Yeah...Every time I check out the clearance bin at Fry's, it's always a sea of green cases. These games are selling for ostensibly less than the cost of getting them on the shelves, minus the retailer's cut. I don't see how anyone other than Fry's makes money off them. (Although I imagine some of them were intended for the bargain bin in the first place. It's a legitimate market niche, after all.)
I'd just like to say that I for one loved Crystal Chronicles. There was a period where my friends and I all got together - I think we had 4 GBAs between 9 people, and we rotated and played the hell out of it.
I could go on about blah blah modular leveling blah secret goals blah blah spell fusion, but really, you get my point. Great game. I highly recommend it if you can get all the equipment together.
Oh, please. Maybe you wish it were that easy to stamp out dated views of the world, but the rules of selection show otherwise. It is not enough for something to be inconvenient, not enough for an idea to be refuted with a concordant volume of facts. An idea, like a gene, can only been driven into obscurity if it is such a handicap to it's carrier that the person becomes inviable.
For example, it was of little use to anyone knowing whether the earth was round or flat until it became clear that believing in a round earth gave you accurate navigation, while believing in a flat earth led to navigation that was often innacurate, required a lot of fudgework, and sometimes led you to exactly the place you did not want to be - into a reef, for example. Like so many things, choosing the true idea has very little to do with scientific interest or the consistency of ideas, and an awful lot to do with what pans out.
This is exactly the thing that most people don't understand about natural selection. Mutations don't get picked for dominance because they are the best of the best. They get picked because if you don't have them, you will die. You will get eaten, have a sudden metabolic failure, or accidentally fall into a pit of lava. Or maybe you'll live a long and happy life impotent. Either way, your genes don't see the next generation and they die out.
In the battle between creationism and evolution theory, I see an interesting interplay of evolutionary forces. Creationists are trying to defend the survivability of the idea. Were Creationist ideas to be contradicted in schools and other academic circles, belief in them would tend towards inviability as expressing these ideas would cause one to lose points in school and perhaps hinder the person's ability to get into college or even finish primary school. Darwinists, on the other hand, are trying to bank on the fact that their idea is extremely useful - for describing the movements of money markets and the migration patterns of ideas as well as color changes in moth populations. This does not seem to have an effect on a great number of people, because a great number of people have little use for those things, and many feel that their faith in God the Creator is more useful, and more important. Both groups are trying to defend their base of belief as much as possible, and both sides insist that their idea does not need to be defended. In fact, both maintain that they are not even bothering to defend it, and that the criticim of others constitutes unwarranted ideological bullying. The result is a constant chaotic equilibrium, and the situation will remain that way until one idea or the other becomes completely inviable, and dies out.
Who knows what might bring about such a drastic change? An overthrow of the school system? The establishment of an official government position on the matter? Perhaps it will be a book, or a collection of books as it was in the past. But I don't think that casual observations are going to do a damn thing.
I honestly think that most of this debacle comes from the fact that movie and record companies never actually planned any sort of licensing scheme for their products. Back when everything was on vinyl and magnetic tape, the worst you could do was make some shitty tape copies and give them to your friends. The MPAA doesn't have an answer for, "What if my DVD breaks?" Like the music industry, they've become hooked on the idea that a physical copy sold in the store is the end-all and be-all of distribution.
If your DVD breaks, you buy another one, of course. This idea that you're actually paying for an end-user license to view the movie is something they cooked up long after the fact.
Since most of us are NOT wealthy enough to pay for every piece of media we consume, at least not at the current rates, then "free exchange" has to mean "as in beer" for a good many of us. There are libraries, free public screenings, and open computer labs to provide access to most of the media we need to survive. Last I checked, none of those things were illegal. We didn't accuse those who used them of freeloading, either.
Has anyone noticed that none of the C&D letters out there make mention of any of the really good, cutting-edge movies out there? For example, has anyone been C&D-ed for distributing Napoleon Dynamite?
I hear people pointing this out all the time, followed by the sweet refrain of, "All your movies suck! I wouldn't buy them anyway!" Really, this seems to indicate that good movies don't need to employ this kind of online vigilantism.
Now, I'm no proponent of militant filesharing. But if piracy makes it harder for low-quality shows to survive, I'd welcome the new blood and fresh creativity this could bring to the market.
Except that as counterintuitive as it may seem, in the U.S. distributing child porn is a crime in and of itself, even if you didn't take the pictures or commit the prerequisite rape.
If somebody make a game, they would likely not play it for fun, since they already know all of the quests, plot twists, etc.
I believe you mean, "if they made an RPG." There are many types of games in which the engine makes the game unpredictable and fun even for the people who developed it. Do you think nobody at Popcap plays Bejeweled?
Have you ever had occasion to read a recording contract? My guess is no - I haven't either. If either of us did, though, we would inevitably find 1 of 2 possibilities to be true.
Possibility 1: The contract is designed to confuse the artist into signing away rights that they naturally own, or to simply be so unreadable that the relevant terms are lost in the legal gibberish. This enforces the view that the contract is bad, but exonerates the artist of any wrongdoing as they were intentionally decieved.
Possibility 2: The contract is clearly laid out without any trick clauses. In this case, the artist is knowingly giving away certain rights to have his work published. Fair enough. In that case, their rights are not being taken away, they are being given away. Thus, it isn't a "deal with the devil" as you claim.
If you're dealing with the devil, you probably won't know it till you're in too deep. We can only make it worse pretending that you should have known better.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, their lawsuit is still pending. If the law hasn't decided that the company's business is illegal, why would they have the right to freeze the its assets? Is there something in Australian law that makes this make sense, am I missing something here? It sounds fishy to me.
I agree with your statement, but this turn of phrase got me thinking.
Are we actually willing to believe that, though we have paid a portion of our own salaries to them, our right to keep and enjoy the fruits of our favorite artists is subject to their whim, the whims of their managers, their recording agency, and the retail outlet that graciously lent them it's shelf space?
What about music is so inherently restrictive that it cannot be enjoyed by anyone, most of all by those who choose to buy it? You can sit outside a concert hall and hear the music. You can hum along to a tune in a local cafe. But it seems that as soon as you decide to pay for the music, everything becomes a hundred times more complicated. Once you buy a ticket to a concert, you have to stand in line to get drinks or use the bathroom, you have to agree to work around and, if necessary, with event security. You have to have a wristband to prove your age.
Same thing when you buy a CD. As soon as you buy the CD, it is blatantly obvious what you must do to avoid breaking the law: don't copy the CD and give it to anyone who didn't pay for it. Don't play it in public without a BMA/Ascap license. Don't make it available on the internet. The rules suddenly become very clear the moment you pay for your media.
But how much sense does this make, exactly? Shouldn't paying the company that makes the product result in a net increase in your freedom to enjoy that product? If not, what, exactly did you pay them for? (This is assuming, of course, that the product is freely available in piratical form.) The right not to get sued, as long as you adhere to the clear and precedented rules set out by the manufacturer and the law?
My point is, music has always been about free distribution on the individual level. Music makers make money by performing their music live, by gaining patronage from other, wealthier companies, and by maintaining as wide an audience as possible, which means many fans, as widespread as possible. (A glimpse into the business models of a given record franchise will always reveal that it makes the bulk of it's profit from live performances. Those don't make money if no one is willing to go.)
Do we really feel obligated to pay the artist for being those fans, for making sure that our friends, family, and even our P2P network buddies become fans as well? In days gone by, we would have thrown this little bit of patronage the artist's way because we enjoyed their work. It was a tiny sum as we were not rich, but it meant a vote of confidence. Now it seems like we must pay for the privilege of even judging whether the artist is worth giving money to.
Why pay the record companies anything at all, if it only leads to greater restriction? What is art without the ability to enjoy it, to absorb it, to share it? What art is worthy enough to own, but not worthy enough to preserve, to assimilate, to reiterate in a million forms for yourself and for others? Enjoying art is a messy process - especially the art that we love. Why can't we - and I especially mean we who pay for CDs, DVDs, game discs, etc. - at least grant ourselves the leeway to enjoy what we have without worrying about stepping on the artist's managers' toes?
Many have said that the solution is to leave behind the art that only restricts you when you support it, for music and artists that want their work distributed and won't punish you for anything short of releasing it with your name on the cover. But should this have to be the answer? Should the fans of Jimmy Eat World be any more restricted than the fans of Jim's Big Ego? Does that make any natural sense, or is the word "syndicate" here more than just an industry term?
Le Guin is also a linguist. The Earthsea series is, among other things, a metalinguistic treatise on the relationship between language, perception, and reality. The Left Hand of Darkness could easily be called a book about a single word, it's place in the language and it's complex meaning.
One of my favorite and most reputable professors teaches a linguistics class which examines and evaluates the linguistic theories in LeGuin's writing. So yeah, even though I know nothing about actual degrees she holds, I can say she's a linguist at least as much as Tolkien was.
I think a lot of us here on/. and elsewhere are honestly fed up at the fact that every time a form of entertainment starts becoming popular, it meets a tremendous conservative backlash. It becomes the new scapegoat for a whole generation of problems, and it must be arbitrarily controlled.
Right now what we have are frightened outsiders who know nothing about video games demanding the authority to regulate them. This includes people like the Center for Media and the Family, as well as a healthy dash of various senators and conservative pundits. This is coupled with a vague paranoia that all video games are in some way bad - a paranoia encouraged by groups that make "hit lists" of dangerous games and release pseudoscientific papers on the dangerous effects of interacting with your media. We've been through this same kind of panic many times before.
This happened with film. It happened with television. It happened with The Beatles, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, and Marilyn Manson. I happened with comic books. It happened with science fiction and fantasy novels. You'd think that we'd figure out the pattern here. You'd think after doing this sort of thing for a hundred years we could learn to relax a bit, safe in the knowledge that whatever new art comes along, it's not likely to kill anybody. But the overwhelming parental panic inspired by anything new seems to override these thoughts. It's frustrating to watch happen over and over.
I guess you could say that this is the kids of the world wondering when the adults are going to actually grow up.
Indeed. Ever since FFX I've wondered what was happening to Final Fantasy as a series. It's like they forgot that behind the grandeur of it all there was a game to be played, a story to be unfolded in intricate detail by we the players - a story for us to become immersed in.
I don't know if this all amounts to SquareEnix being full of itself though. When you're creating something as complex as a video game, especially a video game that is supposed to be rich in graphics, beautiful architecture, realistic characters, and ferocious monsters, it is very easy to lose sight of the final product. It takes a stroke of genius to create a truly compelling RPG that doesn't feel bogged down and actually delivers the kind of mystical awe that players crave. I think the genius of SE just seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
The fact that Final Fantasy has become a reward in and of itself is what has allowed them to survive this creative dearth. It's not that they aren't producing anything good - FF Tactics Advance was a wonderful game that blended gameplay and storyline in a way that's rarely seen anywhere. Crystal Chronicles is just amazing, although it isn't an RPG. But if they don't get their genius back pretty soon, SE is going to really feel the hit as the major FF console releases become less and less credible.
I have to admit that FFX became a totem of hatred as my friends and I went through it. I mean it. We took the X as the logical sign for not. We would go into battle and kill Tidus off for the joy of it. We made a list of problems with the game - hell, I coulda made a day calendar.
But that's beside the point. The point is, Square has made good games for so long that they don't know the difference between releasing a good game and releasing any game at all. Either they'll figure this out and release a major console Final Fantasy RPG that is truly breathtaking, or they won't and other players in the RPG game market will get a chance to shine. Or they decide to take FF in a bit of a different direction and turn it into a series for hybrid-genre games like Crystal Chronicles. Either way, we win.
"Attractive" means "people are attracted" - that, and nothing more. It does not mean skinny, fat, dark-haired, blonde, freckled, pale, suntanned, rich or poor, virtuous or skanky. Attractive is for you whatever appeals to you. It is not a universal metric. There is no scale of 1 to 10.
As much as I really hate to jump into this conversation...
I think you may want to reconsider where your opinion about attractive women comes from. I personally know people who have grown up with absent fathers who express the same opinions you have expressed. Therefore, I am less inclined to believe that mature men teach each other these things naturally. And you can't argue that men are "all like that," because if they were, my boyfriend would not exist.
On the other hand, I guarantee that if you were my father's son, you would be looking for an interesting person in that bar, and you wouldn't care about what they looked like. If you really believe that your sex follows such simple rules of behavior, I think you need to get out there and meet some real people on honest terms.
The reason she used the term "pig" is, I think, that there is the good chance that the women who have "let themselves go" have more important things to do, and just don't care whether people think they're sexy. Women can do that; they don't burst into flame or anything. They don't have to look good for anyone, and demanding that they drop all the other things in their lives just to do so is pretty selfish.
Okay, yes I think we get that we can easily compare the best of one medium to the worst of another and get an obvious analysis. Thank you.
The point is that no medium has an upper limit on the quality of work that it can produce. Film and video games have equal potential to create thought-provoking, emotional, immersive experiences. Just because one instance of the medium fails, doesn't mean the entire medium should be thought of as creatively impotent. And it certainly doesn't mean that when a work comes along which actually invokes all the joy of great art, that it should be ignored because it isn't typical. No medium has to produce better work on average than any other to be successful commercially and artistically.
I would also point out that movies and video games, like music and drawing, are geared toward different goals. A game which has eloquent storytelling may not necessarily be a good game - just like a movie with great visuals may not be a great movie. That's why Katamari Damacy keeps popping up here in spite of the fact that it has a plot which, made into a movie, would be largely inadequate. Same thing with DOOM. Do you really think the plot is the heart and soul of a video game? Ikaruga, Tetris, Bejeweled and Mario Kart dissent.
Well, that might also have to do with the fact that only 3 genres were mentioned: racing games, FPSs and RPGs. What about puzzle, strategy, sim, platformer, shooter? Heck, we should add card-based games in there too, since they're becoming so popular now.
Even if you covered all the genres, where would Katamari Damacy fit in? I don't think there's really a place for it (except for best soundtrack). If you wanted to honor it, you'd have to give it game of the year. And it has a rainbow on the cover.
I agree. Right now the only real metrics for determining if a game is good or not are the advertising put out by the game maker, and the endorsements of various "street" sources: other gamers, sites like Penny Arcade, etc. It would be nice to have a reliable way of promoting good games, such as a respected Award or a Cannes Game Festival.
I have a feeling, though, that the industry isn't going to help. At this point, they make a lot of money by selling a large range of products, some of which are pure crap, and advertising every game as an innovative blockbuster. Why would they want us giving out awards that make our purchasing choices clearer?
There are games that evoke emotion by the simplicity, elegance, and integrity of their design. How, exactly, is that different from the joy evoked by a great symphony?
I would suggest doing a video game creation contest instead of a regular programming fair. It will make the kids who can program want to get involved, as well as drawing in kids who have talent in other areas, but might not otherwise be interested in programming.
In order for anyone to sell online items to anyone else, both the buyer and the seller have to already be paying a monthly fee to play on the game's proprietary servers. In this situation, actual IP infringement is impossible.
You may be able to "sell" an item in the online game, but the eventual transaction is just moving data from one part of the proprietary realm to another. You have not, for instance, taken a screenshot of the game and sold it for profit - which would be an infringement of the copyrights held on all the artwork you see in the game, because you have stepped in and distributed it outside channels authorized by the creator. If you found a way to create WoW accounts that didn't need to be paid for, and then you gave it to someone, you would also be standing in as an illegal distributor.
But if you hand another Blizzard customer a Blizzard item inside a Blizzard game, you aren't acting as a distributor. The game has already been distributed to you. You aren't leaking it to anyone who didn't pay Blizzard the price that Blizzard asked for it. That you made money on the deal is beside the point. If you charged people $50 a pop to give them master chess moves out of a book in the middle of a game, that would be cheating, but all the pieces are still on the table. You haven't stolen anything.
You're also incorrect about the CDs and CD keys. Once you buy a CD, it is yours. You own it. The CD-key is also yours to keep forever. It's the contents of the disk - the code, artwork, sounds, etc - that belong to Blizzard. They give you freedom to use those assets under the terms of the ToS. If you violate the ToS, they can ban you from playing the game, but they can't reposess the game discs. You own them, free and forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...Every time I check out the clearance bin at Fry's, it's always a sea of green cases. These games are selling for ostensibly less than the cost of getting them on the shelves, minus the retailer's cut. I don't see how anyone other than Fry's makes money off them. (Although I imagine some of them were intended for the bargain bin in the first place. It's a legitimate market niche, after all.)
I'd just like to say that I for one loved Crystal Chronicles. There was a period where my friends and I all got together - I think we had 4 GBAs between 9 people, and we rotated and played the hell out of it.
I could go on about blah blah modular leveling blah secret goals blah blah spell fusion, but really, you get my point. Great game. I highly recommend it if you can get all the equipment together.
Oh, please. Maybe you wish it were that easy to stamp out dated views of the world, but the rules of selection show otherwise. It is not enough for something to be inconvenient, not enough for an idea to be refuted with a concordant volume of facts. An idea, like a gene, can only been driven into obscurity if it is such a handicap to it's carrier that the person becomes inviable.
For example, it was of little use to anyone knowing whether the earth was round or flat until it became clear that believing in a round earth gave you accurate navigation, while believing in a flat earth led to navigation that was often innacurate, required a lot of fudgework, and sometimes led you to exactly the place you did not want to be - into a reef, for example. Like so many things, choosing the true idea has very little to do with scientific interest or the consistency of ideas, and an awful lot to do with what pans out.
This is exactly the thing that most people don't understand about natural selection. Mutations don't get picked for dominance because they are the best of the best. They get picked because if you don't have them, you will die. You will get eaten, have a sudden metabolic failure, or accidentally fall into a pit of lava. Or maybe you'll live a long and happy life impotent. Either way, your genes don't see the next generation and they die out.
In the battle between creationism and evolution theory, I see an interesting interplay of evolutionary forces. Creationists are trying to defend the survivability of the idea. Were Creationist ideas to be contradicted in schools and other academic circles, belief in them would tend towards inviability as expressing these ideas would cause one to lose points in school and perhaps hinder the person's ability to get into college or even finish primary school. Darwinists, on the other hand, are trying to bank on the fact that their idea is extremely useful - for describing the movements of money markets and the migration patterns of ideas as well as color changes in moth populations. This does not seem to have an effect on a great number of people, because a great number of people have little use for those things, and many feel that their faith in God the Creator is more useful, and more important. Both groups are trying to defend their base of belief as much as possible, and both sides insist that their idea does not need to be defended. In fact, both maintain that they are not even bothering to defend it, and that the criticim of others constitutes unwarranted ideological bullying. The result is a constant chaotic equilibrium, and the situation will remain that way until one idea or the other becomes completely inviable, and dies out.
Who knows what might bring about such a drastic change? An overthrow of the school system? The establishment of an official government position on the matter? Perhaps it will be a book, or a collection of books as it was in the past. But I don't think that casual observations are going to do a damn thing.
I honestly think that most of this debacle comes from the fact that movie and record companies never actually planned any sort of licensing scheme for their products. Back when everything was on vinyl and magnetic tape, the worst you could do was make some shitty tape copies and give them to your friends. The MPAA doesn't have an answer for, "What if my DVD breaks?" Like the music industry, they've become hooked on the idea that a physical copy sold in the store is the end-all and be-all of distribution.
If your DVD breaks, you buy another one, of course. This idea that you're actually paying for an end-user license to view the movie is something they cooked up long after the fact.
Since most of us are NOT wealthy enough to pay for every piece of media we consume, at least not at the current rates, then "free exchange" has to mean "as in beer" for a good many of us. There are libraries, free public screenings, and open computer labs to provide access to most of the media we need to survive. Last I checked, none of those things were illegal. We didn't accuse those who used them of freeloading, either.
Has anyone noticed that none of the C&D letters out there make mention of any of the really good, cutting-edge movies out there? For example, has anyone been C&D-ed for distributing Napoleon Dynamite?
I hear people pointing this out all the time, followed by the sweet refrain of, "All your movies suck! I wouldn't buy them anyway!" Really, this seems to indicate that good movies don't need to employ this kind of online vigilantism.
Now, I'm no proponent of militant filesharing. But if piracy makes it harder for low-quality shows to survive, I'd welcome the new blood and fresh creativity this could bring to the market.
Except that as counterintuitive as it may seem, in the U.S. distributing child porn is a crime in and of itself, even if you didn't take the pictures or commit the prerequisite rape.
If somebody make a game, they would likely not play it for fun, since they already know all of the quests, plot twists, etc.
I believe you mean, "if they made an RPG." There are many types of games in which the engine makes the game unpredictable and fun even for the people who developed it. Do you think nobody at Popcap plays Bejeweled?
Have you ever had occasion to read a recording contract?
My guess is no - I haven't either. If either of us did, though, we would inevitably find 1 of 2 possibilities to be true.
Possibility 1: The contract is designed to confuse the artist into signing away rights that they naturally own, or to simply be so unreadable that the relevant terms are lost in the legal gibberish. This enforces the view that the contract is bad, but exonerates the artist of any wrongdoing as they were intentionally decieved.
Possibility 2: The contract is clearly laid out without any trick clauses. In this case, the artist is knowingly giving away certain rights to have his work published. Fair enough. In that case, their rights are not being taken away, they are being given away. Thus, it isn't a "deal with the devil" as you claim.
If you're dealing with the devil, you probably won't know it till you're in too deep. We can only make it worse pretending that you should have known better.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, their lawsuit is still pending. If the law hasn't decided that the company's business is illegal, why would they have the right to freeze the its assets? Is there something in Australian law that makes this make sense, am I missing something here? It sounds fishy to me.
(within my domain)
I agree with your statement, but this turn of phrase got me thinking.
Are we actually willing to believe that, though we have paid a portion of our own salaries to them, our right to keep and enjoy the fruits of our favorite artists is subject to their whim, the whims of their managers, their recording agency, and the retail outlet that graciously lent them it's shelf space?
What about music is so inherently restrictive that it cannot be enjoyed by anyone, most of all by those who choose to buy it? You can sit outside a concert hall and hear the music. You can hum along to a tune in a local cafe. But it seems that as soon as you decide to pay for the music, everything becomes a hundred times more complicated. Once you buy a ticket to a concert, you have to stand in line to get drinks or use the bathroom, you have to agree to work around and, if necessary, with event security. You have to have a wristband to prove your age.
Same thing when you buy a CD. As soon as you buy the CD, it is blatantly obvious what you must do to avoid breaking the law: don't copy the CD and give it to anyone who didn't pay for it. Don't play it in public without a BMA/Ascap license. Don't make it available on the internet. The rules suddenly become very clear the moment you pay for your media.
But how much sense does this make, exactly? Shouldn't paying the company that makes the product result in a net increase in your freedom to enjoy that product? If not, what, exactly did you pay them for? (This is assuming, of course, that the product is freely available in piratical form.) The right not to get sued, as long as you adhere to the clear and precedented rules set out by the manufacturer and the law?
My point is, music has always been about free distribution on the individual level. Music makers make money by performing their music live, by gaining patronage from other, wealthier companies, and by maintaining as wide an audience as possible, which means many fans, as widespread as possible. (A glimpse into the business models of a given record franchise will always reveal that it makes the bulk of it's profit from live performances. Those don't make money if no one is willing to go.)
Do we really feel obligated to pay the artist for being those fans, for making sure that our friends, family, and even our P2P network buddies become fans as well? In days gone by, we would have thrown this little bit of patronage the artist's way because we enjoyed their work. It was a tiny sum as we were not rich, but it meant a vote of confidence. Now it seems like we must pay for the privilege of even judging whether the artist is worth giving money to.
Why pay the record companies anything at all, if it only leads to greater restriction? What is art without the ability to enjoy it, to absorb it, to share it? What art is worthy enough to own, but not worthy enough to preserve, to assimilate, to reiterate in a million forms for yourself and for others? Enjoying art is a messy process - especially the art that we love. Why can't we - and I especially mean we who pay for CDs, DVDs, game discs, etc. - at least grant ourselves the leeway to enjoy what we have without worrying about stepping on the artist's managers' toes?
Many have said that the solution is to leave behind the art that only restricts you when you support it, for music and artists that want their work distributed and won't punish you for anything short of releasing it with your name on the cover. But should this have to be the answer? Should the fans of Jimmy Eat World be any more restricted than the fans of Jim's Big Ego? Does that make any natural sense, or is the word "syndicate" here more than just an industry term?
Le Guin is also a linguist. The Earthsea series is, among other things, a metalinguistic treatise on the relationship between language, perception, and reality. The Left Hand of Darkness could easily be called a book about a single word, it's place in the language and it's complex meaning.
One of my favorite and most reputable professors teaches a linguistics class which examines and evaluates the linguistic theories in LeGuin's writing. So yeah, even though I know nothing about actual degrees she holds, I can say she's a linguist at least as much as Tolkien was.
I think a lot of us here on /. and elsewhere are honestly fed up at the fact that every time a form of entertainment starts becoming popular, it meets a tremendous conservative backlash. It becomes the new scapegoat for a whole generation of problems, and it must be arbitrarily controlled.
Right now what we have are frightened outsiders who know nothing about video games demanding the authority to regulate them. This includes people like the Center for Media and the Family, as well as a healthy dash of various senators and conservative pundits. This is coupled with a vague paranoia that all video games are in some way bad - a paranoia encouraged by groups that make "hit lists" of dangerous games and release pseudoscientific papers on the dangerous effects of interacting with your media. We've been through this same kind of panic many times before.
This happened with film. It happened with television. It happened with The Beatles, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, and Marilyn Manson. I happened with comic books. It happened with science fiction and fantasy novels. You'd think that we'd figure out the pattern here. You'd think after doing this sort of thing for a hundred years we could learn to relax a bit, safe in the knowledge that whatever new art comes along, it's not likely to kill anybody. But the overwhelming parental panic inspired by anything new seems to override these thoughts. It's frustrating to watch happen over and over.
I guess you could say that this is the kids of the world wondering when the adults are going to actually grow up.
Indeed. Ever since FFX I've wondered what was happening to Final Fantasy as a series. It's like they forgot that behind the grandeur of it all there was a game to be played, a story to be unfolded in intricate detail by we the players - a story for us to become immersed in.
I don't know if this all amounts to SquareEnix being full of itself though. When you're creating something as complex as a video game, especially a video game that is supposed to be rich in graphics, beautiful architecture, realistic characters, and ferocious monsters, it is very easy to lose sight of the final product. It takes a stroke of genius to create a truly compelling RPG that doesn't feel bogged down and actually delivers the kind of mystical awe that players crave. I think the genius of SE just seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
The fact that Final Fantasy has become a reward in and of itself is what has allowed them to survive this creative dearth. It's not that they aren't producing anything good - FF Tactics Advance was a wonderful game that blended gameplay and storyline in a way that's rarely seen anywhere. Crystal Chronicles is just amazing, although it isn't an RPG. But if they don't get their genius back pretty soon, SE is going to really feel the hit as the major FF console releases become less and less credible.
I have to admit that FFX became a totem of hatred as my friends and I went through it. I mean it. We took the X as the logical sign for not. We would go into battle and kill Tidus off for the joy of it. We made a list of problems with the game - hell, I coulda made a day calendar.
But that's beside the point. The point is, Square has made good games for so long that they don't know the difference between releasing a good game and releasing any game at all. Either they'll figure this out and release a major console Final Fantasy RPG that is truly breathtaking, or they won't and other players in the RPG game market will get a chance to shine. Or they decide to take FF in a bit of a different direction and turn it into a series for hybrid-genre games like Crystal Chronicles. Either way, we win.
Some editors or submitters apparently think that we have the online right to attempt to steal the property of other people
Um...I think this was posted under YRO because it deals with banking fraud/identity theft.
"Attractive" means "people are attracted" - that, and nothing more. It does not mean skinny, fat, dark-haired, blonde, freckled, pale, suntanned, rich or poor, virtuous or skanky. Attractive is for you whatever appeals to you. It is not a universal metric. There is no scale of 1 to 10.
As much as I really hate to jump into this conversation...
I think you may want to reconsider where your opinion about attractive women comes from. I personally know people who have grown up with absent fathers who express the same opinions you have expressed. Therefore, I am less inclined to believe that mature men teach each other these things naturally. And you can't argue that men are "all like that," because if they were, my boyfriend would not exist.
On the other hand, I guarantee that if you were my father's son, you would be looking for an interesting person in that bar, and you wouldn't care about what they looked like. If you really believe that your sex follows such simple rules of behavior, I think you need to get out there and meet some real people on honest terms.
The reason she used the term "pig" is, I think, that there is the good chance that the women who have "let themselves go" have more important things to do, and just don't care whether people think they're sexy. Women can do that; they don't burst into flame or anything. They don't have to look good for anyone, and demanding that they drop all the other things in their lives just to do so is pretty selfish.
Okay, yes I think we get that we can easily compare the best of one medium to the worst of another and get an obvious analysis. Thank you.
The point is that no medium has an upper limit on the quality of work that it can produce. Film and video games have equal potential to create thought-provoking, emotional, immersive experiences. Just because one instance of the medium fails, doesn't mean the entire medium should be thought of as creatively impotent. And it certainly doesn't mean that when a work comes along which actually invokes all the joy of great art, that it should be ignored because it isn't typical. No medium has to produce better work on average than any other to be successful commercially and artistically.
I would also point out that movies and video games, like music and drawing, are geared toward different goals. A game which has eloquent storytelling may not necessarily be a good game - just like a movie with great visuals may not be a great movie. That's why Katamari Damacy keeps popping up here in spite of the fact that it has a plot which, made into a movie, would be largely inadequate. Same thing with DOOM. Do you really think the plot is the heart and soul of a video game? Ikaruga, Tetris, Bejeweled and Mario Kart dissent.
Well, that might also have to do with the fact that only 3 genres were mentioned: racing games, FPSs and RPGs. What about puzzle, strategy, sim, platformer, shooter? Heck, we should add card-based games in there too, since they're becoming so popular now.
Even if you covered all the genres, where would Katamari Damacy fit in? I don't think there's really a place for it (except for best soundtrack). If you wanted to honor it, you'd have to give it game of the year. And it has a rainbow on the cover.
I agree. Right now the only real metrics for determining if a game is good or not are the advertising put out by the game maker, and the endorsements of various "street" sources: other gamers, sites like Penny Arcade, etc. It would be nice to have a reliable way of promoting good games, such as a respected Award or a Cannes Game Festival.
I have a feeling, though, that the industry isn't going to help. At this point, they make a lot of money by selling a large range of products, some of which are pure crap, and advertising every game as an innovative blockbuster. Why would they want us giving out awards that make our purchasing choices clearer?
There are games that evoke emotion by the simplicity, elegance, and integrity of their design. How, exactly, is that different from the joy evoked by a great symphony?
I would suggest doing a video game creation contest instead of a regular programming fair. It will make the kids who can program want to get involved, as well as drawing in kids who have talent in other areas, but might not otherwise be interested in programming.
In order for anyone to sell online items to anyone else, both the buyer and the seller have to already be paying a monthly fee to play on the game's proprietary servers. In this situation, actual IP infringement is impossible.
You may be able to "sell" an item in the online game, but the eventual transaction is just moving data from one part of the proprietary realm to another. You have not, for instance, taken a screenshot of the game and sold it for profit - which would be an infringement of the copyrights held on all the artwork you see in the game, because you have stepped in and distributed it outside channels authorized by the creator. If you found a way to create WoW accounts that didn't need to be paid for, and then you gave it to someone, you would also be standing in as an illegal distributor.
But if you hand another Blizzard customer a Blizzard item inside a Blizzard game, you aren't acting as a distributor. The game has already been distributed to you. You aren't leaking it to anyone who didn't pay Blizzard the price that Blizzard asked for it. That you made money on the deal is beside the point. If you charged people $50 a pop to give them master chess moves out of a book in the middle of a game, that would be cheating, but all the pieces are still on the table. You haven't stolen anything.
You're also incorrect about the CDs and CD keys. Once you buy a CD, it is yours. You own it. The CD-key is also yours to keep forever. It's the contents of the disk - the code, artwork, sounds, etc - that belong to Blizzard. They give you freedom to use those assets under the terms of the ToS. If you violate the ToS, they can ban you from playing the game, but they can't reposess the game discs. You own them, free and forever.
weirder things being sold on ebay. Some guy is farming completed Animal Crossing saves.
What we need is a farming MMO where the player manages bots to plant seed, fight off plagues of locusts, and bring the harvest in.
Harvest Moon Online, Summer 2006