Here's why I think people in general are so suspicious of those of us who play video games a lot for our primary means of recreation.
Most people "recreate" in groups. When they watch football, they either watch it together or they talk about it together later. Playing sports is nearly always a group experience. Watching TV shows is much the same.. this is considered 'normal' because it can be considered social currency. Status and respect in a social group can be earned by being able to exchange information and opinion regarding TV shows seen by others. Even knowledge of commercials, funny and deplorable, can be shared in conversation. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the activity is, as long as it is a shared social experience.
Video gaming for the most part is a solitary activity (leaving Wii games out of this for the most part, as it's a relatively new phenomenon), which, unless a person's real-world peers share interest in gaming (unlikely) gives him no social currency. Plus, video games are unfairly stigmatized as being children's games, which is a disincentive to bringing it up among real-world peers at all, and may actually hurt one's social status if the topic is chanced.
Which in my mind expains why MMOs can be so addictive.. the activity is both solitary/escapist AND social, and an immediate community of fellow gamers are available to reaffirm one's needs for kinship and acceptance, enticing the player's further immersion in the game, rewarding greater time spent in the virtual universe as commesurate with status.
Meanwhile "normies" (non-gamers) think of video game enthusiasts as misfits, socially inept, and possibly psychologically damaged. Personally I think one has to be psychologically damaged to be entertained by American Idol or Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionare, but that's just my opinion. I try to be polite about my opinions of other people's activities, as long as they're not hurting anybody or themselves. I don't attempt to label them as diseased because I don't understand why their preferred recreation is fun.
That's a good comparison. Come back to this thread when electric utilities start offering to sell data collected about what kinds of electrical devices YOU own and use, how often you use them and for what purposes to advertisers, the government and whomever ponies up $$. Hey, you don't own the power lines.
Judging someone to be undateable because of her spiritual beliefs is somehow wrong? Why, because it would hurt her feelings?
I'd say a woman's spiritual beliefs, especially if they are wholly incompatible with common sense (as so many of them are), are reason enough to not want to waste time trying to develop a close relasionship with.
This was true for me too for many years, however two things recently have made me a lot more aware of the DRM on DVDs and thinking of ways to nullify it: 1) a recent acquisition of an iPod Touch, on which I want to watch movies without having to buy them again for the privilege, and 2) my increasing frustration with UOPs, which seem to be getting worse and worse. I am already irritated by the FBI warnings and mandatory THX brag screens (and other such nonsense) on DVDs, but has anyone else received a copy of POTC: At World's End recently? That endless and infuriating Disney "whee-we're-Disney" intro (that you can't skip or FF) was more than enough for me to rip the movie off that disc.
Newspapers, as a medium for delivering news, are dying. However the newsrooms that create content for the papers are crucial to the journalism industry, because they don't exist in any other media. TV news is fast, get some visuals, talk to a few folks and get it all done by 6:00pm. Newspaper journalists can pour more investigation and actual news reporting into a 2 column story than some anchorbabe can read on a teleprompter in 30-40 seconds.
The newspaper has to be kept alive, and if they figure out how to successfully produce enough revenue to continue to publish on the Web, great. But when you think about how much the work newspapers do influences all the other media, you start to wonder what how the profession as a whole would suffer if newspapers died out altogether.
In this war I didn't WANT there to be a winner. I was hoping both camps would be forced to accomodate to an ongoing market share tug-of-war, while consumers owned hybrid players and weren't locked into EITHER format, and could choose whichever suited them. Movie studios would release movies on whichever they wanted, or could do double-sided discs (HDDVD on one side, Blu-Ray on the other) and release them in both formats, like music albums were released on cassette as well as CD for many years.
Now that Sony owns the HD movie format, it's a strong disincentive for me to start buying movies in HD, until the DVD format is phased out completely, or until it becomes possible and easy to rip movies from Blu-Ray and reauthor them minus the DRM.
Agree. The "salesgenie.com" ad is absolutely stupid. EDS' "herding cats" ad is one of the greatest of all time, not to mention Mean Joe Green (Coke). Whoever put this list together doesn't know beans about advertising.
Correct, this is not a win for Apple. It IS a win for all the other Apple rumor sites though.
"Seweeeet, one of our competitors--a particularly GOOD one, good enough to get Apple mad enough to shut them down--bites the dust! More Web ad revenue for me! Merry Christmas boys, iPod nanos all around! See you at MacWorld, Nick! Ha ha ha!"
Re:They're called fanboys
on
The Cult of Kindle
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Fanboys is one thing.. but it sure didn't take long for someone to label them a "cult". I personally was very excited about the device until I learned about its DRM and behavior-watching aspects. That is enough to make me warn people away from the device.
I think the best thing for the ebook industry would be for Apple to release a tablet-style device for this purpose. DRM would be tolerable (and fully circumventable), the device's design would be much more elegant and practical, and it would operate much more intuitively and enjoyably. Besides, they already own the trademark "iBook" don't they.
LOL.. I can just hear my teammates on Vent flapping their hands in front of their mouths (producing that silly indian warcry o-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo) as they trash a 4th grade class's little education trek.
> Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.
But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music.
> I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?
If there's a TV show I enjoy, I will eventually come to own it on DVD. It's a lot more convienient for me to watch it in DVD-quality and without commercials, and I also like the fact that I can watch it again if I want. Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available.
I guess that's the difference. I don't honestly think of myself as a "collector", I just like to maintain a collection of music (et al), and when I find music that I like, I want to be able to listen to it when *I* want, not when some other outside force *lets* me. So I buy it, rather than pay for a service to send it to me on demand.
Your explanation cleared up a lot of my lack of understanding though, so thanks.
Those are all very reasonable points. But for me the thing that matters most is long-term dependancy. Can you say for certain that Rhapsody is going to be around next year? Or the year following? Say some lawsuit shows up, blows it out of the water and it ceases entirely. What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it. That's you putting your ability to listen to the playlists you want at the mercy of things entirely outside of your control.
That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music.. but I have plenty of means to discover music already that don't involve paying money. I recently discovered a group called The 69 Eyes because a song was playing on a random MySpace page that I stumbled across. I liked the song, analog-holed it (and the other one that was there), listened to them for a day or so, decided I really liked them, downloaded their album from iTMS, converted the tracks to MP3. Boom. Now I have the music in a non-DRMed format that I am fairly confident I will be able to enjoy in perpituity, whether some company somewhere else goes out of business or not.
HELLO! Oh my god I can't stand that. That is SERIOUSLY offensive to people who already consider it an imposition to have to put up with a network's ghosted logo in the corner. TNT is the most egregious offender.. I am SO SICK OF IT!
All the more reason to go DVD/digital download to get content. TV networks are becoming way too greedy and annoying.
Steven Spielberg's office lies at the end long underground tunnel, protected by a series of trecherous and deadly booby traps. The thief narrowly escaped clutching the script, only to find himself lying on the Paramount studio lot surrounded by lawyers threateningly aiming pens at him.
That was the first thing I noticed. They're saying the 16-year old girl's reputation was hurt, and she's subject to ridicule by her peers? Because she was labelled a virgin? HOW is that derogatory exactly? I know kids will tease, but her parents are claiming DEFAMATION in a lawsuit for christ's sake.
If I wanted to watch Heroes, I'd buy it on DVD. From what I've read, the terms of NBC's download service are entirely unacceptible, so I will just [continue to] ignore NBC.
The cops were defending the rights of everyone else in that room, including John Kerry's. This kid did not have the right to commandeer someone else's forum for his own speechifying. It would appear that you and I are just not going to agree on this one. And my money is on it being ILLEGAL to physically resist police, no matter whether you think they're wrong or not. They're the cops and they're doing their jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's why I think people in general are so suspicious of those of us who play video games a lot for our primary means of recreation. Most people "recreate" in groups. When they watch football, they either watch it together or they talk about it together later. Playing sports is nearly always a group experience. Watching TV shows is much the same .. this is considered 'normal' because it can be considered social currency. Status and respect in a social group can be earned by being able to exchange information and opinion regarding TV shows seen by others. Even knowledge of commercials, funny and deplorable, can be shared in conversation. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the activity is, as long as it is a shared social experience.
Video gaming for the most part is a solitary activity (leaving Wii games out of this for the most part, as it's a relatively new phenomenon), which, unless a person's real-world peers share interest in gaming (unlikely) gives him no social currency. Plus, video games are unfairly stigmatized as being children's games, which is a disincentive to bringing it up among real-world peers at all, and may actually hurt one's social status if the topic is chanced.
Which in my mind expains why MMOs can be so addictive .. the activity is both solitary/escapist AND social, and an immediate community of fellow gamers are available to reaffirm one's needs for kinship and acceptance, enticing the player's further immersion in the game, rewarding greater time spent in the virtual universe as commesurate with status.
Meanwhile "normies" (non-gamers) think of video game enthusiasts as misfits, socially inept, and possibly psychologically damaged. Personally I think one has to be psychologically damaged to be entertained by American Idol or Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionare, but that's just my opinion. I try to be polite about my opinions of other people's activities, as long as they're not hurting anybody or themselves. I don't attempt to label them as diseased because I don't understand why their preferred recreation is fun.
That's a good comparison. Come back to this thread when electric utilities start offering to sell data collected about what kinds of electrical devices YOU own and use, how often you use them and for what purposes to advertisers, the government and whomever ponies up $$. Hey, you don't own the power lines.
Judging someone to be undateable because of her spiritual beliefs is somehow wrong? Why, because it would hurt her feelings? I'd say a woman's spiritual beliefs, especially if they are wholly incompatible with common sense (as so many of them are), are reason enough to not want to waste time trying to develop a close relasionship with.
This was true for me too for many years, however two things recently have made me a lot more aware of the DRM on DVDs and thinking of ways to nullify it: 1) a recent acquisition of an iPod Touch, on which I want to watch movies without having to buy them again for the privilege, and 2) my increasing frustration with UOPs, which seem to be getting worse and worse. I am already irritated by the FBI warnings and mandatory THX brag screens (and other such nonsense) on DVDs, but has anyone else received a copy of POTC: At World's End recently? That endless and infuriating Disney "whee-we're-Disney" intro (that you can't skip or FF) was more than enough for me to rip the movie off that disc.
Hybrids are already available: http://gadgets.fosfor.se/lg-ggw-h10n/
Newspapers, as a medium for delivering news, are dying. However the newsrooms that create content for the papers are crucial to the journalism industry, because they don't exist in any other media. TV news is fast, get some visuals, talk to a few folks and get it all done by 6:00pm. Newspaper journalists can pour more investigation and actual news reporting into a 2 column story than some anchorbabe can read on a teleprompter in 30-40 seconds.
The newspaper has to be kept alive, and if they figure out how to successfully produce enough revenue to continue to publish on the Web, great. But when you think about how much the work newspapers do influences all the other media, you start to wonder what how the profession as a whole would suffer if newspapers died out altogether.
Sony has a long history of behaving badly.
In this war I didn't WANT there to be a winner. I was hoping both camps would be forced to accomodate to an ongoing market share tug-of-war, while consumers owned hybrid players and weren't locked into EITHER format, and could choose whichever suited them. Movie studios would release movies on whichever they wanted, or could do double-sided discs (HDDVD on one side, Blu-Ray on the other) and release them in both formats, like music albums were released on cassette as well as CD for many years.
Now that Sony owns the HD movie format, it's a strong disincentive for me to start buying movies in HD, until the DVD format is phased out completely, or until it becomes possible and easy to rip movies from Blu-Ray and reauthor them minus the DRM.
Agree. The "salesgenie.com" ad is absolutely stupid. EDS' "herding cats" ad is one of the greatest of all time, not to mention Mean Joe Green (Coke). Whoever put this list together doesn't know beans about advertising.
How is this 'flamebait' exactly? Ohhhh .. today's "Drunken Moderation Day". I didn't get that memo, sorry.
You may have been modded troll (which you are not) but I friended you based solely on that post.
Correct, this is not a win for Apple. It IS a win for all the other Apple rumor sites though.
"Seweeeet, one of our competitors--a particularly GOOD one, good enough to get Apple mad enough to shut them down--bites the dust! More Web ad revenue for me! Merry Christmas boys, iPod nanos all around! See you at MacWorld, Nick! Ha ha ha!"
Fanboys is one thing .. but it sure didn't take long for someone to label them a "cult". I personally was very excited about the device until I learned about its DRM and behavior-watching aspects. That is enough to make me warn people away from the device.
I think the best thing for the ebook industry would be for Apple to release a tablet-style device for this purpose. DRM would be tolerable (and fully circumventable), the device's design would be much more elegant and practical, and it would operate much more intuitively and enjoyably. Besides, they already own the trademark "iBook" don't they.
LOL .. I can just hear my teammates on Vent flapping their hands in front of their mouths (producing that silly indian warcry o-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo) as they trash a 4th grade class's little education trek.
Hear hear. I Was going to drop my $.05 on this matter but you did it for me. Thank you!
> Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.
But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music.
> I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?
If there's a TV show I enjoy, I will eventually come to own it on DVD. It's a lot more convienient for me to watch it in DVD-quality and without commercials, and I also like the fact that I can watch it again if I want. Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available.
I guess that's the difference. I don't honestly think of myself as a "collector", I just like to maintain a collection of music (et al), and when I find music that I like, I want to be able to listen to it when *I* want, not when some other outside force *lets* me. So I buy it, rather than pay for a service to send it to me on demand.
Your explanation cleared up a lot of my lack of understanding though, so thanks.
Those are all very reasonable points. But for me the thing that matters most is long-term dependancy. Can you say for certain that Rhapsody is going to be around next year? Or the year following? Say some lawsuit shows up, blows it out of the water and it ceases entirely. What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it. That's you putting your ability to listen to the playlists you want at the mercy of things entirely outside of your control.
That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music .. but I have plenty of means to discover music already that don't involve paying money. I recently discovered a group called The 69 Eyes because a song was playing on a random MySpace page that I stumbled across. I liked the song, analog-holed it (and the other one that was there), listened to them for a day or so, decided I really liked them, downloaded their album from iTMS, converted the tracks to MP3. Boom. Now I have the music in a non-DRMed format that I am fairly confident I will be able to enjoy in perpituity, whether some company somewhere else goes out of business or not.
Cool! Tycho's dream comes true!
HELLO! Oh my god I can't stand that. That is SERIOUSLY offensive to people who already consider it an imposition to have to put up with a network's ghosted logo in the corner. TNT is the most egregious offender .. I am SO SICK OF IT!
All the more reason to go DVD/digital download to get content. TV networks are becoming way too greedy and annoying.
Very well put.
By the time Raiders IV is released, $2000 will get you a movie ticket and a small popcorn.
Steven Spielberg's office lies at the end long underground tunnel, protected by a series of trecherous and deadly booby traps. The thief narrowly escaped clutching the script, only to find himself lying on the Paramount studio lot surrounded by lawyers threateningly aiming pens at him.
That was the first thing I noticed. They're saying the 16-year old girl's reputation was hurt, and she's subject to ridicule by her peers? Because she was labelled a virgin? HOW is that derogatory exactly? I know kids will tease, but her parents are claiming DEFAMATION in a lawsuit for christ's sake.
True statement.
If I wanted to watch Heroes, I'd buy it on DVD. From what I've read, the terms of NBC's download service are entirely unacceptible, so I will just [continue to] ignore NBC.
The cops were defending the rights of everyone else in that room, including John Kerry's. This kid did not have the right to commandeer someone else's forum for his own speechifying. It would appear that you and I are just not going to agree on this one. And my money is on it being ILLEGAL to physically resist police, no matter whether you think they're wrong or not. They're the cops and they're doing their jobs.