But on the other hand, apparently dedicating a whole page to some Manga character or obscure comic book sidekick is, of course, relevant and worth the space, right?
Random example include
- Guts from Berserk, who obviously deserves a page of his own. (Along with a couple of other characters that get their own pages.)
- Penelope Pitstop, Muttley, and generally the whole cast of Wacky Races. Because, you know, it's not enough to know that there was a plot-less and story-less slapstick cartoon series that took the piss out of car racing, you need a whole page about each unidimensional character embodying a stereotype .
- Dino from the Flintstones, along with every single other character, because the fucking dog of a cartoon show not centered around said dog is notable enough to have its own page on Wikipedia
- Pants Ant. Really? Who the fuck is Pants Ant? Oh, right, it appeared in exactly 4 comic books nobody ever heard about, between 1998 and 2001, and didn't influence anything. Right, silly me, that must pass the notability standards.
- Minsc from Baldur's Gate. A character only appearing in a secondary role in a computer game, and memorable only by being batshit crazy and talking to his "miniature giant space hamster" and asking him for advice. And he's not even the only one. There are pages upon pages about every single fucking character ever used in a D&D Forgotten Realms setting. (And Greyhawk, and Ravenloft, and so on...)
- Bayonetta, the character of one action game, obviously deserving her own page separate from that of the game itself. And for that matter Tifa from FF7, and Aeris of "why the fuck can't I use a Phoenix Down NOW?" fame, i.e., a character which didn't even make it past the first CD in FF7, etc. And such fighting game characters as Sophitia from Soul Calibur, or Kitana and Mileena from Mortal Kombat, who, you know, didn't actually have more of a role than generic combatant and drool fodder for geeks even in the movie. And generally every single female character that some editor whacked off to. Because, you know, a character that even the game makers couldn't be arsed to give more than the mandatory half-arsed description or a personality, is something that I need a whole page in an encyclopaedia for.
Etc. etc. etc.
I'm sorry, but if _those_ make the cut as notable enough to have their own page, then so does OMM. Note that I'm not even saying to delete those too. But the circle-jerk gang at Wiki needs to choose one or the other, really.
Yep. That was actually one of the incidents I had in mind when I said that in that universe technology doesn't win wars, technology is the weak link that loses wars. A high-tech army of droids has a central computer as a weak link, as is disabled by a kid shooting in the right point.
For a start, SF routinely relies on technologies that are very likely impossible. E.g., the quantum entanglement faster-than-light communication in Mass Effect 2 is flat out getting it wrong what "entanglement" means and does. It can't work that way. E.g., the lightsabers as a laser beam that somehow loops on itself and somehow bounces on other laser beams, is very much bogus.
Second, in fantasy the "magic" is routinely subject to rules and even calculations. In a lot of fantasy works, it _is_ basically a form of technology.
Third, fantasy doesn't really need much magic, or indeed at all. In LOTR for example -- and I use that not just because it's the topic, but also as _the_ work of fantasy that started the whole frikken fantasy genre -- there is actually very little magic and virtually none that actually impacts the main plot beyond that enchantment on the ring. The only ones who can do any magic at all, are basically angels, like Gandalf. They're few and they use spells very sparingly, if at all. I mean, what spells does Gandalf use? Making his staff glow? When he wants to help against the orcs, he charges with the sword on his horse, not chuck a fireball.
Actually, SW is pretty much fantasy any way you want to look at it. It's got some SF props, but otherwise it pretty much tells a story of a noble knight, or rather son thereof, fighting the usurper of the throne and returning the kingdom (ahem, sorry, "republic") to the God-given (err, force-given) order. It's pretty much a 12'th century chivalric story, given some SF props.
And it proves that old hookey religions and ancient weapons are more than a match for a good blaster, the only one who puts a missile down the Death-Star's tailpipe does so by innate skill and faith instead of a targeting computer, hi-tech walker tanks are defeated by ewoks with sticks and stones, and the evil Emperor isn't killed by modern weapons but by the old knight Anakin coming to his senses, etc. Pretty much wherever you look, battles aren't won by technology, but by the l33t knights, and in fact technology is often the weak link that _loses_ a battle. It is very much anti-progress, even if set in a technologically advanced but otherwise very much stagnant world.
Well, a lot of things that aren't surprising, also aren't true. Especially when it comes to people, stereotypes and "common sense". That's why we want to see them confirmed by actual data.
In particular, here I'd really want to know which direction the causation goes. Because it's really the important bit.
- Do people generally get stressed by having to deal with lots of other people?
OR
- A person who is insecure and socially-anxious, _because_ they are insecure and socially-anxious, add large amounts of imaginary friends to a list to feel less isolated?
However, the claim he was answering to was "the Bible, the world's first and oldest printed book", which is clearly and provably false, not "the first that was printed cheaply enough for Europeans".
What part about the movable-type printing press -- albeit with more expensive ceramic letters -- being invented by the 1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China, did you fail to understand? Basically before being snarky and condescending, do make sure that you're not the one who's the ignorant idiot.
If it makes it any better, sounds like some of the guys in TFA didn't either.
E.g., at #15 some guy created a web-site to do the proposal for him to "KC" in 2006, but "KC" first stumbled upon that site in 2009. Apparently she didn't even know the site existed for 3 years. As half-arsed efforts go, I'll say that deserves at least a honourable mention.
And exactly how does it help satire anyway? It seems to me like one could make a satire on the theme of Berlusconi being a mind-controlling alien without repeated and obsessive returns to how that makes it ok to kill him. Remove the incitations to killing him from it, and you still have the same satire. Well, and still not particularly funny, but adding some violent rhetoric doesn't make it any funnier, it just makes it distasteful.
And frankly, I don't know if Palin in particular and one particular killing are linked, but the tone of political mud-slinging in the USA is not something most of us outside the USA admire. Drawing crosshairs on maps and opponents homes and all the hate rhetoric is something that adds... what? Why don't those guys and gal just say what their party will do for the voter, instead of how their opponents are traitors and need to be shot?
And frankly, even Loughner, since you mention him, seems like a poster child for a right wingnut. Complete with stuff like not having to take "federalist" laws, ranting about the return to a gold standard, and such touching woowoo CT views as that the government mind-controls the people via neuro-linguistic programming. Yes, he was crazy and as deranged as to hold a mortal grudge over not getting the answer he wanted to a nonsense irrelevant question. But are you sure that it's ok to keep telling such nutcases that a segment of the population are traitors and need to be shot? Because it's not clear to me at all.
By sheer virtue of having a large population, there are 2.2 million schizophrenics in the USA. (Note that I'm not picking on the USA for that. All countries have them and a 0.81% prevalence rate isn't particularly high.) Add retards, Lyme disease victims, etc, and you just have a few millions who aren't particularly good at judging stuff. Exactly what is gained by hammering into their heads that some people are traitors and need to be shot and drawing crosshairs on maps? It seems to me like it's only a matter of time until someone whose line between reality and fantasy is blurred anyway, acts upon that information.
Kinda what I was thinking. Especially a text which doesn't have any smiley or anything, and, as far as my piss-poor Italian allows, can read just as well as a schizophrenic's hate tirade. I mean, much as I would like to believe that a text going on about how someone isn't human and can hypnotize the masses is obviously a parody, you could say the same about the contrail conspiracy theory and yet some dolts out there believe it in all earnest.
The thing is, some people _do_ go nuts now and then and start believing all sorts of highly illogical stuff right before they go and shoot someone. A text whose basic and repeated gist seems to be "I never was for killing another human, but I want to kill the head of the government, and it's ok to kill him because he's a mind-controling alien" would probably get one investigated in the USA or most other countries.
I kind of have sympathy for him, and see how being run by a douchebag using his media monopoly to keep himself in power would drive someone to despair. But FFS there are better ways to go about it without sounding like a delusional rant about wanting to kill him. Or at least, you know, a couple of winking smileys or something.
Really, I wish it was even like any kind of modern code... even code from the Daily WTF.
It's actually a mess of spaghetti code, where some gene works by misusing another gene in perverse ways. And one gene ends up controlling hair color, blood clotting, fight-or-flight response, _and_ sensitivity to pain and anesthetics. And some parts are both code and data (in as much as you can call a bit of DNA either.) And, I kid you not, you actually have at least one bit of self-modifying code in your immune system.
(Not to mention, one which temporarily produces invalid DNA, to misuse a repair mechanism to do the modification for it. It's akin to using some obscure bug to force a bit to store a 2 instead of 0 or 1, in order to exploit a quirk in the memory parity circuitry. That kind of non-orthogonal programming.)
And some bugs which have been left unfixed for tens of millions of years... and we still do workarounds for. E.g., you actually have a gene that would have normally allowed you to synthesize as much vitamin C as you need, but it got broken in one of our very distant monkey ancestors. And since it was eating lots of fruits, there was no pressure to select the broken gene out.
It's actually not very surprising at all. If you look at, say, tooth implants, they require a dental hygiene taken to OCD extremes and have a MTBF of just a few years. Then an infection happens. Anything that goes through the skin can do just that.
I was going to say the same at first, but then it occurred to me that it's not like the other consoles and whatnot are exactly open, are they? Control freakery is the norm, call-home DRM and collecting information about your every move too, and let's not forget that Sony just removed an official feature in a firmware patch.
And then we have such historical cases as Nintendo in it's NES days. Good Lord! Not only they determined what you can publish for their console, but also how many units you're allowed to sell, how many cartridges must you buy from them (whether or not you actually sell that many copies of the game), _and_ you had to write off the right to make software for any other platform for two years for the privilege of publishing for the self-important Nintendo. Took a lawsuit to get that crap removed.
Frankly, I don't think Apple can be any worse than the rest of the gang even if they were to try to.
That is a very compelling case made, and not just on two data points. IIRC someone actually tracked Internet availability vs rape incidence by year and state, and it's a damn compelling case.
And I remember reading somewhere that violent crime actually goes down on the days they premiere violent movies in movie theatres. Apparently either for some people seeing it on the screen is a reasonable substitute for the real thing, or at the very least they can't be both watching the movie and outside mugging someone at the same time.
So, who knows? Maybe video games are doing us all a similar service. There must be someone out there who would have been the next Ted Bundy, if not for the fact that he's busy grinding his epic equipment in WoW or the last achievement in <insert brutal fps> instead.
Umm... so? One can be very biased against both, regardless of how one sorts them.
Plus, I'm not sure how that would mean anything for TFA. The Faux News thrust was just that an (imaginary and counter-factual) increase of the number of rapes can be attributed to video games. It was not that games cause an increase in rapes at the expense of an equal decrease in the number of murders. So agreeing or not agreeing that some crimes are even worse, wouldn't really make any difference as long as one still agrees that rape is bad.
Or for that matter, the mass of people either queuing up at the security check or saying their goodbyes before it. If I were crazy enough to want to blow a lot of people up, forget the airplane, I'd blow up the line before the security check. With a bit of luck, you can actually nail more people than on most airplanes.
Hmm, I know... it means we need a pre-security check before we let people queue up for the security check. Wait. And a pre-pre-security check before it.
I'm off to sell the idea to the TSA. Something tells me they'll love it.
hat part right there makes it kinda obvious that you don't know what you're talking about.
Really? Well, I trust you'll enlighten me then.
I guess you're just one of those angry old men, who wish young lads would pick up a real instrument instead.
Ah, right, the appeal to motives fallacy. I was wondering when the usual fanboy bullshit pops up.
No, I never picked an instrument myself. I'm just sick and tired of the endless stream of bullshit that happens about those games. If you want to play a button-mashing game, fine, knock yourself out, but spare me the pretense that it's on par with an actual simulation like GT5 or, for that matter, such bullshit fallacies.
GH is not, and was never meant to be, an alternative to real instruments. It's just entertainment. Exactly like GT5. If it doesn't entertain you, don't play it.
I don't.
So far though, *everyone* I've actually seen playing the game has had fun with it.
And everyone I know that plays WoW or gets whipped by a domina, is enjoying it, or they wouldn't play it. That's such a content-free truism that it doesn't bring any actual information, except to grease the slide into the meat of the bullshit:
I know people who don't like the game. None of them tried playing. They looked at the controller, said "Yeah ok, that's retarded, I'm not touching that", and decided that they were apparently surrounded by retards. Your loss.
Ah, right, the standard "everyone is a clone of me, and if they don't like the same things, they never tried it and/or they're in denial" argument. 'Cause God knows it can't be even theoretically possible that different people actually like different things;)
If you mean the morality of it, I don't think you'll find many "liberal" perspectives that it's not so bad. In fact, just about the only ones who argue that there's any situation where the woman can't say no, are a subclass of the bible-thumping nutters, for whom God made the woman subordinate to their dick.
If you mean incidence or prevalence statistics, then opinions and political biases don't matter, only the numbers do. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the incidence has declined from about 2.4 per 1000 people in 1980 to about 0.4 per 1000 people, i.e., about six times. I don't see how any political bias can change that, short of going out and raping someone to make up for the difference.
Well, there still are lightgun shooters on rails like that, where you just point the gun at the screen, but otherwise the route and enemies popping up and all is pre-scripted and happens without any input from you.
Still, even then, an enemy falls over when you shoot it, reloads when you shoot outside the screen, the game pauses until you finish an enemy or faceplant, etc. And often you have other options too, like seeing your character duck behind cover when you press or release some key on the gun. It's still not quite the kind of interaction in Guitar Hero. If it were, the enemy would get shot in the head even if you aim at something else, you just wouldn't get the points.
But anyway, even for those games you mention, there's an important aspect: It's a phase we've largely outgrown. (Well, except for lightgun games and some porn games.)
I dunno, there's a whole industry of force-feedback steering wheels and pedals and whatnot to make it at least the same kind of thing. You know, you turn a wheel, the car turns.
And let me stress that part again: the car turns when _you_ turn the wheel. In other words, wake me up when such a game at least plays the tune _you_ play, instead of just making you press buttons on cue to a tune that keeps playing the same no matter what you do.
If you want a GT5 equivalent, let's call it Race Car Hero, it would involve watching a pre-recorded race that happens the same no matter what you do, and you just have to press the buttons you're told to press while watching it. But otherwise if you press right instead of left when told, you lose some points but the car on the screen still does the pre-recorded left turn.I think pretty much everyone would agree that such a game would be frakking retarded.
I'm not sure if Nintendo ever "got" games in the same way you do. Most of their history as a video game company was under Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was pretty much proud to never have played a video game and occasionally did disparaging remarks about RPG players or such.
Reginald Fils-Aime, who is President and COO of Nintendo of America, not only rose to that position during Yamauchi's time and in that corporate culture, but is a guy who comes from purely a marketing and sales background. The guy was marketing everything from toothpaste to beer to chinese takeout food before joining Nintendo, and at Nintendo he was pretty much just asked to build up their public image. And while he was undoubtedly good at that, I see nothing in his background to suggest that he ever "got" games as anything else than something that he has to sell.
I don't think he lost the point of games from the perspective of a gamer, as that he simply never had it to start with. He's just the guy who has to sell them and make money for the company, and he always was.
Well, you can certainly see the same going all the way to the ED, which apparently happened just because Statesman had that idea while playing a portable game.
But I'm not sure even if that was his vision or just a rationalization. We're talking the same guy who agreed that 6 slots is a fair price to make Hasten permanent in the early days, but then claimed it was an exploit in the ED. (Effectively turning everyone into a bug abuser.) His version of reality was... flexible, to say the least.
But what gets me is that even if I'm to believe that he had that kind of vision and liked that kind of gameplay... he still was unable to design a game even to that end. He couldn't just do the maths for how fast a power recharges or what DPS does a power set have. He blundered, and stumbled, and turned the knobs wildly between zero and eleven, and hoped something would work. I'm glad he at least liked that kind of gameplay, because that's how he played lead designer.
Heh, indeed. I grew up with a Sinclair ZX-81 and later ZX Spectrum. So at one point in 2000 or so I get a Spectrum emulator and look for some tape images online. So I see one particular game and go, "cool! I remember playing that one!" So I download it and play for a quarter of an hour and then it hits me, "I also remember I thought it sucks.":p
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But on the other hand, apparently dedicating a whole page to some Manga character or obscure comic book sidekick is, of course, relevant and worth the space, right?
Random example include
- Guts from Berserk, who obviously deserves a page of his own. (Along with a couple of other characters that get their own pages.)
- Brainy Smurf
- Penelope Pitstop, Muttley, and generally the whole cast of Wacky Races. Because, you know, it's not enough to know that there was a plot-less and story-less slapstick cartoon series that took the piss out of car racing, you need a whole page about each unidimensional character embodying a stereotype .
- Dino from the Flintstones, along with every single other character, because the fucking dog of a cartoon show not centered around said dog is notable enough to have its own page on Wikipedia
- Pants Ant. Really? Who the fuck is Pants Ant? Oh, right, it appeared in exactly 4 comic books nobody ever heard about, between 1998 and 2001, and didn't influence anything. Right, silly me, that must pass the notability standards.
- Minsc from Baldur's Gate. A character only appearing in a secondary role in a computer game, and memorable only by being batshit crazy and talking to his "miniature giant space hamster" and asking him for advice. And he's not even the only one. There are pages upon pages about every single fucking character ever used in a D&D Forgotten Realms setting. (And Greyhawk, and Ravenloft, and so on...)
- Bayonetta, the character of one action game, obviously deserving her own page separate from that of the game itself. And for that matter Tifa from FF7, and Aeris of "why the fuck can't I use a Phoenix Down NOW?" fame, i.e., a character which didn't even make it past the first CD in FF7, etc. And such fighting game characters as Sophitia from Soul Calibur, or Kitana and Mileena from Mortal Kombat, who, you know, didn't actually have more of a role than generic combatant and drool fodder for geeks even in the movie. And generally every single female character that some editor whacked off to. Because, you know, a character that even the game makers couldn't be arsed to give more than the mandatory half-arsed description or a personality, is something that I need a whole page in an encyclopaedia for.
Etc. etc. etc.
I'm sorry, but if _those_ make the cut as notable enough to have their own page, then so does OMM. Note that I'm not even saying to delete those too. But the circle-jerk gang at Wiki needs to choose one or the other, really.
Yep. That was actually one of the incidents I had in mind when I said that in that universe technology doesn't win wars, technology is the weak link that loses wars. A high-tech army of droids has a central computer as a weak link, as is disabled by a kid shooting in the right point.
That's actually IMHO an even worse criterion.
For a start, SF routinely relies on technologies that are very likely impossible. E.g., the quantum entanglement faster-than-light communication in Mass Effect 2 is flat out getting it wrong what "entanglement" means and does. It can't work that way. E.g., the lightsabers as a laser beam that somehow loops on itself and somehow bounces on other laser beams, is very much bogus.
Second, in fantasy the "magic" is routinely subject to rules and even calculations. In a lot of fantasy works, it _is_ basically a form of technology.
Third, fantasy doesn't really need much magic, or indeed at all. In LOTR for example -- and I use that not just because it's the topic, but also as _the_ work of fantasy that started the whole frikken fantasy genre -- there is actually very little magic and virtually none that actually impacts the main plot beyond that enchantment on the ring. The only ones who can do any magic at all, are basically angels, like Gandalf. They're few and they use spells very sparingly, if at all. I mean, what spells does Gandalf use? Making his staff glow? When he wants to help against the orcs, he charges with the sword on his horse, not chuck a fireball.
Heh, magic was sooo necessary for LOTR. Not.
Actually, SW is pretty much fantasy any way you want to look at it. It's got some SF props, but otherwise it pretty much tells a story of a noble knight, or rather son thereof, fighting the usurper of the throne and returning the kingdom (ahem, sorry, "republic") to the God-given (err, force-given) order. It's pretty much a 12'th century chivalric story, given some SF props.
And it proves that old hookey religions and ancient weapons are more than a match for a good blaster, the only one who puts a missile down the Death-Star's tailpipe does so by innate skill and faith instead of a targeting computer, hi-tech walker tanks are defeated by ewoks with sticks and stones, and the evil Emperor isn't killed by modern weapons but by the old knight Anakin coming to his senses, etc. Pretty much wherever you look, battles aren't won by technology, but by the l33t knights, and in fact technology is often the weak link that _loses_ a battle. It is very much anti-progress, even if set in a technologically advanced but otherwise very much stagnant world.
Well, a lot of things that aren't surprising, also aren't true. Especially when it comes to people, stereotypes and "common sense". That's why we want to see them confirmed by actual data.
In particular, here I'd really want to know which direction the causation goes. Because it's really the important bit.
- Do people generally get stressed by having to deal with lots of other people?
OR
- A person who is insecure and socially-anxious, _because_ they are insecure and socially-anxious, add large amounts of imaginary friends to a list to feel less isolated?
Or maybe a bit of both?
However, the claim he was answering to was "the Bible, the world's first and oldest printed book", which is clearly and provably false, not "the first that was printed cheaply enough for Europeans".
What part about the movable-type printing press -- albeit with more expensive ceramic letters -- being invented by the 1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China, did you fail to understand? Basically before being snarky and condescending, do make sure that you're not the one who's the ignorant idiot.
If it makes it any better, sounds like some of the guys in TFA didn't either.
E.g., at #15 some guy created a web-site to do the proposal for him to "KC" in 2006, but "KC" first stumbled upon that site in 2009. Apparently she didn't even know the site existed for 3 years. As half-arsed efforts go, I'll say that deserves at least a honourable mention.
And exactly how does it help satire anyway? It seems to me like one could make a satire on the theme of Berlusconi being a mind-controlling alien without repeated and obsessive returns to how that makes it ok to kill him. Remove the incitations to killing him from it, and you still have the same satire. Well, and still not particularly funny, but adding some violent rhetoric doesn't make it any funnier, it just makes it distasteful.
And frankly, I don't know if Palin in particular and one particular killing are linked, but the tone of political mud-slinging in the USA is not something most of us outside the USA admire. Drawing crosshairs on maps and opponents homes and all the hate rhetoric is something that adds... what? Why don't those guys and gal just say what their party will do for the voter, instead of how their opponents are traitors and need to be shot?
And frankly, even Loughner, since you mention him, seems like a poster child for a right wingnut. Complete with stuff like not having to take "federalist" laws, ranting about the return to a gold standard, and such touching woowoo CT views as that the government mind-controls the people via neuro-linguistic programming. Yes, he was crazy and as deranged as to hold a mortal grudge over not getting the answer he wanted to a nonsense irrelevant question. But are you sure that it's ok to keep telling such nutcases that a segment of the population are traitors and need to be shot? Because it's not clear to me at all.
By sheer virtue of having a large population, there are 2.2 million schizophrenics in the USA. (Note that I'm not picking on the USA for that. All countries have them and a 0.81% prevalence rate isn't particularly high.) Add retards, Lyme disease victims, etc, and you just have a few millions who aren't particularly good at judging stuff. Exactly what is gained by hammering into their heads that some people are traitors and need to be shot and drawing crosshairs on maps? It seems to me like it's only a matter of time until someone whose line between reality and fantasy is blurred anyway, acts upon that information.
Kinda what I was thinking. Especially a text which doesn't have any smiley or anything, and, as far as my piss-poor Italian allows, can read just as well as a schizophrenic's hate tirade. I mean, much as I would like to believe that a text going on about how someone isn't human and can hypnotize the masses is obviously a parody, you could say the same about the contrail conspiracy theory and yet some dolts out there believe it in all earnest.
The thing is, some people _do_ go nuts now and then and start believing all sorts of highly illogical stuff right before they go and shoot someone. A text whose basic and repeated gist seems to be "I never was for killing another human, but I want to kill the head of the government, and it's ok to kill him because he's a mind-controling alien" would probably get one investigated in the USA or most other countries.
I kind of have sympathy for him, and see how being run by a douchebag using his media monopoly to keep himself in power would drive someone to despair. But FFS there are better ways to go about it without sounding like a delusional rant about wanting to kill him. Or at least, you know, a couple of winking smileys or something.
Really, I wish it was even like any kind of modern code... even code from the Daily WTF.
It's actually a mess of spaghetti code, where some gene works by misusing another gene in perverse ways. And one gene ends up controlling hair color, blood clotting, fight-or-flight response, _and_ sensitivity to pain and anesthetics. And some parts are both code and data (in as much as you can call a bit of DNA either.) And, I kid you not, you actually have at least one bit of self-modifying code in your immune system.
(Not to mention, one which temporarily produces invalid DNA, to misuse a repair mechanism to do the modification for it. It's akin to using some obscure bug to force a bit to store a 2 instead of 0 or 1, in order to exploit a quirk in the memory parity circuitry. That kind of non-orthogonal programming.)
And some bugs which have been left unfixed for tens of millions of years... and we still do workarounds for. E.g., you actually have a gene that would have normally allowed you to synthesize as much vitamin C as you need, but it got broken in one of our very distant monkey ancestors. And since it was eating lots of fruits, there was no pressure to select the broken gene out.
Really, it's _such_ a complete mess...
It's actually not very surprising at all. If you look at, say, tooth implants, they require a dental hygiene taken to OCD extremes and have a MTBF of just a few years. Then an infection happens. Anything that goes through the skin can do just that.
I was going to say the same at first, but then it occurred to me that it's not like the other consoles and whatnot are exactly open, are they? Control freakery is the norm, call-home DRM and collecting information about your every move too, and let's not forget that Sony just removed an official feature in a firmware patch.
And then we have such historical cases as Nintendo in it's NES days. Good Lord! Not only they determined what you can publish for their console, but also how many units you're allowed to sell, how many cartridges must you buy from them (whether or not you actually sell that many copies of the game), _and_ you had to write off the right to make software for any other platform for two years for the privilege of publishing for the self-important Nintendo. Took a lawsuit to get that crap removed.
Frankly, I don't think Apple can be any worse than the rest of the gang even if they were to try to.
That is a very compelling case made, and not just on two data points. IIRC someone actually tracked Internet availability vs rape incidence by year and state, and it's a damn compelling case.
And I remember reading somewhere that violent crime actually goes down on the days they premiere violent movies in movie theatres. Apparently either for some people seeing it on the screen is a reasonable substitute for the real thing, or at the very least they can't be both watching the movie and outside mugging someone at the same time.
So, who knows? Maybe video games are doing us all a similar service. There must be someone out there who would have been the next Ted Bundy, if not for the fact that he's busy grinding his epic equipment in WoW or the last achievement in <insert brutal fps> instead.
Umm... so? One can be very biased against both, regardless of how one sorts them.
Plus, I'm not sure how that would mean anything for TFA. The Faux News thrust was just that an (imaginary and counter-factual) increase of the number of rapes can be attributed to video games. It was not that games cause an increase in rapes at the expense of an equal decrease in the number of murders. So agreeing or not agreeing that some crimes are even worse, wouldn't really make any difference as long as one still agrees that rape is bad.
Or for that matter, the mass of people either queuing up at the security check or saying their goodbyes before it. If I were crazy enough to want to blow a lot of people up, forget the airplane, I'd blow up the line before the security check. With a bit of luck, you can actually nail more people than on most airplanes.
Hmm, I know... it means we need a pre-security check before we let people queue up for the security check. Wait. And a pre-pre-security check before it.
I'm off to sell the idea to the TSA. Something tells me they'll love it.
Really? Well, I trust you'll enlighten me then.
Ah, right, the appeal to motives fallacy. I was wondering when the usual fanboy bullshit pops up.
No, I never picked an instrument myself. I'm just sick and tired of the endless stream of bullshit that happens about those games. If you want to play a button-mashing game, fine, knock yourself out, but spare me the pretense that it's on par with an actual simulation like GT5 or, for that matter, such bullshit fallacies.
I don't.
And everyone I know that plays WoW or gets whipped by a domina, is enjoying it, or they wouldn't play it. That's such a content-free truism that it doesn't bring any actual information, except to grease the slide into the meat of the bullshit:
Ah, right, the standard "everyone is a clone of me, and if they don't like the same things, they never tried it and/or they're in denial" argument. 'Cause God knows it can't be even theoretically possible that different people actually like different things ;)
Get a clue, really.
Hmm? Not sure how to take that.
If you mean the morality of it, I don't think you'll find many "liberal" perspectives that it's not so bad. In fact, just about the only ones who argue that there's any situation where the woman can't say no, are a subclass of the bible-thumping nutters, for whom God made the woman subordinate to their dick.
If you mean incidence or prevalence statistics, then opinions and political biases don't matter, only the numbers do. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the incidence has declined from about 2.4 per 1000 people in 1980 to about 0.4 per 1000 people, i.e., about six times. I don't see how any political bias can change that, short of going out and raping someone to make up for the difference.
Keywords: for its time.
Well, there still are lightgun shooters on rails like that, where you just point the gun at the screen, but otherwise the route and enemies popping up and all is pre-scripted and happens without any input from you.
Still, even then, an enemy falls over when you shoot it, reloads when you shoot outside the screen, the game pauses until you finish an enemy or faceplant, etc. And often you have other options too, like seeing your character duck behind cover when you press or release some key on the gun. It's still not quite the kind of interaction in Guitar Hero. If it were, the enemy would get shot in the head even if you aim at something else, you just wouldn't get the points.
But anyway, even for those games you mention, there's an important aspect: It's a phase we've largely outgrown. (Well, except for lightgun games and some porn games.)
I dunno, there's a whole industry of force-feedback steering wheels and pedals and whatnot to make it at least the same kind of thing. You know, you turn a wheel, the car turns.
And let me stress that part again: the car turns when _you_ turn the wheel. In other words, wake me up when such a game at least plays the tune _you_ play, instead of just making you press buttons on cue to a tune that keeps playing the same no matter what you do.
If you want a GT5 equivalent, let's call it Race Car Hero, it would involve watching a pre-recorded race that happens the same no matter what you do, and you just have to press the buttons you're told to press while watching it. But otherwise if you press right instead of left when told, you lose some points but the car on the screen still does the pre-recorded left turn.I think pretty much everyone would agree that such a game would be frakking retarded.
I'm not sure if Nintendo ever "got" games in the same way you do. Most of their history as a video game company was under Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was pretty much proud to never have played a video game and occasionally did disparaging remarks about RPG players or such.
Reginald Fils-Aime, who is President and COO of Nintendo of America, not only rose to that position during Yamauchi's time and in that corporate culture, but is a guy who comes from purely a marketing and sales background. The guy was marketing everything from toothpaste to beer to chinese takeout food before joining Nintendo, and at Nintendo he was pretty much just asked to build up their public image. And while he was undoubtedly good at that, I see nothing in his background to suggest that he ever "got" games as anything else than something that he has to sell.
I don't think he lost the point of games from the perspective of a gamer, as that he simply never had it to start with. He's just the guy who has to sell them and make money for the company, and he always was.
As I keep saying, if God didn't want me to covet my neighbour's ass, He wouldn't have given her such a magnificent ass ;)
Well, you can certainly see the same going all the way to the ED, which apparently happened just because Statesman had that idea while playing a portable game.
But I'm not sure even if that was his vision or just a rationalization. We're talking the same guy who agreed that 6 slots is a fair price to make Hasten permanent in the early days, but then claimed it was an exploit in the ED. (Effectively turning everyone into a bug abuser.) His version of reality was... flexible, to say the least.
But what gets me is that even if I'm to believe that he had that kind of vision and liked that kind of gameplay... he still was unable to design a game even to that end. He couldn't just do the maths for how fast a power recharges or what DPS does a power set have. He blundered, and stumbled, and turned the knobs wildly between zero and eleven, and hoped something would work. I'm glad he at least liked that kind of gameplay, because that's how he played lead designer.
Heh, indeed. I grew up with a Sinclair ZX-81 and later ZX Spectrum. So at one point in 2000 or so I get a Spectrum emulator and look for some tape images online. So I see one particular game and go, "cool! I remember playing that one!" So I download it and play for a quarter of an hour and then it hits me, "I also remember I thought it sucks." :p