I agree. In fact, if you buy new wheels at Discount Tire, they have the right to use keyed lugnuts on them. That way, only THEY can remove the wheels thus forcing you to use their service.
Regardless of whether the analogy is good, you can remove keyed lugnuts from your car with little trouble (almost anyone can do so with ~20 seconds per tire and a good pair of pliers or vice grips), while trying to circumvent copy protection is illegal.
But, in America, people like to be active participants in something when they can be. Most can't play in sports professionally, but they can play video games and end up becoming good at them. So, there's no way in hell this will have widespread appeal.
The first problem here, obviously, is that people just don't realize how much of a gap there is between the top players in almost any given video game and the people that just play alone, or a random public game maybe a couple times a week. Sure, most people can become decent players of a game themselves without being particularly gifted in any way, but anyone that's played against someone that plays in upper-level competition long enough knows that there is a clear difference in skill.
The second problem is that at any given time the game being played in high level competition is only familiar to a small percentage of the TV audience. Most Americans have played football, baseball, etc (even soccer) at some point in their lives, even if it wasn't with the professional rules. There is no barrier of entry in these sports, until you want to play at a higher level. Everyone knows someone when they're growing up with a bat and a ball. With PC games you have to have a PC that can handle the game, a good internet connection, maybe some knowledge of how to configure the game to work best for you (and your computer), and the game itself, all before you can even learn how the game plays. Particular skills transfer from game to game, but people are easily confused by new maps and differing weapons and skills in different games. It takes some time to get familiar with the new environment before you can take full advantage of any benefits gained by having played earlier games, and even then you have to change habits for the new game.
These things also apply to watching the game. The only thing more confusing than trying to figure out a map in the middle of a deathmatch is trying to figure it out when you are not in control (when you're watching it on TV, for instance). Then add familiarity (or the lack thereof) with the game itself, as well as possibly the game-type (DM, CTF, TF, CS, AQ2, etc), and you've got a lot of things people need to know before they can enjoy watching a game, let alone playing in it.
Perhaps it could be expanded on at G4TechTV, but even then I don't see it successful.
I have watched a few games on G4TechTV, but overall I've found it to be a poor experience even when I'm familiar with the game. This is in direct contrast with the time I spent spectating matches online, although in those cases I had direct control over my viewing angle and occasionally jumped between matches when things slowed down.
What I feel they need to do to make the viewing experience better on TV is take some time before the match not only to explain the game, game-type, and map, but to show, as much as possible, what they're talking about in the game itself. Use an overhead view of the map to give viewers a general idea of what the map looks like, highlight important areas, as well as points of possible strategic interest, show people the different weapons in the game, maybe discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those weapons, classes if the game has them, and the objective of the game type. Some of this can be drawn out into the match, take a break to detail what's going on and show some more background information (like they do in the previously mentioned televised poker, discussing things like what a straight and royal flush are, how the game type works, and so on).
You might show the players themselves when they have a particularly strong reaction, and to introduce them intially, but you don't need to show the player when his character is sitting in a corner defending an area, basically not doing anything but watching the screen. Something else to consider would be to allow some minor customization of skins in order to better associate the individual players with their characters on-screen. Real sports ha
Sure it does. My right to health is absolutely inviolate.
Perhaps to you, but it is certainly not a right protected, nor granted, by the law.
You do NOT have the right to endanger it with your smoke.
You're right, I have no more right to smoke than you do to health. Except, of course, that the government regulates the sale of cigarettes, which, so long as further restrictions are not in place (such as are in place for other vices), gives me some rights in this matter.
The fact theat you're smoking in public already means you don't give a fuck about annoying those around you, am I really supposed to believe that you'd check for people before lighting up, or put it out if someone came by? Of course you wouldn't.
That's entirely situationally dependent, but in the end, you're right, I don't give a rat's ass about annoying those around me, just as most of them don't give a rat's ass about annoying me. Believe it or not (you won't), I do check not only whether people are around, but which way the wind is blowing (or the currents caused by A/C/heating in buildings) before I light up. There are specific cases in which I feel that people bring it upon themselves, but for the most part I tend to respect people's wish not to have smoke in their face (probably because I haven't been allowed to smoke indoors since I was legally able to purchase cigarettes, until 2 years ago). Do I put a cigarette out if someone comes by? Of course not, because I tend to go out of my way to stay out of public walk-ways when I'm smoking, therefore anyone coming by has a reason either to talk to me specifically, or to come into an area that would be out of the way for most people.
So the only way to protect our health is by banning it in public buildings. In your own home, you may of course do what you wish.
Except, of course, that there are many ways to protect people from second-hand smoke that don't involve banning it from public buildings. One of the best I saw that didn't involve actually sectioning off an area had the smoking section on the second floor, with a good filtration system and ventilation fans.
As for the costs to restaurants prior to that- please. If I walked into a bar or a restaurant, the smoke was overwhelming. An hour or two in a bar would leave my skin burning from allergies for an hour. Smoking sectiosn do jack squat. So yes, I still have the trump card.
Your trump card appears to be an allergy, which isn't a trump card at all, though it does put you in a particularly sensitive position. Still, there's a difference between a smoking section as done in many states and a smoking section as was required under California law prior to the ban. In California, a non-smoker in a restaurant (bars had somewhat different regulations) would have little chance of even knowing there was a smoking section if they didn't ask preference, as they had to be completely separated. If I wanted to in most states, I could sit less than 6 inches from a non-smoker and have a cigarette, then blow smoke across their food, but that hasn't been possible in California for well over 10 years (long before the ban was enacted). As I said myself, though, the ban of smoking within a particular distance of an entrance was actually a good thing, allowing people such as yourself, which are particularly sensitive to tobacco smoke, to not have to walk through it simply to get into the restaurant.
>You can say, write, film, record whatever you >wish (actually there are some limits on that, >as well), but you don't have a right to sell >all of it to children.
This is itself a first ammendment violation.
Well, then, let's see how many children can buy child porn, after all, it's porn, for children, right? Oh, wait... The first amendment is not as all-encompassing as some would like it to be, and, in the end, the courts have long upheld the belief that children do not have the same rights as adults, a
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question.
I HATE Myst and games like that. They are TOO focused on puzzles, and their environments are not anywhere near as interesting as the environments in games like Half-Life.
The latest game in the Myst series has a better environment, from what I've heard. I only own one of the Myst games myself, as it came with one of my DVD drives, and I don't care for the genre.
What I need is a game that is exactly like Half-Life, but without any monsters/violence. Harry Potter came close, its violence was more mild and cartoonish, but still, it got in the way of the fun parts of the game.
Personally, I found most of what you probably liked about Half-Life to be what got in the way of the fun parts of the game (that, and head-crabs + crowbar...). I found most of the puzzles to be far too simple (well, what do you expect for an FPS game, but still...), and more often than not they simply took away from the action and/or suspense that was occasionally built up in the game. What I'm trying to say is, I guess I can't help you much with what you're looking for, but I'm pretty sure the games are out there.
Re: God mode, I was using a balky Win98 Intel computer at the time, and for whatever reason despite trying many of the hacks on the 'Net, I could never get God mode to work.
You don't need a hack, but I forgot that there was another command needed: "sv_cheats 1", after that it's simply "/GOD". Of course, you have to get to the console first, which requires editing the target line on the shortcut to the game or editing the.cfg files by hand. I believe the readme.txt file also has information on how to do this. I used to know this stuff by heart, but it's been a LONG time since I played Half-Life in any form.
And now, Half-Life won't even install on my upgraded Win2000 AMD-64 machine. A FAT vs. NTFS file system problem? Intel vs. AMD? Something else? I haven't had the time to really pursue it yet.
NTFS, nope, that's what I'm running here. AMD, doubtful, most of the people I knew when I was active in the community used AMD. That 64 on the end, though, is a possible problem, which might take quite a while to figure out. Another possibility arises if you don't have Win2k up to date, as I believe there were a couple of patches that addressed compatability with the game. Again, if I was still active in the community, it would probably be a simple problem to work through, but since I haven't kept up, I don't know where everyone's hiding (in other words, most of the web pages are dead or inactive).
My point is that I think there is a market for games with all of the bells and whistles of a Half-Life except the monsters/gore/violence, especially amongst parents. You're right, Sierra and such companies should make it easier for us to play their games in non-violent mode.
Note that I didn't say anything about allowing people to play in non-violent mode. I simply believe that there are violent games, and non-violent games. Unfortunately, the tendency towards flashy graphics (which Half-Life no longer has, but did at one time, for maybe 2 months) and so forth comes from the same area that tends to drive violent gameplay, i.e. first person shooters. Fortunately, the technology for a game like Half-Life runs on such low-level computers that it's now available for almost any type of game, and as time goes on, more genres are utilizing that type of technology (which is why I pointed out the Myst series, as the most recent one makes heavy use of 3D interactive environments that you can actually move a character around in). Most of the developers that produce violent games never even think that people might want to play their specific game without the monsters and shooting, because this is usually a specific part of the gameplay they have designed their game around.
Games that are designed with non-violent gameplay in mind, are moving closer to the technology
I think I probably agree, but it's worth checking that you're not making the common mistake of associating "liberal" with "left-wing" and "conservative" with "right-wing". There's actually something of a 2D system, like AD&D alignments - Democrats are Left-Wing Conservative, Greens are Left-Wing Liberal, Libertarians are Right-Wing Liberal, and Republicans are Right-Wing Evil^H^H^H^HConservative. Although, of course, the individuals involved might break the rules, so occasionally you find a Democrat who's gone Liberal without wasting valuable levels multiclassing as a Green, or whatever.
If you're applying Right-wing and Left-wing to economic policies and Conservative and Liberal to social or moral policies (or to put it more bluntly, small vs. big government and religious vs. secular) then I'm pretty sure I agree with you. Of course, that would also make Democrats Left-Wing Liberal, though they try to hide it (and the Greens flaunt the fact that the Democrats hide it; then again, Bush is a Left-Wing Conservative). I'm not sure many people would agree with those particular terms, but I've been well aware of the bipolar nature of the whole thing since shortly before I started voting, and have rarely been happy with any candidate (never with a major party candidate).
>When the most liberal states in this country >have banned smoking in most public places, you >have to start wondering what "liberal" >and "conservative" really mean. I think, in the >end, they just start to look like "want things >to change" and "don't want things to change", >and even that isn't quite right when you start >adding modifiers like "religious".
There's a reason for this. I have a right to be safe in ym person and posessions. Your smoking harms my health directly- this is a proven scientific fact. My right to breathe trumps your right to smoke at all times.
Ok, you didn't address what you quoted whatsoever, but I'll still bite: 1) My smoking harming your health is not a proven scientific fact in any way, shape, or form (primarily because the entire process required to scientifically prove something would require ethical violations in this case). It is widely believed as fact, there is some correlation, but it is not a proven scientific fact. 2) Your right to breath does not trump my right to smoke if you are in another building, a portion of the building seperated from the portion of the building I'm in, etc. California, before passing its ban on smoking in public buildings had already imposed very costly measures on restaurants that wanted smoking sections which gave you no trump card in this case. 3) Being safe in your person and possessions is not the same as being safe from the possible hazards of second-hand smoke. You are equally as free to stay away from people smoking as they are to walk away from you when you start bitching about it (or to blow smoke in your face at that point, which, so far, is not illegal).
>In the end, I believe the best solution is >point-of-sale enforcement of ratings (with, of >course, parental permission allowing those >under the rated age to buy material, though >this not being necessary if parents are not >present) with no government interference.
I disagree hugely. If ratings are enforced, theres a law enforcing them (if there is no law, they won't be enforced because you can make more money by not doing so). If there's a law enforcing ratings, that's censorship. The government is deciding what types of speech I should be able to say or listen to. This is a direct violation of the first ammendment.
The problem with your argument is that the government has already had a long-term policy of not extending full first amendment rights to the eyes and ears of children. You can say, write, film, record whatever you wish (actually there are some limits on that, as well), but you don't have a right to sell all of it to children.
The second problem is that you assume that you need a law to enforce ratings, yet this runs exactly counter to the way most theaters operate in this country (there is no law preventing theaters from selling tickets to R rated movies to minors, yet most will not do so), and the way many major retail chains have begun operating already. I have been carded at Wal-Mart and Best Buy when buying R rated movies (or unrated movies) and M rated games (movies at Wal-Mart, games at Best Buy). These are not the implements of law, but rather corporate reactions to their own perception of public opinion. If they believe that people want them to do this, it is exactly what they will do. They would much rather have that child's parents as a customer than the child, and the reasons should be obvious.
I'd also add that I'd prefer a system similar to what Blockbuster has done for years: allow parents to give some prior consent to allow their children to rent (in this case buy) material up to a particular rating. Although it can tend to put parents in a more hands-off position (not paying attention to what their kids are buying), it does allow the parents that want their children to have access to material to do so with minimal hassle (having to go to Wal-Mart with your 16-year-old every time they want to buy an
Exactly. No-one can "teach" morality, you will only follow a behavioural code if it is one you have arrived at yourself (or if it is imposed externally and enforced perfectly - which is impossible). Parents, teachers, etc should restrict themselves to encouraging thoughtfulness and raising ethical issues - not laying down rules. A lot of teen acting up is a reaction against rules perceived as arbitrary and unfair.
I'm not quite sure that I would go to the extent of saying that no one can "teach" morality, because children learn it every day in the same way they do anything else. They take a bit of what the authority figures in their lives say, and a bit of what they do, and come up with their own idea of right and wrong. More often than not it's the latter part (what they do) that is forgotten, although in many cases it seems that parents are even afraid to do the former (...say). Children learn the most basic and important lessons before they attend school or learn anything of value from religion, and they learn these from their parents, or, if not their parents, anyone else that happens to be around. If they aren't taught that they can't hit other kids, they may learn that they can get what they want through violence (or prevent themselves from getting hurt by striking first, or harder). If they aren't taught not to steal (note that I consider this the opposite of being taught to share... as I see most children being taught to share only by having things stolen from them by kids that know neither how to share nor not to steal), they won't see what's wrong with their behavior when they take from others without asking. and so on and so forth...
If you don't explain to your kids the difference between a television show and reality, they're not going to understand automatically that you can't drop anvils on people's heads and have them be there the next day to do it all over again, but much of that comes from the more basic lessons like not hurting each other. Many children learn by example what hurts and what doesn't (of if we catch them a slap on the hand when they're reaching for the stove may help enforce the lesson), and this simply needs to be extended so that they know that what hurts them will hurt someone else, as well.
Teenagers are actually a quite-different story, because most of them have whatever moral foundation they will take with them through the rest of their life. Specific events may change their opinions on certain things, or bring home the problems with some of their actions (especially things like drugs, alcohol, and smoking), but in the end they've already decided what justifies homicide, theft, and assault in their own minds, not to mention their ideas on sex and drugs. If they rebel, it's because they believe that you're being over-protective in some way, and either they'll find out you were right or you were wrong, but it may be some time before they come to that realization on their own if their moral base is strong enough to keep them out of any serious trouble. Many times they assume they were right (you were wrong) until they actually find out it was the other way around, but it's unlikely that you'll actually be able to tell them that for yourself.
Censoring violence won't help to make a child into an ethically-aware adult.
That's quite right, and anyone trying to do so would actually be quite hard-pressed to prevent children from being exposed to violence (sure, it may be a cartoon, but in the end, if they aren't discussing it with their parents, how do they know the difference?).
I live in the United States of America where everyone has a voice. The government is actually written from scratch to help everyone get heard - movement for the majority while protecting the minority. S'not perfect, but it works. (I don't mean to be too sarcastic, but its what the foundation of the government here really should be about - take it for what it's worth)
While I agree with most of that sentiment, even your own comments suggest that we all know better.
Not necessarily. I lean more on the non-sexual non-violent side, but I don't want people hushed. I just want their 'art' tagged so I can avoid it.
I simply overlooked adding anything about ratings into my own suggestions. The reason is simple: I grew up with the ratings on movies and, to a lesser degree, stickers on music and ratings on games. I tend to agree with them (though I think the stickers on music are a joke, with (usually) no indication of why the sticker is there, and the stickers are often removed if language on the album has been censored, even though the themes may still be inappropriate). Game ratings in many cases actually got worse when they were consolidated under the ESRB, but have recently improved with descriptions of what may have caused the ratings (some of the previous rating schemes were more detailed on the content of the game, but didn't always include an easily recognizable letter/age system).
Point-of-sale only happens once you've already been given a good idea of the wares - I don't think that will really work as well.
I agree, as I said above, I simply forgot to mention ratings because they're already in use and prevalent in the three major entertainment industries. On the other hand, I have always found it interesting that music has managed to get by almost completely unscathed (with just the sticker, which is voluntary), and books have remained completely without any ratings or warnings (for the most part, any warning will have been put there simply for sensationalism by the publisher). I don't feel an urgent need to change these things, but I do believe that people would make better decisions for their children (and themselves) if they were better informed. Some of us can go find information elsewhere, but it's always helpful if there's information available on the item you're considering buying.
I very much agree on parental guidance - but that seems pretty obvious, no? I very much agree on working with your kids to prepare them for the crazy in life: if we shield them to well, they won't be able to handle the scary things in life when the come along.
It seems pretty obvious to us, but, in the end, it's most often what is lacking in the message pushed by those looking for the entertainment industries to change their practices.
Actually, from a strictly logical standpoint, he's correct. The original poster simply chose examples poorly.
When someone smokes, it may cause damage to someone elses lungs which they do not want. In some situations, you can't avoid it (for example, in the winter when smokers are huddled around a door to enter a building). I don't want the damage to my lungs, but someone elses behavior is causing it, and i cannot prevent it. So we regulate where people may smoke.
Actually, this doesn't address much of what he was discussing, and the problem is not addressed any better by most of the more recent laws passed in states like California than the laws that they superceded. For example, California previously required smoking areas to be isolated from non-smoking areas, and workers had a right to refuse to work in smoking areas. Non-smoking areas also had to include the entrance-ways. One law passed which actually addresses your concerns better is that which forbids smoking within a certain number of feet (I believe it was 100, but may have been 100 yards) of an entrance to a public building. On the other hand, the law which banned smoking in all public buildings which do not gain most of their income from tobacco, does not address this problem any better than the previous law. One of the primary groups that backed the law banning smoking from bars (which was permitted in addition to places making most of their income from tobacco under the original law) argued that not only did most bars not even have non-smoking sections, but that waiters/waitresses refusing to work in smoking sections often made less money, either because there were fewer shifts available or because non-smokers tipped less. While this all may have been true, no one was forcing waitresses to work in bars, and restaurants by this time already could not allow patrons to smoke indoors.
Fortunately for the state of California and its restaurant and bar owners, the weather is rarely adverse to sitting out-doors, and nothing prevented restaurants from having outdoor smoking areas. Unfortunately for bar owners, the laws that would permit them to serve drinks outdoors can be fairly complicated, and involve more regulation than even bars are used to dealing with. Those bars and restaurants that could afford to do so, quickly allowed their patrons to smoke outdoors, in some ways exposing more people to the smoke than simply their own patrons...
I don't know how businesses in New York have been handling this, as the winters can definitely be a bigger problem there. On the other hand, both New York and California make more money off a pack of cigarettes than any of the people that actually make those cigarettes, and only a very small minority has even thought to complain about taxation of a minority of the population (often being used for other groups, I might add).
But for video games, i choose to expose myself to the violence, but my actions do not expose someone else who wishes not to be exposed to it. Thats the key difference i think.
Yet if video games cause violence, certainly that violent action will eventually be turned towards others, thereby exposing others.
Personally, having left California for other reasons, I find myself living in a state that has very little regulation on where a person can smoke. I've actually found it quite rare that someone has complained about this situation. The exception, of course, is the waitresses, who complain when they have to work the non-smoking sections (which have only recently been required by law, and are simply tables marked non-smoking rather than a section closed off from the smoking section), usually because the tables stay empty most of the time (obviously this wouldn't be the case in California if that state still had the same situation, but California's law was very similar in the early-to-mid 80s).
On the other hand, the state strictly regulates where you can purchase alcohol (act
The IDSA/ESA founded the ESRB, which controls the rating of games.
Ratings, when actively enforced (or when retailers decide not to carry something with a given rating) can influence content through self-censorship, simply because developers will try to get a lower rating to gain more sales.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view of the matter), many of the best-selling games in recent years have been M-rated games, so it's unlikely that we'll see much self-censorship (or publisher-enforced censorship) as a result of the ratings any time soon.
Of course, the article actually discussed some of the effects of ratings by examples of the movie, music, and comic book industries...
Buy games that don't have the monsters in them. There are many (, many) games out there, especially puzzle-types (the Myst series, for example), that don't feature fighting monsters as part of the game. If you buy games that don't have them, they will make more games that don't have them.
As for the Half-Life comments specifically, well, the game was a first-person shooter, shooting monsters is almost the entire point of the genre. First-person perspectives have moved into other game types slowly, and games like Half-Life have brought in other aspects that make the game something other than just run-and-gun, but, by and large, first-person shooters will always be shooters.
Oh, and to get god mode in Half-Life, I believe you simply had to enable to console and type "god", or possibly "god 1" into the console. The directions to do so are available on the vast majority of Half-Life-related websites, except, possibly, the one maintained by Sierra, the game's publisher (coincidentally, Sierra probably still publishes a lot of the "no monster fights" type games these days).
I always find it interesting that the arguments on this matter can get labeled "liberal" and "conservative" when the people that have introduced most of the legislation in this area have been on both sides of that particular set of labels. It only gets worse when people try to set them to political parties.
The reality is that the government only moves on these types of issues when both sides, whether Republican and Democrat or Liberal and Conservative, manage to come to some degree of agreement. The scary thing is that it usually only takes one or two people on the side that's generally considered against it to swing the rest for it.
Look at the PMRC, the senators listed in the piece, any other group that's really managed to gain any amount of ground against artists. Usually you'll find that they're lead by the very people usually considered defenders of free speech.
When the most liberal states in this country have banned smoking in most public places, you have to start wondering what "liberal" and "conservative" really mean. I think, in the end, they just start to look like "want things to change" and "don't want things to change", and even that isn't quite right when you start adding modifiers like "religious".
This seems to be an ongoing issue across almost every media - can't we figure some out that works for both sides?
As long as people believe they need the government to shield them (or, more likely, their kids) from sex, nudity, violence, and "bad" words, it isn't likely that we'll figure something out that works for both sides. One side believes (because it happens) that government interference will cause them to lose either their creative freedom (as artists) or their freedom to take in whatever content they wish (as viewers/gamers/readers/whatever). The other side believes (because it happens) that as long as the material is available they won't be able to keep their kids from being exposed to it.
In the end, I believe the best solution is point-of-sale enforcement of ratings (with, of course, parental permission allowing those under the rated age to buy material, though this not being necessary if parents are not present) with no government interference. Additionally, parents should discuss TV, music, movies, and games with their children at a young age (and continue doing so as they grow up) so that they are aware that these things are not usually real, and to make sure their kids can separate reality from entertainment.
We all can control what our kids are exposed to in our own homes. We can't expect every parent to have the same level of control or the same assumptions in their own homes. For this reason, we should know the parents of the children our children play with, and we should prepare our children for the possibility that they may see or hear something we don't want them to. Certainly occasional exposure to violent media is not going to be as harmful if the child is properly prepared for it, and in most cases children can deal with it quite well even if it is more than "occasional", if they are raised to understand the differences and to have some morals in the first place (you certainly don't need church or school to teach your kids morality, and why would you want someone else to teach your kids that?).
When you say that Madden's competition is getting worse...are you referring to games like NFL 2K5?
No, I would be referring to the 2004 editions of all of the games, since Madden 2005 was just released. Incidentally, in 2003 Madden, Sega's title, and Microsoft's title were given equal scores by a large number of reviewers. In 2004, though, Madden scored significantly better than either. This year, Sega's title has apparently gotten significantly better, but Sony and Microsoft have dropped out completely to improve their titles for next year.
As for NFL Street, you're looking at a completely different type of gameplay; although it still appeals to a section of Madden's audience, it's not all of Madden's audience, and it will appeal to some outside of Madden's audience, as well (just as the Blitz series did at one time).
These are sales figures from North America. Looking at that list, the only game there that was not an established game franchise is the Matrix game - and that was already an established movie franchise. Simply put, companies that want to make money need to exploit their established characters. The video game industry is still relatively young and perhaps after more maturing, originality will sell games. For now, companies should bet on sequels selling.
Going through the list, only 3 of the titles (Need for Speed, Madden, and GTA) outsold the previous title in the series, though, so companies should beware of the diminishing returns of sequels. In many cases (especially the Nintendo titles), the ratio of sales was nearly 5 to 1.
I would attribute the difference in Madden, NfSU, and GTA as having to do with: -Madden's competition getting worse -NfSU actually being a better game than previous titles in the series, in addition to having more popular appeal -GTA:VC riding off the controversy and popularity of GTA3, having come out perhaps at the height of GTA3's rising sales, and perhaps having stolen some sales from GTA3 in the process (not to mention people's confusion over the fact that Vice City and San Andreas are more expansions rather than true sequels to GTA3).
there is no way that Sega could get in on time, and judging from the dreamcast, if you don't get in early, you already have the deck stacked against you.
Ummm... the Dreamcast was a current generation console, it was just about a year earlier than the PS2.
The only ways in which the deck was stacked against them were the failures of their consoles between the Genesis and Dreamcast, the ad blitz from Sony pushing a console no one would be able to buy for over a year, and the fact that the PS2 had backwards compatability to combat any perceived weakness in their launch library. Oh, and then there were the batches of various popular games that didn't work properly in the Dreamcast's launch library, which got far more press than the batches of PS2s that couldn't read DVDs (probably because most of the launch titles for the PS2 weren't DVD-based).
Right on, my information was 14 years old rather than 4 years old. Maybe by now it's the 8th or 9th with the way the housing prices have moved in the last 4 years.
I agree with his overall topic. Computer RPG's weither single player or MMO should abandon the D&D style and find one more suited to a video game. Killing bees and crabs just for the sake of killing something to gain experience has to go. Come up with an in-game REASON the bees or crabs have to die. Perhaps they are attaking local merchants or caravans and you protect the caravans then you get a reward. Surely there is something game designers can come up with to make it more interesting than "where can I find an easy place to level up".
This in itself does not require abandoning the D&D system, though. A good game developer could modify the system in a few ways to add some of the more interesting features (such as bonuses to related skills and/or skill trees that scale experience through the root levels of the tree to allow, as mentioned, long sword skill to apply to some degree to short sword skill). Furthermore, it *is* possible to give meaning to killing 10 million bats or 3000 bees. However, with MMO games specifically, doing so requires developing "quests", which takes far more time from the world designers than randomly spawning monsters throughout the world. In single player RPGs, it should be much more common (than it is, or than in MMO) that there is a reason for doing this rather than just leveling up or clearing the path, but of course in all of these games you'll need some random encounters, or randomized areas, that allow those players that want to level grind to do so, as long as you don't decide to expel the entire idea of levels from the game in the first place (which leads one to a question of what an RPG without levels would look like to the players).
Another thought would be to hide some of the stats from the players, but again this starts to blend RPGs with other genres, if only because it's removing elements that RPG players expect. If quests are carefully balanced and a lot of options are given to the players, they won't need to know what level they are and how much skill they have with their broad sword.
In the end, though, computer RPGs, PnP RPGs, MMO RPGs, and console RPGs have overlapping, but still often-times very different, audiences to which they appeal. For every D&D-licensed title there's a Final Fantasy game, and an MMO game, and once in a long while you get Fallout or Planescape, and while very few are fans of ALL of these games, each has its own fan base with its own reasons for liking it. Perhaps game designers need to vary their games a bit more to appeal to even more types of players, but in the end if you can find one game you like, there may be others out there that use similar systems.
One final note: MMO games tend to get far more complaints about the "level grind" than any other style of RPG. Part of this is by design, as developers and/or publishers want people to play the games, and level advancement is often drawn out. Another reason for this is that, simply because it is a multiplayer game, players are often rushed through the actual content of the game in order to gain more levels and more cool stuff, because, in the end, there is nothing more to the game than getting more levels and more stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of other players doing the same thing, none of you are going to be *the one* that saves the world. At best you can hope for occasional special events that allow a group to save the world, but as the players in the world get more powerful, the creatures involved in such events must do so as well, to prevent any one player from swinging a stick and killing the creature, stopping the event for the rest of the players.
MMO designers, perhaps, need to find some way of giving the players something to accomplish besides trying to infinitely level their characters (and, of course, the level limits in many MMO games tend to draw out the level treadmill even further, after all, if your limit is lvl 50, you're going to make players work really hard for quite a while to get to lvl 50, while some Diablo
Quake 2 and 3 were just not the same. And then CS came out. Dying had a consequence! The first mod I'd ever played where you tried to stay alive. No more instant respawn!
Obviously you missed a half dozen Q2 mods... Action Quake was doing the same thing long before CS (but of course when they tried to make ActionHL they tried to add too much other crap, and the first few versions were so irritating that no one bothered after a while).
Personally, I'm getting a little irritated that mod developers have gone through this constant re-invention of Quake and Q2 mods in the last few years. CS had some changes from the ActionQuake mold, but those aren't generally what people talk about when they talk about how great CS is. On the other hand, what I'm really talking about is the TF remakes. Every time a new game comes out with mod tools (especially an id game) people rush to announce that they're remaking a mod from a previous id game for this new game. I guess that's great for the community surrounding a particular mod, especially if the original developers happen to be doing it (which is the case for some mods, but the TF stuff has cropped up on just about every new game, despite the original developers working at Valve).
I guess the fact that all of the professional developers are rehashing old games is part of the same problem. No one has something new to do with a game engine simply because they see the "professionals" doing the same things over and over again, therefore there must not be any new things to do in the field.
Hopefully you see my point. Yes, it's a little reductio ad absurdum, but I think it's fair to say that a minority community is allowed a gripe if the majority of times they are presented in games, it's done in a negative way.
I see your point, but it's really not addressing the game itself. After all, the game isn't based on some absurd depiction created by the game developers or the majority race; it's based on a depiction created by a small sub-culture of the minority race, primarily used to profit from the movie and music industries.
On the other hand, if they were griping about the origins of the depiction (and I realize that some groups have been doing so) as well as the continuation of this depiction, than it is quite fair. Trying to portray it as something that Rockstar has created out of whole cloth, though, is either ignorance or deliberate misdirection, and I'm betting on the latter.
As for the way they are presented the majority of times, it's simply not true that this is the way they are presented the majority of times, unless you completely eliminate sports games. The fact that they're so much more often represented in sports games is simply a matter of their own dominance in the actual sports (exceptions like hockey noted), as they represent a far larger percentage of the population in professional sports than they do in the country itself (and therefore a larger percentage of the population of video games than in the country itself). The representation of every race tends to be quite skewed in video games, but more often than not this tends to be caused by the very nature of established genres not representing the outside world. After all, the closest thing to a popular game in which people play the real world is probably the Sims, and those people couldn't even speak properly or do much of anything for themselves.
Well, since you are from So. Cal, but didn't mention LA- my guess i that you are from either the Valley, or more likely O.C.
There's this small town near the border called San Diego, 6th largest city in the US, few million people living in the surrounding counties. Now, in east county, there are a couple of cities that are extremely majority white, and a couple of cities that are primarily latino and black. Obviously, I lived in one of the majority white cities, and the middle-class/upper-middle class designation would probably clarify which for anyone that's actually familiar with the area (unless, of course, they assume that anything outside of La Jolla is lower class).
I have to add, though, that black and Mexican (as opposed to the more general term latino, since a non-Mexican latino was quite rare) people were not so rare that you never knew any of them, but there's a far cry from knowing that 1 black guy in your high school to being 1 of the only 2 white guys on your block. You have no problem with the individuals, as you can treat them as individuals and it often doesn't change any part of your general view of racial stereotypes and so forth. Unfortunately, when you live in an area with a large "minority" population, you quickly learn that some of those stereotypes have a foundation (but of course aren't completely true), and that you should never assume they're true unless you have to make a life-or-death decision.
The other thing I learned, of course, was that it's really hard to get good mexican food once you leave San Diego.
It's a clever marketing tactic designed to sell more Wavebirds.:)
I can't agree more. In fact, I bought a Wavebird the same day I bought my Cube, and therefore have never used my cabled controller on the system.
The PS2 is no better for my use in this area, as I need an extension cable to get to my couch. The XBox is actually the only system with a controller cable of proper length for me. Of course, I'll probably be buying Logitech wireless controllers for both the XBox and PS2 in the near future (probably PS2 first, I'm a little concerned over how the Logitech pad will feel compared to the large XBox controller that I tend to prefer).
You mean not all white people are white? How the heck do you define a group of people by a common characteristic and then pretend that the group isn't uniform? I could turn this around and accuse you of racism for insinuating that all black people must be the same in any way besides skin color.
It would be like calling all black people African... oh, wait.
It's all pretty stupid, but in the end it's the refusal to accept that race and behavior are not irrefutably linked that makes someone racist. Maybe someday we can get beyond that point and get down to the point of "white", "black", "red", "yellow", and "brown" are not races at all, but rather someone's arbitrary determination of skin color.
white, middle class males have always had the best deal there is. we have always been able to get what we want with no govermental/societal/social rad blocks keeping us back. we don't need help.
As a white, middle class male the only choice I had when going to college was to pay for it myself (though I got a minor scholarship due to a GPA in the top 10% of my class and strong SAT scores). The beauty of middle class is that you can live a day-to-day life fairly well, but most middle class parents can't afford to send their kids to college. The beauty of our student aid system is that as soon as the boxes "white" and "male" were checked on the application, the only thing left for them to look at before laughing at me until I went to the bank for a loan was my parents' income, despite the fact that they didn't pay a cent for the time I spent in college.
On the other hand, the good side of things is that very few people are ineligible for a student loan. The bad side is that student loans do have a cap, so that if your parents are unwilling to take the risk of taking out a loan for you, you're probably still screwed (yes, my parents made me pay off the student loan they took out, which was what we had agreed to before they would even sign the loan paperwork).
The point should be to remove the existing blocks, not to generate new ones by trying to promote those that were harmed in the past. So long as we treat race as a reason to give any one person a benefit over another, racism will have a foundation upon which to remain (that isn't to say it's the only foundation, it's simply one of many fuels in the fire).
'78, and personally most of the 80s crap still doesn't do much for me. '85 was a convenient year because it puts people born in that year near 17 when GTA VC was released for the PS2.
This all reminds me of a previous discussion about GTA(sorry, no link) where I related a story about how I was in the game store, and overheard a mother talking to the clerk about how it was better that she buy her 12 year old GTA3 than let him watch cable. "I mean, there's just so much violence, he dosen't need to be exposed to that." I was truly sickened.
I would be, as well. On the other hand, if her 12 year old was mature enough and she was aware of the content of what she was buying, it'd be a different story. The justification of violence already being on cable (or moreso on the evening news) is no justification at all.
Granted, today's discussion is not about age and maturity, however, I think that with age and maturity, satirical racism can be taken with a grain of salt, and that some people are just too damn young for that kind of media. I can't stress enough that age limits need to be enforced because of issues like these. I could go on forever about this, but I'll dismount my soapbox.
I completely agree, and I also agree with one of the people quoted (or perhaps it was the author, I'm not looking at it directly at the moment) in the article as saying "I dont want my 11 year old exposed to this." I was playing Doom when it came out, and a little math will tell you I was in high school at the time (and that just barely if I remember Doom's release year correctly as 92). However, the computer was kept in the family room, and my parents were quite aware of what I was playing. Just as with anything they could control access to (obviously to some degree I was exposed to things when they were not around), they made the determination that I could handle it before allowing me to play it (or view it, as in the case of most of the movies I was watching at that age). I tended to be exposed to a lot of things at an age lower than that recommended by the rating, but it wasn't due to lack of attention to the content. Knowing this, I also know that every child is different, and therefore what they should be exposed to is also different. I hope that my child will be mature enough to handle GTA: San Andreas before she is 17 (though she may never care to play it in the first place), but if I don't believe she is, I will certainly prevent her from playing it when I can, despite the fact that there's little doubt it will be in my house (and yes, I am prepared to keep much of my video game and DVD collection under lock and key, if only to keep her from playing with them as an infant in the near future).
It's not good that we have to think for 20 minutes to remember any intelligent minority game characters.
Try thinking about intelligent game characters in general. Your average game character, if given any personality, is more along the lines of Duke Nukem than Gordon Freeman (who never speaks, but we can suppose to be smart because of where he works...). Not to mention that we have an awful lot of animals and weird anime characters, with the latter often causing us to have a hard time determining sex, let alone intelligence and race.
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I agree. In fact, if you buy new wheels at Discount Tire, they have the right to use keyed lugnuts on them. That way, only THEY can remove the wheels thus forcing you to use their service.
Regardless of whether the analogy is good, you can remove keyed lugnuts from your car with little trouble (almost anyone can do so with ~20 seconds per tire and a good pair of pliers or vice grips), while trying to circumvent copy protection is illegal.
But, in America, people like to be active participants in something when they can be. Most can't play in sports professionally, but they can play video games and end up becoming good at them. So, there's no way in hell this will have widespread appeal.
The first problem here, obviously, is that people just don't realize how much of a gap there is between the top players in almost any given video game and the people that just play alone, or a random public game maybe a couple times a week. Sure, most people can become decent players of a game themselves without being particularly gifted in any way, but anyone that's played against someone that plays in upper-level competition long enough knows that there is a clear difference in skill.
The second problem is that at any given time the game being played in high level competition is only familiar to a small percentage of the TV audience. Most Americans have played football, baseball, etc (even soccer) at some point in their lives, even if it wasn't with the professional rules. There is no barrier of entry in these sports, until you want to play at a higher level. Everyone knows someone when they're growing up with a bat and a ball. With PC games you have to have a PC that can handle the game, a good internet connection, maybe some knowledge of how to configure the game to work best for you (and your computer), and the game itself, all before you can even learn how the game plays. Particular skills transfer from game to game, but people are easily confused by new maps and differing weapons and skills in different games. It takes some time to get familiar with the new environment before you can take full advantage of any benefits gained by having played earlier games, and even then you have to change habits for the new game.
These things also apply to watching the game. The only thing more confusing than trying to figure out a map in the middle of a deathmatch is trying to figure it out when you are not in control (when you're watching it on TV, for instance). Then add familiarity (or the lack thereof) with the game itself, as well as possibly the game-type (DM, CTF, TF, CS, AQ2, etc), and you've got a lot of things people need to know before they can enjoy watching a game, let alone playing in it.
Perhaps it could be expanded on at G4TechTV, but even then I don't see it successful.
I have watched a few games on G4TechTV, but overall I've found it to be a poor experience even when I'm familiar with the game. This is in direct contrast with the time I spent spectating matches online, although in those cases I had direct control over my viewing angle and occasionally jumped between matches when things slowed down.
What I feel they need to do to make the viewing experience better on TV is take some time before the match not only to explain the game, game-type, and map, but to show, as much as possible, what they're talking about in the game itself. Use an overhead view of the map to give viewers a general idea of what the map looks like, highlight important areas, as well as points of possible strategic interest, show people the different weapons in the game, maybe discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those weapons, classes if the game has them, and the objective of the game type. Some of this can be drawn out into the match, take a break to detail what's going on and show some more background information (like they do in the previously mentioned televised poker, discussing things like what a straight and royal flush are, how the game type works, and so on).
You might show the players themselves when they have a particularly strong reaction, and to introduce them intially, but you don't need to show the player when his character is sitting in a corner defending an area, basically not doing anything but watching the screen. Something else to consider would be to allow some minor customization of skins in order to better associate the individual players with their characters on-screen. Real sports ha
Sure it does. My right to health is absolutely inviolate.
Perhaps to you, but it is certainly not a right protected, nor granted, by the law.
You do NOT have the right to endanger it with your smoke.
You're right, I have no more right to smoke than you do to health. Except, of course, that the government regulates the sale of cigarettes, which, so long as further restrictions are not in place (such as are in place for other vices), gives me some rights in this matter.
The fact theat you're smoking in public already means you don't give a fuck about annoying those around you, am I really supposed to believe that you'd check for people before lighting up, or put it out if someone came by? Of course you wouldn't.
That's entirely situationally dependent, but in the end, you're right, I don't give a rat's ass about annoying those around me, just as most of them don't give a rat's ass about annoying me. Believe it or not (you won't), I do check not only whether people are around, but which way the wind is blowing (or the currents caused by A/C/heating in buildings) before I light up. There are specific cases in which I feel that people bring it upon themselves, but for the most part I tend to respect people's wish not to have smoke in their face (probably because I haven't been allowed to smoke indoors since I was legally able to purchase cigarettes, until 2 years ago). Do I put a cigarette out if someone comes by? Of course not, because I tend to go out of my way to stay out of public walk-ways when I'm smoking, therefore anyone coming by has a reason either to talk to me specifically, or to come into an area that would be out of the way for most people.
So the only way to protect our health is by banning it in public buildings. In your own home, you may of course do what you wish.
Except, of course, that there are many ways to protect people from second-hand smoke that don't involve banning it from public buildings. One of the best I saw that didn't involve actually sectioning off an area had the smoking section on the second floor, with a good filtration system and ventilation fans.
As for the costs to restaurants prior to that- please. If I walked into a bar or a restaurant, the smoke was overwhelming. An hour or two in a bar would leave my skin burning from allergies for an hour. Smoking sectiosn do jack squat. So yes, I still have the trump card.
Your trump card appears to be an allergy, which isn't a trump card at all, though it does put you in a particularly sensitive position. Still, there's a difference between a smoking section as done in many states and a smoking section as was required under California law prior to the ban. In California, a non-smoker in a restaurant (bars had somewhat different regulations) would have little chance of even knowing there was a smoking section if they didn't ask preference, as they had to be completely separated. If I wanted to in most states, I could sit less than 6 inches from a non-smoker and have a cigarette, then blow smoke across their food, but that hasn't been possible in California for well over 10 years (long before the ban was enacted). As I said myself, though, the ban of smoking within a particular distance of an entrance was actually a good thing, allowing people such as yourself, which are particularly sensitive to tobacco smoke, to not have to walk through it simply to get into the restaurant.
>You can say, write, film, record whatever you
>wish (actually there are some limits on that,
>as well), but you don't have a right to sell
>all of it to children.
This is itself a first ammendment violation.
Well, then, let's see how many children can buy child porn, after all, it's porn, for children, right? Oh, wait... The first amendment is not as all-encompassing as some would like it to be, and, in the end, the courts have long upheld the belief that children do not have the same rights as adults, a
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question.
.cfg files by hand. I believe the readme.txt file also has information on how to do this. I used to know this stuff by heart, but it's been a LONG time since I played Half-Life in any form.
I HATE Myst and games like that. They are TOO focused on puzzles, and their environments are not anywhere near as interesting as the environments in games like Half-Life.
The latest game in the Myst series has a better environment, from what I've heard. I only own one of the Myst games myself, as it came with one of my DVD drives, and I don't care for the genre.
What I need is a game that is exactly like Half-Life, but without any monsters/violence. Harry Potter came close, its violence was more mild and cartoonish, but still, it got in the way of the fun parts of the game.
Personally, I found most of what you probably liked about Half-Life to be what got in the way of the fun parts of the game (that, and head-crabs + crowbar...). I found most of the puzzles to be far too simple (well, what do you expect for an FPS game, but still...), and more often than not they simply took away from the action and/or suspense that was occasionally built up in the game. What I'm trying to say is, I guess I can't help you much with what you're looking for, but I'm pretty sure the games are out there.
Re: God mode, I was using a balky Win98 Intel computer at the time, and for whatever reason despite trying many of the hacks on the 'Net, I could never get God mode to work.
You don't need a hack, but I forgot that there was another command needed: "sv_cheats 1", after that it's simply "/GOD". Of course, you have to get to the console first, which requires editing the target line on the shortcut to the game or editing the
And now, Half-Life won't even install on my upgraded Win2000 AMD-64 machine. A FAT vs. NTFS file system problem? Intel vs. AMD? Something else? I haven't had the time to really pursue it yet.
NTFS, nope, that's what I'm running here. AMD, doubtful, most of the people I knew when I was active in the community used AMD. That 64 on the end, though, is a possible problem, which might take quite a while to figure out. Another possibility arises if you don't have Win2k up to date, as I believe there were a couple of patches that addressed compatability with the game. Again, if I was still active in the community, it would probably be a simple problem to work through, but since I haven't kept up, I don't know where everyone's hiding (in other words, most of the web pages are dead or inactive).
My point is that I think there is a market for games with all of the bells and whistles of a Half-Life except the monsters/gore/violence, especially amongst parents. You're right, Sierra and such companies should make it easier for us to play their games in non-violent mode.
Note that I didn't say anything about allowing people to play in non-violent mode. I simply believe that there are violent games, and non-violent games. Unfortunately, the tendency towards flashy graphics (which Half-Life no longer has, but did at one time, for maybe 2 months) and so forth comes from the same area that tends to drive violent gameplay, i.e. first person shooters. Fortunately, the technology for a game like Half-Life runs on such low-level computers that it's now available for almost any type of game, and as time goes on, more genres are utilizing that type of technology (which is why I pointed out the Myst series, as the most recent one makes heavy use of 3D interactive environments that you can actually move a character around in). Most of the developers that produce violent games never even think that people might want to play their specific game without the monsters and shooting, because this is usually a specific part of the gameplay they have designed their game around.
Games that are designed with non-violent gameplay in mind, are moving closer to the technology
I think I probably agree, but it's worth checking that you're not making the common mistake of associating "liberal" with "left-wing" and "conservative" with "right-wing". There's actually something of a 2D system, like AD&D alignments - Democrats are Left-Wing Conservative, Greens are Left-Wing Liberal, Libertarians are Right-Wing Liberal, and Republicans are Right-Wing Evil^H^H^H^HConservative. Although, of course, the individuals involved might break the rules, so occasionally you find a Democrat who's gone Liberal without wasting valuable levels multiclassing as a Green, or whatever.
If you're applying Right-wing and Left-wing to economic policies and Conservative and Liberal to social or moral policies (or to put it more bluntly, small vs. big government and religious vs. secular) then I'm pretty sure I agree with you. Of course, that would also make Democrats Left-Wing Liberal, though they try to hide it (and the Greens flaunt the fact that the Democrats hide it; then again, Bush is a Left-Wing Conservative). I'm not sure many people would agree with those particular terms, but I've been well aware of the bipolar nature of the whole thing since shortly before I started voting, and have rarely been happy with any candidate (never with a major party candidate).
>When the most liberal states in this country
>have banned smoking in most public places, you
>have to start wondering what "liberal"
>and "conservative" really mean. I think, in the
>end, they just start to look like "want things
>to change" and "don't want things to change",
>and even that isn't quite right when you start
>adding modifiers like "religious".
There's a reason for this. I have a right to be safe in ym person and posessions. Your smoking harms my health directly- this is a proven scientific fact. My right to breathe trumps your right to smoke at all times.
Ok, you didn't address what you quoted whatsoever, but I'll still bite:
1) My smoking harming your health is not a proven scientific fact in any way, shape, or form (primarily because the entire process required to scientifically prove something would require ethical violations in this case). It is widely believed as fact, there is some correlation, but it is not a proven scientific fact.
2) Your right to breath does not trump my right to smoke if you are in another building, a portion of the building seperated from the portion of the building I'm in, etc. California, before passing its ban on smoking in public buildings had already imposed very costly measures on restaurants that wanted smoking sections which gave you no trump card in this case.
3) Being safe in your person and possessions is not the same as being safe from the possible hazards of second-hand smoke. You are equally as free to stay away from people smoking as they are to walk away from you when you start bitching about it (or to blow smoke in your face at that point, which, so far, is not illegal).
>In the end, I believe the best solution is
>point-of-sale enforcement of ratings (with, of
>course, parental permission allowing those
>under the rated age to buy material, though
>this not being necessary if parents are not
>present) with no government interference.
I disagree hugely. If ratings are enforced, theres a law enforcing them (if there is no law, they won't be enforced because you can make more money by not doing so). If there's a law enforcing ratings, that's censorship. The government is deciding what types of speech I should be able to say or listen to. This is a direct violation of the first ammendment.
The problem with your argument is that the government has already had a long-term policy of not extending full first amendment rights to the eyes and ears of children. You can say, write, film, record whatever you wish (actually there are some limits on that, as well), but you don't have a right to sell all of it to children.
The second problem is that you assume that you need a law to enforce ratings, yet this runs exactly counter to the way most theaters operate in this country (there is no law preventing theaters from selling tickets to R rated movies to minors, yet most will not do so), and the way many major retail chains have begun operating already. I have been carded at Wal-Mart and Best Buy when buying R rated movies (or unrated movies) and M rated games (movies at Wal-Mart, games at Best Buy). These are not the implements of law, but rather corporate reactions to their own perception of public opinion. If they believe that people want them to do this, it is exactly what they will do. They would much rather have that child's parents as a customer than the child, and the reasons should be obvious.
I'd also add that I'd prefer a system similar to what Blockbuster has done for years: allow parents to give some prior consent to allow their children to rent (in this case buy) material up to a particular rating. Although it can tend to put parents in a more hands-off position (not paying attention to what their kids are buying), it does allow the parents that want their children to have access to material to do so with minimal hassle (having to go to Wal-Mart with your 16-year-old every time they want to buy an
Exactly. No-one can "teach" morality, you will only follow a behavioural code if it is one you have arrived at yourself (or if it is imposed externally and enforced perfectly - which is impossible). Parents, teachers, etc should restrict themselves to encouraging thoughtfulness and raising ethical issues - not laying down rules. A lot of teen acting up is a reaction against rules perceived as arbitrary and unfair.
I'm not quite sure that I would go to the extent of saying that no one can "teach" morality, because children learn it every day in the same way they do anything else. They take a bit of what the authority figures in their lives say, and a bit of what they do, and come up with their own idea of right and wrong. More often than not it's the latter part (what they do) that is forgotten, although in many cases it seems that parents are even afraid to do the former (...say). Children learn the most basic and important lessons before they attend school or learn anything of value from religion, and they learn these from their parents, or, if not their parents, anyone else that happens to be around. If they aren't taught that they can't hit other kids, they may learn that they can get what they want through violence (or prevent themselves from getting hurt by striking first, or harder). If they aren't taught not to steal (note that I consider this the opposite of being taught to share... as I see most children being taught to share only by having things stolen from them by kids that know neither how to share nor not to steal), they won't see what's wrong with their behavior when they take from others without asking. and so on and so forth...
If you don't explain to your kids the difference between a television show and reality, they're not going to understand automatically that you can't drop anvils on people's heads and have them be there the next day to do it all over again, but much of that comes from the more basic lessons like not hurting each other. Many children learn by example what hurts and what doesn't (of if we catch them a slap on the hand when they're reaching for the stove may help enforce the lesson), and this simply needs to be extended so that they know that what hurts them will hurt someone else, as well.
Teenagers are actually a quite-different story, because most of them have whatever moral foundation they will take with them through the rest of their life. Specific events may change their opinions on certain things, or bring home the problems with some of their actions (especially things like drugs, alcohol, and smoking), but in the end they've already decided what justifies homicide, theft, and assault in their own minds, not to mention their ideas on sex and drugs. If they rebel, it's because they believe that you're being over-protective in some way, and either they'll find out you were right or you were wrong, but it may be some time before they come to that realization on their own if their moral base is strong enough to keep them out of any serious trouble. Many times they assume they were right (you were wrong) until they actually find out it was the other way around, but it's unlikely that you'll actually be able to tell them that for yourself.
Censoring violence won't help to make a child into an ethically-aware adult.
That's quite right, and anyone trying to do so would actually be quite hard-pressed to prevent children from being exposed to violence (sure, it may be a cartoon, but in the end, if they aren't discussing it with their parents, how do they know the difference?).
I live in the United States of America where everyone has a voice. The government is actually written from scratch to help everyone get heard - movement for the majority while protecting the minority. S'not perfect, but it works. (I don't mean to be too sarcastic, but its what the foundation of the government here really should be about - take it for what it's worth)
While I agree with most of that sentiment, even your own comments suggest that we all know better.
Not necessarily. I lean more on the non-sexual non-violent side, but I don't want people hushed. I just want their 'art' tagged so I can avoid it.
I simply overlooked adding anything about ratings into my own suggestions. The reason is simple: I grew up with the ratings on movies and, to a lesser degree, stickers on music and ratings on games. I tend to agree with them (though I think the stickers on music are a joke, with (usually) no indication of why the sticker is there, and the stickers are often removed if language on the album has been censored, even though the themes may still be inappropriate). Game ratings in many cases actually got worse when they were consolidated under the ESRB, but have recently improved with descriptions of what may have caused the ratings (some of the previous rating schemes were more detailed on the content of the game, but didn't always include an easily recognizable letter/age system).
Point-of-sale only happens once you've already been given a good idea of the wares - I don't think that will really work as well.
I agree, as I said above, I simply forgot to mention ratings because they're already in use and prevalent in the three major entertainment industries. On the other hand, I have always found it interesting that music has managed to get by almost completely unscathed (with just the sticker, which is voluntary), and books have remained completely without any ratings or warnings (for the most part, any warning will have been put there simply for sensationalism by the publisher). I don't feel an urgent need to change these things, but I do believe that people would make better decisions for their children (and themselves) if they were better informed. Some of us can go find information elsewhere, but it's always helpful if there's information available on the item you're considering buying.
I very much agree on parental guidance - but that seems pretty obvious, no? I very much agree on working with your kids to prepare them for the crazy in life: if we shield them to well, they won't be able to handle the scary things in life when the come along.
It seems pretty obvious to us, but, in the end, it's most often what is lacking in the message pushed by those looking for the entertainment industries to change their practices.
No, your reasoning i believe is wrong.
Actually, from a strictly logical standpoint, he's correct. The original poster simply chose examples poorly.
When someone smokes, it may cause damage to someone elses lungs which they do not want. In some situations, you can't avoid it (for example, in the winter when smokers are huddled around a door to enter a building). I don't want the damage to my lungs, but someone elses behavior is causing it, and i cannot prevent it. So we regulate where people may smoke.
Actually, this doesn't address much of what he was discussing, and the problem is not addressed any better by most of the more recent laws passed in states like California than the laws that they superceded. For example, California previously required smoking areas to be isolated from non-smoking areas, and workers had a right to refuse to work in smoking areas. Non-smoking areas also had to include the entrance-ways. One law passed which actually addresses your concerns better is that which forbids smoking within a certain number of feet (I believe it was 100, but may have been 100 yards) of an entrance to a public building. On the other hand, the law which banned smoking in all public buildings which do not gain most of their income from tobacco, does not address this problem any better than the previous law. One of the primary groups that backed the law banning smoking from bars (which was permitted in addition to places making most of their income from tobacco under the original law) argued that not only did most bars not even have non-smoking sections, but that waiters/waitresses refusing to work in smoking sections often made less money, either because there were fewer shifts available or because non-smokers tipped less. While this all may have been true, no one was forcing waitresses to work in bars, and restaurants by this time already could not allow patrons to smoke indoors.
Fortunately for the state of California and its restaurant and bar owners, the weather is rarely adverse to sitting out-doors, and nothing prevented restaurants from having outdoor smoking areas. Unfortunately for bar owners, the laws that would permit them to serve drinks outdoors can be fairly complicated, and involve more regulation than even bars are used to dealing with. Those bars and restaurants that could afford to do so, quickly allowed their patrons to smoke outdoors, in some ways exposing more people to the smoke than simply their own patrons...
I don't know how businesses in New York have been handling this, as the winters can definitely be a bigger problem there. On the other hand, both New York and California make more money off a pack of cigarettes than any of the people that actually make those cigarettes, and only a very small minority has even thought to complain about taxation of a minority of the population (often being used for other groups, I might add).
But for video games, i choose to expose myself to the violence, but my actions do not expose someone else who wishes not to be exposed to it. Thats the key difference i think.
Yet if video games cause violence, certainly that violent action will eventually be turned towards others, thereby exposing others.
Personally, having left California for other reasons, I find myself living in a state that has very little regulation on where a person can smoke. I've actually found it quite rare that someone has complained about this situation. The exception, of course, is the waitresses, who complain when they have to work the non-smoking sections (which have only recently been required by law, and are simply tables marked non-smoking rather than a section closed off from the smoking section), usually because the tables stay empty most of the time (obviously this wouldn't be the case in California if that state still had the same situation, but California's law was very similar in the early-to-mid 80s).
On the other hand, the state strictly regulates where you can purchase alcohol (act
The IDSA/ESA founded the ESRB, which controls the rating of games.
Ratings, when actively enforced (or when retailers decide not to carry something with a given rating) can influence content through self-censorship, simply because developers will try to get a lower rating to gain more sales.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view of the matter), many of the best-selling games in recent years have been M-rated games, so it's unlikely that we'll see much self-censorship (or publisher-enforced censorship) as a result of the ratings any time soon.
Of course, the article actually discussed some of the effects of ratings by examples of the movie, music, and comic book industries...
Buy games that don't have the monsters in them. There are many (, many) games out there, especially puzzle-types (the Myst series, for example), that don't feature fighting monsters as part of the game. If you buy games that don't have them, they will make more games that don't have them.
As for the Half-Life comments specifically, well, the game was a first-person shooter, shooting monsters is almost the entire point of the genre. First-person perspectives have moved into other game types slowly, and games like Half-Life have brought in other aspects that make the game something other than just run-and-gun, but, by and large, first-person shooters will always be shooters.
Oh, and to get god mode in Half-Life, I believe you simply had to enable to console and type "god", or possibly "god 1" into the console. The directions to do so are available on the vast majority of Half-Life-related websites, except, possibly, the one maintained by Sierra, the game's publisher (coincidentally, Sierra probably still publishes a lot of the "no monster fights" type games these days).
I always find it interesting that the arguments on this matter can get labeled "liberal" and "conservative" when the people that have introduced most of the legislation in this area have been on both sides of that particular set of labels. It only gets worse when people try to set them to political parties.
The reality is that the government only moves on these types of issues when both sides, whether Republican and Democrat or Liberal and Conservative, manage to come to some degree of agreement. The scary thing is that it usually only takes one or two people on the side that's generally considered against it to swing the rest for it.
Look at the PMRC, the senators listed in the piece, any other group that's really managed to gain any amount of ground against artists. Usually you'll find that they're lead by the very people usually considered defenders of free speech.
When the most liberal states in this country have banned smoking in most public places, you have to start wondering what "liberal" and "conservative" really mean. I think, in the end, they just start to look like "want things to change" and "don't want things to change", and even that isn't quite right when you start adding modifiers like "religious".
This seems to be an ongoing issue across almost every media - can't we figure some out that works for both sides?
As long as people believe they need the government to shield them (or, more likely, their kids) from sex, nudity, violence, and "bad" words, it isn't likely that we'll figure something out that works for both sides. One side believes (because it happens) that government interference will cause them to lose either their creative freedom (as artists) or their freedom to take in whatever content they wish (as viewers/gamers/readers/whatever). The other side believes (because it happens) that as long as the material is available they won't be able to keep their kids from being exposed to it.
In the end, I believe the best solution is point-of-sale enforcement of ratings (with, of course, parental permission allowing those under the rated age to buy material, though this not being necessary if parents are not present) with no government interference. Additionally, parents should discuss TV, music, movies, and games with their children at a young age (and continue doing so as they grow up) so that they are aware that these things are not usually real, and to make sure their kids can separate reality from entertainment.
We all can control what our kids are exposed to in our own homes. We can't expect every parent to have the same level of control or the same assumptions in their own homes. For this reason, we should know the parents of the children our children play with, and we should prepare our children for the possibility that they may see or hear something we don't want them to. Certainly occasional exposure to violent media is not going to be as harmful if the child is properly prepared for it, and in most cases children can deal with it quite well even if it is more than "occasional", if they are raised to understand the differences and to have some morals in the first place (you certainly don't need church or school to teach your kids morality, and why would you want someone else to teach your kids that?).
When you say that Madden's competition is getting worse...are you referring to games like NFL 2K5?
No, I would be referring to the 2004 editions of all of the games, since Madden 2005 was just released. Incidentally, in 2003 Madden, Sega's title, and Microsoft's title were given equal scores by a large number of reviewers. In 2004, though, Madden scored significantly better than either. This year, Sega's title has apparently gotten significantly better, but Sony and Microsoft have dropped out completely to improve their titles for next year.
As for NFL Street, you're looking at a completely different type of gameplay; although it still appeals to a section of Madden's audience, it's not all of Madden's audience, and it will appeal to some outside of Madden's audience, as well (just as the Blitz series did at one time).
These are sales figures from North America. Looking at that list, the only game there that was not an established game franchise is the Matrix game - and that was already an established movie franchise. Simply put, companies that want to make money need to exploit their established characters. The video game industry is still relatively young and perhaps after more maturing, originality will sell games. For now, companies should bet on sequels selling.
Going through the list, only 3 of the titles (Need for Speed, Madden, and GTA) outsold the previous title in the series, though, so companies should beware of the diminishing returns of sequels. In many cases (especially the Nintendo titles), the ratio of sales was nearly 5 to 1.
I would attribute the difference in Madden, NfSU, and GTA as having to do with:
-Madden's competition getting worse
-NfSU actually being a better game than previous titles in the series, in addition to having more popular appeal
-GTA:VC riding off the controversy and popularity of GTA3, having come out perhaps at the height of GTA3's rising sales, and perhaps having stolen some sales from GTA3 in the process (not to mention people's confusion over the fact that Vice City and San Andreas are more expansions rather than true sequels to GTA3).
there is no way that Sega could get in on time, and judging from the dreamcast, if you don't get in early, you already have the deck stacked against you.
Ummm... the Dreamcast was a current generation console, it was just about a year earlier than the PS2.
The only ways in which the deck was stacked against them were the failures of their consoles between the Genesis and Dreamcast, the ad blitz from Sony pushing a console no one would be able to buy for over a year, and the fact that the PS2 had backwards compatability to combat any perceived weakness in their launch library. Oh, and then there were the batches of various popular games that didn't work properly in the Dreamcast's launch library, which got far more press than the batches of PS2s that couldn't read DVDs (probably because most of the launch titles for the PS2 weren't DVD-based).
San Diego is the SEVENTH largest city in the US
Right on, my information was 14 years old rather than 4 years old. Maybe by now it's the 8th or 9th with the way the housing prices have moved in the last 4 years.
I agree with his overall topic. Computer RPG's weither single player or MMO should abandon the D&D style and find one more suited to a video game. Killing bees and crabs just for the sake of killing something to gain experience has to go. Come up with an in-game REASON the bees or crabs have to die. Perhaps they are attaking local merchants or caravans and you protect the caravans then you get a reward. Surely there is something game designers can come up with to make it more interesting than "where can I find an easy place to level up".
This in itself does not require abandoning the D&D system, though. A good game developer could modify the system in a few ways to add some of the more interesting features (such as bonuses to related skills and/or skill trees that scale experience through the root levels of the tree to allow, as mentioned, long sword skill to apply to some degree to short sword skill). Furthermore, it *is* possible to give meaning to killing 10 million bats or 3000 bees. However, with MMO games specifically, doing so requires developing "quests", which takes far more time from the world designers than randomly spawning monsters throughout the world. In single player RPGs, it should be much more common (than it is, or than in MMO) that there is a reason for doing this rather than just leveling up or clearing the path, but of course in all of these games you'll need some random encounters, or randomized areas, that allow those players that want to level grind to do so, as long as you don't decide to expel the entire idea of levels from the game in the first place (which leads one to a question of what an RPG without levels would look like to the players).
Another thought would be to hide some of the stats from the players, but again this starts to blend RPGs with other genres, if only because it's removing elements that RPG players expect. If quests are carefully balanced and a lot of options are given to the players, they won't need to know what level they are and how much skill they have with their broad sword.
In the end, though, computer RPGs, PnP RPGs, MMO RPGs, and console RPGs have overlapping, but still often-times very different, audiences to which they appeal. For every D&D-licensed title there's a Final Fantasy game, and an MMO game, and once in a long while you get Fallout or Planescape, and while very few are fans of ALL of these games, each has its own fan base with its own reasons for liking it. Perhaps game designers need to vary their games a bit more to appeal to even more types of players, but in the end if you can find one game you like, there may be others out there that use similar systems.
One final note: MMO games tend to get far more complaints about the "level grind" than any other style of RPG. Part of this is by design, as developers and/or publishers want people to play the games, and level advancement is often drawn out. Another reason for this is that, simply because it is a multiplayer game, players are often rushed through the actual content of the game in order to gain more levels and more cool stuff, because, in the end, there is nothing more to the game than getting more levels and more stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of other players doing the same thing, none of you are going to be *the one* that saves the world. At best you can hope for occasional special events that allow a group to save the world, but as the players in the world get more powerful, the creatures involved in such events must do so as well, to prevent any one player from swinging a stick and killing the creature, stopping the event for the rest of the players.
MMO designers, perhaps, need to find some way of giving the players something to accomplish besides trying to infinitely level their characters (and, of course, the level limits in many MMO games tend to draw out the level treadmill even further, after all, if your limit is lvl 50, you're going to make players work really hard for quite a while to get to lvl 50, while some Diablo
Quake 2 and 3 were just not the same.
And then CS came out.
Dying had a consequence!
The first mod I'd ever played where you tried to stay alive.
No more instant respawn!
Obviously you missed a half dozen Q2 mods...
Action Quake was doing the same thing long before CS (but of course when they tried to make ActionHL they tried to add too much other crap, and the first few versions were so irritating that no one bothered after a while).
Personally, I'm getting a little irritated that mod developers have gone through this constant re-invention of Quake and Q2 mods in the last few years. CS had some changes from the ActionQuake mold, but those aren't generally what people talk about when they talk about how great CS is. On the other hand, what I'm really talking about is the TF remakes. Every time a new game comes out with mod tools (especially an id game) people rush to announce that they're remaking a mod from a previous id game for this new game. I guess that's great for the community surrounding a particular mod, especially if the original developers happen to be doing it (which is the case for some mods, but the TF stuff has cropped up on just about every new game, despite the original developers working at Valve).
I guess the fact that all of the professional developers are rehashing old games is part of the same problem. No one has something new to do with a game engine simply because they see the "professionals" doing the same things over and over again, therefore there must not be any new things to do in the field.
Hopefully you see my point. Yes, it's a little reductio ad absurdum, but I think it's fair to say that a minority community is allowed a gripe if the majority of times they are presented in games, it's done in a negative way.
I see your point, but it's really not addressing the game itself. After all, the game isn't based on some absurd depiction created by the game developers or the majority race; it's based on a depiction created by a small sub-culture of the minority race, primarily used to profit from the movie and music industries.
On the other hand, if they were griping about the origins of the depiction (and I realize that some groups have been doing so) as well as the continuation of this depiction, than it is quite fair. Trying to portray it as something that Rockstar has created out of whole cloth, though, is either ignorance or deliberate misdirection, and I'm betting on the latter.
As for the way they are presented the majority of times, it's simply not true that this is the way they are presented the majority of times, unless you completely eliminate sports games. The fact that they're so much more often represented in sports games is simply a matter of their own dominance in the actual sports (exceptions like hockey noted), as they represent a far larger percentage of the population in professional sports than they do in the country itself (and therefore a larger percentage of the population of video games than in the country itself). The representation of every race tends to be quite skewed in video games, but more often than not this tends to be caused by the very nature of established genres not representing the outside world. After all, the closest thing to a popular game in which people play the real world is probably the Sims, and those people couldn't even speak properly or do much of anything for themselves.
Well, since you are from So. Cal, but didn't mention LA- my guess i that you are from either the Valley, or more likely O.C.
There's this small town near the border called San Diego, 6th largest city in the US, few million people living in the surrounding counties. Now, in east county, there are a couple of cities that are extremely majority white, and a couple of cities that are primarily latino and black. Obviously, I lived in one of the majority white cities, and the middle-class/upper-middle class designation would probably clarify which for anyone that's actually familiar with the area (unless, of course, they assume that anything outside of La Jolla is lower class).
I have to add, though, that black and Mexican (as opposed to the more general term latino, since a non-Mexican latino was quite rare) people were not so rare that you never knew any of them, but there's a far cry from knowing that 1 black guy in your high school to being 1 of the only 2 white guys on your block. You have no problem with the individuals, as you can treat them as individuals and it often doesn't change any part of your general view of racial stereotypes and so forth. Unfortunately, when you live in an area with a large "minority" population, you quickly learn that some of those stereotypes have a foundation (but of course aren't completely true), and that you should never assume they're true unless you have to make a life-or-death decision.
The other thing I learned, of course, was that it's really hard to get good mexican food once you leave San Diego.
It's a clever marketing tactic designed to sell more Wavebirds. :)
I can't agree more. In fact, I bought a Wavebird the same day I bought my Cube, and therefore have never used my cabled controller on the system.
The PS2 is no better for my use in this area, as I need an extension cable to get to my couch. The XBox is actually the only system with a controller cable of proper length for me. Of course, I'll probably be buying Logitech wireless controllers for both the XBox and PS2 in the near future (probably PS2 first, I'm a little concerned over how the Logitech pad will feel compared to the large XBox controller that I tend to prefer).
You mean not all white people are white? How the heck do you define a group of people by a common characteristic and then pretend that the group isn't uniform? I could turn this around and accuse you of racism for insinuating that all black people must be the same in any way besides skin color.
It would be like calling all black people African... oh, wait.
It's all pretty stupid, but in the end it's the refusal to accept that race and behavior are not irrefutably linked that makes someone racist. Maybe someday we can get beyond that point and get down to the point of "white", "black", "red", "yellow", and "brown" are not races at all, but rather someone's arbitrary determination of skin color.
white, middle class males have always had the best deal there is. we have always been able to get what we want with no govermental/societal/social rad blocks keeping us back. we don't need help.
As a white, middle class male the only choice I had when going to college was to pay for it myself (though I got a minor scholarship due to a GPA in the top 10% of my class and strong SAT scores). The beauty of middle class is that you can live a day-to-day life fairly well, but most middle class parents can't afford to send their kids to college. The beauty of our student aid system is that as soon as the boxes "white" and "male" were checked on the application, the only thing left for them to look at before laughing at me until I went to the bank for a loan was my parents' income, despite the fact that they didn't pay a cent for the time I spent in college.
On the other hand, the good side of things is that very few people are ineligible for a student loan. The bad side is that student loans do have a cap, so that if your parents are unwilling to take the risk of taking out a loan for you, you're probably still screwed (yes, my parents made me pay off the student loan they took out, which was what we had agreed to before they would even sign the loan paperwork).
The point should be to remove the existing blocks, not to generate new ones by trying to promote those that were harmed in the past. So long as we treat race as a reason to give any one person a benefit over another, racism will have a foundation upon which to remain (that isn't to say it's the only foundation, it's simply one of many fuels in the fire).
Please tell me you weren't born in '85.
'78, and personally most of the 80s crap still doesn't do much for me. '85 was a convenient year because it puts people born in that year near 17 when GTA VC was released for the PS2.
This all reminds me of a previous discussion about GTA(sorry, no link) where I related a story about how I was in the game store, and overheard a mother talking to the clerk about how it was better that she buy her 12 year old GTA3 than let him watch cable. "I mean, there's just so much violence, he dosen't need to be exposed to that." I was truly sickened.
I would be, as well. On the other hand, if her 12 year old was mature enough and she was aware of the content of what she was buying, it'd be a different story. The justification of violence already being on cable (or moreso on the evening news) is no justification at all.
Granted, today's discussion is not about age and maturity, however, I think that with age and maturity, satirical racism can be taken with a grain of salt, and that some people are just too damn young for that kind of media. I can't stress enough that age limits need to be enforced because of issues like these. I could go on forever about this, but I'll dismount my soapbox.
I completely agree, and I also agree with one of the people quoted (or perhaps it was the author, I'm not looking at it directly at the moment) in the article as saying "I dont want my 11 year old exposed to this." I was playing Doom when it came out, and a little math will tell you I was in high school at the time (and that just barely if I remember Doom's release year correctly as 92). However, the computer was kept in the family room, and my parents were quite aware of what I was playing. Just as with anything they could control access to (obviously to some degree I was exposed to things when they were not around), they made the determination that I could handle it before allowing me to play it (or view it, as in the case of most of the movies I was watching at that age). I tended to be exposed to a lot of things at an age lower than that recommended by the rating, but it wasn't due to lack of attention to the content. Knowing this, I also know that every child is different, and therefore what they should be exposed to is also different. I hope that my child will be mature enough to handle GTA: San Andreas before she is 17 (though she may never care to play it in the first place), but if I don't believe she is, I will certainly prevent her from playing it when I can, despite the fact that there's little doubt it will be in my house (and yes, I am prepared to keep much of my video game and DVD collection under lock and key, if only to keep her from playing with them as an infant in the near future).
It's not good that we have to think for 20 minutes to remember any intelligent minority game characters.
Try thinking about intelligent game characters in general. Your average game character, if given any personality, is more along the lines of Duke Nukem than Gordon Freeman (who never speaks, but we can suppose to be smart because of where he works...). Not to mention that we have an awful lot of animals and weird anime characters, with the latter often causing us to have a hard time determining sex, let alone intelligence and race.