So, to which category do God of War: Chains of Olympus and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops belong?
The problem of the PSP isn't good games, its unique games. The games you mentioned there are downsized versions of big console titles, I just don't care to play them when I could just as well play the big version instead. It is the "been there, done that" factor that the PSP just can't escape, getting downscaled versions of games that I already played last year just isn't very appealing, even if the story is a bit different, graphics and controls are just to much alike and also worse then on a real console.
The DS of course has plenty of shit and not all that much good stuff either, but at least its good stuff is unique and provides an experience that I just can't get on any of the big consoles.
Its really kind of a shame, the PSP hardware is great and you could make some awesome 2D platformers on that device, to bad everybody tries to turn it into a small PS2 instead.
I think that's a pipe dream which doesn't take human nature ("why pay when I can take it for free?") into account.
Its quite the opposite. Its the only solution that actually takes human nature into account. The problem simply isn't the copying, people have done that since forever, thats how culture spreads and they will continue to do that on the Internet. The real problem is that very large parts of the youth is getting criminalize and *that* has to be fixed if you don't want a large scale revolt a few years down the line. Might that mean that the entertainment industry collapses? That could very well happen, after all they are mostly obsolete since distribution can be handled via the Internet. Will it mean that artists get bankrupt? I kind of doubt it. Artists today already get only a very tiny fraction of sales of their stuff, if you remove the industry and distribution on the other side, you could channel all money directly to the artists. So even when many people stop buying stuff, there would still be enough money left once the industry is out of the picture.
That is trivial to fix, you simply pay for the charge you used instead of the charge that the battery holds. These are after all not stupid batteries, they will have electronic in them that monitors what is going on with them.
Metacritic gives 96 titles over 80% for the PS3 while only 76 for the DS. There also happen to be 621 DS titles listed, while only 319 PS3 titles.
The "to much shit and not much good stuff" is a very real problem for a gamer with a Nintendo consoles. Of course, their demographic aren't traditional gamers and might not care about the same qualities as gamers do, so it might be a non-issue for Nintendo.
I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument.
The whole thing really isn't about Piratebay, they just happen to stand at the front lines and thus get into the cross fire first. The real issue is the broader picture, namely that copyright as it is, just doesn't work in the digital age. So far all political action have only been about trying enforcing copyright, harsher punishment, more surveillance of network traffic, restrictions of free speech and heap load of other bullshit is eroding your civil rights as we speak. Now you might argue that Piratebay is no loss, but it just doesn't stop there. A week ago Wikileaks.de got raided by German police, not exactly something that I consider acceptable in a state that should respects free speech. Also Germany is on its best way to install its own special version of that Great Firewall of China. Now of course that's just to stop "child porn", but new uses will be found with time, let alone that its completly idiotic right from the start to filter "child porn", when pretty much every country has laws that would allow to take those servers completly down.
This whole Piratebay issue is really a civil rights and free speech issue and yes, free speech pretty much means that you will have to accept hearing those things you don't like, in this case torrent files pointing to possibly copies of your software.
All that said, I expect it to get worse before it gets better. Shutting down a torrent server has never stopped another one to pop up some weeks or month later, even if those are shut down, that doesn't really fix anything. The next logical step is a move to anonymous P2P technology, that move isn't far away and once done, new laws will likely follow outlawing that. And well, what follows after we have to wait and see, in the good case we might end up with enough votes for the pirateparty's and some real copyright reforms, in the worst case we might end up with something like RAF2.0, after all, criminalizing large parts of the young population, as current copyright does, is unlikely to stay unchallenged in the long run.
BOOKS ARE CHEAP and they do not NEED an electronic delivery mechanism! I don't quite understand why on earth a product like the Kindle needs to exist.
Books might be cheap, newspapers however aren't. Also lets not forget that books aren't exactly cheap in terms of weight, carrying a dozen books around is not much fun, carrying a single kindle around is much easier.
The GFDL license, under which the current Wikipedia content is licensed, has a "or any later version" clause, which Wikipedia uses.
With the newest update of the GFDL, the FSF introduced a new section, 11. RELICENSING, specifically designed to handle this update:
11. RELICENSING
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
The solution to goldfarming should be to find out why earning gold in the game is so bloody tedious and focus your design efforts on making the game fun to play. Games are supposed to be fun, not a second job.
Different people have different needs, so I doubt that you will ever make everybody happy in a MMORPG. Some just don't have the time for it, while others like to spend endless hours in the game. Proper business man solution would of course be to simply make the gold farming an official part of the game and just officially sell the gold, so that the game company is the one getting the money, not some chinese farmer.
What these students have really done is make a very public demonstration of something that's possible before less ethical parties got a crack at doing it on a large scale.
Wiki Spam isn't anything new, it has been around for ages.
For a lot of young people it wil ascociate feelings of fun and laughter with graphic imagery of death and decay
Depends, the trouble with most games is that they don't give you any breathing room, they drive you from mission to mission without ever giving you time to think or even understand what you have done. They are also extremely low on background story and consequences, while being insanely high on the kill count. Those things however are not things that all games must do, most can be easily avoided. We have to see how it ends up in the end, but according to first reports this game is placed in the survival horror genre, which is a good first step.
You might find greater consistency problems with artwork
The thing is that you have close to zero consistency problems in software on the code side. Look at Inkscape for example, large parts of the code are old Sodipodi pieces written in C, while other stuff is written in C++, its quite a mess. Does it matter much? Nope, because no user will ever sees a piece of any of that. Same with coding standards in general, it just doesn't matter if its SetFoobar or set_foobar or if you indent with tabs instead of spaces, just implementation details no user will ever see.
Artwork on the other side is exactly what the user sees, if its not 100% it will look weird, if its off a little more it will be ugly and distracting. Yeah, some top-notch artists can fix that, but those aren't exactly easy to come buy, most of the time you are stuck with an average artists, which is good enough to do graphics in his style, but mostly lost when he should match up work with another artists. You just don't have that problem with coding.
All that aside, another huge issue is that the tools just suck. Sure you might find a few half descent open source game engines, but how many of those have a fully working art pipeline going for them? Most of the time you are stuck with broken export scripts and other mess, that makes it impossible to actually do serious work with it.
Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
Raytracing isn't a solution, its just another way to tackle the problem. You still have to fix all the same visual inaccuracies that you get in normal rasterization. Raytracing doesn't give you soft shadows, it doesn't give you dynamic scenes, it doesn't give you ambient occlusion, it doesn't give you global illumination and many many more things. You can write a raytracing in a few dozens lines of code, but that will be one that renders shiny spheres, not something that can keep up with a commercial game engine. If you want to have all the advanced lighting in raytracing you have to do lots of research and coding just as you have to do with rasterization and of course you have to wait 10 years before everybody has decent enough hardware to make that even practical.
With coding you can come in, submit a patch and leave again. It doesn't really matter who wrote the code, as long as its functional. With art on the other side you can't do that, if you just accept each and every random contribution you will easily end up with an ugly inconsistent mess, no matter how talented the individual artists are. And thats exactly the problem, a commercial game just needs way to much art to be doable by a single person and the chances to find enough people that stay with the project for a long time and are talented enough to produce a consistent art style are very very slim.
if machines can't describe the picture, how the hell is the CAPTCHA server supposed to verify that the client gave the correct answer?
Trivial: The machine renders the picture from 3d models. Have a bunch of 3d models at hand, place them randomly in the scene and its trivial for the server having the scene graph to ask all kinds of questions about the picture and check the answer, yet extremely hard for the spam-bot to crack it, because it doesn't have the scene graph, just a simple 2d image.
That aside, I think the real solution is simply going to a single-point authentication system like OpenId, where you do not resolve CAPTCHAs for each and every small site you visit, but you solve it exactly once for your OpenId provider and then just reuse that trust in other places.
Baen books had a lot of money at stake on this gamble. But, they PROVED CONCLUSIVELY that giving stuff away free MAKES MONEY for them. Every time they released a title that had been out of print, sales of that book skyrocketed.
While I congratulate them for their success, I have some doubt about that business model for the future, since it works under the assumption that the digital version is a degraded one and printed one is the 'real deal'. That assumption won't work forever when ebook readers become cheaper, better and more common place, people won't continue to carry books around when they already have a ebook reader with them. And the ebook reader also either already is better or at least has the potential to become more comfortable then a real book in the future. So will there be enough people left buying things, when they could get them for free and lose nothing in the process?
I'm afraid putting in some ethics would make it a very frustrating game.
I don't think so. The game shouldn't force you to be the good guy not killing civilians, but instead it should simply show the consequences. Maybe add in some flashback sequences like FEAR for each civilian you kill or whatever.
People don't get killed in war because all soldiers are evil, but because its a fucked up situation right from the start. If you have two groups of people shooting at each other with civilians in the middle, innocent people will die. Add some weapon overkill into the mix where calling an airstrike is easier and saver then searching the area on foot and you have a disaster waiting to happen. If the game would show that war is a fucked up situation where nothing good will happen, that'd be a good start.
Iraq was no problem in the first place. Why the hell do you need an alternative solution for a non-existent problem? You already crippled Iraq in the first war. The second one was completly unnecessary and unprovoked by the other side. There was *ZERO* need to invade Iraq. The whole war only has made matters worse and made Iraq a nice breading ground for terrorists, which it wasn't before.
Iraq and Afghanistan had shown themselves to be dangers to the US
Iraq had *NOTHING* to do with 9/11, if you haven't noticed yet. The whole war was completly pointless as "self defense", not only did you attack the wrong guy, you also wasted a gigantic amount of money, troops and stuff in it that you could have used to stabilize Afghanistan, your economy, your skyscraper or whatever.
1) You've made it clear that there's never a good reason as far as you are concerned.
I never said that. I don't really have much of a problem with you playing "world police" if there is an actual need, but that of course has to be executed properly and honestly and not like that clusterfuck that the Iraq war is.
You simply have to take into account the amount of money that was wasted. $600 billion dollar is a lot of money and certainly it shouldn't be to hard to come up with better ways to spend it then blowing things up. A lot of the cause for terrorism can be much more easily be conquered by fixing the underlying social problems, then by dropping bombs, doing the later will only create more people hating you.
2) IMHO, that number is wrong.
IraqBodyCount is scratching the 100'000 mark and that is the low-bar, the true number of death is likely quite a bit larger.
Until someone comes up with a better way, war will continue to happen.
The USA started the Iraq war. If you wouldn't have started it, it wouldn't have happened, its as easy as that. If you don't like people calling you a murderer, stop murdering other people.
The problem is that most of those compiler/interpreters suck enormously. Or is there any high level 'scripting' language out there that can actually measure up to a decent Lisp implementation?
So, this is your understanding of an 'accurate' game as compared to all those 'propaganda games'?
When I spoke of "accurate" I was referring to those games and movies that get all the details about uniforms, machines and guns right (thanks to often being sponsored by the military), yet utterly fail to make the other side look like anything more then a generic bad guy to shoot at.
You clearly believe that every last service member is a blood crazed, baby killing monster.
No, but I believe that that is what war lets you become. Murder is murder, an order from your former President doesn't change that. And I don't need to have been there, there have been more then enough wars fought in the past and in the end the result is always the same. Oh, and self defense doesn't count when you are fighting a few thousand miles away from home.
No... well then you have no fucking right to say how it was a massacre of epic proportions, pure genocide, or the next holocaust.
Interesting attitude. You are the ones commiting the crimes and now we should just shut up because you killed everybody who might have been a witness? That isn't exactly a good defense.
Short Summary in case you might have missed it:
1) you invaded another country for no good reason 2) you killed hundred of thousands of people, most of them either civilians or people defending their country 3) you complain that some people in the world might not be with those crimes
If you take the classic game definition, sure, video games however have long ago ventured into the area of storytelling where winning isn't really necessary any more to make a compelling game.
In movies its probably much easier to show that "sometimes the only way to win is not to play" or that in a war, both parties are loosing, no matter who might be "winning" in the end.
And yet your average Hollywood war movie fails miserably at that. Even the so called anti-war movies, far to often portrait nothing more then brave US soldiers fighting an evil faceless enemy. The movies that portrait both parties or at least give the enemy a human face are few and far between (Das Boot, Tunnel Rats).
The thing that makes video games interesting is that it not only lets you watch the events, but that its lets you control the events. If bad things happen, you are the one doing them and this in turn gives a much better understanding why those acts where committed. You can think of it as an @home version of the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram Experiment. Now given, the number of video games that ventured into that direction hasn't been many and probably close to zero when it comes to realistic settings, but we had games going in a similar direction, like Shadow of the Colossus.
All that said, the likelihood that this will be just another brainless FPS without any reflections on the ethics of your doing is huge, after all thats what most war games are about.
you even kill prostitutes o take their money in GTA.
You can do that, the game however doesn't require it by any means. Most of those 'evil' games out there, are far less evil then the media likes to paint them. That of course doesn't mean that there isn't to much violence around, but most of the time its about hero vs monster or gang vs gang, not about executing innocent civilians.
they find it 'sick' and 'disturbing' that actual soldiers want to tell a story.....
Well, that completly depends on how it is executed. If they try to do it as realistic as possible, including views from both sides, the civilian casualties and such. Sure, I welcome that, since most war media out there is far to filtered and clean, not showing how war really is, but just showing some American soldiers shooting at invisible bad guys in the distance. However, when the game becomes just another mindless run&gun shooter, then yeah, its pretty sick and disturbing, because it yet again just turns the death of people into entertainment and we already had more then enough of that. Even worse it might yet again paint the other side as face less bad guys, instead of actual real people like you and me.
but if anyone protests against video game violence, they are instantly shouted down as 'prudes' or 'against freedom of speech' by the slashdot legions.
There is nothing wrong with protest against violence in video games, I like to do that myself every now and then, there is however a lot wrong with trying to outlaw or ban them, especially when the banning is based on misinformation about the actual game, as is most often the case (German politicians try that all the time).
Slashdot Mirror
So, to which category do God of War: Chains of Olympus and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops belong?
The problem of the PSP isn't good games, its unique games. The games you mentioned there are downsized versions of big console titles, I just don't care to play them when I could just as well play the big version instead. It is the "been there, done that" factor that the PSP just can't escape, getting downscaled versions of games that I already played last year just isn't very appealing, even if the story is a bit different, graphics and controls are just to much alike and also worse then on a real console.
The DS of course has plenty of shit and not all that much good stuff either, but at least its good stuff is unique and provides an experience that I just can't get on any of the big consoles.
Its really kind of a shame, the PSP hardware is great and you could make some awesome 2D platformers on that device, to bad everybody tries to turn it into a small PS2 instead.
I think that's a pipe dream which doesn't take human nature ("why pay when I can take it for free?") into account.
Its quite the opposite. Its the only solution that actually takes human nature into account. The problem simply isn't the copying, people have done that since forever, thats how culture spreads and they will continue to do that on the Internet. The real problem is that very large parts of the youth is getting criminalize and *that* has to be fixed if you don't want a large scale revolt a few years down the line. Might that mean that the entertainment industry collapses? That could very well happen, after all they are mostly obsolete since distribution can be handled via the Internet. Will it mean that artists get bankrupt? I kind of doubt it. Artists today already get only a very tiny fraction of sales of their stuff, if you remove the industry and distribution on the other side, you could channel all money directly to the artists. So even when many people stop buying stuff, there would still be enough money left once the industry is out of the picture.
That is trivial to fix, you simply pay for the charge you used instead of the charge that the battery holds. These are after all not stupid batteries, they will have electronic in them that monitors what is going on with them.
SVG is already troublesome enough as is, no need to bloat it into insanity with 3d crap.
Metacritic gives 96 titles over 80% for the PS3 while only 76 for the DS. There also happen to be 621 DS titles listed, while only 319 PS3 titles.
The "to much shit and not much good stuff" is a very real problem for a gamer with a Nintendo consoles. Of course, their demographic aren't traditional gamers and might not care about the same qualities as gamers do, so it might be a non-issue for Nintendo.
I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument.
The whole thing really isn't about Piratebay, they just happen to stand at the front lines and thus get into the cross fire first. The real issue is the broader picture, namely that copyright as it is, just doesn't work in the digital age. So far all political action have only been about trying enforcing copyright, harsher punishment, more surveillance of network traffic, restrictions of free speech and heap load of other bullshit is eroding your civil rights as we speak. Now you might argue that Piratebay is no loss, but it just doesn't stop there. A week ago Wikileaks.de got raided by German police, not exactly something that I consider acceptable in a state that should respects free speech. Also Germany is on its best way to install its own special version of that Great Firewall of China. Now of course that's just to stop "child porn", but new uses will be found with time, let alone that its completly idiotic right from the start to filter "child porn", when pretty much every country has laws that would allow to take those servers completly down.
This whole Piratebay issue is really a civil rights and free speech issue and yes, free speech pretty much means that you will have to accept hearing those things you don't like, in this case torrent files pointing to possibly copies of your software.
All that said, I expect it to get worse before it gets better. Shutting down a torrent server has never stopped another one to pop up some weeks or month later, even if those are shut down, that doesn't really fix anything. The next logical step is a move to anonymous P2P technology, that move isn't far away and once done, new laws will likely follow outlawing that. And well, what follows after we have to wait and see, in the good case we might end up with enough votes for the pirateparty's and some real copyright reforms, in the worst case we might end up with something like RAF2.0, after all, criminalizing large parts of the young population, as current copyright does, is unlikely to stay unchallenged in the long run.
BOOKS ARE CHEAP and they do not NEED an electronic delivery mechanism! I don't quite understand why on earth a product like the Kindle needs to exist.
Books might be cheap, newspapers however aren't. Also lets not forget that books aren't exactly cheap in terms of weight, carrying a dozen books around is not much fun, carrying a single kindle around is much easier.
The GFDL license, under which the current Wikipedia content is licensed, has a "or any later version" clause, which Wikipedia uses.
With the newest update of the GFDL, the FSF introduced a new section, 11. RELICENSING, specifically designed to handle this update:
The solution to goldfarming should be to find out why earning gold in the game is so bloody tedious and focus your design efforts on making the game fun to play. Games are supposed to be fun, not a second job.
Different people have different needs, so I doubt that you will ever make everybody happy in a MMORPG. Some just don't have the time for it, while others like to spend endless hours in the game. Proper business man solution would of course be to simply make the gold farming an official part of the game and just officially sell the gold, so that the game company is the one getting the money, not some chinese farmer.
What these students have really done is make a very public demonstration of something that's possible before less ethical parties got a crack at doing it on a large scale.
Wiki Spam isn't anything new, it has been around for ages.
If those don't convince them that war is a bad idea
Past war game are all about glorification, they show you all the fun parts of war and none of the bad ones.
For a lot of young people it wil ascociate feelings of fun and laughter with graphic imagery of death and decay
Depends, the trouble with most games is that they don't give you any breathing room, they drive you from mission to mission without ever giving you time to think or even understand what you have done. They are also extremely low on background story and consequences, while being insanely high on the kill count. Those things however are not things that all games must do, most can be easily avoided. We have to see how it ends up in the end, but according to first reports this game is placed in the survival horror genre, which is a good first step.
You might find greater consistency problems with artwork
The thing is that you have close to zero consistency problems in software on the code side. Look at Inkscape for example, large parts of the code are old Sodipodi pieces written in C, while other stuff is written in C++, its quite a mess. Does it matter much? Nope, because no user will ever sees a piece of any of that. Same with coding standards in general, it just doesn't matter if its SetFoobar or set_foobar or if you indent with tabs instead of spaces, just implementation details no user will ever see.
Artwork on the other side is exactly what the user sees, if its not 100% it will look weird, if its off a little more it will be ugly and distracting. Yeah, some top-notch artists can fix that, but those aren't exactly easy to come buy, most of the time you are stuck with an average artists, which is good enough to do graphics in his style, but mostly lost when he should match up work with another artists. You just don't have that problem with coding.
All that aside, another huge issue is that the tools just suck. Sure you might find a few half descent open source game engines, but how many of those have a fully working art pipeline going for them? Most of the time you are stuck with broken export scripts and other mess, that makes it impossible to actually do serious work with it.
Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
Raytracing isn't a solution, its just another way to tackle the problem. You still have to fix all the same visual inaccuracies that you get in normal rasterization. Raytracing doesn't give you soft shadows, it doesn't give you dynamic scenes, it doesn't give you ambient occlusion, it doesn't give you global illumination and many many more things. You can write a raytracing in a few dozens lines of code, but that will be one that renders shiny spheres, not something that can keep up with a commercial game engine. If you want to have all the advanced lighting in raytracing you have to do lots of research and coding just as you have to do with rasterization and of course you have to wait 10 years before everybody has decent enough hardware to make that even practical.
With coding you can come in, submit a patch and leave again. It doesn't really matter who wrote the code, as long as its functional. With art on the other side you can't do that, if you just accept each and every random contribution you will easily end up with an ugly inconsistent mess, no matter how talented the individual artists are. And thats exactly the problem, a commercial game just needs way to much art to be doable by a single person and the chances to find enough people that stay with the project for a long time and are talented enough to produce a consistent art style are very very slim.
if machines can't describe the picture, how the hell is the CAPTCHA server supposed to verify that the client gave the correct answer?
Trivial: The machine renders the picture from 3d models. Have a bunch of 3d models at hand, place them randomly in the scene and its trivial for the server having the scene graph to ask all kinds of questions about the picture and check the answer, yet extremely hard for the spam-bot to crack it, because it doesn't have the scene graph, just a simple 2d image.
That aside, I think the real solution is simply going to a single-point authentication system like OpenId, where you do not resolve CAPTCHAs for each and every small site you visit, but you solve it exactly once for your OpenId provider and then just reuse that trust in other places.
Baen books had a lot of money at stake on this gamble. But, they PROVED CONCLUSIVELY that giving stuff away free MAKES MONEY for them. Every time they released a title that had been out of print, sales of that book skyrocketed.
While I congratulate them for their success, I have some doubt about that business model for the future, since it works under the assumption that the digital version is a degraded one and printed one is the 'real deal'. That assumption won't work forever when ebook readers become cheaper, better and more common place, people won't continue to carry books around when they already have a ebook reader with them. And the ebook reader also either already is better or at least has the potential to become more comfortable then a real book in the future. So will there be enough people left buying things, when they could get them for free and lose nothing in the process?
I'm afraid putting in some ethics would make it a very frustrating game.
I don't think so. The game shouldn't force you to be the good guy not killing civilians, but instead it should simply show the consequences. Maybe add in some flashback sequences like FEAR for each civilian you kill or whatever.
People don't get killed in war because all soldiers are evil, but because its a fucked up situation right from the start. If you have two groups of people shooting at each other with civilians in the middle, innocent people will die. Add some weapon overkill into the mix where calling an airstrike is easier and saver then searching the area on foot and you have a disaster waiting to happen. If the game would show that war is a fucked up situation where nothing good will happen, that'd be a good start.
My main problem is the lack of alternatives.
Iraq was no problem in the first place. Why the hell do you need an alternative solution for a non-existent problem? You already crippled Iraq in the first war. The second one was completly unnecessary and unprovoked by the other side. There was *ZERO* need to invade Iraq. The whole war only has made matters worse and made Iraq a nice breading ground for terrorists, which it wasn't before.
Iraq and Afghanistan had shown themselves to be dangers to the US
Iraq had *NOTHING* to do with 9/11, if you haven't noticed yet. The whole war was completly pointless as "self defense", not only did you attack the wrong guy, you also wasted a gigantic amount of money, troops and stuff in it that you could have used to stabilize Afghanistan, your economy, your skyscraper or whatever.
1) You've made it clear that there's never a good reason as far as you are concerned.
I never said that. I don't really have much of a problem with you playing "world police" if there is an actual need, but that of course has to be executed properly and honestly and not like that clusterfuck that the Iraq war is.
You simply have to take into account the amount of money that was wasted. $600 billion dollar is a lot of money and certainly it shouldn't be to hard to come up with better ways to spend it then blowing things up. A lot of the cause for terrorism can be much more easily be conquered by fixing the underlying social problems, then by dropping bombs, doing the later will only create more people hating you.
2) IMHO, that number is wrong.
IraqBodyCount is scratching the 100'000 mark and that is the low-bar, the true number of death is likely quite a bit larger.
Until someone comes up with a better way, war will continue to happen.
The USA started the Iraq war. If you wouldn't have started it, it wouldn't have happened, its as easy as that. If you don't like people calling you a murderer, stop murdering other people.
The problem is that most of those compiler/interpreters suck enormously. Or is there any high level 'scripting' language out there that can actually measure up to a decent Lisp implementation?
So, this is your understanding of an 'accurate' game as compared to all those 'propaganda games'?
When I spoke of "accurate" I was referring to those games and movies that get all the details about uniforms, machines and guns right (thanks to often being sponsored by the military), yet utterly fail to make the other side look like anything more then a generic bad guy to shoot at.
You clearly believe that every last service member is a blood crazed, baby killing monster.
No, but I believe that that is what war lets you become. Murder is murder, an order from your former President doesn't change that. And I don't need to have been there, there have been more then enough wars fought in the past and in the end the result is always the same. Oh, and self defense doesn't count when you are fighting a few thousand miles away from home.
No... well then you have no fucking right to say how it was a massacre of epic proportions, pure genocide, or the next holocaust.
Interesting attitude. You are the ones commiting the crimes and now we should just shut up because you killed everybody who might have been a witness? That isn't exactly a good defense.
Short Summary in case you might have missed it:
1) you invaded another country for no good reason
2) you killed hundred of thousands of people, most of them either civilians or people defending their country
3) you complain that some people in the world might not be with those crimes
A game is by definition about "winning".
If you take the classic game definition, sure, video games however have long ago ventured into the area of storytelling where winning isn't really necessary any more to make a compelling game.
In movies its probably much easier to show that "sometimes the only way to win is not to play" or that in a war, both parties are loosing, no matter who might be "winning" in the end.
And yet your average Hollywood war movie fails miserably at that. Even the so called anti-war movies, far to often portrait nothing more then brave US soldiers fighting an evil faceless enemy. The movies that portrait both parties or at least give the enemy a human face are few and far between (Das Boot, Tunnel Rats).
The thing that makes video games interesting is that it not only lets you watch the events, but that its lets you control the events. If bad things happen, you are the one doing them and this in turn gives a much better understanding why those acts where committed. You can think of it as an @home version of the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram Experiment. Now given, the number of video games that ventured into that direction hasn't been many and probably close to zero when it comes to realistic settings, but we had games going in a similar direction, like Shadow of the Colossus.
All that said, the likelihood that this will be just another brainless FPS without any reflections on the ethics of your doing is huge, after all thats what most war games are about.
you even kill prostitutes o take their money in GTA.
You can do that, the game however doesn't require it by any means. Most of those 'evil' games out there, are far less evil then the media likes to paint them. That of course doesn't mean that there isn't to much violence around, but most of the time its about hero vs monster or gang vs gang, not about executing innocent civilians.
they find it 'sick' and 'disturbing' that actual soldiers want to tell a story.....
Well, that completly depends on how it is executed. If they try to do it as realistic as possible, including views from both sides, the civilian casualties and such. Sure, I welcome that, since most war media out there is far to filtered and clean, not showing how war really is, but just showing some American soldiers shooting at invisible bad guys in the distance. However, when the game becomes just another mindless run&gun shooter, then yeah, its pretty sick and disturbing, because it yet again just turns the death of people into entertainment and we already had more then enough of that. Even worse it might yet again paint the other side as face less bad guys, instead of actual real people like you and me.
but if anyone protests against video game violence, they are instantly shouted down as 'prudes' or 'against freedom of speech' by the slashdot legions.
There is nothing wrong with protest against violence in video games, I like to do that myself every now and then, there is however a lot wrong with trying to outlaw or ban them, especially when the banning is based on misinformation about the actual game, as is most often the case (German politicians try that all the time).