Yup, that's right. Which is why extending copyright laws past the death of the author is ludicrous.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The length of a copyright should be for a fixed amount of time, regardless of whether the person is alive or dead. Take the following situation:
Father of three young children has just finished writing a novel that has the critics raving. He's expecting to make several hundred thousand dollars on this book. A week before the book is released, he is killed in a car accident. His copyright expires, leaving his wife and kids with only the advance the publishing company gave him. Is this fair?
On the other hand, allowing copyrights to persist for a very long time won't help the arts and sciences. The trick is finding an equilibrium point that balances the incentive (usually of the financial kind) of being innovative with the greater good of the public when the work becomes public domain. Another problem that arises is that different forms of work would likely have different equilibrium points, but you don't want to overregulate. Releasing a book/novel to the public domain will likely have a fairly large public benefit (for example, think of the novels you read in high school -- schools could then provide the books to students at little cost to the school), so it would make sense for a novel to enter the public domain sooner. The same could go for nearly all inventions. Music, movies, and videogames, on the other hand, probably wouldn't serve the public as much good by being released to the public domain. Therefore the life of the copyright could be longer.
Even having it be the life of the author is ludicrous (you want to encourage them to create again, after all! If they only need to invent one thing, how is that helpful?).
I think you don't understand how most people work. The more wealth they get, the more they want. I think we can mostly agree that the financial incentive of a copyrighted/patented work is increased by an increase in the length of time that work is protected. With increased financial incentives, there will likely be more first-time inventors/authors. The question is then: Are the number of would-be repeat inventors/authors decreased by a greater amount than the number of added first-time inventors/authors?
My answer would be no, and in fact I think more people would be multiple-time inventors/authors with the increased financial incentive.
Your argument assumes that a person would be satisfied with the income from one invention. My counter-argument would be that if you can make X amount of dollars working on one invention, why wouldn't you want to make 2X amount of dollars by making two inventions? If you don't think this is the way the world works, then why do the wealthy keep doing more things to make themselves even more wealthy? Why would a professional athlete, who made $30 million in his/her first contract (and could probably live very comfortably on that for the rest of his/her life), ask for a larger contract when the first one expires?
Back when people played Doom or Descent... levels [made] you... sometimes run through familiar areas again.
You should try Halo. I hear it has that sort of level design. (For the record, I loved Halo, but I did get confused about where I had been or where I was going on more than one occasion due to the repetitive level design).
Ermm, I'm not trying to be flamebait here, but I am 33 years old and have been playing computer games and programming since 1981 and I don't know who Link is.
This is what happens when you name the games after the girl you have to save instead of the hero. "Princess Toadstool 64" anyone?
To the parent: You have heard of "Zelda", right? Link is the hero in those games. And this walk is meant for console gamers, not computer gamers.
However, I instantly discredit this thing if they put Halo as one of the best games ever.
Don't look at this as an assembly of the best games ever. Look at this as a "who's who in video games." Much like the walk of fame in Hollywood has just about every even moderately famous or popular actor/actress on it (Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, for example), this is really just a way to recognize the popular games/characters of the time. And whether you think it was a good game or not, it is one of the only successful FPS games available on a console.
I wonder if they've ever played Half-Life, Starcraft, Warcraft, Metroid, etc.
The first 3 are PC games, not video games. While the time when video game exclusively meant a console game has passed, I think the emphasis here is on console games. I'm sure Metroid/Samus will be there eventually, as will your Pokémon, Sonic, Final Fantasy, etc.
The OP was talking about how if they put Sony characters/games first, it would look like nothing more than shameless self promotion (since the Mall is owned by Sony). Since Halo isn't a Sony game, they aren't patting themselves on the back.
which means it's nothing more that a popularity contest
And the walk of fame is any better? Have you ever seen a list of the people in the walk of fame? Keanu Reeves? Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen?
I was speaking as to how most of the FF games have been Sony games
The only thing Sony about these FF games are that they are designed for the Sony consoles. They were developed and produced by Squaresoft (Square Enix now). They are definitely NOT Sony games any more so than Half Life 2 is a Microsoft game.
How about Id's masterpiece Wolfenstein 3D or Id's materpiece Doom?
From TFA: "...the first-ever 'Walk of Game' stars for video games..."
Video games != computer games. Most people, when they talk of "video games," are talking about console games exclusively. The line is becoming less fine (for example, you can now find "Doom 3" for the PC on both the Video Games and Software sections of Amazon), but I think (and the recent inductees back this up) that this is geared toward consoles only.
Not to pick nits, but Metal Gear and Final Fantasy were originally NINTENDO titles....
More importantly, neither of them were developed/produced by Sony (or Nintendo for that matter). Sony's stuff would be the stuff done by its first (and perhaps second) party development units...I wouldn't call any game that happens to run on a Sony platform a "Sony" game. Otherwise you have to start calling any PC game a <shudder> Microsoft (or Intel or AMD or Dell, etc.) game.
Final Fantasy VII was published by Eidos for the PC. That's the only one I can be sure of, and I know that because it came in the odd-shaped box that all of the Eidos games were shipped in at the time. You know, the one that's sort of trapezoidal, sort of triangular...
Initially, yes. But when the people paying for the advertisements realize that they're paying for a bunch of clicks and receiving no revenue for it, they'll quickly lower their rates to those sorts of sites, or stop advertising on them altogether.
Then again, it's also possible that the advertisers could get that same list of open proxies and just not pay any money for clicks from those proxies.
It's really an interesting problem, and I think it's a lot like the war on drugs. You can either go after the drug users (in this case, the squatters), or you can go after the drug suppliers (the companies paying for the advertisements). Without the companies willing to pay for the ads, the squatters wouldn't be getting any money. I personally will try to avoid supporting any business that advertises in such a way.
Video gaming itself is just a symptom of these kinds of problems.
I can't stress this enough. In my view, there are two kinds of addictions to MMORPGs. The one is where a mentally healthy person enjoys the escape a little too much and may get to the point where his/her real life starts to suffer a bit. Usually the addiction isn't too severe, and as soon as the sh*t starts to hit the fan, he/she will realize that the game is affecting real life and will tone down the playing.
The other addiction is the one you should be really worried about. It is the one where the person is already depressed or detached from the world, and is playing the game because it allows them to escape from the real world even more. These people are often already showing signs of being suicidal. The MMORPG will likely make things worse, but I really believe that the people who exhibit this sort of addiction are already troubled and likely going to find some other addiction if it's not a MMORPG.
I think her son had a personality that was prone to being addicted to virtual realities and gamespaces, and probably many other issues as well.
I think this is really important to stress. The type of people that get addicted to MMORPGs are the ones who like to detach themselves from the real world, and want to escape it. Which, unsurprisingly, is very similar to someone is suicidal. The problem is that the MMORPG reinforces the suicidal detachment, but that doesn't mean we should blame the MMORPG. In moderation, a MMORPG is a great way to briefly escape the real world and just relax. If you use it to chronically escape the real world, then you are just asking for problems.
The same can be said for alcohol. I enjoy a beer or two from time to time because it helps me relax and take my mind off all my problems. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing. If I instead drank every day so I could avoid dealing with my problems, then it becomes a dangerous addiction.
But wouldn't addiction not caused by some form of drug be a psychological issue?
Actually, studies have shown that what you classify as "psychological" addictions cause a very similar chemical reaction in the brain as a physical addiction. The brain is a very powerful thing, and it has been shown that the psychological addictions can be even worse than an actual chemical addiction. I wouldn't be so quick to label those who suffer from these psychological addictions as the problem any more than you would blame someone with a chemical addiction.
I guess what I'm basically saying is blame the person who cannot control themself.
I agree...most of the blame should be placed on the person addicted. However, it shouldn't be for actually being addicted, but it should be for letting it get to that point. You can make an argument that a chemical addiction is easier to get, but once it gets to the point of addiction, an alcoholic should have just as much blame as someone addicted to an MMORPG.
I think we're about to quickly go to the point where your regional local-phone monopoly quickly becomes a regional long-distance phone monopoly.
Or you could do like I (and many others) do, and simply cancel the local land line. It was a psycological hurdle to overcome, as it can be a bit scary that you no longer have a "home phone."
However, it got to the point where all the outgoing calls we were making were "long distance" (because of cell phones with numbers from college area codes), and to do that we would all use our cell phones since we had long distance included in our cell plans. We couldn't justify the $30+ a month we were getting charged for only getting incoming calls and making the occasional local call to Domino's or the Chinese place down the street.
We've been land-line-less for 3 months now and I haven't missed it a bit...and now we no longer get telemarketers calling us as an added bonus.
What would it be worth to a casino's marketing department to know which path certain groups customers walk after losing all their chips
If you lost all your chips, how are they going to track you? Then again, I always make it a point to keep a $1 chip as a souvenir, so maybe they could bank on that.
You could be in the heart of the orc home lands as a human and not worry about being injured in a PvE server.
Actually, when you enter a major city of the opposing faction, your PvP flag is turned on and people of the opposing faction can attack you at will if they so desire, even if you are on a PvE server. I believe the ways to turn on your PvP flag in a PvE server are as follows:
Entering a major city zone of the opposing faction.
Attacking an NPC of the opposing faction.
Aiding a player who is attacking a member of the opposing faction.
One hand motion vs. right clickety-click and so forth
Is that "(One hand) motion" or "One (hand motion)"?
And I don't know about your setup, but I have to go under the desk and reach behind stuff to do the "one hand motion," so that makes it a little more time consuming than a "right clickety-click and so forth."
I wonder why they never moved beyond the "realm" concept and put together a single, huge, continuous world (where different areas would be physically located on separate servers, even with several servers serving a single area or sharing area serving wherever needed).
Have you played this game? The AH in Ironforge is packed on my server, and it is one of the low-population servers. I have seen screenshots of it from a high-population server. Can you imagine what it would be like if there was only one server?
The problem with having one realm is not about servers, because you could have each area on its own server. The problem is overcrowding -- unless you could find some way to forcibly keep people spread out on the entire world, you're going to have popular areas that everyone flocks to.
Even if you could forcibly spread people out, having 100,000 people in the same world at one time would require a vastly larger game world. For the smaller-scale MMORPGs, like EVE-Online, this is feasible, but for the really popular games like EQ and WoW, it's just not possible.
This promotes innovation the same way that having to compete with Anheuser Busch's marketing machine in the beer industry promotes innovation- not at all.
You clearly don't watch enough TV, or perhaps you have a TiVo and skip all the commercials. I think Anheuser Busch's marketing machine has driven lots of innovation, albeit mostly in the advertisements.
Joking aside, I think someone having a near monopoly on something does promote innovation. In order to break into a marketplace that features a near monopoly, you have to be innovative.
Furthermore, beer is a horrible example...have you ever been to a beer barn? My local liquor store has to have over 200 different kinds of beer. Just because the supermarket only has Bud, Coors, and Miller products doesn't mean they are the only things out there (or the only things that are successful).
I wasn't sure. I know that current dual shock controllers for the PS1 have clickable analog sticks, but I was under the impression that they introduced the dual shock PS1 controllers at the same time as the PS2 controllers came out. Unfortunately, I'm too busy at work right now to do any thorough research to see if I'm right. Anyone want to bite?
Also, I seriously doubt that Sony was the first to market with the clickable analog sticks, and I'm sure that a year or two from now we'll be reading on slashdot about a company suing Sony for violating their patents on clickable analog sticks...
I remember reading about these tactile feedback control in video games a few years back.
The
Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro Joystick was one of the first to implement this really well. It came out in 1997 (I think), and when it first came out a lot of the game stores had demos. A friend bought one (retailed for $149.99 when it first came out), and it was great for Flight Simulator, but most of the other games "supported" by it didn't really do a good job. If properly supported, I think these FF controllers really do add to the experience, but the Microsoft joystick wasn't something that you could hold in your hands -- I wonder how much detail they could put into something the size of today's console controllers.
Slashdot Mirror
I wholeheartedly disagree. The length of a copyright should be for a fixed amount of time, regardless of whether the person is alive or dead. Take the following situation:
Father of three young children has just finished writing a novel that has the critics raving. He's expecting to make several hundred thousand dollars on this book. A week before the book is released, he is killed in a car accident. His copyright expires, leaving his wife and kids with only the advance the publishing company gave him. Is this fair?
On the other hand, allowing copyrights to persist for a very long time won't help the arts and sciences. The trick is finding an equilibrium point that balances the incentive (usually of the financial kind) of being innovative with the greater good of the public when the work becomes public domain.
Another problem that arises is that different forms of work would likely have different equilibrium points, but you don't want to overregulate. Releasing a book/novel to the public domain will likely have a fairly large public benefit (for example, think of the novels you read in high school -- schools could then provide the books to students at little cost to the school), so it would make sense for a novel to enter the public domain sooner. The same could go for nearly all inventions. Music, movies, and videogames, on the other hand, probably wouldn't serve the public as much good by being released to the public domain. Therefore the life of the copyright could be longer.
Even having it be the life of the author is ludicrous (you want to encourage them to create again, after all! If they only need to invent one thing, how is that helpful?).
I think you don't understand how most people work. The more wealth they get, the more they want. I think we can mostly agree that the financial incentive of a copyrighted/patented work is increased by an increase in the length of time that work is protected. With increased financial incentives, there will likely be more first-time inventors/authors. The question is then:
Are the number of would-be repeat inventors/authors decreased by a greater amount than the number of added first-time inventors/authors?
My answer would be no, and in fact I think more people would be multiple-time inventors/authors with the increased financial incentive.
Your argument assumes that a person would be satisfied with the income from one invention. My counter-argument would be that if you can make X amount of dollars working on one invention, why wouldn't you want to make 2X amount of dollars by making two inventions?
If you don't think this is the way the world works, then why do the wealthy keep doing more things to make themselves even more wealthy? Why would a professional athlete, who made $30 million in his/her first contract (and could probably live very comfortably on that for the rest of his/her life), ask for a larger contract when the first one expires?
You should try Halo. I hear it has that sort of level design. (For the record, I loved Halo, but I did get confused about where I had been or where I was going on more than one occasion due to the repetitive level design).
Remind me to never drive in your town...
Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold! And it will *ONLY* run on Linux!
That's rediculous!
This is what happens when you name the games after the girl you have to save instead of the hero. "Princess Toadstool 64" anyone?
To the parent: You have heard of "Zelda", right? Link is the hero in those games. And this walk is meant for console gamers, not computer gamers.
Don't look at this as an assembly of the best games ever. Look at this as a "who's who in video games." Much like the walk of fame in Hollywood has just about every even moderately famous or popular actor/actress on it (Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, for example), this is really just a way to recognize the popular games/characters of the time. And whether you think it was a good game or not, it is one of the only successful FPS games available on a console.
I wonder if they've ever played Half-Life, Starcraft, Warcraft, Metroid, etc.
The first 3 are PC games, not video games. While the time when video game exclusively meant a console game has passed, I think the emphasis here is on console games. I'm sure Metroid/Samus will be there eventually, as will your Pokémon, Sonic, Final Fantasy, etc.
The OP was talking about how if they put Sony characters/games first, it would look like nothing more than shameless self promotion (since the Mall is owned by Sony). Since Halo isn't a Sony game, they aren't patting themselves on the back.
which means it's nothing more that a popularity contest
And the walk of fame is any better? Have you ever seen a list of the people in the walk of fame? Keanu Reeves? Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen?
The only thing Sony about these FF games are that they are designed for the Sony consoles. They were developed and produced by Squaresoft (Square Enix now). They are definitely NOT Sony games any more so than Half Life 2 is a Microsoft game.
From TFA: "...the first-ever 'Walk of Game' stars for video games..."
Video games != computer games. Most people, when they talk of "video games," are talking about console games exclusively. The line is becoming less fine (for example, you can now find "Doom 3" for the PC on both the Video Games and Software sections of Amazon), but I think (and the recent inductees back this up) that this is geared toward consoles only.
More importantly, neither of them were developed/produced by Sony (or Nintendo for that matter). Sony's stuff would be the stuff done by its first (and perhaps second) party development units...I wouldn't call any game that happens to run on a Sony platform a "Sony" game. Otherwise you have to start calling any PC game a <shudder> Microsoft (or Intel or AMD or Dell, etc.) game.
Final Fantasy VII was published by Eidos for the PC. That's the only one I can be sure of, and I know that because it came in the odd-shaped box that all of the Eidos games were shipped in at the time. You know, the one that's sort of trapezoidal, sort of triangular...
Initially, yes. But when the people paying for the advertisements realize that they're paying for a bunch of clicks and receiving no revenue for it, they'll quickly lower their rates to those sorts of sites, or stop advertising on them altogether.
Then again, it's also possible that the advertisers could get that same list of open proxies and just not pay any money for clicks from those proxies.
It's really an interesting problem, and I think it's a lot like the war on drugs. You can either go after the drug users (in this case, the squatters), or you can go after the drug suppliers (the companies paying for the advertisements). Without the companies willing to pay for the ads, the squatters wouldn't be getting any money. I personally will try to avoid supporting any business that advertises in such a way.
I can't stress this enough. In my view, there are two kinds of addictions to MMORPGs. The one is where a mentally healthy person enjoys the escape a little too much and may get to the point where his/her real life starts to suffer a bit. Usually the addiction isn't too severe, and as soon as the sh*t starts to hit the fan, he/she will realize that the game is affecting real life and will tone down the playing.
The other addiction is the one you should be really worried about. It is the one where the person is already depressed or detached from the world, and is playing the game because it allows them to escape from the real world even more. These people are often already showing signs of being suicidal. The MMORPG will likely make things worse, but I really believe that the people who exhibit this sort of addiction are already troubled and likely going to find some other addiction if it's not a MMORPG.
I think this is really important to stress. The type of people that get addicted to MMORPGs are the ones who like to detach themselves from the real world, and want to escape it. Which, unsurprisingly, is very similar to someone is suicidal. The problem is that the MMORPG reinforces the suicidal detachment, but that doesn't mean we should blame the MMORPG. In moderation, a MMORPG is a great way to briefly escape the real world and just relax. If you use it to chronically escape the real world, then you are just asking for problems.
The same can be said for alcohol. I enjoy a beer or two from time to time because it helps me relax and take my mind off all my problems. This, by itself, isn't a bad thing. If I instead drank every day so I could avoid dealing with my problems, then it becomes a dangerous addiction.
Actually, studies have shown that what you classify as "psychological" addictions cause a very similar chemical reaction in the brain as a physical addiction. The brain is a very powerful thing, and it has been shown that the psychological addictions can be even worse than an actual chemical addiction. I wouldn't be so quick to label those who suffer from these psychological addictions as the problem any more than you would blame someone with a chemical addiction.
I guess what I'm basically saying is blame the person who cannot control themself.
I agree...most of the blame should be placed on the person addicted. However, it shouldn't be for actually being addicted, but it should be for letting it get to that point. You can make an argument that a chemical addiction is easier to get, but once it gets to the point of addiction, an alcoholic should have just as much blame as someone addicted to an MMORPG.
Or you could do like I (and many others) do, and simply cancel the local land line. It was a psycological hurdle to overcome, as it can be a bit scary that you no longer have a "home phone."
However, it got to the point where all the outgoing calls we were making were "long distance" (because of cell phones with numbers from college area codes), and to do that we would all use our cell phones since we had long distance included in our cell plans. We couldn't justify the $30+ a month we were getting charged for only getting incoming calls and making the occasional local call to Domino's or the Chinese place down the street.
We've been land-line-less for 3 months now and I haven't missed it a bit...and now we no longer get telemarketers calling us as an added bonus.
If you lost all your chips, how are they going to track you? Then again, I always make it a point to keep a $1 chip as a souvenir, so maybe they could bank on that.
Actually, when you enter a major city of the opposing faction, your PvP flag is turned on and people of the opposing faction can attack you at will if they so desire, even if you are on a PvE server. I believe the ways to turn on your PvP flag in a PvE server are as follows:
Is that "(One hand) motion" or "One (hand motion)"?
And I don't know about your setup, but I have to go under the desk and reach behind stuff to do the "one hand motion," so that makes it a little more time consuming than a "right clickety-click and so forth."
Have you played this game? The AH in Ironforge is packed on my server, and it is one of the low-population servers. I have seen screenshots of it from a high-population server. Can you imagine what it would be like if there was only one server?
The problem with having one realm is not about servers, because you could have each area on its own server. The problem is overcrowding -- unless you could find some way to forcibly keep people spread out on the entire world, you're going to have popular areas that everyone flocks to.
Even if you could forcibly spread people out, having 100,000 people in the same world at one time would require a vastly larger game world. For the smaller-scale MMORPGs, like EVE-Online, this is feasible, but for the really popular games like EQ and WoW, it's just not possible.
You clearly don't watch enough TV, or perhaps you have a TiVo and skip all the commercials. I think Anheuser Busch's marketing machine has driven lots of innovation, albeit mostly in the advertisements.
Joking aside, I think someone having a near monopoly on something does promote innovation. In order to break into a marketplace that features a near monopoly, you have to be innovative.
Furthermore, beer is a horrible example...have you ever been to a beer barn? My local liquor store has to have over 200 different kinds of beer. Just because the supermarket only has Bud, Coors, and Miller products doesn't mean they are the only things out there (or the only things that are successful).
I wasn't sure. I know that current dual shock controllers for the PS1 have clickable analog sticks, but I was under the impression that they introduced the dual shock PS1 controllers at the same time as the PS2 controllers came out. Unfortunately, I'm too busy at work right now to do any thorough research to see if I'm right. Anyone want to bite?
Also, I seriously doubt that Sony was the first to market with the clickable analog sticks, and I'm sure that a year or two from now we'll be reading on slashdot about a company suing Sony for violating their patents on clickable analog sticks...
The Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro Joystick was one of the first to implement this really well. It came out in 1997 (I think), and when it first came out a lot of the game stores had demos. A friend bought one (retailed for $149.99 when it first came out), and it was great for Flight Simulator, but most of the other games "supported" by it didn't really do a good job. If properly supported, I think these FF controllers really do add to the experience, but the Microsoft joystick wasn't something that you could hold in your hands -- I wonder how much detail they could put into something the size of today's console controllers.
I'm pretty sure the PS2 had those first...