I'm glad that someone else understands that the stripping nude thing was much more significant than most people think. This was not simply about stripping them naked and embarassing them. It was about humiliating and degrading them in the worst way they could come up with. They took a cultural perspective and found the worst acts they could perform on them to break them down psychologically.
This was psychological torture. It was not simply pointing at their genitals. Besides, as noted above, prisoners WERE killed. Dogs were set loose on them while they were defenseless. It is much easier for Westerners to empathize with Nicholas Berg, because you can relate to him. Hell, even if we knew the NAMES of the Iraqi prisoners, many of us probably wouldn't be able to even pronounce them properly. A human life is a human life, and lives are being taken on every side. There isn't much of a better or worse at this point.
You are correct, but the biggest difference is in the number of handguns. America has about 9-10 times the population of Canada, but in that chart 63 times the number of handguns. You can get rifles fairly easy here (hunting), but handguns and now bullets (for any gun) are harder to get here than in the US.
I've always been of the opinion that there are more guns in a major US city (say New York or LA) than there are in all of Canada.
I'm not totally sure, but if you're looking for "hot man potential" or want to encourage guys to realize their "hot man potential", this probably isn't the best place to start. We are not to be encouraged in this area!;P
Ummm... the story is obviously about the US game market. It hasn't even been released here. The North American rights were only purchased by Eidos after its release in Europe and the AO rating was also only applied very recently. I suppose this is why Eidos only mentioned it for release as an online download in their initial press release.
I also have concerns about Sony's ability to build durable gaming products. With PS1, the first generation had overheating problems and problems with the laser. With PS2, people report that it scratches their discs (especially if placed standing upright), and also problems with the laser.
Frankly, I've NEVER had any problem with any Nintendo hardware, but I've had numerous problems with Playstation hardware. I definitely won't pay $250 for something that I will always have to be afraid of breaking just by bouncing it around.
I pretty much agree. These guys are working off of an ESTABLISHED game design. They won't be changing it. I'm guessing they are doing this to get some familiarity with programming games (for PC, Gamecube and Xbox). Why is that a bad thing? They are using a design that works and figuring out how to maintain that design while building around it.
This isn't about making a new super-brilliant game, it's learning about game development by using a game that they really enjoy, and we'll get to play it for free. I say it's win-win for everyone.
Are you saying it's bad to combat P2P piracy? Slashdotters shouldn't care, right--after all, they don't illegally pirate. Right?
I've been buying from the iTunes store since it came out. There is no valid reason whatsoever to pirate an artists' works on Kazaa and eMule. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.
How about that P2P networks aren't just restricted to the US?
Here in Canada, the music industry called for a levy on CD-Rs and MP3 players and they got it, but now we've got the right to download and share files as a result. They wanted the levy, they've got it. Now as part of the bargain, I get to download all of their music I want. If they get in the way of that, I want to know what the consequence for them will be, because I was/am paying them money for something I never did in the first place (copying and distributing music CDs on CD-Rs).
It is pretty damn hard to find, and it's apparently out of print now. Lots of large sites don't even have it listed (to say it's out of stock) any more. It won't cost them anything to release the guide now, since there aren't any new copies around anyway.
I'm going to have to resort to Ebay, but it's been a bit difficult finding a reliable seller shipping to Canada...
Since when does the RIAA beg? It commands, it guilts, it sues, it takes. The RIAA (and please remember which companies comprise it so they can't hide behind that acronym) believes that it has a right to your money, because they think they control music. Even if you only hear it in passing on someone else's radio, if you hear any music it must be theirs, and you have to pay something.
They can't seem to understand that there is any use other use for P2P or CD-Rs than copying their music, so as a Canadian I pay money for CD-Rs that I've never used to copy (which is legal anyway) or distribute music. Of course, the CRIA now want it so that copying and sharing isn't legal, while also increasing the levy. I have to wonder if this price hike will be brought to Canadian music services, as we really are better off exercising the right to copy and share given to us by this damn levy.
I do notice that many of the games considered true classics, which we still want to play now are Nintendo games. The Mario, Zelda, Metroid etc. series on each system are still great games and great examples of their genres, whereas many of the current blockbuster games tend to have sequels released that better them, and the original is replaced. (eg Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo, Tony Hawk etc.)
It seems to me however, that the N64 may be the last generation of Nintendo games that have this classic status. I like Nintendo's GC games, but they don't feel like classics any more to me. They seem to have fallen prey to that same "improve on existing game" bug that is so rampant now. Can anyone tell me which (if any) of Nintendo's GC games you would consider a classic? Well, Metroid Prime maybe, but that too is getting a sequel...
Yes, some games have objectionable content (Manhunt or Soldier of Fortune come to mind), but this is a very small minority of games. There are an extremely small number of games that come even close to having the graphic violence of your average summer action movie or slasher flick. In fact, I personally find ACTUAL blood and violence as shown on TV newscasts (or those captured on camera, something attacks shows) much more disturbing as it exploits real violence and suffering for shock value.
My point (and Lowenstein's, I think) is that the average videogame doesn't really have that much in the way of graphic violence. The media tends to take one or two examples and blow them out of proportion, because it is easier to incite people against what they don't understand (currently videogames). The violence that does exist just isn't nearly as bad as the few extreme examples.
It's not old people suck, it's older people don't understand younger people and always think they are going down some wrong path because they don't think it's the same path they took. This is true for every generation, and perhaps always will be.
Far Cry in High Res, with effects on pushes graphics cards pretty damn hard. Besides which, there's also the general sense of comfort in knowing that your rig will handle Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 better than anything else you could get (right now).
Besides, the people who buy this will likely also have huge expensive monitors, CPUs, ridiculous amounts of RAM etc. The idea of exploiting all the other parts of one's rig to their fullest potential is also a good feeling. Or at least it was, when I wasn't way behind the curve like I am now.
Besides, why is violent crime our only concern? What about overall violent, antisocial or aggressive behavior that is not criminal? I think the impact of violent games is more likely to be much more subtle than turning a teenager into a mass murderer (dylan and klebold aside).
Violent crime isn't the only concern, it's just the one that is easiest to get hard data for. It also happnes to be obviously directly harmful to society. Most violent behaviour in general is criminal, and any real increase in violent behaviour should result in increased numbers in violent crime.
I would like clarification on what you mean exactly by antisocial or aggressive behaviours that are not criminal (please provide examples).
I'm not sure what your crime rate and video games argument is. Do you honestly think that you can point to media as the sole explanatory factor for something as multi-faceted and complex as the rise/fall of violent crime?
Actually, what I am trying to point out is that media can not be the sole explanatory factor in rise or fall of violent crime. I am trying to point out that the effect of violent media compared to many other more critical factors (social, economic, political etc.) is practically NIL. People keep hearing about how games get more realistic and violent and more kids are playing them. Then they maybe turn on the news and there's a report of some gang-realted murders, and think "things are getting worse, games are part of the problem".
I hear it from my parents, from older people around me especially, thinking that things are worse than they've ever been and they're getting worse. But violent crime is dropping, and has been for quite a while. Then there's always the argument that even if we aren't committing more violent crime we are still more aggressive towards each other in everyday life. If this is true (and how could you actually prove this?), it is STILL more likely that the other things mentioned are a bigger factor than games.
As for the control for mere excitement in the study, (this is directly from the study): "Our findings do not rule out the possibility that under some circumstances violent video game effects on subsequent aggressive behavior might be mediated by increased feelings of hostility or by general arousal effects. Indeed, GAAM explicitly notes that thoughts, feelings, and arousal are intricately interconnected, sometimes to such an extent that they can't be disentangled." They are essentially saying that the very formula they used to calculate the aggression itself says that excitement can not necessarily be accounted for.
They keep saying, I won't admit there's a problem until I see overwhelming evidence that "proves" it. The evidence is there, but gamers (and game publishers for that matter) have a vested interest in ignoring it.
The evidence is NOT there. You INFER it from the studies showing short term spikes in aggression/excitement, and assume that short term behaviour has to have long term effects. Hasn't there already been plenty of time for these long term effects to emerge (since Wolfenstein, the game in that APA study has been out for over 12 years now)? If not then how long? What type of behaviour should we be looking for? And IF it doesn't manifest itself in behaviour, what is the problem?
See a previous response I wrote to this article here. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the issues I bring up. That article shows up all the time because it is readily available, but it is not a good one in my opinion.
What you're not getting is that the enjoyment is not ALL about the violence. Most of us are grounded enough in reality that we realize that we are not actually shooting people, and it becomes more of a skill testing exercise than anything else. The violence is only therebecause it is something that is understood fairly easily, something being there and then not being there. The concept of death and destruction are things that we learn about fairly early on. That's not a bad thing. You need to understand that things die and that its not good to truly realize that murder is bad.
Have you seen what researchers consider to be aggressive behaviour in those studies? Some of the dumbest things imaginable, and also attributable to just being excited (or frustrated if it's a bad game). That is the point of most games, to make you excited. Pretty much every study I've seen has participants being tested shortly after playing the game, when they are still excited. Maybe you can point me to a few studies that show people testing appreciably more aggressively long-term (ie games and only games are making people more fundamentally aggressive and/or violent). I would be very interested to see them, and be proven wrong.
Besides which, why is aggression necesarily always a bad thing? Consider that Canada and various parts of Europe (some countries, such as Germany, have censorship laws) have access to EXACTLY the same media and in some cases are even more lenient about it (many movies rated R in the US are 14a or lower in Canada), and their violent crime rates are appreciably lower than in the US. Also, violent crime rates have been dropping in both the US and Canada for at least the last 5+ reported years (from FBI statistics). So if videogames have such a negative effect, and they're now more widely available and explicit than they ever were before, where's the serious harm to society? I still see people killing each other for all the reasons they've always killed each other (love, money, power, sociopathy).
I would suggest that people just look at violent crime rates, which have been dropping across North America for several years now. This at a time when games are more prominent and "realistic" than ever before. Not that I'm saying games don't have any effect, but that any effect it does have is nowhere near where the people who use words like "killographic" would have you believe, and is not necessarily even negative.
I would suggest that the reason this is so memorable to you is because the game's reaction to your actions was totally different from what you had intended. You had your own story going (like you don't use excessive force), but the game's story still said you had used too much force.
I think that particular instance is a bit of a bug, or possibly a reprimand for using ANY kind of force. After all, you never know if your tranq darts hit someone in the eye or neck or something. He seems to suggest totally avoiding the enemy wherever possible (which is why he praises you if you choose a lock pick from him). I also happened to encounter this, even when I prevented even the UNATCO guys from killing anyone.
Still I think it's a credit to just how much stuff you can do in the game and how deeply it draws you in that you notice things like this. For example of other things you can do, I killed Maggie Chow in her apartment with a knife then tossed her body out the window (to fall something like 14 stories). When I got down to ground level, the robot on patrol started shooting me even though it should've had no idea that I was the one who had killed her. That's not the kind of question that would come up in DX: Invisible War, with its crappy small levels and pathetic AI.
Now, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any story in a game, far from it, I like stories in games, but the most memorable story is the one that you create by yourself while playing the game.
For example, in Deus Ex, which had its own great story, I created my own story by the way I played it. The first time I played through, I would knock out UNATCO agents, until it became more difficult and I started killing them. Then, in France, you actually meet the parents of a UNATCO agent, and the father gives you info you can use against them. If you keep bugging him he says something like: "I've helped you kill my own son, isn't that enough for you?" For the rest of that level I only used tranquilizer darts on the agents. Sometimes, I play through killing everybody, or only harming those who actually attack me.
This can be applied to other games in other ways, like when you grow attached to characters besides the main ones and use them all the time (RPG, strategy games), and even your style in a fighting game (say if you performed a particularly cool combo in a certain situation, or if you can use moves no one else does effectively). The more actions that a game allows you to use to overcome its obstacles, the more you can tell your own story in the game. Thus while there's a larger more linear story going one, you define your own little story by the way you play. The more (effective) actions you have at your disposal, the more "nuanced" the player-created "story" is.
Story is great, but great gameplay allows those who don't like the story (because it's bad or just not to their taste) to enjoy themselves anyway. Focussing on gameplay before story will still result in beter sales.
It's probably the drop in PS2 sales. The way it works is that the sale of a console tends to spur a relatively large number of game purchases. What I mean is that when a new console is bought, people will tend to buy 3 or more games with it, plus controllers and memory cards and whatever else. They'll also buy more games than average for the first few months or so. After this though, most people buy at a rate of a game a month or less.
That's why number of systems sold is a good indicator of the number of games that will be sold. Of course, it is good games in the first place that spur console sales, but each console sale tends to be worth a certain number of immediate game purchases.
I agree with you. When people play together, it should be in the name of fun. When one player decides that his winning is more fun than everyone else's then he is an asshole. Worse, when cheesing, it often isn't even about fun for them, it's about kill counts or ego. I don't see spawn campers laughing a lot, bragging yes, but no real joy.
And this guy is a hypocritical prick too. He tells people to get better at the games and then says, "In Soul Calibur II, I use only two moves with Raphael--not because I hate variety but because I don't have the time to study each character's wide array of attacks and defenses"
In other words, it's only you that needs to get better. And I'll bet that once you do get better, he'll want to play another game or stop playing entirely. He doesn't like whining because it annoys him, but he cheeses even though he knows it annoys people. What a prick. Exactly the type of person that ruins online games, the type of person adressed in this Penny Arcade comic.
Exactly as above, but I'll add one comment: There are millions of copies of famous works of art, on postcards and lithographs and so on. No one is saying these are valuable, but the originals are. Thus, original cartridges for old systems are increasingly expensive as are old arcade cabinets in good condition. I imagine that if you could get ahold of some of the pre-production run copies of a good old game (say the Mario or Zelda series), they'd be worth something.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that someone else understands that the stripping nude thing was much more significant than most people think. This was not simply about stripping them naked and embarassing them. It was about humiliating and degrading them in the worst way they could come up with. They took a cultural perspective and found the worst acts they could perform on them to break them down psychologically.
This was psychological torture. It was not simply pointing at their genitals. Besides, as noted above, prisoners WERE killed. Dogs were set loose on them while they were defenseless. It is much easier for Westerners to empathize with Nicholas Berg, because you can relate to him. Hell, even if we knew the NAMES of the Iraqi prisoners, many of us probably wouldn't be able to even pronounce them properly. A human life is a human life, and lives are being taken on every side. There isn't much of a better or worse at this point.
You are correct, but the biggest difference is in the number of handguns. America has about 9-10 times the population of Canada, but in that chart 63 times the number of handguns. You can get rifles fairly easy here (hunting), but handguns and now bullets (for any gun) are harder to get here than in the US.
I've always been of the opinion that there are more guns in a major US city (say New York or LA) than there are in all of Canada.
I'm not totally sure, but if you're looking for "hot man potential" or want to encourage guys to realize their "hot man potential", this probably isn't the best place to start. We are not to be encouraged in this area! ;P
Ummm... the story is obviously about the US game market. It hasn't even been released here. The North American rights were only purchased by Eidos after its release in Europe and the AO rating was also only applied very recently. I suppose this is why Eidos only mentioned it for release as an online download in their initial press release.
Since it's pretty late/early, I'm hoping that my constant reloading to see each of the splash pages doesn't contribute to the Slashdot effect...
But then again, there's only 2 damn screenshots, so there really isn't much there to Slashdot...
I also have concerns about Sony's ability to build durable gaming products. With PS1, the first generation had overheating problems and problems with the laser. With PS2, people report that it scratches their discs (especially if placed standing upright), and also problems with the laser.
Frankly, I've NEVER had any problem with any Nintendo hardware, but I've had numerous problems with Playstation hardware. I definitely won't pay $250 for something that I will always have to be afraid of breaking just by bouncing it around.
I pretty much agree. These guys are working off of an ESTABLISHED game design. They won't be changing it. I'm guessing they are doing this to get some familiarity with programming games (for PC, Gamecube and Xbox). Why is that a bad thing? They are using a design that works and figuring out how to maintain that design while building around it.
This isn't about making a new super-brilliant game, it's learning about game development by using a game that they really enjoy, and we'll get to play it for free. I say it's win-win for everyone.
Are you saying it's bad to combat P2P piracy? Slashdotters shouldn't care, right--after all, they don't illegally pirate. Right?
I've been buying from the iTunes store since it came out. There is no valid reason whatsoever to pirate an artists' works on Kazaa and eMule. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.
How about that P2P networks aren't just restricted to the US?
Here in Canada, the music industry called for a levy on CD-Rs and MP3 players and they got it, but now we've got the right to download and share files as a result. They wanted the levy, they've got it. Now as part of the bargain, I get to download all of their music I want. If they get in the way of that, I want to know what the consequence for them will be, because I was/am paying them money for something I never did in the first place (copying and distributing music CDs on CD-Rs).
It is pretty damn hard to find, and it's apparently out of print now. Lots of large sites don't even have it listed (to say it's out of stock) any more. It won't cost them anything to release the guide now, since there aren't any new copies around anyway.
I'm going to have to resort to Ebay, but it's been a bit difficult finding a reliable seller shipping to Canada...
They're begging for us to pay for music.
Since when does the RIAA beg? It commands, it guilts, it sues, it takes. The RIAA (and please remember which companies comprise it so they can't hide behind that acronym) believes that it has a right to your money, because they think they control music. Even if you only hear it in passing on someone else's radio, if you hear any music it must be theirs, and you have to pay something.
They can't seem to understand that there is any use other use for P2P or CD-Rs than copying their music, so as a Canadian I pay money for CD-Rs that I've never used to copy (which is legal anyway) or distribute music. Of course, the CRIA now want it so that copying and sharing isn't legal, while also increasing the levy. I have to wonder if this price hike will be brought to Canadian music services, as we really are better off exercising the right to copy and share given to us by this damn levy.
I do notice that many of the games considered true classics, which we still want to play now are Nintendo games. The Mario, Zelda, Metroid etc. series on each system are still great games and great examples of their genres, whereas many of the current blockbuster games tend to have sequels released that better them, and the original is replaced. (eg Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo, Tony Hawk etc.)
It seems to me however, that the N64 may be the last generation of Nintendo games that have this classic status. I like Nintendo's GC games, but they don't feel like classics any more to me. They seem to have fallen prey to that same "improve on existing game" bug that is so rampant now. Can anyone tell me which (if any) of Nintendo's GC games you would consider a classic? Well, Metroid Prime maybe, but that too is getting a sequel...
Nokia removed the ONLY reason to own an N-Gage, which was to go out and do some Sidetalkin'!
I mean really, with the QD, all you're left with is a fairly generic phone that plays games on a tiny screen.
Yes, some games have objectionable content (Manhunt or Soldier of Fortune come to mind), but this is a very small minority of games. There are an extremely small number of games that come even close to having the graphic violence of your average summer action movie or slasher flick. In fact, I personally find ACTUAL blood and violence as shown on TV newscasts (or those captured on camera, something attacks shows) much more disturbing as it exploits real violence and suffering for shock value.
My point (and Lowenstein's, I think) is that the average videogame doesn't really have that much in the way of graphic violence. The media tends to take one or two examples and blow them out of proportion, because it is easier to incite people against what they don't understand (currently videogames). The violence that does exist just isn't nearly as bad as the few extreme examples.
It's not old people suck, it's older people don't understand younger people and always think they are going down some wrong path because they don't think it's the same path they took. This is true for every generation, and perhaps always will be.
Far Cry in High Res, with effects on pushes graphics cards pretty damn hard. Besides which, there's also the general sense of comfort in knowing that your rig will handle Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 better than anything else you could get (right now).
Besides, the people who buy this will likely also have huge expensive monitors, CPUs, ridiculous amounts of RAM etc. The idea of exploiting all the other parts of one's rig to their fullest potential is also a good feeling. Or at least it was, when I wasn't way behind the curve like I am now.
Besides, why is violent crime our only concern? What about overall violent, antisocial or aggressive behavior that is not criminal? I think the impact of violent games is more likely to be much more subtle than turning a teenager into a mass murderer (dylan and klebold aside).
Violent crime isn't the only concern, it's just the one that is easiest to get hard data for. It also happnes to be obviously directly harmful to society. Most violent behaviour in general is criminal, and any real increase in violent behaviour should result in increased numbers in violent crime.
I would like clarification on what you mean exactly by antisocial or aggressive behaviours that are not criminal (please provide examples).
I'm not sure what your crime rate and video games argument is. Do you honestly think that you can point to media as the sole explanatory factor for something as multi-faceted and complex as the rise/fall of violent crime?
Actually, what I am trying to point out is that media can not be the sole explanatory factor in rise or fall of violent crime. I am trying to point out that the effect of violent media compared to many other more critical factors (social, economic, political etc.) is practically NIL. People keep hearing about how games get more realistic and violent and more kids are playing them. Then they maybe turn on the news and there's a report of some gang-realted murders, and think "things are getting worse, games are part of the problem".
I hear it from my parents, from older people around me especially, thinking that things are worse than they've ever been and they're getting worse. But violent crime is dropping, and has been for quite a while. Then there's always the argument that even if we aren't committing more violent crime we are still more aggressive towards each other in everyday life. If this is true (and how could you actually prove this?), it is STILL more likely that the other things mentioned are a bigger factor than games.
As for the control for mere excitement in the study, (this is directly from the study): "Our findings do not rule out the possibility that under some circumstances violent video game effects on subsequent aggressive behavior might be mediated by increased feelings of hostility or by general arousal effects. Indeed, GAAM explicitly notes that thoughts, feelings, and arousal are intricately interconnected, sometimes to such an extent that they can't be disentangled." They are essentially saying that the very formula they used to calculate the aggression itself says that excitement can not necessarily be accounted for.
They keep saying, I won't admit there's a problem until I see overwhelming evidence that "proves" it. The evidence is there, but gamers (and game publishers for that matter) have a vested interest in ignoring it.
The evidence is NOT there. You INFER it from the studies showing short term spikes in aggression/excitement, and assume that short term behaviour has to have long term effects. Hasn't there already been plenty of time for these long term effects to emerge (since Wolfenstein, the game in that APA study has been out for over 12 years now)? If not then how long? What type of behaviour should we be looking for? And IF it doesn't manifest itself in behaviour, what is the problem?
See a previous response I wrote to this article here. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the issues I bring up. That article shows up all the time because it is readily available, but it is not a good one in my opinion.
What you're not getting is that the enjoyment is not ALL about the violence. Most of us are grounded enough in reality that we realize that we are not actually shooting people, and it becomes more of a skill testing exercise than anything else. The violence is only therebecause it is something that is understood fairly easily, something being there and then not being there. The concept of death and destruction are things that we learn about fairly early on. That's not a bad thing. You need to understand that things die and that its not good to truly realize that murder is bad.
Have you seen what researchers consider to be aggressive behaviour in those studies? Some of the dumbest things imaginable, and also attributable to just being excited (or frustrated if it's a bad game). That is the point of most games, to make you excited. Pretty much every study I've seen has participants being tested shortly after playing the game, when they are still excited. Maybe you can point me to a few studies that show people testing appreciably more aggressively long-term (ie games and only games are making people more fundamentally aggressive and/or violent). I would be very interested to see them, and be proven wrong.
Besides which, why is aggression necesarily always a bad thing? Consider that Canada and various parts of Europe (some countries, such as Germany, have censorship laws) have access to EXACTLY the same media and in some cases are even more lenient about it (many movies rated R in the US are 14a or lower in Canada), and their violent crime rates are appreciably lower than in the US. Also, violent crime rates have been dropping in both the US and Canada for at least the last 5+ reported years (from FBI statistics). So if videogames have such a negative effect, and they're now more widely available and explicit than they ever were before, where's the serious harm to society? I still see people killing each other for all the reasons they've always killed each other (love, money, power, sociopathy).
I would suggest that people just look at violent crime rates, which have been dropping across North America for several years now. This at a time when games are more prominent and "realistic" than ever before. Not that I'm saying games don't have any effect, but that any effect it does have is nowhere near where the people who use words like "killographic" would have you believe, and is not necessarily even negative.
I would suggest that the reason this is so memorable to you is because the game's reaction to your actions was totally different from what you had intended. You had your own story going (like you don't use excessive force), but the game's story still said you had used too much force.
I think that particular instance is a bit of a bug, or possibly a reprimand for using ANY kind of force. After all, you never know if your tranq darts hit someone in the eye or neck or something. He seems to suggest totally avoiding the enemy wherever possible (which is why he praises you if you choose a lock pick from him). I also happened to encounter this, even when I prevented even the UNATCO guys from killing anyone.
Still I think it's a credit to just how much stuff you can do in the game and how deeply it draws you in that you notice things like this. For example of other things you can do, I killed Maggie Chow in her apartment with a knife then tossed her body out the window (to fall something like 14 stories). When I got down to ground level, the robot on patrol started shooting me even though it should've had no idea that I was the one who had killed her. That's not the kind of question that would come up in DX: Invisible War, with its crappy small levels and pathetic AI.
Now, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any story in a game, far from it, I like stories in games, but the most memorable story is the one that you create by yourself while playing the game.
For example, in Deus Ex, which had its own great story, I created my own story by the way I played it. The first time I played through, I would knock out UNATCO agents, until it became more difficult and I started killing them. Then, in France, you actually meet the parents of a UNATCO agent, and the father gives you info you can use against them. If you keep bugging him he says something like: "I've helped you kill my own son, isn't that enough for you?" For the rest of that level I only used tranquilizer darts on the agents. Sometimes, I play through killing everybody, or only harming those who actually attack me.
This can be applied to other games in other ways, like when you grow attached to characters besides the main ones and use them all the time (RPG, strategy games), and even your style in a fighting game (say if you performed a particularly cool combo in a certain situation, or if you can use moves no one else does effectively). The more actions that a game allows you to use to overcome its obstacles, the more you can tell your own story in the game. Thus while there's a larger more linear story going one, you define your own little story by the way you play. The more (effective) actions you have at your disposal, the more "nuanced" the player-created "story" is.
Story is great, but great gameplay allows those who don't like the story (because it's bad or just not to their taste) to enjoy themselves anyway. Focussing on gameplay before story will still result in beter sales.
It's probably the drop in PS2 sales. The way it works is that the sale of a console tends to spur a relatively large number of game purchases. What I mean is that when a new console is bought, people will tend to buy 3 or more games with it, plus controllers and memory cards and whatever else. They'll also buy more games than average for the first few months or so. After this though, most people buy at a rate of a game a month or less.
That's why number of systems sold is a good indicator of the number of games that will be sold. Of course, it is good games in the first place that spur console sales, but each console sale tends to be worth a certain number of immediate game purchases.
I agree with you. When people play together, it should be in the name of fun. When one player decides that his winning is more fun than everyone else's then he is an asshole. Worse, when cheesing, it often isn't even about fun for them, it's about kill counts or ego. I don't see spawn campers laughing a lot, bragging yes, but no real joy.
And this guy is a hypocritical prick too. He tells people to get better at the games and then says,
"In Soul Calibur II, I use only two moves with Raphael--not because I hate variety but because I don't have the time to study each character's wide array of attacks and defenses"
In other words, it's only you that needs to get better. And I'll bet that once you do get better, he'll want to play another game or stop playing entirely. He doesn't like whining because it annoys him, but he cheeses even though he knows it annoys people. What a prick. Exactly the type of person that ruins online games, the type of person adressed in this Penny Arcade comic.
Exactly as above, but I'll add one comment: There are millions of copies of famous works of art, on postcards and lithographs and so on. No one is saying these are valuable, but the originals are. Thus, original cartridges for old systems are increasingly expensive as are old arcade cabinets in good condition. I imagine that if you could get ahold of some of the pre-production run copies of a good old game (say the Mario or Zelda series), they'd be worth something.