisms share a common line of descent or ancestry. In this case a phylogenetic definition is particularly useful. On the other hand, many animals and most of the orchids (a huge family of flowers with some 26,000 species--more than all the fishes) can hybridize and produce new species in a single generation. Among the American whiptail lizards are several parthenogenetic species that we now know are the hybrid result of matings between sexual species sometime in the past (the formation of a new species via hybridization is termed reticulate evolution). Add to this variety species, such as many snails and flatworms, that are hermaphroditic (containing the reproductive systems of both sexes) and occasionally self-fertilizing, and you can see how the problem of agreeing on a single, all-encompassing species definition becomes quite unlikely.
It seems to me you're not listening to all that, out of ego needs of your own.
they go ahead and call it a "new species" without testing whether or not it can be interbred.
Your version of confirming a new species would proceed how, again? Testing to see if each newly-found animal can interbreed with, what, every possible roughly comparable species? Are you at all familiar with modern cladistics, or with how paleontologists go about discussing species in extinct animals? Is this a case where the one thing you learned is what you're clinging to dogmatically, lest you be cast loose into the wild world, or what?
really the gaming industry lacks any coherent self-regulation and this needs to change.
As a single parent of 12-year-old twins I can tell you that the current system is at least coherent enough to provide me with what I need. My kids probably understand the ratings better than I do, and I'm passingly familiar with them. The categories act as rough guidelines for me to think about in allowing or preventing any particular title, and the kids if anything tend to rule out M-rated games themselves before they get to me.
What more is it that you want? Coherency is that pivotal for you? The ratings are consistent across stores, whether the store policies toe the line or not. If anything the criteria for the different levels are more sensible (from what I see) than ratings for movies, which still carry with them the genetic history of the old Hays/Breen code and its Catholic origins.
As far as coherency goes, there's never going to be an absolutely clear code. Censorship becomes arbitrary at some point. It's the nature of the beast. The movie "The Whale Rider" was a great family film, but it got a PG-13 because of (apparently) some drug-related paraphernalia and a bunch of giggly, pot smoking people in one scene. The plot barely touched on those people, and if anything it redeemed the characters involved by bring them away from their dissolute lives a little bit by the end -- but the good ol' MPAA has its rules, you know. Say a four-letter word beginning with "F" a certain number of times and you get an R, period. 'Cause, you know, 13-year-olds have never heard that one.
ScreenIt.com goes to enormous lengths to catalog the various traits of different movies, to the point where the level of detail is almost laughable -- and it's still hard to be sure what categories they're putting things in and why. What does "bad/disrespectful attitude" mean in a movie about the X-Men? Which behavior is imitative? Would that be coherent, or incoherent, in your book? I'm a little lost in it, usually.
one of the biggest weaknesses of the ESRB is its lack of real power: it lacks any and all punitive ability.
Game stores do have policies to do with the ratings boards. People who sell the wrong stuff to minors face some pretty stiff financial risks in so doing. The idea of jail time for selling a video game is ludicrous; it's if anything even more disproportionate than enormous sentences for minor drug offenses.
Clearly this has been ineffective in keeping inappropriate games from the hands of minors.
How much documentation do we actually have about the way games like GTA III wind up played by younger kids? If someone showed me that stores completely disregard the ratings, that would be one thing. I'm not convinced of that at all. Unless the demogogues behind this bill show me that they truly understand the whole ecosystem of this problem, I'm not voting for them. At this point it sure seems like they're scaring up a contrived social issue to scare people, not seriously caring about whatever problem's really out there.
People never seem to learn this lesson. It doesn't matter that kudzu and dandelions and purple loosestrife and house sparrows and starlings and gypsy moths and buckthorn and... you get the picture: it doesn't matter that any given introduced species goes nuts and that other introductions meant to curb earlier mistakes blow up. People don't see how it could happen the next time. They just don't care that much.
Head on down to your local plant nursery and consider what share of the plants there are native to your area. The percentage will be pitifully small unless you're in Hawaii or something. Hawaii takes plant imports very seriously. In my area, even when there's a perfectly good native species like American bittersweet vine, the nursery will decide to carry a eurasian species that has some slightly different quality. Bam: eurasian bittersweet swallows whole forests in the south. The native version didn't do that. Gee, I guess the difference was a little bit bigger than we thought.
People could have planted native chestnut trees. They were the dominant species of non-mast food tree in eastern U.S. forests, and a huge wildlife habitat -- until they were wiped out by the chestnut blight brought over on shrubby eurasian chestnuts by plant nurseries. Didn't learn from that one either.
If anything, where there are legal restrictions about plants, they're usually an encouragement not to plant natives. Introduced species are so much more civilized, or something.
"If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you'd be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!"
This particular number in the article is based on nebulous logic every bit as specious as the RIAA's "if every pirate bought instead" arguments.
All the math people are doing here, including that in the original article and your speculation, fails to imagine a world where there's a difference between people who buy on CD and people who buy from iTunes. There is a huge difference, though. Remember when the iTunes store came out, and the big news was that you could buy just the tracks you wanted? One of the big lessons was that people wanted to do that, and there was lots of talk at the time about how the idea of the album wasn't always going to be the sales paradigm and so on.
Weird Al is a gimmick songwriter. His write parodies, and one or two of them catch on every once in a while. Now, I'm an iTunes buyer, I've bought some songs but not a lot of them -- and if there was a Weird Al song I enjoyed a lot, I'd possibly buy it on iTunes where I would never have considered purchasing an album. How does Weird Al's income change in that case? He had zero, bupkus, before. Does Weird Al get more when a bunch of people buy one or two songs, as opposed to when a smaller number of people buy a complete album? We don't have the sales figures to make that comparison, but I'm pretty sure given the sort of musician he is that he's going to get a lot of individual track sales, and also that he doesn't have that big a hard core fan base that'll buy whole albums.
I have maybe 75 iTunes tracks that I've purchased, and then a few books from Audible via iTunes. Maybe, maybe ten or twenty of those tracks would have been purchases I'd have made in a bricks and mortar store. When I went to try to buy Leo Kottke's two-disk greatest hits collection a while ago, nobody in the Mall of America (eck -- a huge mall) even carried it. It was available at 10:00 that night from iTunes, though. Leo Kottke didn't lose any money because of that purchase. He got some he wouldn't have gotten.
This "if everyone bought one way or the other" math, in short, is based on false assumptions.
Does having two similar sounding words to describe the exact same thing add any value to the English language?
In the case of "utilize" it allows every bureaucratic middle manager to sound a lot cooler, s/he thinks, than "use." See there?
When people say language is alive, they mean it's got a lot of the properties of living things. Mutations, redundancy, and so on apply. Language adapts, and it's messy. Just like life. More life means more mess. Irregular verbs are the ones people use a ton, "to be" being the best example in all the languages I've spoken a little.
(The French have government bodies to help choose correct usage. They take their language pretty seriously. If "L'hot dog" had happened to you, you'd sympathize more.)
Whenever I've seen it used, "Schadenfreude" has implied pleasure in the suffering (or just difficulties) of others -- independent of whether those others deserved to suffer.
Wanting a company to fail because its actions are objectionable is far less amoral -- uh, more moral? -- than that. We're not rooting against Sony because it'll make us feel better about our own failings if they belly flop. We want them to fail because they're behaving in a way that actually offends our sense of how companies should act. Maybe that "moral" thing was real after all: we think they way Sony's acting is wrong. Not illegal, no -- just wrong.
This isn't just a case of wanting to see the bully stumble, either. If Sony had taken Nintendo's approach this time around, I'd be lining up to buy.
The longevity of Sony's console sales does really point out the mountain MS was trying to climb, doesn't it?
You say the original XBox market for new games disappeared, and it's true -- there's almost nothing new coming. Meanwhile Sony can rely on plenty of third party legs for the PS2; even if the PS3 outright crashes, there's still some cushion there.
Anyone who's scoffed at the idea of "market share" or said it was overrated should think about how much critical mass MS would have needed here. Even a first generation buyer of MS's product is hard-pressed not to go ahead and buy Sony's old version. You "needed a new console" and Sony's old one was plenty good enough -- and it has tons of games you haven't played. You don't even say you were dissatisfied with the XBox, but the 360 doesn't make sense to you.
It's all about the price and the third-party support, seemingly.
Having been to four different club matches in Europe, I've never seen anything like the stories being regurgitated in several newspapers today.
Granted, I wasn't attending especially thug-heavy English matches, but I never saw anything even remotely approaching "Sieg Heil" salutes and overt signs. The big club teams all have racially mixed rosters anyway; it doesn't make particular sense for fans to chant racial slurs -- not that racism makes any particular sense.
Not that the incidents aren't real, but there's some echo chamber effect going on there.
American sports has such a strong strain of submerged racism, though -- I wonder how pervasive that is in international "futbol." (For example: two almost identical baseball players have borderline Hall of Fame careers; one of them did it through hard work and refining his skills and so on, and the other one was a brilliant athlete. Wait a minute -- the numbers are nearly the same. How can we tell the natural athlete from the hard worker? Because the hard worker's white, and the athlete is black. See: Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, Detroit Tigers.)
Why should they have to pay twice?...How many times does it have to be paid?
Given that the lines here are in place partly because of government spending, I've already paid for this bandwidth once, in the form of my taxes. When we start seeing advanced rate plans that charge me more for the same access I have now, are we not paying again when we already invested in this access before?
(It doesn't surprise me at all that this would happen in the House. The Republican Party hears two voices right now: massive corporate interests and the "social right," to which they need to pander to get elected. They don't think anyone else even belongs at the table when decisions are made.)
Plus, look at the Gamecube/GBA connection. We have... what, six games that use it? And most, if not all, are made by Nintendo?
I wouldn't make it a main component, but I'm sure they'll find a few creative ways to use the functionality.
So far the only thing I remember hearing that made me think there might be something truly new to the Wii-DS connection was the thing about how an Animal Crossing village would be visitable 24 hours a day because of the persistent internet connectivity on the console. That comment was ambiguous, though -- more of a general example than a specific description, and it could have been talking about a similar game on the Wii alone.
Nintendo has tried to cross-sell the N64 and the GameBoy Color, and then the GC and the GBA, and both times it's been basically what you describe: nothing central to the game, just entertaining add-ons. They're well-designed and fun to use; my kids and I played Windwaker through with them following me in the "Tingle Tuner" investigating each room. Nintendo probably isn't going to be developing too much that requires both systems, though. Narrows the market horribly. They seem to have known that with the previous systems.
Pygmy populations derived from elephants or mammoths are known from several locations throughout the world, including the islands of Malta and Sicily in the Mediterranean, several islands in southeast Asia, and Wrangel Island in the Arctic.
Nova did a nice little show about the Wrangel ones, if I remember right.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, with WoW they added parental controls a while back.
I imagined someone would have thought of that. Cool.
If only Blizzard had tastes as refined as their game engines, I'd be buying their products. As it is, the voice acting, the general goofy fantasy setting... Meh. It was all sort of cute, but wearing, back with Warcraft II. (The Myth series and Bungie pre-MS sort of showed me that it could be done with some class, and I haven't been back Blizzard's way since.)
You say: Sony guy answers to that along the lines of "well, we _can't_ start selling games for $99, because people expect games to be between $39 at the low end and $59 at the high end."
The way I read it, Sony's rep says, to quote from the article:
Both the /. summary and the article have that word "suddenly" in there; the Sony guy uses it twice. In your paraphrase, the emphasis would seemingly need to be on "start" instead of "can't," seemingly. Because it sure does sound like Sony's saying it's going to happen eventually; they just don't think the market's ready now.
(The Nintendo counterstrategy is worth thinking about again. Yeah, production costs for these new games are climbing, and a big part of the costs are to do with HD development supposedly. Companies are more and more conservative about the types of games they release because of that -- another WWII shooter, anyone? Except, whoops, the Nintendo platform is supposedly going to cost significantly less. I don't remember Nintendo talking about developers with pitchforks demanding $100 games, either...)
As the very sort of person who sees the problem being acted on here, I would deeply resent any attempt by Tipper Gore, Jack Thompson, or any politician to impose even the standards by which my kids were judged, let alone the specific measures to enforce them. That'd be every bit as likely to introduce unintended consequences as the consoring of library internet connections using government-chosen filtering software. It's sure less effective than what I did, too.
That said, it wouldn't hurt me at all to see game companies doing stuff like selling accounts at different thresholds of time, or giving me tools within the game, to cap time spent at different levels. Give me the tools in a way that works with the game, make it easier for me to choose this stuff. At the client end, this is a fine idea.
When life is so force-fed and censored as it can be in China, outlets like MMORPG's are the only form of "freedom" and people flock to them... so much so that it is an epidemic.
Er, personally I know a handful of people in the US who've gotten seriously hooked on MMORPGs. The ratio of people I know with a gaming "problem" on that scale to people I know with a drug or alcohol problem is -- well, let's say there are more gamers and leave it there.
What does that mean about the U.S., based on your "escape into gaming" explanation?
I'm not seeing concrete evidence that things are worse in China. Given the terms of labor there, it seems likely the time spent per user is greater in America just based on our comparatively greater leisure time... Not that we're so loaded with time off next to other Western powers.
If we had real numbers about this, I'm going to guess that the US and Japan would rank very high in "obsessive" MMORPG by whatever criteria we chose, and that European societies with greater leisure time (vacations, fewer hours worked a week) wouldn't show the same thing. Just a guess, though. (And none of that's an argument for governmental intervention.)
One good thing: it helps keep those MMORPG kiddies who play 12 hours a day from having such a huge advantage over gamers who only play a few hours a day and never get a chance to level up the same way. And it reduces the load on the gaming companies from those 12 hour a day players, who never free up resources for others to play on the same servers.
Let's have game companies make calculations about how to appeal to the most players and how to manage their resources to serve games. The advantages you suggest may be there -- they sound plausible, and as a casual player of a few games I have to say MMORPGs have never really appealed to me largely because of exactly the sort of people you're talking about.
Government intervention only imposes arbitrary standards for compliance with the law, preventing exactly the sorts of balancing you're talking about, though. Suddenly instead of "How do we serve our customers better?" it's "How do we obey the letter of this law some hair-sprayed politico cooked up in her utter ignorance of how games work?" Unintended consequences and ways to game the system will surely result.
(Speaking of the U.S. "No Child Left Behind" standards for schools.)
For a second though, just flip it around (to my position): you have a new HDTV. Are you really going to want to throw down money for a console that will never actually use the full resolution of that TV?
Old post, but my reaction is: That's exactly why we didn't buy an HDTV when I got the itch a while back. The thing is, you pony up $1500 and then you're stuck with something that actually looks worse for a lot of sources of video. To get the satisfaction of a true HD image, you're paying tons more than my cheapie cable connection... The costs start to mount. That's one of those treadmills I've learned I don't want to step onto. Not yet.
Obviously we all know that not all people -- or in my case not all men -- do wash their hands. For that to be true, we've all got to have witnessed people not doing it. Forget the eyes on the wall, these people have ignored actual witnesses.
(I've seen salespeople slapping each other's backs and shaking hands in the rest room -- without washing. Egh. Smarmy handshakes are awful even when they're hygenic.)
This has been around for a while, but it's an even better example -- they improved it over time by moving the fly's image slightly off center. The image of a fly on the bottom of a urinal cut "spillage" by 80 percent:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_fly_in_ur inal.htm
(In answer to the post I'm linking to, there, a black dot or target wasn't as effective as the not-quite-realistic fly. Men didn't aim for a truly real-looking fly, either.)
The PS3 is going to (probably) cost too much; the X360 relies heavily on Live! for value and has no standard HD; and the Wii can't do HD.
You're right, this generation's not even here yet. But POV of a parent here: both the 360 and the PS3 seem to be fatally flawed in price. People with a regular TV -- me -- aren't going to think the 360 or the PS3 are worth the cost. It's not just the consoles, it's the HD monitor cost that puts me well above a grand before there's a game popped in there.
A huge increase in market penetration for HD monitors is what Sony and MS are banking on. I dunno. I do know three families with big HD screens, at least -- and none of those happens to be in the market for what the game companies are selling. (One of them actually had an original X-Box, bought by two sons who shared the cost: the 360 is out of their price range, they say. So the console price alone alienated previous buyers, there. [The broken original X-Box maybe contributed some to that too.])
At worst Nintendo's lack of HD is a wash. They're pitching for a market that exists, and their system is significantly cheaper because of that choice. Pool of people with a TV > Pool of people with an HDTV, by many times, and the greater than sign isn't going to flip over for a long, long time.
That, in a nutshell, is why the Democratic Party can't make any headway in "red states". (Which, by the way, used to be blue states. Do you think the population of Texas changed in any measurable way when they swung from Democrat to Republican? No.)
It's all very well to talk about "education" as opposed to "condescension." I don't really even disagree with you putting my post in with the latter... It's the truth, this sort of bill is blatant demagoguery, but I could easily have said it with less political troll to it.
But, getting to Texas, if you don't think the "used to be blue state" part has anything to do with the Civil Rights movement, you are plain kidding yourself. That's what Nixon's "southern strategy," mentioned in my parent, is all about: playing to racial fears in the south so the Republicans could win all those formerly "Dixiecrat" states.
Take a good long look at Zell Miller and his speech at the Republican convention last time around. That's the old Democrat, fomenting about "agitators." Recognize that Carter and Clinton have been the only Dems to win national elections since 1968, and that John Edwards ran last time largely on his ability to win "talkin' like this."
I have Southern Baptist relations who live in Oklahoma. You don't know how hard the "educate them" part can be; these people think putting numeric digits on our coinage would be a sign of impending world government. No kidding.
One could just as easily say "Ach, mein Fuerher, too bad the actual scientific possibilities of eugenics were overshadowed by a bunch of moral concerns."
Nice toss-in of the Hitler reference, there. Nothing subtle about that. It's not like this is an area where moral people might differ; people who think embryonic stem cells from infertility procedures are even a grey area are to be equated with Hitler's willing sycophantic minions, period. So it seems.
You go on to dismiss "a lot of Slashdot posters" for their straw man willingness to junk "whatever moral notions they have about the dignity of the human person." That's interesting. It's precisely my unwillingness to dismiss my own notions about human dignity which lead me to think this might be a little more complicated than any authoritarian or absolutist stance. Same with abortion, on much the same lines.
(By the by, despite all sorts of noisiness about birth control, for the most part America's religious communities were pretty sympathetic with the eugenics movement. Take a look at "Evangelical Engagements With Eugenics, 1900-1940":
The same people who today take questions like stem cells as set in stone were quite willing to entertain eugenics. I've got a book in the basement at home that phrases eugenics in very religious terms, handed down to me by the Missouri Synod Lutheran side of the family. It's a very weird read.)
Anyone with two neurons to rub together knew the legislation was BS.
Which tells you, in case you'd missed it, exactly whom this legislation was meant to appeal to: fearful idiots.
Now we'll get the next phase in the fearful idiot plan, in which those who passed the legislation tell us scary, black robed judges are dictating our society to us. Does any of this sound at all familiar?
All these social wedge issues are microcosms of the "Southern Strategy" that's been winning the Republican Party national elections since 1968. Don't scoff. It's like the old moment with Adlai Stevenson. Told he had the support of all thinking voters, Stevenson replied: "That's not enough, I need a majority." Fearful idiots have a narrow majority in this country. Hence: thinly-veiled "race cards," our latest attempt to make immigration a hot button issue, the supposed gay marriage crisis, and so on.
Your point about the med school funding -- I'm considering med school, so I know whereof you speak -- is well taken.
I did have a friend in the Navy, though, who underwent a nightmarish wisdom tooth extraction. The Navy dentist gave him conscious sedation (a narcotic) instead of a general anesthetic, and then proceeded to perform an extraction that would have given any Civil War surgeon pause. My friend described the fear very effectively. Said he never slept on his back after that, because it reminded him of the surgery chair somehow.
In general the reputation of the military's medical services was that of a poor-to-middling staff model HMO, based on my friend's description of the general situation. Maybe that reflected all the young doctors doing their five years and gaining experience, maybe not.
But at the end of the day I know that I can see - with my glasses.
At the end of the day, people with laser surgery can basically see. Some have problems with glare, and some develop vision problems that can't be corrected even with glasses, but the procedure basically works for most people despite the risks.
That's at the end of the day. How about at the end of the decade, or of your lifetime, though? This thing has only been done for a short while now, and the longitudinal studies aren't in, by definition.
Military organizations, again, have done studies over shorter periods. Eighteen months is not the measure of this surgery, though. It's performed on a sensitive organ that already has problems with deterioration with age. Given that, I'm not exactly jumping to get it done because of the deals on those special ads that come with the Sunday funnies in my paper.
Are contact lenses such a problem? I can see it for jet pilots, okay, maybe. But for everyday people, what -- you absolutely can't wear goggles when you swim?
Biologists themselves admit that "species" has no universally accepted, absolute definition. In fact all levels of taxonomy are subjected to constant scrutiny, and major revisions are entirely possible. To wit: in the last 15 years or so the "domain," a level above "kingdom," has become commonly accepted. We're talking about the highest level of the taxonomy changing due to persuasive new arguments. And yet you're telling me scientists never change due to their egotism?
The world is much wilder than you imagine, and your grudge against science is far less helpful than you imagine too. Sample quote from the supposed egotists you so disdain:
It seems to me you're not listening to all that, out of ego needs of your own.
they go ahead and call it a "new species" without testing whether or not it can be interbred.
Your version of confirming a new species would proceed how, again? Testing to see if each newly-found animal can interbreed with, what, every possible roughly comparable species? Are you at all familiar with modern cladistics, or with how paleontologists go about discussing species in extinct animals? Is this a case where the one thing you learned is what you're clinging to dogmatically, lest you be cast loose into the wild world, or what?
really the gaming industry lacks any coherent self-regulation and this needs to change.
As a single parent of 12-year-old twins I can tell you that the current system is at least coherent enough to provide me with what I need. My kids probably understand the ratings better than I do, and I'm passingly familiar with them. The categories act as rough guidelines for me to think about in allowing or preventing any particular title, and the kids if anything tend to rule out M-rated games themselves before they get to me.
What more is it that you want? Coherency is that pivotal for you? The ratings are consistent across stores, whether the store policies toe the line or not. If anything the criteria for the different levels are more sensible (from what I see) than ratings for movies, which still carry with them the genetic history of the old Hays/Breen code and its Catholic origins.
As far as coherency goes, there's never going to be an absolutely clear code. Censorship becomes arbitrary at some point. It's the nature of the beast. The movie "The Whale Rider" was a great family film, but it got a PG-13 because of (apparently) some drug-related paraphernalia and a bunch of giggly, pot smoking people in one scene. The plot barely touched on those people, and if anything it redeemed the characters involved by bring them away from their dissolute lives a little bit by the end -- but the good ol' MPAA has its rules, you know. Say a four-letter word beginning with "F" a certain number of times and you get an R, period. 'Cause, you know, 13-year-olds have never heard that one.
ScreenIt.com goes to enormous lengths to catalog the various traits of different movies, to the point where the level of detail is almost laughable -- and it's still hard to be sure what categories they're putting things in and why. What does "bad/disrespectful attitude" mean in a movie about the X-Men? Which behavior is imitative? Would that be coherent, or incoherent, in your book? I'm a little lost in it, usually.
one of the biggest weaknesses of the ESRB is its lack of real power: it lacks any and all punitive ability.
Game stores do have policies to do with the ratings boards. People who sell the wrong stuff to minors face some pretty stiff financial risks in so doing. The idea of jail time for selling a video game is ludicrous; it's if anything even more disproportionate than enormous sentences for minor drug offenses.
Clearly this has been ineffective in keeping inappropriate games from the hands of minors.
How much documentation do we actually have about the way games like GTA III wind up played by younger kids? If someone showed me that stores completely disregard the ratings, that would be one thing. I'm not convinced of that at all. Unless the demogogues behind this bill show me that they truly understand the whole ecosystem of this problem, I'm not voting for them. At this point it sure seems like they're scaring up a contrived social issue to scare people, not seriously caring about whatever problem's really out there.
People never seem to learn this lesson. It doesn't matter that kudzu and dandelions and purple loosestrife and house sparrows and starlings and gypsy moths and buckthorn and... you get the picture: it doesn't matter that any given introduced species goes nuts and that other introductions meant to curb earlier mistakes blow up. People don't see how it could happen the next time. They just don't care that much.
Head on down to your local plant nursery and consider what share of the plants there are native to your area. The percentage will be pitifully small unless you're in Hawaii or something. Hawaii takes plant imports very seriously. In my area, even when there's a perfectly good native species like American bittersweet vine, the nursery will decide to carry a eurasian species that has some slightly different quality. Bam: eurasian bittersweet swallows whole forests in the south. The native version didn't do that. Gee, I guess the difference was a little bit bigger than we thought.
People could have planted native chestnut trees. They were the dominant species of non-mast food tree in eastern U.S. forests, and a huge wildlife habitat -- until they were wiped out by the chestnut blight brought over on shrubby eurasian chestnuts by plant nurseries. Didn't learn from that one either.
If anything, where there are legal restrictions about plants, they're usually an encouragement not to plant natives. Introduced species are so much more civilized, or something.
"If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you'd be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!"
This particular number in the article is based on nebulous logic every bit as specious as the RIAA's "if every pirate bought instead" arguments.
All the math people are doing here, including that in the original article and your speculation, fails to imagine a world where there's a difference between people who buy on CD and people who buy from iTunes. There is a huge difference, though. Remember when the iTunes store came out, and the big news was that you could buy just the tracks you wanted? One of the big lessons was that people wanted to do that, and there was lots of talk at the time about how the idea of the album wasn't always going to be the sales paradigm and so on.
Weird Al is a gimmick songwriter. His write parodies, and one or two of them catch on every once in a while. Now, I'm an iTunes buyer, I've bought some songs but not a lot of them -- and if there was a Weird Al song I enjoyed a lot, I'd possibly buy it on iTunes where I would never have considered purchasing an album. How does Weird Al's income change in that case? He had zero, bupkus, before. Does Weird Al get more when a bunch of people buy one or two songs, as opposed to when a smaller number of people buy a complete album? We don't have the sales figures to make that comparison, but I'm pretty sure given the sort of musician he is that he's going to get a lot of individual track sales, and also that he doesn't have that big a hard core fan base that'll buy whole albums.
I have maybe 75 iTunes tracks that I've purchased, and then a few books from Audible via iTunes. Maybe, maybe ten or twenty of those tracks would have been purchases I'd have made in a bricks and mortar store. When I went to try to buy Leo Kottke's two-disk greatest hits collection a while ago, nobody in the Mall of America (eck -- a huge mall) even carried it. It was available at 10:00 that night from iTunes, though. Leo Kottke didn't lose any money because of that purchase. He got some he wouldn't have gotten.
This "if everyone bought one way or the other" math, in short, is based on false assumptions.
Does having two similar sounding words to describe the exact same thing add any value to the English language?
In the case of "utilize" it allows every bureaucratic middle manager to sound a lot cooler, s/he thinks, than "use." See there?
When people say language is alive, they mean it's got a lot of the properties of living things. Mutations, redundancy, and so on apply. Language adapts, and it's messy. Just like life. More life means more mess. Irregular verbs are the ones people use a ton, "to be" being the best example in all the languages I've spoken a little.
(The French have government bodies to help choose correct usage. They take their language pretty seriously. If "L'hot dog" had happened to you, you'd sympathize more.)
Whenever I've seen it used, "Schadenfreude" has implied pleasure in the suffering (or just difficulties) of others -- independent of whether those others deserved to suffer.
Wanting a company to fail because its actions are objectionable is far less amoral -- uh, more moral? -- than that. We're not rooting against Sony because it'll make us feel better about our own failings if they belly flop. We want them to fail because they're behaving in a way that actually offends our sense of how companies should act. Maybe that "moral" thing was real after all: we think they way Sony's acting is wrong. Not illegal, no -- just wrong.
This isn't just a case of wanting to see the bully stumble, either. If Sony had taken Nintendo's approach this time around, I'd be lining up to buy.
The longevity of Sony's console sales does really point out the mountain MS was trying to climb, doesn't it?
You say the original XBox market for new games disappeared, and it's true -- there's almost nothing new coming. Meanwhile Sony can rely on plenty of third party legs for the PS2; even if the PS3 outright crashes, there's still some cushion there.
Anyone who's scoffed at the idea of "market share" or said it was overrated should think about how much critical mass MS would have needed here. Even a first generation buyer of MS's product is hard-pressed not to go ahead and buy Sony's old version. You "needed a new console" and Sony's old one was plenty good enough -- and it has tons of games you haven't played. You don't even say you were dissatisfied with the XBox, but the 360 doesn't make sense to you.
It's all about the price and the third-party support, seemingly.
Granted, I wasn't attending especially thug-heavy English matches, but I never saw anything even remotely approaching "Sieg Heil" salutes and overt signs. The big club teams all have racially mixed rosters anyway; it doesn't make particular sense for fans to chant racial slurs -- not that racism makes any particular sense.
Not that the incidents aren't real, but there's some echo chamber effect going on there.
American sports has such a strong strain of submerged racism, though -- I wonder how pervasive that is in international "futbol." (For example: two almost identical baseball players have borderline Hall of Fame careers; one of them did it through hard work and refining his skills and so on, and the other one was a brilliant athlete. Wait a minute -- the numbers are nearly the same. How can we tell the natural athlete from the hard worker? Because the hard worker's white, and the athlete is black. See: Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, Detroit Tigers.)
Why should they have to pay twice?...How many times does it have to be paid?
Given that the lines here are in place partly because of government spending, I've already paid for this bandwidth once, in the form of my taxes. When we start seeing advanced rate plans that charge me more for the same access I have now, are we not paying again when we already invested in this access before?
(It doesn't surprise me at all that this would happen in the House. The Republican Party hears two voices right now: massive corporate interests and the "social right," to which they need to pander to get elected. They don't think anyone else even belongs at the table when decisions are made.)
Plus, look at the Gamecube/GBA connection. We have... what, six games that use it? And most, if not all, are made by Nintendo?
I wouldn't make it a main component, but I'm sure they'll find a few creative ways to use the functionality.
So far the only thing I remember hearing that made me think there might be something truly new to the Wii-DS connection was the thing about how an Animal Crossing village would be visitable 24 hours a day because of the persistent internet connectivity on the console. That comment was ambiguous, though -- more of a general example than a specific description, and it could have been talking about a similar game on the Wii alone.
Nintendo has tried to cross-sell the N64 and the GameBoy Color, and then the GC and the GBA, and both times it's been basically what you describe: nothing central to the game, just entertaining add-ons. They're well-designed and fun to use; my kids and I played Windwaker through with them following me in the "Tingle Tuner" investigating each room. Nintendo probably isn't going to be developing too much that requires both systems, though. Narrows the market horribly. They seem to have known that with the previous systems.
Nova did a nice little show about the Wrangel ones, if I remember right.